The Rothman Scandal (16 page)

And what was the editor's role in sponsoring, abetting, and keeping alive all those long-distance love affairs? She was a kind of marriage broker between the people who contributed the words and pictures, and the readers who turned the pages of glossy paper. “I'm a kind of procurer,” she once said, “or, as the French say,
une maquerelle
. But I've tried to be an honest one.”

At a seminar for college students interested in careers in journalism, Lenny Liebling once said, “Putting out a magazine like
Mode
is like having a new baby every month.”

Alex had disagreed with him. “Having a baby is easy,” she said. “Putting out a magazine like ours is more like reinventing the wheel every month.”

But even that hardly said it all. In the end, there was no definition for love.

8

The telephone beside her bed was ringing and, from the little flashing red light on the panel, she saw that someone was calling her on her private line. Though Mel groaned unhappily from his side of the bed, she picked up the receiver and said, “Hello?”

Lily Rothman was one of those New York women who, when placing a telephone call, never troubled to identify themselves to the person being called, but just immediately began talking, and who, when they had finished saying what they had to say, simply replaced the receiver without troubling to say goodbye. “Alex,” she was saying, “I watched it all on television. I know how you must be feeling, and I know what you must be thinking. But don't resign.”

“He hasn't given me much choice,” she said.

“But don't. Don't do it. That's what he wants you to do, don't you see? Don't play into his hand. Make him fire you.”

“I don't particularly like the idea of being fired, Aunt Lily!”

“I mean make him think he's going to
have
to fire you. Because he can't fire you—not now, anyway.”

“Why can't he?”

“Profit sharing. Don't you remember profit sharing? Do you realize how much you have in your profit-sharing plan? Nearly three million dollars! If he fires you, he'll have to give you all of that—in cash—right now. But he can't afford to do that. Not now. Everything is tied up in the IRS case, and as treasurer of the company, I can't release funds like that. The lawyers won't let me. But if you resign, he doesn't have to pay you a penny. That's why he's hoping you'll resign. So don't do that.”

“But Lily, I—”

“Listen to me. You mustn't. You're too valuable to us. You're too valuable to me. You're too valuable to Ho.”

“How is Ho, Lily?”

“Oh, dear. Don't ask. Ho is just—a vegetable now, Alex. The doctors say he has the heart of a teenage boy, and the constitution of an ox. But it's his mind that's gone. I'm not even sure he recognizes me anymore, Alex.”

“I'd like to come to see him.”

“No, don't. Visitors just make his blood pressure go up. The doctors say it's because of frustration—frustration and anger because he can't speak anymore, because he can't recognize people anymore. You wouldn't want to see him the way he is now, Alex. Just remember him the way he was, when he was strong and alert and on top of everything. Remember him when he was the Ho we both loved, not the way he is now, old and angry and frustrated, and just a vegetable. It's the IRS business that did this to him, you know. It was the last straw. The man who advised presidents! And now having the government turn on him like this! It's shocking, that's what it is. If Ho dies because of this, I'm thinking of suing the IRS for manslaughter. Don't laugh. They're looking into it, the lawyers.”

“I'm very sorry, Aunt Lily.”

“So don't resign. Promise me you won't resign. Make Herbie sweat it out for a while, because he knows he can't fire you, and meanwhile I'll think of something.”

“I've pretty much made up my mind—”

“Don't. Don't make a single move. Do nothing. Promise me. Remember, you owe me a lot, Alex. And I owe you a lot, too. We both owe each other a lot. We're in this together, which is why we've got to make this work,
bubeleh
.”

“Would you be in a position to fire Herbert, Lily?”

There was a brief silence, and then she said, “Not right now, I can't. Right now, we need Herbie, too. It's this IRS business, again, and it's all too complicated to explain to you now. Just take my word—we need him. But we also need you. So promise me you won't resign, and meanwhile I'll think of something.
Just don't resign
. Remember, you owe me.” And the line went dead, and Alex realized that Aunt Lily had terminated the conversation.

In the apartment at the Gainsborough, Lenny Liebling lay in his tanning bed listening to a Mozart tape through his stereo headset. It was a nightly ritual, twenty minutes in the tanning bed just before bedtime, a time when Dear Old Lenny ministered to the special needs of Dear Old Lenny. The physical, and spiritual, needs.

