Satin Doll

by Davis, Maggie;

  “They’re not saying a word,” Sam whispered. Nannette, not comprehending her English, only shrugged. The next model went out and Brooksie levered herself past a rack of clothes to help Sam peel off the green silk and lower the first of the bouffant cocktail dresses over her head. “Brooksie, what’s happening?” Sam hissed.

  Then, haltingly, they heard the first clapping begin. The first rows where the great powers sat, Vogue, Bazaar, the New York Times, the Washington Post, began to applaud. They kept clapping. And the sound grew.

  “Watch your hair,” Brooksie warned, shoving Sam toward the door.

  Thank God for Alain des Baux and her new hairstyle; the Raggedy Ann cut would never have worked with Claude Louvel’s magnificent, ultra-feminine cocktail designs. Exhausted since Brooksie’s telephone call that morning and now so keyed up she was running on nervous energy, Sam went out to model a raspberry chiffon dress in a daze.

  The applause filtered back to the room where the models were changing and a new sense of excitement charged the air. With the growing realization that something was happening, Nannette, Sylvie, Brooksie and the models frantically trod over clothes hangers and facial tissues, wading through the discarded originals they were too busy to hang up. After the cocktail dresses, Ulla announced the evening gowns.

  Rivers of perspiration running down between her shoulder blades, Sam was zipped and hooked into the last number that was to have been Sophie’s, an amazing off-the-shoulder white moire silk with a vast skirt glittering with seed pearls and crystal beads. Brooksie touched up Sam’s hastily piled and twisted hair with hair spray and managed to shoot some of it into Sam’s eyes.

  “Are you all right, kid?” Fatigue and excitement had reduced Brooksie’s voice to a hoarse rasp. “We’re almost to the end—you are the end, Sammy! Can you see?”

  “Only with one eye,” Sam whispered despairingly. Nannette was on her knees, pulling the great stiffened skirt into manageable folds. Sam felt as though she could barely hold up the weight of the dress; her shoulders sagged. “Here goes nothing,” she told them.

  At the entrance to the salon Sam visibly staggered with weariness and the bulk of the extravagant ball gown. The dress weighed at least forty pounds and she’d never even tried it on before; she felt that she lumbered out into the salon like a battleship underway, her mind a blank, no longer able to think.

  She turned slowly in front of Ulla at the microphone and could hear the beat of clapping hands in her ears like a hailstorm. Is this what you wanted, Sammy? some voice from inside her head asked.

  She turned slowly in the ballooning, sparkling gown, breathing in gasps, one eye still tearing from the jet of hair spray. Yes, this was what she wanted, she answered the voice. If everything in Paris had been dreamlike since she’d arrived, this moment was the greatest, most impossible dream of them all.

  At the finale, the best numbers in the retrospective show were to file out, stand in a row and accept the accolade. By some miracle, it was an accolade, Sam realized, shivering uncontrollably. And it was still a dream as the clumsy models from the second-rate agency found their way out to stand beside her. It was a dream, because surely the front row of the American press, the Bergdorf Goodman and Saks Fifth Avenue buyers, hadn’t stood up. She was dimly aware the members of the French press were slowly rising too.

  The heavy pearl-and crystal-encrusted dress kept her immobile; she felt as though it would take Nannette and Sylvie both to carry her back to the dressing room. In all that was going on, she knew that Chip was standing at the outer door to the landing, leaning against the doorjamb, watching her with intense, black eyes.

  The crowd in the salon stood and clapped, a standing ovation. It couldn’t be happening, but it was. Because the front rows were on their feet, Sam couldn’t see the old, tattered aristocrats of the Maison Louvel regulars huddled toward the back, but she knew they were there. At the French windows at the end of the room, a tall figure stood, homburg hat in hand, the shoulders of his hand-tailored suit speckled with rain. There was no mistaking the angle of that leonine, platinum head or the unmistakably handsome face.

  Jack Storm was there.

