Play Dates

by Leslie Carroll

  “You know, there’s a chance there may be nothing to celebrate,” I tell Dennis, as I wait for the call to connect. “Laura Sloan might not offer me a contract.”

  “There is that possibility,” Dennis admits, “but it doesn’t change the need for a celebration. Look how much you’ve accomplished in just a couple of months! We’re celebrating you, Claire.”

  How cool is that? I feel a blush spread from the apples of my cheeks all the way into my hairline.

  The following morning, as I pass Zoë’s bedroom door, I overhear her telling Wendy, her imaginary friend, all about her trip to Dylan’s yesterday. “You couldn’t go because Dennis doesn’t know you very well yet,” she informs Wendy. “But you could share some of my Jelly Bellies.”

  I knock on the door. “Hey, Z. I have a question for you.” She looks up, somewhat confused. What could Mommy possibly need to know that she, Zoë, would have the answer to? “I was wondering if you’d like to come with me to Barneys this morning. That is…of course, unless you’d rather go straight to Lissa’s house.”

  She scrambles to her feet. “I can go with you?”

  I nod.

  “Really?”

  “Really. After all, some of the jewelry designs were your idea. What do you say?” Zoë scampers over to me and throws her arms around my waist. “You’re welcome.”

  I remind her that she’ll have to act very grown-up during our excursion, and she practically bounces off the furniture in an overzealous effort to choose the perfect ensemble. “This is going to be so fun!” We select an outfit for her and she compliments my own choice of wardrobe, which is a big deal for both of us, since she’s so judgmental about everything I wear.

  “I’m so glad you let me get dressed without you.”

  “Well, you look fun today. More like MiMi. So it’s okay. Oh, can MiMi come with us, too?”

  “MiMi’s got her own plans today, sweetie. She and Owen are going to pick out her engagement ring. Besides, I thought this might be something we could enjoy together. Just the two of us.” I call Melissa Arden to see if I can bring Zoë over for her play date with Lissa a bit later than we’d previously scheduled. Melissa tells me it won’t be a problem, they’ll be home all day, and they wish us both good luck at Barneys.

  I introduce Zoë to Laura Sloan and explain that some of the concepts for the kids’ jewelry were hers. Our meeting is going very well. Laura thinks it’s neat that I brought my daughter with me. “You’re really very entrepreneurial, Claire, and that sets a good example for her.” Then she tells me that Nina Osborne has high praise for me—as a designer, as a mom, and as a person. I try very hard to disguise my surprise over the source of such compliments. “Oh, yes,” Laura says, as I realize I haven’t been able to mask it at all, “she told me how you ran up to the roof of the school and saved Xander’s life.”

  “She helped save him,” Zoë corrects, interrupting Laura. “Fireman Dennis and his friends actually saved Xander. And Fireman Dennis saved Mommy, too. And now he’s her boyfriend.”

  Laura’s hand flies to her heart. “Ohh, that is so sweet. Is that true?” I smile sheepishly.

  “And they might even get married one day soon and I’d have a new daddy. Well, I’d still have my old daddy because he’s my real daddy, but—”

  Gently, I place my hand on Zoë’s knee. “I think Laura gets it,” I whisper to her.

  “So,” Laura says, ready to change the subject and get back to business, “I love your designs. They’re whimsical, original, well made. The only question I have for you is how fast can you make them?”

  “She’s really fast!” Zoë tells her. If she doesn’t decide to be an astronaut when she grows up, my daughter could have a real future as an agent.

  I explain how much time it makes to craft each piece, assuming I’m giving it my full attention, and don’t have to stop what I’m doing to attend to some domestic emergency or put it aside for eight hours while I go off to work at the museum.

  “Well, the point is for you not to have to go back to the museum,” Laura says. “The jewelry design should be your job. Not your job—your career. And as long as you can deliver the pieces on schedule, it’s none of Barneys’ business when you complete them. So your time is as flexible as you need it to be. Based on everything you’ve shown me today I’m prepared to offer you a contract.”

  My cheeks grow warm and my eyes begin to water. “That’s…that’s wonderful!” I can hardly believe the good news.

