Lipstick Jungle

  Five nights without sleep suddenly took its toll, and Victory nearly burst into tears. For the first time, she realized that Myrna might not like her collection, and the thought of failure was devastating. The shame might cripple her; it might define the rest of her life. What if she kept trying and failing? She’d have to return home and work at the Xerox copier shop, like her best friend from high school who hadn’t managed to make it out of their small town . . .

  “These are cute,” Myrna said, examining the collection. The way she looked at the samples, holding them up and turning them over and scrutinizing the fabric, made Victory feel as if she herself were being inspected. In the harsh fluorescent light, she saw that Myrna’s complexion was pockmarked and that she’d attempted to cover it up with a heavy foundation. “Of course, you don’t have any sales record, do you? Or is there something I should know that you’re not telling me?” Myrna said, looking at her suspiciously.

  Victory had no idea what Myrna was talking about. “No . . .” she faltered. “I just . . .”

  “Have you ever sold in a store before?” Myrna demanded impatiently.

  “No,” Victory said. “This is my first collection. That’s not a problem, is it?” she asked with rising panic.

  Myrna shrugged. “Everyone’s got to start somewhere, right? It just means I can’t take a big order. I’ll have to start you off small and if you sell, we’ll buy more next season.”

  Victory nodded, stunned.

  Afterward, she ran out onto the street, dizzy with triumph. She would experience this kind of life-altering moment of success again, but there was nothing like that first time. She strode up Thirty-seventh Street to Fifth Avenue, not knowing where she was going, but only that she wanted to be in the middle of everything. She walked up Fifth Avenue, weaving joyfully between the passersby, and stopping at Rockefeller Center to watch the skaters. The city was like a silvery Oz, full of magic possibilities, and it was only when she reached the park and had exhausted some of her energy that she went to a phone booth and called her best friend from F.I.T., Kit Callendar.

  “She said she wanted to start me off small, but she took eighteen pieces!” Victory exclaimed.

  The order seemed enormous to both of them, and at that moment, she couldn’t have ever imagined that someday she’d get orders for ten thousand . . .

  Three more weeks of sewing late into the night completed her first order, and she showed up at Myrna’s office with the pieces in three supermarket shopping bags. “What are you doing here?” Myrna demanded.

  “I have your things,” Victory said proudly.

  “Don’t you have a shipper?” Myrna asked, aghast. “What am I supposed to do with these bags?”

  Victory smiled at the memory. She’d known nothing about the technical aspects of being a designer back then; had no idea that there were cutting and sewing rooms where real designers had their clothing made. But ambition and burning desire (the kind of desire, she imagined, most women had for men) carried her forward. And then she got a check in the mail for five hundred dollars. All the pieces had sold. She was eighteen years old, and she was in business.

  All through her twenties, she just kept going. She and Kit moved into a tiny two-bedroom apartment on the Lower East Side, on a street that was filled with Indian restaurants and basement “candy stores” where drugs were sold. They would cut and sew until they couldn’t see anymore, and then they would make the rounds of art openings and dingy nightclubs where they danced until three in the morning. She was barely making enough money to cover her costs and her living expenses, but it didn’t matter. She knew big success was just around the corner; but in the meantime, living in the city and doing what she’d always dreamed of doing was enough.

  And then she got her first big order from Bendel’s, a department store known for supporting struggling young designers. It was another turning point—the order was large enough to warrant her own special area on the third floor with her name and logo on the wall—but there was a catch. The cost of actually making the clothes would require a huge outlay of cash, more than $20,000, which she didn’t have. She went to three banks to try to borrow the money, but in each case the bank managers patiently explained that in order to secure a loan, you had to have collateral, something concrete like a house or a car that they could take from you and sell if you couldn’t pay back the money.

  She couldn’t see her way out of this conundrum, but one day her phone rang and it was Myrna Jameson. She suggested Victory call a man named Howard Fripplemeyer. He was a scumbag, Myrna explained, a real garmento, but he’d been in the business for thirty years and he might be able to help her.

