by James Brady
“When I’d hear her coming, heard her step on the stairs, oooh! how quickly I slipped my needlework into a little bag and shoved it out of sight with my foot.”
When Jackie Iskandere died I wrote that story for the first time.
We were in Rome for the collections the week it came out, Bingo and I sitting there in the sun looking out over the Hilton’s pool as the sun fell toward the tall cedars, and he put down the magazine, freshly arrived by courier, and smiled beatifically at me.
“It’s really a fine story, showing that the fairies have feelings, too, even if some people don’t like them and make fun. And everyone on Seventh Avenue will talk about it. And Ames.”
“Why, thanks, Bingo.” I meant it.
Just then a girl in a bikini passed, sleekly wet from the Hilton’s pool, casting a brief shadow in the hot sun.
Bingo was still smiling, savoring the account of Jackie Iskandere’s secret needlework.
“Think of all the people we know in joyless jobs,” he said, stretching almost catlike in contentment.
“Yes,” I said, following the girl with my eyes, but knowing precisely what he meant. At that moment, lolling poolside in the Roman sun, I shed the last of whatever reservations to which I still clung about Bingo Marsh and his magazine.
“Yes,” I said, “I wouldn’t trade with anyone.”
45 Park Avenue sucking up to the Black Leopards.
ELEGANT Hopkins looked down at me from his great height.
“Ah yes, Mister Sharkey, isn’t it?”
He had put aside the proper Henry Poole suit and Turnbull & Asser shirts and the other accoutrements of Savile Row and the West to move, gradually, toward the Third World in a sort of tropical uniform, a khaki affair with matching fez that suggested President Mobutu of Zaire or some such African despot.
“Hello, Elegant.”
It was late September at the U.N. in New York, start of the new session of the General Assembly, and I’d strolled over to attend one of the receptions for delegates. No matter how broke the U.N. claimed to be, they were never short of cocktail parties, and I went thinking there might be a column in it, you know, pious Muslim delegate from Mecca in Manhattan gets stewed.
Elegant tarried with me only a moment. He’d been taken up by the diplomatic set, and it was said he had a private tutor from Alliance Française laboring over his French.
“Congratulations on the new collection,” I said. “It seems to be doing very well.”
“Yes,” he said complacently, “quite well.”
His handshake was as languid as his tone, and he passed on, beckoned to by a fashionable Nordic blonde and a turbaned fellow in aviator shades.
Women’s Wear Daily had recently anointed Elegant one of the top five designers in America, elevating him from top ten.
“John Fairchild hates me!” was Bingo’s reaction. He saw malign motives in most things and certainly in this.
In that season there was no end to Marsh’s suffering.
“Who was it turned into a pillar of salt in the Bible, Noah?”
“I think it was Lot’s wife.”
“Well,” Bingo said, “I’m next. Either that or the plague of boils that afflicted Babylon.”
“Egypt.”
Fortune did a feature on Elegant Hopkins’s burgeoning network of licensing deals, a favorite with the Japanese and the Germans. Liz Smith reported Elegant was negotiating the purchase of a Georgian house in the Lake Country and was learning how to ride.
“Sidesaddle, I assume,” snarled Bingo, by whom no betrayal was ever forgiven.
When Elegant was profiled by Enid Nemy in the Times he spoke, with some eloquence, of his work, saying it derived from the primal ooze of his tribal roots, cadence and beat, origins deep in Africa.
“For God’s sake!” Bingo cried in exasperation. “He was born in New Jersey. I looked it up. He’ll be wearing a bone through his nose next and carrying a spear.”
But on this, Bingo was wrong. Within a year Elegant Hopkins had moved his entire operation west, to Los Angeles, to take advantage of, he said, the exploding markets of the Pacific Rim.
“He means the cheap labor of Mexican wetbacks,” Marsh insisted.
