Fashion Show, or, the Adventures of Bingo Marsh

by James Brady

  “J’Accuse,” I said. “I Accuse.”

  “Yes, by Proust.”

  “Emile Zola. It’s quite famous, you…”

  “Whatever. Perhaps Princess Diana would testify. Clive claims he’s been asked to the palace more than once. Hardy Amies and Mary Quant, as well.”

  “Well…”

  “Is Nan Kempner in town? She’s on more committees than Mario Buatta. And certainly Suzy must do a column about poor Clive…”

  “And Liz Smith.”

  Marsh looked at me sternly. “Liz and Suzy do not get on. Either you have Suzy saving Neville from prison or you have Liz do it. You do not have both.”

  The greengrocer’s apprentice, or young guardsman, or whatever he was, was paid off and declined to testify, and Clive Neville, somewhat subdued, returned safely to New York, where Bingo immediately gave a small dinner party to celebrate his escape while, at the same time, regretting the thing had blown over so swiftly.

  “It would have been such fun visiting Clive in prison and sending him things.” He stopped, his face solemn.

  “Why do you think the British spell ‘gaol’ like that instead of ‘jail’?”

  “I have no idea.”

  Bingo buzzed his secretary. “Mrs. K., phone Mr. Neville and ask him why they spell prison ‘gaol.’ ”

  “Yes, Mr. Marsh,” the woman said. I believe she drank at night. I hope so.

  73 … an Australian. The loud kind, a disheveled Errol Flynn.

  BINGO really tried to work with (or more accurately, for) Hugo Grottnex. He really did. But he was bleeding inside. For nearly twenty years the magazine had been his baby. Now social workers from the foster home had taken it away. On the first Monday after the takeover he called me into his office and pointedly shut the door. There was no skip in his gait.

  “Would it be appropriate to introduce Sir Hugo to a few of the more presentable designers?”

  I didn’t know. “Just which ones?”

  “Well, Blass, he’s polite.”

  “He might start telling Grottnex about firemen, about hoses and phallic symbolism…”

  “Yes, there’s that.”

  “What about Ralph Lauren?” I suggested.

  “Oh, he’d just talk about merrie old England, the moors and the grouse, and how he admires Fred Astaire.”

  “Beene?”

  “Geoffrey’s too fat. I don’t want Sir Hugo to think that’s what designers are like.”

  “Too bad Norman Delavan is no longer with us,” I said. “He could tell Grottnex about the geese.”

  “Don’t be malicious.”

  In the end Grottnex didn’t meet any of the fashion designers, nor did he evince any interest in so doing. His empire, even beyond the pasteless wallpaper that covered half of Europe on both sides of the Iron Curtain, now comprised more than forty publications and a range of television and other properties, and Fashion, while a desirable asset with a very good cash flow, was hardly his only concern. But he was a good businessman; he kept in touch:

  By imposing Barrier Reef on us. This time both Ambrose and I were summoned urgently to Bingo’s side.

  “There’s this man Sir Hugo is sending down, a legate so to speak, to function as overseer. His name’s Nigel Reef. I understand he’s Australian.”

  “Barrier Reef,” I said.

  “A friend of yours?” Marsh said in surprise.

  “Only by reputation.”

  Ambrose wasn’t pleased. While the magazine didn’t have a general manager’s title, that was pretty much what Ambrose did, look after money and personnel and manage.

  “You sound like Nunc,” Bingo told him. “Don’t be so picky. We’ve all got to make adjustments. Even I.”

  Barrier Reef was indeed an Australian. The loud kind, a disheveled Errol Flynn.

  “Mates,” he informed the staff on their first meeting, “I’ve worked everywhere from tea boy at the South China Morning Post to head reporter in Sydney to general manager on Fleet Street. So if anyone bloody comes the acid with me, I’ll know about it.” “To come the acid,” we learned, meant phonying an alibi.

  To Ambrose’s undisguised glee, Reef had no intention of devoting himself exclusively to personnel and finance; he would be looking over all our shoulders. Marsh, his titular superior, took to ducking into anterooms and offices when he saw him coming. Barrier was, we soon learned, truculent, loud, and a drunk. He was, however, very good at his trade, watching expenses and cracking down on waste. He could sniff out a phony business lunch receipt the way nuns smell out sin. Even Pinsky, another thoroughgoing professional, gave him grudging respect.