  Howard Fripplemeyer was everything Myrna promised and worse. Their first meeting took place at a coffee shop, where Howard wolfed down a pastrami sandwich without bothering to wipe away the mustard residue that formed in the corners of his mouth. His clothes were brown, and his hair alarming—he wore a toupee that jutted from his forehead like a shingle. When he’d finished eating, he picked up his copy of the Daily News and disappeared into the men’s room for fifteen minutes. Victory’s instincts told her to pay her portion of the check and run, but she was desperate.

  When he returned to the table, he said he’d decided she was a good investment—she had potential. He would put $80,000 into her company over the next year; in return, he wanted thirty percent of the profits. It seemed like a good deal to her. Howard was awful, and on top of his crude personality, he had a strange, sharp odor about him, but she told herself she didn’t have to sleep with the man. Plus, she needed him. “Let me worry about the money, kid,” he said, puffing on his tenth Newport cigarette. “You worry about the fashion. I’ve been in this business for thirty years, and I understand creative types. When you think about money, you get all mixed up.” And she’d nodded, thinking yes, that was exactly what happened.

  She trusted Howard, but only because she didn’t have enough experience not to. Howard moved her “operation” into a large room in a building off Seventh Avenue, where sound echoed through the walls of the corridors painted an industrial gray, and the ladies’ room required a key to get in. It was a building that reeked of desperation, of promises and dreams that were never going to be fulfilled, but after working out of her tiny apartment, it felt like a huge step up.

  And her clothes were selling. Howard told her that the company was going to make $200,000 that year, a sum that seemed mind-boggling. “ ’Course, that’s before you subtract my eighty thousand plus my thirty percent. That’s sixty thousand plus eighty thousand—one hundred and forty thousand.” This didn’t seem right to her, but she was too meek to argue.

  “He’s ripping you off!” Kit said. There was a woman who lived next door to them who was a banker, and one evening Victory explained the situation to her. “No one does business like this,” the woman said, shaking her head. “Besides, you don’t need him. It’s all pretty simple—supply and demand. You can do this yourself.”

  There was only one problem: Howard couldn’t be gotten rid of, at least not legally. In the excitement of being rescued from her money problem, she had signed a contract with Howard, entitling him to thirty percent of her profits for the rest of her life.

  She was going to be stuck with Howard and his stench forever. She couldn’t believe her stupidity, and lying awake at night, she wondered if there was any way to get rid of Howard short of hiring someone to kill him. If she ever got out of this situation, she vowed, she would never take on a partner again . . .

  And then Howard did something strange. He opened another fashion company in the building across the street.

  It was odd, but Victory didn’t think that much about it because it meant Howard was out of her hair. Every morning he arrived in the office from his commute from the Five Towns on Long Island, wearing a cheap trench coat and carrying a cardboard box and the Daily News. The box always contained three coffees and a knish. The first thing he’d do was to get on the phone, which he would stay on
for the next three hours, until he went to the coffee shop for lunch. Howard seemed to have an endless network of garmento buddies whom he talked to hourly, and Victory wondered how any of them managed to get any work done. She didn’t mind on principle, but the office was only one large room, so there was no getting away from Howard and his conversations. And when he finally got off the phone, he’d review her designs.

  “That’s no good,” he’d say. “Who’s gonna wear that in Minnesota?”

  “Howard, I’m from Minnesota. I’m trying to get away from the Midwest . . .”

  “What for? So you can have a couple of pretty pictures in Vogue? Pretty pictures don’t sell clothes, you know. Needing something to wear on a Saturday night with your sweetheart, now that sells clothes. And nothing too out there either. Guys want to see their gals in something pretty and demure . . .”

  “I do want to see my clothes in Vogue,” she’d hiss fiercely. “And I will, I promise you . . .”

  Then Howard would lean forward, engulfing them both in his signature odor, and smile. His teeth were gray with a whitish scum in the cracks, as if he could barely be bothered to brush his teeth. “You ever look closely at the designers in Vogue?” he’d ask. “Halston, Klein . . . even Scaasi, who used to be Isaacs but decided to spell his name backwards . . . they’re all Jewish fags. You ever see a woman designer in there? No way. That’s because when it comes to fashion, or anything else for that matter . . . movies, architecture, painting—all the best are men. And there’s a reason for that . . .”

  Howard never told her what this reason was, exactly, and she never asked. She didn’t want to hear his answer.

