Back Then Page 14

  Each month the magazine would “do” a city—Cincinnati, Louisville, San Francisco, Baltimore—that had retained something of an upper crust. Instead of employing models to pose in posh gowns, they used local debutantes, who posed for free, saving a good deal of money and, at the same time, making that issue of the magazine a must-buy for the families and friends of the models.

  The editorial staff—all of them elongated and skinny—had an alarmingly high blue-blood count; several belonged to prerevolutionary Russian aristocracy. My father had unwittingly obliged me to equate Jewishness with shame and so, constantly aware of being Jewish, I wondered whether this exotic fact would automatically exclude me from their fun-loving, lighthearted, madcap, perfectionist company. I was like a recently pubescent girl, terrified that her menstrual blood has seeped through to the outside of her skirt. Hide it! These White Russian ladies, were they anti-Semitic or merely snooty? I couldn’t tell. In any case, they never tried to talk to me, they never said hello in the morning or good-bye in the afternoon; they acted, in fact, as if I were invisible until the day I was vexed enough to ask if I could try writing some copy. “You mean,” one woman said, staring at me as if seeing me for the first time, “you actually want to write that stuff?”

  “That stuff ” turned out to be precise but flowery descriptions of clothes and accessories fated to appear in the magazine’s editorial pages. I soon discovered that T&C’s advertising and editorial departments were locked in a perpetual embrace, so that if, say, there was a full-page ad for a coat by the manufacturer Davidoff in the July issue, a Davidoff coat would show up in the editorial pages of the August issue. No one ever alluded in any way to this wicked coupling.

  Toward the end of November dozens of gift-wrapped packages began arriving for the fashion editors. Whenever this happened all work would stop and the rest of the staff would gather at the desk of the recipient and shriek while she tore off its skin. Behold! A calfskin valise with brass fittings! A case of Chivas Regal! A fourteen-carat bauble to wear around the wrist! A pair of long white kidskin gloves! Squeals of joy. It was Christmastime at the orphanage. I wondered if it had occurred to any of these women to send the payola back?

  The editor to whom I applied for work was absurdly grateful to me for taking the task off her hands, leaving them free to comb her hair, scribble thank-you notes to manufacturers who sent her costly presents, poke through piles of silk scarves at Bergdorf’s and Bendel’s.

  When you compose descriptive caption copy you have to fit an exact number of characters into a space smaller than a stick of gum. Characters include every letter plus the blank spaces between words, plus punctuation marks. This exercise forces you to condense ruthlessly and to be willing to work hard on a project you wouldn’t have picked, given the choice. But I actually enjoyed describing a froufrou dress or a pair of shoes I wouldn’t be caught dead in. Describing perfume was more difficult because trying to put a smell into words is about as easy as rendering the flavor of roast lamb via music. You could get around this by comparing the smell to something else, but since this meant using more words rather than fewer, you had to pare down the rest of it with a lethal weapon.

  Soon word circulated that the girl in the beauty department was eager to do this chore, and one by one the editors deposited stuff on my desk. “Thanks awfully, darling. It’s such a bore.” It kept me busy. Meanwhile, I had gone one morning into Mr. Sell’s grand office to tell him, putting it into the most positive phrases, that I wished he had more work for me to do. The man’s manner was so affable it was almost impossible to determine the nature of his true temperament. “What can I do for you, young lady?” he said. (Had he forgotten my name?) “Here, sit down and talk to me.” With this, he glanced at his watch. “How are you enjoying our little magazine? How do you find Marian?”

  I told him everything was fine except there didn’t seem to be enough work to fill up eight hours a day. He took a moment to ponder. “What would you like to do?” he said.

  “I’d like to read manuscripts. I was an English major. I did my honors thesis on Jonathan Swift.” Did I imagine I saw a small smile sneak past Security?

  “I don’t see why that can’t be arranged,” he said, getting up. “I’ll speak to my assistant. He’s in charge of that operation. I imagine he’ll be delighted to have you take this little chore off his hands.”

