Shades of Fortune Page 14

  “And then what will you do?”

  She laughs. “I’m going to become a lazy, contented housewife, flopping around the house in my horrible bedroom slippers and coffee-stained wrapper, watching the daytime soaps.”

  “Somehow,” he says, “I can’t quite picture you in that role.” Then he says, “I would, too, you know.”

  “You would what? Flop around watching the soaps?”

  “Carry the torch for you. After all these years.”

  “Why, darling! That’s the sweetest thing to say!”

  “Somehow, it just popped out.”

  They are silent now, sitting catercorner at the dining room table, the candles in their silver candlesticks guttering in the slight, late-summer breeze that blows in from Central Park, billowing the glass curtains into the room. If one had looked in on them just then, one might have taken them for two conspirators, a two-party cabal, plotting intrigue on a summer night.

  There was another summer evening. She had begun to come out of the anaesthetic at New York Hospital, and when she opened her eyes she could not understand what Brad was doing lying on an identical hospital bed beside her, his shirtsleeve rolled up, with a small bandage on his right arm. The baby had begun to come three weeks earlier than Dr. Ornstein had said it was due. She had been rushed to the hospital, and after nineteen hours of labor, the doctor had said to her, “We’re facing a breech delivery, Mimi. I’m going to do a section.” She had merely nodded. “Don’t worry,” he said. “Caesarian babies are beautiful babies. They don’t have to be squeezed out. You’ll be fine.” That, of course, was the last thing she remembered.

  Some pelvic flaw, it seemed—inherited, perhaps, from her mother, who had a similar problem giving birth to her—had caused the trouble. The operation had gone well enough, and the baby had been taken, but soon afterward she had begun to hemorrhage. All this she learned later, but now, still groggy from the anaesthetic, and cross with the way she felt, it annoyed her to see her husband lying in the next bed. “What are you doing here?” she said angrily. “What the hell are you doing here?”

  “Hush,” he said. “Don’t move. Lie still.”

  “What’s going on here, anyway?” she said, trying to raise herself up on her elbows in the bed.

  “Don’t move, I said. You needed blood. I just gave three pints. I’m feeling a little weak, too. That’s my blood that’s going into you right now.”

  “Your blood is going into me?”

  “My blood is in you now. And it’s in our little son. It cements us, doesn’t it.”

  “A son,” she said sleepily. And then, instead of that irrational anger she had felt upon first waking up, she was suddenly suffused with an almost delirious feeling of happiness. In her drugged half-sleep, she let this feeling gather and fold itself around her like a warm blanket. Details of the room floated lazily in and out of focus, and she lay in this blissful, drowsy dream. “A son,” she said again. “I want to name him after you. I want to name him after you … after you … Mi—”

  “Don’t try to talk. Just rest,” Brad interrupted.

  “What are you thinking about?” he says now.

  “Thinking? Funny, but I was thinking about the beach at St.-Jean-de-Luz,” she lies. “The day you buried me in the sand.”

  “I made you look like Mae West, remember? You were always too damned skinny.”

  “‘Bradford is not a very demonstrative man,’ your mother said.”

  “She was always saying that. ‘We Moores are not a very demonstrative family.’ She seemed to think demonstrativeness was in violation of the Scriptures. Sort of naughty.”

  She smiles, turning away from him toward the window. “But you were able to demonstrate some things to me that afternoon in Athens. Remember that? The view of the Parthenon from your room?”

  “My, weren’t we naughty then.”

  “And I’m thinking about something Jim Greenway said to me today. He asked me if I thought of you as a father figure.”

  “And what did you say to that?”

  “I said no, I thought of you as a husband figure.”

  “I have some news for you,” he says.

  “What’s that?”

  “I think I may be picked to fill out Arm Miller’s unexpired term.”

  “Really, darling? How exciting!”

  “That’s the word from Albany. But would you like that, Mimi? Living that kind of a fishbowl life in Washington as a Senate wife? What about your business here?”

  “I’d commute on the shuttle, like lots of other people do.”

  “We could live in Washington during the week, and come back up here for weekends—for our Saturday shopping sprees.”

  “We haven’t been on one of those in ages.”

  “We’ve both been busy.”

