Fashion Show, or, the Adventures of Bingo Marsh

by James Brady

  She also admired Tamerlane and Alexander and Attila and the Vikings. “They invented amphibious warfare. The Marines are always patting themselves on the back about amphibious warfare, and it was a bunch of crazy Danes and Norwegians with horns on their hard hats about a thousand years ago.”

  “Pillage and rape,” I said.

  “Sure,” she said, shrugging, “spoils of war.”

  The funny thing, for all her intensity and ambition, she enjoyed reading what I wrote and hearing me talk about it. Not that she liked everything; she loved playing critic. And while she didn’t nag me about it—she was a pest but never a nag—she thought I ought to try another book. Nonfiction.

  “Maybe you’re not really Shoeless Joe Jackson when it comes to novels, Shark.”

  Shoeless Joe was, of course, perhaps the best natural hitter ever in baseball. I understood the allusion.

  61 Madonna’s our Grace Kelly.

  EVEN as he aged, Bingo manifested a gloriously fresh enthusiasm for new directions in fashion.

  When Madonna began to emerge as a major star, wearing her underwear on the outside, Bingo was like a boy, skipping about and calling on Rambush the art director for new prodigies of illustration on the magazine’s cover.

  “Tyson, she’s so nice, Madonna, and those bustiers. But would your wife wear them? I keep asking myself that. And Ames.”

  Tyson Rambush, who as you know lived with another middle-aged gentleman, said he would work up some sketches.

  “Yes,” Marsh said, “along the lines of ‘lingerie is sweeping the country…’ Wasn’t that a Cole Porter song? Or something?”

  Bingo also liked Madonna’s pointy, stainless-steel bra cups, the famous “bullet bra.”

  “They’re rather fierce and threatening. But I’m sure that appeals to certain masculine tastes, you know, like being dominated, as with all those Valkyries flying about singing Wagner and scaring Siegfried and the dragons and such. I’m not sure if bullet bras are for everyone, though. Madame Stealth would never wear them, I’m quite certain. And just how comfortable they’ll turn out to be is something else again. Mrs. K.…” He called his secretary.

  “Yes, Mr. Marsh.”

  “Mrs. K., tell Madame Stealth to get several of her girls, you know, ones with busts, to try on some steel bras and report how they feel. Comfortwise, I mean. If they chafe and so on.”

  “Yes, Mr. Marsh.”

  “The Maidenform people and Lily of France will probably know how to handle chafing. They worked that out years ago with the underwire bra. Ask Mr. le Boot to assign a reporter to delve into the brassiere market a bit and find out. Madonna doesn’t look to me the sort of woman who’d happily put up with much pain and suffering. She probably wouldn’t like Spanky magazine at all.”

  “No, Mr. Marsh.”

  Sometimes I was called in during such spasms of creativity, often in midthought, so that I was totally unaware of just what the hell Bingo was talking about.

  “It occurred to me perhaps it would be a better ‘Shark!’ column than a straight market report, John.”

  “What would?”

  “The chafing problem Madonna has. Ask whether the lingerie industry can do anything about it. I mean the way they did with under-wiring at that point in time. Madame Stealth’s girls are trying on some of the new stainless-steel models even as we speak, and you might want to ask them as well how they feel about it.” He paused. “You know, it just occurred to me, that metal must be terribly chilly to wear, especially in the morning, don’t you think? I mean, unless there was some way to warm them up, you know, like those handwarmers L. L. Bean puts in the catalogue for deer hunters and skiing?”

  “Bingo, you’d better start over and just…”

  “Oh, the designers will all have a point of view, I’m sure, you know how they hate to be left out of any new trend. They’ll explain it to you, and at tedious length. I wouldn’t see Blass or Trigere or people that age. They’ll be totally out of it. But the young ones, Isaac whatever-his-name-is, and Todd Oldham. And Donna, because she’s a woman and has to wear bras, which the male designers don’t, though I’m sure some of them do in private life and around the house and so on.”

  In the end I didn’t do a column, but Fashion ran a cover story about Madonna’s stainless-steel bras that included reactions and quotes, one of them especially dear to Bingo’s heart. One of the kickier, young, androgynous downtown designers, rhapsodizing about Madonna’s influence and inspiration, and wanting to put her into historic context, told the magazine:

  “You don’t understand. Madonna’s our Grace Kelly.”

