So I turned to Pop Lit. Femme 101.
Women Who Love Too Much; Men Who Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them; Smart Women, Foolish Choices
. . . all the books that promise relief from man addiction. I drew the line at man-addiction groups, as I drew the line at Sexoholics Anonymous. For one mad moment, I thought of going to Sexoholics Anonymous to
meet
men, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to. The very notion made my sane mind giggle.
The books were
some
thing. They told you everything that was wrong with your relationship (heavily implying that it was all your fault), but they didn’t tell you how to find a
good
relationship. Were you masochistic? A doormat? A sexoholic? Did you use sweets to assuage your loneliness? Wine? Dope? Coke? Well, just follow these simple twelve steps, and it would all get better. You had to focus on your own recovery. You had to be entirely ready.
Nobody seemed to be writing these books for
men.
It was women who had to be entirely ready to give up their addictions. It was women who were hooked on heartless bastards. (Could that be because of the percentages: seven million more women than men, so why
should
men behave?) At times, I thought these books were part of a conspiracy of female authors to get other women’s men. Because if every female reader followed the hard-nosed suggestions in these books, a lot of men would come loose and be on the open market again. That was my theory for a while—until I realized that it didn’t account for the fact that some of these books were written by men! Were they homosexuals, hoping to spring loose a few more men who were now disaffected with the whole female sex?
And who could blame men for being disaffected with the whole female sex? Men are so vulnerable—all their vulnerability hanging so nakedly between their legs. Frightened of their mommies, of shrieking women—all they ask is a little softness and tenderness from us. No wonder armies of screaming women on the march terrify them. Wouldn’t
I
react with terror and with rage if I were a man? In my sane mind, I know I would.
I tried to take care of business. During the death throes of my affair with Dart, when things were crashing and burning, not a lot of work had got done, as you can imagine.
After the success of the film stills of Dart/Trick, which launched Dart/Trick into a sort of SoHo stardom—complete with all the appurtenances thereto pertaining, particularly toot and tootsies—
my
work went to the dogs. How can you paint when you never know when or if your lover is coming home? Better to be Georgia O’Keeffe, alone on her mesa beneath the scudding clouds (with a pretty young wrangler to carry your easel and a pretty young potter to catalog your work—no fool Georgia). Better to live in splendid isolation than to look for love in all the wrong places with a tricky Dart or a darting Trick.
So now that he has gone, and I was left on the rock of my half-assed sobriety, I tried to get back to business. Invited by my dealer, one André McCrae (the McCrae Gallery), to a shindig at his Fifth Avenue digs, I accepted—though of late I had made myself scarcer than scarce.
André was a symptom of everything wrong with the art biz. He knew nothing about art and had no idea what he liked. He liked what sold, and the more it sold for, the more he liked it. If it stopped selling, he stopped liking it. If it sold a lot and the artist died, he liked it best of all. His idea of a perfect artist was a dead artist—preferably one who had died at the height of his fame. Once, before I signed with André, he told me at a dinner party in Cornwall Bridge that he really preferred to deal with dead artists. “They don’t puke all over you,” he said. I should have taken this as a warning, but I didn’t. I thought I could manage André—which only goes to show how wrong I can be.
On a hot Wednesday night in July, I drive down from Connecticut in DART and park in the Carlyle garage, then walk over to André’s duplex at Seventy-fourth and Fifth. It’s that rare thing—a summer party in New York, which can only be held on Tuesday or Wednesday night; all the other nights, the city is likely to be left to the poor. The rich are in the Hamptons, the Vineyard, Newport, Nantucket, Maine, the Cape, Tuscany, Greece, Venice, the south of France.
André and his wife, Sally, have devised a unique scheme for saving their marriage: separate co-ops in adjacent Fifth Avenue buildings. This party is being held in André’s, the grander of the two.
Going to parties stone-cold sober is new for me—new and scary. I see too much, feel too much, am too aware of all the lying.
I go up in the paneled elevator and am let out on the fourteenth floor—really the thirteenth, but this building skips from twelve to fourteen for good luck. The apartment is actually on the thirteenth and fourteenth floors. Knowing André, he probably negotiated a discount because of that.
André was not born André, and his father was not named McCrae any more than mine was named Sand. André McCrae is a self-created character. Born Arbit Malamud in Lithuania in the twenties or thirties, he started life as a furrier but soon discovered that there was more pelf in canvases than in pelts.
