Satin Doll (2 page)

The dark woman listened with a calm face. They hadn’t really expected to duplicate Sammy Whitfield’s look. It was a last-ditch try, an effort by Jack to convince himself that there was something worth salvaging, a justification of the money and time spent on a two-year advertising and media campaign intended to imprint the Sam Laredo image in the minds of every woman in the Western Hemisphere. Excepting, of course, those millions who were already committed consumers of Jordache, Gloria Vanderbilt, Calvin Klein and a hundred other jeans makers. And that was where they had made their mistake.
 

She only murmured, “The Sam Laredo label was always up against big competition in a tight market. Even a year ago.”
When you started sleeping with her,
she added silently.
 

The man at the desk lifted the computer printouts of the cost sheets and studied them, scowling. The trip to the deserts of Arizona to shoot the ad pictures had run wildly over budget. “What the hell’s this? Compensatory pay for the model’s skinned back? Are they kidding?”
 

“The model slipped on the rocks. We paid her a bonus, Jack. The insurance company covered it.” She made a pretense of leaning over his shoulder to study the figures. “Medical costs, plus sick time until the scabs fell off.”
 

“I’m not believing this.” He was studying the evocative shot of, the half-naked girl with her wind-swept hair against desert rock and Western sky. “We pay for scabs, now? On her back? On her tits? Someplace where nobody is going to see them—except her boyfriend when he’s in bed, screwing her?”
 

After a moment’s silence they both lifted their eyes to the gold-framed picture placed next to the desk’s leather-bound appointments book. The photograph had been taken a year ago for a layout in
Town
&
Country
magazine, and it showed beautiful dark-haired Marianna Storm seated in the living room of her Connecticut house with two pretty teenage girls. Mrs. Jackson Storm and daughters.
 

How many interviews, the small woman was thinking, had quoted Jack as saying he loved his wife as he could never love any other woman? And that he would never subject his family to the heartbreak of divorce? It was Marianna who always let Jack know when she’d had enough. Only the designer, the European princess, had lasted more than two years.
 

“Oh, Christ,” she heard him mutter under his breath. He picked up the report on another project, the worrisome French acquisitions that had been forwarded from Jackson Storm’s brokers in London.
 

Mindy Ferragamo knew he hadn’t forgotten about Sammy Whitfield any more than she. Two years ago Mindy had brought her into his office, a scrawny kid dragging a suitcase of sample dresses, original designs she’d been peddling with some success in the Western specialty shops in Denver. She was too tall, too skinny, a raw, towheaded ragamuffin from the cattle and wheat country of Wyoming and she looked it. Later they would find out she’d been raised in hard-scrabble poverty, the father a drunk, a drifter, a sometime rodeo rider with too many kids, all of them living in a broken-down trailer on the outskirts of town.
 

For a few minutes that morning all anybody could see were the negatives: freckles, a lean boy’s body, legs two miles long, that terrible mop of straw-colored hair—all adding up to a big-eyed, taut-faced absurdity with nothing going for her. Including the awestruck look on her face that said she didn’t believe she was actually in the office of the great Jackson Storm, but she was going to fight like hell to make the most of it. Desperate, ambitious, Samantha Whitfield was all of twenty-four.
 

Her designs were strictly a no-go, at least for the mass market; Jackson Storm marketing heads had turned thumbs down on them after one quick appraisal. But Jack had taken one long, hard look at the girl, and it had come to him like a bolt of the famous Jackson Storm creative lightning—Sammy Whitfield personified the Western look that American consumers were going for. And he, Jack Storm, had rare authenticity in his hands, the breath, the soul of the Jackson Storm Great American Line that had made him famous. The new jeans project he was going to launch was just sitting there, like an act of God, waiting for her. In that moment he was sure she was going to make them millions.
 

