The Rothman Scandal

by Stephen Birmingham

  The photograph was taken up by serious art critics, one of whom wrote, “Newton’s photograph becomes a metaphor for life itself—the throbbing need of wild creatures to establish new territory, a new resting place, a new leader, a Queen, and to propagate the species—the pulsating force that has driven nature since the dawn of time. And in the young woman’s face is an image of not only life’s nurturing joys and rewards, but also life’s uncertainties, dangers, fears, and the dark certainty of death. Newton’s photograph speaks eloquently of en passant, ça va, as poignantly and heartbreakingly as an Edith Piaf song.” Oh, well …

  The photograph has already won a number of important prizes and awards, including an award from the American Society of Magazine Editors, the industry’s highest honor. The Pulitzer Prize Committee is very secretive, but my spies tell me that the picture has a good chance of winning the prize for feature photography. If it does, it will be the first time a magazine has won that particular Pulitzer since 1969, when it was won by a publication whose name I won’t even deign to mention. Alex is often asked where she came up with the concept for that photograph. “It wasn’t my concept at all,” she replies. “The concept came from Gregory Kittredge, one of our bright young editors.” Yes, Gregory has been promoted to assistant editor, quite a step up from being an editorial assistant. And Gregory is definitely a young man on the rise around here, something of the fair-haired boy, and if Alex ever decides to retire, there are those who say that Gregory will be her handpicked successor.

  By the way, we had our little letter-burning party—just the three of us, Alex, Charlie, and I—not long after Herbert’s stroke. We committed the letter to the flames of our fireplace at the Gainsborough, and the document from the Jackson County Court House met the same fate. During the cremation rite, I couldn’t help noticing Alex’s eyes traveling briefly to the pair of stained-glass windows. Then her eyes withdrew and, afterward, we went into another room and drank champagne, and got a little tiddly. I considered a toast to Skipper’s memory, but then thought better of it.

  With Melissa Cogswell—suddenly the hottest, and priciest, young model in the country—in her stable, you’d think that Lucille Withers would be doing very well. Still, to save money, she continues to take the bus when she comes to New York from Kansas City, as she did for Alex’s stylish little wedding.

  Ho Rothman picked me to succeed Herbert as president of the Publishing Division of Rothman Communications. This was my reward, I suppose, for having saved the company nearly a billion dollars in taxes. But I also suspect that Ho realized that my talents were better suited to the business, rather than the editorial, side of publishing, that I am more of a financial person than an editor. The Publishing Division is doing well enough, though the late-1990 recession has caused our revenues to dip somewhat. Mode has felt the pinch, too, but whereas other magazines have suffered revenue losses of up to ten percent, Mode is down only three percent, so Mode is still ahead of the pack.

  Also, now that she is freed of the constraints Herb Rothman placed upon her, Alex is able to have much more fun running her magazine. Already—subtly, gradually—she is introducing new themes and motifs into the book, changing it in ways Herb never would have approved of. I can’t reveal the little surprises she is planning for the future, but the atmosphere on the fourteenth floor is suddenly exciting again. It is almost as though she had been given all the money in the world, and allowed to create her own new magazine—those are the sort of changes you’ll be noticing in the months ahead. For instance, I can tell you that if Herb Rothman was scandalized by last June’s cover, wait till you see the cover she has planned for this coming May! Even Ho, who is hard to scandalize, may raise his eyebrows at this one, though Ho never wails too loudly as long as the bottom line looks good.

  As for Ho himself, he has made an astonishing recovery, just as Aunt Lily said he would, once the nightmare of the IRS suit was settled in our favor. As Aunt Lily says, it is shocking to think that a federal agency, such as the IRS, could come so close to destroying a man who has been a conscientious taxpayer for so many years. Though Ho no longer has the complete power that he once had, and must share his power with other stockholders, he is still very much in charge of things at the age of nearly ninety-five. He has moved back into his old squash-court-sized office on the thirtieth floor—the office with the huge map on the wall—and there is no question of who tells whom what to do. Ho’s doctors say that they have never seen a case of what was diagnosed as advanced senility reverse itself so dramatically. It is as though the hardened arteries have thawed. Some physicians credit his comeback to his hardy, immigrant genes. One doctor has said that Ho was never senile at all, but was suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome, rather like that suffered by veterans of the Vietnam War—in Ho’s case, the IRS being the equivalent of the Vietnam experience.

