Scruples (36 page)

He had all but hired Valentine sight unseen when he saw the rare new talent in her designs for the Wilton collection, which Spider Elliott had brought to his attention. When she arrived in his office he was content to see that, for once, he had found someone vivid enough for two. She marched in with her crop of curls smoldering brightly above her astonishingly pale green eyes and white face. Although Valentine always used three coats of black mascara on her lashes, which served to emphasize the Rue du Faubourg-St. Honoré quality of her looks, today she had applied green eyeshadow as well, to draw attention away from her body. Since finding out about Alan Wilton she had lost fifteen pounds she badly needed, and dressing at the last minute, she had to fling a bulky rust-and-orange plaid poncho over the brown jumpsuit that now hung on her body.

“Well, pet, I feel as if I could warm my hands on you,” he said with a flattering smile, as he rose from his chair to shake her hand. Prince led Valentine to a tufted leather Chesterfield, which faced his desk. His office looked like the smoking room in a distinguished London club, all dark woods, fine bindings, gleaming leather, polished brass, and dignity. Prince was a high-school dropout from Des Moines who had reincarnated himself as an English squire. It was not good taste but linguistic inability that stopped him from assuming a British accent. An agreeably bulky man with graying hair and a pleasantly lined face, Prince looked, simultaneously, like a high-ranking, semiretired British general in mufti and a fabulously successful racetrack tout. He created this impression by artfully combining various pieces from his own line of men’s clothes and never wearing anything that was not either tweed, checked, or plaid—unless it was herringbone. If his pants were in a brown-and-white tweed, his vest would be in a green-and-brown Glen plaid, his jacket in a very hairy, large houndstooth check, and his tie a Paisley that matched the lining of the jacket collar. He had always hankered to carry a shooting stick but compromised on an umbrella. One of his employees was fond of saying that Prince had to be immortal because he didn’t own anything plain enough to wear to his own funeral. Prince secretly saw himself as a great landed gentleman, the Earl of Northumberland perhaps, who supported a band of traveling players. None of these harmless fancies kept him from being the richest designer in the United States.

“When I spoke to your agent yesterday,” he said to Valentine, “I told him that I needed you to work directly with me on my women’s ready-to-wear. Now, I don’t want to pry ino your reasons for leaving Wilton Associates, but the one thing we have to understand, up front, is that your name
cannot
be used in connection with my line. You see, my dear, you’ll be my associate until you go on to someplace where they’ll give you billing—as you undoubtedly will in time—but, in the meanwhile, there won’t be any personal credit for anyone but me.”

When Valentine merely nodded in quick and understanding agreement, he thought to himself that his hunch had probably been right—she’d had trouble with that notoriously nasty, high-busted queen, Sergio. Her agent, Elliott, whoever he was, had hinted that it was a question of credit, but somehow he hadn’t thought that was the whole story. And Alan Wilton had been very quick to praise her to the skies. Ah well, the intrigues of other shops rarely interested him—God knows, he had enough to handle under his own roof. Right now he was involved in creating a line of men’s grooming products, and after six months the chemists still hadn’t come up with a scent he thought was sufficiently masculine. His criterion was “Would the Duke of Edinburgh wear it?” and somehow, the answer was no. Press on, old chap, he encouraged himself, press on. The Empire wasn’t built in a day.

Of all the male dress designers visible today in the world of American fashion, some 95 percent, if not more, are homosexual.