  “There’s something else I want you to consider. We’re not stupid or naïve. We know that there are other high-end department stores and hundreds of boutiques in New York which you could interest in your designs. Barneys, of course, enjoys a certain cachet and our customers welcome its exclusivity when it comes to a number of the goods and services and products we offer them. So, we’re prepared to offer you a sweet-enough deal financially, provided that Claire Marsh Originals are sold only at Barneys.”

  It sounds fantastic. But I don’t know enough about the business world to figure out if this is really the best deal I can get. Something inside me says, Don’t jump at the first chance. They know you’re green and they know you’re hungry. “You’ll give me all of this in writing, won’t you?” I ask Laura.

  “I’ve got it right here,” she says, opening the manila folder on her desk. She hands me an unsigned contract.

  Clearly, if Laura fell in love with my designs, they had the paperwork all set to go. The numbers look good. This should indeed mean that I can give the Metropolitan Museum my notice. It’s all very exciting. Still, I wasn’t born yesterday and I know that their contract has been drawn up to inure to Barneys’ benefit. I think it’s a good idea to get a professional opinion before signing my name. “I’d like to review this with my business manager,” I tell Laura, knowing I’ll probably dial Owen from my cell phone as soon as Zoë and I are back on Madison Avenue.

  Laura stands and extends her hand to me. “Of course. It’s not a problem. If you can get back to me by the beginning of next week, though, I’d appreciate it. And…I look forward to doing business with you. So…is there anything else you’d like to ask me before you go?”

  “I have a question,” Zoë says. “Why is your store named for a dinosaur?”

  “Hey, hey, no running on ahead,” I caution Zoë, as we head for the exit. Every little thing on the main floor catches her eye, particularly the jewelry displays.

  “I want to see if it’s as good as yours is, Mommy.” I catch up with her and clasp her hand. “You could make stuff like that if you wanted to. Easy. But your jewelry is a lot prettier.”

  I’ve got a contract in my purse, a flexible new career, a happy child, a man who adores me, a sister who’s finally in a fulfilling relationship after at least thirteen years of bad luck, and a pair of parents who still enjoy communicating with each other. The air in midtown Manhattan suddenly smells sweet and the sky is the saturated shade of turquoise-blue you see only in digitally enhanced picture postcards and Magritte paintings.

  “Zoë, would you like to go on a play date with me? Right now?”

  She beams at me. “Yeah! Where?”

  “We’re just a block or so from the Plaza Hotel,” I tell her. “How ’bout we go have lunch with Eloise?”

  Being New York, no one even pauses to notice two blondes, one a miniature version of the other, holding hands and actually skipping toward Fifth Avenue.

  Celebrity Magazine: Who’s Hot

  This month, Celebrity freelance writer Leslie Carroll contributes to our “Who’s Hot” column, profiling Claire Marsh, jewelry designer to the stars.

  Dateline: Hollywood, California.

  Sometime in the near future.

  The pre-Oscar buzz this year isn’t about who will take home the coveted golden statuettes. Richard Dreyfuss and Alec Baldwin appear to be locks in their respective categories, Madonna is a surefire shoo-in for Best Director for her own biopic, Meryl Streep is looking to break all Academy records fo
r number of awards taken home—she must have several sets of bookends by now—and a newcomer named Alice Finnegan (who used to be a legal secretary) is the odds-on favorite to win the Best Actress nod for her remarkably brave portrayal of an adulterous prostitute opposite tall, dark, and hunky heart-throb Jon Santos.

  Here in tinseltown, the talk is all about the tinsel itself that will accessorize the glitterati on the red carpet and in the plushy seats of the Kodak Theatre. With near-meteoric speed, jewelry maven Claire Marsh has rocketed her way into the hearts and homes of Hollywood’s A-list celebs. They can’t seem to get enough of the young designer’s unique creations. Nicole Kidman, in fact, was photographed for a recent cover of Vanity Fair clad in nothing but Claire Marsh Originals, as the baubles’ line is known.

  We caught up with Claire—and her young daughter Zoë—in their spacious home in Manhattan, overlooking Central Park.

  CELEBRITY: First of all, thanks for meeting with us this afternoon.

  MARSH: Not at all, I’m always delighted to talk to the press.