  “Yes.”

  There is a silence. Then he says, “There’s something else we haven’t done in quite a while.”

  “Which is?”

  “Why don’t we fill our wineglasses and go upstairs and be demonstrative for a little while?”

  “Why, Brad, what a lovely idea!”

  “Promise not to tell my mother.”

  “Promise.”

  She rises first, and he follows. On the stairs, she says, putting her lips close to his ear, “Tonight, I think I’d like to do the thing you like best. Remember? In Athens? What you said you liked the best? After all, I’ve never made love to a United States Senator before.”

  He takes her hand and they run up the stairs together, like the guilty children they once were thirty years ago. All’s right with the world, Mimi thinks, at least for now.

  “The Magnificent Myersons!” declared the headline of the picture story on the family that was published in the November 1939 issue of Town & Country. Bear in mind that this was a year in which nearly ten million Americans were still unemployed, when only forty-two thousand had incomes of over twenty-five thousand dollars a year, and when only three percent of the country’s population earned enough to pay income taxes at all.

  Here are some of the picture captions from that story:

  Adolph Myerson, the “Cosmetics King,” and his beautiful wife Fleuret [sic], née Guggenheim, of the copper-smelting fortune, take tea in the grand salon of their Manhattan mansion. Mr. Myerson, a descendant of an old French family, explains that the original family name, which is still the family motto, “Ma Raison” (“My Right”), became transliterated as Myerson in nineteenth-century America. The single goal that has fueled Adolph Myersons’ success in the cosmetics industry: “To make American women the most beautiful in the world.”

  Sons Henry G. Myerson, left, 24, and Edwin R. Myerson, 7, stroll with their parents on Fifth Avenue. Henry Myerson is already a force in his father’s business, while Edwin, a bright second-grader, says he wants to be “a Policeman” when he grows up!

  Auburn-haired debutante daughter, Miss Naomi Myerson, center, hosts a party for young friends at The Stork Club. Miss Myerson, known to her friends as “Nonie,” is a popular member of New York’s younger social set.

  “Merry Song,” the Myersons’ spacious summer retreat at Bar Harbor, on Mt. Desert Island, Maine. A quarter-mile of manicured lawns and gardens sweeps down from the portico of the Georgian house to the sparkling blue waters of Frenchman Bay.

  Mer et Son, the Myerson yacht, lies at anchor off Bar Harbor. The 70-foot yacht, with a beam of 14 feet, a draft of 9 feet, and a gross tonnage of 24.6, was commissioned by Adolph Myerson in 1932 and built by Harvey Gamage. Like the names of the Myerson country homes, Mer et Son (“Sea and Sound”) is a playful sound-alike of the name “Myerson.”

  “Ma Raison,” the newly completed Myerson estate in Palm Beach, Florida, which will provide the “Magnificent Myersons” with a winter retreat. Built of rose-colored stucco, in the Spanish-Moorish style, the main house consists of 80 principal rooms under 2½ acres of red-tiled roof. The property, which extends from the shore of Lake Worth to the Atlantic Ocean, includes an u
nderground passageway, called “The Shell Grotto,” beneath South Ocean Boulevard, so that the family can stroll from poolside to private beach and beach cabana without crossing the street. The Bell Tower which rises dramatically above the rooftop of the main house is an exact copy of the Giralda Tower in Seville, Spain. The Myersons will inaugurate their new vacation home with a Christmas party for 500 of the Palm Beach social set.

  The latest “bud” to blossom on the Myerson family tree is baby Mireille Myerson, 6 months old, the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Henry G. Myerson, shown here with her mother, the former Alice Bloch of New York, in the gardens of the family’s summer home in Bar Harbor. Once again, the family’s fondness for playful, sound-alike names is apparent, for the name “Mireille,” pronounced the proper French way, to the ear becomes “Miray,” or the name of the Miray Corporation, which Baby Mireille’s grandfather founded in 1912. And without the Miray Corporation, where would all this magnificence come from? Mirabile ductu! is all one can say.

  “Of course it was all my money,” Granny Flo says to her interviewer. “I didn’t know it then, but it was. They’ve always been after my money, all of them. They still are.”

