Fashion Show, or, the Adventures of Bingo Marsh

by James Brady

  “I can’t even swim.”

  LaRuffa the contractor worried about his friend Stanley, who was now seventy, a famous submariner during World War II, and living in a small apartment next door to two guys who gave loud parties.

  “Stanley hammers on the wall and he’s scared they’re coming in one night after him, so he bought a .22. He keeps it by the bed, and he figures he can get to it in four seconds if they come through the door and that if you shoot guys in your own bedroom, it’s not against the law.”

  O’Brien the federal agent, a man trained to carry out investigations, wasn’t so sure. One chill night O’Brien and I passed a bag lady huddled in a Second Avenue doorway with a bottle of red wine on her head. O’Brien went over, solicitous.

  “She’s okay,” he reported. “It’s a Robert Mondavi.”

  It was a shallow business, male bonding and bad jokes and drunken capering that passed for companionship, for a social life. I recognized that, most of us did. We weren’t stupid, just silly, not destructive the way le Boot had become. Then Babe came along, and an empty apartment was no longer empty, my pub crawls ever shallower. Surprisingly, and she was forever surprising me, she liked my friends. Most of them.

  “Except for the guy in the beanie with the propeller on top of it, it’s a lot healthier hanging out with them than Calvin Klein and your precious Mr. Marsh.”

  “I drink too much when I’m with them. You’re always saying that, and I know it.”

  “You do. But I like the guys you drink with.”

  They liked her, too. Even in uniform. As one of the admen put it, “I never thought I could be sexually aroused by a first lieutenant.”

  One of our first pub crawls together she got into a fierce debate with an editor at Forbes on Marshal Ney’s rearguard actions during the retreat from Moscow.

  “That girl’s great!” he enthused. “Even if she is full of shit about Ney.”

  A couple of nights a week she went home from law school to Forest Hills to study and wash her hair and do laundry with her roommate. The other nights she came home to me, taking over one of my closets and installing a hair dryer and toothbrush and some disposable razors and cosmetics in the bathroom and big bottles of Evian water in the fridge.

  “I hope the army doesn’t find out,” she said. “They don’t expect us to be virgins, but they’re kind of against career officers living in sin.”

  “Tell them you just drop by occasionally to drink my Evian water.”

  “With your bureau half full of bras and panties and pantyhose?”

  “I’ll explain I’m a cross-dresser.”

  “But just who is she?” Bingo demanded. “Do you know anything about her family?” His network of spies was at work, but I stayed pretty vague about her. Babe, after all, was my affair, not the magazine’s. To Bingo, I realized, such things smacked of betrayal.

  “I doubt very much she’s your sort.”

  She threatened to find a maid for me. “Just once a week, once every two weeks.” I didn’t want a maid, I insisted stubbornly. “I’ll find you one,” she said, just as mulish. One evening I came home to find her on her hands and knees scrubbing the kitchen floor. Even the refrigerator had been pulled from the wall.

  “Shark, I found dead bugs back there that were fossilized. This place is the petrified forest.”

  “You remind me of a man called Norman Delavan.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes, he liked to scrub floors. And he had affairs with geese.”

  She made me tell her that story. And others. Like all of us she enjoyed a little dish. She also knew when to stop, when to be serious, when to pose objections and explore motives.

  “You’ve got this discipline,” I said. “You try to do everything right and you’re not shy about saying so.”

  “West Point.”

  “No,” I said, “it’s just… you.”

  She smiled, very pleased.

  “I know it is,” she said. “And I can’t tell you how nice it is you recognize that.”

  That Christmas she bought me a VCR. I don’t know how she saved the money, but she did. That, too, was discipline.

  “I watch too much junk already,” I protested.

  “Now you can watch better quality junk.”

  “I won’t be able to work it. I’ll be electrocuted.”

  “I’ll teach you. We’ll go over the schematics and the instructions together. You can learn, I promise you,” she said firmly.

  I’d never had a girl like this, none of the cover girls, none of the jet set, no one back in Ohio. I was half ashamed to think it, but my mother never had Babe’s set of values.

