The Secret (10 page)

Of the models, only one, Melissa Lamb, had appeared in our first show. Giselle decided not to appear. The girls were eighteen and nineteen years old, every one of them stunning, with generous figures. I had specified: no Twiggy.

The first item we showed was what we called a bridal nightgown. It was white and sheer and had a long pleated skirt. As the bride’s legs moved inside the pleats her legs were exposed, then hidden, then exposed, then hidden, erotically. Depending on how the bride walked, she might even give brief blurred glimpses of her pubic hair. Nearly all of the nightgowns sold in America at the time had an opaque panel across the upper chest, so that even if the legs and hips and tummy could be seen, the breasts would remain discreetly hidden. We showed two versions of that nightgown, one with a sheer panel across the breasts, one with nothing there at all, showing the breasts bare.

One of the young models blushed and said she just couldn’t wear the version with the breasts bared. She did consent to modeling the one with her breasts almost as fully displayed under the sheer panel. Melissa volunteered to wear the bare model.

As I now anticipated they would, the assembled writers applauded the two nightgowns, the bare version more than the other. They published reviews of our show, and we sold tens of thousands of that nightgown, about half-and-half divided between sheer panels and bare breasts.

Melissa and another girl modeled a sheer black baby-doll nightie. The other girl wore skimpy black panties under it. Melissa wore nothing and showed her hair.

When we were ready to show a red version of the same nightgown, the girl who had worn panties asked to be allowed to model this one without panties. “On second thought,” she said, “it’s more honest. Why fool around?”

We showed bikini panties that were nothing but triangles of fabric fore and aft, attached by strings over the hips.

We showed bras with circles cut out to expose the nipples. Things like that are common enough now, but they were once brazenly lewd.

The hit of the show was the first crotchless panties I ever saw. Albert Larkin had designed them. They were slit from just below the waistband, and the model’s most private parts were exposed. It had been our plan that the show’s finale would be a parade of all our models, wearing bras that displayed the nipples and crotchless panties.

Two of our models refused. One of them wept. “Oh, Mr. Cooper, I just can’t! I just
can’t!
I’m engaged to be married, and—” I excused her without reproach. The other girl offered no excuse, and I didn’t ask for one.

Four girls appeared: one in black, one in white, one in red, and one in green. The writers loved them.

Giselle and I took the models out for drinks after the show. “I never thought I’d ever—” one of them said. “Well, hell,” said another, “we knew what kind of show it was. It’s something for my diary!” And another said, “So long as it’s anonymous and my name isn’t mentioned, I’d walk out there in the altogethers, for the money. My mother doesn’t see me, but if I appear in an underwear ad for Macy’s, she sees me in the paper.”

*   *   *

We sold a lot of cutout bras and crotchless panties, and it brought a question to Sal’s mind. “Okay, they aren’t going to wear that stuff under their clothes all day. This kind of stuff is what you might call boudoir lingerie, to wear only in the privacy of the bedroom. So, okay, I wonder if they’d buy G-strings and like that. Maybe not, but their boyfriends and husbands might buy them, hoping the gals would wear them. It might be worth a try, to see.”

Larkin Albert would not design a G-string. There was no challenge in it, he said. Giselle and I designed our first ones ourselves. We bought black nylon and cut a variety of triangles, ranging from large enough really to cover the pubic region to small enough barely to cover the trench. Giselle was no seamstress, but she could sew well enough to put G-strings together.

We settled on one sample—not the one that covered most or the one that covered least—and I took it to Charlie Han and asked him if he could run me up a hundred dozen of them. He laughed and said of course he could, but that G-strings would hardly sell except as part of a set that would have to include a totally sheer bra. Even women who did not wear bras would want sheer ones if they were pretending to be strippers. He didn’t need a design for that from us; he would make it up from his own idea.

We decided not to make big posters to advertise the strip sets in the stores. Instead we bought Lucite frames and put eight-by-ten black-and-white prints on the counters.