  But another doctor has decided that Ho was the victim of what this man calls “hysterical senility,” brought on, again, by the IRS. Hysterical senility, this physician maintains, is like a hysterical pregnancy. Hysterical senility, of course, fits no known medical category, but this man is writing a scholarly paper on the subject.

  Poor Herbert, on the other hand, has not been well, I am sorry to say. In the aftermath of his stroke, the right side of his once-almost-handsome face now sags rather horribly, making it difficult to look at him. To me, Herb Rothman’s face calls to mind a sand castle that has been ravaged by the tide. Occasionally, he still tries to write company memos, if that’s what they are, with his left hand, in a handwriting which, alas, no one can decipher. So, for the most part, he is reduced to a mute and angry, bitter glare from his wheelchair, as he watches the world pass him by.

  But in the meantime, Herbert’s illness has softened Pegeen considerably. It even seems to have saved their faltering marriage. In the process, Pegeen has lost her Razor Blade thinness, and has put on at least thirty pounds. Perhaps what Pegeen always needed was an invalid husband to care for, and Herbert’s disability may have given her at last an opportunity to be splendid in a way she never knew how to be, or dared to be, before. Everyone comments on her obviously caring ministrations to her handicapped husband—the way she wheels him on daily outings in Central Park, and takes him to movies, plays, and concerts, activities he never enjoyed before. She has had all the doorknobs in the River House apartment lowered by six inches, so he can grasp them with his good hand from his chair. She has had an orthopedic toilet, with grab bars, installed in his bathroom. People have begun calling the new plump Pegeen Rothman a “saint,” the way darling Marlene called Charlie and me saints. Thus beatified, Pegeen’s personal star has risen consequentially in that fickle firmament known as New York Society.

  But it has not risen to the extent that Maude McCulloch’s has. Maude’s rise has been meteoric. Let Mona Potter tell the story:

  THE FASHION SCENE

  by

  Mona

  Well, kiddies, now that autumn’s here, you jes knew there’d be a buncha fashionable parties, dincha? Well, the most fashionable of ’em all was tossed last night by Magnificent Maude McCulloch in her smashingly redecorated East Side duplex, done all in white, with splashes of color provided ONLY by the Mirós, Picassos, Manets, Monets, and Gauguins on her walls, plus the Van Gogh her handsome hubby outbid the Japs for.

  Magnificent Maude herself, who’s never been skinnier, is singlehandedly putting my favorite sweetie, Pauline Trigère, back on the fashion map where she belongs. The wife of zillionaire Rodney McCulloch, her dark hair pulled back in a jeweled Chanel bow, looked scrumptious in Trigère’s hot pink evening pajamas as she greeted her guests who were everybody who was anybody. Anybody who wasn’t somebody just wasn’t there, kiddies. How does Magnificent Maude do it? Coming soon: My first exclusive interview with M.M., who’s promised to tell Mother all her secrets.…

  Et cetera, et cetera. I was at that party, of course. And I couldn’t help noticing that Mona Potter was wearing a new pair of ruby chandelier ea
rrings. They dangled beneath her birdcage of copper curls. From Mona’s report it would be possible to guess that Maude McCulloch had transformed herself into just another East Side Razor Blade, right down to the death-rattle laugh. But I am pleased to say that, though she is fashionably thin, Maude has not gone quite that far. For one thing, she included her children at her party—as guests, and not just to pass hors d’oeuvres. A typical Razor Blade ships her children to the country when she entertains. There seem to be dozens of McCulloch children, though I actually counted only seven. They were quite astonishingly well behaved, as children go.

  Mona also failed to mention that Maude. McCulloch has inherited Coleman, Alex’s former majordomo. Coleman had trouble adjusting to Alex’s new husband, I understand. He told me that he considers Mel “not good enough for her.” Ah, well. In Coleman’s view, no one would be good enough for Alex.