  You had to love Babe Flanagan. Even if she weren’t so much fun in bed, where she shed discipline along with her clothes.

  65 What a dirty old man Wyeth is!

  IN the spring Andrew Wyeth first showed his “Helga” pictures, making in the same week the covers of both Time and Newsweek.

  Marsh was frenzied. He’d actually entertained Jamie Wyeth in his home and felt betrayed. “We should have been on top of this,” he lamented. “Every designer in the world is poring over those pictures right now. The braided hair, the ripe flesh, the bovine, almost sluttish poses. And the voluptuousness! Right now Eileen Ford’s phone is ringing off the wall with Vogue looking for slightly blowzy blondes.”

  Our art director, Rambush, was summoned for counsel.

  “Reubens,” Tyson said quickly. “It’s decidedly Reubenesque.”

  “What a dirty old man Wyeth is!” Bingo raged. “Think of what his dear, loving wife is having to put up with. How humiliating! How disgusting!”

  Bingo could be pious. Especially when competing magazines published Helga first.

  I rather liked the pictures, empathized with Mr. Wyeth. If I could paint, that’s how I would do Babe, ripe, nude, sexy, alive!

  I told her so.

  “Shark,” she said, practical as ever, “you’re sweet to say so, but you can’t draw a line with a straightedge.”

  She’d found me a maid, a Guatemalan Indian, who left me a note the first day she was there.

  “You need a new faction cleenar,” the note said.

  “You do, you know,” Babe said. “That damned thing doesn’t pick up anything.”

  “My faction cleenar is just fine,” I insisted. “Neither of you changes the bag often enough.”

  The maid screwed up my television, not understanding about cable and changing channels and the focus. She also found a Spanish-language station on the bedroom radio and instead of its always being set to news, or to one of Babe’s rock stations, we had FM in Spanish.

  “She bent one of my venetian blind slats,” I complained. Babe defended her.

  “Oh, Shark, she’s a sweet illegal trying to stay off welfare. Give her a break.”

  I could hear Marsh. “She’s not your sort; not your sort at all.”

  In ways, he was right, of course. I was cataloguing the rich and beautiful, and Babe was refighting Gallipoli.

  “Churchill had the right idea, you know. The soft underbelly of Europe and all that. Anything but beating yourself to a pulp on the Somme. But my God, the officers they sent out to do the job. Was there ever such an incompetent pack of…”

  “Babe, give it a rest. It happened eighty years ago.”

  “Seventy.”

  It was a schizoid relationship. I wondered what Chanel would have made of her. When I said something like that, Babe smiled sweetly.

  “She probably would have tried to get me into bed. Wasn’t that what your old girlfriend said she always did?”

  “Gillian. Gillian was a model. They think everyone is trying to get them into bed.”

  Babe looked at me solemnly.

  “Shark, do you miss those skinny girls?”

  I thought of Helga. “Not one bit,” I said.

  “Good,” she said, very matter-of-fact, pleased but not precisely knocked off her feet by it.

  Ralph Lauren and his wife,
Ricky, had us to dinner one night.

  “Don’t go,” Bingo advised. “He’s incredibly boring.”

  I went. If you conducted your affairs by the revealed truth according to Bingo Marsh, you’d never go anywhere.

  I’d seen Lauren’s work and liked it. The few times we’d met, I found him inarticulate, a neat, compact man with close-cropped graying hair and a discernible speech impediment. His real name was Lifshitz. His father, a house painter, had changed it when Ralph and his brothers were boys. Bingo didn’t accept that.

  “It’s like Scaasi, ‘Isaacs,’ spelled backwards.”

  “Well, so what?”

  “John,” said Bingo in some exasperation, “would you spell your name backwards?”

  “Stop being such a snob. If the guy…”

  “I am not a snob. I simply have certain standards.”

  “Then it’s your anti-Semitism talking.”

  He was indignant.

