Fashion Show, or, the Adventures of Bingo Marsh Read online

  “May I present Monsieur John Sharkey, Mademoiselle. He is the editor of the Times of New York and insisted on meeting you.”

  I muttered something about just being a reporter and was ignored.

  Chanel was a very old lady, but she gave me that flat smile and a brisk handshake and then, her arms around both our waists, walked us into the most elaborate room I’d ever seen, full-sized ceramic deer, coromandel screens everywhere, piles of leather-bound books stacked about, a suede sofa that might have been eight or nine feet long on the edge of which she balanced while pouring me a neat whisky over ice. I am dark and lean with a ruddy complexion and my nose was once broken playing ball and knit badly, and Chanel somehow got the idea I was an American Indian.

  Gillian sat near her on the sofa, and I perched on a footstool, and we sat there in her incredible apartment over the fashion salon and talked, or rather Coco talked and we listened. It was rapid-fire and fascinating, much of it slanderous, and I was glad I had French. Gillian knew how to get her started, something about the miniskirt.

  “Ah, that,” Chanel said, “dégoûtant. Tasteless. Une exhibition de viande… a show of meat.”

  The actress Romy Schneider had long been a client, and now, in a new film, was being dressed by a rival, Pierre Cardin.

  “But what is she, after all?” Coco demanded. “A little Swiss milkmaid.”

  I’d recently interviewed Brigitte Bardot and asked if she’d ever done her clothes.

  “Yes, yes, I tried to do something with her. Here it is very nice, très jolie,” she said, stroking her buttocks, “but up here?” cupping her own minimal breasts, “it is too much.”

  Over drinks Gillian just sat there looking beautiful and being bored, crossing and uncrossing her legs and admiring them. She’d heard all the Chanel stories before, during fittings. At eight o’clock we went into the dining room to be served by a fat waiter wearing white gloves and livery. The food was astonishing, glutinous Scottish smoked salmon served with chilled ponies of Polish vodka, blue trout with the heads still on, one eye regarding us, tiny quail, three to each plate, skin as crisped as Peking duck, asparagus and haricots steamed rather than boiled, a cheese platter and mille feuilles that challenged description, three wines, two white, the red a private Rothschild label.

  “Marie-Hélène sends it over,” said Coco. I assumed this was the Baronne Rothschild.

  Despite her great age, Chanel seemed to eat and drink everything, occasionally pulling out a cigarette. By now I was “mon petit Indien,” ignoring the fact I was nearly a foot taller and not an Indian.

  Feeling the wine I made the mistake of mentioning another designer I’d interviewed, a Spaniard named Castillo who stuttered in four or five languages and claimed he’d once as a young man been Chanel’s principal assistant.

  “Ah, that one,” Coco said disdainfully, “he may have held the pins.”

  Having dismissed Castillo’s significance, she recounted a salacious story to the effect he retained an assistant who hired Gypsy boys to come to the cellar of his castle in Spain to be whipped. I didn’t know just what to say to that, but Gillian brightened.

  “I never heard that before,” she said, always alert to any story with sexual overtones.

  “Voilà, la télévision,” Chanel announced at ten o’clock as the waiter switched on a big set hung at the far end of the dining room.

  There was a taped interview Coco had done with a French version of Phil Donahue, and we sat there and watched while the waiter fetched cognac. Questions were asked and she answered, rambling on but getting off some good lines. A couple of times, looking up at herself on the screen, Chanel nodded and said, “Tu sais, elle a raison… You know, she’s right.”

  It was as if she were watching a stranger and agreeing with what the woman on television was saying.

  Then the talk-show host asked if Chanel had a favorite client.

  “The one who pays her bills,” she snapped. “Keep your princesses and comtesses and pretenders to the throne. Such women are so impressed by their own nobility, to send a check is beneath them. Give me the chic, second wife of a rich businessman who cheats a little on his government contracts. Such a woman is too insecure to posture; such a woman pays her dressmaker.”

  Going home in the cab Gillian was sulky.

  “Did you notice how she gestured to Antoine to give you another quail, and I was neither offered nor given one?”

  “Well, she kept saying I was skinny, and calling me her ‘poor Indian.’ Maybe she thought I was starving.”

  “We’re the ones who starve. The girls of the cabine. They’re so cheap, the French.”