  Chapter Eighteen

  “Sammy, oh, Sammy, where’s my beautiful cowgirl gone? Look at you, baby, you’re magnificent!” Jack Storm’s large, well-manicured hands were braced at the sides of her head against the fitting-room wall, gently imprisoning her, his famous blue eyes inches from her own. “You’re a queen, a goddess—I can’t get over it!”

  The surging crowds in the corridor pressed against the door and Jack held it shut with one elegantly shod foot. He had grabbed Sam and pulled her inside one of the Maison Louvel fitting rooms at the back of the salon; now his familiar tanned face, sleekly tailored body in a charcoal-gray suit, and mane of platinum hair were even more overpowering than she remembered.

  “Sammy, what a fool I was to think I could let you go. It’s been hell without you these past few weeks. I’m going to take you back with me, kid. I’m asking Marianna for a divorce.”

  Over his shoulder Sam could see them reflected in the tiny fitting-room mirrors: a tall, urbane man, his expensive suit lightly spattered with rain and a willowy young woman with a hectically flushed face and bare shoulders wearing a full-skirted white ball gown that sparkled under the fluorescent lights.

  Someone banged on the door, calling out over the uproar in French. It was Sylvie, looking for Sam.

  “Jack, I’ve got to get out there.” Sam avoided his eyes. She wasn’t reacting to Jack. She was bone-tired, the weight of the ball gown dragging at her relentlessly. There was too much confusion. “Can we talk about this later? They’re looking for me in the salon.”

  “Let them wait, sweetheart. Dennis and Peter Frank are out there, let them take care of it.” He lifted his hand to cup the side of her face. “Didn’t you hear what I just said? The whole thing with Marianna is winding down. It has been for years, I knew that before you left. It’s you I want, beautiful; come back to me, Sammy.”

  It was what she’d been waiting for months to hear, she thought, staring up at him. Jack wanted her. She supposed everything she wanted was now, miraculously, within reach—marriage, a family, even her career. It just wasn’t sinking in.

  “Jack, I really have to go,” she tried tiredly. “Look, this is kind of a bad moment.” She managed to get her hand up between their closely pressed bodies to brush back a strand of the looped pearls in the braid that had come loose. They were dangling at the side of her face. “I have to get out there and meet the press. We’ve worked so hard. You don’t want all this to slip through your hands, do you?”

  “I couldn’t care less, baby.” His mouth hovered over hers, his brilliant blue eyes filling up her vision. “I’ve got to dump this Maison Louvel thing anyway, Sammy. The silk mill and the finishing plants are the targets, not this. The international division’s overextended right now, especially with our bad Western wear market.” He tucked the loop of pearls back over her ear, smiling. “But this retrospective show, what you did here today, is going to let the whole world know we’ve been here, darling—it was fantastic. Jackson Storm was in Paris. We did our thing for the whole industry to see, thanks to you.”

  Samantha was still watching the dream figures in the mirror with a feeling of unreality. “Jack, didn’t you even get to look at my proposal? The idea I wrote you about Jackson Storm International opening a couture house in Paris?”

  “I always pay attention to everything you do, Sammy.” His mouth was nuzzling the top of her pearl-decorated hair. “So what about this proposal?”

  The regally beautiful woman in the mirrors stiffened. “You didn’t even read it, did you?”

  He held himself away from her slightly so that he could look down into her face. “Sammy, sweetheart, you’ve got every right to be pissed off with me and—”

  “Me?” she said, suddenly pushing him away. “I’m a queen, a goddess, remember? I couldn’t be pissed off with you. It wouldn’t be g
ood for my image. And you’re always telling me what’s good for my image, right?” She lifted one side of her glittering skirts in her hand and stepped back, wanting to get around him to the door. “Jack, I’m tired. This is no time to talk to me right now. I’m liable to say anything. But you know,” she said in a deep breath, “I was yours for almost two years because you pressed all the right buttons, you knew just what to do with somebody like me—a nothing from nowhere, a dumb, inexperienced girl who was hungry and ambitious.” She faced him, her chin up. “I let you turn me into Sam Laredo, I let you take me to bed, I let you make me fall in love with you, I even let you get rid of me when you got ready! Do you want me to fall on my knees right now in the middle of—of what’s going on here, just because you want to tell me you’re going to divorce your wife?”

