Fashion Show, or, the Adventures of Bingo Marsh Page 2

  “Just fine,” I said, choosing not to go into equivalent detail.

  It seemed an awkwardly long time for the elevator to bring us to the ground floor. I stared fixedly at the car door, discouraging conversation, and when it slid open permitted him to exit first, marginally the older man. There being no cabs we walked west a silent block.

  I knew who he was; if you were in journalism you knew about Bingo Marsh and his magazine. I was already composing in my head an anecdote about having met him and of his extraordinary response to the most banal of casual greetings.

  Now, as we walked together through late Manhattan, he began to chatter amiably, a man about as tall as I and quite plump. I could see him only vaguely now in profile, but I recalled from photographs that his face had no planes or angles but only dimples and a doughy softness strengthened on occasion by a curled lip. His hair was blond and straight and parted on the left in proper prep-school tradition, occasionally falling into gentle bangs that gave Marsh something of the look of a youthful and vastly oversized Truman Capote. As we proceeded west in search of cabs, I noticed his curious gait, three or four normal steps and then a little skip. I had to hurry to keep up, recognizing I really should just let him go, skipping into the night. But Bingo was telling me he’d known Coco Chanel and how well I’d captured her in words.

  I was flattered he even remembered the book. And no writer turns callously from a good review.

  “You must come to lunch,” he said, “the Racquet Club.”

  “Sure,” I said, having early learned that in New York people were forever threatening lunch and rarely committing it.

  A taxi slowed, but as I stepped into the street to hail it, I realized there was already a passenger, a lone woman barely discernible, with a vague but pleasing profile silhouetted briefly against the window.

  “She’s playing with herself,” Marsh remarked in a satisfied tone.

  “How can you possibly know that?” I demanded.

  “Well, wouldn’t you, if you had a nice cab all to yourself?”

  Just then two empties came along, and we each waved one down.

  “I’ll phone,” Bingo cried, skipping into the gutter. “I want to hear all about you and Coco…”

  4 Oh, a worm!

  MARSH meant what he said about lunch and got me through the switchboard at the Times.

  “Let’s make it La Grenouille instead,” he said. I assumed he’d had second thoughts as to whether I was Racquet Club material. La Grenouille, on East Fifty-second Street, was obviously a favorite of Bingo’s, and we were greeted at the door and bowed obsequiously to a fine corner under enormous vases of fresh flowers. A headwaiter approached.

  “They have the best boiled potatoes in the world here, don’t you, Marcel?”

  Marcel, the headwaiter, a man the size and heft of a good middleweight and with the ritual broken nose, nodded enthusiastically.

  “They are very good, Monsieur Marsh.”

  Bingo beamed, delighted to have judgment confirmed.

  “They have a special way of cooking them,” he said.

  Marcel confirmed this.

  “Yes,” he said, “we boil them.”

  Out of self-defense, I ordered a drink, and Marcel, his boiled potato badinage exhausted, went off to fetch it. Bingo wagged his head in admiration.

  “I think Marcel is marvelous. And Ames.”

  “Ames?”

  “My wife,” Bingo said. “I forgot you don’t know her. She admires Marcel as well.”

  “I see.” I was making a genuine effort but not at all sure it was working.

  The appetizer was artichoke vinaigrette. Halfway through his, Bingo carefully put aside one of the leaves on which a small white worm was undulating.

  “Oh, a worm,” I said, startled into stating the obvious.

  “Of course,” Marsh said blandly, “it’s how you know they’re fresh.” He resumed eating with considerable relish, blandly insensitive either to worms or misplaced modifiers, smiling and content, providing a bit of family lore:

  “Ames is British. I met her in Paris when I was doing graduate work. Her maiden name is Hillary, a distant relative of the Hillary who climbed Everest. Sir Edmund. You know, the one who said, ‘Because it’s there… ’ ”

  “I thought that was Mallory.”

  “No,” Bingo said primly, “Sir Edmund said it. Ames’s cousin, as I said, third degree of kindred, I believe. She’s only an ‘honourable,’ because of her father. Her brother got the title.”