They have a variety of ways of being gay. John Prince was individual in his solid British gentry style, noticeably masculine and tempered with good midwestern roots. Others were austere functional-gay, given to wearing dark glasses at all times and dressed in a careful, unvarying uniform of a dark turtleneck and dark trousers, as if they had come out of the future by first-class spaceship. They lived in steel, plastic, and glass apartments, so spare and fined down that people felt tense just looking at photographs of their living rooms in which no trace of comfort was permitted. Then there is the sweet flock of Gatsby-gays, young beauties who dress in perfectly cut navy blazers and white pants, innocent, Ivy League open-necked pale blue shirts and Shetland crew sweaters, impeccably ready for a yacht to sail in and anchor at their feet. There is also a block of elder statesman-gays who have been secure for long enough to affect jeans and beards and amulets and strange-looking jackets without buttons. All of these designers are in enormous demand as guests and escorts by many of the most powerful—but single—women in the country. Without her priceless list of gay reliables, few society hostesses could put together a party,

There is also a tiny but influential married-gay set, whose wives are invariably as decorative as they are clever. They make a religion out of the art of living well, possessing marvelously beautiful apartments and country homes in which they give inventive dinner parties on small round tables, which are little museums of rare porcelain and cutlery. This is the group without which no major society party or important press junket is complete.

Advancement in the world of fashion design is dictated by this gay mafia. It is, for all the superficial differences of life-style in its members, a club in which no straight man is likely to make any progress. Women, yes: A number of important women designers, such as Holly Harp, Mary McFadden, Pauline Trigère, and Bonnie Cashin, as well as a number of good female designers in California, have been allowed entry, but they are a decided minority.

A durable working alliance exists between the gay designers and the generally heterosexual businessmen who either own or run the financial side of the garment business. These men, generally Jewish and, for the most part, strong family men with firm ties to the New York Jewish community, are active in charities of all kinds. They provide the ballast that keeps the world of Seventh Avenue on a firm course. Outside of the business day little or no mingling between the two groups occurs, barring a department store publicity party or some sort of fashion establishment event, such as the Coty Awards.

The gay designers are leaders in almost everything that exists of the glamour of New York City. If a new restaurant opens, they find it first; a new artist, a new ballet, a new place to dance, a new hair stylist, can be made or broken by their favor. They are, in effect, Stars, with all the special privileges and perks of Stars. Each one of them attracts to himself a court, an entourage, that revolves around him, glorying in the air he projects of being superior to the dull norm of humanity. He invests himself and his followers with the conviction of being wittier, more daring, more artistic, more experimental, more sophisticated, more wicked, more knowledgeable, and, particularly, of
having more fun
than others.

No one did this better than John Prince.

His Vivid People were, in all the most important ways, his real family. He followed his impulses toward the open-handed largesse of one born to be a patron and never felt contented unless he was surrounded by those of his chief associates he secretly thought of as his “retinue,” as well as a collection of others.

After the business day, Prince held court in his town house in the East Seventies. It had originally been two large town houses built side by side. When he bought them, he had the wall separating them torn down. The twin houses were then unified by a new Palladian facade, made of blocks of honey-beige marble with a noble center entrance. Inside the house a manorial staircase, with wide landings, ran up four flights through the old center of the two houses, the interiors of which had been completely gutted. Prince had depleted the rarest stocks of Stair and Co. and Ginsberg and Levy, two of the finest antique dealers in the world, before he realized that he—even he—was in need of a decorator. Within a year “Sister” Parish—Mrs. Henry Parish II, society’s favorite decorator, famous for her seductive bedrooms and voluptuous sense of color, as well as for redecorating the Oval Room of the White House and for decorating President Kennedy’s private quarters—had given him an unquestionably ducal setting. Quite properly he had forced himself to draw the line at even hinting to Mrs. Parish that he would like to have a family crest embroidered in gold thread on the hanging of his wide Chippendale four-poster—somehow he guessed that the firm-minded grandmother from Maine would not approve. Nor had he dared to mention the minstrel gallery he longed for, but otherwise he was vastly satisfied with his stately home.

Prince even had a majordomo: his lover of many years, limbo Lombardi, a cocky, tough cherub of a man, no more than five feet four inches tall but a born brawler, who had been one of the most decorated noncoms in Korea. When he wasn’t efficiently killing the enemy, Jimbo was a gifted but essentially lazy painter, who was well content to spend his afternoons languorously occupying the beautifully equipped studio Prince had built for him under the eaves. In the morning, long after Prince had left their bed for his office, Jimbo finally descended to the lower regions of the house where he, the master chef, Luigi, and the two robust pantry maids, Renata and Luchiana, swapped tall and naughty tales in the kitchen Italian of Jimbo’s boyhood in far-off, exotic Bridgeport, Connecticut. Jimbo was in charge of menus, inviting guests, and planning all the details of the week’s parties.

