She closed her eyes and remembered back to a time she preferred to forget. She’d been born Elena Zofia Bartlewski, into a life no one would want. Poverty had its own smell, she’d often thought. It was rising damp, rotting waste, and urine, mixed in with shattered booze bottles, cigarette butts, and human despair.
Her grandparents, who had fled Poland during the rise of the Nazis, had made a new life in New York, where Elena was born. She’d grown up with her parents, grandmother, and three brothers, above her uncle’s run-down tailor shop in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. She’d hated her life and the stifling expectation she would one day work in a local garment factory.
As she entered her teenage years, she knew she would be nothing like the worn-out, sallow-cheeked neighbours she passed each day. Elena had places to go and ambitions to accomplish. She would be a someone one day. She’d show all those stupid, cruel children at school, who mocked her name, her faint Polish accent acquired from years spent at the knee of her live-in grandmother, or her too-big, hand-me-down shoes.
Her mother had taught her to sew at an early age, and she enjoyed it, but her design eye truly flourished the day she stumbled upon some discarded, glamorous fashion magazines. She’d scoured them for every detail, her eye darting from the unique cuts of the bold styles to their stitching and fabric flow.
Her heart pounded furiously. Faster even than that day Jenny Copeland had kissed her on the cheek and called her pretty before sliding her hand to Elena’s waist and squeezing.
Oh yes, Elena Bartlewski, gaze locked on fashions the likes she’d never seen before, at that moment knew exactly where her life would lie. She would run a magazine like this one day. She would leave behind this grinding, grey life and her mother’s and grandmother’s depressing existence spent taking in their neighbours’ washing. The world was bigger than dirty old buildings, peeling paint, and graffitied walls. Bigger than mouldy rented apartments cursed with leaking pipes and cracked walls.
So, she planned. Elena continued at school, ignoring countless offers to date the neighbourhood boys, their hair slicked back and eyes gleaming as they stared at her suddenly developing chest.
At age seventeen, an advertisement in one of the big papers caught her eye, and she could barely dare to hope. She dressed in her best outfit—she’d made it herself from design ideas sourced from an impressive, new American magazine called CQ. Catwalk Queen. The glossy publication needed an assistant to the deputy features editor. Elena didn’t have any of the qualifications they listed, and she was too young, but she desperately wanted the job.
The interview had been curious. On the one hand, the lady with the expensive perfume and designer suit had taken one look at Elena’s threadbare résumé and almost thrown her out of the office. But as her manicured fingers hovered her application over what appeared to be a towering reject pile, she suddenly asked Elena: “Why fashion? Why us?”
Elena’s entire being felt lit up as she explained. She began with the dreamhow fashion crossed countries, divides, ideologies. How even poor Jewish girls could see the same wonder of an exquisitely cut ensemble as a rich socialite in Manhattan. How, at the end of the day, fashion was transcendent…like music or great art. It needed to be celebrated. She added how it had changed her life by giving her a dream of her own. And, for good measure, she mentioned, in passing, that she’d run the fashion publishing world one day.
The interviewer, a poised woman in her forties with a shock of white-blonde hair, promptly dropped Elena’s résumé back on her desk, staring at her, open-mouthed. “Where did you come from?” Then she peered at Elena’s dress. “And where, pray tell, did you get that? I do not recognise the label. And I pride myself on knowing them all.”
Elena launched into enthusiastic detail, explaining how she quite liked the cut of Pierre Cardin’s new women’s suits and had incorporated that flair across the shoulder and bust, but felt the style of Hubert de Givenchy was more interesting and classic, so she’d based most of her outfit on his latest design on page 124 of CQ’s March issue.
“Although,” she continued after inhaling quickly, “the Givenchy in Vogue, on page 76, was probably more engaging to the masses, with the longer cut and clever use of contrasting tones, but the one in the CQ issue was definitely more classic. There was no comparison in the end.”
Elena had stopped and sat back uncertainly when the other woman ceased breathing, and she’d wondered if it was somehow wrong to take inspiration from famous designers. She had blushed then. Maybe she’d made a dreadful faux pas, because who was she? A poor seventeen-year-old girl who hemmed rich people’s clothes after school for petty cash. And, oh God, maybe it was tacky that she’d taken elements from more than one designer and fused them to create a whole new look. Was that not done?
She swallowed and contemplated crawling out then and there, before things got any more humiliating.
The other woman seemed to read her mind. “Stop fidgeting. You will not go anywhere. Now, you are completely unqualified for the job you applied for…”
Devastation washed over Elena. It was so overwhelming that she gasped.
The interviewer lifted her hand and continued, “…but so help me, I will not let you leave these doors without being on my staff somewhere. Let me talk to Human Resources. Don’t move an inch.”
And that was the day Elena Bartlewski entered the world of publishing. Initially, she was a personal assistant to Clarice Montague, the woman who had just interviewed her. A woman she later learned was a brilliant editor. Clarice would drill into Elena the need for excellence in all things.
By her twentieth birthday, Elena Bartlewski was no more. Elena Bartell was born, and that byline appeared on her well-researched and increasingly prolific fashion features. She became features editor at twenty-two, under Clarice’s guiding hand and much to the shock of many more seasoned staff.
