The Secret (8 page)

He drank nothing stronger than wine, and of wine he drank only the best. He cared nothing for champagne or, in fact, for any white wine, but he knew French and Italian reds and could order them by year.

I was amused at how wise he was to the specialty waters. If he wanted fizz water, he ordered Canada Dry or Adirondack water that was just as good but even cheaper. He laughed at the people who made it a point of honor to have little green bottles on their tables.

“Shows what you can do with the right advertising,” he said. “With the right kind of promotion we could bottle and sell horse piss.”

His taste in women was entertaining.

He liked heavyset women. He explained why:

“Y’know, when y’got a whang like mine, y’gotta do it with a
big
gal; I mean, one with plenty of flesh around her pussy. Hell, with a little thin woman I’d go through her and come out the backside.”

I was already curious about his whang, of which I’d had a glimpse as we’d stood side by side at two urinals. One day we were in my office. He stepped to the door and latched it. “Go ahead and have a look,” he said, and he pulled on his penis to bring it all out of his pants.

As God is my witness, the man had a ten-inch penis! It was formidable.

“I’m a friggin’ freak,” he said. “But what can I do? I can’t have it cut down.”

When I met him, his current girlfriend was a chubby twenty-five-year-old named Truda. She was not obese, but she was oversized in all dimensions. She was fascinated with the line of merchandise we stocked in our Cheeks shops, but we had almost nothing she could wear, which caused Sal to offer his first idea about our business.

“Y’know,” he said, “there’s a lot of girls like Truda. We oughta offer a bigger choice of sizes.”

He was right, and our next shipment from Paris included merchandise in larger sizes.

His next idea had to do with advertising that we carried the larger sizes. We couldn’t put up signs saying
“SCANTIES FOR
BIG
GIRLS, TOO!”
We could, though, Sal suggested, feature bigger girls in some of our color photos. That would get the message across. All we needed was one or two fat models.

“Hell,” he said, “why not my Truda? She’d be flattered. I mean flattered.”

So we took Truda to the photographer and had her pose in bra-and-panty sets; also in skimpy nighties and bikinis. Sal bought her a blond wig, which was so conspicuously a wig that there could be no doubt that was what it was—which made her even cuter. Within two weeks at least one photo poster in each of our shops was a picture of Truda showing a lot of skin.

This inspired her to think she could become a model. Her hair was red, so she took to calling herself Ginger. She had a portfolio of pictures taken and began to offer herself as a model. Sal and I thought it was strange, but a number of photographers hired her. She never became the fashion model she had dreamed of being, but her picture appeared from time to time in magazines given to photo art. One caption suggested a fat girl like her had to have a lot of courage to pose in the nude. That showed how much the caption writer understood about a woman like Truda. She wasn’t ashamed of herself. She was proud.

17

Frank Costello had suggested that Sal’s chief value to Cheeks would be his contacts in the garment district. And so it turned out. He knew his way around in that business.

When we went to the district, I expected to meet a bald, cigar-chewing man in a soiled shirt and vest, sitting at a scarred old desk, probably with his feet up—an Uncle Harry come back to life.

What I met instead was an emaciated Chinese named Charlie Han, dressed in fashionable faded blue jeans and a light blue flannel shirt with white buttons. Charlie was a chain smoker of unfiltered Camels, and a pack of them always stood in his shirt pocket. He did not put his feet on a desk. If he had a desk. If he had a desk, I never saw it. In fact, I never saw any room that might have been his office. If you didn’t find him in one of his shops, walking around, supervising, you would find him sitting in a booth in a coffee shop on Thirty-eighth Street. As I would learn, Charlie did business in cash and kept no records, so the tax authorities could find no way to audit him. Well … actually, they could have, but he also made it his business to be inconspicuous, and I doubt that the agencies who might have wanted to look into his operations were even aware he existed.

Everyone has heard the word
sweatshop.
Few have ever seen one. Charlie’s employees were almost all Hispanic women, from a variety of Latin-American nations. Few of them were legal immigrants. They worked at sewing machines on the upper floors of district buildings, in conditions that even I—who thought of myself as reasonably knowledgeable about how things were on the streets—found unbelievable.

