The twin burdens of bisexuality and Jewish guilt weighed heavily on Hank. He considered that he’d been had. Shit, one day he was giving some pussy a try-on-for-size with a cute, little, blond fashion coordinator who was game for anything, and in what seemed to be only forty-eight hours later he found out that she was not only pregnant, indisputably by him, but also a Nice Jewish Girl who had several dozen relatives in Brooklyn, some of whom belonged to his mother’s branch of Hadassah.
So Hank ended up married and a father before he found out for certain if all-gay might have been more fun, not that he ever stopped trying to make sure.
However, it was far from a total loss. Chicky was a lot smarter than he was. She was also more aggressive and more ambitious. She wore sable hats before anyone had ever seen one except in the movie version of Anna Karenina. She wore the no-lipstick look before it was invented, or perhaps she invented it; she wore the first pants suit and the first miniskirt and the first midi and made Women’s Wear Daily at least five times a year. She shaped up Hank’s act, giving shrewd and cunning little dinner parties to which she managed to entice enough impossibly rude celebrities to make everyone else who was invited feel that they had had a brush with the glittering world of high fashion. Still, it kept the jobs rolling in to Levy’s huge studio, where the obligatory newest records played all day on the obligatory fabulous sound system, and the obligatory butcher-block table was always loaded with the obligatory feast of French cheeses, Italian and German sausages, dark, twisted breads from Bloomingdale’s gourmet department, and kosher dill pickles. All in all, a swell arrangement, and Spider learned a great deal during the year he was Levy’s assistant.
A photographer’s assistant spends nine tenths of his time handing his boss a camera that he has just loaded with fresh film, pulling down rolls of paper for backgrounds, checking the light meter, moving tripods from one place to another, fiddling with temperamental strobe lights, and shifting props. The other tenth of his time is devoted to changing the tapes on the sound system. However, Hank Levy was lazy and he was heavily involved in the social rumble, so he let Spider actually take a lot of pictures. Meaning that now Spider finally got to do all the things that had made him want to become a fashion photographer in the first place, like posing the models and deciding on angles and inventing his own lighting and focusing the camera and pushing the buttons and making the camera go click. It was even better than it looks in those movies about fashion photographers because Spider turned out to be a genius in talking to the models.
However, Hank Levy wasn’t so simpleminded or preoccupied that he ever let Spider take any of the pictures on magazine assignments. If anyone was going to go down to the Virgin Islands and shoot three models in next year’s monokinis, getting it off on the beach with a steel band, it was Hank. Not that he got a great many jobs like that. He had almost been a star photographer at one time in his career, but lately he was being asked to shoot Kimberly Knits on the Staten Island Ferry or White Stag separates at the West Side Tennis Club. Still, it was for Vogue and that was where you got your name underneath the photo. The money was lousy but the prestige was essential. Hank only let Spider loose on the small ads for watches and shoes and creams to bleach body hair, and not too many of those either—only when the smaller ad agencies were involved and he was sure that they didn’t plan to send their own art department people to observe the proceedings. Spider worked strictly on the low end of Hank’s business, the end that paid almost all of the rent.
The ad that launched Spider was for a new type of fingernail hardener, put out by a shoe-string company. The model, who was suppose to embody the essence of the romantic South, was young, inexperienced, and stiff in her hoopskirts and laced waist. Spider inspected the awkward-looking girl with frank appreciation.
“Perfect! Honey, you’re perfect! We finally booked someone who looks the part. I’m on to you, kid—you’re just that sort of proud little tease who used to drive the boys to drink in old Virginia. Too bad you weren’t born in time to play Scarlett O’Hara in the movie. My Lord, if this isn’t one irresistible girl—a little more to the right, sweet—I’ll bet there isn’t a man you meet who wouldn’t like to nibble his way up under that hoopskirt—now try to look remote, baby, remember you’re the plantation belle they went to war for. Great! It’s going great—bend a bit to the left, no that’s your right, lover—Christ, it’s fun to work with a fresh face. Oh, you are a clever little darling—this is better than a time machine—you can call me Ashley or Rhett, whichever you choose, because when a girl is as beautiful as you are, she always gets her pick. Come on, Scarlett honey bun, let’s try it sitting in that garden swing—lovely!”