  8

  Mimi and Mark Segal are sitting on the sofa in her office with the retouched photos of the Mireille Couple spread out on the coffee table in front of them. Mimi looks at one after another, and for several minutes neither says anything.

  Finally, Mark says, “Do you notice something that’s happened, Mimi, when we give the guy the scar? Something very interesting?”

  “You tell me, Mark.”

  “It not only gives the guy a kind of mysterious personal history, the thing you said you wanted. It does something else. It makes him incredibly—there’s no other word for it—it makes him incredibly sexy. I mean, don’t get me wrong, guys don’t turn me on. But this guy is now sexy! It’s raw, naked, basic, animal sex, Mimi. I’ve never seen anything like it!”

  “You’re right. It makes him look hard and tough—the kind of hard edge he didn’t have before.”

  “Hard, and tough, and mean—there’s even a hint of mean sex there. I think this is going to turn women on, Mimi, turn ’em on in a way no ad campaign has ever turned women on before, I really do! Just to be sure, I brought a set of these prints home and showed ’em to my wife. She took one look and shivered, Mimi—shivered! She said, ‘My God, what a hunk!’ but it was the shiver that I noticed. Which has given me an idea.”

  “What’s that?

  “Since we’re going to have to reshoot the first commercials anyway, if we decide to go with this, I thought, why not undress ’em both a little more? Put him in a pair of bikini briefs. Put her in a teeny little maillot—she’s got a great body. What do you think?”

  “You mean the Calvin Klein bit? The Obsession bit, the nude bodies all twisted around each other? The naked men and women posed around Greek columns?”

  “Not exactly that, of course. Different, but the same idea. Something that would capitalize on the sexiness that we’ve found is already there. Then, when he kisses her, it could be, like—wow! It would be like watching sexual intercourse on your twenty-three-inch screen! Mothers would scream at their children, ‘Don’t look!’”

  Mimi thinks about this for a moment or two. Then she says, “No, I don’t think so, Mark. And do you know why? First, because Calvin’s already done it, and it would look as though we were copying him, no matter how different we managed to make it look. And second, because of taste. We’ve always been known for producing tasteful ads, and our customers are used to it, they like it, and I think they respect us for it. And don’t forget, we’ll be airing this commercial not just in New York and L.A. We’ll be airing it in Salt Lake City, and Boise, and God knows the Bible Belt. But finally, I think it’s because the scar makes him look sexy, yes, but just sexy enough. It’s a case of less is more. I think we’d be overdoing it if we stripped them to their skivvies. The scar’s enough. This is sexy, but it’s also subtle.”

  “Sex can be subtle?”

  She laughs. “Oh, yes. I’m older than you, Mark, and I know that sex can be subtle—very subtle, and it’s nice that way. You sleep better afterward.”

  He scratches his red beard thoughtfully. “Well,” he says. “Maybe you’re right.”

  “I think I am in this case, Mark. I really think I am. I think we can achieve the same effect we want without the bulging crotch, if you see what I mean.” She glances at her watch. “But look—I’ve got to run. I’ve got a kind of important lunch date. Tell the art department they’ve done a terrific job. Tell them, ‘By George, I think we’ve got it! The man with the scar!’ Get things in motion to reshoot the commercials. Get the best makeup man in town to do the scar. There used to be a man named Scott Cunningham, who specialized; I think he did the work for Planet of the Apes.”

  “What about the print ads?”

  “The TV spots are more important. Once we’ve got the scar finalized for TV, we can see what the art department can do with airbrushing to match it. If that won’t work, we reshoot the print ads, too!”

  “Well … okay.”

  “You seem hesitant, Mark. What’s wrong?”

  “There’s just one thing about this campaign that I hope you’ve thought of, Mimi.”

  “What’s that?”

  “This is turning out to be a ground-breaking campaign,” he says, “now that we’ve got a man with a scar, and there’s a certain amount of risk involved. We’re going to be breaking a taboo.”

  “Taboo? What sort of taboo?”

