"The Price of Illusion"

[fiefoe]

Joan Juliet Buck's autobiography is full of names, and they happen to be names I actually know, which I suppose date me all too well. Despite the title, her stories are mostly about attractive surfaces, but not the one about her mother, who stayed and smiled and smiled and smiled.

• When I arrived, I apologized for the weather.
• My entire life had been one easy exile after another, but I’d lived in too many places to belong anywhere.
• When he wasn’t at the casino or the racetrack, he did deals; some worked out, some didn’t. He moved stuff around. When the stuff was frozen, like postwar German marks, he moved himself around.
• The smitten captain moved all 45,000 metric tons of the Coral Sea to a spot where it appeared to be perfectly centered between the two fig trees on our patio. He came up to toast his feat, but no sooner had he arrived than the aircraft carrier began to drift toward the Carlton Beach. He was hastily fetched by naval police on motorbikes, relieved of his command, and sent back to Maryland, but without disgrace.
• the Palais Rose was huge and splendid and gorgeous and rare... There was a golden harp missing a few strings in the Grand Salon,
• French was more than a party trick. The language set Frenchness inside me as a hunger for rules and form that went unmet in the margins of my family’s fantasy of a beautiful French life. I envied the strict households that my school friends described, I wanted rules to rebel against, but the most Joyce and Nana ever said was speak softly in public, never grab, and never, ever, wear an ankle bracelet.
• Surface became everything, surface became my substance. I clung to inanimate objects and gave my allegiance to things. I made secret pacts with my toys;... I pitied the poor caryatids who strained to hold tables on their heads and was comforted by the devotion of flattened urns that had agreed to line up as balustrades.
• I overheard things I didn’t understand. “What does ‘financial difficulties’ mean?” I asked my aunt Charlotte
• She looked like what I wanted to be, a grown-up with no concession to fashion or the beauty parlor, with the straight back of a ballerina. She looked so complete that she was almost closed off.
• For the next fifty years she’d made it her mission to put little French girls on point before their bones were strong enough to do anything but turn into knotty little clubs. <> “Kschessinska,” said Ricki. “She could do thirty-two fouettés. Show me your feet.”
• That necklace was everything I wanted the things around me to be. Subtle and mysterious, precious but not gaudy, full of a charge I couldn’t name.
• You could dress up and play a part, become a bigger version of you, welcoming guests with noble condescension, ruling over your creation in a nightgown, as if you were still in bed dreaming. But you could also reject costume and artifice to be only yourself. Ricki’s simplicity gave her a different advantage, power, a resonance, a distance from the game that made her, subtly, a judge... I wanted to bake bread, I wanted to give people the best gifts they’d ever had, I wanted to be the one who saw the truth. I wanted to be the king in long red robes, I wanted to be the queen with jewels so precious they didn’t have to shine. <> I saw the world divided into action and audience, my mother firmly in the audience,
• “John, this is Peter O’Toole,” he said standing between them, a zookeeper between unicorns.
• John was famous after The Maltese Falcon; Jules was twenty-four and had photographed movie stars. He fell under the older man’s spell.
• Joyce and Betty went out to Hollywood in 1943 with their mothers. Betty was discovered by Howard Hawks, renamed Lauren Bacall, and cast in To Have and Have Not.
• Jules filmed the women of San Pietro carrying bundles on their heads, their children in rags, dead American soldiers heaved into mattress covers; body bags did not yet exist... The Battle of San Pietro was briefly released and reviewed but instantly withdrawn by the War Department, and held back for twenty years. John’s grandiose narration and my father’s stark images made the destruction too real for the film to be effective propaganda.
• Evelyn Keyes became my mother’s best friend. She was a thin, sharp Southerner who knew a great deal about men, sex, and Freud, and had become famous as Scarlett O’Hara’s whiny younger sister in Gone with the Wind. Ten years later, after her lover Mike Todd left her to marry Elizabeth Taylor, she would take Artie Shaw as her fourth husband and become his eighth wife, Ava Gardner having been his fifth.
• Walt Disney, creator of Mickey Mouse and inventor of American happiness, denounced his own animators. The town was divided.
• Jules knew that Peter had to be T. E. Lawrence. Sam Spiegel and David Lean had doubts that the roistering six-foot-two black-haired Irishman could play the composed five-foot-five blond homosexual colonel. Jules showed them Peter as Monty Fitch, ramrod straight in his guardsman’s uniform, flinching at the flickering gaslight, and all competition was eliminated.
