Career Girls (25 page)

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The rivalry escalated with Joe Hunter on Oprah.

‘But why do you guys get such adulation from some of

the press, and yet other magazines are …’

She held up a copy of White Light, the cover plastered

with a shot of Mark Thomas taken during some gig, in motion. His mouth was open and his eyes were shut in a pose that made him look like a moron. The strapline was WORST BAND IN THE WORLD.)

The audience laughed. Oprah held the magazine between

thumb and forefinger, as if it were a piece of trash, the wry expression on her face making her distaste clear.

‘Oh, it don’t bother us,’ Joe answered firmly, the

northern accent making some women on the audience visibly squirm on their seats in delight. ‘We don’t care about the press, we only care about the fans. We’ve just hit number one in America with our first single and we’re on tour with bloody Guns n’ Roses. White Light can go … stuffthemselves,’ he finished carefully, remembering just in time that they were on coast-to-coast TV.

The host smiled, charmed by the singer’s forthright speaking. In an age where most rock stars’ hairdressers had publicity agents, and said exactly what they were told, Atomic Mass obviously couldn’t care less. The smoked, they drank, they ate red meat, they screwed a lot of girls and they said things like’ White Light can go stuffthemselves’ on primetimc shows.

They were likable. They were dangerous. They meant ratings.

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‘Fair enough,’ she said. ‘And you have no idea why opinion on you is so split?’

Joe gestured to the magazine she was holding. ‘With that one there I do,’ he said. ‘That article was written by Josie Simons. She writes in-house on music for American Magazines, and her boss is a girl called Topaz Rossi, who’s an old rival of our A & R girl, Rowena Gordon-the woman who gave us a record deal. Rowena’s working in New York now, and Topaz Rossi is determined to give her a really hard time. So she gets at us. There’s hardly been one article published by magazines in that company that don’t slag us off. So we ignore it.’

‘Are you sure?’ Oprah asked, scenting something interesting. Like a high-profile libel case, for a start.

Joe shrugged. ‘Barbara Lincoln, our manager, went through all the American Magazines articles with us. They’re all the same. Maybe it’s coincidence, but I don’t think so.’ o

‘And how do you feel about that?’

Hunter leant forward and looked straight into the camera, his brown eyes angry. He knew this girl Rossi would be watching.

‘It’s what you expect, right?’ he replied. ‘Rowena Gordon’s a doer. Rowena participates, and Topaz commentates. It don’t mean nothing to Atomic Mass.’

With her perfect sense of timing, Oprah let the tension hang in the air for just long enough. Then she waded in to break it up.

‘A female talent scout, a female manager-we don’t think of Atomic Mass as exactly leading the feminist charge,’ she remarked to loud laughter. The firs’t albu.m wasn’t even out yet, and already the stories of what they got up to on the road were being printed in the National Enquirer. ‘Do you like working with women?’

Joe gave the camera a wink.

‘We like doing everything with women,’ he replied.

‘It reflects badly on the company,’ Matt Gowers said. ‘I take “

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on board what you’re saying, Topaz-and we all know your work on Girlfriend is terrific and your journalistic contributions to US Woman are invaluable.’

Joe Goldstein kept his face impassive as he watched Rossi burning up with humiliation. She was obviously itching to defend herself, but he’d noticed Nathan Rosen kick her under the table, and she was now biting her lips in order to force herself to keep quiet.

‘And we couldn’t be happier with the way Economic Monthly is selling,’ Gowers added.

For once, the reference to his recent defeat didn’t hit Joe in the solar plexus. No, it was Rossi’s turn to try to hold her head up in front of her colleagues. Don’t smile, don’t smile, don’t smile, thought Joe. Topaz had gloated when she surprised everybody by beating him out of the new glossy. She’d lost a lot of friends that way.

He glanced round the editors’ meeting. A number of them were looking down and smirking. This was the first

real setback Topaz had had since she joined the company, and many of them weren’t sorry. The girl had started to act

like she was the Queen of Sheba. Like she was invincible.

,

Well, that longhaired English boy had had other ideas.

Not that this was a threat to Topaz’s career, as the

chairman was making clear. But it was her first fuck-up. Rap-on-the-knuckles time.

Joe Goldstein was enjoying himself.

