by James Brady
“I’d like to know precisely what you’re trying to say.”
Marsh smirked. He had the man now!
“As if you didn’t know, going into dark corners, lifting your robes and doing number two…”
Mohammad, disbelieving, attempted to maintain dignity. “Mr. Marsh, not only as a member of the Saudi Royal Family, but as an honors graduate of Harvard, I must protest this irrational…”
“Don’t you tell me about Harvard. I’m a Yale man and…”
No one is quite sure who struck the first blow (an open-handed slap, I was quite confident), but within seconds the two men were rolling about in the snow, flailing at each other, while Arab retainers from the Sheikh’s entourage and faithful employees of Bingo’s hotel (in their livery by Gianfranco Ferre) tried to pry the combatants apart, beating at them with ski poles and Louis Vuitton handbags, the Yale man and the Harvard locked in ineffectual combat, small boys battling over honor and possession of the sandbox.
86 No more sucking up to Grottnex?
UNLIKE Marsh, who thought himself many things, expert on enemas and Mount Everest, on Arab customs and the ozone layer, and was none of those things but just a great fashion editor, now I knew precisely what I was and who: a pretty good nonfiction writer whose small gifts fled when I approached the novel. And I knew something else.
I was never meant to be an editor.
The realization had been growing almost from the moment Sir Hugo anointed me in Bingo’s stead. He and I had clashed, and I had lost, on any number of editorial matters. The final break involved advertising. Barrier Reef delivered the bad news.
“We seem to be the only magazine in the category that doesn’t smell, mate.”
“You mean fragrance inserts?”
“Just so. Research tells me there’s millions in it. Vogue gets the money, Elle gets it, so do Mademoiselle and Glam…”
“I know,” I said, “Marsh was adamant. Said he wouldn’t have his magazine tarted up with cheap scents. One of the few things he ever really felt strongly about, keeping the magazine pure.”
Reef tossed an issue of the new Vanity Fair on my desk, opened to a glossy and rather foul-smelling fragrance insert on which the copy read:
“A cologne of raw sensuality!”
He rocked back and forth on his feet like a cop on the cover, a half-smile on his face.
“The Chief says we’ll be accepting this kind of advertising in future, mate. Soliciting it, in fact.”
“Raw sensuality.” How Bingo would have shuddered. And I knew that on this question of principle, I owed it to Marsh to make a last stand. I lost again.
I asked for a meeting, and Grottnex, as he always had, listened graciously to my little speech of resignation.
“The world moves on,” he said philosophically. “When I first got into wallpaper they all told me, ‘You can’t keep it up without glue, y’know,’ all the great men of the trade, wiser men than I. But I pushed on. Proved them wrong. Same thing with fragrance inserts. New technology, new opportunities. What makes a country great, what ennobles a people…”
Grottnex said he understood my reasons, that he respected me, and so on. I think he was relieved to be rid of me. I took my severance pay plus a generous additional sum Sir Hugo threw in and left, pausing to tell Barrier Reef good-bye and that he’d been right about stinking up the paper and I’d been wrong. There was talk of installing him as editor pro tern, and I wanted to wish him well. He thanked me warmly, mentioning “a bloody marvelous cover story in the works,” a profile of Zizi Orlando, an intimate it turned out not only of the Reagans but of George and Barbara Bush.
The headline would read: “The White House’s favorite guest.”
For nearly ten years I’d been writing for the magazine, and when I went, two men, Pinsky and another, took me out for drinks. One of the senior women promised to call about lunch. She never did. Count Vava, out on bail on the munitions charge, avoided me, confiding to people, “I never believed in Sharkey. He lacks the style.” Cap’n Andy hurried in locksmiths to change the tumblers lest I plunder the building. I trekked up to the twelfth floor to tell Elmer Marsh good-bye.
“No more sucking up to Grottnex, eh?” he said with his customary grace.
“I guess not.”
Nunc, looking for an argument and not getting one, poured himself a glass of water from the thermos on his desk and drank it off, a pinky finger elegantly extended. In ten years I’d seen him do this perhaps a hundred times. Never once had it occurred to him to offer his guest a glass.
“Well… ,” I said.
He put down the glass to paw at his nose, ripely seeded and more than ever resembling a vast raspberry. Then, leaning conspiratorially toward me, resentful and sour, he said:
“You ever learn how Sir Hugo does it?”
“Does what?”
“Get the damned wallpaper to stay up there without glue?”
I had money for a year, perhaps two, plenty of time to try yet again to write a book. Not Vietnam this time.
