The Collected Stories of Louis Auchincloss (27 page)

“‘I suppose you think your money can buy the muses,' I told him. ‘I'm afraid you'll find they're not for sale.' ‘There you go,' he retorted; ‘like all the rest, you're telling me what my money
can't
buy. I know I can't buy the muses. But can't I purchase a little seat from which to see them at work? Is that asking too much?' As he paused for an answer, I had to agree that this might not be asking too much. ‘Very well!' he exclaimed, leaning back with folded arms. ‘Then here I am watching.' ‘And what are you watching?' I demanded. ‘Why, my new editor-in-chief, of course!'

“Well, Gentlemen, I guess we all have to admit that Lester has charm. It may be a vulgar, repulsive sort of charm, but it's still charm. If anyone had told me the day before that I was going to give up my career as a drama critic to become the amanuensis of Lester Gordon, I'd have called up Bellevue and told the little men in white coats to come and take me away. Yet that is precisely what happened. Of course, he promised me a
carte blanche
and a salary double what I was getting. The picture that he drew of the future of
Blackwell's
was an editor's dream. Everything was to be increased: the circulation, the quality, the illustrations, the text, the advertisements, the staff. Even if one
knew
it was a pipe dream, it was still impossible not to try to believe it.”

“But did you succeed in believing it?” Townie interrupted, remembering, no doubt, Hilary's question to him.

“Not really—never really,” Hilary admitted. “But I thought I might be able to have things my way with the new
Blackwell's
for a year, and a year's a long time in journalism. The first step I took was to house myself and my staff in sumptuous new offices. Lester was perfectly affable about this, as he was about all the people I wished to hire. He did not bat an eye when I added a music editor, an art editor and an architecture editor to our roster.
Blackwell's
was to be the review of reviews; it was to point the way forward to the best in all the arts everywhere in America.”

“But, as I remember it, Hilary,
Blackwell's
did in a way become that,” I objected. “For a while, anyway. Wasn't it
after
Lester sold it that it went to the dogs?”

“Perfectly true,” Hilary agreed readily. “But that leaves out of the picture
why
Lester sold it. You see, Lester knew from the beginning that a magazine genuinely dedicated to the arts could never be supported by the greater public. He also knew that the town was full of fat cats who were dying to own just such a magazine, but who were terrified of losing their shirts. For this reason he calculated that by souping up
Blackwell's
to look both intellectual and successful, he could make a quick killing. So
Blackwell's
got a large shiny new format, some dazzling photography, a galaxy of brilliant names for one-shot contributions, interviews with such unlikely persons as the Pope, Stalin and Lady Macbeth and a big promotion campaign. By its third issue Brian Longford, a third-generation soft-drinks heir, who was tired of boozing and marrying and wanted to ‘contribute' to mankind, was trailing Lester all over town, begging and bawling to buy his magazine. Lester at last, out of the kindness of his heart, agreed to swap
Blackwell's
for a little bottle cap company that Brian happened to own. It also just happened that this little company had a portfolio of vital contracts with Brian's family corporation. By the time the latter had awakened to the necessity of getting the bottle cap factory back, Lester's price was five million!”

“And
Blackwell's?
” I asked. “At least poor Brian Longford had
you
, Hilary.”

“Yes, he had me, and a lot of good it did him. I was as much taken in as he was. I had no idea, as Lester had, that four issues of brilliant ideas could not be repeated indefinitely and that the new
Blackwell's
was ‘too much, too soon.' I was astonished when subscriptions began to fall off and suggested to Brian, as disaster followed disaster, that we go back to the old format. But the old
Blackwell
subscribers had been alienated by our flashy changes and could not be coaxed back to the fold. Brian kept the magazine going as long as his tax lawyer allowed him and then closed shop and threw his staff into the street.”

“Some of them evidently managed to scramble out of that street,” John Grau observed dryly.

“And it's interesting, isn't it,” Townie suggested, for we were nothing if not critical that day, “that when Lester wanted an editor to give
Blackwell's
the meretricious gleam that would attract the greater multitude, he knew just where to find him.”

“And even more interesting,” I pointed out, to add my own small bit, “that that same editor went directly from the obsequies of
Blackwell's
to his own greatest triumph as a columnist in
The Knickerbocker Gazette
. Would you have got that job, Hilary, without the fame you acquired in the brief but giddy heyday of Lester's magazine?”