  “Ah, Sammy,” he sighed. He didn’t move, his big body blocking her way to the door. “Do you want me to apologize? Okay, so I’m a bastard, I don’t excuse my own faults. I know I’m throwing everything at you at once, baby,” he said contritely, holding her with the sheer, mesmerizing power of his marvelous voice. He was being Jack Storm at his most persuasive. “But, Sammy, I need you. I took a flight to Paris to tell you I’m going to give you the world this time, lover. You’re going to have everything you want. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”

  She knew, staring at him, that he hadn’t understood a word she had said. “Hells afire,” she burst out, “you’ve been in this business a long time. Don’t you know what happened out there today? The retrospective should have fallen on its face, except some poor kid who works for Rudi Mortessier shot himself, and these people didn’t have any place to go to compare news bulletins except here!”

  She pushed him out of her way with both hands and grabbed the doorknob. “You don’t want me, Jack. I’m no queen, no goddess. I’m still just Sammy Whitfield. I’m just as much a loser now as I was as Sam Laredo! You’d be making a mistake, believe me. As big a mistake as you made when you dumped me here in Paris!”

  “Okay, okay,” he soothed her. He lifted both hands, palms outward and stepped back. “You’re upset, darling. You’re tired and you’ve been through a hell of a lot. I’m not going to push you. Go out and see your fans, have your day in the sun. Believe me, you deserve it. Dennis and I are going up to the offices here. You come up when things settle down. Tell me,” he said, opening the door for her, “where’s this Doumer broad who’s supposed to be in charge?”

  To his surprise, Sam began to laugh. She swept past him without another word and into the crowded corridor.

  “I remember Claude Louvel,” the great gray eminence of the New York Times fashion pages was saying over the roar of the voices in the salon. “I was doing public relations for Harper’s Bazaar in Paris in the 1950s and I’m sure I saw one or two of her showings here.” The Times editor had pinned Sam in the jostling crowd, holding her drink carefully shoulder high to keep it from splashing. “Frankly, I always thought she was good. Whatever happened to her? Somebody told me she died.”

  “Weren’t you Sam Laredo jeans?” the woman from the San Francisco Examiner wanted to know. She bent toward Samantha, squinting at her hair scraped back in the knot crowned by pearls and gauze butterflies. “I loved you in the jeans ads, but this is a total transformation. So very Paris, really. Is this going to be Jack Storm’s new look for you? Are you going to take over Louvel’s?”

  Jane Pauley of NBC and Joan Lunden of ABC were converging on them through the crowd. “I liked the feel for all that fifties nostalgia,” the Times editor said, raising her voice, “especially those extraordinary models. And the potted palms were a stroke of genius.”

  The San Francisco Examiner woman said, “You know that was old Alphonsine L’Espinous in the back row, don’t you, the Count of Paris’s cousin? That was really a coup, all the old Louvel customers, fantastic atmosphere. How about letting me set up an interview with some of them?”

  Someone handed Samantha a glass of champagne. She held it in her hand, staring at it rather numbly. The Maison Louvel bag ladies had been getting more than their share of attention. A news photographer had materialized from somewhere and was snapping shots of the aristocratic oddities, who were posing like movie queens at the far end of the room. “Who’s the Count of Paris?” was all she could say.

  “Where’d the Medivani kid go?” the New York Times editor said, looking around. “That was a shocker, when she walked in. I thought the prince had her under wraps.”

  “Her bodyguards dragged her out when she fell on the floor during the cocktail dresses,” the Examiner woman put in. “Didn’t you see it?”

  “Actually, I think Jackson Storm is preparing a statement about everything,” Sam murmured. “It should be released shortly.” No one seemed to hear her.

  “I’m going to have to set up an interview,” the Times editor was deciding, “and come back with a photographer and go through Louvel’s. This place is a veritable museum. We ought to be able to get some kind of feature out of it. We could slot it for some time around Halloween. Put it on the front page of the Sunday fashion section, probably. But I can’t commit myself to anything this far in advance until we see our space.”

