Lacy tried to smile encouragingly at Mr. Irving Fishman, but she couldn’t help thinking whoever had designed his spring junior dress line must have been colorblind. She vaguely remembered Mr. Fishman saying his son-in-law, a former unsuccessful portrait photographer in Queens, was trying his hand at it, encouraged by his wife, Mr. Fishman’s daughter, who was a very successful obstetrician. Fishman Brothers Frocks and Superior Sportswear was obviously heavily into family.
“They’re very strong hues,” Lacy said diplomatically. She felt she should contribute something, since Mr. Fishman was looking so doubtful himself. The number the dress manufacturer was holding up, a chartreuse and grape acrylic satin, made for a curiously unsettling effect on the viewer. Like seasickness.
“Hughes?” Mr. Fishman rumbled from the depths of his cigar-ash-sprinkled shirt front. “I’m not familiar with his work. No, this is a Birnbaum, a Leonard Birnbaum. Frankly he should have stuck to taking class pictures of kiddies in P.S. 28, Queens, and never mind that my meshuganeh daughter Rosalie thinks he’s another Picasso. A Picasso I don’t need. What I need is a good cloak and suit man.” Mr. Fishman took the cigar out of his mouth and stood staring at the satin creation. “It’s his green and purple period, she tells me,” he said, wincing. “My wife says we should be lucky Birnbaum didn’t go into house painting.”
Lacy frowned at the frock being held at arm’s length by Mr. Fishman. In spite of the horrendous colors the junior dresses’ basic lines were quite good, many of them bias cuts in the popular skimpy 1930s style, all daring kneecap length with the exception of a few ultrachic designs that hung to midcalf.
Hey, Lacy thought, suddenly inspired. She could never resist a genuine hit-on-the-head creative idea. Maybe Fishman Brothers’ dresses weren’t tacky enough! “Mr. Fishman, why don’t you go for the Palladium disco crowd trend? You know, split skirts, a few bugle beads and all that. Tacky to the maximum! What you’ve got here is definitely not Sears, Roebuck or J. C. Penney, now is it?”
“My best markets,” Mr. Fishman groaned. “Why should I turn my back on Sears after all these years? I’m looking at a disaster.”
“But there are other markets,” Lacy insisted. It wasn’t her job to be a fashion consultant to Fishman Brothers; if nothing else, it was a conflict of interest. As a reporter for one of the oldest rag-trade magazines, she could actually, if she wanted to, do a fairly truthful job on Fishman Brothers Frocks and Superior Sportswear and write up their awful spring dresses objectively. And ruin their whole line. But Lacy wasn’t made that way.
“I’m thinking maybe beads,” Lacy said, falling into the language of dress wholesaling. “I’m thinking maybe Schapiarelli beads of the 1940s, which would go smashingly with those Joan Crawford padded shoulders.
“So you jump the trimmings price to maybe twenty or thirty percent of wholesale,” she went on judiciously, “who cares? Actually a markup that big in the disco market is an incentive. There’s nothing like overpricing to stimulate interest.”
“Nineteen forties beads?” Mr. Fishman murmured thoughtfully. “I got a nephew in trimmings and notions on Fourteenth Street with shelves of 1940s beads he should get rid of if he should be so lucky.”
“Wow—antiques,” Lacy said, her eyes sparkling. “Really? That’s a gold mine if he’s got that many old beads. You ought to think about it.”
“Around the neck,” Mr. Fishman said, thinking about it. “I could see glass beads around the neck, why not? Over on Broadway and Times Square they are making photographs of movie stars on the fronts of T-shirts with sequins in them. If sequins, why not my nephew’s beautiful annual-tax-loss beads? Like nice scenic views of Niagara Falls maybe, and even heads of celebrities in lovely sparklers.”
“You mean,” Lacy said, awed, “photo reproductions of the heads of famous people on the front of your dresses filled in with beads?” Even she wasn’t capable of such a gigantic leap of inspiration. Her eyes were drawn to the purple, orange, green and red satin dresses on their hangers. “You’ve seen it,” she murmured. “You’ve seen ... tacky-max. You know what it is!”