  “I am not anti-Semitic. I won’t have you accusing me of such things. My father always employed Jews. So do I. And Nunc, even. Wasn’t my mother killed by Hitler? I’d think Scaasi was ridiculous even if his name weren’t Isaacs. It has nothing to do with anti-Semitism. He’s a pretentious little Jew, and there’s nothing anti-Semitic about it! Catholics and Protestants don’t change their names, do they?”

  “If you and I had an argument, would you get sore and call me ‘a pretentious little Catholic’?”

  “Of course not. You’re rarely pretentious and you’re not at all little. Not like that Scaasi.”

  How could you win such arguments? On matters like this he was simply opaque. I consoled myself I might be the only person at the magazine permitted to argue.

  And, as I say, we argued about Ralph Lauren, who was also small and Jewish and had changed his name. Why such things mattered so to Marsh would have taken a shrink to explain. I’d heard a dishy story about Lauren Bingo would have delighted in, dining out on it, tittering and skipping about. I decided against giving him the satisfaction, keeping the story to myself.

  When Ralph did the clothes for The Great Gatsby he’d gotten to know Robert Redford. They were a pair: the super WASP blond and little Lifshitz from the Bronx. But Redford sparked a surprising new ambition in Ralph Lauren. He decided to become a movie star! He was sufficiently well connected that William Morris agreed to explore the notion. The agent described the scene.

  “I was assigned to talk to him. He came into the office and I said, ‘Well, Mr. Lauren, and what can William Morris do for you?’

  “He looked at me for a moment and then, very somber, and looking straight at me with those rather beautiful eyes, he said softly, ‘I want to be a thtar.’

  “When I heard ‘thtar,’ I knew we had a small problem.”

  Over his own dinner table in the Laurens’s spare and elegant Fifth Avenue apartment, he was more impressive. You forgot the lisp and his size and even the halting turn of phrase. He talked, intelligently and occasionally with grace, about his role not as designer but as editor, of how he blended an element here, a texture there, a mix of rough Western leather and denim and the hacking jackets and flannels and wool sweaters of an English country house. Fred Astaire, Cary Grant, Gary Cooper, and Kate Hepburn, these were his heroes, his inspiration, he said, admitting with a delightful candor to having spent too many Saturday afternoons in the local movie theater watching double features and in the cool darkness of make-believe, shutting out reality and the Bronx.

  He and Mrs. Lauren, a slender, pretty woman, were gracious, friendly. After, Babe said, “I liked them. Mostly I don’t like the people you know, but they were good.”

  I told Marsh I was writing a “Shark!” column about the evening. “Oh, he’s a bore. It’s unworthy of you.”

  I went ahead anyway, but Bingo was right. Ralph was nice, Ralph was dull. So, too, the column. It needed an edge, it needed something, and in the end I tossed in the William Morris anecdote as a coda.

  Bingo exulted, forgetting entirely he’d told me not to write anything. “I knew you’d get something juicy on him!”

  Babe hated the column. “It’s contemptible, putting that in about his lisp. You’re contemptible. How can you go to dinner at a man’s home and trash him? You’re just like Marsh!”

  The column about Ralph Lauren was the talk of New York for at least a day and a half, which was all Bingo ever demanded. He knew to the millisecond the shelf life of good dish. I shrugged off guilt, made easier by the fact Lauren didn’t call to raise hell, too shy, too vulnerable. That was part of my calculation. People told me I’d been cruel, unfair. I shrugged that off, too.

  Only Babe couldn’t be shrugged off.

  “Yes,” I agreed, “you’re right, it was a calculating thing to do.”

  “But you did it.”

  “Yes.”

  “Shark, you’re better than that. Or should be. This Marsh…”

  “You don’t understand the job, the work I do, and what sells magazines…”

  “I know about fair play and decency and honor.”

  It was the first real anger ever between us. I kept trying to justify myself, if not to her, then to me. Babe didn’t relent, but then neither did she go on endlessly about it.

  “I told you what I think,” she said. “I made my point and you know how I feel. It’s up to you to live your life.”