  Town and Country offhandedly published one piece of fiction in each issue, stories by international heavy hitters like Ludwig Bemelmans, Somerset Maugham, and a young Englishman, Denton Welch. Habit more than commitment to the life of literature kept this practice going, and agents sent enough stories to the magazine to ensure its continuing quality, though not its courage—everything published was by an author whose name would be known to even the most casual reader. Manuscripts began to appear on my desk, delivered there by the mail room boy. Whenever I wasn’t writing captions or hanging out with Donald Gainor, the menswear editor, I read them and passed judgment. Eventually two of my picks made it into the magazine.

  Donald Gainor was a slight man in his midthirties with half-inch-thick horn-rimmed glasses. Like the beauty editor, he had a separate office, and the moment I stepped into it I knew Donald had about as much in common with the other editors as I did. He kept poetry books on his shelves. He talked like someone who enjoyed reading more than being seen at Le Pavillon or Chambord. During our first conversation I realized, without his having to say so, that he wasn’t exactly crazy about his job. This was something he communicated via subtle but unmistakable hints; his distaste for the kind of conspicuousness he helped promote lay just beneath the surface and came out in small bursts of frowns and groans, a raised eyebrow, a shrug, an assortment of body language and innuendo. I liked him for not ever bad-mouthing Mr. Sell or anyone else he had to work with. “Did you know,” he said, “that Henry makes canned liver paste?” I assumed he was joking but he wasn’t; we had a couple of cans at home, and now I connected the SELL on the label with the “Sell” who ran the magazine I worked for. “Sell’s Liver Pâté,” he said. “It’s quite tasty for something in a tin can.”

  I took to Donald, he took to me, though it was clear he was not interested in girls qua girls. “There’s not much for you to do here, is there?” he asked.

  I told him about the caption writing and manuscripts.

  “It could be worse,” I said.

  “How would you like to go with me on a shoot this afternoon? You can be my assistant.”

  We walked over to Cafe Nicholson, a trendy new restaurant in the east fifties, one of the first places in New York to offer a prix fixe meal. It was suitably dark and smokey inside, and bored-looking guys in expensive suits stood around admiring one another and themselves. The photographer was fussing with lights and backdrop. Donald was telling everyone in the nicest way what he wanted them to do. We drank coffee out of tall cardboard cups. There was a lot of waiting. This was glamor, this was “backstage.” But what was I doing except standing around and gawking? What was I learning except that many of the men who worked in the fashion industry were . . . you know?

  I spent as much time as I could with Donald Gainor. He was the first person to talk to me about writing and writers as if I were not a moron. Before this, everyone, from Barnard faculty to bookish boyfriends, had made it clear that they had a mission and that was to “educate” me; Donald credited me with some lurking judgment of my own. We went to lunch together. He took me with him to inspect the glove and tie counters at Saks Fifth Avenue. If it hadn’t been for Donald I would have quit this job sooner than I did.

  And how this happened was as inadvertent as are most “accidents.” We are now about three months at Town and Country. Marian and I got along well, mainly because there were so few transactions between us that could have caused abrasion. She still seemed surprised to find me sitting at one of the two desks in her office. I did my captions, the exercise getting easier as my skill improved. It was just a trick, after all. One Thursday aftern
oon in early spring, just before leaving for the day, I straightened the papers on my desk as usual, dumped the butt-filled ashtray into the wastebasket, looked around to make sure all was tidy, put on my spring coat, shut the door and walked home, half a mile or so up Madison, across on Fifty-seventh Street, then up Lexington to Sixty-third. And down the block to number 163, the double house in which I lived uneasily with my parents.

  The next morning as I got off the elevator Sell pounced. He’d been waiting for me.

  “Good morning, young lady. Would you mind stepping into my office for a few minutes—no, before you take your coat off. There’s something you probably ought to know.”

  This was the sort of frozen moment where the blood temperature plummets, the heart races, and everything bad you’ve ever done comes back to you in a toxic rush. I followed my boss into his airy office, with its greenery, its beige and chrome fittings, its odor of success.

