Spring Collection Read online

  “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?

  “It was Gabrielle d’Angelle. GN has chosen April, Jordan and Tinker for the Lombardi contest,” she spat out in a rush of fury.

  “But … but …” I sputtered, “they’re all ours! All three of them—our girls!”
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  “You don’t think it’s a stroke of good luck, do you?” Justine asked me with bitter scorn. “You can’t possibly believe that out of dozens and dozens of girls they’re the only acceptable new faces in this entire town? He’s planned to pull this from the beginning … when nothing else worked, he saw a way to sneak into my life through the business, that vile son of a bitch!”

  “Justine, have you gone out of your mind?” I demanded, stunned by Justine’s incomprehensible flood of words.

  “It’s Necker! Jacques Necker, that contemptible, evil, evil man—he’ll do anything to get what he wants. From the second d’Angelle waltzed in here I knew it had to be something like this, but I never dreamed he’d go so far, damn him to hell … it stinks to high heaven, it’s unspeakable—”

  “Necker …? Justine, I don’t get it. You’re not making sense. None, not one word.”

  I finally penetrated Justine’s tirade. She looked at me and took deep breaths, willing herself to calm down enough to explain. I could actually watch the process on her features as her passion of outrage slowly changed to the decision to part with a secret she could no longer keep.

  “Frankie, he’s my father,” Justine said in a low voice, speaking so quickly that the words ran together in her haste to get her statement over with.

  “Your what?” I sputtered, too confused to make any sense of her statement. “What the hell are you raving about?”

  “Necker, that bastard, that bloody, bloody rotten man, is my father. Frankie, you heard me the first time.”

  “But … but … Justine … that’s the most absurd thing—” ’

  “Now don’t, do not, ask me anything more about it,” Justine continued. “It’s not something I can discuss, not now, maybe never. But I’m not delusional. I’m his daughter, God help me. I want nothing to do with him, nothing ever, ever—and now he’s found a way to reach me, a way I can’t get out of.”

  “But, Justine—”

  “Frankie, not one question!”

  “Okay, okay! I’m not saying one word about you and.…” I stopped and regrouped, my brain starting to function again. “The thing I don’t get is how GN using our girls puts you in … that person’s … power, that’s all. Hey, let’s take the worst-case scenario, okay? Are you with me here on this, Justine?” I spoke with exaggerated calm. “Three of our girls will go to Paris for the Lombardi collection and one of them will win the pot of gold. Can you show me the harm in that?”

  “But you didn’t hear all of it, you didn’t listen to d’Angelle’s end of the conversation, Frankie,” Justine said, ferociously. “An essential part of this whole thing is that I personally have to accompany the girls to Paris.” She said the words so furiously that it seemed as if she thought sheer anger could make them disappear. “And it gets worse. It’s not enough that I go with them, but in addition, d’Angelle—meaning Necker, of course—wants all of us in Paris three days from now! ”

  “What? That’s two whole weeks before the collection!”

  “Exactly. You should have heard her, false and smarmy, fronting for him, taking a fairy godmother attitude to explain something she has to know is a lie—‘The extra time will give the models a chance to learn the ropes and become familiar with the job.’ What a joke! They’re even paying each of them an additional hundred thousand bucks for doing that one Lombardi show! Not even Iman or Claudia has ever earned half that much. Two entire weeks at GN’s expense? At the Plaza-Athénée with hot and cold running limos? Please. Gabrielle knows that most new girls have less than two days to get acclimatized, if that. Obviously those two weeks are for Necker to get at me and break me down, Frankie, don’t kid yourself. None of it makes sense any other way.”

  “They seem to have thought of everything,” I said finally, forcing myself to push away the impossible matter of Justine’s paternity and make myself consider only the business alternatives.

  There weren’t any. None. There was no possibility that we could turn down this opportunity for our three girls, no matter how Justine felt. How could anyone rationalize not grabbing the GN opportunity? Justine had been cleverly painted into a very tight corner. We looked at each other for a minute, as if expecting the other to come up with some brilliant idea. Finally, as the silence lengthened and felt more hopeless by the second, I roused myself.

  “Justine, we’re wasting time. You’ll have to deal with this long-lost-you-know-what business sooner or later, but right now we should be letting the girls know that they’re going to Paris.”

  “You do it, Frankie,” Justine told me, drooping in the aftereffects of her storm of emotion. “I have to think. I know I don’t have to say it, but this whole mess stays between us.”

