Mistral's Daughter (68 page)

The
Lunel Agency conducted an evaluation, called the Program, of all new models
they accepted, in which Maggy, Fauve, Casey and three of the most experienced
bookers participated. The agency paid to send the girls to a photographer for
an exhaustive series of pictures expressly designed to show how she worked in
front of the camera in her own clothes and makeup.
 
Every detail about her was then analyzed and
the six of them decided how best to polish their new model.
 
They asked each other if she needed help with
her posture; whether her hair was the perfect length, style and color; what
more must she learn to do with makeup to widen her range; whether she needed to
have extra coaching on her expressions to gain flexibility and camera presence;
or dance classes for ease of movement and poise.
 
If she had come to them from a modeling
school they asked, what did she have to unlearn?

"There's
never been a Swede as stubborn as I am," Fauve remarked.
 
"Unless she has her own flying saucer,
Miss Sweden will go through the Program even if Revlon calls today and wants to
sign her to an exclusive contract for the rest of her life.
 
We made one mistake with Jane, when we
decided she didn't need the Program and that taught me a lesson I'll never
forget."

"These
top beauty contest winners do put in a lot of time before they make it,"
Casey said, in an attempt to be fair.

"None
of which has anything to do with modeling."

"As
I well know."

"I'll
see Miss Truly Magnificent
—
I think it was the Universe,

Casey,
when I have a minute.
 
Meanwhile, let's
get Loulou in here."
 
Fauve picked
up the phone intercom and dialed the Big Board room and asked Loulou, the
booker with the most seniority in the agency, to come into her office.

A
half-minute later Loulou strolled in, flopping gratefully down into a
chair.
 
She was thirty, a plump, fair,
pleasant-looking woman whose expression invariably combined deep worry and
absolute optimism, so that she looked as if she were going down in the
Titanic
with firm faith in the existence of Paradise.
 
Loulou, like a great racehorse trainer or a
wise ballet mistress, had developed to an art that special equilibrium that
enabled her to deal with a different race from herself.
 
The model, highly strung, highly priced,
highly vulnerable, a natural aristocracy, separated by the class system of
beauty from ever being quite like other women.

"Hi,
guys," she said.
 
"Well, let's
see.
 
Betty won't pierce her ears for the
diamond studs for the De Beers ad.
 
She
says she's not a coward, but she can't stand needles; Hillary booked out for
the entire month of October.
 
She's going
to the Himalayas to meditate whatever with that guru of hers, whoever.
 
Glamour
gave me their budget for the
Tangiers trip and it will only cover two and a half girls and they need three
so I said I'd ask the girls if they'd take less to see the Casbah. That new
Canadian girl keeps telling me she only wants to do catalog when I know she's
ready for editorial...
 
somebody has to
talk to her about her image problem.
 
Nine phones are out as usual but Pete, our semipermanent phone repair
man, is on vacation and since nobody else really understands our setup, we're
just lucky it's Friday.
 
One of you is
going to have to resign Cindy because I haven't had a request for her for two
weeks and you know that means it's over for her here but, what the hell, she's
twenty-six and she knows this has been coming for a year or more so maybe it'll
be a relief.
 
There's a sale in the Anne
Klein showroom; Halston is giving a party and Linda didn't get an invitation
—
I can't be responsible for what she might do
—
keep her away from razor
blades.
 
I hocked and hocked Faberge to
use Jessica and now they're in love with her, they don't want anybody else,
they need her tomorrow, but she's in Mexico; Dawn's father is in from Syracuse
and she picked this weekend to skip town with her guy, what'll I tell old
Dads?
 
Doyle Dane suddenly called to
remind me that Patsy has to drive a stick shift in that Alfa Romeo ad
—
she's halfway to the location and as far as I know she doesn't drive period;
one of the booker trainees forgot to give Lani her wake-up call this morning so
she overslept and kept ten people waiting for an hour and they want to charge
her for it; Patsy just called and asked us to make dentist, doctor, facial and
waxing appointments for her but we don't even know what she wants waxed...
 
anyway, if you guys have nothing else to do
but sit around and yak and complain that's grand, but I've a lot of work to do
so if you'll just excuse me
—
oh, did you want to see me?
 
What's up?"

"It's
gracious of you to ask," Fauve said.

"Kind
of you to make time for us," Casey muttered.

"Day
O'Daniel will be joining our happy group," Fauve announced.

"Why
not?" Loulou never showed surprise.
 
Just as her expression never changed, her composure couldn't be
shaken.
 
If Fauve had decided to get rid
of every single one of the twenty models on the Big Board, Loulou would have
shrugged.
 
Her philosophy was that every
three months a new generation of models arrived from the vast reaches of that
mysterious, unimportant world outside of Manhattan and her job was simply to
put them to work as profitably as possible. The models on Lunel's Big Board
earned seven hundred and fifty dollars a day, although a few among them had the
notion that they were worth more, as much as a thousand dollars daily.
 
No one, not Maggy, not Eileen Ford, not
Fauve, and certainly not Loulou, had any idea that within a half-dozen years
all the top girls at all the agencies would be getting three thousand dollars
for a day's work.

Loulou
had trained both Fauve and Casey and they knew that while Loulou had her
favorite models, as did every booker, the agency was always more important to
her than any individual girl.

"I'll
set up a chart for her," Loulou sighed, stretching and yawning. "My
head," she groaned.

"Loulou,
don't you wonder why she's coming here?" Casey demanded.

"I
know why.
 
I've just won five bucks on
it.
 
Wish I'd bet more.
 
Oh, God, why do I drink? Nothing's enough fun
to feel like this for.
 