And the now giggling girl, who had lived all her life in New Jersey, believed every word he said because she had only to notice the hard-on Spider got when he was shooting—and it was impossible to miss—to know that she really was divine. And that knowledge made her divine to the ninth power faster than Spider could say “Lick your lips, doll baby, and give me that smile again.”
The difference between the way a model looked when a fag photographer flung out a perfunctory “Fabulous, absolutely fabulous, darling!” and the way she looked when Spider was standing there clicking away with the bulk of his massive prick clearly outlined inside of his tight, white denims—and she felt her pussy begin to twitch, my God, actually get wet under that crazy hoop-skirt—was the difference between a good fashion shot and a great fashion shot.
Harriet Toppingham, the fashion editor who discovered Spider, was at the top of her field. However, all fashion editors, no matter how important, do not just breathe the electric, perfumed air of high fashion and gossip over expensive lunches. They work like dogs. One of her jobs was to scrutinize the ads in all magazines, not just purely fashion magazines, because ads are the life-blood of the magazine business. The cost of the paper and printing and distribution of each individual copy of a magazine is usually more than its newsstand or subscription price. Without advertising revenue there would be no magazine, no reason for a fashion editor’s job to exist.
There are only a handful of top magazine fashion editors in the United States. Each of the straight fashion magazines has an editor in chief, who is usually assisted by two or three subordinate fashion editors. There are always special editors for shoes, lingerie, accessories, and fabrics, each of whom has an assistant, since companies in these businesses advertise widely and have to be given particular attention and hand holding. On a general women’s magazine, like Good Housekeeping, the fashion department may have a staff of one fashion editor, her assistant, a shoe editor, and an accessory editor, but they fill only six editorial pages or less each month. At Vogue there are something like twenty-one editors of varying degrees of importance, including those stationed in Paris, Rome, and Madrid who are socialites first, editors second.
Only the very top fashion editors on any magazine make impressive salaries. The others are paid no more than a good secretary, but they willingly slave for the status, the excitement, and the prestige of the job. These lesser editors must be not only talented but ambitious. It helps if they come from backgrounds where a working-woman doesn’t need her own money to keep her in Laszlo soap and an occasional leg waxing.
When a fashion editor, like Harriet Toppingham, is at the top, or close to it, she is courted by those seeking favors as Madame de Pompadour was when she enjoyed the ear and favor of Louis XV. Her lunches are bought for her in that handful of acceptable French restaurants by dress manufacturers and designers and public-relations people; her clothes are, if not free, at something considerably less than cost; and at Christmas she has to hire a car and driver to clear her office of gifts twice a day. Naturally, she travels free. A discreet inclusion of even part of the logo of an airline or the image of a corner of a hotel swimming pool in a fashion photograph, with several words of acknowledgment in the body of the copy, takes care of the transportation and lodging for the editor, photographer, models, and assistants.
Harnet Toppingham had arrived at the top of the business on merit, not because she could pay her own way, although her private income from a father who had manufactured hundreds of thousands of bathtubs was considerable. She was a woman of such hard, sharp style that she seemed to have a cutting edge. Her feeling of authority was so genuine that it inspired equally genuine fear in her entire staff, and her creative imagination had as few limits as Fellini’s. Her innovations were first hated and then imitated and eventually became classics. When she first noticed Spider’s work she was in her early forties and many people called her ugly. She had never become what the French call a jolie laide because she saw no reason to make the attempt to exaggerate any good points she might have had. She preferred to be that other thing the French know how to admire, a sacred monster. She took what she had and presented it uncompromisingly, full front—plain, thin, brown hair pulled back severely, a large, masculine nose jutting forward, thin lips covered with bright red lipstick, and plain brown eyes, small and shallow, set like a mud turtle’s, taking in every detail and discarding all but the most delicate, the most intricate, the most important and recherché. She was of better than medium height, built like a stick, and she always wore splendidly and shriekingly chic clothes, since nothing she put on could do anything to overpower looks she didn’t possess. She made no concessions to what was currently fashionable. If this was the season for the “American sportswear look” or the “return to softness” or “dressing with clear color,” you could count on Harriet to wear a look that couldn’t be pinned down to a year or even a decade, a look that would make any other woman, no matter how perfectly turned out, feel like just another sheep in a pack. She had never been married and she lived alone in a large apartment on Madison Avenue, which she filled with her collections, treasures from her countless trips to Europe and the Orient, most of them too odd and too unharmonious, often too grotesque, to fit in anywhere as well as they did in her crowded, brown interiors.
