Mistral's Daughter (67 page)

For
over twenty years Maggy Lunel and Eileen Ford had vied for these same precious
pieces of property, and since neither woman took kindly to losing, and since
one of them lost each time the other won, a truce, however momentary, amazed
Darcy.

"We're
like the oil-producing countries," Maggy had explained to him.
 
"Eileen and I, and now Wilhelmina in the
last seven years and even Zoli, since 1970, run the only games in town worth
mentioning.
 
We can't fix prices or form
a monopoly because it's against those ridiculous antitrust laws.
 
But we're responsible to our girls to
maintain standards so that they don't get unfairly treated by the advertising
agencies and the photographers
—
after all, they only have a few good
earning years before they're over the hill
—
so, as their
representatives I've always thought we should be on reasonably good terms with
each other."
 
Now Darcy understood
her motivation; she was thinking about Fauve's future.

One
day Fauve would be alone running the agency and Maggy wanted her to be as
secure as possible, free of long-standing feuds.
 
Darcy didn't believe it was an idea whose
time would ever come but he enjoyed watching Maggy struggling with her attempt
to be pragmatic.
 
Basically, he thought,
as he studied her now, she was the most splendid woman in the room, every
though it also contained Karen Graham and Renee Russo, but sweet reasonableness
wasn't her style.
 
He enjoyed her most
when she was her feisty, fiery, everyday self, but organizing this party had
brought out Maggy's mother hen side, and she had, for the event, managed to
gloss over the viciously competitive spirit that existed, had always existed
and would always exist in the model agency business.
 
Her very inconsistency delighted him.

Jason
Darcy knew he was a lucky man.
 
He'd
dragged Maggy before a judge before she had a chance to change her mind but
even as the ceremony progressed he'd wondered what differences a legal tie
could make to a union that had lasted for so long.
 
While he was repeating his vows he'd been
remembering case histories without end of people who had had long and loving
relationships until they made the mistake of indulging in marriage.
 
What then about the example set by novelist Fanny
Hurst, who had lived in great happiness with her husband for many years during
which they occupied two different apartments and made appointments whenever
they wanted to be together?
 
Might that
not be the ideal way to conduct such an unnatural, inhuman, artificial
arrangement as marriage?
 
But Maggy, this
ardent, wistful, girlish, springtime Maggy who had popped out one night at
"21", apparently intended to become his wife and he hadn't dared to
entertain too many second thoughts.
 
And
it was different.
 
It was, quite simply,
better.
 
Better to know that she finally trusted
him, better to know that after all she was willing to depend on him a little,
better not to wake up in the morning in another room on another street and not
know what his beloved was doing or feeling until he reached her by
telephone.
 
He decided that marriage was
such a lovely treat that it should be reserved only for the middle-aged.
 
Young people should be forbidden by law to
regularize any of their romances until they had passed fifty because they
couldn't possibly appreciate the charms of matrimony as long as they thought
of it as a right rather than a privilege.
 
It should be a reward for being faithful and loving, reserved for those
who had been true to each other.
 
He did,
however, have the good sense to keep these opinions to himself.
 
His reputation for crusty toughness would be
destroyed if they ever became public and, since Darcy still published one of
the most successful groups of magazines in the country, he didn't want to sound
uxorious.

"Where
the hell is Fauve?" said a man's voice behind him.

"I
thought she might be with you," Darcy said, turning to Ben Litchfield, his
one-time
protégé
whom he had watched rise from a space-salesman's job in
the advertising department of
Woman's Journal
, the biggest and most
successful women's magazine in the country, to editor-in-chief, bewildering
the world of women's magazines by reaching the top just before he turned
thirty.

"I
wish she were," he said, "but I haven't seen her since Monday."

Benjamin
Franklin Litchfield was the most fervent, and seemingly the most successful of
Fauve's many suitors, although she kept her own council and Maggy and Darcy
could only speculate.
 
Darcy felt a
proprietary interest in the man's case for he had introduced them himself a
year ago.

Fauve
and Ben should know each other he decided one day when he had tried to
telephone each of them on a Sunday morning and discovered them both in their
respective offices, hard at work on matters they had put aside for the weekend
when they wouldn't be interrupted.
 