His first painting, as he likes to tell everyone who will listen (and with André you often have no
choice
but to listen), was given to him as part of a divorce settlement by his first wife. Apocryphal stories about André’s first marriage abound: it is said he was married to a Rothschild, a Churchill, a Vanderbilt, a Rockefeller—perhaps all four at once. She was rich, in any case, defied caste and class to marry this pushy little redheaded Jew (five feet, two inches, even in his elevator shoes), and lived to regret it. She bought him off with a van Gogh (which still hangs in the grand co-op foyer—along with other, more recent acquisitions). The van Gogh (whose companion piece hangs in the Phillips art gallery in Washington) depicts the public gardens at Arles in 1888, with a man and a woman walking through the verdant summer foliage.
Van Gogh is the perfect artist for André to own, because van Gogh is André’s polar opposite. This tormented artist who never sold a painting—except, as a sort of mercy fuck, to his brother—but was driven by an inner frenzy to produce them represents everything André will never be and therefore hopes he can either buy or destroy: inner fire, inner certainty, the driving force of genius.
“How are you, Tsatskeleh?” says André, opening the door himself and characteristically not waiting for any answer. (André affects
Yiddishkeit
to shock the goyim. He piles it on with a trowel, particularly in the presence of Gettys, du Ponts, and Mellons, who find him
cute.
Sort of the pet Jew.)
Sally rushes up to admire my dress.
“Don’t tell me. Let me guess. Zoran? Karan? Koos?”
“No. Guess again.”
“Krizia?”
“No.”
“You made it yourself? So clever of you.”
“It’s an ancient Zandra Rhodes.”
“I should have known.” Sally is thin enough to have flunked selection at Auschwitz. She and André have one of those marriage-is-a-business marriages so dear to the hearts of New York’s New Money Elite. They own things together rather than fuck. This is their form of sex.
Sally wears a size-two dress, and going to bed with her would be like going to bed with a bicycle. Her hair is raving red—though expensively done, at Monsieur Marc, no doubt—and her Art Deco jewelry is always dazzling. It covers her breastbones, which otherwise would show. She wears a Scaasi pouf over her pick-up-stick legs, and she is the mistress of the touch-me-not kiss. She turns her smile on and off like a bare lightbulb in a cheap hotel. You will never know what she’s thinking. André is more transparent.
Even at his own party, André’s eyes scan the room to see if there’s a more important person to talk to than the one he’s with. When André is with you, you always have the sense he’s just about to dart away. Dart. Everything reminds you of Dart.
“How’s Dart?” says André.
“Gone,” I say.
“It was only a matter of time,” says André. “What are you drinking?”
“Tab, Perrier . . .”
“Roberto will get it,” he says, waving a hand at the South American butler, and he sprints off across the room to talk to someone who looks like Princess Di but isn’t. André has the chutzpah of an elephant, and the attention span of a gnat.
The room seems to swim. All these people laughing mirthlessly, all these darting eyes working the room.
André’s parties always have a smattering of royalty, a hint of Hollywood, a major media celebrity who mouths the news, a press lord or two, a Wall Street tycoon or two, a real estate baron or two—all appropriately wived in women who come (like certain designer dresses) only in sizes two to eight. Double digits are out. The artists are there, of course, André’s artists, but they are sort of like zoo animals on their best behavior. At André’s parties, they always have the sense that their endeavors are vaguely peripheral to the main event: buying and selling. They often get quietly drunk or stoned, pass out in the guest room or discreetly throw up in the powder room, perhaps nauseated by so much proximity to the beau monde to which their success has entitled them.
Sally takes me by the hand and leads me over to a little nest of ninnies: six size-six women who look just like her—except for the hair color (they are all straw-into-gold blond) and the skinny legs perched upon spikes.
I recognize the names from Liz Smith’s column and the faces from the central hatchery: some plastic surgeon is turning out that chin this year. They all have the razor-sharp jawline not even nature bestows on a twenty-two-year-old. Each one of them looks delighted to meet me. It isn’t long before I am recruited to do my bit for various chic diseases—AIDS, heart disease, cancer: the fashionable plagues of the moment. One blonde wants a drawing to auction, another my company at an “exclusive little dinner,” whose seats on either side of me will be auctioned, another for me to teach a class at her daughter’s school. I am expected to be honored by their requests to have my pocket genteelly picked, though if I asked one of these women for her diamond necklace, she would be horrified and call the police. But an artist’s time and an artist’s work is of no worth—unlss of course it is bartered by André.
