Spring Collection

by Judith Krantz

  “But Tom!”

  “We’ll get Tom and bring him to the hotel. He’ll stay with you there and help take care of you. Frankie will get him as soon as you’re in bed. If you don’t go to bed, Tinker, Frankie can’t go get Tom. I’ll talk to Marco, he’ll understand perfectly, this happens lots of times, they can do the dress rehearsal with somebody standing in for you, you’ve already had your final accessory check, so they don’t need you, doesn’t that make sense, Tinker? There, that’s better now, isn’t it, here, blow, good, don’t let go, Frankie, we’ve still got those fucking stairs, grab her coat, okay, let’s go, back to the hotel, some nice hot soup, you’ll be perfect for tomorrow, Tinker, you just need to get off your feet.”

  “But you’ll talk to Marco, you promise? You’ll explain?”

  “Oh, I’ll talk to Marco, Tinker, you can count on that.”

  23

  I realized that I was holding my breath as Justine, Mike and I shepherded April and Jordan to the elevator that would take us to the underground space at the Ritz where the Lombardi spring collection was going to be presented tomorrow night. Tonight was the dress rehearsal and the first time Jordan and April would find themselves in the company of the top girls in the world.

  It had been a long day and the hard part was just starting now, after eight at night. We were late, on top of everything else, because of an unexpected traffic accident that had tied up the Place de la Concorde.

  It seemed years ago, rather than just this morning, that Justine and I had settled Tinker in her room and made sure that she ate every last bite of a light lunch. When we’d last looked in on her, before leaving the Plaza for the Ritz, she’d had another meal and was sound asleep. Tom, reading in a chair, was riding shotgun.

  “Just what kind of favor is Necker doing our girls by making them hold their own with all the superstars?” I’d asked Justine in the afternoon, hours ago, after she’d returned from her confrontation with Marco, filled with the glowing, righteous satisfaction of someone who has finally performed a major public service in a woodshed. “That sadistic, sick little creep won’t give us any more problems,” she told me. Her victory-blue eyes had never been so vibrant a color, every individual one of her blond hairs seemed to have an energetic life of its own, and I had felt a lift of my spirit every time she flashed her familiar smile that combined mirth, courage and pride in the same moment.

  “Face it,” Justine replied, suddenly serious. “GN hired the stars to give the first Lombardi collection borrowed status. The fashion press always expects to see the most important girls doing the most important shows. But it could be exactly the sort of gesture that backfires and makes our three girls look even more inexperienced than they are.”

  “Look at the bright side,” I had urged her. “The photographers and editors must be getting damn sick of all the familiar, predictable models, they’ll take a really good look at our girls, three fresh, unknown faces who’ve had a huge PR buildup. Each one of them is as beautiful as the big girls, they’re simply not famous. You know that the hotter a girl is, the closer she is to being history.”

  “Maybe you’re right,” she had replied dubiously.

  “And maybe you are,” I had said gloomily. “But, on the other hand, even if our girls don’t grab the limelight, what difference does it make? The real competition is only among them. The others are just there to show the clothes, so what are we getting in such a twist about? It’s a win-win situation.”

  “I don’t believe in ‘win-win’ ” she had said, shaking her head competitively, her stubborn streak taking over. “It’s a myth, one of those expressions that’s easy to say and too good to be true.”

  The reception desk had called, interrupting the seesaw of our discussion, and announced that Gabrielle d’Angelle was in the lobby and would like to come up. When she arrived, looking far-beyond-sleek in black, she announced that she had been delegated by Necker to be our guardian angel from GN until the spring collection was over. Believe it or not, I was so nervous at this point that I actually welcomed the distraction of her sharp-edged, beady-eyed, bred-in-the-Parisian-bone hardness, although how she could help to protect my beauties from disappearing beneath the shadow of the great perfect pumpkinhood of Claudia-Linda-Yasmeenness, I couldn’t imagine.

  “Well,” Gabrielle said, as she shook hands with Justine, “I’m glad that you’ve finally recovered. Your illness seems to have left you looking extremely well.”

  “Antibiotics often have that effect,” Justine answered smoothly.

  “How is poor Tinker?”

  “Sleeping peacefully.”