  The fashion features editor from UPI grabbed Sam’s arm. “This day’s been such a mess with the Mortessier thing breaking I didn’t have a photographer assigned to your show. Can we come back and do some stills here after the Dior showing Thursday?”

  “—still in surgery,” the Elle magazine representative shouted to Kitty O’Hare. “Lisianne’s not at Galanos, I just telephoned there.”

  “—do it now for Radio France,” a small dark-haired woman said at Sam’s elbow, “if we can find a quiet room somewhere.”

  The noise of more than a hundred voices beat in Sam’s ears. The Maison Louvel retrospective, that crazy idea that should have been sure disaster, was a smashing success; she still couldn’t believe it. But now, on the brink of worldwide recognition of the Maison Louvel, Jack Storm was pulling out—what he’d planned to do all along. He had come to Paris with Dennis Wolchek and Peter Frank to close it out, and what the Storm King’s empire would have was a mountain of valuable publicity.

  So with the bad, the good, Sam was thinking. The cards that had been dealt by a slightly cross-eyed fate had turned up wildly confused; it was beyond her, right at that moment, to make any sense of it. Except that the news media wanted the story. No one seemed to want to go on to the luncheon and fur show at the Crillon; the shouted conversations around her were either about the retrospective or the latest news on the condition of Gilles Vasse. From the way the crowd was flowing up the grand staircase to the upper floors, the fashion press corps were going through the Maison Louvel building in search of telephones.

  Then, through the crowd, she saw a tall, beautiful man standing in the doorway of the salon, his hair slightly wet with rain. He seemed to be looking for someone.

  “Excuse me,” Sam murmured, pushing away from the New York Times editor and the television newswomen. She grabbed the heavy gown in both hands and waded through the jam of bodies toward the doors.

  Alain was there. For the first time that day the world seemed to come into brilliant focus, and Alain des Baux was at the center of it.

  Chip had unplugged the wires to the sound equipment and was rolling them up around his forearm. He started toward her, black brows drawn together in a frown, but a surge of French magazine people pushed him back.

  “Sorry to be late,” Alain called over the noise. He waited until Sam reached the doors, then looked down at her, a slow smile lifting the corners of his mouth. “Business detained me. I couldn’t get here any sooner.”

  He stepped onto the landing where the crowd was thinner. “Do you know how you look in that dress?” His eyes were glowing. “My God, but you are beautiful.”

  She threw herself against him. “Just get me out of here,” Sam cried. “Right now!”

  Chapter Nineteen

  After coffee, Alain had g
one to take a call on the library telephone. Alone for the first time since that morning, Samantha leaned her elbows on the stone balustrade of the terrace and inhaled deeply of the sweltering July night, the scent of mimosa blooming in the garden.

  “It’s only another fortified country house,” he had said with his usual well-bred deference, “certainly nothing to compare with the great chateaux of the Loire valley, but I think you will like it.”

  She should have known what Alain’s house would be like. When the Lamborghini drove through the electronically controlled iron gates topped with the coat of arms of the des Baux, Sam saw the half-mile-long avenue of ancient trees that led to a towered and moated seventeenth-century manor house. She knew his cousin’s estate in Versailles, by comparison, was only a nice suburban residence.

  They had taken an early dinner on a terrace overlooking formal gardens that were, after several centuries of relentless grooming, verdant fantasies of clipped hedge, sparkling fountains and walks with vistas of ornamental Greek temples and classical statuary that faded away into a twilight horizon of tall trees. The table set for two on the wide terrace overlooking the fountains was covered with an exquisite rosepoint lace cloth that touched the stone floor. The only light was a huge eighteenth-century silver candelabrum of Venetian design. The points of the candle flames, almost motionless in the hot, still July night, were reflected in tall crystal goblets, two-hundred-year-old Sevres plates and carved and gold-handled silverware so ancient the designs were worn smooth with use. While a middle-aged couple served the meal, music came through the open doors of the library, the stereo playing a selection of old Charles Aznavour tunes sung by the famous French artist himself in his smoky voice.