He
had insisted that they both finish up in an hour and join him and Maggy for
lunch.
 
It had taken all his authority to
persuade the industrious pair to agree to such a waste of time but, since that
first meeting, Darcy had reason to suggest that they were moving toward
spending Sunday mornings in bed together, an arrangement he favored as much
more humane, and better for the circulation, the complexion and the psyche.

Maggy,
too, approved of young Litchfield.
 
In
some ways he reminded her of Darcy when she'd first met him:
 
he had that intensity that masked a capacity
to be amused by the major absurdities of life, he had Darcy's curiosity and
much, she sensed, of Darcy's generosity, but physically he had none of the
lean and philosophic, almost ascetic distinction that had first attracted her
to her love.

Handsome
Ben Litchfield was a habitually rumpled man.
 
He started out each day with the best of intentions, tall, muscular,
conventionally clad in a well-pressed suit, a clean shirt, and freshly shined
shoes, but by lunch he was a disgrace to the world of
Gentleman's Quarterly
.
 
He had pulled at his thick sandy hair in
despair so many times that it stood up on end where it wasn't falling into his
eyes, he had tugged impatiently at the knot of his tie until it reached the
third, by-now-unbuttoned button of the shirt that was peeping out between his
vest and his trousers, his pockets were stuffed with papers and stubs of other
people's pencils and he'd usually lost all of the three pairs of horn-rimmed
glasses he needed in order to see layouts or read manuscripts.

But
when Ben Litchfield took off his glasses his enormous, myopic blue eyes were
as startled and happy as those of a baby waking up to the sight of his first
elephant.
 
He greeted everything in life
with that same look of surprise and acceptance, although his associates had
been heard to mutter that he was about as innocent as a vice squad cop in
Detroit.
 
He had the sudden, sweet,
half-astonished smile of a man who's doing what he likes best and doing it
better than anyone else.
 
He'd been so
busy getting to the top that he'd never paused and looked around for a serious
girl until he'd met Fauve.

"Not
since Monday?" Darcy asked. "I thought you two were seeing a lot of
each other...
 
that's three days."

"I
know," Litchfield groaned.
 
"Listen, Darcy.
 
You've
taught me everything I know as you've reminded me on innumerable occasions,
usually in public.
 
How do you get a girl
to marry you?"

"Exercise
patience, my boy, patience."

"Thanks
a heap. That's a big help."

"Lunel
women do not take to marriage easily, if ever."
 
In fact, Darcy thought with complacency, he
was the only man to have managed to marry one of them, the only man to have
actually lured one of the line of three, lovely, redheaded Lunel women into
matrimony.
 
One of the three
illegitimate Lunel women, he mused, for Maggy had told him the whole story on
their honeymoon and he was, he believed, the only person on earth besides Fauve
who knew that Maggy and Teddy had been as illegitimate as Fauve herself.
 
"I won't have a minute's peace of mind
until I see Fauve safely married," Maggy had told him. "Three
bastards in a row are more than enough."

"Come
on, Ben, let me buy you a blini, and we'll talk this over seriously.
 
I may be able to give you some good advice
—
I don't think, after all, that too much patience is such a good idea,"
Darcy said.
 
Perhaps it wasn't altogether
fair to corner the market on Lunels.
 
He
owed it to Maggy to be more helpful.
 
But
where was Fauve?

He
looked down the staircase again.
 
At
last!
 
There she came, as flagrantly
gorgeous as he'd ever seen her, long red hair flying, dressed in a streak of
silver sequins, cut like a short slip, her cheeks bright with a flush of
excitement, bounding up the staircase two steps at a time calling,
"Magali, Magali, I'm sorry I'm so late!"
 
A succulent girl like a salamander whose
natural element is fire, Fauve Lunel arrived at her birthday party, but not
alone.
 
She had her hand firmly locked
around the wrist of another girl
—
at least Darcy supposed it was a girl
—
a six-foot-tall scarecrow of a creature, in overalls and sneakers,
with her flaxen hair cropped almost to a crew cut and a bewildered look on her
face as she loped after Fauve.

"Magali
—
look what I brought you!
 
She's
just off the bus from Arkansas
—
do you think what I think?"

Maggy
inspected the girl.
 