  “She’ll definitely be all right by tomorrow?”

  “She will, in spite of Lombardi. Who did you get to take her place tonight?”

  “Fortunately Janine, Marco’s former house model, is helping out. She’s still loyal to Monsieur Necker.”

  “What I don’t understand is why is the dress rehearsal starting so late?” Justine protested. “Eight in the evening is a ridiculous hour—it might run all night.”

  “At no price would the Ritz allow us to rent the space earlier in the day. As it is, they exacted an incredible amount for the use of the swimming pool for twenty-four hours, as if anybody has time to swim during collection week. We’ll be using the beauty salon, next to the swimming pool, for dressing, hair and makeup. Their last hair client is scheduled to be finished just before seven tonight.”

  “But what about the hotel guests who want to get their hair done tomorrow?”

  “Tomorrow the Ritz has made arrangements to send them to Alexandre by car and driver, all at GN’s expense. Months ago I suggested that it would be more practical to set up the runways and hold the rehearsal elsewhere than in the hotel, but Marco fought for the actual location of the show so that the girls and their dressers will know exactly where they are to be tomorrow night.”

  “He makes sense about one thing, anyway,” Justine grumbled.

  “Do you two have any idea how different this is going to be from the ordinary show?” Gabrielle asked. “The normal show lasts forty minutes, costs about two hundred thousand dollars and the editors leave unfed. This show will last less than a half hour, and cost well over half a million dollars.”

  “We haven’t been given any of the details,” Justine replied, interested in spite of herself.

  “It’s a black-tie dinner of the most lavish kind. Champagne and caviar will be served before the show, dinner afterward. Only the crème de la crème of the press and customers have been invited. Normally there are two thousand people, tomorrow night only three hundred, plus the most important photographers of course. Remember, GN is one of the world’s biggest advertisers. No editor of importance can ignore Lombardi. We kept this deliberately small and exclusive but nevertheless the media coverage will be huge since Monsieur Necker has spent money with an open hand.”

  “What about the runways?” Justine asked, unwilling to be drawn into a discussion of Necker’s financial excesses.

  “The crew from Belloir et Jallot will get started tonight at seven sharp. Their first job is to cover the pool and set up the runways. They’ll be arranged in concentric circles with the banquet tables between them, so that everyone will have a front-row seat.”

  “Belloir et Jallot?”

  “The great experts on location backgrounds: sets, lights, seating, the musicians’ bandstand, everything that you need for transformation of any space into a great party.”

  “Musicians.” I asked, “Aren’t you using a DJ?”

  “My dear Frankie, this is not going to be like all the other Paris collections, so many of which have turned into vulgarity contests. Lagerfield actually played something called ‘Don’t Want No Short Dick Man’ last season, and he began the show with a soundtrack screaming ‘Turn This Fucking Music Up!’ ”

  “Good God!” I couldn’t believe those words had issued from Gabrielle’s elegantly made-up mouth.

  “Marco,” she continued, not turning a s
ingle glossy hair, “decided he wouldn’t be like everyone else, in competition with those ridiculous people who call themselves ‘soundtrack stylists.’ So he persuaded Monsieur Necker to import a band called Chicago.”

  “But they’re an American rock and roll group from the late seventies,” Justine said surprised. “Why them?”

  “They’re favorites of Marco’s,” Gabrielle said, shrugging in a way that clearly showed her lack of enthusiasm. “He arranged for them to supplement their group with other musicians, singers and a backup group. He commissioned them to reinvent music from the nineteen thirties in a new idiom. There’ll be twenty musicians in all not counting the vocalists.”

  “Are his clothes also a reinvention of the nineteen thirties?” Justine asked. “I didn’t expect him to steal—borrow—from that far back.”

  “I haven’t seen them,” Gabrielle replied snippily. “He may be fabricating a new kind of neutron bomb, for all I know, or even bringing back the high-button shoe. However, the key words he gave the PR department were ‘gaiety, freshness and charm.’ ”

  “You haven’t seen them?” Justine and I asked together, equally amazed.

  “Marco has been ‘too busy’ creating to show me anything. He refused to show clothes that were in the ‘formative state,’ except to the other people concerned in the design process.”

