The Devil Wears Prada (36 page)

 “Have
you ever noticed that she has no friends, Emily? Have you? Sure, her phone
rings day and night with the world’s coolest people, but they’re
not calling to talk about their kids or their jobs or their marriages, are
they? They’re calling because they need something from her. It sure seems
awesome looking in, but can you imagine if the only reason anyone ever called
you was because they—”

 “Stop
it!” she screamed, the tears streaming down her face again. “Just
fucking shut up already! You march into this office and think you understand
everything. Little Miss I’m So Sarcastic and So Above All This! Well, you
don’t understand anything. Anything!”

 “Em—”

 “Don’t
‘Em,’ me, Andy. Let me finish. I know Miranda is difficult. I know
she sometimes seems crazy. I know what it’s like to never sleep and
always be scared she’s calling you and have none of your friends
understand. I know all that! But if you hate it so much, if you can’t do
anything but complain about it and her and everyone else all the time, then why
don’t you just leave? Because your attitude is really a problem. And to
say that Miranda is a lunatic, well, I think there are many, many more people
out there who think she’s gifted and gorgeous and talented and would
think you’re a lunatic for not doing your best to help out someone so
amazing. Because she is amazing, Andy—she really is!”

 I
considered this for a moment and decided she had a point. Miranda was, as far
as I could tell, a truly fantastic editor. Not a single word of copy made it
into the magazine without her explicit, hard-to-obtain approval, and she
wasn’t afraid to scrap something and start over, regardless of how
inconvenient or unhappy it made everyone else. Although the various fashion
editors called in the clothes to shoot, Miranda alone selected the looks she
wanted and which models she wanted wearing each one; the sittings editors might
be the ones at the actual shoots, but they were simply executing
Miranda’s specific and incredibly detailed instructions. She had the
final—and often even the preliminary—say over every single bracelet,
bag, shoe, outfit, hair style, story, interview, writer, photo, model,
location, and photograph in every issue, and that made her, in my mind, the
main reason for the magazine’s stunning success each month.Runway
wouldn’t beRunway —hell, it wouldn’t be much of anything at
all—without Miranda Priestly. I knew it and so did everyone else. What it
hadn’t yet done was convince me that any of this gave her a right to
treat people the way she did. Why was the ability to put together a Balmain
evening gown and a brooding, leggy Asian girl on a side street in San Sebastian
worshiped so much that Miranda wasn’t accountable for her behavior? I
still wasn’t building the bridge, but what the hell did I know? Emily
obviously got it.

 “Emily,
all I’m saying is that you’re a really great assistant to her, that
she’s lucky she has someone who works as hard as you do, who’s so
committed to the job. I just wish you’d realize that it’s not your
fault if she’s unhappy with something. She’s just an unhappy
person. There’s nothing more you could have done.”

 “I
know that. I really do. But you don’t give her enough credit, Andy. Think
about it. I mean, really think about it. She is so incredibly accomplished, and
she’s had to sacrifice a lot to get there, but couldn’t the same be
said of supersuccessful people in every industry? Tell me, how many CEOs or
managing partners or movie directors or whatever don’t have to be tough
sometimes? It’s part of the job.”

 I could
tell we weren’t going to see eye to eye on this one. It was clear that
Emily was deeply invested in Miranda, inRunway, in all of it, but I just
couldn’t understand why. She wasn’t any different from the hundreds
of other personal assistants and editorial assistants and assistant editors and
associate editors and senior editors and editors in chief of fashion magazines.
But I just didn’t understand why. From everything I’d seen so far,
each one was humiliated, degraded, and generally abused by their direct
superior, only to turn around and do it to those under them the second they got
promoted. And all of it so they could say, at the end of the long and
exhausting climb, that they’d gotten to sit in the front row at Yves
Saint-Laurent’s couture show and had scored a few free Prada bags along
the way?

 Time to
just agree. “I know,” I sighed, surrendering to her insistence.
“I just hope you know that you’re doing her the favor by putting up
with her shit, not the other way around.”

 I
expected a quick counter-attack, but Emily grinned. “You know how I just
told her like a hundred times that her Thursday hair and makeup were
confirmed?”

 I
nodded. She looked positively giddy.

 “I
was totally lying. I didn’t call a single person or confirm
anything!” She practically sang the last part.

 “Emily!
Are you serious? What are you going to do now? You just swore up and down that
you’d personally confirmed it.” For the first time since starting
work, I wanted to hug the girl.

 “Andy,
be serious. Do you honestly think that any sane person is going to say no to
doing her hair and makeup? It could make his whole career—he’d be
crazy to turn her down. I’m sure the guy was planning to do it all along.
He was probably just rearranging his travel plans or something. I don’t
have to confirm with him, because I’m that sure he’ll do it. How
could henot ? She’s Miranda Priestly!”

 Now I
thought I would cry, but instead I just said, “So what do I need to know
to hire this new nanny? I should probably get started right away.”

 “Yeah,”
she agreed, still looking delighted with her own cleverness.
“That’s probably a good idea.”

 The
first girl I interviewed for the nanny position looked positively
shell-shocked.

 “Oh
my god!” she’d howled when I asked her over the phone if
she’d mind coming to the office to meet with me. “Oh my god! Are
you serious? Oh my god!”

 “Um,
is that a yes or a no?”

 “God,
yes. Yes, yes, yes! ToRunway ? Oh my god. Wait until I tell my friends.
They’ll die. They’ll absolutely die. Just tell me where to be and
when.”

 “You
understand that Miranda’s away right now, so you won’t be meeting
with her, right?”

