Fashion Show, or, the Adventures of Bingo Marsh Page 3

  I shook my head in sympathy, trying to communicate a sense of loss such as Amelia Earhart might have inspired, even if her death was concocted by Hearst.

  “President Roosevelt sent a medal of some sort,” Marsh said. “I have it still, I think. Father didn’t want the horrid thing. He was a Republican, very staunch about it, too.”

  He talked then a bit about himself.

  “We live simply, my wife being English. They so hate display. There’s nothing I’d rather have for lunch than a thick slice of homemade bread slathered in preserves put up from our own fraises and framboises.”

  Bingo had just finished, along with his boiled potatoes, a goujonette of sole, and had tasted the extraordinary Graves (Château Laville-HautBrion) I was drinking and he had selected.

  They had several homes, also simple, he insisted, especially now that the children were away at school. There was an apartment at 834 Fifth (“not even a duplex”), the cottage in Barbados, a weekend place on the Vineyard (“wrong end of the island, I assure you, totally unfashionable”), and a place out west where they skied.

  “I dream one day of operating a ski lodge, perhaps an entire resort,” Marsh said.

  Bill Blass, whom even I recognized from photographs, interrupted Marsh’s reverie as he took a table nearby, shouting a cheerful and apparently quite sincere “Hallo!”

  “I had the impression designers hated you.”

  “Oh, that’s just Bill,” said Marsh. “He’d love to be an Englishman. He’s from one of those square states in the middle, and he affects this little accent and holds a cigarette as Noël Coward might and we always put in the magazine, ‘Bill Blass of London comma Indiana.’ Drives him mad.”

  “He seemed genuinely friendly.”

  “They’re terrified of us, Blass and all of them. Deep down they’re resentful, we poke such fun. Bill and I were walking across town one day and we passed a firehouse and he remarked, ‘You know, Bingo, most firemen are gay,’ and I said I certainly didn’t know that. And Blass said I was naive, that it was so obvious, the boots, the rubber clothes, the male bonding, the phallic symbolism of the hose and that pole they slide up…”

  “… down?” I murmured.

  “Well, I thought Bill was talking rubbish, but I put it in the magazine, quoting him by name, and he was furious.”

  Marsh paused. “And you know, despite myself, I’ve never passed a firehouse since without wondering just what was going on inside…”

  Chic women, slim and suntanned out of season, stopped at our table. So did a bald, flabby little man. Bingo introduced me to each with exquisite courtesy.

  “Mr. Sharkey won the Pulitzer, you know,” he said, mispronouncing “Pulitzer,” as most people did. I was dismissed. These people cared about Marsh and his magazine and not about faceless strangers. They paid him gushing tribute and were off, waving to others and blowing still more kisses.

  “That was the Social Larva,” Bingo hissed, the small, flabby man barely out of hearing, “not quite a moth and certainly never a butterfly.”

  He went on like this over the coffee, charting the restaurant with his eyes, occasionally jotting a note on his shirt cuff, trashing people in the room, cattily, entertainingly.

  “That’s Mollie Parnis over there. She’s dressed every President’s wife from Mamie Eisenhower on, except Jackie, who has taste.”

  He pointed out Marvin Traub, the chief executive of Bloomingdale’s.

  “Marvin’s turned the store into a phenomenon. It used to live on bargain basement business. Now it’s the trendiest place in town. Marvin puts on a big international promotion every year. It doesn’t seem to matter to him if the United States and the foreign country involved are at war or at peace. Marvin says Bloomie’s has a foreign policy of its own. And the house furnishings floor, I’m assured, is where all the Saturday afternoon pickups take place. The store pullulates with sex, hetero and otherwise.”

  Bingo looked extremely pleased, as he tended to do when discussing sex.

  He also enjoyed recounting stories of impending bankruptcy, marital discord, incipient madness, lawsuits, and terminal illness among people sitting within twenty yards of us. I found myself, to my marginal shame, listening avidly and even laughing along.

  Then, again unsettling me with an unexpected question on another subject about which I would be less than frank:

  “You and Coco,” he said, “did you have sex?”

