Fashion Show, or, the Adventures of Bingo Marsh

by James Brady

  “Not to go outside this room.”

  I braced myself. What perfidy had some fashion designer committed now?

  “Vice President Bush wants me to join his cabinet. Or to represent him in Paris.”

  Even the usually imperturbable lawyer raised an eyebrow. “He what?”

  “Yes,” Marsh said, “we had dinner last evening. And Ames. At Brooke Astor’s apartment. And the Vice President took me aside after dinner, just the two of us. He’s so bright. Very well informed.”

  That was just too much for Ambrose.

  “Just the other day you were telling me how stilted he is, awkward and gauche.”

  “The Presidency inspires men,” Marsh said primly, “they grow in office.”

  I thought it time to point out Reagan was going to be President for another few years.

  Bingo looked pained. “I know that. We’re talking about 1988, when Mr. Bush is elected.”

  “A long shot, Bingo,” Ambrose said.

  “He’s sure to win,” Marsh insisted, “and we both went to Yale and we had such a good chat.”

  “What exactly did he promise?”

  “Well, there were no promises as such. But he seemed very interested in my point of view on any number of matters. And he was impressed that I spent time in Paris.”

  “Just stroking you, Bingo,” the lawyer said matter-of-factly, “setting you up for a rich contribution the next election.”

  “Things were left unsaid,” Marsh said smugly. “But he’s so nice. And Barbara.”

  Ambrose was behaving now like a lawyer, probing. “You get anything in writing, Bingo?”

  Marsh looked pained.

  “Yale men share a bond, something sacred. They trust each other, I’ll have you know. It’s not like…”

  “The Big Ten?” I put in.

  “Yes, or NYU or Notre Dame or someplace…”

  He was such a snob. Ambrose, who’d gone to Notre Dame, couldn’t resist:

  “Wasn’t Bush tapped for Skull and Bones?”

  For an instant, Bingo looked genuinely stricken.

  “Who knows?” he said airily, having pulled himself together, “and one never says. I’m sure that Barbara doesn’t…”

  Ambrose, now very much the lawyer, said, “Which must mean you were Skull and Bones, too, because if you weren’t, you could talk about it, right?”

  Then Marsh did, for him, a rather clever thing, rolling his eyes and starting to whistle, off-key, and beginning to skip about and clap his hands, much the way stockbrokers on the Paris Bourse are supposed to behave, singing and telling coarse jokes and spitting into the sandboxes, if a woman somehow wanders onto the trading floor, so that she won’t suspect anything serious is going on, but simply grown-up boys having sport.

  When Ambrose and I got out of there and wandered off toward our respective offices, leaving Marsh still whistling tunelessly, the lawyer said:

  “He shouldn’t be let out alone, you know. He really shouldn’t.”

  “I know.”

  I was still hearing his jolly, silly whistle. At such moments I could forgive Bingo almost anything.

  56 Don’t you turn first to the obituary pages of the Times? I know I do.

  I didn’t tell him of Babe. Not yet. As inured as I was to his snobbery, I didn’t think I’d be amused to hear Bingo say she wasn’t my sort, “not your sort at all, John,” lips pursed and unapproving.

  So, in a way, as happens to a man and his parents, no matter how loving, when he finds a wife, Babe was already coming between Bingo and me.

  He learned of her soon enough, of course. He had his spies. This time it was Princess Tiny Meat, once more out of Chapter 11 and doing splendidly and with yet another terribly social new wife. Babe and I had a table next to theirs at La Reserve over near Rockefeller Center one evening and we chatted, and, as you might expect, Bingo knew all about her before nine the next morning.

  “It’s all over town, John. One can’t keep such matters confidential. New York talks of nothing else, according to Tiny Meat. And Ames.”

  While Bingo enjoyed a little romantic gossip, his true specialty was disaster.

  If a designer had gone mad or a fashion editor was dying or a store president about to be arrested for peculation, Bingo knew about it. When the AIDS crisis began its slaughter of fashion figures, Marsh became a one-man center for disease control and always knew, often even before the victim, just who was carrying the infection and the roster of those who’d lately been to bed with him.