I am polite. I make vague promises. Then, spotting someone I know, I cross the room.
It’s Wayne Riboud—the Nevada biker who has become the flavor of the month by meticulously reproducing dollar bills, yens, francs, and lire, and trading them for necessaries like food and clothing. It has become quite fashionable in New York to hang money on the walls. None of your arcane symbolism here. Pass the buck: that is all ye know on earth and all ye need to know.
“How are you, kid?” says Wayne, peering down my cleavage.
“Still living.”
“That bad, huh?”
“Worse.”
“Kid split?”
“Mmm.”
“Who with?”
“Does it matter?”
“No,” says Wayne. “Endings are all the same: the bimbo, the bills, the blues. God, people bore me. Why can’t they love one another for a change?”
“Can you?”
“No. Can you?”
I laugh. “I honestly don’t know, Wayne.”
“You wanna split?”
“Where?”
“We could dance. Nell’s—if it isn’t over yet. Somewhere. We could take a garbage scow around Manhattan, hear Bobby Short at the Carlyle.”
“Not the way you’re dressed.”
“We could split to the country. Your place or mine?”
Wayne does a sort of Groucho Marx imitation of lust.
“I gotta circulate first.”
Wayne nods and makes for the loo. I wander over to talk to André’s best friend, Lionel Schaeffer, who is such a
grubber yung
that he makes André seem like Percy Bysshe Shelley.
“Leila, pussycat,” says Lionel. “Long time no see. What’s up?”
“What’s up with you?”
I shouldn’t have asked. Lionel begins a recitation of everything he’s
bought
in the last two months. Two companies. One old master. A villa in Beaulieu. An apartment in Beijing. (“Beijing is the next place,” says Lionel.) Jon Bannenberg is redesigning his schooner,
Lion’s Share.
(Most men name their boats after their daughters or wives; Lionel named his after himself: a key to his character.) “I’m only in New York for one day. Tomorrow I leave for Paris to go ballooning with you-know-who, then I’m off to London to meet with Jon about the tub”—his mock-deprecatory title for his boat—“then to Venice for some cockamamy charity ball at some cockamamy palazzo rented by some cockamamy friends of Lindsay’s.” Lionel has won the shiksa sweepstakes with this marriage. He indicates his third wife, Lindsay, a thirty-five-year-old who is fast turning into a replica of his second wife, Lizbeth, and his first wife, Shirley: emaciated charity ballers both. (Is photography the reason that anorexia has become equated with beauty? These women photograph well, though they look terrifyingly like death’s-heads in the flesh. Has the image become so much more important than the thing itself?)
Isadora:
Yes!
And you’ll never be thin enough.
Leila: Or rich enough.
“Leila!” sings Lindsay.
“Lindsay!” sings Leila, embracing Ms. Bones.
Lindsay is dressed in a short Lacroix with a bell-shaped cerise skirt over black petticoats and gold upholstery braid all over the black velvet bolero jacket. She looks as if she was dressed by Scarlett O’Hara out of the window drapes at Tara. She is about two heads taller than Lionel, who, with his bulgy blue eyes, his implanted hair, and his perfectly tailored suit, could be in any business at all—from crack to art, from publishing to movies to finance.
The truth is, he made his fortune in the news business, inherited chains of newsstands from his father, Izzy Schaeffer, who traveled everywhere with a little man called Lefty Lifshitz, who packed a rod. Izzy and Lefty were not unknown to Meyer Lansky, though to hear Lionel talk today you’d think his father had been a concert violinist—a myth he likes to perpetuate, because Izzy did, in fact, play the fiddle. Lionel gives lots of money to the New York Philharmonic and the Metropolitan Opera, and every time he comes up with another million-dollar check, Rogers & Cowan gets him plenty of media coverage for it. Last year he was hailed as “Philanthropist of the Year” in
Manhattan, inc.,
got the Légion d’Honneur in France and an O.B.E. in England. These things are not exactly bought, but it is astonishing how gullible people who should know better are about the motives for philanthropy. Lionel and Lindsay move in social circles in which giving million-dollar checks to arts organizations has become as de rigueur as the Lacroix pouf and the Turnbull & Asser tie.