by Sally Koslow
in her thirties, trying to earn a good salary.
The luncheon over, Magnolia flew upstairs to a tiny powder room
she knew would be emptier than the one the horde would hit on the
ground floor. As she emerged from the stall, she found herself face-to
face with Candace, who was even tinier than she’d appeared from the
podium—a size 2, tops. In the split second during which Magnolia
pondered if she should introduce herself and ask Candace if she’d write for Lady—and then decided that, no, she was way too big a deal for that—Candace greeted her by name.
“Magnolia Gold?” “Yes, oh, that’s me.” Magnolia felt like an idiot for not responding
in a more articulate fashion, but was flattered—and shocked—to be
recognized.
“Is it true what I’m hearing?”
What was Candace hearing? Did Candace want to be her friend? Before she could concoct a witty retort, Candace continued.
“Bebe Blake taking over your magazine? That’s rich! Man, am I
glad I’ve left women’s magazines. And I thought television was low.”
With a toss of her long, blond hair, Candace was off, leaving behind
only a whiff of delicious perfume and her empty champagne flute,
which she’d parked on the marble countertop.
As Magnolia settled back at her desk at 2:45, the temp buzzed her on the intercom. “Jack wanted to see you fifteen minutes ago,”
she said.
Jack the IT guy? Every time he touched her computer, it developed
tics in new places. “Please tell him that now isn’t a good time.” Mag
nolia had a December planning meeting and it would take hours. It might be almost the Fourth of July, but at Lady they needed to be thinking eggnog, bûches de noël, and, every year, a new spin on Hanukkah latkes. December was their biggest seller. By mid-November,
you could count on American women to instinctively scour their
supermarkets for a comforting magazine full of artery-clogging
cookie recipes.
“Jack’s secretary said it was important.”
Jack from IT had a beeper, not a secretary. “Could that have been
Jock Flanagan’s office?” Magnolia may as well have asked her to
recite the periodic table. The temp stared at her, blankly. “Did the sec
retary have a name?”
“Vera? Viola?” This temp had just graduated from Penn and, four
hours ago, told Magnolia she’d kill for a magazine job.
Magnolia called Jock’s office herself. “Magnolia, we were expect
ing you fifteen minutes ago,” Elvira said. “Jock’s waiting, and he’s got
a three o’clock.” He could keep you waiting, but the behavior wasn’t tolerated in
reverse. “Be right up,” Magnolia said. “Minor administrative snafu.
Sorry. You don’t need to hear explanations.”
As the elevator opened on the tenth floor, Magnolia collided with
Darlene.
“Cute skirt!” Darlene bellowed as she rushed by at her I’m-more
important-than-you pace.
Jock’s door was closed. Twenty minutes later Elvira allowed her in.
His office looked like a movie set—it rarely showed any evidence of
an executive who did actual work. Jock motioned Magnolia to a black
leather chair.
“Water?”
“No, thanks,” she answered, her heart thumping like Biggie’s tail
when he sniffed a pig ear hiding behind her back.
“Magnolia, you’ve been courageous in defending your position on Lady.”
Whenever someone called you courageous you knew they really meant nuts.
“I’m sure you’ve recognized that going with Bebe is, however, too
good a deal not to do,” Jock said. “It’s plain and simple.”
Plain, simple, shatteringly mediocre—take your pick, Magnolia
thought. She held her breath, waiting to get voted off the island, deter
mined not to be embarrassed by a meltdown. She’d never been fired,
not even from the babysitting job in high school when the Gustafsons
arrived home early and discovered her making out with Tyler Peterson
in their bedroom.
“I’m going to count on you to teach our girl Bebe the ropes,” he
continued.
“Excuse me?” The words stuck in her throat. Magnolia coughed,
lowered her voice, and started over. “Excuse me, Jock. Could you, uh,
clarify?”
“Bebe Blake will be big picture. I’ll expect you to work with Felicity
Dingle to turn Bebe’s vision into a magazine.”
“Her vision?” Jock walked back to his massive mahogany desk, raised one brow,
and eyeballed Magnolia.
“Of course, you don’t have to stick around. Your choice. If you wish
to break your contract, HR has been alerted. Which will it be?”
This could be her moment to impersonate Katharine Hepburn and
tell Jock where he could put his big idea.
Magnolia thought of how much she loved her work, the only
thing she’d ever wanted to do—perhaps the only thing she could
do. Was she an idiot savant? She didn’t care. She pondered the
pleasure of writing a clever headline, teaming the right idea with
the right writer, finding the one photo image among hundreds
with the best smile on the best star, which yielded a stupendous sale. She considered the high she got seeing Lady lining the airports’ racks—and the kick of observing a real reader take a crisp copy to the
register.
Magnolia thought of her $3,500 mortgage payments; her $1,900-a
month in co-op maintenance, the $1,000 she donated every year to the
University of Michigan, and Biggie and Lola’s vet bills. She thought
of how she had no man to share her financial load, or parents who
were still giving handouts, and pictured herself home at 12:30, in
need of a shower, her dark roots three inches long, trying to concen
trate on the Tom Friedman column when everyone she knew was at
Michael’s. Perhaps someone there would be saying, “Whatever
became of Magnolia Gold?”
