I'll Take Manhattan (6 page)

“Zack, I met a girl,” he mumbled. “At a football game, on Saturday. She was with some guy who knows your family in Andover, nobody she cared about, so I persuaded him to get lost.”

“There are a million girls in New York and you’ve met half of them.… What’s so special about her?” Zachary asked, putting his feet up on his desk.

“Everything. She’s perfect. I even told her the name of the magazine, the real name, I mean.”

“And she didn’t fall down shrieking with humiliating laughter?”

“No, not exactly. She thought it was very interesting, not just interesting but odd, considering that I’m the publisher of
Trimming Trades
and you’re the editor and she and I had never met before. She said you must have been keeping us apart on purpose. Were you, Zack? Why didn’t you ever introduce us, anyway?”

“Introduce you?”

“To Minnie?”

“Minnie? What Minnie?”

“Minnie your sister. The most beautiful, the most adorable, the … how come you never told me about her—I thought I was your best friend.”

“It never crossed my mind. She’s just a kid—eighteen—and you’re a dirty-minded former Naval person who doesn’t think about anything but getting laid.”

“I’m an ex-dirty-minded former Naval person. I’ve reformed. Listen, Zack, buy my half of
Trimming Trades
. I’ll practically give it to you.”

“Are you crazy? Why would you want to sell? It’s making a hell of a lot of dough between the ads, the new subscriptions and the low cost of production.”

“I know, but I don’t believe in doing business with family … it’s the classic way to lose a friend.”

“Family? Hold on now. Aren’t you taking a lot for granted? Doesn’t Minnie have anything to say about this?”

“After the football game we had drinks. After drinks we had dinner. At dinner we decided to get married. In
two weeks you’ll be my brother-in-law.” Nathan Junior looked every one of his twenty-five years as he entered into manhood.

“My God, you’re serious, Seaman Landauer.”

“Some things you know right away. I knew about Minnie right away and she knew about me. That’s the advantage of all my experience.”

“You two were simply made for each other. Minnie never needed experience.” Zachary stood up and grabbed his former partner in a giant hug. “How much do you want for your half?”

“Pay me what you figure is fair. I’ll lend you the money to buy it.”

“Love doth make suckers of us all,” Zack yelled and waltzed Nat around the office. “Congratulations, sucker!”

Owning a magazine, becoming the sole proprietor, unleashed in Zachary Amberville all the ambitions he had not quite dared to entertain before. He had been marked by the Depression more than he realized and a certain natural caution had always restrained a devouring desire to create, to risk, to rule.

Soon after the marriage of his sister Minnie he launched his second magazine,
Style
. From everything he had learned about the garment industry and fashion magazines he knew that there was a place for a magazine that would appeal to women who couldn’t afford to buy the clothes shown in
Vogue
and
Harpers Bazaar
, who were obviously too old for
Mademoiselle
, yet were too sophisticated for
Glamour
, with its rosy-cheeked, just-out-of-college models.

He went to banks for the money to start
Style
and they lent it to him, on the basis of the balance sheet of
Trimming Trades Monthly
. The late 1940s and early 1950s were prosperous ones for publishing, as the country entered a postwar boom economy and Americans, hungry for the material things of life, bought magazines with the same greed as they bought new cars.

Style
made money almost from its first issue. Zachary
Amberville had an invaluable knack for discovering and promoting new talent, and
Style
owed much of its immediate success to the talents of an unknown illustrator, Pavka Mayer, whom Zack had first hired to do black-and-white sketches for
Trimming Trades
.

Pavka had come to the United States in 1936, at the age of eighteen, a Berliner whose family had been wise enough to leave Germany. He had spent the war in the Army, landing on Utah Beach on D-Day, officially a translator and unofficially, as the Army fought its way up to Paris, a procurer of milk, hard cider, and fresh meat in return for blankets, soap, and sugar. Even an occasional entire jeep had been known to disappear along the route of Pavka’s barter service.

