The Stork Club (17 page)

"Are you calling me a liar?" one dark-haired, very tan woman from Beverly Hills asked, her body tense with rage. Mitch knew she was the wife of a well-known movie producer. Behind her, through the large front window of the store, he could see her red Rolls-Royce with her personalized license plate MINDY.

He looked at her with the most benign look he could summon, no anger, no self-righteousness, no judgments, while she clenched her fists and contorted her face and said to him loud enough for everyone in the store to hear, "The goddamned dress is too small on me, and I only took it because your pushy salesgirl forced it on me, and if you don't give me every cent of my money right now, I'll tell every friend I have how badly you're treating me and I swear to you not one of them will ever set foot in this place!"

Lainie usually stood on the other side of the store by
the dressing room doors while one of those incidents took place, wanting to hide inside one of the rooms until the customer left. It made her sick to think that what the woman was saying might be true, that the anger of this one customer might have the power to destroy their business, and she was awed by Mitch's ability to not react.

At home they laughed about how he was the emotional Italian to Lainie's level-headed cool WASP, but in the store it was the opposite. She would get flustered, be churning inside while, for the sake of the business, Mitch always maintained his composure. Even when Mindy took the dress in question from the counter, balled up the sequined garment, which retailed at four thousand dollars, and with her eyes never leaving Mitch's, threw the dress onto the floor, then stomped out of the building, climbed into her Rolls, and drove away.

When she was gone, Mitch walked to the dress, picked it up, and called out to one of his salesgirls, "Put this in a box and send it to her house. She paid for it, she wore it, it's hers." And when Mindy came into the store a few weeks later, looking for something to wear to her friend's daughter's wedding, all of them—Mitch, Lainie, the salesgirls who had witnessed the scene, and Mindy herself—acted as if nothing had happened.

Lainie was five nine, with a long willowy body, ash blond hair, and pale blue eyes. She looked good in everything she wore, so she always wore the clothes they had in stock at Panache. When the customers saw her dressed in an outfit, Mitch knew they would want to try that outfit on themselves, and hopefully buy it. Sometimes, though, the plan backfired, because the customer would stand next to Lainie, who looked like an angel in a certain cropped jacket or short skirt in which the customer looked ridiculous. The result was some
times a teary-eyed customer storming out frustrated and empty-handed.

But the new store had lighting and mirrors that could make nearly everyone look good. Mitch had spared no expense making sure of that. He had hired a film lighting director famous for working with beautiful demanding female stars, and insisted the designer pay attention to every corner of the eight-thousand-square-foot space. Even in the ladies' room, the customers' cheeks looked pinker than they were, and when they modeled for themselves in front of the full-length three-way mirrors, their bodies looked longer and slimmer.

In the first store there had been so little hanging space that Mitch kept some of the stock on a rack in his van, which was parked downstairs behind the building. When a customer asked, "Do you have this in a size ten?" he would have to excuse himself and run out the back door and down to the parking lot, sometimes in the rain, to check the merchandise. In the new store, there was plenty of hanging space for miles and miles of stock, a room for the back stock of shoes in all sizes, a steaming and pressing room, an alterations room, and an office for Mitch.

The first store was upstairs from a greasy-spoon restaurant on Ventura Boulevard in Woodland Hills and across the street from Valley BMW, where Lainie Dunn was working part-time as a cashier. The rest of the time she went to school studying English literature at Cal State, Northridge. Mitch and Lainie met at the restaurant downstairs when Lainie stopped in there for a quick lunch on her break. He spotted her beautiful face, put his cheeseburger and Coke on the little table across from her tuna-salad sandwich, sat down across from her, and said, "Now don't say I never take you to any fancy places."

He knew he was good-looking and funny. Women
always fell for him and he had confidence that this girl would like him too. He could see by the poor quality of her clothes that she didn't have money, but the way she tied the little scarf just so around her neck and turned up the collar of the jacket and pushed up the sleeves showed style. And it didn't hurt that she was break-your-heart pretty. Lainie smiled at the pickup line then glanced at his left hand to see if he was wearing a ring.