  “Yes,” I said noncommittally.

  “Well, what did you think of the old girl?” Gillian asked.

  I said what I thought, that Chanel was incredible.

  “I know,” Gillian agreed, “just imagine, nearly ninety years old and still fucking.” Gillian’s mind ran along such lines.

  10 Eating asparagus with their fingers and the butter running down their chins.

  IN Paris they stage the big fashion shows in January and July. The fall fashion collections were shown the last week of July, but except for what I’d learned listening to Chanel and a rooting interest in it for Gillian’s sake, it didn’t excite me at all. Gillian, of course, was highly stimulated; it was the work she did. Coco’s show would draw the American buyers and the fashion editors and the paparazzi and the rich women who could afford the clothes and the network television crews who would shoot both the clothes and the rich women.

  And the fashion mannequins.

  “Why shouldn’t I be discovered?” Gillian demanded. “Lots of model girls have become cinema stars. Lauren Hutton, Betty Bacall, Twiggy, Suzy Parker, why not me? I’ve got legs as good as any of them and boobs as well.”

  She was Chanel’s current star and would wear the classic suits, the slinkiest evening gowns, and with that face and legs and her coltish grace, you weren’t likely to miss her. Gillian kept after me to write a story about her. She didn’t understand The New York Times frowned on stories about one’s friends. I must say it was pleasant how Gillian kept trying to convince me.

  Then she got the notion a PR man might help, getting her name around, generating a little publicity. So she got me to take her to lunch with Percy Savage, an Australian pal of mine who did publicity for the fashion house of Nina Ricci. Gillian kept promoting herself, but Percy kept talking about a new account he had with the cotton trade.

  “It’s a real challenge, you know,” Percy enthused.

  “Do tell us about it,” Gillian said finally, in some exasperation.

  “Well, it’s to convince everyone cotton is superior to synthetics. You know, getting nuns to use cotton tampons instead of polyester.”

  That same week I saw my second fashion show. It was important to Gillian that I see her performance, and Coco had invited me. We’d had dinner with her again, and then Coco asked me for lunch a couple of times. Without Gillian.

  I’ve called Coco “fascinating.” That’s just an adjective. She was eighty-six years old and still the single most influential force in world fashion. She knew everyone and had an opinion on everything. She was crotchety and prejudiced and tactless and stubborn and very, very wise. Best of all, for a newsman, she was quotable. Even my bureau chief at the Times, who considered me an infant, was impressed I knew her.

  “Ten years in Paris and I’ve never met the woman. Saw her once lunching with the Duchess of Windsor at the Espadon in the Ritz. Never forgot it, the two of them eating asparagus with their fingers and the butter running down their chins.” Then he paused. “During the war she had a Nazi boyfriend, didn’t she?”

  Coco scheduled her fashion show for three in the afternoon, precisely the time of the Cardin show on the other side of town, so editors and buyers would have to choose between the bitter rivals. I got there about two-thirty to find a queue of people, most of them women, jostling slowly through the ground-floor shop to
ward the stairs and the salon, waving their invitations and being ignored by the staff. I’d been told what to do and just went up without asking, starting to take a chair toward the back in the third row when a directrice grabbed my arm.

  “No, monsieur, up there,” she said, pointing toward the second floor.

  I wasn’t to sit in the audience with the rest of them, but with Coco, up at the top of those famous mirrored, winding stairs where habitually she perched on the top step to watch the show, as she made catty remarks about people and even about her own work, chain-smoking nervously and elbowing me to pay attention and never shutting up.

  “Regard that woman in gray on the left. Have you ever seen such ankles? And they speak of the Swiss disdainfully as cows. Now, this next suit, in navy, the proportions are important. Can you believe that photo of Mees Fonda [this was Jane, I assumed] in the current Match? Why don’t such women act their age? Now, this little dress, charming, I have to say, don’t you think? I’ve caught fashion editors fast asleep during a show, you know. They drink themselves into insensibility during lunch, and there is a monumental struggle to remain awake. One is dozing off even as we speak, there in the second row. I’ll show that one the door next season. Now, there is your girlfriend, Gillian, in the evening suit. I once had such legs, a century ago. Give me another cigarette, mon petit Indien, I know they’re bad for me, but what is one to do?”