  CELEBRITY: I have to say that I’m surprised that all this Hollywood hype hasn’t induced you to chuck it all and move out there.

  MARSH: Not on your life. In fact, I think that living in New York keeps me grounded, despite the fact that we’re actually several stories above street level here. New York is where I grew up and where I prefer to raise Zoë. The pulse of the city is in our blood. I can’t imagine what we’d do in L.A., in fact.

  ZOË MARSH: Swim a lot.

  CELEBRITY: So you like to swim, Zoë?

  ZOË: Uh-huh.

  MARSH: Speak in real words, please, Zoë.

  ZOË: Yes. I like to swim a lot. And in California we would have a lot of sunshine. But all my friends are here and so is my

  Aunt MiMi.

  CELEBRITY: But your Aunt MiMi—Mia Marsh—has become something of a Hollywood darling herself of late, hasn’t she?

  MARSH: Yes, her own cosmetics line took off like a shot, too. So between that and her film gigs, it’s true, she’s out in L.A. a lot. She just finished designing the special-effects makeup for Halloween XXVI and she’s about to start on Titanic 2: Let’s Haul Her Up for James Cameron. But she’s still pretty much a newlywed and her husband adores New York. Mia’s a real East Villager at heart. I think her brain would atrophy in Hollywood.

  CELEBRITY: And yours?

  MARSH: My brain? [she laughs]. I’m kind of a culture vulture, I must admit.

  ZOË: What’s a culture vulture?

  MARSH: Somebody who likes art and ballet and museums and theater…

  ZOË: You never go to the theater. Well, hardly ever. [she turns to the interviewer]. She used to work in a museum, though. That’s how she got discovered. Sort of.

  CELEBRITY: Why don’t you talk about that a bit, Claire?

  MARSH: I think I need to set the scene. Any single mom can attest to the fact that if you need to work for a living, doing so while raising and caring for a child can make you feel like a hamster in a cage. That wheel just never stops turning. After my divorce, I needed to find a job that was flexible enough to bend into the pretzel that was Zoë’s schedule. Believe me, her social life was much more exciting than mine. And affording professional, even paraprofessional, child care was a complete non-option. In fact, I’d like to thank my parents in print for contributing to our upkeep. If it weren’t for them, Zoë and I would have been living in a cardboard refrigerator box in Central Park.

  ZOË: It would have been a cool view, though.

  MARSH: Zoë, why don’t you start your homework now?

  ZOË: I can’t.

  MARSH: Why?

  ZOË: I need your help. We have to redesign the solar system because of the new planet they discovered. I need Styrofoam balls, too, and we don’t have any.

  MARSH: Why don’t we walk over to the Rose Center [the planetarium affiliated with the New York City Museum of Natural History] and see what they came up with?

  ZOË: We’re not allowed to do that. That’s copying.

  CELEBRITY: [laughing]. We’re getting a little off track here. Claire, you were telling me about how you worked in a museum when you got your start as a jewelry designer.

  MARSH: Sorry about the digression there. So I had a day job at one of the reproduction jewelry counters at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and when I had a little time on my hands, I started to look at some of the pieces to see how they were made, and thought I could do at least as good a job. I always designed jewelry as a hobby when I was younger…

  CELEBRITY: You’re still pretty young now! If you don’t mind my asking, how old are you?

  MARSH: I do mind. As Oscar Wilde said—and I paraphrase, “A woman who will tell someone her age will tell them anything.”

  CELEBRITY: [coyly] Then how young are you?

  MARSH: As Oscar Wilde said—actually he has Cecily Cardew say it in The Importance of Being Earnest, “I admit to twenty at dinner parties.”

  CELEBRITY: I give up.

  MARSH: Good. I never understood this mania people have, particularly the press, for needing to know someone’s age. Honestly, who the %@$*^* cares?

  ZOË: Mommy, you used the F-word!

  MARSH: Anyway, one afternoon I had a rather fortuitous visit from a customer who happened to be the mother of one of Zoë’s classmates. Actually, before that, Zoë and I had attended another classmate’s birthday party—

  ZOË: Lissa isn’t a classmate. She’s in my Museum Adventures after-school program.