  “If Pinsky approves, that’s approval,” he confided to me after two weeks of Barrier Reef. “Like? Pinsky does not hastily award ‘like.’ ”

  I went drinking with Reef one night and thereby earned his confidence. Leaning boozily close, he inquired, “And how do you put up with all the poofters, mate?”

  “Poofters? Poofters?” Bingo demanded indignantly next morning. “Does he mean fairies?”

  “I think he does.”

  “Well, then, many of my closest friends are ‘poofters.’ And Ames.”

  Cap’n Andy, the office manager, eager to suck up to the new power, pulled Reef aside to say how he admired direct action, how he himself broke in by checking the men’s room toilets for shirking copyboys. Barrier gave the Cap’n little encouragement.

  “Don’t let me bloody well catch you at narrow dealing either, mate.”

  Once Sir Hugo Grottnex and a small entourage descended for Bingo’s weekly editorial luncheon in the rubbed-wood dining room, at which senior editors and writers sat in, Marsh presided, and the previous week’s issue was dissected and the next discussed. It was usually, barring Bingo’s eccentric judgments and pronouncements, a fairly tweedy, relaxed, clubby affair, everything but the vintage port going ‘round the table. Sir Hugo listened to it all, laughed heavily once or twice at intramural joshing, made a sensible comment or two, thanked us and left.

  Only Marsh, all the Marsh family paranoia in full flight, was unsettled. He’d noticed that one of Grottnex’s aides de camp, the Red Peril, had taken notes throughout.

  “I could see him,” he told me. “Shorthand. He was taking everything down, every word said.”

  “Fleet Street trains journalists that way,” I said. “Probably just a reflex action, taking a few notes.”

  “They’re checking on us. They’re checking up. I know it.”

  I left Bingo to fret. Babe and I were leaving in early June for France, and I gave the Red Peril’s shorthand no further thought.

  74 French workmen and idlers called to her.

  THERE was no wind at all, not even a breeze.

  That surprised me. In Normandy there was always wind, but now, nothing. And when the propane burner was switched off, no sound, just the huge balloon floating silent above green fields and hedgerows and darker green stands of wood, at precisely the speed of the air itself. There was no resistance. Bombard, the professional balloonist, lighted a match.

  “See, it doesn’t even flicker.”

  I stood braced against the side of the wicker basket of the hot-air balloon as it sailed across northern France toward the Channel over small farms and the occasional château and old battlefields. With me were Bombard and a rather pretty English girl with a title I hadn’t caught and a brigadier of the Pakistani army. To my surprise, I was enjoying myself.

  Perhaps that was simply a function of temporary release from Bingo’s asylum.

  “Look!”

  The brigadier grabbed my arm, pointing down. A hundred feet below, a big boar, all tusk and snout, crashed through the forest, dodging the bigger trees and snapping off saplings and branches, running fast and looking competent and mean.

  “I say!” said the Englishwoman, leaning out to see.

  I nodded happily. The brigadier was lean and brown and terribly Sandhurst, but he was excited.

  “You know, I’ve never before seen o
ne, full grown. Not even in the Kashmir.”

  A grin split his narrow, mahogany face, not at all “Sandhurst” now. I suspected I, too, was grinning.

  “Don’t lean out too far,” Bombard cautioned, laughing, “you don’t want to meet that fellow at close range.”

  How far from New York and the world of Bingo Marsh.

  Babe and I flew Air France to Paris and then took the train down to Caen. We were stabled at the Château de Balleroy, Malcolm’s place, in a bedroom without a bath under the eaves four or five creaky flights up. Babe examined the place before nodding in satisfaction.

  “Not bad, Shark. When do we get to meet Elizabeth Taylor?”

  “After we get some sleep.” We’d been traveling for fifteen or sixteen hours. The platformed bed, narrow but comfortable, was sufficient.

  “I’ve slept worse,” Babe admitted.

