Little Pink Slips (10 page)

mined not to be embarrassed by a meltdown. She'd never been fired,

not even from the babysitting job in high school when the Gustafsons

arrived home early and discovered her making out with Tyler Peterson

in their bedroom.

"I'm going to count on you to teach our girl Bebe the ropes," he

continued.

"Excuse me?" The words stuck in her throat. Magnolia coughed,

lowered her voice, and started over. "Excuse me, Jock. Could you, uh,

clarify?"

"Bebe Blake will be big picture. I'll expect you to work with Felicity

Dingle to turn Bebe's vision into a magazine."

"Her vision?" Jock walked back to his massive mahogany desk, raised one brow,

and eyeballed Magnolia.

"Of course, you don't have to stick around. Your choice. If you wish

to break your contract, HR has been alerted. Which will it be?"

This could be her moment to impersonate Katharine Hepburn and

tell Jock where he could put his big idea.

Magnolia thought of how much she loved her work, the only

thing she'd ever wanted to do—perhaps the only thing she could

do. Was she an idiot savant? She didn't care. She pondered the

pleasure of writing a clever headline, teaming the right idea with

the right writer, finding the one photo image among hundreds

with the best smile on the best star, which yielded a stupendous sale. She considered the high she got seeing
Lady
lining the airports' racks—and the kick of observing a real reader take a crisp copy to the

register.

Magnolia thought of her $3,500 mortgage payments; her $1,900-a

month in co-op maintenance, the $1,000 she donated every year to the

University of Michigan, and Biggie and Lola's vet bills. She thought

of how she had no man to share her financial load, or parents who

were still giving handouts, and pictured herself home at 12:30, in

need of a shower, her dark roots three inches long, trying to concen

trate on the Tom Friedman column when everyone she knew was at

Michael's. Perhaps someone there would be saying, "Whatever

became of Magnolia Gold?"

The plebiscite approach to editing a magazine—she couldn't begin

to imagine it, but she didn't feel she had a Plan B. "Sure, Jock, I'll give

it a go," Magnolia said, in a jaunty voice she didn't recognize.

"I thought you'd see it that way. And I think you'll be able to man

age just fine in the office we'll move you to."

"Bebe's getting my office?" she asked. Her voice quivered with just

the faintest tremor, but in her stomach she felt sucker-punched.

"Not right away. The decorator will be in first thing in the morn

ing, though, so you'll need to move out. Don't worry—you'll get

plenty of help with that."

C h a p t e r 1 1

Avalanche of Reality

Bebe Blake Beheads Lady.
That's how the
Post
summed it up, accompanied by a photo of Magnolia, mid-bite, at a cocktail party

four years earlier. Magnolia could carbon-date the shot from her unfortu

nate short hair. She had a lamb chop in her hand, as if it were a weapon.

   BOLD GOLD FOLDS was the New York
Daily News
spin. Usually Magnolia didn't give the Snooze a glance, but today she made a run to

the closest newsstand to gather all the papers, even the ones that

would be delivered to her office later.

   
The New York Times
treated the Bebe takeover in a subdued Business Day item alluding to
Lady
as one of many beleaguered women's service magazines. The
Times r
eporter suggested that the whole category, with its fifty million readers—enough to sway a presidential

election—might, by the end of the decade, vanish, like the VCR.

   
The Wall Street Journal
ignored the story. They generally hung back and, months later, came out swinging. Magnolia could imagine

their suggesting—on page one of a slow news day—that both readers

and advertisers were shying away from magazines in favor of digital

media. Young people don't read anything but blogs, they'd lecture.

   
USA Today f
ocused only on Bebe, with the headline OPRAH, WATCH YOUR BACK. As if she were sweating one drop.

Magnolia dumped the newspapers in the recycling bin near her back

door. By the end of the week, the weeklies—not just celebrity-studded

periodicals but newsmagazines as well—would also feature the Bebe

takeover. Then there would be the online newsletters, and e-mail blasts that each editor received, and they all received plenty—
Mediaweek, Iwantmedia, Media Life, Media Industry Newsletter, Media This,
and
Media That.
Since the media loves no subject more than itself, it would be a festival of narcissism.

