Shades of Fortune

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  But he is not smiling now. He is unhappy because he is ashamed of the place he has just come from, and ashamed of the lie he has told his wife. “Whenever you are worried or depressed,” his mother used to tell him, “remember who you are. Remember that you are both a Moore and a Bradford of Boston. The Bradfords and the Moores were not put together with flour-and-water paste. Clement Clarke Moore did more than write ‘The Night Before Christmas.’ He was a distinguished linguist, historian, and lexicographer, who compiled the first Hebrew-to-English dictionary in America. And don’t forget him, either,” and she would point to the portrait of William Bradford, Mayflower passenger and the second governor of the Plymouth colony.

  But all the family portraits gazing sternly down at him from their heavy frames in his parents’ house on Beacon Hill could not erase the feelings of unworthiness that consume him now over the place he has just come from, and the lie.

  As the taxi passes the Waldorf, Brad Moore suddenly sees a familiar face in the street. It is none other than his own twenty-six-year-old son, Brad Moore III: handsome, eager-looking, a little windblown, his black tie still loose and his collar unbuttoned, cheerily trying to hail a taxi for himself. Immediately, his father sinks back deep in his seat and averts his head lest his son recognize him.

  What a thing to do! How to explain this? Why would a father spot his own son on the street and not immediately order his driver to stop and give him a lift? Badger, his father knows, is also heading for 1107 Fifth Avenue. In just a few minutes, he and Badger will be pumping each other’s hands and throwing mock punches at each other’s shoulders like the friends they are, father and son. Why not stop the cab, throw open the door, call out to Badger, and tell him to hop in? What kind of father would not do this? What is wrong with a father who is ashamed to have his son find him heading homeward in a perfectly ordinary Yellow Cab? But while all these thoughts are racing through his head, the opportunity—to stop the cab, call out, “Hey! Badger! It’s me! Hop in, kid!”—has passed. The taxi is blocks beyond the Waldorf, and Badger is out of sight.

  It is because of where Bradford Moore, Jr., has just come from. He can hear his son, hopping in beside him, saying, “Hey, Pop—what’s with the taxi? I thought you always took the subway uptown. Don’t tell me you’re finally starting to live like a rich person!”

  But then the taxi meter would tell the story. He could not have come all the way from Wall Street for three dollars. It would mean another lie.

  “And so that’s who’ll be here,” Mimi is telling her first-arrived guests, Sherrill Shearson and Dirk Gordon. “My sweeet mother, my aunt Nonie and my uncle Edwee, my dear little old grandmother who’s almost blind and”—she taps her forehead—“just a little bit dotty. Sometimes. Other times, she can be sharp as a tack. And my husband, Brad, of course, who’ll be a little late, and my son, who’s also Brad, but whom everybody calls Badger. We’re big on nicknames in this family, as you can see. Most of them were handed out by my Granny Flo. Badger’s still not married, and I know he’ll flip for you, Sherrill—may I call you Sherrill? He wanted you for the Mireille Woman the minute he saw your composite. And, let’s see … who else? Oh, there’s a man Aunt Nonie’s bringing whom I haven’t met named Williams, and there’s Uncle Edwee’s brand-new wife, whose name is Gloria. Does that make twelve of us?” She counts on her fingers. “Oh, I nearly forgot. There’s a young man named Jim Greenway whom we all must be especially nice to. He’s a writer for Fortune, and he’s writing a piece on the company and the Myerson family. I thought this would be a good way for him to meet everybody in the family and get a feel for our business all at once. You see, I always say the Miray corporation isn’t just a business. It’s also a family, and the two of you are going to be a part of the Miray family—at least for the next few months. But don’t worry about this Mr. Greenway—I doubt he’ll ask you many questions. Oh, he may ask you what it’s like to be working for me, or something like that, and just be absolutely truthful. I’ve always found, when dealing with journalists, that it’s best to be truthful. If you start playing games with them, they’ll start playing games with you. So, if you think I’m going to be a demanding bitch to work with, just say so.…”

  Dirk Gordon gives Sherrill a small sideways look.