• I thought I was the center of the universe, but it turned out that the center of the universe was Peter O’Toole... “They don’t let Jews into Jordan. Even Sam has to stay on his yacht off of Aqaba. And it’s not my movie.”
• Walt Disney: He had a gray suit, gray hair, a gray mustache a bit like Poppy’s, and a big empty smile.
• “The Blue Hour,” written with the cool precision of Katherine Mansfield. “The blue hour” is what the French call those forty minutes late in a Paris afternoon when the sky turns bright blue black, opaque. There were few details and little action; the suggestion of a love affair in the sharp, pained prose astounded me and made me cry.
• It took some maneuvering to get her to tell me that she had written a story, and then ask to see it, and to read it again in front of her, so that at last I could tell her how good it was. “You’re brilliant,” I said.
  “I only tried it once,” she said. There was no question of publishing it.
• He didn’t want me to compete with the real beauties. I belonged with the exotics. And just as he’d assigned roles to everyone—Joyce, paragon of loyalty; Peter, volcanic genius; Siân, theater actress only—I was to be a brain, a worker.
• Color hit almost every one of my senses: colors were flavors; they were salty, sweet, sour, bitter—black tasted like licorice—colors were sounds with pitches and frequencies all the way from warm-bath bass—dark brown—to the terrible high piercing wail of ice blue. And when you placed two colors together, they became textures: grainy, smooth, rough—blue with brown was definitely rough. It challenged you to take in two opposing forces. Maroon with yellow was always rubbery, not just because of the erasers on pencils; yellow brought out the dull paste thickness of maroon, and poor maroon had no decent relationship to any other color, and sounded like a fart.
• His Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby had been out a year and he’d come to London to write about us. I pointed out a girl who was “starved to near-perfection”; he wrote it down.
• I wasn’t Simone de Beauvoir, and Sartre was not pretty. I’d go to Sarah Lawrence to study anthropology under Joseph Campbell, find out everything about pre-Columbian cultures, and discover the central reason for human existence. I’d move to New York, write a book, and marry Tom Wolfe. That was my destiny.
• Joseph Campbell wasn’t going to teach me anything because he was not there. Word was he’d been run off campus for racism by a great-niece of Chiang Kai-shek.
• Their names were something “de Niro” and something “de Palma.” They might be fellow Europeans, allies in this strange new world... No, I said, I didn’t want to meet them. Why ask Dad for film stock for boys who weren’t real Italians?
• I went back to the Lombardy to keep my father company on the day of his father’s funeral. And to prove that I could be trusted not to have sex with Tom Wolfe.
• The French authorities would not let Ricki’s body return to En-gland until they had seen the purchase papers for the gold Cartier watch; it was a matter of customs duty. And so our treasures betray us.
• The grandson of the late press baron Lord Beaverbrook wanted to go into politics and thought I should write his speeches. Tim was blond, blue-eyed, impatient, and rude, which I took as a mark of integrity. Only phonies pretended to be nice... Tim worked for an Australian named Rupert Murdoch, owner of News of the World and the Sun,
• Karl interrupted him. “In the eighteenth century, noblewomen at court wore monkeys on their shoulder to make themselves look more beautiful in contrast.” <> I hadn’t realized the fashion world was that cruel.
• I couldn’t imagine myself alone with Leonard Cohen on a Greek island... He was older; his skin might drag against mine. At what age did men’s bodies wrinkle? I didn’t love Harald, but his skin was as smooth as water.
• Josephine Baker swiveled toward us from the banquette where she was holding court, held out her arms, and declared to the room that we were angels.
• Donald Sutherland had the face of a newborn baby, elongated, a newborn’s pale blue eyes. An undefended face, without the practiced expressions of a movie star, no special set to the eyebrows or glint or stare or smirk, but an open face where awe, surprise, delight, doubt seemed to change the substance of the skin and the bones, but not the shape. A face that was all-registering.
• The violets represented him, us. The flowers so much smaller than the leaves, meek, hidden, purple. We didn’t say “we.” We said “it.” It went beyond anything I knew. The hard surfaces in my hotel room vanished, but the air around us became as warm and solid as flesh. It was as if I’d found a way into the heart of impulse, feeling, and sensation, where nothing else existed.