  Alex and Rodney McCulloch are still friendly—friendly rivals, you might say—for he still talks of wanting to develop a competitive publication to Mode. The trouble is that he has thus far been unable to find the right editor to steer the project for him.

  As for Charlie and me, our new house in East Hampton is very pretty—a bit larger than we really needed, but very pretty. We really didn’t need two tennis courts, for instance, one grass and one en tout cas, but I suppose they’re nice to have. Our drop-in Sunday brunches are already becoming something of a social feature in this part of the South Shore. Drop in, next time you’re in the area. Very casual. Drop in, that is, if you’re comfortable with the sort of people we like to be around. Some people might find our guests a bit too high powered. Last week, for instance, Claudette Colbert just suddenly appeared. Guess what she was wearing. Hot pants. And a fisherman’s vest. She looked divine.

  As head of Rothman’s publishing division, I find I can pretty much run things from the house out here, and don’t need to be in the office in Manhattan all that much. In fact, where Mode is concerned, I pretty much leave business decisions up to Alex, and so, in effect, she is both editor and publisher of the magazine, a very nice arrangement for both of us. Though we keep the apartment at the Gainsborough as a pied à terre, our lives are pretty much out here nowadays. Even the canary seems happier out here. At the Gainsborough, Bridget hardly ever sang. Out here, she sings all day long!

  We’ve moved the shrine to Adam out from the Gainsborough to East Hampton. I suspect this is why Mel and Alex haven’t been over from Sagaponack for a visit, though they’re only a hop and a skip away. She just doesn’t want to see those stained-glass windows again.

  I don’t suppose Alex will ever get over Skipper. Her love for him was too bruising for her. I’ve thought a lot about the three men in Alex’s life: Skipper, Steven, and Mel. There are many different kinds of love, of course, certainly more than Mr. Heinz’s 57 Varieties, and perhaps more than there are stars in the sky. But when Skipper happened to her—and that is the right word, he happened to her, fell upon her like a hunter upon his prey—she was so young, and he was such a sexual animal. He even smelled of sex. When he was in a room with you, the smell in the air was so thick with sex that you could have cut it with a butter knife, sliced it off in great thick slabs and left them lying about the floor. In fact, that was probably the only thing poor Skipper … Adam … really ever had.

  That afternoon of our little letter-burning party, I brought out one of our nude photographs of Adam, in a state of violent erection, which was really something to behold. I showed it to her. She looked at the picture briefly, then turned away with a shudder of revulsion. It could have been the revulsion of remembered lust.

  Perhaps, at seventeen, she thought that was what all men were like. Alas, they are not. Perhaps, at seventeen, she thought that was what love was. Alas, it isn’t.

  Then came Steven. For all his sweetness and his gentleness and kindness—or perhaps because of these qualities—I am sure he was a passive lover, quite the opposite of Skipper. I know Steven loved her very much, and I’m sure she loved him, but it was just a different kind of love. She asked herself: Is this, then, what love is like?

  Both men hurt her in different ways. Both men loved her in different ways. Both men abandoned her in different ways. Both men fulfilled her in different ways. Both men offered her a great deal. But both men robbed her of a great deal.

  In Mel, I think, she has found the best of both at last, minus the worst of both. It would be trite and banal to say that Mel has made Alex happy at last. Alex is too smart and sophisticated a woman to think that anyone is happier, or unhappier, than anyone else. Or, to put it more accurately, no one is happier, or unhappier, than he or she decides to be. But, in some ways, marriage to Mel seems to have made Alex an even better editor—more willing to experiment, more willing to gamble, more willing to explore the untested and the risky. The untested and the risky certainly applies to her task of building a new relationship with Joel, too, and Mel is definitely a help to her there. The past is a great deal of heavy luggage for a person to carry about in life, and if there is one sure thing that Mel has done for Alex it has been to help her let go of the past. Is there any better kind of love than a love that makes one forget past loves? I think not.

  I pray that this is true for her, because she deserves the very best of love.

  You see, I love her too, in my own way.

  And I think, in her own way, that she loves me. It’s just another, different kind of love.

  Sometimes I think that if love could be sold and bottled, its various formulas would fill an entire supermarket aisle.