  “This sure is a nice place you have here, Mrs. Moore,” Sherrill says.

  “Well, thank you,” Mimi says. “And please call me Mimi. Everyone does.” She thrusts her hands deep into the pockets of her white silk dress and, in the same motion, turns on one heel toward Felix, who stands at the library door, his silver tray in one hand. “Now, what can Felix get you from the bar?” she says.

  “I’d like a tequila sunrise,” Sherrill says.

  “A tequila … sunrise. Oh, dear. I wonder if we …”

  Dirk Gordon clears his throat conspicuously. “We’re not in a Mexican restaurant, love,” he says. “Maybe you could settle for something a bit less … exotic? I’ll have a Perrier with lime,” he adds, with a slight nod in Felix’s direction.

  “Oh,” Sherrill says, looking abashed. “Well, uh—”

  “Oh, but you know what Felix can make,” Mimi says brightly, stepping in to save the moment. “He makes an absolutely smashing banana daiquiri—in the blender, using both light and dark rum. Felix’s banana daiquiris are practically world famous. Why not let him fix one of those for you?”

  “Uh … okay,” the young woman says.

  “And you know what I want, Felix,” Mimi says.

  This is the Mimi Myerson you have read about in Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar and Town & Country, and also in the Wall Street Journal.

  A great deal has been written about her beauty, which is arresting, about her fair hair, which tonight is caught back in a simple ponytail secured with a small, white satin bow, and about her luminous skin, which, even at forty-nine, seems to need very little of her own products in terms of makeup. She is one of those fortunate women who can wear any color, and tonight her color is white, a pale chiffon off-the-shoulder sheath by Jimmy Galanos that is almost Grecian in the way its gathered folds swirl about her body. She is also one of those rare women who are not necessarily improved by jewelry, and tonight her only adornment consists of a pair of small diamond earclips and the ruby and diamond ring her husband Brad gave her when they became engaged in 1958.

  Mimi has always been the sort of woman who, if you saw her on the street, possessed the sort of quality—is it her posture? her sense of style?—that would make you pause and take a second look. She is the sort of woman who, if you saw her at a party, and did not know who she was, would cause you to turn to a companion and say, “That tall blonde over there—who is she?” There is a certain aura about her that conveys a certain mystery, which has nothing to do with her beauty. But, to me, her eyes are her most striking feature. They are large and, some captious critic might insist, a touch too far apart, but they are of an extraordinary pale grey color. She sometimes makes jokes about “my beige eyes,” but the word beige does not really do them justice. A friend of hers once said that her eyes had the color and luster “of fine old silver when it’s polished every day,” and that describes them better. Then there is her laugh, which is deep and throaty, but with a soft ripple to it, rather suggesting water flowing over smooth, round pebbles in a stream. Or am I getting carried away with metaphors? She is laughing that pebbly, throaty laugh now, over something Dirk Gordon has just said about their taxi driver thinking that 1107 Fifth Avenue was in Harlem, when any fool would know that this is one of the four best addresses in Manhattan, the other three being 825 and 834 Fifth Avenue, and River House. Mr. Gordon is obviously the sort of young man who, coming from out of town, would know such things.

  A lot of adjectives have been used to describe Mimi, and a lot of qualities have been ascribed to her to account for her extraordinary success over the past twenty-five years at steering, almost single-handedly, this company from the brink of bankruptcy—where it was at the time of her father’s tragic de
ath—to where it is today, among the Fortune 500. She has been called a visionary. She has been called an organizational genius. She has been called a workaholic, and much more. She has been called a stainless-steel butterfly, an Iron Maiden in silk pajamas, the Mata Hari of Mascara, the Dragon Lady of Lip Gloss, and a number of other, less flattering things, for this is a business where the competition is both articulate and ruthless, and makes no bones about it.

