Glamorama (57 page)

A simple flash of light, a loud sound, the BMW bursts apart.

The extent of the destruction is a blur and its aftermath somehow feels beside the point. The point is the bomb itself, its placement, its activation—that’s the statement. Not Brigid blown apart beyond recognition or the force of the blast flinging thirty students closest to the car forty, fifty feet into the air or the five students killed instantly, two of them by flying shrapnel that sailed across the courtyard and was embedded in their chests, and not the other section of car, which flies by, lopping off an arm, and not the three students immediately blinded. It’s not the legs blown off, the skulls crushed, the people bleeding to death in minutes. The uprooted asphalt, the blackened trees, the benches splattered with gore, some of it burned—all of this matters just as much. It’s really about the will to accomplish this destruction and not about the outcome, because that’s just decoration.

A stunned silence and then—among the conscious covered with blood, not always their own—the screaming starts.

Fifty-one injured. Four people will never walk again. Three others are severely brain-damaged. Along with the driver of the BMW, thirteen are dead, including an older man who dies, blocks away, of a heart attack at the time of the blast. (A week later a teacher’s assistant from Lyons will die from head injuries, raising the number of dead to fourteen.) By the time the flashing blue lights of ambulances start arriving at the darkening scene, the film crew has packed up and disappeared and will show up later in the week at another designated spot. Without staring through the lens of the cameras, everything at that distance looks tiny and inconsequential and vaguely unreal to them. You can tell who is dead and who is not only by the way the bodies look when they’re picked up.

And later that night at a very cool, sexy dinner in an upstairs room at the Hôtel Crillon, past a door flanked by dark-haired, handsome guards, Tammy mingles with Amber Valletta, Oscar de la Renta, Gianfranco Ferré, Brad Renfro, Christian Louboutin, Danielle Steel, the Princess of Wales, Bernard Arnault and various Russians and
Vogue
editors and everyone is into very serious slouching and some people just got back from Marrakech—a few less jaded because of that trip—and others pay their respects to Tammy as she huddles in a corner gossiping
with Shalom Harlow about how all the girls are dating so many inappropriate people (nobodies, gangsters, fishermen,
boys
, members of the House of Lords, Jamaicans with whom they have no rapport) and Tammy’s fanning herself with an invitation to a party at Queen that a boy who looks just like Christian Bale offered her but she’s going to bypass it in favor of one in the 16th arrondissement that Naomi’s throwing and then sashimi’s served and more cigarettes are bummed then lit and Tammy leans into John Galliano and whispers “You’re so nuts, baby” and she’s drinking too much red wine and switches to Coke and more than one lesbian vaguely comes on to her and someone wearing a kimono asks how Bruce Rhinebeck is and Tammy, gazing at a figure prancing by in the darkness, answers “Wait” dreamily because she’s realizing it’s really just another difficult evening.

37

A giant set—high-tech and industrial with hints of Art Deco and Mission—appropriating an apartment in either the 8th or the 16th arrondissement is where Jamie Fields, Bobby Hughes, Bentley Harrolds, Tammy Devol, Bruce Rhinebeck and myself live during autumn in Paris. We’re inhabiting a 5,000-square-foot triplex that has been paid for with Iraqi money washed through Hungary. To get into the house you have to deactivate an alarm and walk through a courtyard. Inside, a swirling circular staircase joins all three floors and the color scheme is muted olive green and light brown and soft pink, and in the basement there’s a gym, its walls lined with Clemente drawings. An expansive open kitchen designed by Biber contains cabinets made from Makassar ebony and dyed tulipwood and there’s a Miele oven and two dishwashers and a glass-door refrigerator and a Sub-Zero freezer and custom-made wine and spice racks and an industrial restaurant sprayer installed in a stainless-steel alcove with teak-lined drying racks holding gilded polka-dotted china. A giant mural by Frank Moore looms above the kitchen table, which a silk Fortuny shade hangs over.

Serge Mouille chandeliers are suspended over sparkling green-and
white terrazzo floors and rugs designed by Christine Van Der Hurd. Everywhere there are glass walls and giant white citronella candles and glass-box towers filled with CDs and white glass fireplaces and Dialogica chairs covered in Giant Textiles chenille and padded leather doors and stereo systems and Ruhlman armchairs in front of TV sets hooked up to a digital satellite system that picks up five hundred channels around the world, and bookcases filled with bowl arrangements line the walls everywhere and piles of cellular phones lie in heaps on various tables. And in the bedrooms there are blackout curtains designed by Mary Bright and rugs by Maurice Velle Keep and Hans Wegner’s lounges and ottomans in Spinneybeck leather and divans covered in a Larson chenille and dwarf fruit trees often sit next to them and the walls in all the bedrooms are leather upholstered. The beds were made in Scandinavia and the sheets and towels are by Calvin Klein.

