Spring Collection (2 page)

“You scared me!” I yelped, almost spilling my cold coffee. “I got in ages ago … I had this dream … oh, never mind … you don’t want to know.”

“You’re right about that, girlfriend.”

“I love it when you try to sound hip.” I couldn’t help grinning at her, vile as my mood was. “And just what
are
you doing in at this hour?” I demanded, recovering my poise.

“Ah, I had one of those bad nights.…”

“
You
have bad nights?”

“Even I, my mouse, even I. But last night was the worst. Every time I managed to fall asleep I had a nightmare. Finally I got smart enough to realize that I should give up on sleep and get in here and do some work in peace and quiet. I see now that was not to be.”

“Not while I’m around feeling itchy.”

“That sickening contest, of course.”

“What else?”

Justine had the nerve to sigh at me, just like she would at a peevish child.

“Don’t give me that superior attitude,” I growled. “You know it’s important even if you refuse to admit it. I’m going to make more coffee. Want some?”

“Desperately. Blessings on you, my child.”

While I hung over the coffeepot I allowed myself to brood over the events that had started this whole waiting-for-the-Paris-fax business. It all started about three months ago. A woman named Gabrielle d’Angelle arrived in New York on a mission to all the model agencies in town. Gabrielle was a highly placed assistant to a guy named Jacques Necker. You know, the Swiss billionaire who’s head of La Groupe Necker? He owns four of the world’s most important fabric mills, two major fashion houses and a fistful of highly profitable perfume and cosmetic companies. Even civilians have heard of him. GN, as everybody in the business calls it, had recently decided to back the designer Marco Lombardi in a new couture house. Lombardi’s first spring collection would be shown in Paris in a little more than two weeks from now.

“I’m here to find a group of completely fresh faces,” the Frenchwoman had told Justine and me in her impeccable English. “I need girls who are as unexposed as it is possible for models to be, girls who are
entirely
virgins to the Paris collections, yet they must not be too raw, too green to work with—even if they are technically children they must not look it.” I tried unsuccessfully to catch Justine’s eye. Of all the glossy, brilliantly dressed, annoyingly overconfident females I’d ever come across, Gabrielle took the cake. “I’ll be searching for them,” she had continued, “at every agency in town and making videotapes of the best of the lot. Three among them will be picked to come to Paris to take part in Marco Lombardi’s very first spring collection. One of them will ultimately be chosen as the incarnation of Lombardi’s style.” She had smiled loftily at us. “I suppose you Americans would call it a contest, I prefer to think of it as a modern-day version of the Judgment of Paris.”

“Just exactly what plans do you have for this lucky little contest winner?” Justine asked. Amazingly I heard clear suspicion in her voice. My mental eyebrows shot up at Justine’s tone. What was there to be suspicious about?

From the moment it had been announced, everyone in the fashion world had been agog to see what would come of the Lombardi launch. How come Justine wasn’t delighted to hear of this chance for new girls to be showcased?

“As I’m sure you realize, the first Lombardi collection will be the most watched event of the spring collections, Miss Loring,” Gabrielle d’Angelle answered her, allowing herself to look ever-so-slightly huffy and sounding ever-so-faintly surprised. “The winning girl will be signed to a long-term exclusive contract and become the focus of a worldwide advertising campaign.”

“Exclusive?” Justine’s question was sharp and hard, all but nasty. “If the winner’s so good, give me one reason why she should tie herself down to a new designer.”

What the hell was biting Justine’s ass, I wondered in absolute bewilderment. Her manner was utterly unlike the way she’d ever handled any prospective client.

“The contract will guarantee the winner of the contest three million dollars a year for the next four years,” d’Angelle said. Her words were crisper than fresh Melba toast and she obviously expected them to cut off further discussion.

“Aren’t you taking a large risk? An unknown model working with an unproven talent? Lombardi may just be a flash in the pan,” Justine insisted, sounding entirely unimpressed by twelve million dollars. I had to fight not to enter the discussion, even with body language, but of course I knew that whatever mistake Justine was making, she didn’t want to be second-guessed.