  “Sit down, please.” As I sat, I noticed on the windowsill several small red cans: SELL’S LIVER PTÉ.

  Sell went around to the far side of his desk, sat down and stared at me, his expression as inscrutable as a shrink’s.

  After a minute or so he said, “There was a little fire here last night. Are you aware of that?”

  I shook my head.

  “Yes,” he said. “It seems to have started in your office.”

  What do you say—I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to do it?

  I started to say something that revealed my confusion, but he stopped me. “Yes, it started in the wastebasket—it’s made of some sort of composition board, you know, very cheap—it caught fire. Someone [a piercing look in my direction] tossed cigarette butts in it without making sure they were completely extinguished. . . .”

  “That was me. . . .”

  “That’s precisely how I imagined it to have happened. It turned into a four-alarm fire. The fire chief called me at home at nine-thirty last night. Apparently it had been smoldering for some time.”

  “Oh my God . . .”

  “A regular conflagration.”

  I scrambled through a slim repertoire of responses. Unable to read his face—was he furious or merely annoyed?—I considered several options: apologize (yes); offer to pay for the damage (no); offer to quit (maybe); jump out the window (maybe).

  “How much damage was there?” I said, temporizing. “Four alarms?”

  The number of alarms, it turned out, had as much to do with the location of the burning building as it did the extent of its flames. The Hearst Building was, relatively speaking, middle-aged, on a prime Manhattan site with tall, flammable neighbors. “Let’s you and me go, shall we, and see just how bad it was. . . .”

  Sell escorted me out of his office, down the hall, past the elevators, into the editorial precincts, where everyone managed to avoid staring at their resident arsonist, and into the beauty editor’s office. It looked as if gray paint had been smeared over the walls and ceiling. The window pane had been smashed, leaving spikes of glass sticking out. Bits of it sparkled on the carpet, alongside puddles and streaks. Most of the empty bottles had been knocked over, the desk was a mess, the wastebasket consumed.

  “Mostly smoke damage,” Sell said. “We’ll get the place cleaned up pronto.”

  Marian arrived, out of breath. “I just heard,” she said.

  “I’m terribly sorry,” I said. “If there’s anything I can do. . . .”

  “What did you have in mind?” she said. “Henry, I hope you haven’t been giving this poor child a hard time. It was an accident, could have happened to anyone. We’re insured, aren’t we? Well then, what’s all the fuss? The place needed painting anyway.”

  Through my humiliation, I recognized the irony: I was a good girl not a careless or inadvertent one. I had never caused real damage or put anyone at risk. Although addicted to daytime and nighttime fantasies involving sex with dangerous men, in living color I was as prudent as a vestal virgin. Moreover, I had never shoplifted, cheated on an exam or at cards, never told more than a white lie.

  After the fire, the editorial ladies, who, since I had taken the caption chore off their hands, had warmed up a couple of degrees, let their temperature drop again, and I felt the chill of their contempt. Accident or not, I had set fire to the premises, something not likely to endear me to its inhabitants. In an attempt to cheer me up, Donald tried to turn the fire into a joke, but to me it wasn’t funny, suggesting that perhaps I was more in the thrall of my unconscious than I cared to acknowledge. Less than a month after the office was repainted, the perfume bottles restored, a metal basket installed under the desk, I wrote a note to Sell telling him how much I had enjoyed working for him but that I intended to quit. He didn’t try to stop me. Marian gave me a jet-black bottle of Joy, the world’s most expensive perfume, along with a whiskey kiss. “It’s been nice knowing you,” she said.

  While trying to figure out how to leave my job at Town and Country with at least a whisper of grace, I met Vance Bourjaily at an after-dinner party given by Sue Kaufman, a woman slightly older than me in years but eons in worldliness. I had been introduced to Sue by Donald Gainor—both of them seemed to know everyone and were sturdy elements of the social net covering the city, people in glamor jobs connected one to the other all over town. Sue had published a couple of stories. Her friends were in publishing, fashion, the theater, and television, still in diapers. Sue’s style was allover gloss, serious lipstick, cashmere sweater sets, a pageboy haircut. She wore long, low-heeled Italian pumps and a lynx coat. She was smart and caustic and taught me to hold my head up. Sue was bossy, but this didn’t bother me; in fact, everything she recommended to me I eagerly accepted. I wasn’t exactly an innocent, but Sue was both worldly wise and wise in the kind of subtle negotiation you do with men and with those you want something from.