  62 Pardon me, Pinsky…. I was in a bad chamber.

  MARSH kept getting reports about Babe, through Princess Tiny Meat and Regina Stealth’s operatives and Count Vava and the émigré circles, but whenever he pressed me on her, I became evasive. All these years I’d known him and never been to his home or met his wife. Two could play the privacy game. I invented dodges.

  “Just look at this Reuters dispatch,” I insisted one morning as he started again to pry. “Do you think there could possibly be anything to it?”

  I handed him a teletype just off the office machine.

  “ ‘Lagos, Nigeria,’ ” he read. “ ‘People shouting that their sexual organs have been stolen set off riots in Nigeria in which several people have been killed. Bizarre claims about people being able to steal penises and women’s breasts by means of a handshake or other casual contact have spread rapidly across the country. Some Nigerians believe the stolen organs are put to magical use in charms and potions.’ ”

  Marsh laughed nervously. But I noticed he folded the dispatch carefully and inserted it into an inside pocket, possibly to be studied later with greater care, his curiosity about my love life forgotten.

  He and Nunc were feuding, worse than ever. Perhaps the Nigerians were onto something here he might use against the old man. Nunc took me to lunch at his club, ducking several times into the bar for “phone calls,” and complaining throughout about his nephew.

  “The magazine’s making a lot of money, Mr. Marsh. Circulation at an all-time high.” I knew Bingo’s worth and wasn’t going to hear him trashed.

  Facts frightened both Marshes, so Nunc grunted and changed the subject.

  “I ever tell you about the time I skied the Headwall at Tuckerman’s Ravine?”

  “No, but I’d like very much to hear about it.”

  “Good,” Nunc beamed, “why don’t you have a drink.”

  Although he wasn’t “our sort,” I lunched occasionally with Pinsky, the adman, a decent man and funny.

  “They are not an entirely sane family,” Pinsky said one day over a cocktail. “You never knew Bingo’s father.”

  “No, he died before I got here.”

  “A gent. Nothing like Nunc. But also, not like his son. Yet, in his own way, strange. That woman who writes best-sellers about vampires…”

  “Anne Rice?”

  “She could have made a career off the Marsh family. Even the father.”

  “Oh?” I had the impression Bingham Marsh II was the clan’s one balance wheel. Occasionally an old-timer smirked when I made the suggestion but refused to elaborate. Now Pinsky fleshed out the portrait.

  “I was their Chicago man for a couple of years, a young salesman with a shine on my shoes and greed in my heart, covering the Midwest, and old man Marsh would come out once a year and make some calls with me, Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan, whatever. I knew every motel and gas station in the territory. And Mr. Marsh would sit there, amiable, asking intelligent questions about the accounts, about the competition, you know. Not like Elmer at all. Nice man.”

  This was all leading somewhere, I knew. Pinsky was a salesman, and salesmen don’t talk unless they’ve got a sale to close.

  “But every once in a while on these long drives, right in the middle of a conversation, whether it was about an account or last night’s Cubs game, old man Marsh would go silent. Just stop talking. Thirty
miles, forty miles, nothing. I’d ask him something, or say, ‘Are you all right?’ No answer. Nothing. Just staring straight ahead through the windshield at the ribbon of road.”

  “Not saying anything, just staring?” I said.

  “Pinsky would not ask that you suspend disbelief.”

  I nodded, not knowing quite what to say.

  “So, there I am, a salesman in a rental car, and my boss, the chief executive officer of this company, is sitting there beside me, stricken mute. I should make a clever remark, I should ask after the health of the children? No?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “The fact is,” Pinsky went on, “I am terrified Mr. Marsh has flipped out, that at any moment he will expose himself, he will seize my throat in his jaws and begin to suck my blood, that he may dash himself to the macadam from a speeding car and the authorities accuse Pinsky of manslaughter.”

  “So?”

  “So,” Pinsky said, picking up on my clever line, “so suddenly Mr. Marsh turns around and resumes talking about the Cubs. Or about Carson, Pirie, Scott. Or whatever we were discussing, perfectly cogent, as if nothing had happened, and then he says, by way of explanation, ‘Pardon me, Pinsky, but you see, I was in a bad chamber.’