The look of top
models of the day was elegant, sophisticated, sculptured, with flowing
hair.
 
The girl was all bold bones and
ever-so-slightly buck teeth, freckles and winged eyebrows.
 
She had stupefying promise.
 
So the look was about to change. Trust Fauve.

"Is
she why you're late?"

"Yep.
 
I was upstairs at the office, just checking
out a few things before the party started and she wandered in off the
street.
 
Her friends, the ones she came
on the bus with, had dared her to come up.
 
So, naturally, that meant talking to them and then phoning her parents
and telling them why she wasn't coming home and convincing them that I wasn't
a white slaver and finding a place for her to stay...
 
you know."

"What's
your name?" Maggy asked the girl.

"Ida
Clegg."

"Hmm...
 
well, welcome to the Lunel Agency.
 
Do you drink vodka?"

"Darned
if this isn't a day for firsts," the girl said in a soft southern
voice.
 
"Yes, Ma'am, I believe I
will."

Maggy
turned to Fauve and kissed her, whispering,
 
"But why didn't you leave all those details till tomorrow?"

"Magali,
she also had Eileen's address on a piece of paper
—
her friends had
dared her to go there too," Fauve whispered back.
 

"Why
didn't you say so right away, for heaven's sake?
 
I was worried."

"Because
look behind you."

Maggy
turned and found Eileen Ford standing there, looking, as always, like the girl
who will inevitably be elected president of any class she's in.

"Happy
birthday, Fauve," Eileen said with a warm smile.

"Thank
you, Eileen."

"You
must be very proud, Maggy."

"Oh,
I am!"

"And
who is this?"

"A
new girl we've just discovered
—
Arkansas."

Eileen
gave Ids Clegg a quick, piercing look that saw everything, knew everything,
understood everything.

"Arkansas?"
she asked. "Arkansas what?"

"Just
Arkansas," Fauve replied.

"I
see.
 
How patriotic.
 
Well, Arkansas, welcome to New
York."
 
Eileen walked away
thoughtfully.
 
She did not look happy.

"Who
was that nice lady?" Arkansas asked.

"Ahh...
 
that was..." Maggy began.

"Nobody
you'll ever need to know," Fauve assured her hastily.

28

Fauve
Lunel almost sprinted through the doors of the old elevator that opened so
slowly on the tenth floor of the Carnegie Hall office building where the Lunel
Agency was located.
 
She was late for her
regular Friday meeting with Casey d'Augustino, but Benjamin Franklin Litchfield
had been exceedingly persistent last night and she'd overslept this
morning.
 
Fauve whisked through the
reception room where the walls were hung with six framed magazine covers of
former Lunel models.

"Only
six," Maggy had once said, "out of all our hundreds and hundreds
because when anyone waits to be interviewed in that room and looks at those
covers she'll leave if she doesn't have enough self-confidence to make it.
 
Then, when I have to turn her down, on her
way out she'll find comfort in the same pictures because after all how could
anybody be expected to be as beautiful as those girls were?"

The
agency, as it had grown over the years, occupied more and more space in the
fine old building and still it was crowded.
 
All model agencies are crowded the way restaurant kitchens and army
camps and backstages are crowded.
 
There
is never enough room for all the items needed to properly perform the functions
for which the space is intended, and if by some miracle of design, enough room
were provided, the work would suffer because of lack of communication between
the necessary personnel.

Maggy's
own office was large and comfortable but Fauve and Casey shared two small
offices next to one of the three booking rooms which were the heart of the
agency.
 
The bookers all seemed to be
busy on the phones, Fauve noted automatically as she sat down at her desk and
buzzed Casey to come in.
 
The Men's
Division, supervised by Joe O'Donnel, who had once been a male model himself,
was across the hall, and occupied even more cramped and less elegant space.

Casey
d'Augustino had been working at the agency for only a year but she and Fauve
functioned as a team.
 
She was a graduate
of Hunter, the public high school that accepts only the best and the brightest
of New York's students, and smart, smart Casey, born with what she considered
the unimaginatively ethnic name of Anna-Maria to a large Brooklyn family two
generations removed from Palermo, was Fauve's closest friend.
 