  “But if you haven’t seen them, what about the PR people? They must be working in a vacuum?” I asked, feeling sympathetic to Gabrielle for the first time since I’d met her.

  She gave us an I’ve-been-there-and-done-it-all shrug. “Worldwide, only a dozen or so designers are important. PR will not decide if Marco is to become one of them. But I do know quite enough to tell you that he is playing all his strongest cards, even though I haven’t seen the clothes.”

  “So,” Justine said slowly, “you mean seduction.”

  “Exactly.” Gabrielle looked at her with a new appreciation. “Seduction. What else can it be with sets that have been executed at vast expense to turn that enormous space under the Ritz into the terrace of an outdoor café surrounded with one thousand flowering cherry and apple trees? Marco is invoking the spring of some vague, entirely idealized year between nineteen thirty-four and nineteen thirty-six.”

  “But nobody remembers that far back,” I objected.

  “And that is exactly the point. The present is not particularly alluring, is it? Marco wants it to be an imaginary year during which nobody had any reason to worry about the future or brood on the past. The seduction of the senses will begin as the press enters the hotel from the cold night and finds the lobby banked in springtime.”

  “Have you any idea what music Chicago is going to play? New stuff in the thirties idiom?” I asked.

  “You didn’t think they were doing original music, did you?” she asked, horrified at the idea. “No, only the interpretation, the orchestration, is original. Marco wouldn’t leave something that important to these musicians,” Gabrielle said, taking a notebook out of her purse. “Here are some of the titles from the medley that will set the mood before the show and you tell me how original it is. ‘Lovely to Look At,’ ‘Isn’t This a Lovely Day—to Be Caught in the Rain?,’ ‘I’m in the Mood for Love,’ ‘Blue Moon,’ ‘All I Do Is Dream of You,’ ‘My Romance’ …”

  “Stop!” Justine cried, laughing as hard as I was. Even Gabrielle was smiling. “We get the idea. Cornball as all hell but if it doesn’t put people in a receptive mood, nothing will. So you’ve got a dazzling replica of Paris in a never-never spring, music from the highest period of Hollywood musicals, a banquet provided by the Ritz, all the top models available—Marco won’t be able to say that they didn’t like his clothes because they weren’t presented with a maximum of schmaltz.”

  “ ‘Schmaltz’?” Gabrielle asked.

  “Chicken fat,” I explained, but she still looked puzzled.

  “It’s another way of saying charm,” Justine explained.

  “And I thought I spoke perfect English,” Gabrielle murmured. “Chicken fat? Highly idiomatic, I imagine.”

  “Highly,” I reassured her. “You have to be there.” It’s at a moment like this that I find it easy to understand that French custom-designed clothes actually lose four million dollars a year.

  “But,” Gabrielle reminded me, “with luck, tonight is the first step to the Lombardi perfume. And the perfume market is seven and a half billion dollars a year. Monsieur Necker plans for many years in the future.”

  This conversation was cut short by Jordan and April, who beat on our door, closely followed by Mike and Maude. The girls were showing clear evidence of opening-night shakes.

  “What are we supposed to do with ourselves until it’s time for the rehearsal?” Jordan asked plaintively. “We’ve taken bubble baths until our fingertips shriveled, done our toenails twice, shaved our legs, washed our hair and we’re afraid that we might start tweezing our eyebrows and not be able to stop until there isn’t a hair left.”

  “There are still two more hours till we have to leave for the Ritz,” April said, looking faint. “I haven’t eaten all day. I’m weak from hunger but I’m afraid I’ll throw up if I put anything in my stomach.”

  “I have an idea,” Mike said. “Do you all play poker? No? Only me and Maude and Frankie? Well, we’ll teach the rest of you until you catch on. Then we’ll play for money till it’s time to leave.”

  Justine gave me an approving nudge that unmistakably meant, “you done good.” I didn’t deign to reply to such an obvious truth, but called room service for some playing cards and platters of food. The next two hours passed quickly as some very fast, loose and highly unorthodox poker took over. Soon everyone relaxed enough to consume the food, and Jordan, a beginner, or so she’d claimed, ended the session by raking in over three hundred dollars. Mike sat next to me, occasionally shooting a few pictures when he wasn’t trying to look at my cards.

