The Rothman Scandal (8 page)

She withdrew her hand quickly. “Don't talk like that, Lenny,” she said. “You're frightening me. There's nothing that Herb could possibly do now that would hurt us—is there?”

“Us?” he said, almost automatically. “I'm not talking about us. I'm talking about you.”

The band was playing “Somethin' Stupid,” and the waiters were moving about the terrace, tapping little silver triangles—
ping, ping, ping
—to signal that it was time for Alex's guests to move to the tables.

Why'd I have to spoil it all

By sayin' somethin' stupid like I love you …?

Lenny took Alex's arm to escort her to her table.

4

If anyone had troubled to ask Lenny Liebling for the answers to the questions about Alex Rothman that the Razor Blades and their Eraserhead husbands, lovers, and walkers were gossiping about, and speculating about, that night on Alex Rothman's terrace, he could easily have supplied them. Her age, for example. Alex was born September 30, 1944, which made her nearly forty-six. A face-lift? Never, nor had she ever contemplated one, nor, in the opinion of most people who were able to look at her objectively, did she need one. “Wait until you're fifty-five before you even begin to think about it, Lexy, honey,” her friend Lucille Withers told her once. “Fifty-five is an age when a woman's face begins to need a little tightening. Meanwhile, men between the ages of forty and seventy hardly seem to age at all. Don't you hate 'em? Men?”

It was only the women who had had their faces lifted who speculated about other women's face-lifts, and peered behind their ears for the little telltale signs.

And that business, the subject of much speculation over the years, about Alex and Ho Rothman, the company's founder, having been lovers—that was quite absurd. Ho Rothman was Alex's husband's
grand
father, for heaven's sake, Lenny thought. Alex and Ho's relationship was based on mutual respect—and, of course, the fact that Alex had made
Mode
display the black ink at the bottom of the balance sheet that Ho Rothman so dearly loved to see. Meanwhile, Ho and Aunt Lily Rothman had been happily married—oh, they had their ups and downs like everyone else—for sixty-eight years, something of an accomplishment in this day and age.

And as for the difference between Alex's age and that of Mel Jorgenson, who had been her beau for the past two years, Mel was forty-three—hardly a significant age gap between a man and a woman in the Year of Our Lord 1990, Lenny thought.

Lenny could have pointed out the truths behind all these silly canards about Alex Rothman, but it was not in his nature to do so. Besides, the Razor Blades and their Eraserheads enjoyed their nasty little speculations too much for him to take the trouble to disillusion them; it would leave them with nothing to carp and prattle about, which would be too cruel and easy, like snatching pennies from a blind man's cup. Let them stew in their own Jews, he often said and, being Jewish, he could say that. And Lenny was not a stewer. Lenny saw himself as a
saucier
, a
gratinier
. He took the boring and the banal and added garnish. Lenny was not interested in gossip, and he was not interested in bedtime stories, either. But he was interested in secrets. Secrets were his weapons, the source of his power.

For instance, Lenny did nothing to quash the stories, which circulated in the trade, to the effect that Alex received free dresses from designers and manufacturers, though nothing could be farther from the truth. In an industry riddled with graft, bribery, greased palms, and under-the-desk payoffs, no one on
Mode
's staff was permitted to accept gifts, or even discounts, from designers, manufacturers, advertisers, or other interested parties. Alex had made this an ironclad policy at the magazine and, like everyone else, she paid the full retail price for her clothes. The only exception to this rule was Carol Duffy, the beauty editor, who was powerless to curb the cosmetics industry's traditional practice of “sampling,” and could not stem the flow of samples that poured into her office from Revlon, Estēe Lauder, Arden, and the rest. Cartons, literally, of lipsticks, nail polishes, scrubs, scents, cleansers, moisturizers, and other elixirs and beauty panaceas arrived at poor Carol's desk daily—more beauty products than any woman could ever sample, much less use up, in a lifetime in front of a mirror. Alex's solution to this was simple. A bushel basket, decorated with red ribbons, was placed outside Carol's office door; the cosmetics samples were dumped there, and staffers were invited to help themselves to whatever they wanted. Whatever was left over at the end of each week was picked up by the Salvation Army.