For example, there was just one toilet for as many as fifty women. They had one ten-minute toilet break in the morning and one in the afternoon, at which time a line naturally formed and most of them did not return to their machines by the end of the break. When they didn’t—or if they went to the toilet at another time—they were docked an hour’s wages.
An hour!

These women were young, most of them, and many of them were conspicuously pregnant. Abused by the sweatshop all day, they went home to some hovel at night to be abused by the man who had gotten them into this country, and who took their money from them. They were slaves; there was no other way to put it.

Charlie paid his people cash. That way there was no record of how much he paid to whom, so he paid no social security, no workers’ compensation premiums, no unemployment compensation tax. God knows what other taxes or charges he did not pay. Of course he paid nothing like the minimum wage. Very few of the women who worked for him knew there was such a thing.

Once in a while a union organizer came around and tried to organize the women. Those fellows were in a risky business. They had a way of … disappearing. Various kinds of reformers came around from time to time, representing organizations as lofty as the United Nations. An operator like Charlie could move his sweatshop in a matter of hours, so that when inspectors came in response to a reformer complaint all they found was a bunch of empty floors.

“That’s the garment industry,” Sal told me. “Forget you ever saw this shop. The most upscale stores in the country sell name brands that come from sweatshops like Charlie Han’s. Their buyers have no idea—or can pretend they have no idea—about the conditions in which the clothes they buy for their stores are made. Charlie is a contractor. He gets a contract—an
oral
contract, nothing in writing—to make a thousand dozen skirts, let’s say, for Big Store chain. That contract comes from a middleman who may have got it from another middleman, and only the middlemen deal directly with Big Store. Big Store defines design and fabric, Charlie buys the fabric and thread and zipper for, say, a dollar seventy-five per skirt, has the sewing done in his sweatshop at a cost of a dollar twenty-five per skirt, and sells the skirt to Middleman One for seven-fifty. Middleman One sells it to Middleman Two for eleven twenty-five, and Middleman Two sells wholesale to Big Store Corporation for, say twenty-one dollars—”

“Why two middlemen?” I asked.

“Levels of insulation,” Sal explained. “It’s illegal to sell sweatshop merchandise, so they build a barrier between Charlie and Big Store. Now, Middleman Two sells the skirt to Big Store for twenty-one dollars, and Big Store sells it to the public for seventy-five fifty. Sometimes Big Store has a sale and sells the Leigh skirt for fifty-six fifty. Customer thinks she’s got a great deal!”

“So we…?”

“We make a deal with Charlie Han to make stuff for us. We don’t want to get in trouble with the law, so we deal with Charlie through a guy I know by the name of Murray. That way we don’t sell stuff we know is sweatshop-made. Murray insulates us from Charlie. That’s his business. He’s an insurance broker, so to speak. He takes the risk of getting in trouble with the law for dealing in sweatshop merchandise. He takes the fall if shit happens, and we’re protected.”

“Jesus!”

“Hey, don’t think you can reform the garment industry. That’s the way it is. That’s the way it’s always been—hell, for a century at least, and more than that I imagine. And let me tell you something else: Charlie will deliver quality merchandise. Forget how it gets made. From the standpoint of quality and cleanliness, it’s made
right.
”

Okay. If I didn’t take a profit out of this way of doing business, somebody else would. And, of course, if Herr Standartenführer Schultz hadn’t had his squads shoot all those Jews down there in the woods, somebody else would have. It’s a common rationalization, one that covers a multitude of sins. The unsubtle don’t even realize they are rationalizing and soldier on with clear consciences.

But Charlie Han would only do the sewing. We had to provide the designs, and as it turned out we would have to provide the fabrics.

For Cheeks, design would be everything.

In this, Sal was not at all helpful. Giselle tried to be helpful. But she knew little about American designers. Help came from an unexpected source.