Dear Old Lenny. Everybody had always called him that, even when they didn't mean it. Dear Old Lenny Liebling was not universally loved, nor did he for one minute expect to be.

How old was dear old Lenny? “He must be seventy-five, at
least,
” they said. But naturally Lenny would never divulge that statistic. He was certainly older than Herbert Joseph Rothman, because Lenny sometimes dropped hints about Herbert's teenage escapades. Still, with his carefully dyed and marcelled champagne-colored hair—
all his own
—styled weekly by Jerry at Bergdorf's, and after at least two face-lifts, and in his corset, Lenny managed to look considerably (twenty years?) younger than Herb. And how many titles and positions had Lenny Liebling held at Rothman Publications over the years? Lenny himself had trouble keeping track of them all. Right now, his title was special projects editor for
Mode
, a job that could be described as loosely and imprecisely as one wished. What where the duties of a special projects editor? That depended. At Rothman, they said, there always had to be some sort of a job found for Lenny Liebling. Always. They said he must know where some significant corporate bodies were buried—how else would one explain it?

Over the years, Lenny had worked, in some capacity or other, for nearly every one of the Rothman publications, the newspapers as well as the magazines. His titles had included features editor, managing editor, art editor, fashion editor, beauty editor, antiques editor, design editor, deputy editor, food & wine editor, roving editor, assistant editor, associate editor, society editor, contributing editor, and editor-at-large. For a while, he was even executive editor of
Wanderlust
, the Rothman travel magazine, and, for an even briefer period, he was given the editor-in-chief-ship of
Mirror, Mirror
, that ill-fated celebrity magazine that was the Rothmans' attempt to challenge
People
and
Us
at the newsstands. In each of his capacities, furthermore, Lenny always commanded a corner office (not the largest corner office, to be sure, but always a corner), with his choice of drapes, furnishings, and carpet, and a secretary. The secretaries came and went, complaining that all they were asked to do was run personal errands for Lenny—to and from his tailor and his dry cleaner, fetching his regular luncheon hamburger from “21” (returning it if it was overdone), ordering his theater tickets, setting up the table in his office for the thrice-weekly visits from his masseur, making appointments with his hairstylist, misting and watering his plants. So many secretaries had come and gone that he no longer bothered to learn their names, and called them all “secretary.”

From all the positions Lenny had held with the Rothmans, one might credit him with a certain versatility. Durability would be the better word. A mysterious survivability.

Still, Lenny had not done badly for a little boy from Onward, Mississippi (pop. 512 and growing smaller by the day), who came to New York almost sixty years ago, knowing no one, without so much as a high-school diploma, with no more than fifteen dollars in his pocket and a hole in his shoe, where he suddenly became the darling of the Rothmans, and where—overnight, it seemed—he was transformed into the elegant, poised, sophisticated, witty, worldly, and polished Lenny Liebling whose name popped up regularly in Liz Smith's, Cindy Adams's, and Mona Potter's columns. None of these ladies knew a thing about Lenny Liebling's past, and by now it no longer mattered.

Wasn't it odd, people often said, that both Lenny Liebling and his boss, Alexandra Rothman, came from tiny midwestern and southern towns that almost no one had ever heard of. But it was a fact that many of New York's most successful people came originally from obscure places. Was there something about small towns that spurred the clever and ambitious to set their sights on the big city, where one had to be willing to be lucky? The very smallness of the towns, and the openness of the open country, seemed to force the clever and ambitious into the claustrophobia of crowded sidewalks and jostling skyscrapers, where they seemed to thrive. Or at least the lucky ones did.

Of course everyone knew how Alex Rothman had done it. She had married a Rothman. She had started out as a small-time model, had won some sort of contest, and had wound up on the cover of
Mode
, where her beauty had caught young Steven Rothman's eye. But then she had done even more than that. She had not just settled, as so many young women of that sort do, for being a rich man's wife, a part of his domestic decor. She had gone on to take over the editorship of her husband's magazine, which meant that she had been lucky,
and
clever,
and
ambitious. No wonder certain women hated her.

But how had Lenny Liebling done it? No one knew, and so naturally along the gossipy grapevine of the Rothman organization the rumors flew.

He was Ho Rothman's illegitimate son.

He was Aunt Lily Rothman's illegitimate son.