Hilary was not in the least put out. He lit a new cigarette and waved the match slowly back and forth, as if he did not really care to extinguish it. I suppose my word “triumph” made up for everything. “We should be grateful, I suppose,” he said with a wink, “that anything at all was saved from so disastrous a wreck.”

“Tell us about Lester during the
Blackwell
era,” I suggested. “Did he take an active interest in it?”

“Not really. He left the running of it to me. But we were all surprised at how much he was there. I don't think a day went by that he didn't come to my office to chat, to listen in at editorial conferences, to look over galleys. At last it began to dawn on me that Lester had had a subsidiary interest in acquiring the magazine. He wanted to educate himself.”

“In art?” Townie demanded in surprise.

“In everything. Or rather in everything fashionable. This was the period in Lester's life when he began to be interested in society, and he took me for his guide and mentor. I considered it a case of symbiosis, or living together for mutual advantage. He would let me run his magazine, and I would try to make him presentable. We started with clothes. I made Lester jettison all his wardrobe and jewelry; I stripped him, so to speak, to his checkbook. Then we took a trip to Europe: to London for suits, to Paris for shirts and ties, to Rome for boots and accessories. But it was a dismal case of
plus ça change
. Lester remained stubbornly Lester. Dressed by a duke's tailor, he was still the realtor from Queens. Fortunately, that doesn't matter in the fluctuating society of modern New York, particularly in the world of fashion magazines and charity balls.”

“Hairdresser society,” Townie sneered.

“Society is always society,” Hilary retorted coldly, “and as Oscar Wilde so wisely put it, only those who can't get in abuse it. The Draytons and Livingstons and Stuyvesants have had their day. Nobody who really counts gives a hoot about family anymore. But I will admit that I could never persuade Lester of this. He was as loyal to the old Knickerbocker families as Townie himself. At least he was
then
. The very ease with which he was accepted by the international set made him suspicious. When he found himself sitting at the Duchess of Dino's table at the Heart Ball, his triumph was clouded by the sad reflection that only a
déclassée
duchess could be the friend of such a meatball as Lester Gordon!”

We all laughed, and I asked: “But where was Huldah in all of this? Did she, too, make the grade with duchesses?”

“Ah, no, even
that
world has its limits. Poor Huldah was left to sulk at home. Lester, with his customary tact, suggested that she take lessons in voice and deportment and learn to be a lady, and she threw a vase at him. Yet he was fond of her in his own way, and when he begged me to intercede and persuade her to grant him a divorce, he wept at the cruelty of a world that made him be so cruel. Napoleon had to cast off Josephine for an Austrian archduchess. Lester Gordon had to have a Drayton!”

“How did he ever pull that off?” John Grau asked, turning to Townie.

“Ask Hilary,” Townie replied with a shrug. “He's telling the story.”

“Can I speak frankly, then?” Hilary asked Townie.

“Oh, Lord, yes. Gabrielle's only my second cousin. I told her she was a goose to marry him, and she sent me smartly about my own business. That was the last time we spoke until he absconded, and then she came around humbly for my advice. Go ahead, Hilary. I'd like to know myself how she ever talked her father into it. Cousin Bronson once told me he'd rather see his daughter in her coffin than married to a Jew!”

“Gabrielle's father wasn't talked into it,” Hilary explained. “He was told. She and her mother, like most women, could be very practical on occasion. Gabrielle, unlike Townie, was a poor Drayton, over thirty and, despite a regal nose and sandy hair, something less than a beauty. She and her mother sneered at Lester when he started calling after meeting them at Townie's, but all sneers ceased together when he made the offer of his hand—even before it was out of Huldah's grasp—and a settlement of a million bucks!”

John whistled. “That's what I call taking a place by storm!”

“Gabrielle and her mother promptly reversed course, and the Drayton aunts were given the family line to spread over town. Lester a Jew? Hadn't people heard of integration? Lester married? Well, was he the first man who had to buy off an adventuress who had trapped him into matrimony in college days? Lester sharp in business practices? Wasn't that what people always said of the successful? Lester not a gentleman? My dear, who
was
these days? By the time Lester and Gabrielle were united, there was even talk that one of her uncles might propose him for the Union Club!”

