Mistral's Daughter

Copyright
© MCMLXXXII by Judith Krantz

All
rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any
form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without
permission in
writing from the publisher. Published by Crown
Publishers, Inc., One Park Avenue, New York, New York 10016 and simultaneously
in Canada by
General
Publishing Company Limited Printed in the United States of America

Grateful
acknowledgment is hereby made to the New World Music Corporation for permission
to reprint lyrics from "Someone to Watch Over Me," copyright 1926 (®
renewed) by New World Music Corporation.

All
rights reserved.

Library
of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Krantz,
Judith

1.
 
Title.

PS3561.R264M5
  
1983
  
813'.54
  
82-17966

ISBN
0-517-54906-9

Design
in Camilla Filancia

10
  
9
  
8
  
7
  
6
  
5
  
4
  
3
  
2
  
1

First
Edition

For Ginette Spanier Who opened the doors of
Paris for me. With much love and the memory of many years of friendship.

For Steve Who has all my love. This book could
never have been written without him.

1

    
Fauve dashed through the lobby, her Stop-sign red slicker
flapping around her, and managed to squeeze her way through the elevator doors
a split second before they closed. Panting, she tried to furl her big striped
umbrella so that it wouldn't drip on the other people who were jammed in with
her, but, in the crowd, her arms were pinned to her sides.

Earlier in the morning Fauve
would have had the elevator pretty much to herself, but there hadn't been a
single empty taxi in Manhattan on this rainy September morning in 1975. She'd
had to wait endlessly for a bus on Madison Avenue and run the rest of the way
across Fifty-seventh Street. Soaking and uncomfortable, she cautiously
swivelled her neck around to survey the snob that hemmed her in. Would any of
them get off before the tenth floor? No hope of that, she realized. The creaky,
ancient elevator that rose so slowly in the Carnegie Hall office building was
charged with a palpable cloud of tension and terror. Except for the operator,
the small space was packed with young women who were gripped in silent, fierce
and frightened concentration. Each one of them had grown up knowing that she
was, beyond any question, the most beautiful girl in her high school, in her
hometown, in her state.

This elevator trip was the
last step toward a goal they had been dreaming of feverishly for years. Before
them lay an audition at the Lunel Agency, the most famous of all the modeling
agencies in the world, the agency with the most prestige and the most power.
Fauve felt the almost unbearable weight of the quivering anxiety and nervous
anticipation that palpitated around her, and, closing her eyes, she prayed for
the ride to be over.

"Casey asked if I'd seen
you," the elevator operator said to Fauve, so loudly that everyone heard
him. "She's waiting for you upstairs."

"Thanks, Harry."
Fauve hunched deeper into her coat collar, trying to disappear as she felt
twenty pairs of eyes immediately turn toward her in a wave of hostile
awareness. On each side her profile was being evaluated in naked
competitiveness, her neighbors sweeping their glances from her forehead to her
chin and finding no flaw. Behind her they were estimating her height and
noting, with a misery that vibrated clearly, that she was as tall or taller
than any of them. Even in the rear of the elevator there was no girl whose view
was so completely blocked that she couldn't see the conflagration of Fauve's
tumult of hair, of a red so extravagant that it could only be natural.

There was absolute silence as
Fauve was inspected.

"You're a
model, aren't you?" the girl on Fauve's right asked her, accusation and
desperate envy clear in her tone.

"No, I just work
there." Fauve could feel the relief in the elevator as if it were a solid
substance. She straightened up, invisible now and blessedly unimportant. As
soon as the elevator doors opened on the tenth floor she sprinted out into the
corridor and ran through the entrance to the Lunel Agency without a backward
glance.

She knew precisely what the
girls behind her would do. Each one of them would take her place on the line
that had begun to form a half-hour ago for the open auditions that were held
three mornings a week at the agency that had been founded more than forty years
earlier by Maggy Lunel, Fauve Lunel's grandmother. Out of the many thousands
who auditioned each year, only thirty were accepted.