He was Herb Rothman's secret homosexual lover.

He was Alexandra Rothman's secret heterosexual lover.

He was Joel Rothman's father. Joel was blond, wasn't he? Steven had been dark.

And so on. Lenny was aware of all these rumors, did nothing to discourage or disprove them—rather enjoyed them, in fact. When people tried to excavate the truth, he was deliberately vague. A reporter once asked him how he spent his days at Rothman Publications.

“Climbing,” he replied with a wave of his hand.

“Climbing?”

“Just climbing. Aren't we all climbers, actually? Don't
you
want to be better off tomorrow than you are today?”

That was as far as he would go. Lenny Liebling didn't mind being in the gossip columns. But when reporters tried to do “in-depth” stories, he was very clever at sending them down blind alleys, and leaving them with nothing but loose ends.

And so, all that anyone knew for sure was that Lenny Liebling was the darling of the Rothmans, but even this was not quite true. He was not the darling of
all
the Rothmans. Herb Rothman, for one, barely tolerated him. On the other hand, both Ho and Lily Rothman appeared to find Lenny useful, and Alexandra Rothman clearly liked him. A better word than
darling
would be
force
. Lenny Liebling had become a force within the Rothman family, a power, a controlling influence in their lives—inescapable and indispensable—a force and a fixture in the Rothman family firmament.

But it was not really true that Lenny knew where certain corporate bodies were buried, though there were one or two human resting places whose whereabouts he knew.

What, then, was Lenny's special usefulness? For one thing, he was an invaluable—and usually reliable—source of inside company information. His ear was always to the ground and, as he said, he had his spies. Who were Lenny's spies? No one knew, exactly, but there were certain obvious suspects. The mail-room boys were one. Nearly every new male employee at Rothman Publications started in the mail room, and the mail-room boys were as eager to get ahead as anyone else. To keep track of who was who, and who was telling what to whom, the mail-room boys read all the mail and memoranda—even, and especially, those items marked
“PERSONAL”
and
“CONFIDENTIAL”
—before placing them in In boxes. (Lenny himself had started at Rothman as a mail-room boy, so he knew how it worked.) The mail-room boys knew all about those foreign magazines that arrived, in plain brown wrappers, addressed to Herbert J. Rothman and even spent time giggling over the pictures before slipping the publications back into their envelopes.

Then there was Wally, the shoe-shine boy who made daily rounds of the executive offices. Most people paid no attention at all to Wally as he squatted on his bootblack's box tending to their uptipped toes, and went right on with their business conversations as though Wally weren't there. But Lenny had discovered that Wally not only liked to listen, but that he also liked to talk, and enjoyed an audience, and it was quite amazing what significant scraps of corporate news Wally was able to pick up, and which Lenny was able to fit together into a larger picture.

There were also the people Lenny called “the Production moles”—the solemn-faced kids who came out of Yale and Princeton, Smith and Wellesley, who had made it out of the mail room to the next step up, the Production Department, but who were still willing to work for next to nothing because, after all, this was considered a glamour industry, and the Production moles were able to tell their friends that they had glamorous jobs “in publishing.” Lenny had managed to skip that particular stage in the scramble up the masthead—where the names of the Production moles were listed, in tiniest print, at the very bottom—and so Lenny had no idea what the Production moles actually did. Some of them seemed to spend their days crouched over computer consoles, staring at moving lines of green print. Others seemed to occupy themselves with pots of glue. The moles spoke a strange and incomprehensible lingo all their own. At times they spoke of headers and footers, flats and column-inches, which sounded as though they were in the construction business. They also talked of plants and inserts and tip-ins and slugs and mice, as if they were landscape gardeners. At times, the instructions from the Production chief sounded like instructions for a space launching: “Bring your ruler bar up to the foreground, and click the mouse button when your cursor is on it, and set your tab stop.” When they spoke of serifs and fonts, it sounded as though they were part of a religious cult. Lenny comprehended none of their mysterious language, beyond knowing that a “typesetter's widow” was not the surviving spouse of a deceased typesetter, and only when the moles talked about paste-ups, proofs, galleys, and tear-sheets did Lenny realize that the moles were involved in the grubbiest, mechanical part of putting a magazine together. In fact, the final printed-up, pasted-together page was called a mechanical. The moles were mechanics. Their fingernails were even dirty.