Spring Collection Read online

  Why do I get outraged by Paul Mitchell, who’s only trying to make a buck selling salon treatments like something called “The Detangler”—hey, Paulie, ever hear of a comb?—when I can smile indulgently at Helmut Newton’s brilliant excursions into not-so-soft porn with overexcited Dobermans slobbering over girls in Chanel?

  Once a month I claim the prerogative of leafing through all the new magazines, domestic and foreign—would you believe that the new Italian Vogue costs thirty-three dollars by the time it gets here?—and pulling out every picture I can find of our girls who are working in Europe. Any booker could do that job of course, but it keeps me abreast of the competition and the new directions of European hairstylists and makeup artists, who are so much more daring than those in New York.

  Invariably, that day I have one of my Paul Mitchell attacks. Because of a set of circumstances I’ll tell you about later, no model has ever made me feel inadequate, but even a single Paul Mitchell ad will set me off. I can’t stop myself from going home and checking out my own bunch of hair to find out if it’s anywhere close to being free-flowing like the sea. I’ll say this much for it, it’s long, right to my waist. It’s an acceptable medium brown with a bit of red in it if you look closely—no, I see no sparkling diamond-like evidence of “vibrant”—but it performs the task I demand of it which is to cover my head and serve as an homage to my lost art. I haven’t called upon the “elements of our Earth” to care for it. Baby shampoo seems to do the trick.

  I don’t spend a whole lot of time in front of the mirror after I’ve confirmed that I still don’t have Paul Mitchell hair. I don’t need a mirror to know that I’ve got my father’s nose, indisputably Italian, the most prominent feature in my face, slender, high, arched, definitely aristocratic in the European way. It’s a Real Honest to God NOSE, almost a Sophia Loren nose—Paul Mitchell’s copywriter would have to give it at least that. I have my mother’s brown eyes, a whole hell of a lot more vibrant and dancing than my hair.

  But the big Paul Mitchell question, does this face “live in Harmony with light”—Paulie, kiddo, we don’t usually capitalize the word “harmony”—there you’ve got me. How the hell do I know? It’s bathroom light I’m looking at myself in, not outdoor light, and harmony is such a neutral word. It’s certainly not one I’ve heard used about me. “Check out Frankie, man, there’s one harmonious chick.” Nah, never, not even once.

  Women who aren’t in the beautiful girl business often ask me, ever so subtly, if I don’t get “depressed” being surrounded by models so much of the time. They don’t mean it as an insult but as a reflection of the way they imagine they’d feel if they had my job. The fact is that my formative years, my dancing years, from six to twenty, have given me a crossover understanding of models that almost no woman can be expected to have. As a dancer I too, like any successful model, had aced all the tests without studying. I too was born genetically designed to perfection. Oh, lordy, I remember all too well how it felt to possess all the right stuff without having worked for it.

  When I was seventeen, during my senior year in high school, I was accepted at the Juilliard Dance Department. I was one of a class of less than a hundred students, selected from the thousands of would-be applicants from all over the country who wanted to go to Juilliard. In my evaluation I was told that my body type was the ideal for a modern dancer: extra-long arms and legs, a natural turn-out, an unusually supple back and tremendous flexibility in my joints. I also had a dancer’s ideal eyes, wide-set and extra large, important for the communication of emotion. Call me immodest, but during my dancing years, particularly during my three years at Juilliard, I was high as a kite on unearned pride.

  So, no, the answer to how I feel about models is that I realize deep in my very own, splendid Severino bones and ligaments that it is an utterly innocent stroke of luck when any girl is born having hit the particular genetic jackpot she needs for her work. I know that models are not responsible for creating a single one of the intricate and magical connections of their features.

