Scruples (15 page)

Only the very top fashion editors on any magazine make impressive salaries. The others are paid no more than a good secretary, but they willingly slave for the status, the excitement, and the prestige of the job. These lesser editors must be not only talented but ambitious. It helps if they come from backgrounds where a working-woman doesn’t need her own money to keep her in Laszlo soap and an occasional leg waxing.

When a fashion editor, like Harriet Toppingham, is at the top, or close to it, she is courted by those seeking favors as Madame de Pompadour was when she enjoyed the ear and favor of Louis XV. Her lunches are bought for her in that handful of acceptable French restaurants by dress manufacturers and designers and public-relations people; her clothes are, if not free, at something considerably less than cost; and at Christmas she has to hire a car and driver to clear her office of gifts twice a day. Naturally, she travels free. A discreet inclusion of even part of the logo of an airline or the image of a corner of a hotel swimming pool in a fashion photograph, with several words of acknowledgment in the body of the copy, takes care of the transportation and lodging for the editor, photographer, models, and assistants.

Harnet Toppingham had arrived at the top of the business on merit, not because she could pay her own way, although her private income from a father who had manufactured hundreds of thousands of bathtubs was considerable. She was a woman of such hard, sharp style that she seemed to have a cutting edge. Her feeling of authority was so genuine that it inspired equally genuine fear in her entire staff, and her creative imagination had as few limits as Fellini’s. Her innovations were first hated and then imitated and eventually became classics. When she first noticed Spider’s work she was in her early forties and many people called her ugly. She had never become what the French call a
jolie laide
because she saw no reason to make the attempt to exaggerate any good points she might have had. She preferred to be that other thing the French know how to admire, a sacred monster. She took what she had and presented it uncompromisingly, full front—plain, thin, brown hair pulled back severely, a large, masculine nose jutting forward, thin lips covered with bright red lipstick, and plain brown eyes, small and shallow, set like a mud turtle’s, taking in every detail and discarding all but the most delicate, the most intricate, the most important and recherché. She was of better than medium height, built like a stick, and she always wore splendidly and shriekingly chic clothes, since nothing she put on could do anything to overpower looks she didn’t possess. She made no concessions to what was currently fashionable. If this was the season for the “American sportswear look” or the “return to softness” or “dressing with clear color,” you could count on Harriet to wear a look that couldn’t be pinned down to a year or even a decade, a look that would make any other woman, no matter how perfectly turned out, feel like just another sheep in a pack. She had never been married and she lived alone in a large apartment on Madison Avenue, which she filled with her collections, treasures from her countless trips to Europe and the Orient, most of them too odd and too unharmonious, often too grotesque, to fit in anywhere as well as they did in her crowded, brown interiors.

At least once a year or so Harriet Toppingham liked to “make” an unknown photographer so that she could drop, at least for a while, one of her regulars. What was the point in having power unless people knew you wouldn’t hesitate to use it? Once she had established a new photographer, he, or she, was indebted for life, and even after her favor had passed elsewhere, they retained the cachet she had bestowed on them. She thought of the photographers she had unearthed as her creatures, as much her property as the objects in her collections. As head fashion editor of
Fashion and Interiors
, she could bypass her enemy, the art director, and interview photographers themselves (for she refused to deal with photographers’ agents) in her own office, known in the trade as the Brown Hole of Calcutta.

When she saw the ad for the nail-hardening product, tucked away in the back of
Redbook
, she checked with the agency to find out who had taken the picture. “They say Hank Levy,” she told her secretary, “but I find that impossible to believe. He hasn’t done anything that original since the late sixties. Get Eileen or one of the other agencies on the phone and find out who posed for the shot. Then get the gal to call me here.”

