Shades of Fortune: A Novel by Stephen Birmingham | eBook

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Shades of Fortune

A Novel

By Stephen Birmingham

OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA

CHAPTER 1

"If you want to make a good impression on people," my father used to say, "be a listener, not a talker. It's known as drawing people out, and it's not hard to do. Most people enjoy talking about themselves, and when they find someone who'll listen to them, they're happy as clams at high tide. They'll like you right away."

Most people pay little attention to parental advice, but this one small piece stuck with me. And after a lifetime of listening to people talk, and making notes of some of it, I have developed a habit, which has become something of a private hobby, and that is imagining what people are talking about when I could not possibly be around to hear their conversations. That was what I began doing when I saw that extraordinary-looking young couple step out of a taxi in front of Mimi Myerson's building at 1107 Fifth Avenue that late-August evening in 1987, while I sat on a bench on the park side of the avenue filling out, in a desultory sort of way, the squares of the crossword puzzle in that afternoon's Post.

Though I had not yet met this couple, I knew immediately who they were, and knew they were also going to Mimi's dinner party.

I envisioned the girl entering the gilt-and-walnut elevator cab and immediately addressing the mirrored panel at the cab's rear, intently scrutinizing her face, applying the business end of a rat-tail comb to a wayward wisp of dark hair, and saying to her companion, "What's she like, I wonder. I hear she's a real bitch."

The young man, who appeared more poised and certainly more worldly-wise, says, "Didn't you have an interview? I had an interview."

"I was chosen from my composite," the girl replies, still studying her image in the glass. "Out of a hundred finalists. Do I have too much eye makeup on? Tell me the truth."

"Rule number one," the young man says, "is that if you have to ask whether you have too much eye makeup on, you do."

"You're the one who's the bitch," the girl says.

Their names were Sherrill Shearson and Dirk Gordon, known by certain of his friends as "Flash" Gordon. His name was real, while hers was the invention of the Ford Modeling Agency. Sherrill Shearson was born Irene Godowsky. That much I knew about them, and I could imagine Buddy, the elevator man, whom I'd already gotten to know quite well, listening impassively to this exchange while pretending not to, as he guided his passengers upward to Mimi's apartment entrance on the fourteenth floor.

Eleven-oh-seven is one of the few buildings left in New York City where the two elevators are still manned by a pair of uniformed operators who wear gold epaulets and white gloves. It is a building whose entrance lobby is secured not only by a doorman but also by a concierge who sits all day long at a desk inside the entrance, behind a sign that reads, ALL VISITORS TO 1107 FIFTH AVENUE MUST BE ANNOUNCED. It is a grand old building, put up in the twenties when cost was no object, and its splendid old Otises rise slowly, majestically, almost noiselessly. It is the kind of building that, as Mimi Myerson herself has said humorously, "If you live here, you become instant old money." No one was surprised, a while back, when Ralph Lauren bought the duplex just two floors below Mimi's. The people who live here, many of them, are the kind of people who the people in Ralph Lauren's ads pretend to be. If you had seen Sherrill Shearson and Dirk Gordon entering Mimi's building that evening, being announced, and being ushered to the north elevator, you might have imagined them stepping out of a Ralph Lauren ad, but with a difference. Their faces were less jaded, fresher, younger.

The reason I happened to be sitting on a park bench across the street, working the Post's crossword, was that I was early for Mimi's dinner. Traffic up from the Village had been lighter than I'd anticipated. At the time, I didn't know Mimi as well as I later got to know her — hadn't fallen in love with her as, in an odd way, I later did. But I did know her reputation as a fastidious hostess, a perfectionist in every detail of entertaining, and I knew that at the last minute before any party there were always small, last-minute details to attend to — an anthurium with a browning pistil to be plucked out of a centerpiece, for instance. I also happened to know that it wouldn't matter if Dirk Gordon and Sherrill Shearson were a full ten minutes early. For they were, essentially, no more than a part of Mimi's decor, not much more important than one of her flower arrangements.

But that's not quite fair. From a business standpoint, they were important to her, though their importance was not of the sort that they appeared to attach to themselves. Watching their entrance into the building, one might have supposed that these two were principals in some sort of currently unfolding national, or even international, drama. For one thing, there was a certain studied exquisiteness about this pair, an insouciance — he in that impeccably fitted dinner jacket, she in a lipstick-red Scaasi, which, knowing who she was and where she came from, I suspected had been borrowed from a more affluent roommate. Then there was that moment when, after alighting from the taxi, they both paused almost haughtily beneath the building's marquee, looking first up the avenue, then down, as though they expected flashbulbs to start popping and videotapes to start rolling and were giving the cameramen time to adjust their shutters and set their lights. "Where is Women's Wear?" they seemed to be demanding. "Where are the people from NBC's Nightly News?" Of course there were no cameras. And yet in just a few weeks' time — or at least this was Mimi's plan — these two were to become the focus of just that sort of national attention. Fame and recognition were part of Mimi's plan for them, and I knew that Mimi Myerson was a woman who always had a plan.

