The Rothman Scandal (7 page)

“Enough of this effing business, Buster,” she said. “Is that the way they teach you to talk at Exeter?”

“Dammit, Mom, have you heard a single effing word I've
said?
”

She bit her lip. “But I do worry about you,” she said. “You're the only real family I have left. You're really the man of the house here. You're—”

“Dammit, Mom, if I'm the man of the house, why do I have to have an effing bodyguard?”

“But what if something should—?”

“Nothing's going to
happen
to me, Mom. Look, I'm going to be eighteen years
old
. I'm old enough to drive. I'm going to be old enough to vote. If there's a war, and they have an effing draft, I'll be old enough to be effing drafted, for Chrissakes. What're you going to do? Send me off to the army with effing Otto on my tail?”

“But there isn't any war, and there isn't any draft.”

“But what I'm saying is that I'm going to be an effing legal
adult!
”

“You're right, of course,” she said. “But don't forget that Otto was your grandfather's idea, not mine.”

“Dammit, Mom, do we have to do
every
thing Gramps says? Does Gramps
own
us, or something?”

“Of course not. Nobody owns anybody.”

“But this much is final. If I have to go to Harvard with effing Otto on my tail, I—just—won't—go!”

“What do you mean you just won't go? You've been accepted and—”

He tossed his mane of blond hair. “How can I not go? Easy! When I get to Harvard, I won't do any of the work. I'll see to it that I flunk every test! By the end of the first semester, I'll have flunked out of Harvard. What do you think of that?”

She laughed her throaty laugh. “Buster, you're turning into a true Rothman,” she said. “You're as manipulative as the rest of them. Okay, it's a deal. Otto goes. And I agree with you—this Otto business has gotten ridiculous. I'll speak to Herb first chance I get.”

“And do me another favor,” he said.

“Sure. What's that?”

“Quit calling me Buster.”

She looked at him. “All right,” she said quietly. “All right, Joel.” And then, “Hey, we're still pals, aren't we?”

He shrugged. “Yeah, I guess so,” he said.

But of course Alex had not yet had a chance to speak to Herb about the Otto matter, and so, tonight, Otto was still on the job.

Now Mona Potter had approached Joel on the terrace—the same Mona Potter who had once expected to be named
Mode
's editor, and who now wrote a syndicated column called “The Fashion Scene” for the
Daily News
. Famously nearsighted, Mona peered closely at Fiona Fenton's face and, realizing that this was someone she did not recognize, and that this therefore was a person of no consequence whatever, she ignored her and turned to Joel with her steno pad and pencil. “Your mother says you're a genius,” she said.

“Well, that's nice,” he said pleasantly.

“Okay, so say something genius for my column. Gimme a genius quote. You're the heir apparent. Wanna say something heir apparent?”

“Hmm—ah—”

“Your mother says you got an original mind. Say something original.”

“I think she means I like word games,” he said.

“Yeah? Like what?” Her pencil was poised over her steno pad.

“Can you think of a nine-letter word that has only one vowel?”

“No. What?”

“Strengths,” Joel said. “I've only been able to discover one other word like it in the English language.”

“Huh. What's that?”

“It's a proper name, so maybe it doesn't count. But it's still a word.”

“Huh!”

“I'll give you a hint. It used to be the name of a chain of restaurants in New York.”

“Huh!”

“Schrafft's,” he said.

“Aw, you're pulling my leg,” Mona said, and moved away from him in search of more quotable grist for her journalistic mill.

“Dear me, what a perfectly dreadful woman,” the young Englishwoman said to him.

The orchestra was playing “You're the Top,” changing the lyric slightly to suit the occasion:

You're the top,

You're the Park Pavilion,

You're the top,

Now you've hit five million …

And one or two couples were actually dancing, which was becoming a rare thing to see at a New York party these days, where there were too many important business matters, and people, to talk about. Lenny strolled among the party players, those fashionable savages, listening to their voices rising against the music, fueled by cocktails and champagne.

“She photographs okay if you shoot her in profile. Shoot her from any other angle, and she looks like Noriega in drag.”