  His information was not invariably correct.

  “So-and-So’s dying,” he would inform me, having called me to the office and showily closed the door, “won’t last out the year.”

  Sometimes it turned out So-and-So had a heavy cold.

  While announcing impending doom, he attempted, without success, to look distressed and never quite could, skipping about the office and waving his hands.

  “It’s terrible. He’s one of my best friends.”

  When someone was dying he almost automatically became one of Bingo’s “best friends.” He collected victims. But when the dying man or woman really was a friend, you could assume any mention of illness would be kept out of the magazine. Which didn’t mean Bingo’s excitement was cooled, just that he wasn’t sharing it.

  Mainbocher died, one of the old-school designers, and no favorite of Marsh, who always referred to him in the magazine as “Remember the Main-Bocher.” He wrote that obit himself, all piety and venom.

  Other designers died, most of AIDS, some of other things. Chester Weinberg, short, squat, and balding, an American of whom it was said Balenciaga was in admiration. Phillippe Guibourge, Bohan’s longtime assistant at Dior and later the Chanel designer. Perry Ellis, young, handsome, preppy, who in summer flew to Manhattan by seaplane from Fire Island.

  Before Ellis died we had a tremendous debate at the magazine.

  “Perry’s dying,” Bingo announced. “His lover died of AIDS and he’s got it.”

  “We can’t say that.”

  “We can issue broad hints.”

  Bingo took AIDS seriously, because it killed people he knew. Yet it was also, in his ethic, an item of gossip, who had it and who might, information to be collected and passed on for the enlightenment of others, much as the story of Delavan and the geese. And, in his murky view of Bible history, AIDS represented something of a visitation upon the wicked.

  “I don’t agree at all with William F. Buckley, wanting AIDS patients to be branded…”

  “Tattooed, Bingo.”

  “Or that, either. But you know quite a number of clergymen, eminent divines, consider the disease to be a punishment for sin. Mind you, I’m broadminded, exceedingly so, but there just might be something to that. You know, rather like what happened in the Bible to people.”

  “Oh?” I said, not being a great Bible scholar myself and unsure just where this was leading. And that was all Bingo needed, someone else’s ignorance, to set him off.

  “Yes, there was all variety of wickedness in several cities in the Holy Land, Sodom and Gomorrah principally, and God turned everyone into salt right there on the spot except for a few who escaped with Noah in his boat and Job or Lot or somebody who migrated into Africa and turned black from the sun and that was where Elegant Hopkins and all of them came from, many years later, of course, and some people had what was called ‘the mark of Cain,’ or perhaps ‘of Abel,’ the fellow who killed his brother over his ‘coat of many colors,’ I think, and they also suffered a number of plagues, like the plague of fleas…”

  “Flies.”

  “Yes, and many ministers and bishops and such believe that’s what’s happening now to the designers.”

  Some people in the office agreed with Marsh about whether the magazine should hint that Perry Ellis was dying, others didn’t. Everyone in the fashion business knew Perry was in bad shape, one of those open secrets. The ethical question was whether to print the story, even in veiled form, knowing it wou
ld bring pain to Ellis’s friends and to the designer himself and could damage his business. Bingo called me in.

  “I know you don’t cover collections, but you ought to attend the Ellis show. It could be a great column.”

  “Because he’s dying.”

  “Well, his novel use of smocking is said to be very interesting as well and…”

  “Bingo…”By now I was savvy to his bullshit.

  “Well, yes, because he’s dying.”

  “And we’re keeping the deathwatch. A bit ghoulish, isn’t it?”

  Marsh stared at me. Whenever he suspected he might be wrong he became aggressive.

  “I won’t be accused of such things, John. This magazine has a responsibility to millions of readers to tell them what’s happening, to reveal truth.”

  In the end I went. Curiosity. I was getting as bad as he was.

  When the collection was ended, Perry stepped through the parted curtains, supported by two assistants, gave a little bow, and disappeared. People were cheering and people were crying. Everyone in that room knew this was the last time he would see Perry.