The plan was to make Sherrill Shearson's face as famous as Brooke Shields's and Dirk Gordon's as recognizable as Robert Redford's as, in the next few weeks, they began seductively addressing Americans from their television screens and the glossy pages of the fashion magazines as the Mireille Woman and the Mireille Man.

If the campaign was successful, before it was over each would have earned something in the neighborhood of two million dollars.

And then what? Though these beautiful two did not know it yet, once this costly advertising campaign had run its course, both might find themselves virtually unemployable. It is one of the glum ironies of this business. For this is a business in which intense celebrity can be followed by an even more intense oblivion. It is called overexposure. A few years from now, I thought, unless they were very careful, she might be going back to modeling shoes on Seventh Avenue, and he might become a dance instructor at Arthur Murray's.

But who knew at that point? Tonight they were nobodies about to be, however briefly, Somebodies — she, a raven-haired girl of nineteen who, with her eye makeup and in her Scaasi, managed to look two or three years older, and he, a young man of twenty-five who, for career purposes, said he was twenty-two, with hair the color of canary feathers.

"I want a blond male and a brunet female," Mimi had said. These were they. It didn't matter that they loathed each other.

And their importance to the story is that Mimi's dinner party was where it all began, and these two were the first to arrive.

As they ascended in the elevator, I imagined her saying, not to him, but to her reflection in the mirror, "So. If you've met her, what's she like?"

And his superior reply, "You'll see, love."

And her turning now to Buddy to demand imperiously: "So you work here. So what's this broad like?"

And Buddy, not approving of this sort of talk in his car, saying politely but reproachfully, "You'll find that Mrs. Moore is a very great lady, ma'am."

Now they are at the fourteenth floor, and Buddy's white-gloved hand slides the door open for them, and they step out, and the door glides closed behind them.

"Never talk about your hostess in front of her elevator man," the young man says. "Bad form, love. Rule number two. It'll get back to her that you said you heard she was a bitch."

The elevator foyer of Mimi's apartment is a small, oval room, with walls covered in pale yellow silk and with a pair of Regency commodes flanking the front door, and above each commode hangs an oval mirror in a silver frame. I saw the young woman immediately go to one of these, lipstick in hand.

"And what's this Mrs. Moore shit?" the girl says, pouting at the mirror. "I thought her name was Mimi Myerson."

"Rule number three," the young man says. "When you're in her office, she's Miss Myerson. When you're in her house, she's Mrs. Bradford Moore."

"This isn't a house. It's an apartment, asshole."

"On Fifth Avenue, an apartment is called a house, even if it's an apartment. That's rule number — what? Four, I think."

"Fuck you and your rules," the girl says.

The young man leans languidly against the door frame, plucks an invisible fleck of lint from the sleeve of his dinner jacket, and says, "Oh, my, what a foul little tongue we have in that pretty head. That pretty, empty head. When you've finished with your face, let me know, and I'll ring the doorbell. Meanwhile, knowing a few rules of correct behavior might explain why I get five hundred an hour, and you've never made more than two-fifty."

"Not anymore that's all I get, faggot," she says.

"Try charm," he says. "Try it tonight. Who knows — if you tried a little bit of charm, you might even have a future, love. It would certainly be worth a try."

"I got this contract, didn't I?"

"This woman could always change her mind, you know," he says. "She's been known to do that in the past."

From the mirror, she gives him a brief, frightened look — in that moment she looks about thirteen — and he touches the doorbell with the tip of his index finger, as though testing a soufflé for doneness.

Downstairs, from across the street, and imagining this typically unpleasant exchange between two unknowns —"I want unknowns," Mimi said. "I want two brand-new faces, faces that will belong exclusively to me" — I looked up at Mimi's apartment through the leafy shade of the trees and saw the lights coming on in room after room. Then, in a sudden oblique shaft of afternoon sunlight against an open window of what I knew was her bedroom, I was amazed to see, even from fourteen floors below, her unmistakable silhouette, and for a moment I imagined I heard her special, ripply laugh. Then I saw the figure of a man approaching her, and saw her quickly turn her back to him. The man bent over her, and I realized that he was zipping her into a white dress, and that this man was not Brad Moore, her husband. Brad, I knew, had been detained at his office and would be fifteen or twenty minutes late. I saw that the man helping her with her zipper was Felix, Mimi's major domo.

There was nothing unusual about this. But then I saw something that astonished me. I saw Felix's tall shape bend lower and kiss her bare shoulder. There was no mistaking this. He had kissed her. Then both shadows moved away from the window, he presumably to answer the doorbell, and she to start down the curved staircase to greet her first guests.