Giselle wanted to pose for those photos. She was forty-one years old that year. She didn’t look like a woman in her forties, but she didn’t look like a girl in her twenties, either. She thought we should make the point—and she was right!—that Cheeks merchandise was not just for chicks, but for
women.
So she did pose, and her pictures were displayed: a mature woman dressed to please her husband in the privacy of their bedroom.

That simple strip set—strip
panels
they were called, believe it or not—became the basis of a complete new line of merchandise for Cheeks stores.

And there is where the trouble began.

Giselle and I had opened three initial stores in New York. By the time Sal came in, we had eleven. We had five in Manhattan, one in Brooklyn, two on Long Island, one in White Plains, one in Greenwich, Connecticut, and one in Ridgefield, New Jersey.

I spent a hell of a lot of my time traveling from one of these stores to another, trying to be sure they operated the way we wanted them.

When we tried to open a store in SoNo, a restored waterfront area of pricey shops and restaurants in South Norwalk, Connecticut, the town fathers found all kinds of ways to discourage us—zoning problems to start with, then expensive renovations to the building that would be required by fire laws, sanitary laws. The truth was, they simply didn’t want scandalous undies being sold on the main drag in SoNo, no matter that our store would show nothing to the street and would generally be a good municipal citizen.

We almost had to close the Ridgefield store when our manager put some of our photo posters in the window. That brought pickets from the religious community. We fired that manager and cleared that window just in time to avoid irate regulators coming in, thinking up all kinds of problems, and shutting us down.

When we tried to open a store in Rye, New York, we came under fire from a local Bible-banger who declared that “this kind of filth” had no place in a Christian town.

“Well, there’s more than one way to skin a cat,” Sal said to me when we were talking about the problem in my Manhattan office. “I’ve done a little checking. And guess what? The Reverend Mr. Wright is not so cool and clean as he makes out. Lemme show you something.”

Sal rarely carried a briefcase, but he was carrying one that morning, and he took from it a bundle of papers. The first thing he showed me was a Denver newspaper. With his hand he covered everything of a certain story except a picture.

“Know ’im?”

The photo was of the Reverend Mr. Wright, beyond question.

He uncovered the rest of the story. It read:

JR. HI CAGE COACH CHARGED WITH SEXUAL ASSAULT, STATUTORY RAPE

A junior-high school basketball coach has been charged with assault and statutory rape after three cheerleaders charged that he had improper intimate relations with them. The girls, two of them fourteen and one fifteen, whose names are being withheld because of their ages, allege that the coach groped one of them, partially undressed another, and sexually entered the third. Arrested last night and held without bail is Theodore “Ted” Bligh, 29, a teacher and coach at Blair Junior High School.

The story went on to say that Bligh had been arrested on the complaint of three fathers. And so on.

Later issues of the newspaper reported that Bligh had been found guilty of the charge and sentenced to five years in the penitentiary.

Sal also had a copy of Bligh’s—Wright’s—FBI record, including mug shots and fingerprints.

“Where do you come up with stuff like this, Sal?” I asked. I was genuinely surprised.

“There are ways of doin’ things, and there are ways of doin’ things,” he said. “I laid a little dough around. I’ll give you an expense account.”

A week later Sal met with the Reverend Mr. “Wright” in his pastoral study. We showed him photocopies of the newspapers.

He grinned almost insanely. “You can’t stick this filth to me,” he said with a brittle laugh. “Sure, the picture looks like me, but—”

“Maybe your fingerprints look like or don’t look like,” said Sal with grim calm.

“I know what you’re trying to do! And why!”

“You’re licensed to marry people,” said Sal. “Your application for that license is a public record. When a man has a church, the state doesn’t ask questions particularly; it just issues the license. Well, you got a church, buster, but you don’t got a degree, and you were never ordained.”

“The board of my church—”

“Is a little gang of ignoramus boobs,” Sal interrupted harshly.

“I know what you’re trying to do!”

“And we know what
you’re
trying to do. I got an idea the Rye police are going to find your FBI sheet very, very interesting. Not to mention the newspapers.”