  I have a theory that when every girl child is born, a multitude of fairies gather around her crib, the fairies in charge of distributing perfect skin and great legs, the fairies who hand out symmetrical noses and full lips, the fairy of wide eyes, the fairies of chinlines, of cheekbones, of beautiful hands and long waists. Every once in a great while, one time in tens of millions, every last one of the fairies—with the frequent exception of the tooth fairy—will decide to bestow her particular gift on just one baby and of those few babies, some will grow up healthy in the Western world, and of these little females, some will become models. It’s not abnormal that this happens, it’s just the random way nature, and fairies, work.

  I equate any model’s looks as no more unfair a blessing than my truly great feet. I have the most remarkable, long and lovely feet, thin feet, strong feet, with a perfect arch and magnificent toes. Important toes. Even the pinkie toes stretch straight in line with the others. I’m not quite five-feet-seven and my feet are a wondrous size ten! If it hadn’t been for my accident, those feet might well have been my launching pad to dance stardom.

  I hadn’t grown into all this, of course, when I was six and started studying dance with Marjorie Mazia, who had a studio out in Sheepshead Bay, not even a mile from where I lived with my parents in Brooklyn.

  Marjorie had been a great Martha Graham star in her day—her husband was Woody Guthrie, an oddball fact that always thrilled me—and I studied with her for eight exciting, dedicated years. I was so skinny that most of my classmates made fun of me, but I knew that for a dancer skinny was good, so I held my big nose high, trod proudly on my big feet, and ignored them.

  During high school I went to the Martha Graham School in Manhattan, taking the subway into the city after school and doing my homework on the way. It was Marjorie Mazia who encouraged me to continue my education at Juilliard after I graduated from Abraham Lincoln, the best arts-oriented public high in Brooklyn.

  I waved off the flight attendant offering more champagne and wondered if everyone is like me about plane trips. I always find myself evaluating my life on any flight that lasts over an hour. Perhaps it’s because of the slight undercurrent of risk that even good fliers can’t totally forget, but as the feeling of a long plane flight took hold I started to think how lucky I’ve been with most things in life, starting with my beloved parents whose only fault was the name they tried to stick on me. Francesca Maria, the name with which I was baptized, always irked me because it sounded meek, dutiful and semi-saintly, all wrong for a Catholic who lapsed so young that I never made it to my first communion.

  On the first day of freshman year at Lincoln I told everyone my name was Frankie. I took a lot of kidding about it, but it stuck. My parents weren’t thrilled by this information, but, as usual, they ended up thinking everything I did was marvelous. I was their only child, conceived after their twentieth anniversary when they’d given up hope. Ma was forty and Dad was fifty when I was born, so naturally I was brought up like a future Dalai Lama. My folks both died five years ago, in a car accident on the Amalfi drive. The only thing merciful about it was that they were together.

  I still live in the six-room co-op they owned in a nice apartment house on Brighton Beach, overlooking the boardwalk just before it turns into Coney Island. It’s on the ninth floor, with an endless view of the ocean. There’s a balcony big enough for beach chairs and at night, when I sit out there and listen to the waves crashing below, with the gulls sweeping above my head, the smell of the ocean fresh in my face and the stars above, I can easily believe I’m on my own yacht. Justine considers it a scandal that I’m still living in Brooklyn. She believes I’d be better off in a tiny, overpriced, chic little place in Manhattan, because she refuses to understand what a great neighborhood this is.

  My parents were passionate beach people and they turned their back on Avenue X, the Italian neighborhood nearby, to settle here, where you can take the elevator straight down to the lobby and
find yourself a hundred feet from Bay Six, the name for the part of the beach opposite our house. Jetties break the surf so the swimming is fine and the sand is white powder that never sticks to your skin. What can the East 70s offer to compare to my place?

  When I was growing up this was an almost totally Jewish neighborhood, and since my father didn’t think the nearest Catholic school was challenging enough for his dancing darling, he sent me to Lincoln, where I was sometimes the only kid in class on Jewish holidays. My one intensely serious crush in high school was on a Jewish guy, but when I got married, the single biggest mistake of my life, it was to a Catholic, and a moody Irishman at that.