  Yesterday was my birthday—which one, I won’t say, because at this point I really don’t know, but it was one of them, one or another of them. I think age is the most boring statistic. Why are Americans so obsessed with age? Why does the New York Times insist on peppering its pages with the ages of the people in its news stories, when their ages have absolutely no relevance to the events being reported? It is a question I might pass along to Joel, in light of his proposed future journalistic career. If I were running things, I would like to see age done away with.

  In any event, a huge UPS van backed into our drive, driven by, of all strange coincidences, that dreadful Otto Forsthoefel, whom I naturally pretended not to recognize. Her gift, she had said, was to be a combination birthday and housewarming present, and when we unpacked the large crates it turned out that they contained a lovely pair of matched Boulle commodes. They are perhaps not quite as fine as those Aunt Lily Rothman has, and they do not bear the hallmark of the Palais de Versailles. But they are signed, and they are in better condition than Aunt Lily’s pieces, and they are very fine indeed. They look quite handsome where we have placed them, flanking the doorway to the room we call the Orangerie.

  How did she know of my passion for Boulle cabinetry? I’ve no idea unless, as I suspect, she and Aunt Lily had put their heads together. The card was very simple. On it, she had drawn a slash through the word “old,” and so the message looked like this:

  FOR DEAR OLD YOUNG LENNY

  XXXX

  Alex and Mel

  At first, we didn’t open the drawers of either of the two cabinets. Then I opened the top drawer of one of them, marveling at how magnificently it was fitted and doweled, and Scotch-taped to the rosewood bottom of the drawer was the plain gold wedding band Skipper had given her. With the ring was another note that said, “I think you should have this now.” I confess there were tears in my eyes.

  And—oh, yes. Fiona. I rather imagine you are wondering what became of her. But I’m afraid the fact is that I have more or less lost track of her. After she was evicted from the Westbury for failure to pay her rent, I heard she went to Los Angeles, where in that fragile world of Hollywood society, and still posing as Lady Fiona Hesketh-Fenton, she did all right—for a while, at least—under the sponsorship of some producer whose last picture was made in 1971. Then I heard she was in Duluth. Why Duluth? I’ve no idea. I’ve never had the misfortune of visiting Duluth, and I suppose D
uluthians (Duluthites?) feel fortunate in never having had me to entertain. The only thing I’ve ever heard about Duluth is that the Holiday Inn there closes up completely during the winter months because freezing spray, blowing off Lake Superior, encases the entire motel complex in a thick carapace of ice.

  I’ve never known what kind of nasty scheme she was trying to cook up with Joel, which involved me somehow. It was no doubt something that she hoped would embarrass or frighten me, or put me in a blackmailable position. Needless to say, I’ve never asked Joel about this. I wouldn’t want him to know that his mother and I had poked around in his private journals.

  I’ve nothing personal against Fiona, actually. She was just a girl who’d botched up her life in London, and tried to reinvent herself in New York. Most people would like to reinvent themselves from time to time, it seems to me. Haven’t you ever thought of chucking your old self aside, and starting fresh, someplace else, as someone else, with a whole new persona? Of course you have.

  All of us were people who tried to reinvent themselves, though some of us were more successful than others. After that blessed day when I was ordered never again to set my footprints in Sharkey County, Mississippi, I was able to reinvent myself as who I am today. Alexandra Rothman Jorgenson, a little girl from the tall corn belt of Western Missouri, came east and reinvented herself as an Oracle, the High Priestess of American Fashion. Alex’s mother, a Midwest country housewife, longed to reinvent herself as a Broadway playwright. Mel Jorgenson, the Brooklyn tailor’s son, rolled marbles in his mouth until he lost his accent, and reinvented himself as one of the most popular newsmen on the airwaves. Poor Adam Amado tried to reinvent himself again and again, and I even thought once that I could help him pull the rabbit out of the hat at last, because it’s all done with mirrors, magic, sleight of hand. Herbert Rothman wanted to reinvent himself, but his father wouldn’t let him, and much the same could be said for Steven. Ho Rothman reinvented himself seventy-eight years ago in a defunct printing plant in Newark. Maude McCulloch reinvented herself just the other day.