But then there was always the problem—such as the complaint Lenny had overheard the agency head express tonight—of the advertiser who felt, rightly or wrongly, that he or she was not being sufficiently paid back, editorially, for the advertising dollars spent in the magazine. Advertisers were constantly threatening to “pull out of the book”—or even to pull their ads out of every one of the Rothman publications—because their products were insufficiently plugged in the editorial pages, or if they felt a competitor's line was being unfairly favored. If Ralph Lauren, a major advertiser, picked up an issue of
Mode
with a design by his arch-rival, Calvin Klein, on the cover, Lauren's fury was predictable. Fashion designers were a notoriously touchy and temperamental lot, and they always felt cheated out of the recognition they thought they deserved. But part of an editor's job was to play favorites, and obviously Alex Rothman had hers. If she had overheard that complaint tonight, she would have said, “Look, we're grateful for your advertising dollars, and we're proud to have you advertise in
Mode
. But I have to assume that you advertise in
Mode
because you want to reach our readers, and I have to assume that reaching our readers must pay off for you, or else you wouldn't advertise. What more can I say?”

Lenny could have said the same thing, if he had felt like it. He could also have said that, unlike some editors whom he could name, Alex did not believe in running around town begging for advertising. He could have said that, unlike some magazines,
Mode
did not offer substantial discounts to big advertisers. He could have said that the great Ho Rothman himself had disagreed—violently—with Alex when she had outlined her let-them-come-to-me policy about advertisers, and he could have added that, whether advertisers liked it or not, that policy seemed to have worked, thus far, for Alex.

And as for the Semi–Very Important Seventh Avenue designer whom the agency man represented, Lenny knew that this chap was not one of Alex's special favorites at the moment. The fellow was young, still growing, and had a way to go. He was certainly not ready for a cover of
Mode
. Should Alex, then, not accept his agency's invitations to lunch at Le Cirque and La Cote Basque? There was perhaps a gray area here, but not much of a one in Lenny's opinion. Alex was in the business of fashion news-gathering. Let her have her lunches with designers' reps. It was one way of keeping up with what was happening, and what might be on the designers' minds. Besides, it was a dog-eat-dog world, this whole business. The dogs were still dogs, even when they invited editors to French restaurants, and, naturally, when they didn't get exactly what they wanted, they tried to bite back.

Integrity was a word not high on the list in Lenny's lexicon of human virtues, but he was willing to recognize it in others, and he had to admit that Alex maintained her integrity better than most people in the howling, canine pack around her. It took guts to accept an advertiser's hundred-dollar lunch, and give him nothing in return.

But it was Herb Rothman's assertion—if he had indeed said such a thing—that Alex had become a “gimmicky” editor that disturbed Lenny the most. That was an aspersion on his own work for the magazine, in Lenny's opinion. Alex was an editor who believed in strong visual images and, as special projects editor, Lenny had had a hand in staging some of those images. Lenny was not the magazine's art director—that job belonged to a somewhat crass (in Lenny's opinion) but perfectly likable Irishman named Bob Shaw whose best work (Lenny happened to know) was accomplished in the morning, before Bob had washed down his lunch with several Scotches. Lenny knew why Bob Shaw's office door was often closed during the afternoon: Bob Shaw was sleeping off his lunch. Also, Lenny knew of a certain little blonde in the Art Department, who was eager to climb the masthead, who often slept off Bob Shaw's lunches with him, and about whom Lenny was sure Bob Shaw's wife had no knowledge, but that was neither here nor there. That item, for the moment, was one of Lenny's not-very-useful secrets, though who knew what might prove useful later on? The oddest things sometimes turned out to be useful.

Lenny saw himself as a stylist. Let Bob Shaw do his overall layouts for a picture feature, which were usually very good, but when it came time for a photo shooting session, it was Lenny who kept an eye on the little details, the little touches—a girl's scarf not quite tied properly, for instance, or a model's foot extended at an awkward angle, her chin tilted upward when it would look prettier tilted down, a speck of lint on her skirt—Lenny was good at catching things like that. In a famous Mary Poppins spread, for instance, which had involved huge wind machines and photographing the models flying through the air on invisible wires in the middle of Hyde Park, Lenny had spotted a leaf caught in one of the wires. “We'll airbrush it out,” Bob Shaw had said. No, Lenny insisted. Airbrushing always looked like airbrushing, he said, and Alex agreed. And so they reshot the whole elaborate, expensive photograph. Lenny's ability to spot little details like that was one reason why he and Alex were a good team.