  That first evening was informal, with half Forbes’s guests not yet arrived. Miss Taylor would not come down from Paris until next morning when Malcolm’s jet, “The Capitalist Tool,” would fly her in to Caen airport along with a personal assistant, a hairdresser, a hairdresser’s assistant, and several tame photographers. Henry Grunwald of Time, like us an early arrival, told Forbes in considerable delight, “Malcolm, do you know that in Bayeux there is a supermarket called ‘le Conquérant’?”

  William the Conqueror had sailed from Bayeux to conquer England, and the locals had never forgotten.

  The Comtesse de Breteuil came from Marrakesh, where she had a house. Someone else mentioned having been there once, staying with Yves Saint Laurent. “Yves now has two pools,” said the comtesse, wickedly, “one for him; one for everyone else. He insists on swimming alone.”

  By some miracle the Normandy sun continued to shine, and I went up in one of the first flights, and saw the wild boar.

  That night there was a welcoming dinner under a striped marquee, with Norman horns and dancers. People drifted in late, muddied balloonists whose flights had outdistanced their chase cars and trucks. Some had landed in cultivated fields, heavy with manure, where they placated irate farmers with bottles of chilled champagne flown along for the purpose. Most people were up at dawn the next day. Dawn and late afternoon were the best time to fly, when the updrafts were strongest. Babe flew with one of the teams, Dutchmen, all three of whom promptly declared their undying devotion to her.

  “We had a few beers up there, Shark,” she admitted.

  The revels continued for three days, and on Monday morning we took the train up to Paris and stayed in one of the attic rooms of the Hotel San Regis, where they had beds that were not at all narrow and Babe was better able to exhibit her agility, properly to thank me for having taken her along. She’d never been to Paris and liked to stand in the French doors looking out over the roofs and the chimneys and the little balcons under the spring sky, but since she liked to do this wearing very little, or occasionally nothing, French workmen and idlers called to her from distant rooftops and balconies. She waved back enthusiastically.

  “I like the French,” she said, “really friendly. Not anti-American or hostile to strangers the way you always read.”

  I took her to places I liked, restaurants and bars and parks and bookstores and bridges I remembered and loved. She was pleased that I wanted her to see these places, too.

  “I like it you know all these things and all those famous people we met at Balleroy,” she said, “but it doesn’t change you, make you phony or impressed. You just say ‘Hi’ and shake hands and that’s it.”

  “Well, I guess so.”

  “I like that, Shark.”

  Babe was also enthusiastic about Chez Lipp, on the Left Bank, where we ate choucroute and the cold beer came in glasses classified by size as “sérieux” and “distinguée” and so on.

  “I like the ‘sérieux’ best,” she said. “The ’distinguée’ tends to intimidate.”

  “It looks as if you like the choucroute pretty well, too.”

  Choucroute was sausage and ham and potatoes and ‘kraut, boiled in the style of the Alsace, eaten with globs of hot mustard and washed down with beer.

  “I do, you know. I could eat here every day. Are they open for breakfast?”

  “Breakfast? Choucroute for breakfast?” It was difficult to visualize.

  “Sure,” she said, “it has all the basic requirements of vitamins and minerals. Just like Total.”

  “Have another ‘sérieux,’ ” I said.

  I saved Chanel for near the end, taking her to the boutique of the Maison Chanel on the rue Cambon, where I bought her one of those trademark quilted leather handbags. While it was being wrapped, I showed Babe the mirrored stairs at the top of which on lazy, drunken afternoons the old lady fed me Scotch and ran fingers through my hair and whispered, “Mon Indien, mon petit Indien…”

  “She really loved you, didn’t she, Shark?”

  “In a way, I guess, she must have.”

  We crossed the street to the small bar of the Ritz, another shrine revisited, and had a martini.

  “To your Coco,” Babe said, lifting the glass.

  I drank.

  “And to us… ,” she said, leaving doors ajar.

  I should have said something meaningful then but didn’t. This was the best girl I’d ever had, the best friend as well as lover. And still I backed away. Her career, my careless ways, these were the excuses. I knew the real reason, that empty place into which I retreated, unready for commitment, wary of taking risks.