In this episode, Sal showed how effective he could be. It was also evidence of a problem we would have with him. After he left, two enforcers arrived. They gave the Bible-banger forty-eight hours to get out of the State of New York. Forty-eight hours! Or they would hand over to the local police and newspapers their evidence of his Colorado crimes. To place emphasis on their demands, they thumped him a little.

After he was gone—within his forty-eight hours—they gave the police and newspapers the whole story, anyway.

Sal believed in direct action. And he took no prisoners.

But that wouldn’t help us in what was coming up.

21

The big problem came in New Haven.

It seemed like a good town for us. We figured Yale students might buy some of our stuff, and faculty people would have open minds and might be receptive to Cheeks merchandise. Besides, New Haven was a good-sized town, and prosperous. It had a certain cachet, also, that we figured would be good for us. Greenwich was like that. Ridgefield was like that, too. Prestige locations.

The way we opened a store in a new town was to hold a preview evening for invited guests, and that is what we did in New Haven.

We invited the mayor, members of the council, people from the chamber of commerce, newspaper editors and writers, the president of the university, and a few senior faculty members—all with their wives, of course. Obviously, not all these people came. But half an hour after the announced time of opening, we had twenty-five or so people in the store.

On four tables covered with white linen, set up in the middle of the sales floor, we had bottles of red and white wine and platters of assorted yellow and white cheeses, with crackers, melba toast, and bread sticks. Our caterer had been told to supply glasses and real plates, no paper cups or plates. Candles burned on each table.

At these parties we didn’t display our more daring items, such as crotchless panties, and focused on high-quality lingerie and bathing suits. The identity we wanted was one that would allow people to be seen coming out of our store and not be embarrassed. We wanted it understood that we were not a sleaze operation.

We offered no speeches. I circulated among the guests and tried to get my message across conversationally.

“We like your show window, Mr. Cooper,” one man said. The “we” he referred to was himself and his wife. A heavyset man, he was a member of the city council. “Will it stay that way?”

“Absolutely. We never display underthings to the passersby on the street. The window will always be just as it is—with the exception that civic organizations can bring in a limited number of posters announcing concerts, plays, and the like, and we will display those in the window. Otherwise—”

The show window had only our signature cast-metal sign that said nothing but—

CHEEKS

INTIMATE APPAREL

When just about all the guests we could expect were in the store and it seemed unlikely that more would come, we had girls model a few of our more modest items, especially our orange maillot swimsuits. Giselle modeled negligées and nightgowns. I would always introduce her as my wife. Melissa, who continued to work with us from time to time, modeled panty-and-bra sets, with garter belts and stockings.

We got our point across, as we almost always did. The people we shocked were amused-shocked. Clearly we were no threat to the town’s morals.

As the guests left, each woman was presented a wrapped gift box. They opened them in their cars, we knew. They expected to find … God knows what. What they found in each box was a handsome silk scarf.

*   *   *

We had employed a woman from Hartford to manage the store. Betty Logan. She was a woman in her fifties, with graying hair and eyeglasses she wore hanging from a chain around her neck. She was widowed, and had managed a boutique in Hartford to put her son through the University of Connecticut.

“I’ve hired two girls to model for the party,” she said. “They are Yale coeds, and that will make a good impression.”

“Ordinarily we bring along our own models.”

Betty shrugged. “I can cancel them.”

“No. Maybe you got an idea. Two Yale girls
will
make an impression.”

The two Yale girls had glorious figures, but were not otherwise outstanding beauties. One of them modeled our international-orange maillot and the other a couple of our bikinis. I had still brought along Giselle and Melissa, who modeled the lingerie.

I should have figured it out when—

Giselle suggested we go down to the hotel bar and have a nightcap. I said okay, and I said I’d stop by Sal’s room and ask him to join us. Giselle told me to go ahead; she needed to use the bathroom and would catch up with us in five minutes.

I went to Sal’s room on the floor below and knocked.