  I ignored Burke’s Peerage to return to Everest. “And I was so sure it was George Leigh Mallory who…”

  Marsh made a throwaway gesture, shooting a cuff and indicating none of this was significant.

  “They argue endlessly over just who said what. Alpinists are apparently difficult, argumentative people, envious and litigious. Has to do with altitude and oxygen starvation. But it most certainly was Hillary got up Everest first. Sir Edmund and some coolie.”

  “A Sherpa guide, I believe.”

  “Whatever,” Marsh said, waving to a woman three tables away who was smiling at him.

  “That’s Princess Radziwill, Jackie’s younger sister. Younger, with nicer legs as well. All that horseback riding around New Jersey every Sunday with the local hunt, well, someone ought to give Jackie some friendly counsel. Anyway, Onassis had an enormous letch for Lee, such a pleasant relief from tantrums by la Callas. But once he met Jackie, it was all over. Daddy O. bought originals and not numbered prints. Someone once suggested, surely in jest, that Onassis might dump Jackie for Diana Ross and the Supremes because by then they were the most famous women in the world.”

  Bingo’s voice had a way of carrying, and I glanced toward Lee Radziwill, wondering if she were catching any of this. Marsh went on, impervious.

  “Her title’s bogus, of course. There hasn’t been a King of Poland since the third partition. She and Jackie get on, I’m told, but barely.”

  They cleared away the artichoke (the worm still wriggling) as Marsh identified other people in the front room.

  “That’s Mica Ertegun, the woman with the shiny hair. Her husband’s a Turk and owns the biggest record company, so people like the Rolling Stones and Jerry Brown’s girlfriend and those charming little colored children, the Johnson Five…”

  “Jackson?”

  “… work for him. Her best friend is Chessy Rayner, who has a husband at Condé Nast, and they’re in the catering business or something together, Mica and Chessy, but we always put it in the magazine, ‘Messy and Chica.’ If she comes over here let me do the talking. She can be arch.”

  “But doesn’t that confuse your readers, using the wrong names?”

  “Oh, but that’s the fun of it. We mentioned La Grenouille so much in print people said I was getting free meals, so then we called this place The Frog Pond and then everyone started using that so now we call it ‘Restaurant X.’ Readers like puzzles, the way some people enjoy S and M and things.”

  “I suppose so,” I said, starting to lose him.

  “We also publish a list of who’s In and who’s Out. It’s an old staple of the magazine business, like the best-dressed list and the ten worst movies. I stole the idea from one of the Mitford girls, who wrote a book about just who was U- and non-U, U- being upper-class…”

  “Nancy Mitford. I know the book.”

  “I’m sure you’re right, though I thought it might be Jessica. I knew it wasn’t the other one, Verity…”

  “Unity.”

  “… because she was Hitler’s girlfriend. And John Fairchild, as well.”

  Astonished, I said, “She was John Fairchild’s…?”

  “No, I mean Fairchild stole the idea, too, and uses it at Women’s Wear, who’s In or Out. I like to shift people from list to list every year just to confuse things.”

  I was thinking of the thick book of editorial rules at the Times and how slavishly we subscribed to its…

  “Oh, good, here’s Marcel,” Bingo said
, rubbing his hands. “Marcel,” he said, his voice falling conspiratorially, “today’s boiled potatoes, are they really good?”

  Marcel looked about cautiously before answering.

  “Monsieur Marsh, my word as a Breton.”

  Marsh beamed again. When we’d ordered he turned to me and in a voice suddenly amplified, demanded:

  “Tell me about your Pulitzer, tell me of the horrors of Vietnam.”

  I provided a brief, bowdlerized version, not knowing him well enough for candor and uneasy with his penchant for shouts. I wasn’t halfway through the story of Da Xiang when he said:

  “It’s amazing, how each of us has had to struggle, you versus the Communists, me against Nunc.”

  “Nunc?”

  5 People will say it’s trash.

  IT was 1960 and Jack Kennedy had just, and narrowly, been elected President, and Bingo was in Paris, a Yale man loafing through lectures at the Sorbonne for exams he had no intention of taking, when he fell among expatriates short of money.