He had sketched out an ad campaign right then: the blacks, whites and grays of the desert as the sun was coming up, a camera tracking her against tumbleweed and sand as she strode toward the horizon in a halo of harsh, brilliant sunlight—wearing Storm King jeans. Their ragamuffin goddess would be wearing a Jackson Storm cotton chambray shirt bleached to a faded blue-gray, resinated so that the wrinkles were processed in, a virtuoso achievement of incomparable, understated Western chic. He would have her wearing Storm King’s Art Hammer of Dallas handmade cowboy boots, plain, no embossing, no colors, just beautifully fashioned American cowhide. All pure, beautiful lines, like the girl herself.
 

They were going to have to name her “Sam” something because Jack liked the idea of an androgynous label for her. It evoked a certain style. The marketing consultants came up with Sam Laredo. She was going to be another Diane von Furstenberg—
Sam Laredo
—a name on a label the shopping mall masses wouldn’t be able to forget.
 

Two years later it was all over. It was not the first failure Jackson Storm had ever had, but one of the worst. The demand for jeans had come full circle, the mass market was glutted, and buyer resistance was so great that the big houses were casting about desperately for something new. Ralph Lauren was advertising in the chic pages of
W
: “Dungarees, crafted in the spirit of an era when quality and durability were more important than fashion”—these were only loose-fitting denims that appealed to the inverse snobbery of old-fashioned ugliness. Jordache, Gloria Vanderbilt, even Levi Strauss were hurting. And Sam Laredo, the sales figures showed, had dissolved into nothingness.
 

Mindy Ferragamo took a deep breath. “Look, Jack, why don’t you just go ahead and fire her?” She knew she was pushing him, but somebody had to say it. The way things were going he thought he was making a sacrifice, and Jackson Storm making a sacrifice was Jackson Storm making a mistake. “Jack, send her back to Wyoming.”
 

When she saw the famous storm clouds gathering, she said quickly, “Okay, so send her to one of the Storm King boutiques. Give her one to manage in Dallas, L.A., Chicago—” She pushed the wire-rimmed glasses up on her nose a little nervously. “Or if she wants to stay in New York, you can set her up for something big with a modeling agency.” They both knew Sammy didn’t want to be a model; she still thought she was going to be a designer. “But not to this thing in Paris. My God, Jack, she’s just a kid from some Western cow town—she can’t handle it. And you’re asking for trouble!”
 

He slammed the folder shut. “Jesus, knock it off, will you?” His handsome face contorted. Jackson Storm was being a bastard, but a masterful one. “What she gets is nothing,” he bellowed. He swept the appointments book, the advertising proofs, the financial folders away with a petulant sweep of his hand. “Nothing means
nothing
—get me?”
 

He didn’t look up at her. Jack knew this woman to whom he owed so much, this middle-aged figure in the discreet, tailored black suit, still resisted him, as only she, out of the whole multimillion-dollar fashion conglomerate, could. When they were younger, he had slept with her, too.
 

“Christ, I’m being damned good to her!” He jumped up from the desk, a commanding figure in his magnificent suit. “What I did for this kid was a gift, making her Sam Laredo. She was a zero, a nothing, and I gave her a chance, right? What I’m doing for her now, I do out of the goodness of my heart. What the hell do I owe her, anyway?”
 

He swept the entire contents of the surface of the massive desk away with his arm; the file folders scattered and fell on the rug around them. “These things always cost me a bundle,” he roared. “Christ, after all these years you could have said something, you know, before we got started! Okay, cancel the jeans ads, start closing it out. Move the Sam Laredo inventory, get it out of my hair. Discount it—dump it on K-Mart, Woolworth, anything. But get rid of it!”
 

She tried one more time. “Jack, you’re running away from the whole thing by sending her to Paris, and you don’t even know what she’ll find.”
 

He abruptly stopped, raked both hands through his hair, and closed his eyes. “Jesus God, I don’t need these problems,” he said huskily. “After all these years, you’re arguing with me over some broad who’s just lost me two years’ work and a lot of money?” He appealed now to her reasonableness, her sympathy. “You’re really letting me down, Mindy, you know that?”
 