  But none of these descriptions quite sums her up. She is, among other things, essentially a gambler, possessed of what the men who work the tables at Las Vegas call “heart.” What riskier business is there than the beauty business? Where are the stakes higher, the odds against success more staggering? Even tonight’s dinner party is the opening move of another huge gamble on Mimi’s part: millions of dollars from Mimi’s advertising budget have already been spent to launch her first venture into the fragrance market with a new scent called Mireille, and a companion eau de toilette for men called Mireille Man. Though the first ads and television commercials will not appear until after Labor Day, to run with increasing frequency through the fall in hopes of capturing a share of the Christmas market, all the others in the industry—Lauder, Revlon, Arden, and the rest—are aware of what she is up to and are betting, and devoutly hoping, that she will fail. Mimi is betting that she will not. Her last two product launches were successes. She is shooting for three in a row. So she is also overdue for a flop. Ladies and gentlemen, no more bets, please.…

  She is also a talented showperson. For what is the beauty industry but a kind of show biz? As in show biz, a lot depends on the appeal of the stars, and as her stars Mimi has deliberately cast two unknowns: Sherrill and Dirk. Aside from their obvious beauty, will they also reveal themselves to have that mysterious star quality that will cause audiences to line up, three deep, at the box office? Both possess a kind of soigné, sophisticated look. That may go over with the New York crowd, but will it play in the nabes, will it play in Peoria? No one has the answers to these questions yet.

  Even tonight’s dinner has been planned as a kind of drama, as a theatrical event. At a certain point, when all the guests have gathered, concealed jets, installed behind the bookcases of her library, will release an invisible mist of the new Mireille fragrance into the air. At each place setting in her dining room, a generous sample bottle has been placed—Mireille Man for the gentlemen, Mireille perfume for the women—as a party favor. Even Mimi’s apartment has been decorated—quite deliberately, she would admit this—as a kind of stage setting for what she does. In the library, where the guests are gathering, the woodwork has been painted with Tiger Lily, one of her most successful nail lacquer shades. The books on the mirrored bookshelves are all identically bound in matching leather. Behind the books, small invisible lights create a mysterious glow, like footlights glowing across an act curtain beneath a stage proscenium.

  But it is Mimi’s dining room, at the end of the central gallery, that is perhaps the most dramatic room in the apartment. Its strié walls are painted in a dusky-rose blush to match one of her Miray face powders, and, incredibly, in late August, Mimi has found fresh tulips to match the blush exactly. These fill three George I epergnes arranged across the length of the rosewood dining room table. In this room, too, are Mimi’s famous set of Louis XIV chairs, an even dozen of them, signed “Boulle,” their backs inlaid with tortoiseshell and yellow and gold metal in scrolls and cartouches, their seats covered with a deep pink Fortuny fabric. This same fabric has been used to treat the three tall, park-facing windows. A splendid pair of eight-paneled coromandel screens flank the fireplace, and its mantel displays a pair of eighteenth-century Sèvres vases—in the same pink as the Fortuny, an unusual color for Sèvres, which is more commonly blue, the color called sang du roi—and these are filled with more dusky-rose tulips, baby’s breath, and thin strands of bear grass.

  This is the room where, when she entertains, Mimi likes to use pieces from the collection of motif French and English china dinner and dessert plates that she and Brad have been building over the years. She now has plates to match almost any course she chooses to serve. If, for instance, a main course is to consist of baby lamb chops, Mimi has a set of Wedgwood plates painted with a pastoral scene of sheep grazing in an English meadow. Tonight’s dessert, poached fresh pears in crème fraîche, will be presented on plates decorated with pears, pear leaves, and blossoms. She also has plates decorated with grapes, strawberries, plums and apples, and on and on. For years, for Christmas, anniversaries, and birthdays, Mimi and Brad have given each other sets of motif plates to add to the collection, and a favorite pastime on Saturday afternoons for Brad and Mimi has been exploring the antiques shops along Second and York avenues, looking for plates with food motifs, no matter how whimsical the design. No one in New York has a collection quite like theirs.

