Fashion Show, or, the Adventures of Bingo Marsh

by James Brady

  Enema Quarterly.

  “Isn’t it amazing,” Bingo said, “the ingenuity of publishers. I know I should be envious, but I’ve got to acknowledge creative enterprise when I see it.”

  I paged through the magazine, too slowly for Bingo, as it turned out.

  “Let me have it back again. I barely skimmed the issue before calling you in. I wonder if Blass subscribes. I’d think he would, what with his interest in firemen and hoses and such.”

  “It could be,” I said, choosing discretion.

  We may have spent an hour looking over Enema Quarterly. Finally, I said, “Bingo, I’ve got to go. I’m supposed to…”

  “Oh, all right,” he said testily, shoving the magazine back in the drawer and turning the key.

  I think he didn’t want to be suspected of reading such magazines alone, that going through them with someone else gave the reading legitimacy, as if we were simply a couple of publishing professionals, fellow magazine men, coolly assessing competitive books, judging the typeface, counting the ad pages, calculating a newsstand sale.

  70 Certainly no one has better manners than Princess Tiny Meat.

  IT was the time of corporate takeovers and hostile mergers, and Elmer Marsh had apparently found a buyer.

  Companies with blood relations feuding were raw meat for the Wall Street raiders. Stupid as he was, Nunc had in some primitive way understood this. Bingo, with his reporter’s instinct, had been sniffing out trouble for months, and now he called me and Ambrose to a council of war over lunch at Le Cirque.

  “Nunc can’t really sell the company, can he, Ambrose?”

  Ambrose answered with questions. “How much of the stock does he own, Bingo? How much do you have? Who else in the family holds shares?”

  Bingo didn’t know, not even his own shares. I would have been surprised if he had, but Ambrose was exasperated, sputtering disbelief.

  Marsh looked inordinately pleased with himself. “Well, I don’t know, so there,” he said, delighted to have annoyed Ambrose.

  Over the meal and a very good Château la Grave ’81, the lawyer tried to tell his employer how these things worked.

  “Your Uncle Elmer can sell his shares to anyone he wants, unless there’s some sort of caveat in the family’s partnership agreement. If Nunc has fifty-one percent, he can sell and the new buyer takes over. You then have the choice of selling your shares for the best price you can negotiate or hanging onto your stock and remaining as a minority partner working for the new owner.”

  “But it’s my magazine,” he said in what seemed genuine distress. “They can’t take Fashion away from me, can they?”

  “Fashion’s part of Marsh Publishing. You could always offer to buy it back from the new owners.”

  “But I own it already,” Bingo said, voice rising and cracking in resentment. “How can someone take something I own when I won’t sell my shares?”

  “Because Nunc has more shares, if he does,” Ambrose said.

  It was Bingo’s toy, and he wouldn’t sell; therefore no one had the right to wrest it away. Corporate law and Wall Street were clearly beyond him.

  “They’re both gaga, you know,” Ambrose said later when he and I were alone. He was the company lawyer, but no one, neither Nunc nor Bingo, had introduced him to the mysteries of their stock holdings, paranoid secrecy exacerbated by their own peculiar eccentricities. Finally Bingo was persuaded to go to Nunc, to ask him to see the books. Nunc dithered. In the end Ambrose got a look at Bingo’s holdings.

  “You’ve only got thirty-five percent. If Nunc has the rest he could sell tomorrow.”

  “I won’t let him,” Marsh said petulantly.

  There was one possibility, a white knight, a friendly rival bidder who’d agree to keep hands off Fashion and leave Bingo alone. “You don’t care about the rest of the company anyway, do you?” Ambrose asked.

  “A batch of dull, second-rate papers nobody reads. And Ames.”

  Nunc dug in. Since he and Bingo weren’t talking and communicated only through scrawled, rather insulting notes, I was sent to lunch with Elmer Marsh as emissary.

  “I suppose you want a drink,” Nunc growled with his accustomed grace.

  “Well, yes.”

  Over the club salad he asked if he’d told me how he used to go scuba diving with Captain Cousteau.

  “Yes,” I lied.