  Bingo’s high-pitched voice carried, and I glanced about, wondering if this were the sort of thing about which fashionable people spoke aloud in famous Manhattan restaurants. Marsh continued.

  “There are those who say it was your ardor as much as anything that killed her. That at her age the passion of young men was not to be borne.”

  I said nothing, too stunned to respond. He must have taken an uneasy silence for confirmation.

  “I was just curious,” he said, not at all apologetic, “because when I knew Coco, I often experienced erection in her presence.” He paused, thoughtful. “But she was younger then, not yet eighty.”

  As we finished coffee and he called for the check, Bingo offered me a job writing for his magazine.

  I’d grown wary, as I say, suspecting God, or the World, had it in for me, and as a result, I questioned motives, sniffed out conspiracies, and withheld judgments. So I told Bingo, not entirely honest about it, that I was quite happy at the Times but flattered to be asked, and we must really keep in touch. What I actually felt at this moment following the fine lunch was quite different. I knew Bingo was married and had children. Yet I was uneasy, suspecting without the slightest evidence beyond a skip and a giggle, that he might be homosexual, that this was not so much a job offer as an elaborate pass.

  When he’d signed and Marcel came to pull out the table, Marsh said, “Right back,” and disappeared toward what I assumed was the men’s room. When he reappeared he said brightly, “I had to floss. Do you floss after every meal?”

  I confessed I didn’t, and then we were on the sidewalk and he was climbing into a chauffeured car.

  I waved him off and walked toward Madison, realizing uncomfortably he’d been more than generous, exceedingly generous, especially since I was not all that happy with the Times nor they with me. That weekend I flew home to Paris, suspecting that despite Marsh’s oddities, I was the one acting very much like that English asshole in the siren suit reading palms.

  7 When they shot Dr. King and then Bobby Kennedy… I decided to get out.

  IN some ways, I missed the seventies, Watergate and the hostages and baby boomers and all that. But if you had to misplace a decade, Paris was a pretty good town in which to do it. I mentioned I had French. In all honesty it wasn’t great French, even discounting its Canadian origins. An Englishwoman I met my first year in Paris put her finger on it.

  “I love your French, Jack,” she said, not being at all snide, “so easy to understand, the way you don’t bother with accents and things.”

  Nor did I bother with much else, being young and careless and in love with Paris and drinking more than I should. In a sort of entente cordiale, the British correspondents got drunk at the bar of the Hotel Crillon, while the Americans favored the small bar of the Ritz Hotel on the Cambon side, where Bertin the barman once handicapped horses for Hemingway and arranged outings to the big rugby matches.

  Being an amiable sort, I drank in both places, plus others, and was therefore popular with all my colleagues.

  Later, however, in the old curiosity shop of the magazine Bingo Marsh published and the rest of us sooner or later would inhabit, I was considered something of a crank, notorious for my complaints about synthetic people.

  No one ever seemed to me quite genuine or unposed, no one unrehearsed or taken by surprise, either at the magazine itself or in the elegant milieu on which it weekly reports. There were so many domino masques, so many psychological facelifts, so many disguises. Yet when seized by a rare candor, I must admit that to an extent, I am someone el
se’s creation.

  Bingo Marsh’s, of course.

  But as I insist, only to an extent. Before Bingo and I ever met, and at an implausibly early age, I had already been briefly famous.

  Twice.

  The first time was when I won the Pulitzer reporting for the UPI in Vietnam. That fame endured only until they handed round next year’s prizes, but it put money in my bank account and got me hired by The New York Times, which sent me to Paris, where I wrote that book about Chanel which became a best-seller.

  I was by then twenty-three. And had begun complacently to feel, like the early Scott Fitzgerald, that life was something you dominated if you were any good. It would not take “life” long to knock that misconception out of me.

  In Paris the Times bureau assigned me to work with an older man who was being retired and whose grab bag of assignments I would be inheriting. He was a decent old gent named Tuthill who drank a little and who, as I would come to do, loved France and the French. Tuthill had become incontinent and something of an embarrassment to the bureau, occasionally wetting his chair, so no one wanted to sit near him. They laughed at Tuthill behind his back, saying you always knew when he was in the office from the trail he left behind in the corridors. I’d seen worse, and smelled worse, in Vietnam, so I took the desk next to Mr. Tuthill and we got along fine. I even told him over a glass one night how all that happened, Vietnam and the Prize.