“Speaking of horrors, there's Molly Zumwalt. She must be on furlough from Silver Hill.”

“Molly Zumwalt has a certain sense of style, but no taste. You know what I mean. Blue Rigaud candles.”

“Her husband had a penile implant. Then he had a vasectomy. What's he
want
, anyway …?”

Was it always this awful? Lenny sometimes asked himself. Was there always such cruelty, such venom, so much anger and envy and greed? “The East Side Razor Blades” was what Lenny called these women, who were for the most part thin and for the most part streaked blondes. At a certain age, in New York, every woman became a streaked blonde. He had christened them the Razor Blades, furthermore, long before Tom Wolfe called them X-rays in that book. His was a more apt description, Lenny thought. An X-ray was transparent, black-and-white, and flat. But a Razor Blade could cut, and nick, and slash, and kill. There were male Razor Blades too, of course, equally dangerous, and never satisfied until there was blood all over the floor.

And the answer to his question was no, it had not always been like this. When Lenny first came to New York in the early thirties, it had been quite a different place. The city had been vital, and pulsing, and fun, and everyone went everywhere. Those had been hard times, of course, but they were getting better, and everyone was simply glad to be alive and in the city together, helping things get better. Then had come the war years, and those had been the best of all. Having made sure that he was ineligible for the draft—that quite absurd incident back in Onward took care of that—Lenny had flung himself, yes flung, into the joy of those years when everyone was rooting together for the city, the country, the world.

There were real stores in the city then, not glitzy show-biz emporiums like Bloomingdale's, but
real
stores like Best's and DePinna, which everyone knew was better than Brooks Brothers, and Altman's, which always had the best of everything, including that wonderful bakery shop, and Bergdorf's, before Andrew Goodman sold it to a chain. And W&J Sloane—you never needed to hire an interior decorator in those days. Sloane's told you how to furnish your rooms, and you could be certain they were right.

And then there were the hotels and restaurants and nightclubs they all went to—the Marguery, with its extraordinary garden courtyard, the Ambassador, the old Ritz-Carlton, the Savoy-Plaza, and the pre-Trump Plaza when it really
was
the Plaza. No more. Those places were all, all gone. They had danced at places like Larue—those tiny blue sparkling, starlike lights in the ceiling—and the Monte Carlo and the Copa, and at the Persian Room they had listened to Hildegarde—the “Incomparable Hildegarde”—in her long white gloves sing “The Last Time I Saw Paris,” and for her last number she always came out carrying a bunch of long-stemmed red roses in her arms as she would a baby. And they drank at places like the Stork Club and the old El Morocco with its zebra-striped banquettes and silver palm trees, and, oh, how innocent and free they had all been then! Lenny could remember ordering his very first martini—well under age, of course, but so sophisticated—and saying to the waiter, “Very dry, please—no water at all,” and the laughter that order had provoked among his friends who all had names like Gloria and Bobo and Tommy and Dickie. When they were poor, they ate at the Automat or Childs, and when they were feeling a little richer they ate at Longchamps, or took tea at a wonderful little
bonbonnerie
on Fifth Avenue called Rosemarie de Paris, with its heavenly chocolate-peppermint smell, where waitresses in black uniforms with starched white lace caps and aprons passed the French pastry trays. It was here he learned that the only time it was polite to point was when it was at French pastry, and that it was considered rude and gluttonish to point at more than two, though Lenny could have eaten the entire tray because he was often hungry then, even though he smoked expensive Murad cigarettes. Nobody had any money then, and yet they went to all these places. There was a spirit of tomorrow-we-may-die during those war years, and so everyone wanted restlessly to live and love to the fullest, to the hilt, and relish life while it lasted. At the glamorous Cotillion Room, the cover charge was one dollar, considered steep, but if you tipped the captain another dollar he gave you a ringside table, which was worth it. And at the Stork Club drinks were fifty cents, unless you knew Sherm Billingsley, in which case they were often free. After a night at the Stork, you grabbed for Walter Winchell's column to see if your name was in it, and it sometimes was. The Ritz-Carlton was the most expensive hotel in town—seven dollars a night for a room! No wonder they went everywhere, and Lenny could remember many a rollicking, squandered night at the Ritz, and waking up at dawn, luxuriously hung over. Or, for the night, they might all go downtown for jazz at Eddie Condon's, or uptown because, in those days, you really could go to Harlem in ermine and pearls. And there was one little club up there, Lenny remembered, the Tic-Toe Club, where the most beautiful black boys danced naked on the stage. And, at the end of the night, you might all take the subway down to the Staten Island Ferry—over and back for a nickel—and watch the sun rise over Brooklyn Heights, and as the sun's first rays caught the windowpanes of the houses on Brooklyn Heights, there was such a sense of harmony and lyricism, modulated chords of domesticity and care and love, as windows opened and white curtains fluttered out. Gone, all gone,
le temps perdu
. But there was kindness then, and civility, and gentleness, and people you hardly knew would lend you a dollar for your cabfare home, long ago when the world was young and green and full of promises and hope.