“Monsieur Necker did not arrive at his present power without taking risks,” the Frenchwoman said. By now she wasn’t bothering to hide her affront at Justine’s unexpected skepticism.

Justine just wouldn’t get off it. “Of course there’ll be so much publicity for GN about this talent search
that it’ll be worth twelve million, even if the new girl doesn’t work out and you dump her for one of the usual stars.” Now she sounded downright hostile.

“Miss Loring, we have every intention of building the house of Lombardi in the way Monsieur Necker has planned,” Gabrielle said, deeply irritated—and who could blame her? I felt like throwing up my hands and screaming. How could Justine possibly treat Necker’s emissary with rudeness and scorn?

“No new house has opened successfully in Paris since Lacroix,” Justine continued with one of those curt little negative shrugs I thought only the French could do. “And that was a long time ago.”

“Miss Loring, if your agency isn’t interested in participating.…” Gabrielle d’Angelle said, pulling herself together, and, while I watched, frozen, she started to rise.

“Oh, you know perfectly well that I can’t say no,” Justine interrupted, cutting her off. “I’ll make a list of my best prospects and deliver it to your hotel with their head sheets.”

As soon as the Frenchwoman left, I turned to Justine incredulously.

“What the fuck! Are you totally insane?”

“Why didn’t I lick her exquisite shoes?”

“Basically yes, damn it. I was in cardiac arrest listening to you! So what if it’s a long shot, even if they don’t pick a single one of our girls, you had no reason to speak to her like that. She’s not looking for white slaves, for God’s sake. It’s the chance of a lifetime for someone and you know it.”

“I find all this … talent search … corrupting … distasteful … almost degrading.”

“Oh, give me a break!” I exploded with all the pent-up disbelief I’d had to hold in during Justine’s dialogue with the Frenchwoman. “The whole model world is one big talent search, year in and year out, and you know it as well as I do.”

“Let’s say that I didn’t like being condescended to
by that irritating creature,” Justine said, conceding my point.

“Neither did I, Justine, but what the hell does that have to do with it? Every last one of our new girls would jump ship in a minute if we don’t participate in this Necker thing.”

“That, my mouse, is exactly why I told her I couldn’t say no. The only reason, believe me.”

“Were you playing some sort of dumb game?” I’d asked, still deeply confused. “The above-it-all agency head? I’ve never seen you do that weird number before, thank the good Lord.”

“There’s a first time for everything, Frankie,” Justine replied, with an unfamiliar stern and blank look veiling her eyes, a look that I didn’t understand and Justine obviously wasn’t going to explain. And that was the last time we’d discussed the whole thing.

Our coffee machine finally came through and I poured Justine a cup, took it to her office and left her to her work. The Lombardi model search had gotten more press in the last few months than if Madonna had married Prince Albert of Monaco while she was carrying Prince Charles’s lovechild. As time passed and there was no word from GN, every agency in town was growing more and more preoccupied with getting the final word.

Only at Loring Model Management did the agency head stay visibly uninvolved. While I haunted the fax machine, Justine never even asked if there were any rumors abroad, although she knew that every Friday night I had dinner with four women in the know: Casey d’Augustino, Sally Mulhouse, Josie Stein and Kate James, who are my opposite numbers at Lunel, Ford, Elite and Wilhelmina. The five of us formed a limited palship, like a group of mistrustful Mafia dons who have to stay friendly for the sake of business.

Our sincerely shifty relationship is based on the axiom, “The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” I thought, back in my own office. Restlessly I drank coffee I didn’t want, thought wistfully about bagels,
and put my boots up on my desk as I tried to relax. There was at least a half hour to go before the staff came in, the phones could be expected to ring and I could send one of the assistants out for something to eat.

Yes, Casey, Sally, Josie and Kate and I all had the same enemies. For “enemies,” read “clients,” everybody who books models: magazines, ad agencies, dress houses, even charity fashion shows. It’s us, the agencies, against the clients in every negotiation, right down to the question of whether the client pays for a taxi to take a model to the job.

Of course it was also each of us against each other. Who, for example, would be the first one to brave public opinion and sign a thirteen-year-old beauty to a contract? Who among us was actively stalking another’s models? Little could ever be proved but everything was suspected.