  “Of course, idiot.” I dropped a kiss on the top of her head, and retreated to my own office, closing the door firmly. I stood still, making no move toward the telephone. I found myself shaking, cold and dizzy. My shock was so great that the only word that came into my head was the one I reserved for the great events of life. Caramba!

  2

  It is arranged, Monsieur,” Gabrielle d’Angelle informed Jacques Necker, as she stood before his desk in his office in the Paris headquarters of GN.

  “No problem?”

  “Certainly not, Monsieur. Miss Loring had little to say but of course she agreed.”

  “What about the negotiations, Gabrielle?” he asked eagerly. “What details did she ask about?”

  “None. She sounded frankly overwhelmed. The surprise, as I expected, was enormous. She answered me only in monosyllables and she had no questions. I’ll telephone her again, tomorrow, when the news has been absorbed, and finalize everything. Then we can send the contracts to be signed.”

  “Report your conversation to me before you authorize any release from our press department. And I want to see that release as soon as it’s written.”

  “May I say anything to Monsieur Lombardi? A day doesn’t go by without his asking me about your decision.”

  “Lombardi will have to be patient,” Jacques Necker answered curtly, dismissing her with his habitual abrupt nod.

  She too would have to be patient, Gabrielle d’Angelle thought as she walked quickly out of the vast office. She would have to restrain her curiosity until she discovered exactly why, out of hours of videotape and the copious notes she had taken on her impressions of literally dozens of new models from every last agency in Manhattan, Jacques Necker had rapidly chosen three girls. Particularly three girls from the same agency. They were the best of the Loring Model Management lot, exceptional girls, but not, no certainly not, unique. Nothing explained the haste of his choice, nor his impatient insistence that not one of her other suggestions could even be considered.

  She would have to be clever enough to find out why she had been sent on a scouting trip to New York when she could have accomplished everything Necker wanted merely by sending a fax to Loring Management with a request for photos. And why had that unpleasant, ungrateful female, Justine Loring, been overwhelmed neither with delight nor with any other positive emotion in spite of this gigantic plum falling into her lap? The agency owner had been angrily and resentfully unresponsive. A series of grunts when handed the coup of a lifetime? An impossibly rude attitude? Hanging up on her? What kind of reaction was that? It was astonishing but not something she intended to tell Necker, since she habitually tried to give him the impression that she had every aspect of a situation under control.

  No, watchful patience was required in an extremely odd situation in which the oddest question of all was why Jacques Necker, one of the busiest of men, who ran an enormously complicated group of companies and ordinarily delegated authority in a masterful manner, should have concerned himself for more than a passing minute in this relatively unimportant decision about the models for Lombardi’s spring collection. Why had he himself developed the initial idea of using untested models, for all the world as if he were a bright young publicity attaché? And why was he now asking her so eagerly about routin
e negotiations with such tense interest?

  In addition to the mystery of these questions, Gabrielle d’Angelle considered that she herself had reached far too high a level within GN to have been asked to go to New York on this matter. Any stylist from one of the couture houses could have accomplished it.

  In the twenty years Gabrielle d’Angelle had worked for GN, rising steadily from the typing pool to the job she held now as chief administrative assistant to Necker himself, she’d advanced herself with intelligence, shrewdness and sheer hard work. At forty she had achieved a consummate polish, the impeccably finished and flawlessly groomed freshness of a woman without family responsibilities to occupy her, a woman who is highly paid and has access to the best craftspeople of Paris. Yet, as Gabrielle d’Angelle glanced at herself in the mirror, smoothing her casque of shining dark hair that was cut to the perfect length for the shape of her face, approving of the cut of her new grey suit, she felt no satisfaction at her faultless image. The Lombardi contest left her feeling powerless, because she didn’t know what it was really about. And the one rule that dominated her still unsatisfied ambition was that knowledge was power.

  As soon as he was alone, Necker jumped up and walked over to the bank of windows on the top floor of the imposing GN building on the west side of the Avenue Montaigne. He gazed at the sky on this unusually clear January day and wondered how he could possibly contain his excitement. As he looked down it seemed to him that trumpets must be blowing, that flags must be flying from every building, that the branches of the bare trees that lined the avenue must now be laden with the white torches of chestnut blossoms that mean spring to Parisians.

  On the left he could see all the way to the tree-encircled Rond-Point of the Champs-Elysées, and on the right, only blocks away, the waters of the Seine below the Place de l’Alma flowed swiftly, reflecting the gaiety and brilliance of the sky. Directly across were the fantastic turn-of-the-century glass and iron domes of the Grand Palais and the Petit Palais, and beyond them the view stretched past the gardens of the Tuileries to the Louvre itself.