 “Yep.
Totally.”

 “And
you also know that the job is being a nanny to Miranda’s two daughters,
right? That it won’t have anything to do withRunway ?”

 She
sighed as if to resign herself to the sad, unfortunate fact. “Yes, of
course. A nanny, I totally get it.”

 Well,
she hadn’t really gotten it, because even though she looked the part
(tall, impeccably groomed, reasonably well dressed, and seriously underfed),
she kept asking which parts of the job would require her to be at the office.

 I shot
her a specialty Withering, but she didn’t seem to notice. “Um,
none. Remember, we talked about this? I’m just doing some initial
screening for Miranda, and we just happen to be doing it in the office. But
that’s it. Her twins don’t live here, you know?”

 “Right,
right,” she’d agreed, but I’d already nixed her.

 The next
three the agency had waiting in the reception area weren’t much better.
Physically, all fit the Miranda profile—the agency really did know
exactly what she wanted—but not one had what I’d be looking for in
a nanny who’d be taking care of my future niece or nephew, the standard
I’d set for the process. One had a master’s in child development
from Cornell but glazed over when I tried to describe the subtle ways this job
might be different from others she’d held. Another had dated a famous NBA
player, which she felt gave her “insight into celebrity.” But when
I’d asked her if she’d ever worked with the children of
celebrities, she’d instinctively wrinkled her nose and informed me that
“famous people’s kids always have, like, major issues.”
Nixed. The third and most promising had grown up in Manhattan and had just
graduated from Middlebury and wanted to spend a year as a nanny to save some
money for a trip to Paris. When I asked if that meant she spoke French, she
nodded. The only problem was that she was a city girl through and through and
therefore didn’t have a driver’s license. Was she willing to learn?
I’d asked. No, she’d answered. She didn’t believe that the
streets needed another car clogging them. Nix number three. I spent the rest of
the day trying to figure out a tactful way of telling Miranda that if a girl is
attractive, athletic, comfortable with celebrity, lives in Manhattan, has a
driver’s license, can swim, has an advanced degree, speaks French, and is
completely and entirely flexible with her time, then chances are she does not
want to be a nanny.

 She must
have read my mind, because the phone rang immediately. I did a few calculations
and realized that Miranda would have just landed at de Gaulle, and a quick
glance at the second-by-second itinerary Emily had so painstakingly constructed
showed she would now be in the car on her way to the Ritz.

 “Miranda
Pri—”

 “Emily!”
she practically shrieked. I wisely decided now wasn’t the time to correct
her. “Emily! The driver did not give me my usual phone, and as a result I
don’t have anyone’s phone number. This is unacceptable. Entirely
unacceptable. How am I supposed to conduct business with no phone numbers?
Connect me immediately to Mr. Lagerfeld.”

 “Yes,
Miranda, please hold just a moment.” I jabbed the hold button and called
out to Emily for help, although I would’ve had better luck simply eating
the receiver whole than actually locating Karl Lagerfeld in less time than it
took Miranda to get so annoyed that she’d smash down the phone and keep
calling to ask, “Where the hell is he? Why can’t you find him? Do
you not know how to use a phone?”

 “She
wants Karl,” I called over to Emily. The name immediately sent her
flying, racing, tearing through papers all over her desk.

 “OK,
listen. We have twenty to thirty seconds. You take Biarritz and the driver,
I’ll get Paris and the assistant,” she called, her fingers already
flying across the keypad. I double-clicked on the thousand-plus name contact
list that we shared on our hard drives and found exactly five numbers I’d
have to call: Biarritz main, Biarritz second main, Biarritz studio, Biarritz
pool, and Biarritz driver. A quick glance over the other listings for Karl
Lagerfeld indicated that Emily had a grand total of seven, and there were still
more numbers for New York and Milan. We were dead before we started.

 I’d
tried Biarritz main and was in the middle of dialing Biarritz second main when
I saw that the flashing red light had stopped blinking. Emily announced that
Miranda had hung up, in case I hadn’t noticed. Only ten or fifteen
seconds had passed—she was feeling particularly impatient today. Naturally,
the phone rang again immediately, and Emily responded to my pleading puppy eyes
and answered it. She didn’t get halfway through her canned greeting
before she was nodding gravely and trying to reassure Miranda. I was still
dialing and had—miraculously—made it to Biarritz pool, where I was
currently talking to a woman who didn’t speak a single word, a single
syllable, of English. Maybe this was the obsession with speaking French?

 “Yes,
yes, Miranda. Andrea and I are calling right now. It should only be a few more
seconds. Yes, I understand. No, I know it’s frustrating. If you’ll
allow me to just put you on hold for ten seconds or so, I’m sure
we’ll have him on the line. OK?” She punched “hold” and
kept right on jabbing numbers. I heard her trying in what sounded like
horrifically accented and broken French to talk to someone who appeared to not
know the name Karl Lagerfeld. We were dead. Dead. I was getting ready to hang
up on the crazy French woman who was shrieking into the receiver when I saw the
flashing red light go out again. Emily was still frantically dialing.

 “She’s
gone!” I called with the urgency of an EMT performing emergency CPR.

 “Your
turn to get it!” she screamed back, fingers flying, and sure enough, the
phone rang again.

 I picked
it up and didn’t even attempt to say anything, since I knew the voice on
the other end would speak up immediately. It did.

 “Ahn-dre-ah!
Emily! Whoever the hell I’m talking to… why is it that I’m
speaking with you and not with Mr. Lagerfeld? Why?”