Lenny had grown used to the way it had all changed. He had become hardened to the new cruelty that had replaced the old kindness, and he had learned to play by the tough new rules that had been imposed on this once-graceful business they were all in. Grace was out. Greed was in, and it was Wall Street that had changed it all. Wall Street, and the gnomes who determined interest rates, governed the city now. It was Wall Street that had silenced the church bells on Sunday mornings, and replaced them with the scream of ambulance and police sirens. But Lenny had grown used to it, taken it all in his stride, and if the new rules meant that only Number One was going to look out for Number One, so be it. He was a veteran now. He was used to being resented and envied for the mysterious power he wielded with the Rothmans. After all, he had survived in the company longer than anyone on that terrace tonight, and so Dear Old Lenny was accustomed to being hated. He could view it all with the icy cynicism that was required to step over the dead bodies as they fell. But he often wondered about Alex. Did she really understand the viciousness of the monsters who were toasting her tonight with her own Dom Perignon champagne, and dishing her behind her back? Sometimes he guessed she did, but at other times he was not so sure. Under that easy, confident demeanor, behind the secure smile, the contralto laugh, the shoulder-length caramel hair, behind the carelessly dropped final g's, there was surely another woman—innocent, vulnerable, too trusting—too long protected by old Ho Rothman—who could never be cynical enough to suspect the danger that she might be in. He decided to find her in the crowd and warn her one more time.

As he glided through the elegant crowd, pressing his own elegant backside against the elegant backside of Jacqueline Onassis, he heard a conversation that struck him as particularly sinister and bitchy.

“When you're over forty in this business, you're over the hill,” he heard a man's voice say. “And she's over the hill—five million or no five million.”

He recognized the Very Important head of a New York advertising agency, one of whose clients was a Semi—Very Important Seventh Avenue designer.

“My client has spent over a million bucks on advertising in her book,” he heard the man say. “And I've spent thousands of dollars taking her to lunch at Le Cirque and Cote Basque. But has Alexandra the Great ever put one of my client's garments on her cover? We get zip. Instead, she puts this
dreck,
” and he gestured to the cover of one of the copies of the June issue that lay on a nearby tabletop. “I call that grand larceny. But I'll tell you this, Myron. When Herb Rothman takes over, I'm going to tell him, ‘Give us editorial support in the book, or forget about my client's account.'”

Lenny found Alex in a little group, and took her aside.

“What is it, darlin'?”

“My spies have been busy,” he said. “They have learned a couple of things. I have learned, first, that our friend Herbert did not at all care for your June cover—as, if you recall, I warned you he might not.”

“He's said nothin' to me about it.”

“And I've learned, second, that he was not amused by this morning's ad in the
Times
.”

“We hit five million. We had to announce it, didn't we? Did he want us to keep it a secret that we've got a new ad-rate base?”

He reached out and touched her hand with his fingertips. I'm just warning you, my love,” he said. “Ho is apparently very sick, and he may be dying. As I said before, I think the camel may be trying to push his way into the tent. There's a girl here from England, the one I called Miss Anna Rexia, who appears to be on
very
good terms with your father-in-law. In putting two and two together, as I said earlier, I think there may be fireworks here tonight.”