‘But even if, as you say, you didn’t bring pressure to bear onJosie or Tiz or Jason, Topaz, it looks bad. Our lawyers have told us we’d have a tough time bringing a case. So unless there’s a real story, lay offthis band, OK?’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Topaz, ashamed and enraged. The fact that Gowers was obviously right only made it worse. She could feel the eyes of her co-workers crawling over her skin.

Topaz glanced at Joe Goldstein, who wasn’t looking at her. Apparently he was fascinated by the meeting agenda. She knew that it was an act, he was faking it to be polite.

Self-righteous jerk! she thought.

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Rowena Gordon watched the sun sinking over Central Park from her luxurious apartment window, and felt her heart sinking with it. Another night of futile talent-hunting. Another night when she didn’t want the acts that were prepared to sign with Luther Records, and the ones she did want wouldn’t sign.

She pulled on her clothes. Tailored black slacks by Ralph Lauren. Long-sleeved Soundgarden shirt. Ankleboots by Manolo Blahnik.

That day at work, the Luther offices had been almost silent. Lucy, her secretary, had taken exactly four calls; three of them from Josh Oberman about work on the new Roxana Perdita record back home-Jack Reich was supervising her career now, but Rowena liked to keep in touch with her other two acts-and one from Matthew Stevenson, sneeringly asking when they might see a New York band in exchange for their investment. He’d pretended it was a joke, but Rowena-knew better.

It wasn’t like she was in danger of getting fired. As long as Roxana, Bitter Spice and of course Atomic Mass kept selling records, she was safe. Even without the protection of Joshua Oberman and Michael Krebs.

But there was a timebomb under her, and she knew it. Oberman had been given leave to develop an American operation over the objections of other board members, and there was a time limit on her bringing home some bacon. Three months. After that, they’d close the American company and bring her back to run Atomic’s career in Europe.

She was one month down.

Rowena walked into the bedroom to grab her bag, and was greeted with the sight of her rumpl6d bed, the Irish linen sheets tumbled from her sex with Michael Krebs that afternoon. A mixed-up pang of lust and longing ran through her, and she buried her face in the bedclothes, drinking in the scent of him. She felt like crying. Michael had been so detached this afternoon, so cold. When he was dressed, he’d turned to her and said, ‘Fmjust gonna call my

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wife and then I’m gonna get back to the studio,’ and when he’d seen her stricken expression, Krebs had added, annoyed, ‘Come on, Rowena. I’m not rubbing it in your face. We’re friends and that’s it.’

She could still feel the inexpressible chill that had run through her. My wife. My sons. My family, which is a tight little club from which you are excluded.

And even worse, the subtext. I love my wife. I don’t love you. I’ll never love you.

Why was he so bloody honest about it? Rowena thought bitterly. At least if he lied, she could hate him. She could blame him. She could say she was tricked, deceived like all the other mistresses from time immemorial with promises that he loved her, he’d leave his wife for her. But Michael Krebs was a stand-up guy. He followed his own rules and he wouldn’t lie to her. In fact, he preferred almost anything to discussing their relationship.

‘Let’s talk about us,’ Rowena would say. If she was feeling brave.

‘Us? There is no us,’ Michael would answer with displeasure. ‘We’re friends. I’ve said it before.’

‘ ‘I try to measure what I do by whether you would do it,’ Rowena said to him, as they stood together in a private box at Madison Square Gardens, waiting for Atomic Mass to come on and play their support set.

Michael gave her an affectionate smile. ‘Except that you should try to be the most moral and ethical person you can be.’

She felt a great sense of distress. ‘But Michael, you are,

totally moral and ethical,’ she sid.

‘Except in one respect.’

‘That’s my fault,’ Rowena said.

‘No, it’s my fault,’ he replied, also sadly.

She hated to hear him say he felt guilty, when guilt was eating her alive. She hated to think of herself as a mistress, but was furious when he refused even to call her that. She could see, quite clearly, as though she were watching someone else, how hopeless and destructive this affair was

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for both of them, but especially her. After all, Michael wasn’t in love.

