Fairy Tale Interrupted (9 page)

“It’s awesome. Congratulations,” I said. Before I walked out of his office, I turned and added, “By the way, you aren’t signing any of these. Because if you sign one, you’ll have to sign thousands.”

John just laughed and said, “You’re right. New company policy.”

When I returned to my desk, there was a message from Carolyn Bessette, the woman John had been dating for several months. I immediately called her back.

“Hi, honey, what’s going on over there?” she asked. The two of us had quickly developed a friendly rapport in the time I had been working for John. We talked almost every day, first brief conversations when she called for John, then longer gossip sessions when she called for me.

“Did John apologize?” Carolyn asked.

“Yeah, he did. How did you know?”

“He came home last night a nervous wreck and told me the whole story,” she said. “I said to him that I couldn’t believe he showed all those other losers the magazine first and left you sitting outside like the redheaded stepchild. I told him, ‘Oh no. You need to go in and apologize to her in the morning. That was really gross.’”

Carolyn came to my defense by making John feel like shit
about what he’d done, which was so typical of her. She always protected me, although at our initial meeting I never would have guessed that would be the case.

When she first walked into the offices of Random Ventures about a month after its formation, she was exactly the kind of girl I imagined would date someone like John—and she intimidated the hell out of me. Wearing a Calvin Klein pencil skirt, a white T-shirt, stiletto heels, and blue nail polish, she looked like a model, effortlessly perfect in an unstudied yet elegant outfit.

Carolyn and John had dated briefly in 1993 and reunited in 1994, a few months after his mom passed away. When John introduced us, I felt like I’d gained ten pounds and shrunk three inches. But after he left her in the reception area to deal with something in Michael’s office, I could tell Carolyn was different from the typical gorgeous girls you see around Manhattan. Women who have attitude always stand in a pose, like they’re trying to be sexy and intimidating, even if they’re in line at the supermarket. Carolyn’s easy posture said it all: standing with her legs crossed, she held her small, black patent-leather Prada purse behind her back with one hand, while absentmindedly twisting a lock of hair with the other. She wasn’t trying too hard. In fact, she wasn’t trying at all.

The phone kept ringing as Carolyn and I tried to make small talk. Finally she said, “Does it ring like this all the time?”

I nodded.

“You poor thing.”

I smiled, pressing a button on the phone. “Random Ventures,” I said as I answered another call.

“Hi, is this John Kennedy’s office?” a woman asked.

“May I ask who’s calling?” I said.

“Where are you located?” the caller asked.

“Is there something I can help you with?”

“Does he come into the office every day?”

The caller was trying to get way too much information. I wanted to end the conversation without being rude, and I had to think fast. It didn’t help having Carolyn about two feet away. “John Kennedy?” I said. “Oh, I’ve never even met him. I
wish
he came here every day, miss. But this is an answering service. We just dispatch calls and take messages. So if you want to leave a message, I can take it down and get it to the right person.”

“No, that’s okay. Thanks,” the woman said, and then hung up.

“Wow, you’re good,” Carolyn said.

John, having returned to the reception area, found us laughing.

“What are you two cackling about?” he asked.

We looked up at him like two kids caught in the act.

“Nothing,” Carolyn said.

John and I didn’t talk about his personal life when I first began working for him. He was a typical guy with no desire to hash out with me the intimate details or thoughts about his dates. However, I knew Carolyn was becoming an important part of his life because whenever she phoned the office, he always took the call. The only other person he did that with was his sister.

From the beginning of their relationship, it was obvious they were at ease around each other, the way friends are. Once we moved to Hachette in February 1995, Carolyn would come into the office and sit at John’s desk, making phone calls as
if it were her own. Or she would go directly to see Matt Berman, whom she loved, and hang out with him for a while before she even said hello to John. She didn’t feel the need to run in to her boyfriend and announce herself. Carolyn wasn’t John’s shadow; she was his equal. He would ask her, a fashion insider who worked for Calvin Klein, about cover choices or get her advice on approaching designers and advertisers.