  “ ‘Oh,’ say I, befuddled and intrigued, ‘a bad chamber. You were in a bad chamber.’ ”

  “ ‘Yes,’ says old man Marsh, ‘a bad chamber.’ ”

  Pinsky sampled his martini with a great smacking of lips.

  When he put down the glass, he fixed me with a look. “So do not be surprised, Sharkey, by anything that happens in this family. I love them as I love my wife, as I love my girlfriend, but do not expect from these people sanity.”

  Pinsky was right. Nunc was conniving to sell the company. Or that was the rumor.

  When Bingo heard of his villainy he called the lawyer, Ambrose, and me to his office.

  “Close the door.” This was clearly significant stuff.

  “This isn’t about geese, is it?” Ambrose asked.

  “Mr. Delavan is dead, as you know. This is a crisis.” He regarded us sternly and told us what he’d heard. When he finished Ambrose said, sensibly, “He’s your uncle, Bingo, why not just ask him what the hell is up?”

  Marsh giggled nervously, the prospect of confrontation, even with Nunc, unsettling.

  “We mustn’t do anything for the moment to alert him,” he said murkily. Then, brightening, “He and Miss Fuchs are probably in the shower, anyway.”

  Ambrose called me at home that evening. “You know, with all the Wall Street mergers and acquisitions these days, if this were a grown-up company, I’d worry.”

  Well, I said, then there was no reason for concern, was there, none at all.

  I didn’t really feel that cocky. When you have worked for a family company for a while, you get to appreciate the feeling. Paternalistic it might be, erratic, even flawed, but there was a zone of comfort I occupied at the magazine under Bingo. If Fashion were suddenly to belong to the Japanese, to some huge American conglomerate, would it be anything like as much fun, would I be able to write with the same freedom?

  More to the point: who could ever replace Bingo, the Krazy Glue that held our house of cards together?

  63 Nude photos floating about. Right along with the Ivory soap.

  WHATEVER the tensions within our little magazine, fashion designers, like the sea, rose and fell with predictable regularity. Olivier of Hollywood had disappeared, victim of mediocre collections. Princess Tiny Meat wed for the third time. Calvin and Ralph prospered. Along with, oddly, a woman, Donna Karan. As well as a black.

  Elegant Hopkins won that year’s Coty Award for fashion design. It exasperated Marsh.

  “Bad enough letting women design clothes. But the African Queen?”

  Hopkins, who’d begun so humbly at Bingo’s magazine, establishing relationships along the bush telegraph of fashion, studying fabric, absorbing lessons of line and perspective from Rambush, was now a famous name, generously financed.

  “The most exciting young designer in America,” Vogue gushed.

  “Did God really mean for there to be black designers?” Bingo asked.

  I took Bingo to the movies that afternoon, to cheer him up. “It’s supposed to be terrifying, a sort of slime monster that…”

  When we came out, Bingo decided it was too late to go back to the office. I walked with him a few blocks.

  “You know, you can take credit for Hopkins. Pride of authorship. You saw something in him when he was very young that eluded other people.”

  Bingo continued to brood.

  “You mean I’m to blame for unleashing him on the world.”

  “No,” I said, being stubborn too, “you created this genius, and people ought to acknowledge it.”

  Marsh shook his head sadly. “God creates geniuses. I just help out.”

  He was often like that, wallowing in self-pity. A good horror movie used to be sufficient to bring him out of the funk. Now, he was less easily jollied.

  It wasn’t just Elegant Hopkins. Or the absence of Olivier of Hollywood. Or Princess Tiny Meat’s latest descent into bankruptcy. Or the rise of Donna Karan.

  I wasn’t alone in noticing his brooding. Ambrose saw it, too. “It’s Nunc, finally getting to Bingo with this takeover business.”

  “I think it’s George Bush,” I said. As the 1988 election campaign approached, no emissaries arrived from the Vice President to seek the counsel and support of a fellow Old Blue.