  I wrote the scene, not saying he was dying, just how he looked. That was sufficiently brutal. Ten days later he died.

  “I told you the Ellis show would make a great column,” Bingo said.

  I looked at him. “Bingo, are you always this enthusiastic about death?”

  “It’s not enthusiasm so much as… I dunno, curiosity? Don’t you turn first to the obituary pages of the Times? I know I do.”

  57 Madama Butterfly! Bingo announced authoritatively. It was Bohème.

  I mentioned that I didn’t own anything, neither apartment nor house nor car. Marsh owned lots of things. And was forever changing country places. You wondered if Ames, Mrs. Marsh, ever got to unpack the crystal and plate.

  In the brief time I knew him the Marshes had places in Barbados, the west country of Ireland, outside Ketchum overlooking Sun Valley, a villa at Lago di Como, and a house on Maui which unfortunately vanished under the lava when a nearby volcano came unexpectedly to life. Of each of these homes he assured you, “It’s the last civilized place, really, the very last.”

  I do not believe he said this about Maui, where his house was eaten, but that was an exception.

  Now there was a Greek island. “Surely the last civilized spot on earth.”

  But he was to spend the weekend in an even more exotic clime.

  “Princess Tiny Meat is giving a party. We’ve got to go. Bring along suitable clothes Friday morning. They’re flying us out in a seaplane.”

  “Fire Island?”

  “It’s where the fairies go weekends,” Bingo said, not precisely letting me in on secrets.

  I had no desire to weekend on Fire Island. But it was difficult to deny Bingo. Despite his airy assurance he understood and even tolerated certain behavior, he arranged prudently that we stay at the home of friends in the WASP enclave of Point o’ Woods, miles along the beach from Tiny Meat’s place at Fire Island Pines. On Saturday, by motorboat, we ventured into the Pines for a lunch billed as a charitable fund-raiser for research into some variety of sexually transmitted infection.

  “There’s some new genius,” Bingo explained Friday evening, “they never run out of geniuses.”

  That season’s genius, a protégé of Princess Tiny Meat, was a young painter, Mel something, who’d discarded his name as bourgeois and now called himself “Jason.”

  “Jason was something in mythology, wasn’t he?” Marsh inquired.

  “Yes,” said our host, “he sailed in search of the Golden Fleece.”

  “Now I remember,” Bingo said. “There was a course they made us take at New Haven in freshman year. Jason and the Astronauts.” He paused, confronted by a sort of stunned but well-bred disbelief. “Yes, that’s what it was called. And the Astronauts were his crew.”

  Jason claimed to have met Marsh. “I don’t recall. They all claim to know me. Even Elegant Hopkins says he once worked at the magazine.”

  “But he did. I met him there.” I couldn’t let that one go by.

  “Who can tell them apart?” Marsh said airily.

  Tiny Meat, beaming over his protégé, met us at the dock. His wife was elsewhere, it appeared. Jason, a polite young man with an implausibly perfect profile, welcomed us.

  “His face was made in shop,” Marsh whispered, “even the cheekbones were broken and reset. Regard the nose! And that plastic stuff they use to plump up lips? It’s a scandal.”

  “Mr. Marsh, so good of you… “ Jason gushed.

  “I wouldn’t have missed it. And Mr. Sharkey.”

  We were ushered up to the house, an enormous affair approached on elevated wooden catwalks erected over ecologically fragile dunes.

  “The first course will be at my house,” Tiny Meat explained, “prawns, lobster with a stiff mayonnaise I whipped myself, salmon with sauce verte…”

  Lunch, he said, was to be “a movable feast,” the first course here, the entrée somewhere else, the desserts and ices at a third location.

  “Isn’t that jolly, John?” Marsh enthused, no sarcasm in his voice.

  “We all try to share the burden of philanthropy,” Jason intoned piously. “I’ve put up a picture as door prize.”

  The two-hundred-fifty-dollar-per-head fee had already been paid for us, he said. Bingo made noises about our wanting to pay our way, not meaning it, of course, and Tiny Meat and Jason were sufficiently astute to pay him no heed.