Melissa Lamb, whose hair had shown above the top of her bikini when we took the first photographs for the shops, was a professional model and modeled for many sales campaigns for my lines. I had kept in touch with her. When I mentioned to her that I was looking for a designer, she named a name. He was good, she said, and he specialized in the sort of thing I wanted.

So, with some reservations, I contacted the designer she recommended: Larkin Albert.

I took him for a flaming fag, a swish. God knows I’d had my fill of fairies, having had to work with a whole family of them and their cutie-boys for almost two decades. But Larkin was something else. And I was wrong about him. He was not homosexual. He was a cross-dresser. What’s more, he was damn good at it.

Often he went on the streets as a woman, wearing a wig, falsies, and high-heeled shoes, carefully limited makeup, and a miniskirt. I hardly need say that men tried to pick him up. They could experience not just one but sometimes two most unpleasant surprises. Discovering that the woman they had the hots for was in fact a man was only the first surprise. Occasionally one of them would turn aggressive, which generated the second surprise: Larkin Albert held a black belt in karate. He had made for himself an interesting life.

In his studio, he wore one of his many wigs, skin-tight leggings, high heels, and stuffed-bra T-shirts. He smoked cigarettes in a holder, which he brandished effeminately, even with people who knew full well that he was a man.

But he was a genius designer, as Melissa had promised. I was soon to learn how much a genius.

I talked to him about a design for a swimsuit.

“You know, Jerry,” he said. “We’ve gone about as far as we can go with the bikini. Some beaches girls can go with tits bare. But not with pussy bare. I … a lot of women are uncomfortable with the bikini, anyway. On the other hand, the maillot looks like an old maid’s suit, like something a candidate for Miss America would wear. So—I’ve been thinking. I have an idea in mind.”

What he was thinking of was a one-piece, form-fitting nylon swimsuit cut out all the way to the waist, exposing all of the thighs and a broad expanse of the backside. Being one-piece and covering the navel, it seemed modest. One had to look a second time to see that on each side it bared what no bikini designer had ever yet exposed: everything from knee to waist. The crotch was covered by a narrow strip of fabric, just enough to cover the pubes themselves, while in the rear only the actual cleft was covered, leaving the fleshy butt bare.

I told him to go ahead, make me a prototype. And make it to fit Melissa.

A week later I went back to his studio to see Melissa model the first Cheeks original design. Larkin had chosen international orange for the first suit, the color of a traffic cone. He pronounced it stunning. That was a word I didn’t use, but I agreed that it was stunning. I judged it would make a real splash in the market. Giselle agreed.

Whether or not stunning was the word for it, it was an instant success. I hardly have to say that newspapers and magazines made much of the inevitable play on words—that Cheeks was putting female cheeks on show. At first the cut of the suit was dramatized by the fact that the skin newly exposed was white, showing the boundaries of the bikini the woman had been wearing before.

Newsweek
ran a quarter-page color photo showing the tan, the white, the orange.

Of course the white skin, too, tanned in a little while, but while the contrast lasted it was to our advantage. It sold suits.

It didn’t hurt either that a crew of Florida beach cops arrested three spring-weekend beachgoers for appearing on the sand in “indecent” swimsuits.

The orange Cheeks suit became an international symbol. They began to appear on beaches from Florida to Maine, at country-club pools from New York to Ohio. Because of the distinctive orange, they were identified at a distance.

The quality didn’t hurt us. As Sal had promised, Charlie had things sewn right. There were no incidents of seams opening. The suits did not fade in saltwater and chlorine water, plus sunlight.

We couldn’t make the things fast enough. When the word got around that if you wanted a Cheeks suit you had better buy it while you could, that didn’t hurt us either. We got calls from Big Store Corporation, wanting to know if they could stock our suits. In cities where we had a store, we let no one else sell the suit. When we did let other stores handle our swimsuits, they were sporting-goods stores, not Big Store department stores. If you wanted a Cheeks suit, you had to go where they were sold.

Naturally, that meant a new flow of traffic through our stores. People came in and discovered our line of merchandise. I can’t say that many people who came in for swimsuits left with packages of scanties, but their visits did help our reputation. Some bought other things. Many came back and bought something else later.