“And did he?” I asked when Hilary paused to sip his drink.

“He might have, had Lester not lost interest. The same inner principle that made him devalue a charity-ball world as soon as it accepted him depreciated an old New York that no longer sneered. Lester was oppressed by the stuffiness of Gabrielle's world—as who would not be?—and soon set his sights on higher goals. He was looking now toward big business, the management world, the politicians, control of the human destiny. He chafed at the mild, softly chatting dinner parties at Gabrielle's mother's. He found that his wife had used all her energy to fit him into
her
world and didn't have an ounce left over to cultivate the people
he
cared to cultivate. Gabrielle was always deploring the low standards of the Social Register, yet to be in it was at least a
sine qua non
. It was only a matter of months before she became an actual liability to Lester.”

“Oh, come off it, Hilary,” Townie interrupted, irritated at last. “I know things have changed, and the parents of half the people Ella and I see socially today would have been sent to the servants' entrance by our parents—”

“Thanks!” Hilary interrupted with a sneer. “I guess that takes care of John and myself.”

“Don't get huffy,” Townie retorted. “I'm only trying to point out that an item can drop in value without becoming worthless. I cannot allow that Gabrielle was ever a hindrance to Lester's social career.”

“Ah, but you see, Townie, you
don't
really know how drastically things have changed!” Hilary exclaimed, rising to the climax of his argument. “The social scene has become so diffuse that it's not at all unusual, for example, for a woman like Mrs. Knossos, whose face by Elizabeth Arden and jewels by Schlumberger are known to every reader of the evening papers, never to have heard of the Draytons. I insist that Gabrielle's habit of snubbing people who thought they were simply being kind to Lester's awkward wife did him more damage than all of Huldah's boners. Really, from a purely practical point of view, and leaving aside the moral question, I don't see that Lester had any alternative but to shed Gabrielle. The churning waves of high finance bobbed before him. But that is the tragic denouement, and John's part of the story.”

John Grau had been listening carefully as he drank. He was a weekend drinker, for he worked too hard at other times, but when he did drink, he did it thoroughly, like everything else. His capacity seemed unlimited, yet he never showed the effects, except that he very slightly softened. The hard, handsome, regular squarish face relaxed, and the usually pursed, almost censorious lips spread in a half-smile. One was no longer so aware of the gray hair, the humped, about-to-spring quality of that craggy, muscular body. When John smiled and gave one of his intense gray-green stares, he had charm. It may have been the charm of the totality of his temporary commitment.

“When Lester threw his derby hat down on my desk and said airily that he wanted a ‘Wall Street lawyer,' I practically told him to go to hell,” John began. “I don't think I'd seen him more than half a dozen times since college, and I didn't like anything I'd heard. I informed him that we had only a very small, accommodation real estate department, at which he roared with laughter and said that we weren't nearly tough enough to handle his housing matters. No, he was coming to us, he explained, only for his securities work! Well, I got so mad at the idea of our being too soft for one thing and not for the other that I told him that if we weren't good enough to advise him generally, I wasn't interested. And then, of course, he had me, for he offered me the works: housing, building, finance, and told me to name my own retainer. The upshot of it all was that he took me to lunch, and I had a new client.”

“So you
did
do the real estate,” Townie interpolated.

“There wasn't much of it left,” John replied. “Lester had pretty well sold out of it by then, except for Drayton Gardens. As Hilary implies, he was ashamed of it. He wanted something with more ‘tone.' No doubt, he considered that he wouldn't be in ‘trade' if he dealt with intangibles, if he sat in a great gleaming office downtown and pushed buttons and talked on the telephone while he bought control of vast enterprises. We always keep coming back, don't we, to the child in Lester, the dreaming, scheming child? I'll never forget the first deal I handled for him. He had figured out that S. & T. Manley's, the old jewelry store on Fifth Avenue, was a ripe fruit to be plucked. Under a gentle family mismanagement the stock had declined in value to a point where it was worth considerably less than the inventory. Swoop! Lester pounced from the sky in the fastest proxy raid I have ever witnessed, closed down an ancient and distinguished firm and sold out the inventory for a spanking profit.”