  75 A Paul Profonde collection is a powerful mystical experience.

  DESPITE his own awkward, sometimes goofy, behavior, George Bush was clearly leading a Dukakis proving earnest but inept, so much so Marsh was already preparing himself for his role in the new Administration, almost ready to forgive Mr. Bush for Dan Quayle. Though not quite.

  “When they have cabinet meetings, does the Vice President attend? I certainly hope not. Snubbing him privately is one thing; doing it in front of everyone wouldn’t be polite.”

  But as November neared, no summons arrived from the Bush crusade.

  There were other pressures on Bingo, changing him, and not for the better. Perhaps nothing more brutally illuminated how he was changing than the absurd, yet cruel, business of the French designer Paul Profonde.

  Nunc and Barrier Reef had been seen carousing of an evening (“plotting, I suppose,” Bingo concluded). Sir Hugo, though rarely seen, was now very much owner of his beloved magazine (graffiti scrawled in the elevator, “Don’t Glue! Grottnex!” sent Marsh home ill at three one afternoon). Perhaps it was simply midlife crisis, one symptom a dinner Bingo hosted for the Trumps.

  “You can’t stand Ivana. And you’re having them for dinner?”

  “John, I’m certainly free to entertain friends. And Ames.”

  A new set of values. And now, “l’affaire Profonde,” as the snippier Paris dailies labeled it. No one was quite sure which was cause, which effect, or just why Marsh went suddenly so sour on the designer.

  Around the magazine it had long been said, behind his back, of course: “Paul Profonde cuts a skirt on the bias and Bingo has an orgasm.” Profonde, known to the fashion intellectuals as Pipi, had for a dozen years been one of the top men in Paris, up there with Saint Laurent and Ungaro and Cardin and Givenchy. I once asked Marsh why Paul was so good, why Fashion and the other leading magazines had so canonized him.

  Bingo gave me a long-winded lecture which culminated in something that at least sounded genuine: “Seeing a Paul Profonde collection is a powerful mystical experience.”

  I had visions of Saul of Tarsus being struck from his horse on the Damascus road and said so, earning me from Marsh an exceedingly bleak look.

  Even in seasons when Profonde’s work was somewhat off, Fashion raved. There were theories, of course: the two men were lovers; through Pipi’s manager Gérant they’d invested great sums jointly in financial enterprises; or, less subtly, a numbered Swiss account to which Marsh had the second key. To anyon
e who really knew Bingo, such murky explanations were rubbish. Pipi was a wonderful fashion designer, and Marsh recognized this and liked and admired the Frenchman and had for a long time. What came between them was never satisfactorily explained. Some said Pipi’s snub of a ceremony enrolling Bingo into the Légion d’Honneur for services rendered to French exports; others held Profonde objected to an adjective in a recent Fashion line review.

  Marsh announced the outbreak of hostilities at his weekly editorial meeting.

  “Pipi is finished,” he said, getting up from his chair and doing a mirthful skip, “and there’s a new man to be crowned. His name is Christian Lacroix.”

  Barrier Reef, lounging in a corner of the room, hung over and bored by talk of matters alien, came to life. Accustomed to the rough-and-tumble of the Fleet Street tabloids, he understood regicide and king-making.

  “And what’s this deity’s name again, mate?”

  “La-croix,” Bingo said slowly and in some irritation, “a brilliant young man of whom you will shortly hear more. Much more.”

  He didn’t lie. In the next issue there was a Lacroix cover and six pages inside, ten days before his new collection was to be shown in Paris. The cover photo was of a Lacroix invention of two seasons back, now updated, the pouff dress.

  “But how do you sit in the bloody thing, mate?” Reef demanded.

  A week later, four more pages of Lacroix with comments from top buyers and elegant women everywhere, all of them frantic in their praise of the new star. No mention of Paul Profonde, none. The following issue had Lacroix himself on the cover, smiling broadly, arms entwined around the slender waists of two models in pouff dresses. Inside, an editorial signed by Bingo declaring Lacroix a genius in the tradition of Dior, Balenciaga, Chanel.

  There was no coverage whatever of Pipi’s new line, which the Times called brilliant and everyone else quite good.

  Asked how the magazine could afford to ignore Profonde totally, Bingo remarked piously, “It’s only decent, the man’s gone down so. It would be cruel to chronicle his decline.”