“I have observed a few things in my time, darling,” Mr. Fishman said modestly. “Frankly, I never thought of disco dresses for Fishman Brothers. But then before this, I wasn’t desperate. A nice phrase, ‘tacky-max.’“ He looked thoughtful. “You’re a genius, my dear. Please accept my heartfelt thanks for your wonderfully creative ideas.” Mr. Fishman took his cigar out of his mouth quickly to lift Lacy’s hand and kiss it in a very gallant way. “You’re such an extraordinarily gorgeous and intelligent young lady, I don’t know why you’re schlepping up and down Seventh Avenue in the rain and cold doing this work for some magazine when you could be married to maybe a nice doctor in Connecticut and have several lovely children by now. If I had a son, I would be honored to introduce you to him. You wouldn’t consider maybe modeling for my cousin in Denver, would you? He could use some help with a ski line he has out there.”
“Not a chance,” Lacy told him, “but you’re very sweet to ask, Mr. Fishman. I’m a writer now, I hope never to go back into modeling.
“Listen,” she cried, hit by another sudden inspiration. “If your whole new design change works out, well, you’re going to be needing some promotion.” She was thinking of all those fashion shows she’d done so many times at places like the Pierre and the Waldorf-Astoria. “You might have something really big here.”
“Promotion?” Mr. Fishman said, looking vaguely surprised. “You mean such as tea-time showings at selected hotels in the Catskills, like Grossinger’s? We did it once, my lovely young lady, and believe me, Fishman Brothers died from hunger. Everybody was out playing golf. Nobody wanted to look at sportswear modeling while eating little lox sandwiches and goyisheh tea with milk in it. Six people showed up for the fashion show. It cost a fortune. It was a bomb.”
Lacy shook her head. Several ideas were forming in her mind all at once, and she was having a hard time keeping them sorted out. One was that the heads of celebrities, like famous rock stars, embellished with glass beads on the front of wildly colored disco dresses was a brainstorm. Especially if some promotion person could get the celebrities to approve their autograph-type signatures under their likenesses, for a royalty. Lacy could just visualize the Palladium’s strobe lighting system hitting a packed dance floor full of wildly gyrating bodies, ninety percent of them wearing chartreuse and grape acrylic satins with laser-like reproductions of Michael Jackson and Prince on their chests. It was the ultimate in tacky-max! It was terrible enough to be sensational!
Lacy swallowed, hard. Promotion was not her business; she’d just started a new career in fashion writing. But she could see where she’d have a thousand wonderful ideas if she was in it.
“If the disco line turns out the way I think it will,” she said, sliding down from the stack of dress boxes in Fishman Brothers’ loft, “you ought to be able to promote it right up to the sky, Mr. Fishman.”
“You do it, my beautiful genius young lady,” the dress manufacturer said promptly. “Quit this difficult writing job you have now and do promotion for Fishman Brothers. As an added incentive, I’ll introduce you to my wife’s nephew by marriage, a handsome young millionaire who is an orthodontist in West Orange, New Jersey, and he’s only thirty-two yet.”
“Mr. Fishman,” Lacy said, smiling, “you’re making me an offer I can’t refuse, but I have to. I haven’t been working on my new job for even a week yet—give me time! But I will promise you one thing. I’ll do my best to write a story on your disco dress line if you’ll let me see what you do with the beads.”
“Next week,” Mr. Fishman promised, seizing her hand to squeeze it fondly. “The workroom will have a couple of demo models together, you should see it the moment it’s done, I give you my word on it.
“You’re an angel,” he shouted after Lacy as she let herself out by way of the ancient open freight elevator that took her from Fishman Brothers into the biting autumn wind of midtown Manhattan.
Lacy took a deep breath as she pulled the collar of her Norma Kamali flight jacket up around her ears. It was Friday, and Fishman Brothers Frocks and Superior Sportswear had been the last on her list of most unpromising fashion interviews, but somehow at the eleventh hour she’d struck gold.
Of course, she was working on leads for stories that would only make the back pages of Fad if they got in at all. And she was still competing madly with the four other junior fashion writers for the one permanent job slot. But things were looking better!
It was already early-autumn dark when Lacy got home, dumping her soggy shoes just inside the door of her apartment and padding to the kitchen in her stocking feet. By the time she had taken her dinner of sprouts, tomatoes and cottage cheese, which she’d prepared that morning, out of the refrigerator, she’d used her free hand to shrug off her flight jacket and pull her black silk tailored shirt out of her slacks to hang free comfortably. It was let-down time.