  By the time it was over, my head was a kaleidoscope of color and shape and form, all of it set to the rat-a-tat of Chanel’s comments. Gillian crossed the rue Cambon to meet me afterward in the small bar of the Ritz.

  “You were terrific,” I said, meaning it, “the way you move, how you carry those clothes.”

  “Shaun, the bitch, had one more passage than I did. Did you notice?”

  “I only noticed you, how lovely you looked.”

  “Oh?”

  “Even Coco talked about you, admiring your legs.”

  “And you?”

  “I admired them, too.”

  We went on to dinner and home early and Gillian demonstrated her gratitude several times during the night and in quite extraordinary ways.

  It was shortly after that Chanel told me there really ought to be a good book about her, an honest book, “and not that filth and piggishness they always write. Or the rubbish Mees Rosalind Russell talked after I rejected her for Broadway in Coco.”

  She asked me to do such a book, but I was uneasy about it. I’d been trying to write a novel about Vietnam and couldn’t get it going, the words and images all conveniently in memory; I just couldn’t seem to get them down on paper, not so it seemed like Vietnam, and so I said I didn’t seem to be very good at full-length books.

  “It’s easy,” she said. “Proust told me he just listened to what people said in the Ritz and wrote it down. We’ll do it like Proust; I’ll talk and you write it down.”

  I didn’t have an agent or a publisher but you didn’t say no to Chanel, and I was trying to become a writer, not just a reporter, and I had a primitive sense of just how unique an opportunity this might be, spending hour after hour with this extraordinary old woman who must be nearing the end of her life and had so many memories, so many scores to settle, had lived the kind of life few of us even dreamt of living.

  So I said yes, and we went to work on it that same day.

  Coco stroked my face and ran arthritic fingers through my hair and murmured, “Mon Indien, mon petit Indien,” and chain-smoked cigarettes while I puffed a Punch cigar she clipped with a gold cutter, and she poured whisky over the ice from a decanter that must have been Waterford and said, her voice husking and rasping as she leaned close, “Ask me anything, anything you want, mon petit Indien.”

  She talked and I took it down, and afternoon after afternoon we grew tipsy as the shadows lengthened in the rue Cambon.

  It was that little book which years later would draw the sensitive antennae of Bingo Marsh.

  11 Suppose someone came after him with a horsewhip?

  I didn’t kid myself, then or later, that I knew much about fashion.

  Bingo, in contrast, seemed instinctively to understand and really cared about it.

  Before he was twenty-five and by no means yet an expert, Bingo already had a precisely delineated vision of a different breed of fashion magazine, harder edged, stripped of puffery and pretension, of the sort of bullshit where they run on the inside pages an editorial credit for a perfume the model is supposedly wearing on the cover, simply to please the advertiser with a mention.

  “The clothes,” he informed his first employees years before I met him, “are incidental. The people who design the clothes are the story, the people who sell them, who wear the clothes, who pay for them. Creative designers, beautiful women, and the rich men who finance both. That’s who and what Fashion will be about.”

  What began under his direction as a small, obscure, elitist, and rather cleverly snotty little slick, virtually a newsletter to the chic, a modest counterculture response to the authoritative, powerful Women’s Wear Daily, would become a publishing phenomenon.

  I was a newspaper reporter, trained by a wire service and the Times to ask questions. After I got to know him, I pressed Marsh.

  “But how did you know this stuff? You were only a child.”

  “I guess at the very beginning it was ‘the little monks,’ ” he said, pleased and complacent. “They told me what was going on, passed me the secrets. All the best scoops at first came from them.”

  “And just who are ‘the little monks’ when not at prayer?”

  “The boys who work for the designers in the studio. Every designer has a half dozen assistants. Balenciaga was the king of fashion when I bought the magazine, and he was like the Pope, this austere old Spaniard, so everyone called his assistants ‘the little monks.’ They wore these darling little smocks. Anyway, the designers know everything, they know all the gossip. Their models gossip through their chewing gum as they’re being pinned and basted, rich women come in to be fitted and they talk, the designers themselves talk, and the little monks never stop talking.”

  “A reporter’s dream,” I murmured, remembering how Coco rarely drew breath.

  “Exactly,” said Bingo enthusiastically. “In the fashion business no one is discreet, no secret ever kept, circumspection is considered the… how many deadly sins do Catholics have?”