She sat down in one of the two chairs
opposite the desk and groaned, cautiously patting her curly, short hair down
over her forehead as if searching for bumps or bruises.

"What's
wrong?" Fauve inquired cheerfully.

"Champagne
hangover.
 
The worst kind.
 
Everybody has one.
 
The whole staff.
 
It was drinking all those toasts."

"I
feel fine," Fauve said, surprised.

"You
can't drink a toast to yourself, so don't look so virtuous, it was only because
it was your birthday and not mine.
 
On
mine I promise you a lethal hangover."

"I
brought you a present."

"Nothing
will make it better."

"It's
a counterirritant."

"I
don't like it already."

"It's
the new issue of
Cosmo.
 
Article
on Lauren Hutton by Guy Flatley.
 
Listen
to this.
 
She's talking about a 'go-see'
with Diana Vreeland, her first venture into high fashion.

"A dozen models were parading all about her. And
there I sat like a toad, taking in the whole scene.
 
Suddenly
—
in the middle of a sentence
—
D.V. stopped and pointed a long, white-gloved finger at me.
 
'You!' she said.

'Me.'

'Yes, you...
 
you have a great presence,' she said, her great eagle eyes piercing me.

'Thank you,' I said. 'So do you.'

She gave me a tiny smile and went back to finishing
her sentence.
 
And that after-noon I got
a call to report to Richard Avedon's studio and have some pictures taken."

"Oh,
shit
!" Casey jumped up. "No, tell me it isn't true!
 
Tell me you're making it up! Tell me that this
is just a vicious practical joke and you did it to show how much you love me,
to take my mind off my physical paralysis, to force my blood to try and
irrigate my liver once again."

"Feel
better already, don't you?" Fauve said, pleased.

"God,
yes. I feel like I could tear out a lioness's throat with my bare hands.
 
Oh, how can they do that to us?
 
Do you realize that millions of women read
every issue of
Cosmo
religiously and when they see that little story
they're all going to think that it could happen to them?
 
'Sitting there like a toad,' my ass!
 
Lauren never looked like a toad on the worst
day she ever had. Anyway Eileen, for the love of God, sent her to see Vreeland,
she didn't just drop by!
 
And where are
all those
Cosmo
readers going to end up?
 
Right here in our hallway waiting on line for the open auditions Tuesday
morning.
 
We'd better put on an extra
girl to process them."

"Yep.
 
But, Casey, you know it can happen and you
know it must have happened just like that because Lauren's so straight she
wouldn't make it up."

"Sure.
 
'Lightning' has to strike once in a while
—
but that doesn't mean that if you go out in Central Park and wait for ten years
it's gonna strike you.
 
Anyway, what's
this I hear about you and Miss Texarkana?
 
Faith's out with her buying her some clothes
—
what's up?"

"More
'lightning.' "

The
two girls exchanged a smile of anticipation and cautious excitement, like two
miners panning for gold who just may have hit pay dirt.
 
Modeling was a business built on an
occasional flash of lightning and many long hours of sheer hard work, but
without the lightning, the sudden arrival on the scene of a new and singular
type of beauty, it wouldn't be the business that had grown more and more
fascinating over the last few decades, until it rivaled moviemaking in its
appeal to the public.

Like
everyone else who works in a field that trafficks in the flimflam business of
glamour, they knew the truths behind that elusive illusion; the vital
importance of being equal to the daily grind; the incredible persistence and
the unending discipline, to say nothing of the absolutely crucial need to be in
the right place at the right time.
 
And
yet they knew that glamour
did
exist and that certain faces had it, a
quality no more to be explained than charm could be explained. They understood
that some faces inspired emotion, and they were trained to recognize those
faces amid a sea of girls who were just plain beautiful.
 
The difference was so small that in most
cases it had to be a subjective decision.

Every
year thousands and thousands of girls were seen by the Lunel Agency; those who
wrote and enclosed photographs; those who won the dozens of regional modeling
competitions that were held all over the world; and those who came in person to
the agency.
 
And out of all of them they
selected no more than thirty to represent.
 
Why did they take on those particular thirty?
 
Neither Maggy nor Fauve nor Casey could have
written it out in words or made a diagram.
 