From my point of view, John was happier when Carolyn was around. And Carolyn, like any smart woman, had a way of making John pay attention to things he didn’t necessarily want to even think about. She got him to differentiate between the people taking advantage of his generosity and those who needed a little extra attention from him. With those two circumstances alone, Carolyn made my life much easier.

Carolyn always made me feel attractive and smart. And according to her, there was no better self-esteem booster than great fashion. “Nothing feels better than new clothes,” she’d say. “That and vodka are your new best friends.”

Carolyn had the best taste, so when she suggested a shopping trip—with her acting as my personal stylist—I was beyond excited. But I was also a little nervous. I pictured huge price tags and tiny sizes: way out of my league.

So when John said he needed me in the office around noon on the Saturday of our shopping expedition, I was relieved. But when I called Carolyn to relay the news, I couldn’t talk her out of our plan.

“No problem,” she said. “The stores open at ten o’clock. We have plenty of time. Just meet me,” she said. “We’ll shop for an hour, max. We need to get you a few good jackets and skirts.”

When we arrived at Barneys, I was immediately overwhelmed by all the beautiful things. Carolyn knew exactly where to find outfits that worked for me, and she knew precisely what to pick out.

“Try this on, Rosie,” she said, grinning, as she held up an eight-hundred-dollar Ann Demeulemeester leather skirt.

She had found the perfect piece for me—the gorgeous, very expensive version of me. I immediately launched into the kind of fantasies that amazing clothes induce: I could wear it with combat boots for a romantic date or with a blazer to a high-powered work meeting. But instead of grabbing the skirt out of her hands, I said, “I don’t want to try it on.”

Even though I was a size four from all the cigarettes I’d smoked and all the lunches I’d skipped, I was convinced there was no way I could wiggle into that slim leather skirt, and I didn’t want to put myself through the embarrassment of having to try a bigger size. It wasn’t just my size that bothered me; it was everything about my looks.

For as long as I could remember, I felt ugly. When I was a child, my aunt Rita (who wasn’t actually my mom’s sister but, rather, her best friend from the moment she moved in three houses down from ours) used to tell the same story about my birth at every holiday or family gathering: After first seeing me as a newborn in the hospital, Rita had such an expression of pity and disappointment on her face that the horrified nurse asked, “What’s wrong?”—to which Rita replied, “She looks like her mother!”

She’d deliver the punch line to big laughs—every time. So the gag continued for years. I wanted to crawl under the table but instead laughed along with everyone else so as not to draw any
more attention to the joke. (And my family always wondered why I never brought guys home for them to meet.)

My mom had her own riff on the same theme. Whenever someone said, “Marion, RoseMarie looks just like you,” her response was always, “I know, the poor kid.” Along with her looks, I also inherited her penchant for sarcasm. From the moment I became a teenager, I followed in my mom’s footsteps, keeping my guard up with jokes at my own expense that masked any insecurities or yearnings.

It took me a long time—and some geographic distance from the Bronx—to realize that my mom was actually pretty. She had a great smile and a quick-witted sense of humor (she also had great boobs and great legs). But she lacked confidence in her femininity, and obscured her best features: chopping off her beautiful, thick, dark hair with the excuse that she didn’t have time to waste worrying about it.

Unsurprisingly, self-deprecation came naturally to me, but Carolyn was the one person who wouldn’t stand for it. Whenever I put myself down with a wisecrack about my appearance—such as, “I’m funnier than you because I look like
me,
and you look like
you
”—she reacted as though I had personally offended her. “Don’t you dare say that,” she would admonish. “You’re beautiful and have the kind of body that boys love. You’re so sexy, Rosie, and you don’t even know it.”

That tiny leather skirt from Barneys, Carolyn knew, would give me a boost of confidence.

“Try it on!” she said.

The next thing I knew, I was on my way to the cash register with the skirt, which fit like a glove, and—at Carolyn’s insistence—“a shirt that goes with the skirt but doesn’t match,
a jacket that kind of matches, and pants to go with the jacket.”