  “Oh,” he said, disappointed, and then told me how a twisted ankle kept him from Wimbledon the year Don Budge beat von Cramm. Bingo said Nunc could barely get the ball over the net, but I shook my head in admiration. I’d been sent to charm Nunc, not edit his autobiography.

  “You know, Elmer, Bingo really thinks the company ought to stay in the family, keeping things as they are now, with you as chairman and not some outsiders giving the orders.”

  “I’ll still be chairman. That’s part of the deal.”

  So he had a firm deal, something we suspected but didn’t know. I argued Bingo’s case as best I could, his devotion to Fashion, how hard he worked, the dedicated staff…

  “Bunch of hippies,” Nunc interrupted.

  I wanted to defend our people, but this was no time to quibble. “Who’s the buyer?”

  “Why don’t you have yourself another drink?” Nunc said, grinning maliciously and considering himself one hell of a subtle fellow.

  “Find a white knight,” Ambrose urged Marsh when I reported back, “someone you can live with.”

  Bingo looked gloomy. “What do I do, take out an ad or something?”

  The lawyer explained about merchant bankers and deal brokers and in the end, defeated, Bingo agreed to let Ambrose go ahead and find someone. A fortnight later the three of us took a cab down to Wall Street to meet at a discreet bankers’ club the people Bingo hoped might be his salvation.

  “Where’s your limo?” Ambrose inquired casually.

  “I don’t want them to think we just fling money around.”

  It was never quite clear why I was included. Not a shareholder or even an executive of the company, I was as much a financial illiterate as Marsh.

  “Because I trust you, John,” Bingo said when I asked. I knew he was scared; no one ever trusted me about money. It was too serious a matter.

  Our merchant bankers met us there. “Now, don’t say anything,” we were cautioned, “just an exchange of pleasantries. This is a feeling-out procedure. If there seems a reasonable common ground, we’ll closet ourselves with them and haggle. Just smile and discuss the weather.”

  The “white knights,” chief executive and financial officer of one of the major television networks, were amiable enough. Too amiable. A gracious remark about the enormous popularity of Fashion magazine got a jittery Bingo talking. Compulsively.

  “Nunc doesn’t understand designers. He thinks they’re all strange. Well, there’s Cardin, who went out with Jeanne Moreau. But he makes millions on license deals. And Balenciaga had all those juicy boys around in their smocks. But he’s dead. Norman Delavan used to scrub the floor before every show, and it’s quite possible he had affairs with geese. Though he claimed it was someone else who told him the story, perhaps Olivier of Hollywood, who couldn’t go horseback riding anymore due to excitement. But Calvin’s a nice boy, and certainly no one has better manners than Princess Tiny Meat. And Ames. And surely Ralph deserved praise even if he lisps for those white suits Robert Redford wore in Gatsby, but someone else got the screen credit. And how could anyone say Chanel was strange? Except perhaps Castillo, who tried to set her on fire and had Gypsy boys whipped in the basement…”

  When it was mercifully over, everyone shook hands more energetically than was truly called for, and the network boys offered us a lift uptown in their limos.

  “Oh no,” said Bingo primly, “we always take the subway.”

  The last the merchant bankers saw of us, we were standing forlorn on the corner of John Street while Bingo asked a hot dog vendor where the nearest subway was, and then there was a debate with the token booth
clerk when Marsh, not precisely a subway regular, tried to pay our fares with a credit card. Once aboard a Lexington Avenue express headed north, he looked at Ambrose and me with a certain complacency.

  “I thought it went rather well, didn’t you? They seemed very nice.”

  Ambrose was still too stupefied to respond, and I studied the advertisements in Spanish for painless treatment of hemorrhoids.

  71 Wait till you meet “Street Dog.”

  PAWING at his great nose in pleasure rather than angst, Elmer Marsh called a press conference to announce the identity of his buyer, a “lad” from Britain who’d cut a deal to buy control of Marsh Publishing, a deal which, unhappily for Bingo, included Fashion magazine.

  “The lad,” a London-based Mittel European named Sir Hugo Grottnex, was in the wallcovering trade, the “Wallpaper King,” according to the Fleet Street tabloids, a clever marketing man whose advertising slogans included “Paper without Paste!” and, even more memorably, “Don’t Glue! Grottnex Your Walls!”