  “They thought they discerned in me an easy mark,” he was admitting now over our Manhattan lunch.

  The expatriates had been running, and doing poorly at it, an obscure little trade magazine in which Bingo saw possibilities. The magazine bore an unwieldy title, Bruit de la Mode, freely translated into the “noise” or “gossip” of fashion. Before closing the deal, as a matter not only of finance but of courtesy, Marsh flew to New York to present the purchase to his Uncle Elmer, known as “Nunc,” and chairman of the Marsh clan’s profitable if undistinguished chain of provincial newspapers. When Nunc objected, Bingo threw up his hands.

  “You object to everything new, Nunc. You’re personally affronted every December thirtieth when the year changes.”

  “It changes the thirty-first,” Nunc growled.

  “Whatever.”

  Elmer Marsh possessed a long red nose, keenly pointed and generously dotted with small seeds like a raspberry, part genetic, part alcoholic, at which he pawed and groped when distracted. He was pawing and groping now at his nose.

  “What’s it called again?”

  “Bruit de la Mode.”

  “ ‘Brouilly of the mud?’ ” Nunc demanded. “I thought you said it was about fashion, not some cheap wine.”

  Bingo explained the name. “We’ll rename it, of course, call it Fashion. Or Gossip.”

  “You can’t publish something called Gossip,” Nunc declared. “People will say it’s trash. I’ll say it’s trash.”

  “People will buy it, Nunc,” Bingo said triumphantly, with the confidence of young men with trust funds. “People love gossip; women are mad for fashion. They’ll storm the kiosks to buy it.”

  Nunc groped again at his great nose. “I won’t have the family’s name sullied.”

  “Fine,” Bingo said airily, “keep the family out of it. With Jackie Kennedy taking over the White House in January, fashion will be the national rage. I’ll buy the magazine with my own money.”

  “Oh?” said Nunc, expecting he was about to be mulcted and giving his nose an enormous going over.

  “Yes, and it’ll make tons of money.”

  “Well, then,” said Elmer Marsh, suddenly very much the crusading journalist, “Marsh Publishing ought to give it a try, don’t you think?”

  “Yes, Nunc,” Bingo said piously. “What a splendid idea.”

  He returned to Paris to wrap up the deal for a derisory price, remained long enough to absorb what he could about running a small magazine and, incidentally, about fashion, using his connections to get invited to the collections and to meet a few of the more influential designers and hiring a disaffected former employee of Women’s Wear Daily, an aging fashion expert named Regina Stealth, to put him through a crash course in women’s clothes.

  “It all begins with the cloth, Bingo, you must never, never forget that. Within the fabric, erratically spinning, is the nucleus of every dress ever made.”

  A chum from Paris Match filled in with gossip from the bistros and the discotheques, a lover of Cocteau offered news of the arts, and a broker with a seat on the Bourse provided confidential information on the finances of Jean Patou, Lanvin, Dior, Rodier, and the other major houses. Marsh, who for all his faults was never lazy, took assiduous notes. Then, almost in his spare time but in an inspired moment, he married a pretty young Englishwoman he’d met over dinner at the American ambassador’s residence.

  Halfway through 1961 Mr. and Mrs. Marsh were back in Manhattan, and Bingo’s little magazine, now titled simply Fashion and translated into an English-language weekly for the delectation of monied America, had been installed in unused space of the Marsh Publishing building on lower Fifth Avenue. Staff was hired, and Bingo set out to sell magazines and intimidate people, ever preaching the one gospel:

  “People are more interesting than things.”

  He was not yet twenty-five, and already he understood vulnerability, knew that while other people were difficult, even dangerous, he could frighten the designers, the driving force of fashion. And from the very first he set out to do precisely that, alternately the wealthy, naive, charming boy and, through the pages of his magazine and using its leverage, the powerful, menacing bully.

  I was a newspaperman; I knew how a call from the Times made people nervous. But these were wealthy, successful people of international reputation, these fashion designers. How could they possibly have been intimidated by what Marsh admitted was at first a small, obscure weekly?