She ran her fingers through her still-damp hair. After her first week at Fad she felt as though she could spend the whole weekend just lying in a bubble bath with her eyes closed, listening to the stereo play Chuck Mangione.
Sitting at the kitchen table, Lacy kept her eyes fixed on a large full-color advertising poster that hung on the wall opposite. The thirty-six-inch-long glossy print prepared for a long-dead ad-agency account showed a tall, almost-skinny nymph with a cascade of wheat-fair hair, her gently curving hips tilted to support one hand at her crisp silk waistline, her other hand raised to airily clasp a Virginia Slims cigarette. The blue taffeta dance dress Lacy wore was perfection, its tight, rippling folds and ruffles dipping to expose her bare left shoulder, then swathing her body from her delicately full breasts to a burst of short skirt in two overlapping deep ruffles that ended just above her knees. The tilt of the head to one side, the impish gleam in light-filled green eyes, the sheath of hair blown into a glittering aureole by a large electric fan stationed just off camera, all projected the frenetic verve that cigarette ads were into that year.
That was the old Lacy Kingston pizazz, she thought, remembering that they’d been playing a Sister Sledge number that day in the studio on the powerful stereo. She had reacted to the wild, throbbing music and low voice of the photographer urging her to “sparkle, Lacy, sparkle—blow my mind—give me that look again, baby, you’re dynamite, give me that Lacy Kingston delivery!” The camera had advanced zzzt, zzzt, zzzt, recording an almost unbelievably entrancing vision, catching her poses, dancing, her mercurial changes of expression—all the tricks of the fashion-modeling trade she’d learned in her teens.
That had also been the same day she’d slugged Peter Dorsey. New York’s most lecherous photographer had pestered her all morning and then tried to slip his hand down the front of her dress with the excuse he was trying to adjust it. Lacy had fallen back on the tae kwan do karate lessons she’d taken all through junior high school and had feinted, chopped and counter-chopped. Peter Dorsey had gone down in a tangle of Nikons and Pentaflexes. With, his insurance company later claimed, two loosened front teeth and a damaged septum.
The photo proofs had never gotten into the hands of the advertising agency for Virginia Slims. Lacy’s lawyer father had handled the lawsuit by Peter Dorsey, which had claimed, among other things, that Lacy had been too young and inexperienced to take photographic direction and that she had misunderstood Peter Dorsey’s moves and intent that day when she modeled in his studio.
It had been a real downer professionally for a rising young model to have to settle the lawsuit out of court on her father’s advice, using up her savings and borrowing money to meet the judgment and to accept publicly the worst implications of what the suit had accused her—that she was temperamental, unprofessional and uncooperative. Few top notch photographers could afford the time from their busy schedules to have both their noses and their front teeth anchored against possible assaults; it had been nearly a year and a half before Lacy had worked again, and when she did, she only got jobs from agencies that booked trade shows and runway modeling.
Now, thank goodness, all that was behind her. In spite of its problems, Lacy was certain that fashion writing was going to be her most rewarding profession.
Lacy went to put the kettle on for a cup of tea, reaching up into the kitchen cabinet for her container of Red Zinger tea. She flipped open the top and started to pour what she thought was Red Zinger into the pot, and a large roll of fifty and one-hundred-dollar bills popped out as though they had fermented inside.
If she hadn’t been so tired, she would have given a healthy shriek of exasperation. There it was again, Lacy told herself. All that money. Thirteen hundred dollars of it, since she’d taken some out for the rent, that haunted her like an ax murder. A used Red Zinger-herbal-tea box was no place to keep the roll of bills, but she was afraid to put the money in her checking account. Her father had once had a client who’d been putting strange money into his bank account without telling the Internal Revenue Service, and now he was serving time in the federal penitentiary in Atlanta. Lacy shuddered. If she put it into her bank account, she was sure she’d need to declare it, too. How? Under what category—earnings? Every time she thought about it, she felt sick. If she had to forget anything that morning in Tulsa, why couldn’t it have been her silk stockings or the tarty black garter belt? Why did she have to forget to leave the money behind?