Ever since Bingo finally stood up to fight on a matter of principle out there in Colorado (being Bingo, a principle founded on ignorance, and fallacious), I’d been thinking of another breed of book entirely. A book about Bingo and me.
One that would set the record straight on just what happened between us and how it wasn’t Babe’s fault or Sir Hugo’s or Barrier’s or even to be blamed on Nunc. A book about Olivier of Hollywood on the Blue Train and how Nunc never took a drink at lunch and about le Boot pissing in the wine and about that precious phony Elegant Hopkins and the night on Capri when Bingo and I capered drunkenly outside the bedrooms and when we climbed Tyson Rambush’s tree and how Princess Tiny Meat went bankrupt and about interviewing Streisand and the bad pizza at Valentino’s and the Gypsy boys being whipped and how sore we got Nancy Reagan and getting drunk with Coco Chanel and most of all, the fun we had, Bingo Marsh and I.
Maybe no one will believe it or care, maybe such a book won’t sell. The hell with that; maybe I just want to tell the story so as to have it clear in my own mind. And isn’t that the yarn most worth telling? The one you write for yourself?
87 Western values… and the ingenuity of American plumbing.
HAVING made that decision, I considered doing the writing somewhere other than New York, where I knew too many people and spent too many evenings in bars. The money would last longer overseas, in Ireland, perhaps, where they practically subsidized writers, or the South of France, where I could speak French and go occasionally to Paris on the Blue Train, as Olivier of Hollywood once did. Maybe I should go someplace I’d never been, where a complete change might help the prose. I dropped Babe a line, all very cool and noncommittal, asking if good apartments were really all that available, and did they sell decent bikes in Manila or would I have to bring my own, and did she think I should try piano lessons again.
I’d never told Babe about my dad, what happened back there in Ohio when I was nine that made me so wary, and she deserved to know about it. But not in a letter. That was something you talked about in person, the two of us sitting late over brandy or during a long walk on an empty beach. Or maybe in bed, where I wasn’t all that cool and noncommittal.
I thought, too, of writing Bingo.
That would have to be quite a long letter, and not as cool, thanking him for all he’d done for me over the years and saying I was sorry it ended badly, something like that, maybe slipping in there that it was his fault and not mine, subtly of course. But I couldn’t seem to get it right. Maybe because I wasn’t sure of my real feelings. Did I resent him, did I still love him? What could you say to a man who was at once the patron of your talent, such as it was, and permitted you to toss it idly away on silly, superficial work? No, that was unfair; if there was a wastrel of my gifts it wasn’t Bingo. How could I penetrate the morass of his cluttered mind and those smug biases and tell him, without being sappy, how much he’d meant to me over a long time and in a variety of ways?
> In the end, the long letter, both hail and farewell, was too long, too self-conscious. Better to put it all into the book, between hard covers, to say what I felt about him with whatever eloquence I could muster. Though, knowing Bingo, it was quite likely he wouldn’t recognize himself in any of it, and would go about wagging his head and telling friends Sharkey was writing fiction again and doing it badly.
Still, I owed him a salute, a reminder of happier times, of movie matinees and Clifton Webb typing in the tub and Rodan eating the Japs and chamber pots and Olivier’s horseback rides and Bingo’s contraband bike at Yale. But most of all I owed him something for his silly, gallant, despairing gesture in the snows when he defied the Sheikh and all his works and pomps.
I could still see Bingo on the courthouse steps in falling snow after the hearing, Ames at his side, as television reporters shoved microphones into his face and camera lenses closed in. How Bingo hated such display, how inwardly he must have cringed. And I could yet hear his voice, quavering a bit but defiant, as if in an odd way he found joy in the battle, the first he’d ever really fought on his own and not through the magazine or surrogates.
“I’m terribly sorry about all this. And Ames,” he said. “But long ago President Bush and I were taught at New Haven the time might come when someone, somewhere, would have to stand up for decency. And Western values, as my mother once did fighting Hitler. And in this case, surely, on behalf of American plumbing and not going off in corners and such…”
When he was finished Bingo had given a sappy little grin, and I could almost imagine the beginnings of a skip, but then the camera cut back to Dan Rather and Marsh faded, perhaps forever.
I balled up the failed letter and chose instead that terse, and in ways most eloquent form of contemporary communication, the fax machine, tapping out the number of Marsh’s place in Colorado, reading the single sentence once more, and signing it in my own hand: “John.”
It was okay, it was fine, saying just what I wished to say. Satisfied and at peace, I sent it crackling west, a brief note in a small bottle:
“God bless you, Bingo Marsh.”