  “Let him glue Nunc,” Bingo remarked sourly.

  For some years Sir Hugo had been buying up failing newspapers in England and on the Continent and had only recently turned his media ambitions toward America. No matter; his money was good. And, something of a diplomatist who sensed the schism between members of the Marsh clan, he hosted a small dinner on the occasion of the signing of papers. It was to be in a private dining room of the “21” Club.

  “But he knows I never go there,” Bingo protested.

  “How could he know?”

  “Everyone does. And Ames.”

  It would be Bingo’s first meeting with Grottnex, his first confrontation with Nunc since the deal was made, and he was very nervous.

  “Oh, but I adore the ‘21’ Club,” he assured Sir Hugo on being greeted. “Sharkey and I are here all the time. They’re so nice. And the Perrier.”

  “Yes,” rumbled Grottnex from somewhere deep inside his great belly, unsure if this endorsement were of the club or the mineral water.

  We stood about awkwardly and had drinks, peering, with enormous interest as if they’d never been seen before, at the familiar Frederic Remington paintings. Grottnex, whose accents had been smoothed over by years in London, was slick, dividing time and his charm between the warring Marsh factions, chortling or nodding intently, brow creased, at the most commonplace of remarks from either Marsh. Nunc and Bingo behaved as typecast, the older man snorting and boasting, groping at his nose and relating pointless anecdotes about lads he’d known; while Bingo alternately brooded and skipped about, issuing the odd giggle. One of Grottnex’s bankers diverted me, sotto voce, by identifying various of Sir Hugo’s aides, Fleet Street newspapermen, most of them Australians.

  “The gray-haired fellow, they call him ‘Old Blue Rinse.’ The lean one with glasses and the Oxbridge stammer is the ‘Red Peril.’ ”

  “Do they all have nicknames?”

  “Apparently there’s a law Down Under,” I was assured. “Wait till you meet ‘Street Dog’ and ‘Show Pony.’ And the worst isn’t here, either, ‘Barrier Reef.’ ”

  A large oval table had been set and some wonderful wine poured. People loosened up. Sir Hugo tactfully kept Nunc at his elbow but placed Bingo strategically just opposite, cleverly drawing him again and again into the table chat.

  “Never drink weeknights,” Nunc announced, “but just this once.”

  He’d been knocking back the Scotch and now the wine, becoming garrulous, spinning yarns about enormous feats with this “lad” or that. He was off on some tale of skiing at North Conway back in the long-thong era when a Grottnex lawyer, about Nunc’s age, asked:

  “And was Leslie Spruance one of your gang back then, Elmer?”

  “Oh yes,” said Nunc, expansive and pawing his nose, “a great lad. He and I shared many an adventure. Why, once…”

  The lawyer cleared his throat. “Leslie was a girl, Elmer, tall, lanky brunette…”

  “Oh, that Leslie Spruance,” Nunc mumbled, diving back into the wine.

  Bingo cheered up, always pleased to have Nunc make an ass of himself, and was enthusiastically comparing notes with Sir Hugo on the relative virtues of Savile Row tailors. I didn’t drink as much as normally I would, not wanting to let down the side, and nervous about Bingo, wondering if Savile Row would lead him into jolly accounts of life among the fashion designers, tales of Tiny Meat et al. Then someone asked Grottnex about the current value of the dollar and the economic outlook, the sort of comfortable talk rich men enjoy. Sir Hugo had somewhat diffidently launched into a soft-spoken but impressive tour d’horizon, when Bingo suddenly interrupted.

  “Elmer?”

  “Yes?”

  “I have a very important question, Elmer.”

  Grottnex tensed, wondering if the family feud were about to be reignited at the very moment of his triumph.

  “Yes?” Nunc repeated vaguely, confused and groping at his nose.

  “Elmer, how old do you have to be to stop being a ‘lad’?”

  When I got home Babe was sitting up in bed, looking lush despite reading glasses, a bar exam cram text on her lap, one spaghetti strap of her nightgown slipped provocatively off a shoulder.