  “When they shot Dr. King and then Bobby Kennedy and when everyone went nuts at the ’68 convention, I decided to get out. Not running to Canada to dodge the draft, because I had a shortstop’s knee and was deferred, but just wanting to get the hell away. My parents were both dead, and I was twenty years old and going into my senior year at Ohio State where I ran the student newspaper and worked summers at the Plain Dealer up in Cleveland as a city room gofer, and one of the editors made a phone call that got me a job at UPI, which was always looking for promising young people to underpay.”

  Mr. Tuthill laughed. “Nothing changes, does it,” he said, listening and not patronizing.

  By Christmas of that year I was in Saigon, where they’d done a crash buildup of the bureau. I made coffee and answered phones and ran errands. The war was boiling over, and even kids like me and burned-out old drunks in the Saigon news bureaus found ourselves being sent upcountry on assignment, there being too much war to be covered by the real pros. I was dispatched to a provincial town checking out a nothing story on syphilis rates among American troops. Lousy town, lousy story. “Ma boys don’t do that shit, son,” a career colonel assured me. “Ma boys don’t screw slopes.”

  Lepers were more popular up there than I was, and I didn’t get a damned thing from anyone, but that night Charley came in over the wire and I was pinned down there for nine days, sending out my stories by radio dictation. It began small and became the Siege of Da Xiang, the biggest battle since Tet, and all I did was write the play-by-play. By the third day my stuff was on every front page in America that took the UPI. Some people later insisted I’d been a hero, but I knew better; I was scared shitless.

  I admitted as much to Mr. Tuthill.

  “Shows good sense,” he said.

  So I told him about the fourth or fifth night of the siege, when I got the old gunnery sergeant in trouble with the Geneva Convention, something I never put in any of the stories and for good reason.

  “We were living underground by then, in bunkers. No one could live in the open with the shelling. I bunked in with this old gunny who ran the mortars, but of course there was a young officer over him who had the rank, but the gunny had the brains and said yessir and then went right ahead and did what was right. The gunny knew how important ammunition was, and he fussed over it and kept maybe a hundred rounds of mortar shells with us there in the bunker to be sure it was clean and dry. We slept right next to the shells, and when incoming hit, sand filtered down on top of us through the logs and sandbags and the bunker shook and I wondered what it would feel like to be blown up. Then, during a bad night, the worst shelling we’d had, a trooper dove into the bunker, moving fast.

  “ ‘Gunny! Ammo’s runnin’ short! Corporal sent me!’

  “So the gunny scrambled out after him and I was afraid to stay behind and I went too and the night was like noon from the explosion of the shells, theirs and ours both, and the gunny sergeant yelled to start passing up the shells from our bunker, a sort of bucket brigade, and they got that started and I was crouched there watching when a man went down, holding his stomach and rolling around screaming, and I jumped into that line and started passing the ammo, too. I had to be doing something or I would have gone nuts from fear, and I realize like everyone else I’m yelling and shouting and flipping those shells as if they were nothing and I look up and there’s our lieutenant.

  “He glares at me and then he says to the gunny, ‘Sergeant, this man is a correspondent, a civilian. He can’t handle ammunition. It’s against the Geneva Convention.’ ”

  Mr. Tuthill gave a little laugh and shook his head, and I poured us both some wine and went on.

  “Well, the old gunny looks up but he just keeps right on passing the shells and ducking, as we all did, whenever one hit near, and the lieutenant is really mad now, shouting about how I’m not in the army and we’re contravening the Geneva Convention, and finally the gunny says, ‘Lieutenant, them Vietcongs get through the wire they’re gonna shoot us all up the ass, including this here civilian, so I think we ought to just feed the guns and to hell with the Geneever Conventions.’ ”

  I got a real laugh out of Mr. Tuthill on that, and it wasn’t just wine laughter, either, and I told him other stories and he told some and then had to go to the bathroom, but when he came back he bought us a fin and lifted his glass in a gracious little toast to my Pulitzer Prize.