  Mimi has been called a perfectionist. But look more closely. That Sèvres vase on the left has been broken, and repaired. When Badger Moore was nine, he and his friend Alex Brokaw came home from St. Bernard’s and, in an unsupervised moment, decided to construct a pair of forts in the apartment. The boys used sofa cushions from the living room and library, overturned ottomans and Boulle chairs, and, in a stroke of military inventiveness, decided that the pair of vases would serve admirably as cannons. The vase on the left was one of the first casualties of that battle.

  “Your mother is going to be furious!” Felix roared when he heard the crash and came running from the kitchen. “Your mother is going to kill you!”

  But of course it wasn’t quite as bad as that.

  “Get rid of them both, darling,” the famous decorator Billy Baxter told Mimi when he noticed the maze of tiny lines where the Sèvres vase had been pieced together. “As a matched pair, they have no value now, since one of them’s been broken. Get rid of them, and replace them with something of museum quality.”

  But Mimi demurred. Whether they are broken and restored or not, she still loves those vases. Besides, who else owns a piece of pre-Revolutionary French porcelain that was once mustered into service as a cannon?

  Yes, as the young model commented, it is a nice place that Mimi and Brad Moore have here, and it works, both as a showcase for Mimi’s considerable talents and as a home. It works as a home because so much of what it contains has a story like that of the Sèvres vase. Cole Porter, Noël Coward, and Richard Rodgers have all played that Bösendorfer piano in the living room, and when, in the middle of a particularly spirited arpeggio, Sir Noël managed to fracture the ivory of the highest C, Mimi refused to let him worry about the split key. “It will always remind us,” she told him, “that we had the fun of listening to you play in this room.” And when Andy Warhol’s cigarette rolled out of an ashtray and burned a hole in a faux marbre tabletop, and he offered to have the top refinished for her, Mimi said, “Never! That’s a Warhol burn.”

  And the apartment works as a showcase on nights like tonight when, dressed for a party, filled with off-season flowers, lit with recessed lighting behind cornices and within bookcases, glowing with candles that have been artfully placed to catch the return gleam of mirrors, the whole apartment, room after room, full of shimmer and shadows, seems to float on some powder-puff cloud high above the Central Park lake, a theatrical artifice on invisible wires.

  And of course, as a final touch of theatre, there is Mimi’s plan to surprise her family—and fellow stockholders—by introducing them not only to her new scent but also to the pretty young models, her stars, who will sell her product, and so the evening will have something of the quality of a backers’ audition. This in itself of course is a gamble, which is where we started off describing Mimi. This tactic may fall flat on its face. The young woman seems dull-witted, and the young man seems like a snot. But we shall see.

  “Is that a real oil painting?” Sherrill Shearson asks.

  “Yes. That’s my grandfather, Adolph Myerson, who started the company.”

  “He looks … ooh, sort of mean!”

/>   “He does look a little, well, dour, doesn’t he? But he took this business very seriously. I was always terrified of him. I just can’t take the business quite that seriously. To me, it’s a business that’s all about fantasies—hopes, wishes, dreams. Dreams of looking better, younger, healthier, happier, richer—and perhaps even feeling better about yourself if you can dream that you look that way. Wouldn’t you agree?”

  “Well, I never really thought about it all that much, actually,” the girl says. And then, “Hey, isn’t that painting kind of … lopsided?”

  “You mean the subject doesn’t occupy the center of the frame. Yes, and there’s a story behind that which I don’t have time to go into now.”

  Now Mimi must mingle with her other guests, and she moves away.

  “I didn’t appreciate that crack about Mexican restaurants,” the girl says. “If this is supposed to be polite society, I call that effing rude.”