  “How went the banquet?”

  I told her about Bingo and Nunc. About Old Blue Rinse and Street Dog and the Red Peril. And about the Wallpaper King.

  “It sounds heaven. Why don’t you ever take me to parties like that?”

  “Cheer up,” I said, savoring the surprise I’d nursed until I was sure it was on. “I’m taking you to France. Ballooning with Malcolm Forbes. In June.”

  She dropped the book.

  “Shark! A real hot-air untethered balloon, honest?”

  “I guess so. That’s how it’s billed.”

  “Hey, maybe they’ll let me take a parachute up and you can watch me jump.”

  I was already a bit nervous about a simple balloon flight, and she wanted to jump out of the damned thing.

  Babe grabbed my arm and pulled me down next to her in the bed.

  “Let me brush my teeth first,” I said, remembering the postdinner cigars.

  “Shut up, Shark, and let me worry about your teeth.”

  That’s how she was, an easy girl to please. A week in France, a hot-air balloon ride, maybe a parachute jump, and she didn’t care about your breath.

  “Making love,” she murmured as I undressed, “isn’t a Crest commercial.”

  72 It would have been such fun visiting Clive in prison.

  HUGO GROTTNEX had barely been digested when further disaster loomed.

  “Close the door. I don’t want this out.”

  I glanced about furtively as I usually did, knowing it unnerved Bingo. He got up from behind the big desk and skipped across the carpet with a newspaper clipping in hand.

  “Just look at this. Clive Neville arrested in London. They caught him in the bushes with a young guardsman.”

  I took the clipping. For once, Bingo was approximately accurate. There had been an arrest, the preliminary charges were sodomy and public lewdness, the place was Hyde Park.

  “It says the young man was a greengrocer’s apprentice.”

  “Whatever,” Bingo said airily. “In the best literature it’s always a young guardsman. Oscar Wilde and so on.”

  “I’m sure you’re right.”

  “Of course I am. Clive’s too much of a snob to tamper with a greengrocer’s apprentice.” He paused, brow creased in thought. “Though with those tight trousers guardsmen wear, it’s a wonder they can do anything.”

  “It says he’s out on bail and isn’t supposed to leave England.”

  “He must be awfully pleased. He so loves England.”

  “But under these circumstances…?”

  Marsh was up again. And skipping. “Perhaps a committee should be formed. You know, ‘Set Clive Neville free!’ as they did with that fellow who was going to blow up Parliament…”

  “Guy Fawkes?”

  �
�No, the Irishman in World War One, Roger Casement. Wasn’t he gay as well? I believe they hanged him or something.”

  “Yes, it was wartime and…”

  “… and a defense fund established. Not that Clive can’t very well hire his own lawyers, but there’s always something civic-minded about raising money for a noble cause and not just for the Jews or cancer.”

  “He might prefer the less said the better.”

  “No, that’s out of the question. Brooke Astor should certainly be approached. And Laurance Rockefeller. David’s too stuffy. And Pamela Harriman. And the Trump woman, the one married to the brother and not that tacky Hungarian…”

  “I believe she’s Czech.”

  “… and editorials. We’ll run one in Fashion of course, suggesting encroachment…”

  “Entrapment?”

  “… or a momentary lapse of some sort. A midlife crisis and mention how vital Clive’s work is to the nation. And so on. Weren’t there all sorts of editorials, and quite effective, too, when that Jewish general was sent to Devil’s Island for stealing the war plans?”

  “Captain Dreyfus?”

  “That’s the fellow! I remember seeing a movie about him once, where they tore off his epaulets right there in front of everyone. Givenchy did an entire collection with epaulets one season, a brilliant collection that sold exceedingly well. I’m sure he saw the same movie.”

  “Well, actually, it was an historic event in France, and as a young French boy in school Givenchy probably…”

  “They’ll steal a good idea from anyone, designers.”

  Now his eyes filmed over a bit, possibly recalling details of the Givenchy collection that featured epaulets. I nudged him back.

  “But you were planning to clear Neville’s name and save him from jail.”

  “Yes. And so we shall. Wasn’t there a very important book about Colonel Dreyfus, I Deny or some such?”