It was now, in the picture magazines and on “Entertainment Tonight,” that Elegant entered his Los Angeles Lakers period, hanging out and exchanging high and low fives at the basketball games with Eddie Murphy and Jack Nicholson.
It frightened Bingo, this sudden and extraordinary celebrity of a former employee, especially one Bingo was convinced he had single-handedly raised from poverty and the ghetto. But then he was frightened of almost anything new or strange or which he didn’t understand.
“You see,” he said, waving a copy of Sports Illustrated under my nose, “all these phony white liberals and black people going around together. Just like Lenny Bernstein and everyone on Park Avenue sucking up to the Black Leopards.”
It was symptomatic of Bingo’s time warp that he mentioned the Black Panthers (or very nearly did) and felt threatened by them. All the Black Panthers of those old Radical Chic days were dead or on the faculty of the University of California. Yet Marsh sensed their menace in a photo of Elegant Hopkins at a basketball game in Los Angeles.
“Look at them, scheming and plotting, with Hopkins at the very heart of the conspiracy. I suppose Nicholson provides the bankroll.”
“Oh, hell! It’s just another movie star fawning over people even more famous than he.”
I started to tell Bingo how much money a Magic Johnson made but stopped myself, not wishing to upset him further.
The Yale of his years had not prepared him for a society in which tall black men could become millionaires.
46 Do we have a picture of Lucille Ball without a gin bottle?
“I have but one thing to ask,” Bingo was forever saying, and it was always something different.
“Be yourself… be controversial… be the one columnist everyone is talking about Monday morning.”
With Marsh the goad, Monday after Monday I pinned someone to the corkboard of the column as Bingo rubbed his hands, the victim groaned or raged or consulted eminent counsel, readers clucked, rivals ground their teeth, and Fashion walked off the newsstands.
For obscure reasons he despised Leonard Bernstein.
“He’s such a phony.”
“I dunno. Surely a great musician.”
“John, why don’t you write something nasty about him?”
It was often on my tongue at such moments to say no, to tell Marsh to do the dirty work himself. I rarely did. I was the hired gun or, as less generous folk would have it, “the hatchet man.” Besides, the column would be fun.
I knew Bernstein was in many ways a preposterous man, a poseur, reeking with false modesty while consumed by vast ego. A column about him would get people talking. I found my focus in Bernstein’s penchant for melodramatic tears, for jags of crying onstage at the first or last performance of just about anything. He seemed to revel in public grief. Throughout the piece I referred to him as:
“The weeping maestro.”
Bernstein quite naturally took exception. I never heard whether he got to Marsh with his plaints, but less than a month later Fashion published an obvious puff piece about an otherwise routine charity concert of which he was both sponsor and performer. I asked Bingo about the story.
“Why not?” he said huffily. “The man’s one of the few geniuses we have in this country. And Ames.”
Other demeaning nicknames were invented by us and by others: “The Prince of Swine”… “The Wee Haberdasher”… “The Social Larva”… and, of course, “Princess Tiny Meat.” Calvin Klein graciously devoted an afternoon demonstrating Nautilus machines and other body-building equipment installed at great expense in his fashion establishment, lecturing me on fitness and good health. I rewarded his zeal by doing a column on this “curious new fixation” of his, suggesting narcissism run riot.
Bingo was delighted when Klein issued i
nstructions I wasn’t to be assigned a seat at his next collection.
“Sharkey gets so upset,” he informed people.
John Dodd, shrewd and hearty, an important book editor with beefy thighs and a wheezing laugh, proposed putting together a collection of my columns between hard covers. As part of the wooing process, he produced his wife, Vivian Vance, the actress who played Ethel Mertz on “I Love Lucy.” They lived out on the Coast, in San Francisco, but kept an apartment in Manhattan where I was asked for drinks.
“Do you ever see Lucille Ball?” I said.
“Not often, but we stay in touch,” Miss Vance said, prim and thin-lipped, nothing like the Ethel Mertz of television. “Lucy’s my best friend.”