As Fauve walked rapidly to
her office she thought that perhaps one of those girls in the elevator might
have the slightest breath of a faint percentage of a chance to succeed. Perhaps
one of them had that quality everyone in the agency called
"lightning." How could they know, she wondered, as she pushed open
the door to her office on which the sign said, "Director, Women's
Division," that it had never been enough just to be beautiful?

Casey d'Augustino, Fauve's
assistant, looked up in surprise from the chair on which she was perched,
leafing through an advance copy of Vogue. Tiny and curly haired, Casey, at
twenty-five, was older than Fauve by several years.

"You look as if you're
wanted by the Mounties," she chortled, amused by Fauve's expression.

"I've just escaped the
furies...
 
got caught in the elevator
with a large batch of young hopefuls."

"Serves you right for
being late."

"How often does that
happen?" Fauve asked with mild belligerence, shucking off her raincoat
and sinking, with a sigh of relief, into her chair. She pulled off her wet
boots and put her feet, in their kelly green tights, on her desk. She always
dressed to defy bad weather and today she wore an orange turtleneck sweater and
purple tweed trousers.

"Rarely," Casey
admitted, "but no need to apologize, you're still right on time for the
emergency of the week."

"Emergency?" Fauve
looked out through the glass door of her Ace, her red eyebrows raised in
inquiry.
 
Everywhere she looked she saw
the normal activity of the agency, dozens of bookers talking into their batteries
of phones. As long as the telephones functioned, there could be no real
emergency at Lunel.

"Trouble with
Jane," Casey said, looking unnervingly serious.

"
Again!
"
Fauve, who had started to doodle on the pad on her desk, slammed down her
pencil with as much force as if it were the gavel of` a hanging judge.
 
"After that warning I gave her last
week.
 
Trouble
again
?"

"She was booked for
Bazaar
yesterday
—
Arthur Brown was shooting.
 
Bunny, his stylist, called first thing this morning, absolutely
livid..."

 
"Did you know that livid means black and
blue?" Fauve interrupted hastily, not anxious to have her already harried
day utterly ruined by hearing the latest about Jane, Lunel's top model, a
girl
who
worked only under her plain first name, needing none of the catchy,
inventive appellations of others, for she was the best blue-eyed blonde in the
world, possessing a cataclysmic beauty about
which there could be no ifs,
ands or buts. It was all there with Jane, locked into the bone, irrefutable.
She was the only model Fauve had ever known who was completely satisfied with
how she looked, insufferable Jane, who knew she was perfect.

"Livid as in
furious," Casey went on. "Jane showed up two hours late yesterday
which Bunny had anticipated, since she's always late. So that wasn't the
problem. Her hair was filthy. That wasn't the problem either because the
stylist washed it. She proceeded to mortally insult the makeup man but he
forgave her because he's heavily into being insulted. Then she felt too shaky
to work because she hadn't had lunch so they fed her, sending out for three
different kinds of yogurt before she was happy. After that she had to make a
half-hour phone call to her personal astrological adviser. All par for the
course, so far. The thing Bunny was livid about was that after fawning over
Jane all day
Bazaar
still didn't get the picture. She wouldn't
let them cut her hair."

Fauve leapt to her feet, her
lovely, vivid face a study in disbelief, her great gray eyes wide with outrage.
"Jane
knew
it was a beauty editorial. She knew they had to
cut her hair two inches
—
that was the whole point.
 
Damnation!
 
The difference in hair next season is a
mere
two inches
—
I had it all out with her last month when she accepted the booking."

"Ah, but our Jane
changed her mind, you see. Her astrologer told her not to make any changes
until the sun moves into Neptune."

"That's it! Jane's got
to go. I'm going to terminate her contract today."

"Oh, Fauve..."
Casey moaned, thinking of the next three solid months' worth of bookings on
Jane's schedule.

"Nope.
 
Jane's made us look bad once too often. How
can I expect the other girls to behave and work hard if I let her get away with
this?"

"If you terminate her
she'll be working for Ford or Wilhelmina tomorrow. People will put up with
anything to get her
—
there's only one Jane," Casey warned
solemnly.

"Wrong, Casey. There'll
always be another Jane, sooner or later," Fauve said quietly. "But
there's only one Lunel."