At least once a year or so Harriet Toppingham liked to “make” an unknown photographer so that she could drop, at least for a while, one of her regulars. What was the point in having power unless people knew you wouldn’t hesitate to use it? Once she had established a new photographer, he, or she, was indebted for life, and even after her favor had passed elsewhere, they retained the cachet she had bestowed on them. She thought of the photographers she had unearthed as her creatures, as much her property as the objects in her collections. As head fashion editor of Fashion and Interiors, she could bypass her enemy, the art director, and interview photographers themselves (for she refused to deal with photographers’ agents) in her own office, known in the trade as the Brown Hole of Calcutta.
When she saw the ad for the nail-hardening product, tucked away in the back of Redbook, she checked with the agency to find out who had taken the picture. “They say Hank Levy,” she told her secretary, “but I find that impossible to believe. He hasn’t done anything that original since the late sixties. Get Eileen or one of the other agencies on the phone and find out who posed for the shot. Then get the gal to call me here.”
Two days later she summoned Spider to an audience. He brought his portfolio, a big black-leather folder, accordion pleated and tied together with a strip of heavy black braid. It contained the best prints of the best pictures he had ever taken, a few of them results of his work for Levy, but most of them had been taken for his own pleasure on weekends. Spider kept his loaded Nikon F-2 near him at all times, for his passion was to capture women in moments when they weren’t posing, in passages of brief, intimate communication with themselves. He celebrated the female when she was feeling most her own woman, whether she was cooking eggs or daydreaming into a glass of wine or tiredly undressing or waking up yawning or brushing her teeth.
Casually, Harriet Toppingham leafed through the prints, easily hiding her disbelief as she recognized girls with five-hundred-dollar-an hour faces wearing old bathrobes or casually draped in a towel.
“Hmmmm—interesting, quite nice. Tell me, Mr. Elliot, who is your favorite artist, Avedon or Penn?”
Spider grinned at her. “Degas, when he’s not doing ballet girls.”
“My, my. Still, better Degas than Renoir—so predictably pink and white. Tell me—I hear you’re a famous stud. Is that rumor or fact?” Harriet liked to attack as unexpectedly as possible.
“Fact.” Spider gave her a friendly look. She reminded him of his fifth-grade math teacher.
“Then why haven’t you ever worked for Playboy or Penthouse?” Harriet was not ready to abandon the field.
“A girl twining a string of fake pearls through her pubic hair or all dolled up in a Frederick’s of Hollywood garter belt and playing with herself while she looks in a mirror usually seems a bit lonesome. Masturbation isn’t a great big turn-on in my life,” Spider answered politely. “Then, when they shoot two girls together it gets so artsy-craftsy soft focus that it doesn’t look like sex. In fact, it depresses me—and it seems like such a waste—”
“Yes. Perhaps. Hmmm.” She lit a cigarette and smoked as if she were alone, occasionally glancing at the prints she had littered all over her desk in an indifferent manner. Abruptly she spoke.
“Can you do some lingerie pages for us for the April issue? We need them by next week at the latest.”