All the basic rules were well known, all other physical requirements for
a model could be met by a large number of the hopeful girls they turned
down.
 
They saw so many applicants that
only someone who was blatantly special caused them to take a second look.
 
Casey called it "something
behind
the
eyes" and Fauve called it a sense of "heightened reality" but
they both meant the same thing
—
lightning.

"First
on my agenda," said Casey, "there's the case of Miss Day O'Daniel who
called me again this morning.
 
She's
ready to jump ship and come over here but she wants her own booker."

"How
negotiable is that?" Fauve asked briskly.
 
"It's her own booker or no go."

Day
O'Daniel was one of the top half-dozen girls at another agency.
 
Recently she'd become restless in the fretful
ways models occasionally did for reasons no one could truly fathom, and had let
it be known that she'd consider changing to Lunel.
 
Her contract, like all contracts in 1974,
required only thirty days' notice by either party for termination, and Fauve
and Casey were eager to represent the exquisitely fine-boned brunette whose
range was one of the greatest in the business.
 
Range, the ability to inhabit a Galanos dress with careless authority
and yet to look unthreateningly lovely in a mass-market magazine ad, was one of
the qualities necessary before any girl who was already a top model could
aspire to superstar status
—
and Day had it. However, Lunel had a
policy, laid down by Maggy, of not permitting any model her own booker.

"Day
said that she wouldn't feel she'd really come into her own until she had her
own booker, she said that she wanted someone with whom she could feel totally
secure and comfortable, someone who would know all her needs, someone who would
give her the feeling that she was being taken care of.
 
I quote."

"Maybe
she should go home to mother," Fauve said broodingly.
 
"It's such a mistaken and naive idea
that having your own booker is the only way to prove that you've made it.
 
Doesn't she realize that if I give her her
own booker every other booker in the agency will mentally click her off and
forget about her?
 
What if her booker is
out to lunch?
 
What if her booker's sick
for the week or gets another job
—
Day would never be properly
protected.
 
It's a crazy way to run a
career.
 
I hope you told her."

"Gee,
no, Fauve.
 
I thought I'd let you do that
yourself because you do it so well."

"Droll.
 
I see you're feeling better.
 
It's frightening how nice you can be when
you're really sick.
 
I'm always reassured
when you revert to your truly rotten self.
 
So our Big Board isn't enough for Day O'Daniel?"

Fauve's
eyes wandered to the activity she could oversee through the half-glassed wall
of her office.
 
She had a view into all
three booking areas:
 
the smallish Test
Board room, where all new girls, whose careers were just starting, were handled
by four bookers; the huge Center Board room, where fourteen bookers arranged
the schedules for the majority of the Lunel models, and the legendary Big Board
room, in which three top bookers handled calls for a mere twenty girls, the
stars of the agency.
 
"Did she
actually come right out and insist that it wouldn't be enough to be on the Big
Board?" Fauve persisted.

"I
thought I'd let you find that out."

"I
think I'll let Magali ask her," Fauve said.

"She's
gone to the country for the weekend, remember, and Ms. O'Daniel wants to get an
answer today.
 
Day left her home number
—
you can call her tonight."

"Okay,
next."
 
Once again Fauve was
reminded that from Thursday evening till sometime late on Monday, Maggy now
spent her time in the country place she and Darcy had bought outside of Bedford
Village.
 
It was still difficult to
realize that Maggy had actually brought herself to leave her agency entirely
in Fauve's hands for two out of five days a week.
 
But Darcy had trained his various editors to
claim only three days of his time each week, finding in the process that they
became more efficient and self-reliant.
 
He had always maintained that work contracted to fit comfortably into
the least amount of time you were willing to devote to it, and when he and
Maggy married he decided to fulfill his dream of spending long weekends in the
country.

"Next,"
said Casey, "Miss Nebula, Miss Cosmos, Miss Super Nova, Miss Milky Way or
whatever it was she won, declines to go through the Program.
 
She says she doesn't need it
—
she's
been through enough training for a lifetime.
 
No, do not
dare
to ask me.
 
I've already told her that everybody goes through the Program, without
exception, unless she's a top model who comes over to us from another agency,
and even then we make the decision on an individual basis, but she's Swedish,
highly outer-galactic, and very stubborn."