  You know how you grow up realizing, without being told, that the world is full of males you must never take seriously? Males who should only be let out in public with “not even once” tattooed on their foreheads? Why is it that you can sniff out the wrong guy any one of your friends is dating and yet fail utterly to recognize your particular doom when he comes along?

  Mine was named Slim Kelly. He was, and is, a very good sportswriter for the Daily News, and the last time I saw him he looked like a young Pat Riley: intense, poetic, powerful. Face it, I didn’t have a chance. Slim was intoxicating until about six months after we got married, when his moods began to get to me. Three years later, when we got divorced, we were both so tired out by the effort to stay together that the only thing we argued over was the custody of Big Ed, our favorite neighborhood bar. We tossed a coin and I won. Since then, almost a year ago, I’ve been living, by choice I assure you, in a state of chastity, abstinence or celibacy, whichever term turns you on.

  I’m off men, all men.

  But with custody of Big Ed, who needs them? My social life is provided for—which really drives Justine up the wall. She knows that Big Ed is my version of Cheers and she foresees a future in which I become an unmarried fixture there.

  The thing that makes Big Ed indisputably the best sports bar in Brooklyn is Mrs. Ed’s Happy Hour food, a full Mexican buffet, platters of barbecued baby back ribs and, best of all, Buffalo wings, those delicate deep-fried chicken wings, so spicy that you have to dip them liberally in the blue cheese and sour cream sauce to calm them down enough to eat them. Justine points out that Buffalo wings have put at least six pounds on me since my divorce but I informed her that if you’re going to be celibate, you’d better have a substitute or you’ll turn nasty. Sometimes she has a tendency to treat me as if I were one of our models on whom six extra pounds could be a court-martial offense.

  I wish my mind hadn’t drifted to Buffalo wings: as usual, even in first class, it took forever before they stopped pouring drinks and served lunch.

  Now I feel better, after two portions of foie gras and two helpings of caviar, not just my own, but Maude Callender’s as well.

  Maude, who plunked herself down beside me at takeoff—our little Paris-bound band has the first-class cabin to itself—is generous with anything fattening because she’s on a lifetime deprivation diet so that she’ll never expand by a quarter inch. That’s just as well when you consider she always dresses as an Edwardian dandy in custom-made costumes too special to be called clothes. She wears pants made of fine, English wool, as skintight as if she were Beau Brummell; frock coats; elaborate vests; ruffled shirts; and what I imagine would be called a four-in-hand. She’s Oscar Wilde revisited, but at least she never has to wonder what to wear. Actually it’s a damn clever idea for anyone with her great legs and the nerve to carry off the burden of becoming a professional personality. Maude has nerve enough to be a multiple personality and still have something left over for the weekends.

  Maude became a member of our group when Maxi Amberville, the publisher of Zing, the fashion magazine that is doing almost as well as Vogue these days, got so interested in the Lombardi model contest that she decided to do a major cover story on us. The piece was assigned to Maude, who writes regularly for Zing, and Mike Aaron, the magazine’s top photographer, who’s with us too. Their brief is to create a version of Innocents Abroad. The piece will cover every move we make from the minute we left New York until the show is over and the winner is chosen.

  Justine had agreed to a hurried setup of this wall-to-wall coverage because she and Maxi are such close friends that she couldn’t refuse. However, much as I too love Maxi, it’s becoming uncomfortably plain that Maude is sitting next to me, when she could have a row all to herself, in order to grill me during the flight. As I was waiting for the main course she started in with an ever-so-casual question: how do models stay so thin? Oh, the ones who don’t have bulimia or anorexia all live on cocaine and speed, I was tempted to tell her. And of course they smoke at least five packs a day.