“Go to it, Pavka,” Zachary Amberville had told the diminutive, dapper man who was only five years older than he was. “Use any photographers you want, any models, any quality paper, any printer. We have too much competition. We can’t hold back, we simply have to give the reader more than anybody else.”

Pavka worked hand-in-hand with the fashion editor, another unknown named Zelda Powers. Zachary had spotted her toiling away in a back room at Norman Norell’s—for even the great Norell could not design without buttons—and he had been struck by an immediate appreciation of her eccentric, brilliant, purely personal style. She was from Chicago, a passionate student of fashion who would work at anything as long as it kept her near the world in which clothes were created.

“Listen, Zelda, you don’t know anything about being the editor of a fashion magazine,” Zachary said to her. “That’s why I want you. Give me the land of magazine no one else has ever put out. The kind you’d want yourself. No imitations … strictly original. Do anything,
anything
you want, so long as you keep the advertisers happy and show their clothes the minimum amount of times you have to. Remember who’s in your audience—and give them dreams they can
afford
, but give it to them your way.”

Pavka and Powers, according to people who watched the progress of fashion magazines, were single-handedly responsible for the unexpected emergence of
Style
as a force
and a presence. But people who had met Zachary Amberville knew otherwise.

By 1951 Zachary had made his fifth million. The first one had been due to
Trimming Trades
and
Style
, the others to
Style
and particularly
Seven Days
. He founded the weekly in 1950 with the large size and photo format of
Life
and
Look
. But with a difference. He had made his own studies of the reading habits of the American woman and he had become convinced that there wasn’t a female so high-minded that she wouldn’t read a dozen movie magazines in private if she were sure no one would see her doing it. He understood the deep appeal of gossip columns and the power of men, like Walter Winchell, who seemed to take the public behind the scenes. He realized that there would always be a society column in every newspaper, no matter how much some people deplored it.

Average people, who were almost everybody, wanted to know about non-average people, wanted to know
everything
about them, Zachary told himself as he walked the streets of Manhattan. He visualized a big shining weekly magazine with lots of color pictures; not heavy with text and letters and editorials, not concerned with farmers or football or Middle America, not anxious about the rest of the world and its miseries, not slightly to the right like
Life
or slightly to the left like
Look
, but completely apolitical and resolutely unserious. A magazine that would tell you what had been going on in the last seven days in the lives of glamorous, exciting, famous people, and tell it for an American audience in a way they’d never been told before, in a way that was irreverent, that didn’t keep any secrets that its libel lawyers didn’t say it had to keep, that held no man or woman sacred, yet realized that movie stars and royalty were more interesting than anyone else even if the United States was a democracy.
Especially
because it was a democracy.

Zachary hired as many of the best writers in America as he could find to craft the short articles that accompanied the many photographs. “Don’t give me literature,” he told them, “give me a first-rate blazing read and give it to me
with guts … we’re not a nation of intellectuals, as you may have noticed. It’s too bad, but facts are facts. I want it fascinating, I want it red-hot and I want it yesterday.”

Pavka Mayer took over the art direction of
Seven Days
and made it so piss-elegant that no one who read it noticed that it hardly appealed to their finer instincts. The world’s best photographers were delighted to buzz off to all the corners of the world for higher prices than were paid by
Life
or its European rival,
Paris Match. Seven Days
was a wild, runaway, classic hit that became a national addiction almost overnight.

Late in 1951 Zachary Amberville decided to visit London. He’d been working too hard and as each of his European bureaus opened he’d missed the excitement of hiring bureau chiefs and seeing them get under way. London was his most important foreign bureau, except for the Paris office of
Style
, so he planned to stop there first. His executive secretary suggested that it might even be a good idea, while
he
was in England, to get a haircut and have some suits made.

“That’s not even a hint, honeybunch.”

“It wasn’t meant to be, Mr. Amberville, it’s not suitable for a man of your position to look the way you do. You’re not even thirty and you could be a very handsome man if you cared to be,” Miss Briny said with determination.

“I’m clean, aren’t I? And so’s my shirt. Even my shoes are polished. What’s your problem?”