  “Seven.”

  “… well, the eighth deadly sin. The designers and the little monks and the models and the clients together hour after hour, hermetically sealed into a fashion studio, the women half-naked all the time, in and out of their underwear, wine may be handed around, perhaps a little pot is smoked, and all of them talk, all of them listen. The rich bitches jabber on about their husbands’ businesses, about their lovers; they slander their enemies, they pass on state secrets, and all the while the little monks listen, so pleased to be part of this lush, ornate, monied world; ragamuffins welcomed to the ball. And at night all the little monks spend what few francs they have to go dancing. By day, slavishly faithful retainers to Dior, to Givenchy, to Saint Laurent, to Valentino. By night they revert to silly young boys who giggle and tell tales and drink too much. On the dance floors or in bed, they talk, they tell everything.”

  “But you didn’t spend your evenings out dancing with these kids.”

  “Of course not,” Marsh said, prim as Cotton Mather. “I was home with Ames. But I learned which of the little monks had talent, which might soon launch himself into a career and open his own studio. Those little monks I invited to lunch. Those I flattered with curiosity about their work, and they responded by telling me the shape and spirit of the new clothes which no one else would see for weeks. And, as I say, they gossiped.”

  “And you took notes.”

  “And encouraged the careers of those who told me what I wanted to know.”

  On that, Bingo was totally candid, cold-bloodedly so.

  “But this was Paris,” I said. “In New York…�
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  “There are little monks in New York, as well. Blass has his assistants, Beene, Halston, Trigere… only the smocks are different.”

  Marsh worked them all, he cheerfully admitted, gleaned their secrets, picked their brains, and betrayed confidences every Monday.

  He had other sources. Designers who fed him advance sketches or permitted him to attend a circumspect dress rehearsal of the season’s new clothes found themselves lavishly featured in the magazine, their work praised beyond its inherent virtues. Those who refused to cooperate were ignored, maligned, slandered.

  “And there are others who talk. Photographers, fashion artists, the fabric salesmen, the jewelry designers, milliners, the purveyors of expensive shoes, the hairdressers.”

  All these worked inside fashion’s silken curtain. But, despite his willingness to exploit them and use their knowledge, Marsh drew the line at socializing with hairdressers, maintaining toward them, at least, a decidedly stiff line:

  “Society collapsed when the first hairdresser was invited to dinner at a decent table.”

  When he became vague, fobbing me off with aphorisms, I persisted, demanding just how a young man came to develop such keen instincts so early. Bingo turned playful:

  “They teach you at Yale.”

  Maybe they really did, I thought, product of the Big Ten and square Ohio.

  His vision of a different genre of fashion magazine established, Marsh had thrown family money into the new weekly, hiring the best young writers and photographers and editors (he turned out to have a feel for talent) to cover and report on not only fashion but also the fashionable. And on movies and restaurants and books and ski resorts and architecture and scuba diving and the new cars and low-cholesterol diets and the America’s Cup (it was a Fashion reporter who coined the term for Newport’s luxurious spectator yachts, “floating gin palaces”) and on network television and Sotheby’s auctions and dinner parties and country weekends. On wealthy women and their lovers. The weekly frequency of Fashion, on sale every Monday morning, gave it an edge in timeliness over established monthlies such as Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar; Marsh’s editorial knack gave the magazine an instant identity with the surgically precise nickname, the “hot, new” personality, the latest trendy look, the scandal filling with pus but not quite yet erupting. Circulation soared from a few thousand to more than a million copies a week, with a pass-along readership claimed to be five times that. In a single week when Jackie Kennedy, then between widowings, posed prettily on its cover in a miniskirt (only to be scolded in the headline as “bandy-legged”), some twenty thousand subscriptions were sold. Nor was it cheap. When tabloids at the same supermarket checkout sold for twenty-five cents, Fashion cost a dollar. Fashion was nasty, it was smart, it was In. Bingham Marsh III had arrived, outdoing three generations of publishing Marshes. His idiosyncratic genius provided the uniquely tangy (some insisted “gamy”) flavor its readers, most but not all monied and leisured women, lapped up as Wimbledon devours strawberries and cream. Some readers, who were also his victims, actually seemed to enjoy being humiliated in print, as a Good Friday penitent might welcome the lash.