During bi-annual Fashion Week, clothes seem new again. Familiar trends fade; new one’s launch. Brutal editorial critics make or break designers’ careers and drive CEOs to drink. The slightest innuendo is critical. Backstage make-up fads become the latest look at the beauty counter. Marketing strategies are created, edited, then edited again based on the runways.
Hand in hand, Fashion and Beauty provide tools to feel cool, hip, confident and sexy. Nothing beats backstage access to fashion shows, a world many dream about but few know intimately. The beauty aspect alone represents billions in sales. In my branch of the business, Fall Fashion Week signals the start of the fourth quarter. It makes or breaks the financial year.
That 2003 September I weeded through hundreds of men and women to find that needle in a fabric haystack: the up-and-coming designer or celebrity destined for massive success, often an eccentric and colourful narcissist.
My challenge? Getting them to commit to a fragrance license before they reached the top of their game, and keeping their royalty rate low to ensure profitability. The environment’s insane but addictive, my drug of choice, my alternate universe. I contemplated that guiding principle and my court case as Tommy finally maneuvered us onto FDR Drive. One final ankle rotation convinced me there’d be no limp. Then again, even if sprained, I’d have toughed out a power walk into the court room.
“Stay, Chloe!” had greeted me on my routine run around the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir as a snarling mid-sized mutt lunged at a walker’s loose-leashed lab. I pivoted hard and turned my ankle. Chloe stood her ground, growling low in her throat. The mutt turned tail and ran. I guess he picked the wrong bitch. I would do well to follow her lead.
Nearly thirty years earlier I was just as tense, prepped that time, not by a high-powered attorney for court, but by my high-octane mother for another flimflam. When I was ten, my thirty-four-year-old father retired from real work after a mid-sized sedan rear-ended his industrial size City of St. Louis snowplough. From then on, he milked DPW disability for every dime he could get.
We called a string of pigsties home. Even when my parents cajoled, whined or demanded fumigation from landlords, cockroaches infested all of them. By the time Darby, the youngest of the three of us, could reach the wall switch, he and my sister Genevieve made a perverse game of entering a dark room then snapping on the ceiling light. Hundreds of cockroaches scurried into corners and crevices leaving behind webs of speckled remains. To this day I cannot stand to look at coffee grounds.
The summer after the snowplough incident my mother instructed Genevieve and me to decorate coffee cans. We were two years apart and thrilled with her enthusiastic arts and crafts afternoon. The next day she drove us to through middle-class areas of St. Louis, past single houses, neat lawns, and new cars. This, I felt sure, was where the rich people lived.
“We’re gonna collect for charity. The American Lung Association,” she told us. “We’ll be helping all those poor sick children.”
“Mom—”
She made eye contact with us via the rear-view mirror. “Don’t sass me, Emma. We’ll start at the corner and work our way down the street. You take this side. Genevieve, over there.” She flicked her cigarette ash out the window.
“But we don’t know—”
“Stop whining. I’ll keep tabs on you from the car.”
“Thank you! Thank you so much.” I swiped my eyes. “And Merry Christmas.”
“They’re playing Christmas music and giving out free stuff. It was awesome,” Genevieve reported as we climbed into the car.
“The saleslady even made Emma cry.”
My mother turned from the front seat. “She better not have. Miss La-di-dah Saks Fifth Avenue. Was she a bitch?”
“No! The perfume made my eyes burn, that’s all.” That wasn’t all, of course. A loyal customer was born. And as hard as I tried to smother it, what passed for my conscience immerged.
We drove down to Animal Cracker Park for Christmas at Gram and Grandpa O’Farrell’s. Dinner included Dad’s cousin, my first encounter with Neil Harvey. His parents were gone now but their mothers had been sisters. The cousins had grown up together and somehow Neil had become a successful antiques and fine arts dealer in San Francisco and Los Angeles. I was awestruck. This polished, funny, stylish man had sprung from our family? When Genevieve and I surprised Mom with the Saks gift bag of designer samples, he sealed the deal with oohs, ahs and trendy, knowledgeable comments.
My parents made it clear higher education was not in my future, but I entered high school on the college-bound track. The courses kept me circulating with friends I meant to keep, including Maria Romano from my biology lab. In tenth grade she Alexandra and I formed an unlikely triumvirate with neglect as the common denominator. We skipped school to hang out at Alexandra’s and watch The Young and The Restless, two families fighting over a cosmetics company.