  I asked Bingo.

  “The designers are the fashion locomotives, a few dozen men and a few women in Europe mostly, a few here. Get them scared, get their attention, get them reading the magazine every Monday morning and you’ve won the battle. And all you have to remember is, no matter how sophisticated and rich and tough they seem to be, they all started out as little boys playing with and dressing dolls.”

  I laughed, unsure he was being serious, and said:

  “Jan de Hartog wrote a novel, called The Ship, I think, about an old tramp steamer captain who on long voyages kept an inflated, life-sized rubber doll in his stateroom and…”

  “John, I’m not suggesting the designers are slipping Barbie or Raggedy Ann between the Porthault sheets and having affairs. I mean, they dress the dolls and sew up little costumes…”

  “Oh…” I let my face go stern and attentive.

  “Yes,” he said, pleased I was back on his wavelength, “and the odd thing was, years before, it was worth a lady’s reputation to go unchaperoned to a fashion fitting. The designers then were all rakes, with scores of their wealthy clients and fashion mannequins tumbling in and out of bed night and day. Jacques Heim told me when he was a boy and his mother still alive and designing, the first pederast was hired by a Paris couture house as an assistant and everyone laughed and made rude sport of the poor boy. Within a generation they were all that way, or almost all. And the dashing dressmaker roué of French farce was banished, virtually forgotten.”

  Marsh sighed, as if mourning a better time. Then, brightly:

  “So the designers are easily intimidated and tell us almost anything we want to know, just to stay in our good graces. And Fairchild.”

  “Fairchild?”

  “The Women’s Wear Daily man. The designers are afraid of him, too.”

  Remembering Chanel, I was still skeptical, a furrowed forehead showing it.

  “But don’t we all have our secrets, our little guilts?” Bingo asked. “Your background or mine or Calvin Klein’s, don’t we all have something we’d prefer never to see in print? Isn’t everybody vulnerable?”

  My stomach tensed. I thought of my father, the look on his face that day when I was nine as the local paper screamed its headlines and my mother wept.

  “Well, sure, I guess so…”

  Marcel returned now with the next course, inspiring Marsh to such ecstasies it was a simple matter to change the subject, and I did so, reasonably sure Bingo had seen nothing in my face.

  6 As soon a
s I was suckled, she was off.

  I admired people who went out on their own and did original things, and I said so now.

  “I’d have just gone to work on the family newspapers,” I said, “and not taken the risk.”

  “You don’t know my family, especially Nunc.”

  Not knowing Nunc and having no family myself, I was ignorant of such matters. Nor was I quite ready for Bingo’s account of his mother’s death, an account that seemed to flow seamlessly from his impatience with Nunc.

  “She was what in those days was called an aviatrix,” he said, shoveling up the potatoes, “a female pilot, like Amelia Earhart. Or Beryl Markham. Mother was said to be jealous of Earhart, always talking about the sheer bad taste of that histrionic ‘last flight.’ A publicity stunt, that’s how my mother saw it, faked for the Hearst Sunday supplements. Anyway, she married my father because he was rich. He could buy airplanes for my mother to crack up. She had little interest in him or home and almost none in me. I was an accident of passion. When I was born the war was nearly upon us, and as soon as I was suckled—they tell me I was nearly four—she was off.”

  I dove into the wine, unaccustomed to having total strangers tell me about being nursed. Marsh, abstemious, sipped a Perrier and went on.

  “Mother joined an Air Corps auxiliary, ferrying planes across the Atlantic to England, courageous, embattled England. In 1944 she disappeared on a flight from Newfoundland to Croydon, and it was said in the newspapers that she died a heroine’s death, shot down by the Nazis, the only American woman pilot shot down in the entire war.”

  “Well,” I said, casting about for the proper blend of horror and condolence.

  “My father,” Marsh said equably, “never believed that, about the Nazis. ‘She was always a careless person,’ he said when I was old enough to understand, ‘and probably forgot to check a fuel gauge or something. She simply ran out of gas and fell into the sea. Nothing heroic about it. She was always running out of gas in cars.’ ”