Two days later she summoned Spider to an audience. He brought his portfolio, a big black-leather folder, accordion pleated and tied together with a strip of heavy black braid. It contained the best prints of the best pictures he had ever taken, a few of them results of his work for Levy, but most of them had been taken for his own pleasure on weekends. Spider kept his loaded Nikon F-2 near him at all times, for his passion was to capture women in moments when they weren’t posing, in passages of brief, intimate communication with themselves. He celebrated the female when she was feeling most her own woman, whether she was cooking eggs or daydreaming into a glass of wine or tiredly undressing or waking up yawning or brushing her teeth.

Casually, Harriet Toppingham leafed through the prints, easily hiding her disbelief as she recognized girls with five-hundred-dollar-an hour faces wearing old bathrobes or casually draped in a towel.

“Hmmmm—interesting, quite nice. Tell me, Mr. Elliot, who is your favorite artist, Avedon or Penn?”

Spider grinned at her. “Degas, when he’s not doing ballet girls.”

“My, my. Still, better Degas than Renoir—so predictably pink and white. Tell me—I hear you’re a famous stud. Is that rumor or fact?” Harriet liked to attack as unexpectedly as possible.

“Fact.” Spider gave her a friendly look. She reminded him of his fifth-grade math teacher.

“Then why haven’t you ever worked for
Playboy
or
Penthouse?”
Harriet was not ready to abandon the field.

“A girl twining a string of fake pearls through her pubic hair or all dolled up in a Frederick’s of Hollywood garter belt and playing with herself while she looks in a mirror usually seems a bit lonesome. Masturbation isn’t a great big turn-on in my life,” Spider answered politely. “Then, when they shoot two girls together it gets so artsy-craftsy soft focus that it doesn’t look like sex. In fact, it depresses me—and it seems like such a waste—”

“Yes. Perhaps. Hmmm.” She lit a cigarette and smoked as if she were alone, occasionally glancing at the prints she had littered all over her desk in an indifferent manner. Abruptly she spoke.

“Can you do some lingerie pages for us for the April issue? We need them by next week at the latest.”

“Miss Toppingham, I’d give everything but my left nut to work for you, but I have a full-time job with Hank Levy—”

“Drop Levy,” she commanded. “You surely don’t intend to work for him forever, do you? Open your own studio. Start small. I’ll give you enough work to keep you going until the April issue comes out. If you can do the job I hope for, you won’t have trouble paying the rent.”

Harriet favored Spider with the nearest she ever came to an encouraging look. This moment, this tangible use of power, this ability to alter people’s lives in the way she chose was the most important of the things she lived for. She felt heated, potent, supreme. The pictures she had just asked Spider to take had already been scheduled for Joko by the art director. Joko had become a bit boring lately—tame and lacking in fantasy. He needed a kick in the ass. The art director always needed a kick in the ass. Besides, this Spider Elliott had taken the sexiest pictures of women she’d ever seen. Those girls who were paid to look so otherworldly beautiful in cosmetic ads looked more enticing than she’d ever dreamed they could be, and somehow more approachable, more real.

Lately, she realized, there had been a problem with lingerie photographs at
Fashion and Interiors
. The pages had become so sleek that they were creating a backlash. Some of their biggest advertisers, men with important girdle and bra accounts, were calling to say that while they appreciated the editorial credits, their clients were getting flack because the showroom models on Seventh Avenue didn’t look one tenth as good as the girls in
Fashion
did. This, in turn, made the department-store buyers worried that ordinary women would expect to look like the photographs and then, when they actually saw themselves in the merchandise, blame the garments rather than their own bodies. The photos, quite simply, were a con. When advertisers were unhappy with editorial pages something was wrong and when something was wrong, Harriet Toppingham always played her hunches. Today she had a strong hunch that Spider Elliott could be important to her.

Spider found a studio in an old building off Second Avenue that hadn’t yet been turned into a restaurant or a singles bar. It was too rundown to tempt any but the most desperate tenant. The landlord hadn’t repaired anything for twenty years, waiting for the day when Warner Le Roy would pop out of a cloud of wonder dust and offer him a fortune for the premises. However, there was water for the darkroom, and on the top floor, where Spider rented two big rooms, the ceilings were high. His own apartment would have made a better studio, but he knew it was too inconveniently located.