Also, she didn’t know the slightest thing about the black panther, including his name, so she couldn’t even return it to him by mail! Seeing the bills again brought back all sorts of things Lacy wanted to forget. Like his tuxedo shirt holding his arms captive, his trousers down around his knees in the penthouse, looking rather fascinated and puzzled. And looking so beautiful in bed with his hair all sweaty and tightly curled, his stupendous muscular arms holding her gently, eyes like molten silver. And everything else, Lacy moaned, close to inexplicable tears. When she was about sixty or seventy years old, maybe she would manage to forget it.
She was stuffing the roll of bills back into the tea box when she heard a hammering on the front door of her apartment. With a sigh, Lacy put the Red Zinger back on the shelf over the sink and went to see who it was.
When she opened the door, the tall, beautiful redheaded vision of Candy O’Neill, another model with the Leonard Thornton agency who lived just down the hall, was holding the leash of her large, ferocious-looking Doberman, Baron Ratthausen of Morged-Schalfstein. At least that was the dog’s pedigreed name. No one ever called him anything but Sicky-Poo, because he was so neurotic, he was the only attack Doberman who threw up on people. Lacy took a cautious step backward.
“Watch it, will you, Candy?” she told her friend quickly. “I just got my rugs shampooed.”
“Oh, Lacy,” Candy began at once in her throaty, redheaded voice, “I’ve got a really heavy date tonight, and would it be too much of a favor to ask you to babysit Sicky-Poo?” At the look on Lacy’s face, she went on quickly, “Dr. Magruder, Sicky-Poo’s canine psychiatrist, says he’s ninety percent socially rehabilitated—he’s stopped eating the bottom off curtains and hardly any carpet these days.”
“I don’t know,” Lacy said doubtfully. Candy O’Neill was a good friend, and they swapped favors as well as each other’s clothes occasionally, especially for modeling assignments. But Candy’s gangling, half-grown Doberman was a major baby-sitting job. Even when Sicky-Poo wasn’t giving in to a faulty passive-aggressive mechanism, according to his shrink, he had a disconcerting habit of hiding under the bed and alternately snarling and moaning. To be around anything that mixed-up was pretty unnerving.
Lacy tried to think of several convincing excuses. “Can I beg out, Candy?” she tried. “I really just finished cleaning my apartment, I’m maxed out after my first week on a new job and, ah, you know how Sicky-Poo reacts if he gets to feeling aggressive. Really—he’s sweet, but he’s almost too much to handle.”
“Ahr couldn’t agree moah,” a booming voice said from the hallway
behind the redheaded Thornton model. “He ruined my L.L. Bean Top Siders the first time I met Candycane.”
“Candycane?” Lacy said, giving her friend a startled look.
“Oh, that’s Pottsy, my date,” Candy explained, shoving the reluctant Doberman inside Lacy’s front door. “His real name’s Harrison Salstonstall Potts the fourth.” As a large hand extended itself over the model’s shoulder, Candy went on, “Pottsy’s got a suit on tonight—I want us to make the movie without having to do the Fantastic cleaner and sponge bit again.”
“Chahrmed,” the voice in the hallway said, shaking Lacy’s hand firmly.
Lacy held onto Sicky-Poo’s collar, able to make out the general shape of the man behind Candy. Her friend went on a little breathlessly, “Leonard Thornton scouted Pottsy himself at the Yale-Harvard game. I think Pottsy was tight end for Harvard, and Leonard couldn’t resist him. Actually, Pottsy has an M.B.A. but right now he’s a male model.”
Male model, Lacy thought, putting one leg over the Doberman’s back to keep him from lunging out the door in the direction of Harrison Salstonstall Potts IV. A male model was always a large negative as far as dates were concerned. The gorgeous hunks that made their living posing for GQ and the macho Jockey-underwear ads in Playboy were impossible, demanding peacocks; you couldn’t get their attention even in the dark of a movie theater—they were usually secretly combing their hair. Male model from Harvard? The bulk of Harrison Salstonstall Potts IV stepped cautiously into the light. Her eyes traveled upward from massive male legs attired in very Ivy League slacks to a chest in the same J. Press corduroy covering and finally to a face that was carved in stunning, genial Old Colonial lines. Harrison Salstonstall Potts IV looked as though he had just accepted Betsy Ross’s flag on behalf of the Continental Congress. He was impressively beautiful, if one liked thick, unruly chestnut hair with an impossibly healthy sheen to it, bright-blue eyes and a large, patrician mouth that curved up ingratiatingly. As it was doing now.
Hustle Sweet Love Page 5