Listen, guys, I
have to get back to the board.
 
It may
only be a lousy job for you but it's life and death out there for
me."
 
She shut the door behind her
as she left.

"One
day," said Casey morosely, "I'm gonna surprise her."

"No,
you're not."

"No,
I'm not," Casey agreed.
 
"Bookers."

Surely,
thought Nadine Mistral Dalmas, the bills from Arene must be wrong.
 
How could she possibly have spent twelve thousand
francs on flowers in the last few months?
 
Arene was the most expensive florist in Paris and it was the most
prestigious.
 
It showed a lack of
intelligence, in Nadine's opinion, to send a hostess flowers from any other
shop, for no matter how much you spent elsewhere, they didn't make quite the
same impression.
 
Sending flowers, the
right flowers, in the right way, from the right place, was one of the carefully
calculated nuances Nadine had perfected in the course of seven years of being
Madame Phillipe Dalmas.

They
had been called the most envied couple in Paris, Nadine reminded herself as she
sat at the desk in her modern salon and confronted the pile of bills with which
she had finally brought herself to deal.
 
Most of them were three or four months old, and many of them were from
people who didn't care whether she was the daughter of the Comte de Paris, the
legitimate Pretender to the throne of France, or the daughter of Julien
Mistral, whose estate would make her so immensely rich when he died.
 
When
he died.
 
Her father, damn him to hell, showed every
sign of living to a hundred, and Parisian tradesmen had nothing in common with
British tradesmen of a century before who would keep an heir supplied with
money on the basis of his expectations.

Nadine
inspected the Arene bill carefully.
 
Two
miniature cymbidium orchid plants planted in porcelain cachepots for the
Princess Édouard de Lobkowicz.
 
How could
they have charged so much when she had provided the cachepots herself?
 
She had been rather proud of that particular
offering for she had invented the notion of buying the most charming of
cachepots at Le Grenier de la Marquise, a fascinating old gift shop, on the
rue de Sévigné, and taking them to Arene to be planted.
 
Of course it did make the flowers far more
expensive but how could anyone with the slightest claim to taste just send a
banal bouquet to thank a lady who had been born Princess Françoise de
Bourbon-Parme?
 
A lady who had included
Nadine and Phillipe with the Duke and Duchess d'Uzès and the Duke and Duchess
of Torlonia at a dinner for twelve, served by four butlers on Meissen plates, a
dinner at which the menu card before each plate had borne the crown of the Holy
Roman Empire?
 
She didn't send flowers
each time they accepted the Lobkowiczes' hospitality, but when she did, they
had to be extraordinary.

Lilies
of the valley to the Vicomtesse de Ribes, sent only after invitations to two
intimate dinners followed by film screenings and one seated, black-tie dinner
party for forty.
 
Nadine had hesitated as
long as she could before settling on the flowers to send to the most elegant
woman in Paris.
 
Finally she had realized
that only the simplest blooms would do.
 
Of course, in that case it had been self-evident that there must be
four dozen bunches...
 
any less a gesture
would have been skimpy, attracting no attention.
 
Flowers to Hélène Rochas, flowers to São
Schlumberger, flowers to the Princess Ghislaine de Polignac...
 
she put the Arene bill aside.
 
She had no doubt that it was as exact as it
was necessary, one of the obligations she accepted in order to keep her place
in the inner circle of Paris society.

While
it might seem to outsiders that the society of Paris was loosely organized, for
it included certain dressmakers and a few writers and one or two decorators and
even the Borys, who owned the huge grocery chain Fauchon, Nadine was keenly
aware, with the delicate attunement to every vibration of a tightrope walker
working without a net, that in fact it was a world in which, were it not for
her ceaseless vigilance, even "the most envied couple in Paris" could
quickly disappear from sight.

Discrimination
had always been an art in French society where standing is so finely calibrated
that even among dukes, three
—
Brissac, Uzès and Luynes
—
are
more ducal than others.
 
It is a society
still based on titles.
 
It is a tiny
section of Parisians, but they were the only people on earth who mattered at
all to Nadine.
 
A few outrageously rich
foreigners were always permitted entry since they didn't count
—
how
could they when they weren't French?
 
They were permitted to spend money on entertainment to buy their way
into a purely temporary place in society, a place that depended entirely on the
extravagant and tasteful quality of their largesse.
 
A well-mannered, attractive extra man with
highly placed mistresses, as Phillipe had been, before his marriage, was often
admitted, as were certain foreign diplomats for the length of the time they
kept their posts, as well as a tiny handful of powerful politicians.

But
the great hostesses never invited people simply because they had asked them
before. Each invitation, no matter how big the party, was considered,
scrutinized, weighed, measured and then carefully reconsidered.
 
Why, Nadine could imagine a hostess asking
herself, do I ask the Dalmases to my table?
 
Are they still good value?
 
He
adds nothing by way of status, for he's been around forever, and has no
historic name, no accomplishment, and now, not even the virtue of being
unattached.
 
But she is closer to Jean
François Albin than anyone else...
 
his
last collec-tion was a marvel...
 
and
they're both still terribly decorative...
 
yes, I'll ask them again this time. She is, after all, Mistral's
daughter.

Three
years ago Nadine had asked herself how long would the period of tolerance
continue to be extended for the Dalmases, that amusingly poor married
couple?
 
Another year perhaps... or
less?
 
It was then that she had realized
that they could no longer permit themselves to seem impoverished, however
temporarily, without slipping socially.
 
If she had not made the decision that they must entertain, they would
soon be tainted with the deadly stamp of people who only accepted hospitality,
and never extended it.