  He’d been in the newspaper business forty-three years, he said, and never won a damned thing.

  8 Cheering and applauding, weeping and carrying on.

  FOR the first time I had a few dollars and a decent salary coming in and this big, drafty apartment on a hilly, winding street above the Seine in Passy, two blocks from the Metro Muette and down the street from the shoemakers where you could buy firewood. It was damp and cold that first winter and you needed a fire. Or other alternatives to central heating.

  Her name was Gillian, and I won her by offering to buy lunch.

  “If I can have a steak,” she said. Gillian had a keen sense of the priorities.

  “Sure,” I said, thinking how cold it was in my bedroom.

  She was English, a mannequin working in the Paris couture, planning either to be discovered by Hollywood and become a cinema star or go home to England to get into university. I told her she was the first English girl I’d met and I liked her accent.

  “You just want me to go to bed with you,” she said.

  “Come on, let’s get that steak.”

  She was eighteen years old and that season was the top model at the fashion establishment of Gabrielle Chanel.

  “They’re so cheap there,” she complained, “and Mademoiselle is always going on about my appetite.”

  From the way she demolished the steak, I could believe it. Then I called the office and told them something had come up, and we went back to my place and went to bed for the afternoon.

  “That was really an excellent steak,” Gillian said.

  The following week she moved in with me, which certainly made things cozier on chill nights, and it was convenient for her as well.

  “I can save on the rent,” she said, “they’re so cheap, the French…”

  Gillian was astonishingly shallow and obsessed by herself, clothes, and men, in that order, and had absolutely no interest in my work, my writing, or my war stories, but in bed she was sweetly tolerant of my innocence and performed prodigies of which I had no conception. I paid the rent and she bought the food and the cheap wine and for a time it was a splendid arrangement.

  Then Mr. Tuthill died, which I think was a relief t
o people in the bureau, and I took on his beat, loosely branded “culture.” That meant it consisted of unimportant things no one else wanted to cover, opening nights and art galleries and film crews shooting in Paris on location and stuff like that.

  And the fashion business.

  I wasn’t actually expected to know anything about clothes; they sent a woman named Morris twice a year from New York for that. I was supposed to know just sufficient about the fashion designers in case they went bankrupt and to be able to update their obituaries.

  Although the bureau discouraged it, I did attend one fashion show, curious to see how they did it. Most startling, after my brief season at the Plain Dealer and then UPI and now at the Times, was how the fashion editors rooted for the designer. Or for the clothes. A sportswriter in a press box manifesting such partisanship would have been escorted out, his credentials confiscated. At the Paris showings the fashion editors kept leaping up from their little gold chairs cheering and applauding and carrying on. It almost seemed to be expected that you whoop and fan yourself and rend your garments and suffer nosebleeds and faint with emotion. Weeping also seemed to be encouraged, especially at the end. John Fairchild, who owned Women’s Wear Daily, appeared to lead the cheers, and occasionally the weeping, poking people on either side of him to stimulate their enthusiasm, or their grief, stamping his feet whenever mere hand-clapping was insufficient.

  The second fashion collection I ever saw was that of Gabrielle Chanel, known as Coco, and I went to that because she invited me.

  9 “Mon petit Indien,” murmured Chanel.

  CHANEL lived in a small suite above the inner garden of the Ritz, but atop her fashion establishment just opposite on the rue Cambon, she had a large apartment, and it was there Gillian and I dined. Downstairs, at street level, the shop was officially closed but still brightly lit, and we were let in by a shop girl, chic in a little black dress, kept after hours just to welcome us and to alert Coco by phone as we mounted the stairs. Chanel met us at the opened doors of the apartment, a slender woman with alert eyes under a flat straw hat and a fringe of brown bangs, with a wide mouth capable of a broad, tightlipped smile. Gillian received a kiss that barely brushed her cheek, hardly the passionate embrace I’d anticipated from a woman scheming to get her into bed.