  “For years, advertising has observed a number of unwritten taboos. Self-imposed restrictions on the industry. For a long time, for instance, it was an unwritten rule that you didn’t show a woman in a cigarette ad. Then, back in the thirties, Chesterfield broke the rule with a famous ad that showed a woman saying ‘Blow some my way.’ Until pretty recently, the same thing was true of liquor and beer advertising—you didn’t show a woman with a glass in her hand, much less at her lips. For a long time you didn’t use black people in ads—except in the black-oriented media. Now all that’s changed, of course, but in this campaign we’re taking on a new minority group: the physically disfigured, even the handicapped. It’s pretty daring. I mean, even the Hathaway Shirt ads didn’t show a man with an empty eye socket. This could backfire, Mimi. The scar could turn people off. That’s the risk you’re taking. I just hope you’re aware of that.”

  “You think it’s a big risk, Mark?”

  “It could be—a very big risk, Mimi. A very, very big risk.”

  “But look: the whole idea of launching a perfume was a risk to begin with, wasn’t it? Now we’ve taken the risk, we’ve got to take it all the way, don’t we? So let’s take it!” She jumps to her feet. “Oh, Mark,” she says, “now I really am excited! Scared, but excited! Will you do me one more favor?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Kiss me on the shoulder. Right here,” she points.

  “Kiss your shoulder?”

  “It’s for luck. I’m superstitious. This is going to be an important campaign, and I’m on my way to an important lunch. Whenever I’m about to start out on something important, I ask someone to kiss me on the left shoulder, for good luck. Would you mind?”

  “Well,” he hesitates. Then carefully, almost gingerly, he places a kiss on the left shoulder of the President and Chief Executive Officer of the Miray Corporation.

  “Thank you! That should do it!” she says. “That’s usually all it takes.” Then she is off.

  She has no sooner been seated at his table at the restaurant—sensing immediately that it has somehow all at once become his table, not hers, though her secretary made the reservation—than the captain appears carrying a telephone. “A Mr. Polakoff, sir, calling from Chicago,” he says.

  Michael Horowitz picks up the receiver. “Polakoff?” he says. “How are you, buddy? Now, listen, kiddo, I’ve made you my last offer. No, I don’t want to hear what your price is, and I don
’t want to hear what your lawyer has to say. I want you to listen to me very carefully, kiddo. Are you ready to listen to me? … Then stop talking. Do you know what I want that twenty-five-by-ninety piece for? I want it for a fountain, kiddo—a fountain and a waterfall. That’s right—it’s called landscaping, and it’s a mere detail of landscaping. Icing on the cake. And I think my offer is very generous, kiddo, because stop and think about it. When my hotel goes up on three sides of your twenty-five-by-ninety-foot lot, what’re you gonna have? A vacant lot that’s not gonna be worth shit, that’s what—a vacant lot surrounded by a high rise. Why, you won’t even have a parking lot! No, I’m not going to let you think about it. My offer is final, got that? Tell you what. It’s now”—he glances at his watch—“it’s now twelve thirty-six. You’ve got till five o’clock to fax me your agreement to the deal. If I don’t hear from you by five o’clock, the deal’s off—over, kaput, finished, no more hondeling. Got that, kiddo? And I’m talking five o’clock my time, not five o’clock your time, and five o’clock my time is four o’clock your time. Clear? Okay, kiddo. Take it easy. Talk to you later.” He puts down the phone and smiles at Mimi. “I’ll get my fountain,” he says. “I’ll get my waterfall.” Then, “Well, where were we?”

  “We really weren’t anywhere,” she says sweetly. “You haven’t even said hello.”

  “Hi, kiddo,” he says, brushing his lips against her cheek. “You’re looking great.”

  “Thank you, Michael.” She had forgotten about his habit of calling everybody kiddo. She studies his face for a moment or two, remembering.

  Whatever it was, years ago, she had given it a name. My Michael feeling, she had called it. It came when he looked at her a certain way, when shadows seemed to cross his eyes, and they became wide and intense and luminous. That look left her feeling suddenly helpless, trembling, unable to control her thoughts and words. It was almost like an adrenaline rush, but instead of a surge of power and energy she felt a surge of powerlessness and inevitability. Once upon a time, the effect of the Michael feeling had been riveting, overpowering, but now, all these years later, she is certain that she has outgrown it, is immune to it. It is part of the dead past.