“Miss Toppingham, I’d give everything but my left nut to work for you, but I have a full-time job with Hank Levy—”
“Drop Levy,” she commanded. “You surely don’t intend to work for him forever, do you? Open your own studio. Start small. I’ll give you enough work to keep you going until the April issue comes out. If you can do the job I hope for, you won’t have trouble paying the rent.”
Harriet favored Spider with the nearest she ever came to an encouraging look. This moment, this tangible use of power, this ability to alter people’s lives in the way she chose was the most important of the things she lived for. She felt heated, potent, supreme. The pictures she had just asked Spider to take had already been scheduled for Joko by the art director. Joko had become a bit boring lately—tame and lacking in fantasy. He needed a kick in the ass. The art director always needed a kick in the ass. Besides, this Spider Elliott had taken the sexiest pictures of women she’d ever seen. Those girls who were paid to look so otherworldly beautiful in cosmetic ads looked more enticing than she’d ever dreamed they could be, and somehow more approachable, more real.
Lately, she realized, there had been a problem with lingerie photographs at Fashion and Interiors. The pages had become so sleek that they were creating a backlash. Some of their biggest advertisers, men with important girdle and bra accounts, were calling to say that while they appreciated the editorial credits, their clients were getting flack because the showroom models on Seventh Avenue didn’t look one tenth as good as the girls in Fashion did. This, in turn, made the department-store buyers worried that ordinary women would expect to look like the photographs and then, when they actually saw themselves in the merchandise, blame the garments rather than their own bodies. The photos, quite simply, were a con. When advertisers were unhappy with editorial pages something was wrong and when something was wrong, Harriet Toppingham always played her hunches. Today she had a strong hunch that Spider Elliott could be important to her.
Spider found a studio in an old building off Second Avenue that hadn’t yet been turned into a restaurant or a singles bar. It was too rundown to tempt any but the most desperate tenant. The landlord hadn’t repaired anything for twenty years, waiting for the day when Warner Le Roy would pop out of a cloud of wonder dust and offer him a fortune for the premises. However, there was water for the darkroom, and on the top floor, where Spider rented two big rooms, the ceilings were high. His own apartment would have made a better studio, but he knew it was too inconveniently located.
For this first assignment, Spider decided not to use the usual lingerie models, girls whose bodies are so perfect that no sane person would believe that even once,
in all their eighteen years, they would have dreamed of wearing a panty girdle or a bra. And he didn’t use the usual poses: dance students caught all unaware practicing stretching positions in their undies; or languid beach shots in which the sand-strewn model seems to have mistaken her underwear for her bikini; or storytelling voyeur shots in which a man’s hand, dangling a diamond bracelet, or a man’s foot, in a polished evening shoe, somehow wanders into a corner of the picture.
Instead he hired models in their mid-thirties, still beautiful but with faces and bodies that were at an undeniable remove from youth. He built a set designed exactly like a fitting room in a department store. Piles of discarded lingerie cascaded over a single chair and were draped all over the little shelf so unhelpfully provided in these cells. Models glared at themselves suspiciously in three-way mirrors; sat on the edge of the only chair, dressed only in a half slip, and lit badly needed cigarettes; struggled angrily out of tight girdles; searched in bulging tote bags for a lipstick that might improve matters; did, in fact, in Spider’s photos, all the things every woman does when she has to go out and buy new underwear. The pictures were funny and loving and even though the models undoubtedly needed all the help they got from the lingerie they were wearing, they still looked like fine bodied, luscious women with a lot of mileage left on them.
Men who saw that issue of Fashion and Interiors felt as if they were getting a good look at something they normally were never allowed to see, glimpses of feminine mysteries much more private than an open centerfold had to offer. Women compared themselves to the models, as they always do, no matter how miserable it makes them, and did not find the results as upsetting as usual. In fact, those bras looked as if they might really hold up a pair of normal boobs—how strange. And how reassuring.
The art director of Fashion had threatened to resign when he first saw the contact sheets, screaming in some low Hungarian dialect—normally he screamed in French. Harriet actually laughed out loud when she heard him.
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