At Valley BMW she was the only female employee. Since her first day of work, every male in the place had come on to her. The fact that every one of them was married didn't seem to mar their persistence. Gino from the parts department, a guy with a wife and four kids, was so hot on Lainie's trail that once he actually ripped open the bathroom door while she was inside, probably hoping to catch her with her skirt up, which he did.

But he was stunned and turned off when he saw that her skirt was up because she was injecting her thigh with the insulin she had to have for her diabetes. Later Lainie laughed when she told her mother about the expression she'd seen on Gino's face. But the positive result was that seeing her with the needle stuck in her thigh had unnerved him and he'd stopped bothering her.

"Single," Mitch said that day, seeing her eyes looking at his hand. "And you?" Lainie nodded. Her face flushed when she looked at his dark long-lashed eyes, and that thick black hair nearly to his shoulders, and thought, Oh my God, is
he
gorgeous! And pretty soon she was telling him what she later admitted was "the fancy version" of her life.

That she was working at the BMW place because she liked the pretty cars and needed to pick up a few dollars because she was an English major in college. That her mother, with whom she lived, worked at Bradford, Freeman, a well-known law firm in Beverly Hills. She didn't say that she only took two courses every year in
the English department because it was all the time she could afford to take away from work, or that her mother was the receptionist at the law firm.

Mitch nodded and heard very little of what she said because her face was so pretty he couldn't wait until she stood up so he could take a look at her body. But she still had most of her sandwich left, which she nibbled at between sentences, and didn't seem to be in a hurry.

Mitch told her that his father had just died and left some money to him and to each of his sisters. He'd been working as an accountant but was miserable doing that, so he decided to start a ladies' clothing store upstairs from where they were sitting. He also mentioned that he had a hard time keeping sales help because he was such a colossal pain in the ass to work for. But he said that part grinning broadly so she'd know he was kidding.

When she got up to leave, he offered to pay for her sandwich, which was already paid for, and when she told him so he said, "I owe you one." As he watched her walk away, he noted that the body was even hotter-looking than the face. After Lainie got back to Valley BMW and sat down at her desk, the phone rang and it was Mitch calling to say, "I think you should come and work for me, and one of these days I'll have you driving one of those fancy cars instead of drooling over them. Why don't you tell the boss you quit, and walk across the street?"

Lainie laughed, said, "Don't be silly," and hung up the phone. But after thinking about it for a minute, she stood, took her purse out of the top drawer of the desk where she always kept it, quit her job, and walked across the street.

Mitch was right about her sense of style, and it paid off. The way she pointed out to a customer that a particular pair of earrings brought out the color of her eyes, or that buying two different shirts to wear under a jacket
offered more opportunities to get use out of the jacket, increased the store's take significantly at the end of every day.

When Mitch's mother died he was four, and his three older sisters, who were eight, nine, and eleven at the time, took on the task of raising him. Their father never remarried and the girls ran the household and "Mitchie's" life. They pampered him and treated him as if he were their living doll. They chose his clothes, and ordered the barber to cut his hair just so, helped him with his schoolwork, criticized his friends. It was like having three mothers. The up side of which was having three times the nurturing, the down side of which was having three times the nagging and interfering.

Fortunately, there was enough money from Joe De Nardo's plumbing business to provide them all with good clothes, cars at age sixteen, and an elaborate wedding for each of the sisters. Mitch was crazy about all three of his siblings. Betsy, whom he described as "very Valley," had a wild mane of hair, loved glitzy jewelry and sparkly clothes. Mary Catherine, with dark smokily made-up eyes and straight silky hair, was tall and leggy and always wore sexy suits with boxy jackets and very short skirts that looked sensational. She had been trying all her life without success to get into show business by auditioning for commercials. Kitty lived in Calabassas and loved to ride horses, which, after her husband and kids, was all she cared about. She looked like a Ralph Lauren ad, in her jeans and Shetland sweaters. It was undoubtedly from his pretty, clothes-conscious sisters that Mitch learned a sense of what was stylish and a knowledge about what appealed to women.