"Point well made. Point
taken. Still, aren't you going to talk it over with Maggy first?" Casey
asked.

"Maggy!" Fauve
said, astonished. "She's not supposed to be in today
—
it's
Friday." When her grandmother was away on her habitual long weekends,
Fauve was in full charge of the business.

"She told me it was
raining too hard to go up to the country until tomorrow.
 
The Boss is in her office," Casey
informed her. "Of course I'll tell her about Jane," Fauve said
thoughtfully. "Any more emergencies?"

"Only one you can't do
anything about. Pete's working on it now," Casey said, referring to the
telephone repair man who spent half of every week unscrambling their hundred
outside lines and dozens of intercoms. "One of the bookers' phones is
screwed up — she's getting some shrink's calls and he's getting ours. She's
telling everyone to have a good cry, then take a cold shower, two aspirins...
and pray."

"Couldn't hurt,"
said Fauve as she pushed open the office door and headed in the direction of
the big corner office where Maggy Lunel had long reigned over the world of
fashion modeling.

Certain great beauties age
gracefully; others hang on relentlessly to a particular period in their past
and try to maintain themselves there, withering, nevertheless, just a little
every year; and still others lose their beauty quite suddenly, so that it can
only be fleetingly reconstructed in the imagination of those who meet them. Maggy
Lunel had aged
agelessly.
From twenty feet away she was still that
seventeen-year-old who had once been the loveliest artists' model in all
Montparnasse. At a distance of ten feet she was clearly the most sophisticated
woman in New York, a woman who held her slim body with an élan that generations
of women had tried to copy. From a closer view it was impossible to realize
that she was in her sixties, for her charm was too potent to leave room for
such mean-spirited calculations.

"Magali!
 
What a shame about the country... was Darcy
very disappointed?" Fauve rushed forward to kiss her grandmother, calling
her by her true first name as no one else had the right to.

"He was a bit grumpy but
then he called Herb Mayes and they made a date for lunch at `21' which cheered
him up immediately," Maggy answered, hugging her. "Last night the
radio said the power lines were out so I refused to budge...
 
I tend to lose my famously sweet disposition
when I have to creep around by candlelight and grill a hot dog in the
fireplace."

"And I thought you'd be
more romantic
—
another illusion
gone.
 
Anyway, I'm awfully glad you're here.
 
I've decided to cut Jane loose..."
 
Fauve looked at Maggy with a mixture of
inquiry and determination.

"I rather wondered when
it would happen.
 
Loulou and I've had a
bet on it for the last three months."

Fauve's mouth opened in
surprise. Loulou, the head booker and Maggy's particular crony, had never
indicated anything but resignation over Jane's unpredictable behavior.

"Who won?" she
gasped.

"Loulou, of
course.
 
In five years of trying I have
yet to win a bet from Loulou.
 
Still...
someday..."
 
Maggy grinned and
shrugged.
 
Fauve, she thought, was
looking particularly enchanting on this gloomy morning, in her wild combination
of clothes, and her green feet. Any of
 
Les
Fauves,
the school of painters after whom she'd been named, would have been
overcome by
her.
 
Indeed, in
Maggy's opinion, any man at all would be overcome by her, although it wouldn't
quite do to tell Fauve that.
 
Not that
she was vain, but it might sound like some ordinary grandmother's normal
prejudice.
 
For decades Maggy had
possessed the most expertly trained eye in the world for spotting beauty and
she was deeply thankful that Fauve hadn't decided to be a model.
 
She could have been the best of them all
—
in her
own way outclassing Jane
—
but Maggy had never wanted that
particular career for her.

"What time is it?"
Fauve asked suddenly. "I left my watch at home
—
that's what comes
from dressing in a hurry, and I don't want to miss Angel's new cottage cheese
commercial."

"It's almost
ten-thirty."

"Good.
 
We're just in time.
 
Shall I switch on your set?"
 
Fauve gestured toward the television set that
Maggy kept to monitor the various commercials in which her girls appeared.
"Or are you busy?
 
I can watch on my
own set if you are."