But for the first time in years Jackson Storm’s executive vice president looked at him with an expression that was coldly unresponsive. The girl thought she was in love with him.
 

“Was
I
the one,” she said quietly, “who was sleeping with this kid?
Was
I, Jack?”
 

He glared at her, his face a dark, angry red. Then he turned to the desk and pounded on it with his fists the way he had years ago in the tie factory. “Godammit, I’m telling you she goes to Paris and she gets nothing! That’s what she gets, because that’s what the Sam Laredo thing did for me—nothing!”
 

He drew himself up, an angry, handsome powerful man, Jacob Sturm and also Jackson Storm, the fashion world’s Storm King. She knew he meant it this time.
 

Part One
 

La Terre est une gateau plein de douceur;
 

Te faire un appetit d’une egale grosseur.
 

The world is a piece of cake; be wise—
 

You’ll need an appetite of equal size.
 

Baudelaire,
Flowers of Evil
 

Le Concept
 

The Idea

Chapter One

Approaching Paris from the expressway out of Charles de Gaulle airport was disappointingly like approaching any other sprawling, rather ugly modern metropolis. Sammy Whitfield slumped back in the seat of the airport taxicab and watched mile on mile of working-class suburbs with concrete apartment towers, neon signs and supermarkets, with a jetlagged, dispirited feeling. It was early in the morning, she’d sat up all night on the TWA flight, and she was tired, though she knew she wasn’t supposed to feel that way. After all, as people had gone out of the way to tell her the past few days, this was
Paris
.
 

One of the last things she’d done before leaving New York had been to write out her monthly check to her mother and enclose a letter which began, “Dear Ma—Guess what? I’m going to Paris for a week. Can you imagine it!!! Me, in a place like Paris? I still can’t believe it!!!”
 

After all these years she still wrote to her mother that way—cheerfully, lots of exclamation points, so that whatever was happening to her, her mother wouldn’t worry. It was silly kid stuff, and she was no longer, at twenty-six years of age, a kid. But her mother, who had scraped and saved to help her through art school, was one of the few good things in her life. The other was Jack Storm.
 

Sam grabbed at the back seat’s leather strap as the driver squeezed between two trucks without diminishing his speed and took a right-hand turn off the expressway. She’d given her mother’s letter to her secretary to mail and when it had still been on her desk at five o’clock, she’d picked it up and mailed it herself from Kennedy airport. Going to Paris was no big deal at Jackson Storm Enterprises, Inc.; having enough real authority to get your secretary to mail your letter was. It will come to you, Jack always told her; authority is a matter of experience in this business, give it time.
 

Jack, she thought. She wished she could stop worrying. He hadn’t been there to see her off at the airport and that was the first time that had happened. Jackson Storm, tall, handsome, commanding, sweeping through the VIP lounge, usually with photographers in attendance, with his arms full of roses to make an occasion of his creation, Sam Laredo. Taking a trip somewhere had become so familiar she didn’t even think about it, but this time Mindy Ferragamo had been there in Jack’s place with the bouquet of roses and a note saying ‘Love.’ It was unsigned, as usual, because Jack Storm was still, in spite of what had happened between them and in spite of his half promises to her, a married man.
 

Nothing was wrong, Mindy had assured her. Jack was in San Francisco, the company jet delayed by weather, nothing more than that. He was depending on her to do what no one else could do at the moment: Go to Paris and report on the international division’s little problem. Jack, Mindy Ferragamo had repeated, was depending on her. And after all, it
was
Paris.
 

The taxi started abruptly down the narrow streets of Montmartre, and Sam, pressing her face to the taxicab window, stared at the white domes of the church of Sacré Coeur rising above it. Now that they were in the city itself, Paris was beginning to look more like the pictures in the guidebooks and postcards she’d stuffed in her duffel bag.