• “I didn’t know you were in L.A!” said Joan Collins; “Joanie!” said the studio head; “Darling, is that you?” asked the producer; I’d laugh and explain that my purse had been stolen, and each person offered to help. It was usually a $100 bill. Sue Mengers invited me to dinner. <> Maybe this was how life worked. I didn’t have to prove my loyalty or flatter anyone with my prose; all I had to do was sustain an aura of importance with good clothes and a cheerful attitude. The assumptions of others would provide. I wasn’t panhandling at the Beverly Hills Hotel, I was using the system.
• One night, as Joyce and I stood on the pavement, we watched him go into a rage and gun his car down the center of Eaton Square as if to drive a bloody gash into the very heart of London.
• I didn’t like writing profiles. I was too permeable to remain myself around others, and my only gift was a form of channeling, taking in everything around my subjects...  I preferred to write about places, moments; a close reading of inanimate objects could give me the meaning of a time.
• My matron of honor was Manolo Blahnik. <> We had a blast of a party at Mr. Chow; Michael put black currants in the champagne to make it as mauve as my dress. I didn’t know that my father had to take out one more loan to pay for it.
• Jackie Onassis spoke in breaths of marvel, and made it clear that the subject was me, not her.
• The Only Place to Be was about people who wanted to be famous. ... Jason Epstein, the head of Random House, decided it, or I, was “The Intellectual Judith Krantz.”
• I saw him rarely, but long-distance was familiar, and less obtrusive than marriage. Longing is love without responsibility.
• “You father says you lived in a pink marble palace where Federico Fellini played the golden harp and someone moved an aircraft carrier to please your mother?”
  “That’s true,” I said.
  “Are you sure?” asked the doctor. “It doesn’t sound real.”
  “It’s my life, too,” I said. “I was there.”
• Fashion was a game the true players didn’t take seriously, a game that the icons didn’t fall for beyond fulfilling the duty to represent their brand in public. The duty was noble and arduous, but it was also, they knew, a little pathetic.
• Yes, I thought, I am an artist in a garret who can borrow Saint Laurent couture any time she wants and would never be caught dead eating lunch at Maxim’s. I might be a serious writer if I could finish my second novel and write a third one. I am American Vogue’s French-speaking creature, Vanity Fair’s French movie star correspondent. I don’t want the play-pretend power of a magazine editor. <> I have play-pretend bohemia instead.
• Thin men with scarves and knitted caps, pale faces with the hard red blotches of Kaposi’s sarcoma, and leaning toward them, hunched, confidential, loving, their friends who were not sick, whispering, handing them forkfuls of food from their plates. Now and then a loud, defiant laugh broke through. Socializing in the dead of night, out of sight of the healthy.
• I dropped names no one recognized, threw off impenetrable French literary references, and presented myself as an imported luxury object. It was preferable to being seen as a single woman of forty who couldn’t get started on a third novel. I resented being taken at face value, but that was all I was offering.
• the cast was still the lacquered, slightly ageing media intelligentsia and old society names. <> I prayed that something would happen to liberate me from the infernal cycle of writing profiles to pay for new dresses to wear to old parties, but I was passive in the trap.
• “She wasn’t lost,” he said patiently. “She was in the Lost and Found; it’s just that it was never the right time to get her out of there. Your mother couldn’t come down, and there was all that stuff going on.” <> I knew what “stuff” he meant. The end of Keep Films. “But we were all in Cannes in ’74, and Man Friday was there in ’75, and ’76 you were selling Caligula—you mean, all those years we walked right past Nana in the Lost and Found?”
• I couldn’t write about a life that was nothing but deadlines and new clothes. <> What was experience? I’d had adventures in high heels—one night in heels far too high to be climbing across a rooftop with Werner Herzog and Philippe Petit, but there was no novel where that story belonged... And then to have such men be no more than the instigators of an expedition onto the roof of the Opéra Comique after the first night of an opera directed by Volker Schlöndorff—he would be another chapter, and he wasn’t even a lover—an escapade of totally unnecessary bravado and panic on the roof of the Opéra Comique in a borrowed couture dress and spike heels brought on by a breakup, over the phone, with a secret lover.
• Don’t express yourself. Really? I asked. Yes, that’d be showing off. Control your natural tendencies. No instant reactions of outrage, one said. That would mean don’t behave like Jules. Be nice and calm on the outside, tough in your center. That would mean, behave like Joyce. There wasn’t one recommendation that indicated I could go on being myself.