By twenty-four, she’d acquired the appropriate accessory for every ambitious young woman in the late nineties—a husband. It went with the shoulder pads, charcoal business suits, and pastel blouses. Clarice told her it would stop any whispers about where her interests might lie. The suggestion there might even be rumours had shocked her, because she’d had no time to date anyone. Still, business was business. So she’d proposed to Spencer Fielding, the up-and-coming CQ books editor, during her lunch break one day. He’d looked at her, startled, over his glasses, and blurted out, “Yes, of course.”
Spencer had a few rumours of his own he’d wanted put to rest, she found out later.
It was a perfectly bland pairing, not lit by excitement in or out of bed, but, well, that was marriage, wasn’t it? After the first month, they didn’t even bother with the marital bed. She’d never understood what the fuss was about on that score. And if she ever felt the tendril of desire for someone else or noticed the sensuous curve of a model’s neck or a well-shaped female backside, that was something else she pushed aside. Business came first. Ruling the world meant sacrifices. It meant you did not get distracted. You certainly did not explore certain things, no matter how tempting.
By twenty-five, she was being groomed to take over for her retiring mentor as editor-in-chief of CQ, destined to become the world’s youngest fashion editor. She would be the toast of the town. Adoring, doting, and ambitious designers would arrive from all corners of the world to kiss her feet. She would win it all.
Except that never happened.
Clarice died, suddenly, as her blackened lungs gave out after all those classic long-handled cigarettes, and Elena’s anointing instead turned into a power struggle.
Emmanuelle Lecoq. Even her name filled Elena with loathing to this day. Elena had resigned a month after the job she was meant to have was stolen from under her nose.
The day Clarice died with her beautiful LV heels firmly on, everything changed. No one else knew, but she’d left Elena a collectible, black Hermes bag along with a note, It’s all yours now. Inside were all the documents pertaining to the CQ shares Clarice had acquired over the years in bonuses and stock options. She had bequeathed them to Elena.
So Elena found Tom Withers, a brilliant accountant and business manager, and through him cashed the shares in slowly over twelve months, to ensure CQ’s stock didn’t plummet. She began a small company she called Bartell Corporation. And because he was no longer needed, she dispensed with the husband.
Spencer had merely shrugged, packed a suitcase, and banked her divorce settlement cheque. She hadn’t seen him since, except when he bobbed up to promote his latest novel in her newsfeeds. Elena didn’t miss him in the slightest. She had no doubt the sentiment was mutual.
Bartell Corp was just the start. It was her ambition to go global. One of her earliest investors told her she operated just like a tiger shark. The tiger shark, the man explained, was the garbage disposal unit of the ocean, which could eat anything and not only survive it, but thrive.
It was true; many of the papers she acquired were junk, which was why she could buy them so cheaply. But more often than not, they all had something that was unique or worth salvaging. Elena became adept at sifting through the newspaper entrails, extracting the treasure, and tossing the rest aside. And as the years passed, Tiger Shark stuck. Not to mention a few other, less savoury, nicknames.
By twenty-seven, she had made her first million by flipping some bargain-basement newspapers into something worthier. By twenty-eight, she had enough cash flow to start a global fashion magazine to rival CQ. Style International. And by thirty-five, she’d conquered New York and half the rest of the print media in the US. That was when they named her Time’s Person of the Year.
When she called her mother, wondering if maybe her family had not heard the news, the older woman seemed more interested in telling Elena about Wit’s new fiancée. As though her younger brother’s banal love life was somehow the equivalent of Elena dominating the US publishing world in just one decade.
Her mother compounded the awfulness of the moment by adding—with an even more wistful tone—that it was high time Elena started dating again. Even Jenny Copeland was now “dating that nice boy, Billy Day, the baker’s son, around the corner”.
A cold prickle shot down Elena’s spine. Her mother, despite her good points, had all the perceptiveness of a wet sock. So why had she mentioned Jenny?
By the time she hung up, Elena was in no mood to celebrate anything. She opened a bottle of Château Lafite Rothschild Pauillac 2010 in her latest penthouse apartment—this one overlooked the Hudson—and sat alone, in the dark, watching the boat lights go by, as she drank it all.
Elena had married Richard the following year. Not for her mother. No, it was just that he was so, well, suitable. He wasn’t terrible company. A lawyer and a healthcare executive. He travelled the world. He had prospects. He could network like no one she’d ever seen. All that charm and all those connections? Watching him in full flight, she had come to see how it was done.
She’d learned a lot. Like how Emmanuelle Lecoq had beaten her so well. No one would beat her that way ever again. So when Richard, a man of the few skills she did not possess, asked her to marry him, his eyes aglow as though Elena was a delectable merger proposition, she’d immediately said yes.
He was, she supposed, adequate in the bedroom. Better than Spencer, at least, in that he had some interest in her. She felt no fireworks, though, not that she had expected any. But Richard was constant and clever, sharp, and bitingly funny. She had come to appreciate him. He understood ambition. He didn’t sneer at the excitement she felt at her newest acquisition. No, he would help her celebrate with that same look in his eye he’d had when he married her. Power was his ultimate turn-on.