  Vance was a slight man with a round head, shiny brow, sea blue eyes, and skin so delicate and pale it might never have been exposed to the outdoors. Somehow, he reminded me of a turtle. Vance and his wife, Tina, were friends of—well it didn’t matter, everyone was connected. In introducing me to Vance at one of her soirees, Sue told me that he was the editor of a literary magazine about to be published, called discovery. “We’re going to give New World Writing a run for its money,” he said, mentioning the competition, a softcover magazine of original stories, poems, and essays, published by New American Library, a mass-market house. New World Writing’s circulation was over two hundred thousand per issue, a figure that eclipsed that of any other literary magazine extant. Discovery’s publisher was Pocket Books, Inc., a lucrative limb of Simon and Schuster. Pocket Books started the mass-market revolution in 1939 and was, in the words of Herbert Alexander, its editor in chief, mainly committed to continuing “acts of commerce” rather than “acts of culture.” This is what surprised me when Vance explained what he was up to. Pocket Books didn’t expect to make money with this project, he explained, but to fish for and land new authors with blockbuster potential.

  Shamelessly, I told Vance I’d love to work for something like discovery. I hated my job at Town and Country, and besides, I had just set fire to the place. I think this admission increased my value for Vance, far more than my fancy Barnard diploma, my English major, my knowing Sue Kaufman. He said he would speak to his coeditor, Jack Aldridge, a critic who lived on a New Hampshire farm with his wife and their six or seven children. Aldridge had recently published a book called After the Lost Generation, in which he commended the work of several World War II novelists, among them Norman Mailer, John Horne Burns, James Jones, Gore Vidal, and Vance Bourjaily. The hero of Bourjaily’s novel The End of My Life was a Hemingwayesque wartime ambulance driver. Aldridge’s book, his first, transformed him and Vance from unknowns into a couple of hot items, and on the basis of their newfound celebrity, he and Vance had persuaded the higher-ups at Pocket Books to help them launch a literary magazine. Pocket Books would produce and distribute; the critic and novelist would edit. Vance said he didn’t think Jack would
object to taking me on to read manuscripts, maybe do some editing. They needed help. “We’ll make you assistant editor.” There was just one little thing. “Until the money comes through, there won’t be any salary for you. You’ll have to work for nothing for a while. Sue says you live with your parents? By the way, your father knows my father.”

  “How long is a while?”

  “A month or two at most,” he said. “And just for now, we’re running the magazine out of my apartment on the West Side. They’re getting a place ready for us downtown. You don’t object to the West Side, do you?”

  The job as Vance described it was the one I would have invented for myself. I went home giddy and the next day wrote to my boss, Henry Sell, saying sayonara.

  That undertaking was a snap compared to dealing with my father when I told him about the job. Saving the worst till last, I said, “There’s just one little thing. They won’t be able to pay me anything for about a month. They’re waiting for funding from Pocket Books.”

  My father erupted. He assured me that no one in America respects work done for nothing or the person who delivers it. He said that such work has no value. I didn’t need his permission, but I wanted his approval; my mother didn’t figure in my calculations: my father was head man, my mother a timid assistant. I tried an assortment of arguments: he knew Vance’s father. “Monte Bourjaily? Sure I know him, he’s a good newspaperman.” I tried to persuade him that this was a dream job, a job where I would be doing editorial rather than scut work, filing or answering the telephone. I told him that Vance practically swore that the money to hire me was in the works and would be forthcoming in a month or two. So I had nothing to lose and the experience would be invaluable. . . .

  Scowling and jiggling his foot, my father said, “You’re too smart to work gratis. Only dopes work for nothing.”