• The next editor was a fiercely well-connected war heroine and a bluestocking. An ambassador’s daughter who’d served in the Resistance and been a nurse in the French Foreign Legion, by the time she was twenty-five, Edmonde Charles-Roux had won the Croix de Guerre and been made a chevalier of the Légion d’Honneur. She had Communist sympathies and wore her hair in a strict bun, two marks of good taste in postwar Europe, and was fired after twelve years. The novel she promptly published, Oublier Palerme, won France’s highest literary prize, the Prix Goncourt.
• I replaced the blather with active verbs and crossed out the adjectives. I felt like I’d weeded a garden when the copy chief came in.
• I tried to fire the art director in his office, but it was full of people. I tried to get him to my office, but Mary was busy on the phone. Standing a few steps above him on the staircase, I fired him in the most clumsy way possible.
• You’re happy we got screwed?
  The features editor leaned forward and said, “But now, we have the proof that you don’t work for Anna Wintour. You’re here for us, not for New York. Welcome.”
  I lost Jackie Onassis but I won a staff.
• “We never talk anymore. What’s your life like?” she said. <> I looked up at the model booker, the art director, two fashion editors, and the copy chief all standing in front of me. “It’s like shooting a movie and going to the première at the same time, every single day. Would Bob like to photograph you for the movie issue?”
• A dress we wanted was suddenly on hold for the cover of American Vogue; no matter, there were other dresses. The fashion editors would howl that that was the only dress, but Carine had Tom Ford in her pocket, Marie-Amélie had Nicolas Ghesquière in her bag, Isabelle Peyrut’s boyfriend was Koji Tatsuno, and Alexia’s mother, Irene Silvagni, worked for Yohji Yamamoto. <> Every impediment spurred us into a new improvisation. I’d never had so many restrictions, I’d never had so many ideas. Each slice and bullet confirmed to the staff that I wasn’t Anna Wintour’s creature, and everyone got caught up in the excitement of thinking of another, better idea.
• Madame Jean Bonnardel. No one had ever heard of her; she’d been in Vogue a few times in 1932, had created no scandal, written no book, starred in no play. She had just been very beautiful for a while, and then she was gone. I ran her picture across two pages to open the issue; Madame Jean Bonnardel was my love letter to Joyce.
• We veered between best behavior and fits of temper. I had no idea how to be with him; there were so many of him. He was weak, lost, immobilized with grief; he was a vampire for attention, binding me to him with the unrelenting monotone about the Second World War, a few decibels short of intelligibility; he was a meek servant asking for a break; he was a malevolent imp darting through the hotel, causing havoc; he was a screaming baby throwing things on the floor; he was part of me, he was the person I trusted above all others, he was the person I hated.
• (Charlotte G) drove up from Saint-Tropez, seven hours in the August traffic. It was as simple and practical as giving me a fire screen as protection from flaming lychee nuts. She’d known Jules in London, and treated him with the same teasing respect as she had in his good days.
• He’d caught the instant my mother had to choose between what she wanted to do, and what a good person would do. The instant she became trapped in the swimming pool at Coup de Vent, her butterfly net held over a grasshopper. The instant she gave up the nameless lover from New York to be a good woman who doesn’t abandon her child.
  If she’d stayed for me, she would have held me tighter afterward.
  But she kept her word, stayed with my father through the champagne years, stuck by him as the Dom Pérignon became splits of Kor-bel. And she smiled, and smiled, and smiled till the smile made her cheeks hurt so badly that she had to be drugged to go on.
• I owned a profusion of outfits so dense that no joy, no event, no memory could stick to any one thing. They flashed by like landscape in a train window, the way days at Vogue did. Because I gave myself no time to play, I never got my look right. My old New York clothes looked meek and emotional among the new things, like old friends with whom I used to laugh and cry.
• Paparazzi had chased their car into the crash. “They chased us all the way from the airport,” she’d said in Milan. The soft tall white body, quarry. <> At the office, Donald Schneider saw the bright side. “That’s so great that you didn’t let Helmut photograph the couture on the crash-test dummies; can you imagine if we’d had those in the September issue?
• there was Le Pont: my checkerboard plane, my circles, my poplar tufts. While I gazed helplessly at my lost inheritance, Betty slipped into the bookshop to find me the catalogue with the best reproduction. I gave the page with Le Pont to the photo department with instructions to print it full color, on foam core, two meters high. The painting was only an idea now, and could be as big as I wanted; I wanted it huge.