It could be an astonishingly petty world inside the gorgeous girl cosmos, but, on reflection, we still needed each other for a certain free exchange of information, I told myself philosophically. We all needed to know which horny photographers are busy putting the moves on the girls. We needed to know which cheapo clients would habitually try to pay late, figuring that the money was better off in their own banks, earning a couple of extra weeks’ interest. We needed to know which hairstylist and makeup artist just happened to have a few handy grams of coke or heroin in the bags of equipment they lugged around, and particularly which model had started using drugs.

“Who’s starting to look too thin?” was the first question always asked at our dinners. Besides weight loss and gain, we talked about the newest diet fads going around, we shared information on the results of personal trainers, gyms and dermatologists, and we identified the clients who were giving the girls free sample clothes for working late instead of paying time and a half. There were a ton of dirty wrinkles in the business—bound to be when a certain percentage of the
people who inevitably surround the girls are as welcome as body lice or genital warts.

If any of my Friday night group or any of the agencies not included in our gang, like Boss or Women or Company or Partners, had heard from Necker, they’d have broadcast it immediately. So there was no way anybody could know more than I did at this very minute, unless there was a fax waiting at another agency and someone there to read it. I was obsessing now, definitely over the borderline, and I didn’t intend to walk this territory alone. I opened the door of Justine’s office without knocking.

“Do you think Necker’s people could have changed their minds about using new models?” I demanded, deciding to aggravate my pal no matter how little interest she’d shown in the whole thing. “If they don’t decide in the next two weeks and three days, it’ll be too late, the collections will have started.”

“Oh, somehow I doubt it, Francesca,” Justine said tartly. “They’d look pretty silly if they do.”

So it was Francesca now, was it? Only my mother had ever been allowed to call me that and Justine knew it. Francesca was the name my parents christened me in a la-di-da moment and I’d changed it as soon as I reached third grade.

“Could I ask why you don’t mind being tortured by not knowing, Miz Loring?” Justine hated “Miz” almost as much as I hated Francesca. “I realize you’ve refused to buy into this whole thing, you act as if it’s some sort of scam. I’m fascinated, in a sick way, by watching you being so unrealistically superior to everybody else, but why, for the love of God, why?”

“I’ve been against this contest thing, this form of pressure, from the beginning,” Justine said, looking at me seriously. “The girls GN choose are going to have to be exceptionally mature to get through that ordeal in Paris. Two of the three of them will be disappointed when it’s all over. A rejection like that could permanently damage their self-confidence, and a model without self-confidence can’t function. Don’t you think
that there’s enough potential for rejection in this business already without this GN hoopla that will take place so publicly? It’s not as if they’re going to be allowed to fail in private.”

“I suppose you’ve got a point,” I said reluctantly. “But still.
Twelve million dollars?
 … Sure it’s a war zone out there, but a well-paid one. Most of the girls I know would kill for this chance.”

One of the office phones rang and I welcomed it as an unusually early sign of the start of the day’s business. Justine waved me away and picked it up.

“Loring Management,” she said. “Good morning.”

It must be a girl calling in, someone who was really sick, I thought, as I watched an expression of concern shadow Justine’s face.

“What?” Justine asked, on a far harsher note than I’d ever heard her use. As the response came I saw my friend’s face change into a grimace of defiance mixed with an emotion that looked to me, for one amazing moment, like fear … Justine afraid? … Nope, not possible. In an instant her expression changed to a combination of rage and disgust. “Repeat that last part,” Justine finally asked grimly. She listened again, scribbling a few notes on a pad. “What, no additional conditions? Astonishing. I’ll let you know. When I decide, that’s when.” She slammed down the phone.

“Who in the name of God was that?”

“I knew it was coming! I’ve suspected it all along! Nothing else has worked so this is the way he’s getting at me … it’s
diabolical!
They know I have to go along, they’ve probably told the press already—”

“Justine!
Stop! Damn it, you’re raving!
What’s
‘diabolical,’
who’s
trying to get at you?” I’d never ever even imagined Justine in such a state, I thought in utter astonishment. What had happened to my serene, self-assured Troop Leader?