  Over preprandial cocktails men drifted in to be greeted by our host, young men and old, some of the latter plump and bald or gray; the young men remarkably fit, lean and muscular.

  “Olivier of Hollywood would be in heaven,” Bingo said.

  Jason and Tiny Meat lounged on one of several broad decks in the midday sun, and people were brought to them, much in the manner of presentations at the Court of St. James’s.

  “They do everything but curtsy,” Marsh said, reading my thoughts.

  There were men in swimsuits that resembled G-strings, men with smoothly oiled bodies, men in safari jackets, in tights, in pearl chokers and tiaras, men with glitter on their eyelids and blue lipstick, men with teased hair and silk minidresses, men in formal mess jackets and crisp white ducks, all fluttering about Jason. There was much laughter.

  “Darling”… “bitch!”… “lover”… “Bruce”… “dear one!” they called to each other, exchanging kisses. The more significant men were taken by hand to Marsh and introduced.

  “Oh, my God, Bingo Marsh!” one boy exhaled, flailing at the hot summer air to restore himself.

  The second course was several hundred yards east along the beach, rack of lamb, grilled tuna, vast salads, and freshly baked baguettes hot from someone’s oven. The wine was extraordinary.

  “I work for Marsh,” I kept telling people who asked. Those who recognized my name fluttered.

  “The Shark!”

  At a third, even more magnificent, beachfront house there was English trifle, a cleansing sherbet, and banana split. Here there was also a swimming pool and young men, nude, swam and disported themselves. After lunch, rather drunk, I dozed. There was a disco that opened at midnight but neither Marsh nor I had the gizzard for it. We dined again with his Point o’ Woods friends, who listened, agog, as Bingo described the day’s events.

  “You can’t judge fashion designers by the usual criteria,” he said ponderously, “they molt so easily.”

  In the morning I walked down to the local store to get the Sunday Times. It was hot and sunny with the Catholics going to church and the Protestants and Jews going for the newspapers and the young men staggering home from the discos, half naked and being supported in their drunkenness, staggering and lustful, by other, older, men. There was some problem with the seaplane that had fetched us to the Island and a momentary panic on Bingo’s part (“We’re not going to be marooned, are we?”) so that we ended up taking the four o’clock ferry to Bayshore.

  Jason would not
be going back to the city until Tuesday, but, graciously, he came with us to the pier.

  “I can’t tell you, Bingo (Marsh was now, familiarly, so addressed), how much your visit means to me. My career, everything I am or have…”

  “Yes, yes,” Marsh said impatiently, “I’ve always thought you were so nice. And Ames.”

  As the boat eased toward the pier, the crowd of weekenders pressed forward, surging toward the gangplank, fearful of being left behind. Even Marsh seemed caught up in paranoid frenzy.

  “It’s okay, Bingo,” I said, not all that confident, “there’s room.”

  And there was, just. When we were all on board the ferry captain, identified to me as Peppy Zee, sounded a loud whistle, and as ropes slacked off, we moved slowly away from the pier. It was then the sobbing began, both those on board and departing and those still on the dock, the seduced and abandoned.

  One young man, hanging from a pile, began to sing a Puccini aria.

  “Madama Butterfly,” Bingo announced authoritatively.

  It was Bohème. Another gentleman on the dock was stripping off his designer overalls as a third dove into the ferry’s wake.

  “A nine point nine!” someone shouted.

  More men were singing now.

  “It’s just like the Gay Men’s Chorus,” a boy standing near me said admiringly.

  “Yes, they’re quite good,” I said, trying to be congenial.

  Now more people were diving into the bay, while on the dock a white-haired man seemed to be masturbating.

  Bingo alternated between rolling his eyes and averting his gaze. I had the distinct impression we would not soon again be visiting Fire Island.

  58 My mother, who as you know, was shot down by Nazis.

  BINGO continued to fly to Paris twice a year to cover the collections. Sometimes he had me go along, more for the company, I suspect, than anything, since I seldom wrote about clothes. He had Regina Stealth and Count Vava for that. I was there to write about people.