“And how’s she doing?”
“Oh, fine,” Vivian Vance said, “if you think it’s fine to sit in the house all the day long with the blinds drawn and a gin bottle on your head.”
It was hardly a line you could simply drop into the column, but neither did you ever forget it, tucking it away, knowing one day there would be a way to use it. Like most reporters, I have the curse of indiscriminate memory; things stick there and never leave. And eventually you use them. I understood about memory; I also understood the reporter’s trade and its primitive ethic.
What I didn’t understand is how people can say such terrible things about their “best friend” to strangers.
Marsh never agonized. “Publish it,” he said, “the reader delights in these little insights into famous folk.”
“It’s actionable, Bingo. Lucille Ball’s lawyers…”
“She’s a public figure. Besides,” he said, becoming sly, “you can also say lots of nice things about her and we’ll run a flattering photo so she can’t claim malice and you can slip in the quote about the gin bottle.”
When I continued to object, he called for Rambush, the art director.
“Tyson, do you have any really pretty pictures of Lucille Ball? Without a gin bottle?”
Rambush, who’d worked years for Marsh, just stared, eyes bulging.
There were those who found Marsh amusing, dismissing his venom as adults shrug off dirty words hurled by children in tantrums. There were those who disliked him, a few who moved beyond dislike to hate.
Some people thought I acted despicably.
“Marsh is a bastard. But at least he says what he thinks, right or wrong. Sharkey does these things because he’s paid.”
I heard such criticism but tried to shrug it off. When you are a professional you take the money and do the job. Nothing I’d done for Marsh or the magazine yet tripped ethical alarms. Let others complain about the work we did. I was comfortable with Bingo and the job, both.
Then something happened that wasn’t the job, but personal. And that detonated the first real trouble between us.
47 Everyone has a morgue folder somewhere.
IT began, innocently enough, over girls, as important things often at first seem frivolous.
I’d now been in Manhattan for a couple of years where, as a single man, I was forever being invited to dinner. Eventually, I stopped accepting these invitations, which always involved being paired with a woman, usually recently divorced, widowed, or otherwise abandoned. The women were invariably intelligent, frequently quite attractive, and always and understandably resentful. Since their former husbands (or significant others) had in one form or other fled the scene, sooner or later I became the focus of their anger. I can’t tell you on how many Park Avenue evenings I heard a variant on the phrase, “You men, you’re all…”
For this reason, among others, I gravitated toward younger women, not recently entangled. It was just… simpler.
Marsh, among others, occasionally remarked my cultural lapses, to which I offered protest. I read a lot of books, I said, I watched PBS, and while living in Paris had been any number of times to the Louvre, shepherding visiting Americans to the three things that had to be seen. Still, I recognized some merit in these cultural rebukes and embarked on ambitious self-improvement programs, the reading of the hundred most important books, for example, actually succeeding in getting through a number of them. My latest enthusiasm was ballet.
Her name was Lise, she was a Russian émigré, and she was a promising member of the corps de ballet at the Met. With Lise, I was learning about ballet. Bingo heard about her, of course, and started right off.
“How was the ballet last night?”
“Oh, fine. Tchaikovsky. Petrushka, the one about the puppet that falls in love and comes to life and in the end…”
“Yes, yes,” Bingo said briskly, getting out of his chair to skip a bit, “so much better than that dirty modern stuff they dance these days. I like all those swans and nutcrackers and things. I believe most decent people do.”
“This one had snow falling at the end and the puppet is lifted up toward heaven and…”
“I think I’ve seen it. I probably wept. And Ames.”
Then abruptly, he said, “Is she still with that boy?”
“Who?”
“Jessica something. The actress.”
“Lange?”
“That’s it. She’s the one.”
“Baryshnikov, the fellow who replaced Nureyev. Aren’t they having a thing?”