Rowena Gordon had decided - a cold, academic, intelligent decision-that she was not going to end up like all those other women. Abandoned by a lover who ran back to his wife, frozen out of the society of mutual friends, begging the guy to call her again. She’d seen it happen to girlfriends of the band. All of a sudden you were out of the charmed circle, doors shut, access revoked. Well, she was a career girl, even if her progress was a little slow right now. She was young, beautiful, well-bred and self-reliant. She wasn’t about to immolate herself on the altar of a married man twice her age - even if he was a musical genius, frighteningly intelligent, ferociously intelligent, devastatingly handsome, one of her all-time heroes, spectacular in bed.., oh, Christ Almighty. Oh, dear God, Rowena thought, forcing herself to pull her face out of the sheets. She’d have to tell him to get lost. At least as far as sex went.

But in her heart she knew they were empty words. Rowena was so in love with Michael Krebs she couldn’t see straight.

‘Come on,’ she said aloud. ‘Let’s go to work.’

The Girlfriend offices were busy as hell. Phones were ringing off the hook, the staff writers were yelling at each other, teen models in Gap outfits traipsed round the desks, waiting for Sasha Stone or Alex Waters to call them into the photo room for that week’s fashion layout. In one corner, the sales and advertising team were busiest of all, sitting in almost permanent crouches over their desks, either dealing with desperate make-up companies, fighting over the. last square inches of ad space, or logging yet more” orders from new retailers, mom-and-pop stores outside the national loop.

Success, success, success. It was only the editor’s insistence that stopped them from doubling the thickness of each issue with glossy ads, or raising the cover price by ten cents. Topaz let nothing interfere with the magazine itself. Girlfriend was a sensation, and she planned on keeping ‘

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it that way.

‘Where’s the editor? I need to speak to the editor,’ a stylist begged Tiz Correy, the talented twenty-year-old features editor.

Topaz had hired her own crew, and she’d hired carefully: young, gifted kids barely older than their target readers. The strategy had proved brilliant, and Rossi had repeated it over at Economic Monthly, where the most media-friendly Harvard experts had columns next to guest industrialists, powerful figures who wrote every month on their personal rules for profitability - Ross Perot, Rupert Murdoch, Michael Eisner. With both her titles, Topaz followed her gut instincts. With both of them, she followed what she thought was a fundamental trait in the American psyche the need to hero-worship. For teenage girls, that meant Madonna. For businessmen, that meant Bill Gates. But the rule was the same.

‘American Magazines’ new flagship comes across as Vanity Fair meets The Economist,’ sneered the Wall Street Journal, but as far as Topaz was concerned, the only good title was one that sold.

, Economic Monthly was selling.

‘The boss is busy,’ Tiz shrugged, gesturing to the editor’s office, the door of which was firmly shut. Even over the din of the offices, the sound of raised voices - a man’s and a woman’s - could be heard.

‘But Sasha won’t let me dress Jolene in her JeanPaul Gaultier jacket. And it would look divine,’ the little man pouted. ‘Who’s she talking to, anyway?’

‘Mr Rosen. He’s a director of the board,’ Tiz answered firmly, hoping to shut him up. ‘And Jolene will wear the

PaulGap likeGaultier.,everyone else. Girlfriend readers can’t afford Jean

‘How could you not let me know? I am so goddamn emlarrassed!’ Nathan shouted. ‘White Light. Westside. Fucking Girlfriend magazine. Article after article on this goddamn band! We look so stupid, Topaz! And I get it

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shoved in my face on fucking Oprah!’

‘I didn’t write them all,’ Topaz said sullenly. Couldn’t he give it a break? She’d had the lecture this morning.

‘Yeah, but you let your feelings be known to the people whose pay cheques you sign. In no uncertain terms. Am I right?’ demanded Nathan, stalking round her office. The blue vein at the side of his grey temple was pulsing, and he looked awkward in the tailored suit.

‘Can’t we talk about it later?’ Topaz asked.

Rosen felt anger rise up in his throat, half choking him. He felt so stressed-out, his blood pressure must be off the scale. First that damn Oprah show airs yesterday, and no one has the guts to mention it to him because the girl he’s living with is the one being criticized. Then Topaz and he had a fight last night because she wanted to make love again, and he didn’t. Who did she think he was? Superman? And to cap it all, Matt Gowers had called him into his office this morning anet fucking carpeted him.