Were visual ideas like the Mary Poppins spread gimmicky? Lenny didn't think so, and neither did readers, who stopped to study the photograph and wonder how it had been done. And the wind did wonders for the flying models' clothes—one of whom, of course, was dressed as a nanny, wheeling a pram through the air. The issue was a sell-out at the newsstands, which provided the true barometer of a magazine's popularity.

For another story, titled “Is the Paris Couture Dead?” Alex had had the idea of photographing her models in the misty lanes and pathways of Père Lachaise Cemetery, among the elaborate tombs of Frederic Chopin, Oscar Wilde, Edith Piaf, and Coco Chanel. For a story on architecture in fashion, Alex had posed her models on scaffolding, and in the baskets of cherry pickers, and on the I-beams of a rising skyscraper. Then there was her famous Seraglio issue, at a time when Middle Eastern influences were creeping into fashion, when all the models were posed as though they were members of a desert sultan's harem. One shot, showing a model holding up a bunch of purple grapes before the sultan's open mouth, was positively erotic. Issues like these became collectors' items, and Alex discovered that readers were saving old issues of
Mode
, the way some people refused to throw out copies of the
National Geographic
.

Sometimes Alex's visual ideas for the magazine turned out to have real social impact. During a season that had been characterized by a certain
fin de siècle
decadence, she had asked Richard Avedon to pose her models against the grotesque background of a mountainous, rusting automobile graveyard in Southern California—a risky notion, since it took the chance of offending advertisers in Detroit, who might see it as a reminder of how quickly their products became obsolete. Instead, something quite different happened. The vivid setting did more than dramatize the Decadent Look from Paris. The photographs so incensed readers in Encino, who recognized the mountain of twisted steel that had been rising in their own backyards, that they campaigned—successfully—to have their local eyesore bulldozed underground.

All this went into building up five million circulation and the ad announcing it in this morning's
Times
, which, apparently, Herb Rothman had not cared for, though Lenny had thought it rather clever. The ad, which filled the entire back page of the paper, had been prepared by the magazine's agency, and the idea for it had been theirs, not Alex's. The illustration, by the cartoonist Roz Chast, showed a pert and saucy whale breaching the water and blowing a tall spray of foam into the air, and the headline was simply:

THAR SHE BLOWS!
CIRCULATION OVER 5,000,000!

The only other visual element was a small photo of
Mode
's June cover in the lower lefthand corner of the page. Originally, Chast had shown a tiny whaling vessel in the distance, with a sailor, holding a spyglass, pointing from the ship's crow's nest. But even on her magazine's promotional advertising, Alex Rothman managed to place her own personal stamp. When the agency's account executive had first shown Alex the paste-up of the ad, she immediately covered up the image of the small boat with the palm of her hand. “We're the whale—right?” she said. “We don't want it to look as though we're about to be harpooned out of the water, do we? Save the whale. Leave out the little boat.” Then she took a grease pencil, and gave the whale long, curling eyelashes. “We're a woman's magazine—right?” she said. “Let's make our whale more of a lady. And we're a stylish magazine, so we should have a stylish whale. And suggest to Mrs. Chast that she might have the whale wink at the reader with one eye. That tells the industry that, while we're pleased, we don't take it all
too
seriously. We knew it would happen all along—right?” And so, somewhat grumpily, Chast had gone back to her drawing board, though even she admitted that Alex was right in terms of the message the ad was intended to convey. “Sure she's right, dammit!” Roz Chast said.

And the agency was so pleased with the finished ad that it immediately submitted it to the Clio Awards committee. Why should Herb have objected to that? That mystified Lenny. A pattern was emerging, a plot was unfolding, but Lenny was not yet certain what it was.