When the news got to the sisters that Mitch was in love with a new girl who was working in his little store, each of them came by to check her out. Mary Catherine and Kitty gave her their stamp of approval because she
was pretty and friendly and seemed to be wild about their brother. But Betsy wasn't so bowled over.

"I took her out to lunch and believe me, I had plenty of questions for her. She eats like a bird so I asked her if she was watching her figure for Mitch. She told me no, she's careful for health reasons." The sisters were gathered at Betsy's house in Sherman Oaks one afternoon so their kids could swim in her pool. "Well, when I pressed her to see what that meant, she told me she's got high blood sugar, and she has to give herself shots before every meal. Mitchie knows about it and says so what!"

"He's right. Big deal, lots of people have diabetes. It's not like having cancer. You can control it," Kitty said.

"People like that have problems," Betsy said. "It's bad for your eyes, and also they pee a lot which is bad for the kidneys, and sometimes it's not good for them to get pregnant." Now the others were worried too. Mitch was the only one who could carry on the De Nardo name. All three of the sisters had assumed that any day he would fall in love, get married, and have a million kids.

"Maybe it's just a fling. Maybe he won't marry her."

But it was far from a fling. Lainie and Mitch meshed, united, clung to each other, and never had so much as a cross word between them. And the differences between their backgrounds and their personalities made them seem exotic and exciting to each other. She was intrigued with the fiery passionate man who laughed and cried and fought with his sisters on the phone with ferocity, then thought better of it all and called back to apologize with the sweetness of a puppy. "I'm a jerk. I take it back. I love you." It was the way people behaved in movies.

And Mitch had found a woman about whom he liked
to say, "She knows the rules of the road." Because Lainie knew how to be gracious and polite, somehow knew the proper way to behave in every situation. "She classes up my act," he admitted.

He proposed to her on bended knee in that sweet romantic way he had of doing everything. But before Lainie could say yes she knew she had to tell him what her doctor in Panorama City told her years earlier about the dangers of pregnancy for diabetics. It could be too much of a strain on the kidneys, and if there was a problem she could end up having to be on dialysis for the rest of her life. And worse than that, the baby of a diabetic might come out deformed or blind. Mitch looked a little pale as he listened, but finally he said what she'd prayed he would, "I don't care about any of that. I only care about being with you for the rest of my life."

When their bookkeeper told them they'd outgrown the store above the restaurant, they began working on the design of the new store, their dream store, which they supervised brick by brick, hanger by hanger. It would be two stories, with full bars on both floors, beautiful spacious dressing rooms, designer fashions with new California designers they hand-picked, both cocktail and casual clothes, and a complete line of shoes and accessories. They would do all the buying but they would need a large staff of salespeople, an expert in alterations, and a full-time cleaning crew.

A few weeks before the grand opening, Mitch took Lainie's hand, dragged her away from a conversation she was having about color chips with the painter, walked her outside to his car, and said, "Get in."

"Where are we going? We have a million things to do."

"Get in."

She did and he pulled his car out of the parking lot and drove west on Ventura Boulevard. "Baby, where are we going?"

Mitch reached over and patted her leg. "A surprise for my girl."

They drove for a few miles, and soon he stopped the car on Ventura Boulevard across from the old store.

"Why are we stopping here?"

"That's why," Mitch said, pointing at the window of the showroom of Valley BMW. The car in the front, the white 735I, had a big red bow on the top and a large sign next to it that said
LAINIE, I TOLD YOU SO, I LOVE YOU SO, M.

It took Lainie a minute to understand. "Mitch, you're crazy. We can't afford the car."

"Yes we can. Thanks to all your hard work and the times you stayed in the store twelve hours straight. You're my partner and I want to give you this to let you know how I appreciate you. Let me have the pleasure of watching you drive that car out of the showroom. Please."