For this first assignment, Spider decided not to use the usual lingerie models, girls whose bodies are so perfect that no sane person would believe that even once, in all their eighteen years, they would have dreamed of wearing a panty girdle or a bra. And he didn’t use the usual poses: dance students caught all unaware practicing stretching positions in their undies; or languid beach shots in which the sand-strewn model seems to have mistaken her underwear for her bikini; or storytelling voyeur shots in which a man’s hand, dangling a diamond bracelet, or a man’s foot, in a polished evening shoe, somehow wanders into a corner of the picture.

Instead he hired models in their mid-thirties, still beautiful but with faces and bodies that were at an undeniable remove from youth. He built a set designed exactly like a fitting room in a department store. Piles of discarded lingerie cascaded over a single chair and were draped all over the little shelf so unhelpfully provided in these cells. Models glared at themselves suspiciously in three-way mirrors; sat on the edge of the only chair, dressed only in a half slip, and lit badly needed cigarettes; struggled angrily out of tight girdles; searched in bulging tote bags for a lipstick that might improve matters; did, in fact, in Spider’s photos, all the things every woman does when she has to go out and buy new underwear. The pictures were funny and loving and even though the models undoubtedly needed all the help they got from the lingerie they were wearing, they still looked like fine bodied, luscious women with a lot of mileage left on them.

Men who saw that issue of
Fashion and Interiors
felt as if they were getting a good look at something they normally were never allowed to see, glimpses of feminine mysteries much more private than an open centerfold had to offer. Women compared themselves to the models, as they always do, no matter how miserable it makes them, and did not find the results as upsetting as usual. In fact, those bras looked as if they might really hold up a pair of normal boobs—how strange. And how reassuring.

The art director of
Fashion
had threatened to resign when he first saw the contact sheets, screaming in some low Hungarian dialect—normally he screamed in French. Harriet actually laughed out loud when she heard him.

By the time the April issue was on the newsstands, Spider had completed three other assignments for
Fashion:
perfume pages so outrageously sentimental, so romantically Victorian that a movie critic would have awarded them three handkerchiefs; a series of shoe shots that foot fetishists kept as collector’s items; and a totally lovable layout on children’s nightgowns and pajamas, which persuaded more than one woman to stop taking the pill and see what happened. However, for the last four months he had been utterly dependent on Harriet Toppingham, who doled out these assignments like a stingy hostess who has been forced to serve fresh caviar. In any case, the small sums that a photographer is paid for fashion editorial work, as compared with the large amounts he is paid for advertising shots, is barely enough to keep him in film, shaving cream, and cornflakes. Spider was reduced to letting his girls of the moment pay for his dinners even though their business managers disapproved.

The appearance of the lingerie pictures still did not bring him any commercial work. Although the department stores that carried the merchandise were delighted with the results, advertising agency art directors, much as they respected Harriet, thought that perhaps she had finally gone too far. However, the perfume pictures were something they could understand, and within months, by the end of 1975, Spider felt safe in considering himself a moderate success with all sorts of good things in prospect. At almost thirty, he was finally a New York fashion photographer with his own studio, his own Hasselblad, his own strobe lights. It had taken almost six years since graduation,

Melanie Adams walked into Spider’s studio one day in the early May of 1976. She had arrived in New York precisely three days before from Louisville, Kentucky, and with the maddening innocence of ignorance had simply marched up to the Ford Agency’s waiting room to wait. Both Eileen and Jerry Ford, who know more about photographic models than anyone alive, happened to be out of town for the day, but for a girl who looked like Melanie Adams, there really was no better place to wait. The Fords hadn’t trained their staff to overlook miracles. In fact, their entire operation is based on the premise that the miracle of true beauty exists. Of course, they know that almost all beauty has to be mined and polished like a diamond; they invented the process by which prospective models are. put on diets, taken to the best hairdressers, made-up by experts, taught to sit and stand and move, and then sent to see as many photographers as possible, hoping that some of them will spot a girl’s potential.