If Prince had been born to be a host, Jimbo had been born to be master of the revels. He had a genius for bringing animation and good humor to every gathering and a superb eye for plucking potentially Vivid People from someone else’s party and incorporating them into Prince’s band of loyalists.

Jimbo took to Vallentine as soon as he met her. He had the security of being an indispensable, totally beloved mate in Prince’s life, so he could afford to give vent to his friendly feelings. He had become a little bored lately by Prince’s regulars: a skinny, black male model who was six feet seven inches tall and the wildest disco dancer in New York; a female jewelry designer who came from one of the aristocratic families of Brazil and simultaneously sported a crew cut and three heavily jeweled crosses; a Puerto Rican lad who painted gloriously on silk; a twitchy Hollywood superstar who flew religiously to New York when she was between pictures to order a completely new Prince wardrobe and bask in his genial warmth; a newly married young couple from two of Philadelphia’s oldest families who brought Prince unwanted presents of hashish and then consumed most of it themselves; a legendary Russian ballet dancer who had defected so long ago that the IRS considered him one of their favorite Americans. Not that they weren’t still all Vivid—it was just time for new blood.

Jimbo sensed that Valentine didn’t want anything from Prince. She had an alluring self-sufficiency drawn around her like a lovely but durable carapace, and she was obviously not overanxious to become one of Prince’s band of brothers. Nothing could have intrigued Jimbo more, accustomed as he was to people who felt that entrance into Prince’s circle would grant them a cachet that nothing else could. Prince not only entertained his group at home but often took them out on the town, half filling a restaurant with them, buying two rows of seats for the hottest show on Broadway, leading them en masse, like part of a very elegant circus parade, into a charity exhibition or party given by a thrilled hostess. A Prince entrance was often photographed by
Women’s Wear Daily
for their “Eye” section, the powerful gossip department that is usually read first by everyone but the most crotchety of zipper manufacturers.

Jimbo had always been the kind of homosexual who really likes women and, for that matter, so was Prince. But Jimbo knew how to create instant intimacy; in all but sexual matters he was wildly seductive with females. Valentine, with her cracklingly assertive hair and spunky ways, was a challenge to him.

She went to work for Prince in early 1973 and by the end of that year Valentine, coaxed and wooed by charming little Jimbo, felt comfortably at home in Prince’s crowd. She never did anything to qualify herself as a Vivid Person—since she was born one—but the refreshing difference about Valentine was that she didn’t try. Nothing works so well in a competitive social situation, such as the one in which Prince’s People were caught, as a genuine lack of effort. When they perceived that Valentine just didn’t care; that she could accept an invitation and enjoy it or fail to get an invitation and not have it matter one way or another to her; that she was secure enough, for whatever reason, not to be anxious to stamp herself with the stigmata of status or to step up the social ladder, she became the one ball of catnip in a room full of kittens.

Valentine’s experience with Alan Wilton had, after she recovered from the worst of the emotional damage, inoculated her for a long time against romantic adventures. This deep coolness came across not as an antisocial attitude but as a self-confident, serene refusal to involve herself in high-flown personal expectations. Although the sexual ambiguity of Prince’s People allowed Valentine to avoid relationships that might lead to another love affair, her sexual proclivities were one of the favorite topics of discussion among them. Was she a Lesbian? Did she have a lover somewhere who was married? Was she a fag hag, condemned to feel emotion only for men who didn’t want women? It never occurred to anyone that Valentine’s heart, like that of the Snow Queen in the old fairy tale, was pierced by a sliver of ice that prevented her from loving. To Prince and Jimbo, she seemed perfectly happy with her place as a design associate and her membership in the encircling world of his entourage.