  I was glad the fight was over. But uneasy. I felt a little bit like Huck Finn, early in the story, pulled this way and that by the Dark Angel and the Good, as if Marsh and Babe Flanagan were wrestling for my soul.

  66 Cruise the steam room and check out the priests.

  WE fought about other things. But not often.

  “I like the way you cut your nails.”

  “Squared off and short? Yeah, it makes more sense. Lots of guys like those long, exotic nails, jungle red and lethal. But I figure if you’re reduced to defending yourself with fingernails you’re already in considerable difficulty.”

  “There are sexual overtones to long nails. Those not associated with self-defense.”

  “Oh, I’m aware of that, Shark. And you ever want me to rake your back out of sheer ecstasy, just give me a little notice.”

  She traced gentle circles on my chest. I decided I preferred this to being raked. Sabra, the Israeli cover girl who liked to be stretched, would have found us disappointing.

  When we did fight, it wasn’t sexual. If she liked being tied up with neckties, I certainly would have made the effort. And if I’d wanted my back raked, I’m sure Babe would have let her nails grow. No, our difficulties were more intellectual. But there were frictions. You couldn’t be as different as Babe and I and not collide.

  I found myself defending causes in which I had little faith.

  “Listen to this, an interview with a designer, and it’s in your magazine. I’ll read this. I want to get it right.”

  “Go ahead,” I said, long-suffering.

  “Here’s the designer talking: ‘I’m thinking nudity for this season. But a nudity that transcends transparency. A nudity that conceals as much as it celebrates.’ ”

  She slammed down the magazine.

  “Does that make any sense whatsoever?”

  “The language of fashion is hyperbole. You don’t take it literally. Besides, it’s only Guy Laroche.”

  “I suppose if Chanel said it, you’d think it was fine.”

  “Chanel was a great designer. Laroche is barely marginal…”

  The truth was, I, too, found much of the magazine ridiculous. But to admit that would demean the writing I did, which had validity. So I counterattacked.

  “For God’s sake, Shark, being in the army, being a career officer, doesn’t make me Attila the Hun.”

  “You and Guderian,” I snarled. “German panzers versus Polish lances. Mussolini and the Condor Legion…”

  “The Condor Legion was German…”

  “See, you defend the militarists!”

  “And you’re writing columns abo
ut Leona Helmsley.”

  “Well, yes, but critically. You’ll admit I was quite severe in my…”

  “Your magazine has got to be the most shallow, superficial…”

  “That’s redundant.”

  “… pandering, phony, star-fucking, meaningless exercise in journalism since Hearst invented the yellow press.”

  “It was Pulitzer, I think. With the New York World. Or someone in England years ago with a magazine called The Yellow Book…”

  “Spare me Journalism 101.”

  She blamed me for headlines in the New York Post and for Robin Leach on television, and I suggested she and her “sort” were responsible for everything from the Rape of Nanking to the Beirut hostages.

  “He who lives by the sword shall die by the sword,” I declared.

  And she was hell on Bingo.

  “Look,” she pressed, “I realize he’s a devoted husband who loves his kids and he pays you royally, but, Shark, his obsessions, his Freudian lapses! Those wacky things you keep telling me about as if they’re amusing…”

  “Such as?”

  “Well, masturbation. Enemas. Whipping Gypsies. Peeping Tom stuff…”

  “It was Castillo whipped the Gypsies. And as for the Peeping Tom…”

  “… diaper changing… bowel movements…”

  “We refer to those,” I said prissily, “as doing number two…”

  That shut her up, turning diatribe into laughter. Mostly, we got along pretty well.

  Olivier of Hollywood briefly resurfaced. One bankruptcy too many had driven him again to Paris, where he worked free-lance. “They throw me a bone,” he acknowledged with a candid shrug. Out of nostalgia we took him out to dinner one evening at Grenouille. Reduced in circumstances though he was, there was a certain gallantry to his insistence on choosing the wine, a decided pricey Pomerol.

  “It’s worth every dollar you’ll pay,” he informed me.