  “Stop cheating!” I finally objected.,

  “But your cards are my cards, darling. Share and share alike. Wanna see mine?”

  “Is that the way it works?”

  “Sure.” I was about to take a peek at his cards, under the influence of his grin, and the way his eyes lapsed with pleasure when he looked at me. But Maude caught us and put a stop to it.

  Now even the memory of that fun was almost forgotten. Maude and Gabrielle had gone ahead of us in the small Ritz elevator, and on the second descent Mike, Justine and I stood in the back, while Jordan and April stood in front of us, backs straight, shoulders squared, exquisite heads held high on their exquisite necks, looking totally confident and self-possessed. Only their hair distinguished them, Jordan’s dark Cherubim ringlets and April’s platinum nape. Suddenly Mike’s flash went off and I saw what he had noticed: the two girls were holding hands so tightly that it must hurt.

  “Heartless cannibal!” I hissed at him. “Possible cover shot,” he hissed back at me and took another shot as the elevator door opened. “Go, girl, go!” Jordan encouraged April with a sudden smile, and the girls advanced, still holding hands, into the cigarette smoke-laced air of the white and pink marble reception room. In the background you could see stacks of little gilded chairs being carried by, three models so famous that they could be identified by one feature alone and dozens of black-clad proles who were either the Belloir et Jallot crew or people connected with the business of inserting girls into clothes.

  “What do we do first?” I asked Gabrielle.

  “The girls should report to Marco so he knows they’re here. I’ll take charge of them.”

  “No, I will, Gabrielle,” Justine said quickly.

  “No one who isn’t necessary is to be allowed backstage, and you’re not directly involved with showing the spring collection. It’s going to be a madhouse tonight. I’m sorry but you’ll have to wait here, Justine. I thought you understood that.”

  “Balls, Gabrielle. I’m going with the girls. And so is Frankie. They need us. And of course Mike and Maude have
to be everywhere.”

  “Mike and Maude, yes. But as for you and Frankie, it’s absolutely impossible.”

  “Why don’t you go ask Marco?”

  A minute later Gabrielle returned, looking as astonished as her features would allow. “He’s says you’re both welcome anywhere, so long as you keep out of his way. I’m sorry, Justine, I didn’t know an exception was being made for the two of you.”

  “That’s okay. You couldn’t know. Come on everybody. Mike, remember, no photos of Ms. Schiffer naked, or even in her undies. She may be trapped in a look that she can’t change, but she’s not giving it away when she’s not being paid. It’s a rule.”

  “Ah, shucks!” my beloved whined.

  It was at that moment that Chicago struck up the first strains of their version of “Goody Goody” and I felt immediately corrupted with pleasure. It was strongly syncopated, extra fast, and with a beat so empathic that no one could miss it. Something about the music contained the very essence of expectation and dapper, light, uncomplicated fun. All around me people started to smile and with a gesture as natural as a child scratching a mosquito bite, Jordan swept April into a little dance step.

  “Not so bad, this Chicago,” Gabrielle said in what was, for her, a deeply approving voice.

  We threaded our way into the large beauty salon, which served very well as an improvised dressing room, since the enormous amount of beige marble counter space gave all the makeup artists and hairstylists room to place their tools, the lighting was brilliant, and by taking away all the leather chairs and replacing them with banquet chairs, an adequate space had been created for the dressers and the girls to make their changes.

  As our little group paused in the doorway I realized that I’d never guessed just how smack-in-the-stomach the collective presence of the top girls in the girl business would be. Now they weren’t clacking, one by one, in and out of Loring Model Management, each an individual, as I had come to know them. Now they were banded together in a cloud of heightened awareness of themselves that raised their power to the nth degree. As a group they were plunged into a dense atmosphere of dedicated self-absorption that was deeply knowing and totally privileged, in equal proportions. They were wrapped in the knowledge of their meritocracy, which consisted of the dead-simple fact that at this particular moment in time they were the chosen of the chosen, the anointed. Rules that bound other women had been suspended for them. Their faces, in spite of their youth, carried the weight of so much fantasy that walking into a room filled with top models was ten times more impressive than finding yourself backstage in the presenters’ makeup room on Oscar Night.