   The worst part was that thanks to Google, her misfortune would live on for years. According to Magnolia's unofficial tally,
venerable
had already been used nineteen times to describe
Lady,
causing Magnolia to refresh her understanding of the term. "Commanding respect by

virtue of age, dignity, character, or position" was the dictionary defini

tion. Magnolia suspected no one associated venerability with dignity,

character, or position—the common understanding linked venerability

simply to old age. The word smelled decrepit. Industry insiders who'd never bothered to study
Lady
(it was an open secret that most decisionmakers were "too busy to read") would believe the news and assume that
Lady w
as a dentured, bunioned, whiskered old hag. This pained Magnolia almost more than the fact that she'd effectively be reporting

to Bebe Blake, a fact she hadn't got her head around yet.

Hurt didn't begin to describe how she felt. Sick was more like it,

too sick to eat or talk or even call her parents. But she couldn't waste

time now being hurt or sick or humiliated. She needed to focus.

The most frustrating aspect of this avalanche of reality was that it

was out of the question for Magnolia to tell her side of the story to

anyone but her nearest and dearest—who, over the last day, failed

to include Harry, who hadn't even e-mailed. One thing Scary did

exceedingly well was to control its press coverage. Elizabeth Lester

Duvall, their storm trooper of corporate communications, monitored

every sound bite an employee might want to shout out. She delivered

her gag order in person the previous day the moment Magnolia left

Jock's office.

Elizabeth pulled Magnolia into the executive-floor conference room

and shut the door. "Don't worry, honey," Elizabeth said in the rat-a-tat-tat speech

which almost belied her Mississippi Delta roots. "We'll handle this.

Bebe will give a press conference tomorrow afternoon. We've booked

the Pierre. Be sure to get your hair blown out, because we're giving
Entertainment Tonight
an exclusive."

"We'll have makeup at the ready," Elizabeth continued, breath

lessly. "Back to the press conference. You won't speak. Darlene and

Bebe will handle the particulars. Just go home. Have a cocktail!"

She gave Magnolia a big grin and patted her hand. "You're taking

this so well!" With that, Elizabeth was off. A kiwi green cashmere

cardigan knotted around her shoulders billowed in her wake and her

silver hair sparkled under the hallway's fluorescent lights.

It wasn't until after Elizabeth had left that Magnolia realized,

when she talked to Jock, her title had never come up. Perhaps Bebe

would get the "chief " and Magnolia would be downshifted to "edi

tor," "deputy editor," "executive editor," or the truly opaque "edito

rial consultant." Or maybe she'd remain "editor in chief," and Bebe

would become, what, "editorial director"?

Did it matter, really?

It did. An editor in chief was far more glorious than a plain-Jane

editor, and usually got better pay. When a company wanted to be

cheap, they'd promote an executive editor into the top job, and name

her "editor" with a token raise. But it was all very confusing. An "edi

tor" at one company might be paid four times the salary of an "editor

in chief " at another, and even at the same company, people with

seemingly identical positions had widely variable power, perks, access

to upper management, and compensation. Magnolia suspected that at

Scary, Natalie Simon, for example, was first among equals and earned

at least $200,000 more than she did.

What a lot of bunk, Magnolia thought. Even if her title became Your

Royal Highness, everyone in her world would read the invisible ink and

know that Bebe was running the show. Still, she would like to stay a

chief, and if her title hadn't been decided yet, perhaps she could bargain

for it later. If Jock had a pixel of guilt, she might get him to agree. She took the elevator down to her floor. Magnolia had wanted to

announce the change to her staff personally, but when she walked

into her office, she could tell from the hush that everyone already

knew. A flock of assistants was already helping Sasha arrange her

belongings in neat brown boxes for the move down the hall.

Sasha pulled her aside and whispered a report. While Elizabeth

had been delivering her orders to Magnolia, Jock had addressed the

troops, using words like "eye candy" to describe Bebe, assuring editors

that Bebe had a "dynamite idea" she'd explain herself. Later. When

"later" he didn't say.