The plebiscite approach to editing a magazine—she couldn’t begin
to imagine it, but she didn’t feel she had a Plan B. “Sure, Jock, I’ll give
it a go,” Magnolia said, in a jaunty voice she didn’t recognize.
“I thought you’d see it that way. And I think you’ll be able to man
age just fine in the office we’ll move you to.”
“Bebe’s getting my office?” she asked. Her voice quivered with just
the faintest tremor, but in her stomach she felt sucker-punched.
“Not right away. The decorator will be in first thing in the morn
ing, though, so you’ll need to move out. Don’t worry—you’ll get
plenty of help with that.”
C h a p t e r 1 1
Avalanche of Reality
Bebe Blake Beheads Lady. That’s how the Post summed it up, accompanied by a photo of Magnolia, mid-bite, at a cocktail party
four years earlier. Magnolia could carbon-date the shot from her unfortu
nate short hair. She had a lamb chop in her hand, as if it were a weapon.
BOLD GOLD FOLDS was the New York Daily News spin. Usually Magnolia didn’t give the Snooze a glance, but today she made a run to
the closest newsstand to gather all the papers, even the ones that
would be delivered to her office later.
The New York Times treated the Bebe takeover in a subdued Business Day item alluding to Lady as one of many be
leaguered women’s service magazines. The Times reporter suggested that the whole category, with its fifty million readers—enough to sway a presidential
election—might, by the end of the decade, vanish, like the VCR.
The Wall Street Journal ignored the story. They generally hung back and, months later, came out swinging. Magnolia could imagine
their suggesting—on page one of a slow news day—that both readers
and advertisers were shying away from magazines in favor of digital
media. Young people don’t read anything but blogs, they’d lecture.
USA Today focused only on Bebe, with the headline OPRAH, WATCH YOUR BACK. As if she were sweating one drop.
Magnolia dumped the newspapers in the recycling bin near her back
door. By the end of the week, the weeklies—not just celebrity-studded
periodicals but newsmagazines as well—would also feature the Bebe
takeover. Then there would be the online newsletters, and e-mail blasts that each editor received, and they all received plenty—Mediaweek, Iwantmedia, Media Life, Media Industry Newsletter, Media This, and Media That. Since the media loves no subject more than itself, it would be a festival of narcissism.
The worst part was that thanks to Google, her misfortune would live on for years. According to Magnolia’s unofficial tally, venerable had already been used nineteen times to describe Lady, causing Magnolia to refresh her understanding of the term. “Commanding respect by
virtue of age, dignity, character, or position” was the dictionary defini
tion. Magnolia suspected no one associated venerability with dignity,
character, or position—the common understanding linked venerability
simply to old age. The word smelled decrepit. Industry insiders who’d never bothered to study Lady (it was an open secret that most decisionmakers were “too busy to read”) would believe the news and assume that Lady was a dentured, bunioned, whiskered old hag. This pained Magnolia almost more than the fact that she’d effectively be reporting
to Bebe Blake, a fact she hadn’t got her head around yet.
Hurt didn’t begin to describe how she felt. Sick was more like it,
too sick to eat or talk or even call her parents. But she couldn’t waste
time now being hurt or sick or humiliated. She needed to focus.
The most frustrating aspect of this avalanche of reality was that it
was out of the question for Magnolia to tell her side of the story to
anyone but her nearest and dearest—who, over the last day, failed
to include Harry, who hadn’t even e-mailed. One thing Scary did
exceedingly well was to control its press coverage. Elizabeth Lester
Duvall, their storm trooper of corporate communications, monitored
every sound bite an employee might want to shout out. She delivered
her gag order in person the previous day the moment Magnolia left
Jock’s office.
Elizabeth pulled Magnolia into the executive-floor conference room
and shut the door. “Don’t worry, honey,” Elizabeth said in the rat-a-tat-tat speech
which almost belied her Mississippi Delta roots. “We’ll handle this.
Bebe will give a press conference tomorrow afternoon. We’ve booked
the Pierre. Be sure to get your hair blown out, because we’re giving Entertainment Tonight an exclusive.”
“We’ll have makeup at the ready,” Elizabeth continued, breath
lessly. “Back to the press conference. You won’t speak. Darlene and
Bebe will handle the particulars. Just go home. Have a cocktail!”
She gave Magnolia a big grin and patted her hand. “You’re taking
this so well!” With that, Elizabeth was off. A kiwi green cashmere
cardigan knotted around her shoulders billowed in her wake and her
silver hair sparkled under the hallway’s fluorescent lights.
It wasn’t until after Elizabeth had left that Magnolia realized,
when she talked to Jock, her title had never come up. Perhaps Bebe
would get the “chief ” and Magnolia would be downshifted to “edi
tor,” “deputy editor,” “executive editor,” or the truly opaque “edito
rial consultant.” Or maybe she’d remain “editor in chief,” and Bebe
would become, what, “editorial director”?