“A secretary is only as distinguished as the man she works for. You’re undermining my position in the Executive Secretaries’ Lunch Club, Mr. Amberville. Everyone else’s boss has his suits made to order on Savile Row, he goes to the St. Regis for a haircut at least every ten days, his shoes are made by Lobb but you … you don’t even go to Barney’s,” she complained tartly. “You don’t belong to any exclusive clubs, you eat a sandwich at your desk instead of going to the best restaurants, you’re never photographed in nightclubs with beautiful girls—I just don’t know how to
explain
you.”

“Did you ever tell them what you make?”

“Overpaying your secretary isn’t what makes a man chic,” Miss Briny sniffed.

“Honeybunch, your values are screwed up. But I’ll think about that haircut.”

Zachary refused to justify his private life to his secretary. It was none of her business. The occupations of a well-known bachelor around town were his idea of nothing to do. He didn’t have the time or the interest. He knew a number of women, damned attractive ones, but somehow he’d never fallen in love. Too selfish? Too preoccupied with his magazines? Too cynical? No, why try to kid himself, he was too fucking romantic. Somewhere in the back of his mind there was a dream girl, and if that wasn’t pure corn, what was? She was gentle, pure, idealistic; hardly a type who flourished in Manhattan. She was as unreal as she was beautiful and one day he’d get her out of his mind and settle for a gorgeous, sensible broad with a sense of humor. He needed a wife, if only to protect him from his secretary.

Nobody in her noble family could claim to understand the Honorable Lily Davina Adamsfield but they were as proud of her as if she’d been a rare portrait by Leonardo da Vinci, passed with reverence from one generation to another, the family treasure. She was the only child of the nineteenth Baronet and second Viscount Evelyn Gilbert Basil Adamsfield and Viscountess Maxime Emma Adamsfield, born the Honorable Maxime Emma Hazel. Her many cousins, male and female, were perfectly upstanding, healthy and appropriate, and they did the expected things. They cared for the family estates, they hunted, fished, collected, gardened, took an interest in good works and married the obviously appropriate young members of their own world with whom
they would have quite satisfactory and appropriate children.

Ah, but Lily! Like so many of her friends, she had started to go to dancing school at the age of four. Miss Vacani’s was and is the proper institution to which little aristocratic girls, and junior members of the Royal Family, are routinely sent to learn to waltz and polka. Almost all of them pass through Miss Vacani’s as routinely as they learn to mount a horse. But Lily turned out to be one of the very few, the unpredictable yet constant few, who become utterly possessed by the ballet training from the very first moment. There is nothing any parent can do to quench this passion, as they learn in time, often to their regret.

At eight Lily had auditioned for the Royal Ballet School which she attended after school three times a week. She grasped ballet to her as if it were a vocation, as if she had had a visitation.

“If we were Catholics,” her mother had said to her father, “that girl would be counting the days until she could enter a convent.”

“She certainly isn’t one for chatter,” her father had grumbled. “You’d almost think she already belonged to one of those orders that take a vow of silence.”

“Now darling, that’s not entirely fair. Lily just has a problem expressing herself—she’s never been an easy talker. Perhaps that’s why dancing is so important to her,” Lady Maxime had replied soothingly.

When she was eleven Lily was able to audition for and be accepted by the Royal Ballet Upper School where she could combine her academic and ballet studies. Her life was totally absorbed by her work and, racing from one class to another with her schoolmates, she never minded that she had to renounce all the traditional activities of other girls of her background. The only human contacts in her life besides her parents were with her teachers and her fellow students and even those were limited to a necessary minimum. Lily wasn’t at the Royal to make friends with her rivals, for by the age of eight she had an almost adult understanding of the nature of the ferocious competition that rages in the world of ballet, a lifelong competition that is only interrupted when a dancer finally retires.

For years her greatest fear was that she might grow too tall to dance. If she had reached five feet seven and a half or, God help her, five feet eight, she would have outgrown her future. Her discussions with other dancers were limited to the obsessive issue of height and her second greatest fear, that she might “get an injury,” a terrible, ever-present possibility they all shared equally.