• The bigger the parties, the easier they were. I wasn’t at the dining table with five or seven people that I had chosen in function of a common language—English, French, or Italian—I didn’t have to administer flattery or praise, or feed them gossip as choice as the dishes. Guests at a big party acquired velocity and volition, found a common language or two, delighted in one another. I didn’t have to perform or control; I could enjoy the pleasure around me and didn’t have to stay in any one place too long, and they all took care of my father.
• Doubt was a sensible reaction to world events, but not a rousing rallying cry. Fashion lost its forward thrust, died, and turned into loose scatterings of separate things. <> The survivors were leather goods: handbags, safely self-contained entities, candy, instant advertising for any brand. Bags were as easy to market as perfume: no one had to fit into them. There was no limit to the potential clientele base for handbags, which were now called It Bags.
• “Everyone hired from the same place,” he said. “They’re all in costumes from La reine Margot.” <> The last film I’d seen at Cannes before I went to Paris to take up the job, Patrice Chéreau’s film about the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. My first Rothschild ball was costumed as a bloodbath.
• It was 2000 at last, and now each Vogue had to start its own website, and do it by March.
• “I’m doing it,” I said. “It’s no.” <> That was all it took to move him out. Joe’s currency was connections. All I had to do to make him leave was withhold one big name.
• And now, I could not say Gilbert’s name. His death was not yet real enough for it to be anything but a secret. We were in the gray place. All my little efforts to stanch the finality suddenly seemed a terrible parade of ego, an unsolicited flourish of competence.
• The cook opened her arms and said, “Monsieur est mort.” <> I told the butler to proceed as he would normally, set the table for breakfast on the terrace, make the coffee extra strong.
• “I’m going to the funeral in London tomorrow,” I said. She pursed her lips, which were thin again after a summer away from the doctor’s needle.
• “Either you’re my friend, or you’re setting me up. I choose to believe you are my friend,” I said. <> You can’t complain about being exiled from Hell.
• I didn’t know what to call the people there: inmates, patients, addicts, customers? All ages; faces without defenses or the defenses etched deep as scars;
• I was allowed to gargle with Listerine to the open envy of my new friends. The nurse kept the bottle locked up behind her, and watched me at the sink in case I swallowed.
• The addicts were generally Democrats and the drunks mostly Republicans.
• All those clothes, all those outfits, all those pretty things to make life beautiful, weren’t they drugs? This woman and her coke were me and Vogue, me buying the clothes, buying the parties and the famous names and the access to everything that glittered and shone and was superior and wonderful, and it cost me so much that I didn’t have time to write anything except more pieces about the clothes and the glamour and the parties and the famous names and everything that glittered and shone and was superior and wonderful, I was an addict and servant to illusion until the day I understood that, instead of getting high on it, I could deal it. From magazine writer to editor, from addict to dealer.
• The doorbell rang only twice that day: one bouquet from a nice PR, the other from an Italian designer’s husband. At seven thirty that evening, the cleaning lady asked, “Can I go home now?” I thought I’d broken through to a more cogent view of life, but still I waited for floral tributes, even to my failure.
• John Libson looked at the champagne buckets full of tequila, the mounds of lamb chops and mountains of string beans, the trays of coffee éclairs, the bowls of pistachio ice cream, the movie stars, the fashionable and the grand. <> “He’ll never believe you now,” he said. “He’s going to sue you for the Monte Carlo apartment, and the boat.”
• I looked up to catch the fault, but from so far below, the long arms extended welcome in grace. And just as Bob had promised, the round hole behind her head transformed the sunlight into a halo. <> He’d made the Virgin’s arms the right length for the angle at which she would be seen; he’d aligned the sun by compass point to make a golden crown at noon. Everything is perspective. Where you stand changes what you see.
• The sky over Santa Fe was full of promise and drama, the earth immobile, landlocked. I stretched time out so that I could feel it on my skin.
• It wasn’t easy and I wasn’t very good at it. My tactile descriptions were of no use in a play, where characters had to be motivated by needs. Straight prose was easier than the complicated architecture of characters in motion on a stage.
• There were more assignments, interviews, profiles. I slipped back to the Vogue way of telling things, the praise of surface... Humility began to pall; I wanted response, applause, success. I wanted fame.
• On the last of my nine days in Damascus, a fruit seller set himself on fire in Tunisia and ignited the Arab Spring. Back in New York, I watched the events unfold on television as people across the Middle East demanded democracy. I didn’t want to write the profile and told my editor that we should hold off on the story. “We need it for the March Power issue,” he said, “and no one’s going to notice your piece anyway.”