I was mystified by the kiss. Mimi Myerson Moore did not strike me as a woman who would have a love affair with her butler. It was incongruous. It simply did not fit. In the aftermath of that accidental invasion of her privacy, I kept trying to turn the man's shape into that of Brad Moore. But I knew that Brad had said he would be late, that I was early, and that since my arrival no one had entered the building except the Mireille Man and the Mireille Woman. Also, Brad's was a shorter, stockier, more athletic frame. This man had been taller, thinner, slightly stooped, unquestionably Felix. And somehow the kiss on the shoulder conveyed a more heightened degree of intimacy and tenderness than even a kiss full on the lips would have done. I was nonplussed by it.

Later, I would learn the significance of that kiss. In time, I, too, would be asked to kiss her in just that fashion. But, at the time, I was stunned by what I'd just seen. And I was left with the decidedly unpleasant feeling that, by looking up at her windows just then, I had inadvertently and unintentionally been wrenched from my accustomed role as a listener and become something I have never been, nor ever wanted to be: a voyeur.

Meanwhile, from other parts of town, other guests are making their way to Mimi's dinner party. Mr. Edwin Myerson's limousine left his house on Sutton Square punctually at seven-fifteen, heading westward. Edwin Myerson, whom everyone in the family has always called "Edwee," is Mimi Myerson's uncle, her father's younger brother. Edwee, as some of you may know, has never had anything to do with the Miray Corporation and is, instead, an art historian and critic of some note, as well as a gourmet cook. His recipes sometimes make their way into the pages of magazines like Vogue and Town & Country, and his art criticism, which is often harder to follow than his directions for preparing a galantine, is published from time to time in Art & Antiques and Connoisseur, where even his editors are sometimes not sure what Edwee is trying to say. ("The coy caprices of Poussin, so underestimated, are qualified only in the quantum and are introspective by virtue of their quixotic relationship to the later fauves and pointillists. ...") Edwee is a fop, a dandy, a bon vivant, and pleased that his full head of hair, cut rather long, is greying in all the right places. He is fifty-five, and his trademark is the red carnation he always wears in his buttonhole. He is a pet friend of Nancy Reagan's and has sported his signature boutonnière at White House family dinners.

With Edwee in his car is his wife of just six months, a young woman with peach-colored hair named Gloria. Marriage is a new experiment for Edwee Myerson, and he is finding it both novel and reasonably pleasant. "You look like a faustian rose," he has just said to his bride in the back seat of the car, for she is wearing a dress, of the same sherbet color as her hair, that he picked out for her in a little shop on Madison, which, thus far, only he and Mrs. Reagan know about.

"What kind of a rose?" And then, "What's this dinner party all about, anyway?"

"One of M-M-Mimi's little whimsies, I fancy." Edwee Myerson has a little stammer and has particular trouble with his m's and his b's. In the back seat, Gloria reaches out and tickles Edwee's crotch with her lacquered fingertips. "Naughty little pussycat," he whispers.

At 200 East 66th Street, Edwee and Gloria's limousine makes its first stop, which is to collect Naomi Myerson, Edwee's older sister and Mimi's aunt Nonie, along with her escort for the evening, a somewhat younger man named Roger Williams, whom Edwee has not met before. Edwee's greeting to this Williams is of the customary chilliness he reserves for all strangers whose names are not familiar from the press and, in particular, for male friends of Nonie's. Nonie, after all, despite her fame as a great beauty in her youth (the forties and fifties), has had notably poor luck with men, both as husbands and as lovers, and even as casual acquaintances.

"Darlings," Nonie murmurs as Edwee's driver helps her into the car and as she immediately fills the interior of the vehicle with waves of some violent and passionate and dangerous new perfume. "Darlings, I want you to meet my brilliantnew friend, Roger Williams," she says as they settle into the car. "Roger, these are my brother, Edwee, and his wife, Gloria."

"Hello," says Edwee, extending his hand halfway.

"Pleased to meet you, I'm sure," says Gloria.

The car moves northward into the traffic.

In the flattering evening light, and within the tinted-glass interior of Edwee's car, Naomi Myerson, whom everybody in the family calls Nonie, is almost beautiful again. Nonie is not young, but few people in the family can do more than guess at her exact age, and she has lied about it for so long that even she, if she suddenly decided to be truthful, would probably be unable to give you the figure. Only her mother could tell you the date of her birth, and her mother would never dare to do this, knowing how Nonie feels about this subject. Not even Edwee knows his older sister's age, though by the time he was ten years old Nonie had already been married and divorced. You do the arithmetic.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Shades of Fortune by Stephen Birmingham. Copyright © 1989 Stephen Birmingham. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
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Shades of Fortune: A Novel

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