  The fact is that there always are some girls on drugs and there always will be. If it’s a serious problem they ruin their health and eventually their looks. On their way to this inevitable destination, they become difficult to work with; arrive late for jobs; say nasty things to the other girls; turn uncooperative with the photographers, and within months, sometimes years, depending on how much dope they’re doing, their bookings taper off, no matter how beautiful they are.

  As for the top girls—the so-called supermodels or megamodels, or maybe we should all fall down and worship and call them Deities—they’re deeply into serious upkeep and fitness, for their careers depend entirely on their staying on top of their game. I’ve never known one who didn’t have a personal trainer; almost every one of them wore braces for years—because of that hard-to-please tooth fairy, perfect teeth aren’t automatically included in genetic luck—and calls her mother once a day. And, for what it’s worth, they each own a minimum of a half dozen leather jackets, too many jeans to count and an average of seventy of those Azzedine Alaïa “band-Aid” bandage dresses that all look more or less the same to me.

  The part about calling home has always puzzled me a bit—how can there be so many good daughters?—but I assume it’s because they’re so young.

  In the last three days, since we heard from d’Angelle, I’d often wondered who at GN had chosen April Nyquist, Jordan Dancer and Tinker Osborn out of the twenty head shots Justine sent. Was it Jacques Necker himself, or Marco Lombardi, or Gabrielle or even someone we don’t know? Whoever it was had picked our three tallest girls; Tinker and Jordan are both five feet, eleven inches, and April’s half an inch taller than either of them, just under six feet. What’s more, they seemed to have been chosen for contrast, like a Clairol ad, April the blond Viking, Jordan the dark-haired “woman of color” and Tinker the redhead. In any case, new though they may all be, each of our girls is still gorgeous enough to hold her own physically on any runway Paris has to offer.

  After all, any busy New York agency sees about seven thousand girls a year, of whom some thirty are picked to go through a training and grooming process. At the end of that time, only four or five of them are finally signed to a contract, and the vast majority of those girls will never become stars. Even among the stars, only five, right now, are internationally famous and still at their peak: Claudia, Linda, Kate, Naomi and Christy. And I’m far from sure that everybody knows Christy’s last name is Turlington. Go know! It’s all such a crapshoot.

  Take April Nyquist, for example, sitting across the aisle. She comes from Minneapolis, the natural-blond capital of the United States. There are people who might ask, “Why April, out of all the blonds in Minneapolis?” For one thing, the Scandinavian gene pool, undiluted for tens of thousands of breeding years, that went into producing April’s treasure of buttercup yellow hair, would make Paul Mitchell cry with joy. In addition April seems to breathe air that is fresher than the air available to the rest of us, and her classically perfect features are relieved only by an unexpectedly endearing, ever-so-slightly crooked smile that makes her look even younger than her nineteen years.

  April’s been working from the first day she left the training program, although not nearly as much as Justine and I would have liked, because April’s type is deeply regal and
regal is always a hard sell to advertisers.

  “What sort of living arrangements do most models have?” Maude asked me in her low, confidential voice, as if she were telling me a secret instead of trying to find out to what degree they were sluts.

  “As far as I know, they live alone in New York or they live with their boyfriends, about fifty-fifty,” I answered. “And a few of them live with a roommate.” I didn’t like being treated as the statistical expert on models’ behavior, but I’d been in the business long enough to know what I was talking about, and better that Maude got it from me than from somebody else.

  The flight attendant arrived with lobster, carefully removed from its shell. I looked at Maude expectantly but apparently lobster was okay on her diet. I addressed mine with concentration, after observing Jordan Dancer, who was sitting next to April, wave hers away with an imperious gesture and unwrap the container of health food she’d brought on board.

  Jordan, when she’s serious, calls herself “black,” although one day when we were horsing around, she informed me that her skin was the subtle honey-brown color of a young alder tree when the sunlight hits it. I told her that I doubted she’d ever spent a night in a forest and I thought her skin was more the color of an herb tea I favor called Autumn Garden with milk and sugar added, but I wasn’t about to bicker about technicalities.