  MARSH: I stand corrected. Lissa had a jewelry-making party—you know, all the kids’ parties are themed these days—last year we went to one in an O.R. at Mount Sinai because the kid wants to be a doctor when she grows up. I swear, all the kids were in scrubs and watched a liver transplant. Sorry about that. Back to the jewelry party. My designs were a big hit among the other moms, and it spawned a cottage industry. Shortly after that, Nina Osborne—the woman I referred to a minute ago—visited me at the Met Museum and gave me the business card of a friend of hers who happens to be a buyer at Barney’s. I went to see her, she gave me a contract, and the rest, as they say, is history.

  CELEBRITY: Actually, it was your sister, wasn’t it, who got your designs into the consciousness of the Hollywood cognoscenti?

  MARSH: Definitely. I wear Mia’s makeup exclusively and she wears all my jewelry designs. The Marsh family has always encouraged cooperation over competition, so there was never any major sibling rivalry between Mia and myself.

  ZOË: That’s not what you and MiMi used to tell me.

  MARSH: Zoë, I baked some Kahlua brownies and left the plate in the kitchen. Why don’t you run in and bring it out for our guest?

  ZOË: Okay. [she leaves]

  CELEBRITY: You were saying…

  MARSH: Right. So Mia was working on Taste Me with Sharon Stone, and Stone admired Mia’s jewelry. She was the first Hollywood star to buy one of my pieces. And she’s always been a style setter. She loves to go for that classic Hollywood but with a twist look. Remember the time she wore a Gap tee-shirt with a long skirt to the Oscars? Well, several of my pieces combine that eclecticism, so she really took to them. Then of course Catherine Zeta-Jones had to have one. Arnold bought a few pieces to appease Maria after some sort of domestic squabble, I was told. Mel wanted me to design a unique pendant for Monica Bellucci to wear as Mary Magdalene in The Second Coming, his sequel to The Passion of the Christ, but I said it was a nogo unless he donated five million dollars to the Simon Wiesenthal Center.

  CELEBRITY: And now all of Hollywood—well, except Mel—is wearing Claire Marsh Originals! How does that make you feel?

  MARSH: That’s kind of a silly question, Leslie. I mean, it’s the obverse of asking a grieving mother how it feels to find out her kid was killed in Iraq. How does it make me feel to have a multimillion-dollar jewelry business within such a short space of time? It feels $%)^&^$%$) fantastic.

  ZOË: [reentering the room precipitously balancing a large platter of the
aforementioned brownies] You said the F-word again, Mommy. You never use the F-word and you used it two times today. You sound like MiMi. [to the interviewer] My Aunt MiMi uses the F-word a lot, even though Mommy always tells her that she knows lots of other words and she could use more variety in her enthusiasm.

  CELEBRITY: [to Marsh]. You really said that?

  MARSH: [blushing a little]. Well, maybe not in so many words.

  ZOË: Yes, those words, Mommy, that’s how I know them.

  MARSH: Why don’t you offer Leslie a brownie, Zoë?

  CELEBRITY: [taking a brief break to scarf down a brownie]. These are delicious.

  MARSH: Thanks. They’re a secret family recipe.

  CELEBRITY: So, not to change the subject or anything, but which celebrities will you accessorize on the red carpet next week?

  MARSH: Nicole, certainly. Catherine and Sharon, of course. I hear that Meryl has asked to see two different pieces that I designed based on Fabergé eggs, since she’s nominated for her performance as Catherine the Great. Haley Joel Osment’s date will be wearing my earrings. Oh, and Alice Finnegan—she’s a new client—couldn’t be a nicer woman—she’s become a real friend—she promised to wear something as well. She dropped a hint that she’s always wanted to wear a tiara, and I’ve never done one, so this could be new territory for both of us. She wants to conjure the image of old-fashioned Hollywood glamour, particularly since she had to look like such a wreck through most of her film.

  CELEBRITY: As long as she doesn’t end up looking like the Queen of England.

  MARSH: That’s not likely to happen with my pieces. It’s funny, isn’t it?

  CELEBRITY: What is?

  MARSH: That the actresses who have to ugly up or dress down in their pictures are the ones who win the Oscar that year.

  CELEBRITY: Are you saying that it’s Alice Finnegan’s wardrobe and makeup that should win the Academy Award?