“There was something in Liz Smith…”
“I warn you,” Marsh said, suddenly stern, “ballet dancers never did anyone any good. Men or women.”
“Well, I…”
“It’s like Mayerling or wherever that place was they had a hunting lodge and the Austrian crown prince shot himself and then his mistress…”
“In that order?” With Bingo, I couldn’t resist.
“Well, you know what I mean. The both of them dead, and she was a ballerina. A commoner, I believe.”
“And not his sort at all.”
“Precisely,” Bingo said, “and I’m quite sure the czar had a ballet dancer, too, right down the street from the Winter Palace, and I believe that was really what started World War One, Mayerling and the czar and the ballet dancers being shot. So for goodness’ sake, John, be careful.”
My passion for ballet didn’t last. Lise was demanding and worked theater hours.
“You have a nice body, but you could get yourself into better shape,” she hectored me. “Feel how firm my thighs are, my buttocks.”
They were admirable, I eagerly conceded, noting the rest of her was admirable as well.
“Don’t credit me,” she said, “it’s all a tribute to the efficacy of the barre.”
“I dare say.”
Lise was succeeded by a twenty-five-year-old on the pro tennis tour. “I’m never going to be Evert or Navratilova,” she admitted. “I’m never even going to be Pam Shriver, for God’s sake. I’m too old.”
I commiserated and attempted to console her.
Marsh learned of her as well.
“They’re all tailored women, those tennis players.”
“Tailored women?”
“Don’t be naive. Princess Tiny Meat says they’re all, you know…”
I didn’t mind being teased about my girls, about what he supposed was my extraordinarily active sex life, about exaggerations dating back to Chanel. It was amusing, it entertained Bingo, and it did no real harm. Or so I thought until the day he was sufficiently encouraged by my good nature to proceed from teasing to what I angrily thought of as unconscionable prying and none of his damned business.
And it had nothing to do with Russian ballerinas or “tailored women” who played tennis. It was about my family, about my father and what happened when I was a kid, which I never talked about. Not to anyone.
“I know about your father,” Bingo said, just like that.
“Oh?” I said, my insides jumping, my face flushing red.
“Yes.”
We were at lunch, the Veau d’Or over near Bloomingdale’s, an authentic French bistro with plenty of noise and people with napkins jammed into their collars and their vests unbuttoned, people who concentrated
on their food and wine with deadly seriousness and seemed uninterested in what was being said at the next table. Maybe this was why Bingo chose the restaurant.
When I said nothing, he went on. “Yes, I knew there was something. Knew it instinctively. So I sent for the clips. Everyone has a morgue folder somewhere, everyone has his little envelope of clips.”
“Do you mind telling me why you bothered?”
“Because we work together. Because I care about you.”
“I work for you, Bingo,” I said, quite cold. “You own the magazine; I write for it.”
“Oh, don’t be shirty. I wasn’t intruding. And, besides, such things happen.”
“Sure they do.”
“Teapot Dome. Watergate. The South Sea Bubble…”
“For God’s sake, my father was accused of impropriety in gathering evidence, not trying to steal or overthrow the fucking government!”
“Well,” he said mildly, “I was simply pointing out historical precedents to indicate your father was hardly alone in…”
“Bingo…” The warning was implicit in the word and he sensed it.
“Well, I’m sorry. I’m just normally curious and sometimes it gets me on to a good story and sometimes it gets me into trouble. Journalists ought to be curious. For example, just who was Charles of the Ritz, and why did they name a perfume and all those creams and toilet waters and things after him? I worry about things like that. You’re not the only one with doubts. And so I dig into it and find out eventually and it was like that with your father and what happened back then in…”
“Bingo, about my dad, about my whole damned family, just shut up. We’re not a cosmetics company and we’re none of your goddamned business.”
He should have fired me then; I would have fired me.
Instead, he looked at me, startled, eyes huge, fearful perhaps of violence. And for once, he said nothing more on a subject. Ever.