Maria and Alexandra took risks; I elevated my behaviour to reckless. I missed sixty-two days of classes but had wits enough to turn in minimal requirements, devote all-nighters to hammering out decent reports, and study for my exams. I passed.
I’d been sharing beers with Dad for years, including sips in his favourite hangouts. By fifteen I could talk myself into local bars, which astonished my new crowd. Most of them had licenses, even cars. Nagging got me underage driving lessons with Dad. More than once after my parents fell asleep, I took the car keys and tooled around just because I could.
As spring segued into summer, week after week Alexandra’s house parties started on Thursday night. I essentially lived across the street from my parents, raising myself.
I considered losing my virginity, but not to one of the boring locals. I wanted a rich boyfriend with some style. This wasn’t going to happen by waiting for a classmate to ask me to a high school dance, or sharing a joint in the former maids’ rooms on the Campbells’ third floor. I was hell bent on expanding my social horizons.
Maria’s twenty-one-year-old sister, Dina, attended Washington University, not only renowned in our posh suburbs, but Maria assured us, a hotbed of hot guys. “The kind with pedigrees,” Alexandra said. I gave her a blank stare. “You know, guys with rich parents and famous ancestors.”
“At least totally brag worthy,” Maria added. The place to be was a campus bar. Dina Romano agreed to put our names on a guest list to ensure we would have no hassle getting in. This was no smoke-filled escapade with my dad and his construction friends lined up on their stools, talking above blaring Johnny Cash songs. The three of us walked past students stretching down Main Street. The total coolness of the scene engulfed me. I could do this!
One-dollar drafts flowed all night. College kids packed the dance floor, some gyrating with sloshing drinks. Just off the floor a guy ordering beer for his friends made eye contact: 5’10, Ralph Lauren polo shirt, perfect biceps, perfect teeth, collar up. He might as well have had dollar signs in his eyes. Mr Cosmopolitan ad offered to include me in his order. I accepted.
His friends dispersed and he ushered me to the edge of the dancers. “Liam Weller,” he told me. From Forest Park, nineteen, running back, football was his life, oh, and Dad was a heart surgeon at Barnes-Jewish. Even I knew the hospital affiliated with Wash U Medical School.
Crap! It was my turn. Sweaty dancers packed the floor, bumping into each other. Thank God for the blaring music. “Outside Cleveland.” Outside any city would have rich neighbourhoods, right?
“I’m majoring in Co-mun-i-cations.”
“I like girls who communicate.” Little smirk. Little smirk right back.
“Do you have a name?”
Kimberly. It was the perfect time for my favourite name, except Alexandra and Maria would have to remember. And so would I, drunk or sober. “Emily. My friends call me Em.” Close enough and the last part was true.
The beers flowed and his hands roamed. I wasn’t exactly swatting him away when he asked if I wanted to get some air. Of course we wound up making out in his car. Of course it went from fun, to too fast, and too soon. Plus I wasn’t about to lose my virginity in somebody’s back seat, not even his Mercedes SL. I made up an excuse and we went back to the bar.
All the way home Alexandra and Maria, as psyched as I, plotted our next move: fake IDs for the following weekend. They had it easy—borrow their older sisters’ driver’s licenses.
Not so simple for me. I had no older sister, not even my own license to tamper with. My mother couldn’t have cared less about my under-age shenanigans, but the search for my birth certificate annoyed her profusely. We’ve moved so much who knew where it was. She said I didn’t have one.
“I must. It’s the law! How’ll I prove my age for my license? Or a passport? There’s gotta be something that says I was born! That’s not legal. We need to call the hospital.”
“Christ.” She took a drag on her cigarette. “Every little thing with you’s a federal case. You’re a damn mutt with a bone. Look. Emma, the hospital screwed up. All’s they gave us was some shitty piece of paper.”
Better than nothing. “Then we must have it, right? The shitty piece of paper?”
We did. After searching through beat up cardboard boxes dragged around with every move, I found a stained, dog-eared letter stating the basic details. I managed to iron out some of the wrinkles and clean it up. Thanks to Wite-Out, our ancient typewriter, and the Campbells’ copy machine, Voila! a new DOB and identity. I had my own fake ID.