  “He’s odd,” people said who didn’t really know Bingo, who didn’t love him as Ambrose and I did in our various ways. Enemies whispered of curious fixations, of cabalistic rituals, suggesting that Marsh and I, or unnamed others, dabbled in erotica and performed unspeakable acts. We didn’t. And I knew Bingo went home every night to Ames. So while I was able to shrug off base calumny, as fond as I was of him, even I had to admit Bingo these days was, well… strange.

  One night at a dinner party hosted by cinema people he knew in London, he exceeded himself, stunning even me.

  The name of Maria Ouspenskaya had somehow come up, an ancient crone of an actress who’d been a major talent on the European stage, reduced in her waning years to playing Gypsy seers and the mother of werewolves in B movies. Marsh listened for a while to a minor anecdote about Madame Ouspenskaya, nervously fidgeting lest someone steal his glory. When the previous narrator drew breath, Bingo nipped in swiftly.

  “Well, you know, she was very old and she had a sexual fixation on this beautiful young actress, not Vera Hruba Ralston but someone like that, I forget the name, and Maria Ouspenskaya liked to take a long hot bath, and one evening she was in the tub…”

  He paused, and I could sense the table’s tensing.

  “… and she had some nude pictures of this young actress she was fixated about, and she was becoming terribly excited, Maria Ouspenskaya, not the young actress, as in those scenes by the Gypsy campfire when the moon filled and the werewolf’s hair began to grow, and, voilà!”

  He stopped entirely now, looking pleased with his tale.

  “Voilà what?” a woman demanded from my left. “What does that mean?”

  Marsh pursed his lips. He liked an audience. “Well, one can’t say in mixed company just what she was doing, but it so thrilled her she slipped beneath the water!” Another pause. “They found poor Maria Ouspenskaya submerged the next morning with the nude photos floating about. Right along with the Ivory soap.”

  Yet another pause.

  “That’s the brand that floats, isn’t it, Ivory?”

  As we got into our coats, a man said next to me, “What an extraordinary chap.”

  Marsh kept thinking of himself as clever Waldo Lydecker, brittle, spontaneous, spleenful. But he lacked Waldo’s killer instinct. What in Clifton Webb caught at your breath with its arrogance would have been faintly ridiculous in Bingo, whose vision was so often clouded, seeing not the reality but a potted version of the world about him.

  A
world hemmed in by his own myopia and curious obsessions.

  When Marsh had to fill a table for ten (twenty-five hundred dollars a person) at a New York Public Library fund-raising dinner in the wood-paneled trustees’ room overlooking Fifth Avenue and the library lions and presided over by Vartan Gregorian, I was conscripted.

  “Brooke Astor called and told me we had to buy a table. She thinks twenty-five hundred dollars grows like weeds.”

  “… grows on trees, I believe.”

  “Yes, well, you just try to say no to Brooke Astor.”

  So we were there, Bingo glum and uninterested. Until someone at our table, passing up the meat dish, mentioned he’d been feeling bilious.

  “Oh, it’s easy to talk about cures for constipation,” Bingo began, as he often did in full, conversational flight, frequently in non sequitur. “Bran muffins, citrate of magnesia, even that old standby castor oil.”

  “Who was Castor anyway, Mr. Marsh, or was he even a person?”

  This was the sort of dialogue in which Bingo shone. Figuratively rubbing hands briskly together, he launched into his thesis:

  “I’ve wondered that myself. But the fact is nothing taken orally for constipation is even vaguely in the same league as a simple hot saltwater enema.”

  When his three- or four-minute peroration was complete, a dignified old gent inquired, I thought sarcastically, “Do you often discuss such matters at Brooke Astor’s dinners for the Library?”

  “Oh yes,” he said airily, “and with Brooke herself. She’s fascinated, like most of us, with bowel regularity.”

  64 I’ll explain I’m a cross-dresser.

  OF course I had acquaintances and a few friends, a life beyond Bingo and the magazine, even before finding Babe. They were journalists and cops and admen, and we hung about in pubs, drinking too much, and talked sports and politics and ogled women. The advertising guys complained how the agency business sucked and spoke vaguely of getting into real estate or operating bowling alleys. One of them bought a sailboat and was going to live on board during the summer, beating the high price of Hamptons rentals. Can you sail? he was asked.