A complicated video-monitoring system runs throughout the apartment (and the outside cameras are equipped with built-in illuminators) along with a vast alarm system. Codes are memorized and, since the sequence is changed weekly, rememorized. The two BMWs parked in the garage have been equipped with global-positioning tracking systems, as well as untraceable license plates, bulletproof windshields, run-flat tires, blinding halogen lights in front and back, ramming bumpers. The apartment is swept twice a week—phone lines, outlets, PowerBooks, lampshades, toilets, everything electrical. Behind locked doors are rooms and behind those rooms are other locked doors and in those rooms dozens of pieces of luggage—mostly Vuitton and Gucci—are lined up waiting to be used. In other hidden rooms there are heavy-duty sewing machines, strips of explosives, hand grenades, M-16 rifles, machine guns, a filing cabinet containing battery chargers, detonators, Semtex, electric blasting caps. A closet contains dozens of designer suits lined with Kevlar, which is thick enough to stop bullets from high-powered rifles or flying bomb fragments.

All the phones in the house analyze callers’ voices for subaudible microtremors that occur when a speaker is stressed or lying, giving the listener constant LED readings. All the phones in the house are installed with analyzers that send electrical pulses down the line and, bouncing them back, provide an affirmative reading for the listener if the call is being traced. All the phones in the house have a digital
binary code scrambler that converts voices to numbers and allows the person on the other end of the line to decode it but keeps third parties from hearing anything but static.

Suddenly, that first week in Paris, Bobby threw an elaborate cocktail party in honor of Joel Silver, who ended up bragging to Richard Donner, who had just flown in from Sacramento, about his new three-million-dollar trailer and someone else was flying his dogs over on the Concorde and then Serena Altschul showed up and gave us the inside scoop on the Bush tour and a soon-to-be-slain rap star and Hamish Bowles arrived with Bobby Short and then—boom boom boom, one after the other—Crown Princess Katherine of Yugoslavia, Prince Pavlos of Greece, Princess Sumaya of Jordan and Skeet Ulrich, who was wearing a Prada suit and a shirt with spread collars and seemed happy at first to see me even if the last time we bumped into each other I ended up running away from him down a darkened street in SoHo. Skeet worriedly noticed the way I eyed a dropped Mentos lying on the terrazzo floor. I bent down and, after brushing it off, popped the Mentos into my mouth and started chewing rapidly.

“You just need to, um, put a positive spin on things,” Skeet told me hesitantly.

“I’m saying hello to oblivion,” I told Skeet, chewing rapidly.

He paused, shrugged, nodded glumly and immediately walked away.

Aurore Ducas passed by and so did Yves Saint-Laurent and Taki. An Iraqi ambassador spent the entire party standing close to Bobby, who kept making hand motions my way, urging me to mingle. I spent the early part of the evening chatting nervously to Diane Von Furstenberg and Barry Diller and trying to move closer to Jamie, who sometimes was ignoring me and sometimes laughing hysterically while petting a basset hound someone had dragged in, and bartenders poured champagne into thin crystal flutes while staring blankly past us. And predictably the party got hipper as it kept gliding further along and people started dancing to Republica and Kate Moss and Naomi Campbell arrived with The Artist Formerly Known As Prince and Tom Ford showed up with Dominique Browning and I had a heavy conversation with Michael Douglas about high-end safaris while I held a plate of lobster looking fairly benign and “I’m Your Boogie Man” by KC and
the Sunshine Band blasted out, which was Jamie’s cue to start dancing and my cue to just stare wonderingly at her. Baptiste Pitou did the flower arrangements. The word
PARTY
kept flashing above us in bright, multicolored lettering.

Bruce left the party the moment the French premier’s son showed up and Tammy locked herself in an upstairs bathroom with a bottle of champagne and fell into a fairly hysterical state and someone—this zonked-out NYU film student who’d spent a few nights in the apartment and was lighting everybody’s cigarettes—gave me his phone number, signing the back of an old issue of
Le Monde
with an important pen he borrowed from a certain luminary. A new David Barton gym was opening somewhere in Pigalle and a baffled Princess Sumaya of Jordan gasped “Ooh—how perfect.” The director and Felix, along with most of the film crew, were thrilled by the direction the party was taking. I ended up slumped over on a bench in the courtyard and drunkenly said “Bonjour, dude” to Peter Jennings as he left and my foot had fallen asleep so I limped back into the party and tried to dance with Jamie but Bobby wouldn’t let me.

36

The shows we attended today: Gaultier, Comme des Garçons and—after a stop at the new Frank Malliot place located somewhere beneath the Champs Élysées—Galliano (a giant white curtain, uncharacteristic modern lighting, “Stupid Girl” by Garbage blaring, models bowing, we needed alibis), and then inevitably Les Bains for a dinner in honor of Dries von Noten and male bouncers pull us in and I’m wearing Prada and mellowing out on immense dosages of Xanax and it’s a big hyped-up bash and I’m saying “Hey baby” in strained variations to Candelas Sastre and Peter Beard and Eleanore de Rohan-Chabot and Emmanuel de Brantes and Greg Hansen and a dentist I visited briefly in Santa Fe when Chloe was on location there and Ines Rivero and there are way too many photographers and store buyers and PR types and all the girls are carrying straw bags and wearing
dresses the colors of crayons and the club is decked out with immense flower arrangements made up of gardenias and roses. I keep overhearing the word “insects” and when I light a cigarette I’m just noticing the thousand francs clutched in my hand that for some reason Jamie gave me during the Galliano show while I sat next to her trembling violently. This morning over breakfast Bobby said nothing about where he was heading off to today but since so many scenes are being shot without me I just frantically memorize my lines and show up according to the production schedule, staying inconspicuous, staying out of sight.