"Did Jock mention me?" Magnolia asked Sasha when her helpers

had left the office to replenish supplies. It humiliated Magnolia to be

seeking information from her assistant, but she had to know. Sasha

stopped unpinning Magnolia's elaborate bulletin board collage,

which she was carefully dismantling and putting into folders.

"He said you were totally behind the Bebe change, that you'd be

working with her." Sasha paused and bit her lip.

   "Spit it out," Magnolia said.

   "I'll still work for you, right? I'm not going to have to work for
her,
am I?"

Magnolia hated to admit she didn't know the answer to the ques

tion almost as much as she hated the thought of losing Sasha. "We're

working that out, Sash," she said, hoping Sasha would buy it. "Don't

worry. Change is good."

Magnolia walked to her new office and slumped at the desk. The

space was cramped. The office's most unfortunate aspect, though, was

that—inspired by newsrooms—one wall was transparent glass. The

architect's fantasy might have been to motivate editors to feel like

Lois Lane chasing the page one story, but for the staff who inhabited

these quarters the primary activity seemed to be carping about lack of

privacy. Magnolia knew her new office would make her feel like a

monkey at the zoo.

Cam knocked softly on her door. "There's no use talking about

this," he said. "For now, I have the solution." "A brick wall?"

"Getting hammered." Cameron enclosed Magnolia in a quick bear

hug.

In ten minutes, Cam and Magnolia were sitting at the bar at the

Mesa Grill, and by six o'clock Magnolia had lost count of how many

margaritas she'd downed. One by one, the wake expanded to include all of the top
Lady
edit staff—a very pregnant Phoebe Feinberg-Fitzpatrick, Fredericka von Trapp, Ruthie Kim, and several others.

As the afternoon turned into evening, the digs about Bebe got deeper,

and the jokes, increasingly lame. "Do you think she'll do a cat cover?"

Phoebe Feinberg-Fitzpatrick asked while she absentmindedly pattered her pregnant tummy. "
Catwoman,
the prequel? Halle Barry, get out of town."

"My fashion department can supply a red leotard," Ruthie suggested.

"That would put the scary back in Scary," Cameron said. "
Nein,
" Fredericka said. "She'll vant boys on the cover. Young boys." "There could be a tagline:
Where IQ doesn't count.
"

Magnolia realized she had to shut down the conversation. "We're

going to make this work," she said, hoping she didn't sound as drunk

as she was. "Celebrities are the future." At that, she whipped out her

corporate AmEx card, paid the $350 tab, and escaped into a taxi. A

half hour later, when she arrived home, her phone indicated fourteen

phone messages. All were from editor pals, and except for Natalie

Simon, she didn't return any of them. Nor did she reply to the dozens

of "Oh, shit" e-mails.

"Of course, you know I had nothing to do with it," Natalie said the

minute she heard Magnolia's voice. "Obviously, it's dreadful. But,

Cookie, just deal. Rise above."

Natalie completely understood about Magnolia's not wanting to give

up Sasha, however. Natalie's two assistants kept her life humming with

gracious precision. The First Lady could take lessons. "Power's for the

taking," she advised. "Proceed as if you assume Sasha will continue to

work for you. Believe me, nobody's thinking about her right now."

"Do you think I can pull this off ?" Magnolia asked. "My God, of course!" Natalie all but screamed into the phone.

"You're so talented, so everything, but sometimes I absolutely want to

bitch slap you. Or at least send you to my mother for a self-confidence

tune-up."

Magnolia had met Estelle, Natalie's mother, numerous times. The

woman could have run General Motors if she hadn't been too busy

negotiating delicate country club politics, taking on issues as onerous

and portentous and divisive as whether kids in diapers should be

allowed in the pool. Certainly, Estelle had done a number on Natalie.

No flagging confidence there.

"The press conference is what you should be concentrating on,"

Natalie said. "Look sharp. Wear your Michael Kors suit."

Later in the evening, while walking Biggie and Lola, she thought

again that in the avalanche of attention, all unwanted, there was still

one person she hadn't heard from who might have made her hellish

day easier. Why hadn't Harry sent flowers or at least called? But her

head reverted to work. Change is good, she repeated to herself.

Change is good.

What a lot of crap, she decided. Whoever thought up that proverb