Headed to the cashier with thousands of dollars’ worth of merchandise, I woke up from the whirlwind of playing dress-up and realized I couldn’t afford any of it. “You know what, Carolyn? I’m just going to take the shirt,” I said, trying not to be obvious while picking the least expensive thing in the pile. “I don’t need the rest of it.”

“No,” she said firmly, and handed her credit card to the salesperson. “We’re going to take all of it.”

Carolyn understood how lucky she was to be able to afford beautiful clothes, and she wanted to share the wealth with those she cared about. I loved the clothes and her generosity, even if I was uncomfortable with the extravagance of the gesture.

After she reluctantly agreed to put back two of the items, I looked at my watch and quickly found something much worse to be upset about than the pile of money she had just spent on me. It was nearly one o’clock. I was an hour late for work! That was something I had nightmares about, not something I did in real life.

Carolyn tried to calm me down as I spiraled into total panic.

“I’ll call John later and tell him we went shopping,” she said. “It’ll be fine.”

Fine?
In my world, being late to work was about as fine as showing up naked. I decided not to waste time finding a working pay phone to call and say I’d be late. What would my excuse be, anyway?
Sorry I couldn’t show up for work on time, John. I was busy. Your girlfriend was just buying me a new wardrobe.
Instead, I dove into a cab and proceeded to lose my mind.

As I walked past reception, a sweaty mess, John was standing in the hallway talking to an editor.

“Well, look who decided to grace us with her presence,” he said.

“I’m sorry.”

“Apparently not sorry enough to show up on time.”

John was pissed at me all day. But for once, I didn’t beat myself up. I’d had the best time with Carolyn—and not just because she bought me the most beautiful clothes I’d ever seen. The shopping trip, which marked Carolyn’s officially becoming my style fairy godmother, was her way of contributing to my success.

Confident in my abilities from the get-go, she wanted me to be respected in the role of John’s assistant. She understood that if I wanted to get respect, I had to look the part. People
do
judge a book by its cover, especially in an industry as superficial as the media. She wanted others to see in me what she saw.

Within the first year of our friendship, I went through a complete style transformation under Carolyn’s enthusiastic guidance. She didn’t introduce me to fashion, but previously I had conflated trend with style (probably due to the influence of my sister Andrea, who was named “best dressed” in high school, having spent her entire paycheck from her cashier’s job at Gristedes buying the latest looks from Bloomingdale’s). Carolyn proved that I didn’t have to look obvious to be sexy and that I could wear classic styles but make them my own.

As Carolyn had expected, my new clothes changed how people perceived me. Even John took note. A week after the shopping spree that landed me on his shit list, I got up the courage to wear one of my new outfits to the office.

“Whoa, Rosie,” he said. “You look nice. Where are you going all dressed up? It certainly can’t be for work.”

“I have a job interview,” I said, joking.

Carolyn’s makeover didn’t stop at clothes. Standing back and looking at my dark, curly Italian hair, she pronounced that I should get highlights, insisting I go to the top guy in the business.
Her
guy.

“You have such light skin, highlights would be so pretty and would brighten up your face,” she said. “Next time I go to Brad Johns, you’ll come with me.”

Brad Johns was
the
colorist. All the best blondes in the city went to him. He was famous for inventing that rock-and-roll blond hair with chunky strips of lighter and darker colors. So I found myself entering Brad’s Fifth Avenue salon, a bright, bustling space where everyone except me was blond. A muscular guy with, yes, blond hair flowing down to his shoulders ran up to greet Carolyn with a kiss on both cheeks. It was Brad.

“Hi, honey,” he said. “What’s new?”

“This is Rosie, John’s assistant. And Rosie is the
best,
” she said, pushing me in front of him. “She’s here to get her hair done.”

Brad didn’t really
do
hair anymore—he usually instructed his employees on how to do it. But that day, he sat me down to do my hair. He explained how he was going to soften my base color from a dark brown to a honey brown and add highlights in gold, wheat, and lemon.