Did it matter, really?
It did. An editor in chief was far more glorious than a plain-Jane
editor, and usually got better pay. When a company wanted to be
cheap, they’d promote an executive editor into the top job, and name
her “editor” with a token raise. But it was all very confusing. An “edi
tor” at one company might be paid four times the salary of an “editor
in chief ” at another, and even at the same company, people with
seemingly identical positions had widely variable power, perks, access
to upper management, and compensation. Magnolia suspected that at
Scary, Natalie Simon, for example, was first among equals and earned
at least $200,000 more than she did.
What a lot of bunk, Magnolia thought. Even if her title became Your
Royal Highness, everyone in her world would read the invisible ink and
know that Bebe was running the show. Still, she would like to stay a
chief, and if her title hadn’t been decided yet, perhaps she could bargain
for it later. If Jock had a pixel of guilt, she might get him to agree. She took the elevator down to her floor. Magnolia had wanted to
announce the change to her staff personally, but when she walked
into her office, she could tell from the hush that everyone already
knew. A flock of assistants was already helping Sasha arrange her
belongings in neat brown boxes for the move down the hall.
Sasha pulled her aside and whispered a report. While Elizabeth
had been delivering her orders to Magnolia, Jock had addressed the
troops, using words like “eye candy” to describe Bebe, assuring editors
that Bebe had a “dynamite idea” she’d explain herself. Later. When
“later” he didn’t say.
“Did Jock mention me?” Magnolia asked Sasha when her helpers
had left the office to replenish supplies. It humiliated Magnolia to be
seeking information from her assistant, but she had to know. Sasha
stopped unpinning Magnolia’s elaborate bulletin board collage,
which she was carefully dismantling and putting into folders.
“He said you were totally behind the Bebe change, that you’d be
working with her.” Sasha paused and bit her lip.
“Spit it out,” Magnolia said.
“I’ll still work for you, right? I’m not going to have to work for her, am I?”
Magnolia hated to admit she didn’t know the answer to the ques
tion almost as much as she hated the thought of losing Sasha. “We’re
working that out, Sash,” she said, hoping Sasha would buy it. “Don’t
worry. Change is good.”
Magnolia walked to her new office and slumped at the desk. The
space was cramped. The office’s most unfortunate aspect, though, was
that—inspired by newsrooms—one wall was transparent glass. The
architect’s fantasy might have been to motivate editors to feel like
Lois Lane chasing the page one story, but for the staff who inhabited
these quarters the primary activity seemed to be carping about lack of
privacy. Magnolia knew her new office would make her feel like a
monkey at the zoo.
Cam knocked softly on her door. “There’s no use talking about
this,” he said. �
��For now, I have the solution.” “A brick wall?”
“Getting hammered.” Cameron enclosed Magnolia in a quick bear
hug.
In ten minutes, Cam and Magnolia were sitting at the bar at the
Mesa Grill, and by six o’clock Magnolia had lost count of how many
margaritas she’d downed. One by one, the wake expanded to include all of the top Lady edit staff—a very pregnant Phoebe Feinberg-Fitzpatrick, Fredericka von Trapp, Ruthie Kim, and several others.
As the afternoon turned into evening, the digs about Bebe got deeper,
and the jokes, increasingly lame. “Do you think she’ll do a cat cover?”
Phoebe Feinberg-Fitzpatrick asked while she absentmindedly pattered her pregnant tummy. “Catwoman, the prequel? Halle Barry, get out of town.”
“My fashion department can supply a red leotard,” Ruthie suggested.
“That would put the scary back in Scary,” Cameron said. “Nein,” Fredericka said. “She’ll vant boys on the cover. Young boys.” “There could be a tagline: Where IQ doesn’t count.”
Magnolia realized she had to shut down the conversation. “We’re
going to make this work,” she said, hoping she didn’t sound as drunk
as she was. “Celebrities are the future.” At that, she whipped out her
corporate AmEx card, paid the $350 tab, and escaped into a taxi. A
half hour later, when she arrived home, her phone indicated fourteen
phone messages. All were from editor pals, and except for Natalie
Simon, she didn’t return any of them. Nor did she reply to the dozens
of “Oh, shit” e-mails.
“Of course, you know I had nothing to do with it,” Natalie said the
minute she heard Magnolia’s voice. “Obviously, it’s dreadful. But,
Cookie, just deal. Rise above.”
Natalie completely understood about Magnolia’s not wanting to give
up Sasha, however. Natalie’s two assistants kept her life humming with
gracious precision. The First Lady could take lessons. “Power’s for the
taking,” she advised. “Proceed as if you assume Sasha will continue to
work for you. Believe me, nobody’s thinking about her right now.”
“Do you think I can pull this off ?” Magnolia asked. “My God, of course!” Natalie all but screamed into the phone.
“You’re so talented, so everything, but sometimes I absolutely want to
bitch slap you. Or at least send you to my mother for a self-confidence