  Instead, she’d curse him inwardly and go back to drawing. Someday . . . she’d think. And she’d tell herself that if she made Howard enough money, maybe he’d go away and leave her alone.

  And one day he did. He didn’t show up in the morning, and finally appeared at about four o’clock in the afternoon. This pattern continued for several weeks, and Victory was so grateful to be relieved of his daily presence, she didn’t ask why. But she noticed that no matter how late she worked, Howard always managed to be in the office when she left.

  She ran into Myrna Jameson on the street a few weeks later. “So I see Howard’s got you in Dress Barn,” she said.

  Victory looked at her in surprise, shaking her head and thinking that Myrna must have made a mistake.

  “It must have been a department store. Bloomingdale’s maybe . . .”

  “Honey,” Myrna snorted, placing her hand on Victory’s wrist. “I know your stuff. I’d recognize your designs anywhere. That’s my business, remember?”

  “But that’s impossible,” Victory objected.

  Myrna held up her palms in protest. “I know what I saw. I was in the Dress Barn in the Five Towns on Sunday and they had a whole rack of dresses that looked just like yours. They even had the lace gloves with the velvet ribbons . . . And what’s up with that new company Howard’s started across the street in 1411?”

  Victory shook her head blindly. In the Garment District, people referred to the buildings by their numbers only, and 1411 Broadway was the most down-market building in the area. Lots of clothing were auctioned off to the commercial chain retailers like slaves; the building was the ugly stepchild of the industry that no one wanted to talk about. She was filled with a terrible feeling of dread. Thanking Myrna, she ran across the street, dodging traffic. It couldn’t be, she thought. Even Howard wouldn’t be so stupid as to be secretly selling her clothes in 1411. It would ruin her name and his investment, and it didn’t make sense. She’d checked the inventory statements last month, and nothing seemed to be amiss . . .

  It wasn’t possible, she thought, trying to reassure herself.

  The foyer in 1411 reeked of grease from the millions of bags of takeout food that had passed through the lobby in the last seventy years. On the wall was a listing of all the businesses in the building, but Victory didn’t know what she was looking for—Howard might have called his new company anything, and he was certainly smart enough not to use his own name. She decided to head up to the second floor where the auctions took place, and sure enough, in the middle of a cavernous room filled with racks and racks of clothing waiting their turn on the auction block, she found two racks of clothing that were exact duplicates of her designs. She felt the fabric and shuddered—the difference was that these pieces were executed in cheap materials that would fall apart after three or four wearings and would shrink at the dry cleaner’s. She turned over the hem and saw that the stitching was uneven and not finished; then she checked the label. Her trademark was a pink square with the words “Victory Ford” stitched in whimsical lettering. The label on these cheap knockoffs was nearly the same, the only difference being the actual name, which read “Viceroy Fjord.”

  She dropped the garment as if it were diseased, and stepped back, putting her hand over her mouth in horror.

  She doubled over in pain. He had hardly bothered to even change the name. He must think she was an idiot. Did he really think she was going to let him get away with this? Obviously, he did. He probably saw her as a stupid little girl who would do whatever he wanted, someone he could use and rip off and then toss away without any consequences.

  Well, he had another think coming.

  She was suddenly filled with rage. He had stolen her child, and she was going to kill him. No. She was going to mangle him first, and then kill him. It was one thing to fuck with her, she decided, but another thing entirely to fuck with her business.

  These feelings were completely new to her. She had no idea she could ever be so angry. As if on automatic pilot, she went back to the lobby, found the name of his “new company,” and marched in the door. Howard was sitting at a metal desk with his feet up, shoving something into his mouth that appeared to consist entirely of crumbs, and talking on the phone. “Wha-a-a-a-t?” he said, as if he were irritated at her interruption.

  “You fucking asshole!” she screamed at the top of her lungs, snatching up his paper from his desk and throwing it onto the floor.

  “What the fuck,” he bleated, and speaking into the receiver, said, “I’ll call you back.”

  “How dare you?” she shouted, advancing on him like she was about to hit him, and wishing that she were a man so she could. “I saw those clothes. On the second floor . . .” But before she could go on, he jumped up and interrupted her. “How dare you?” he shouted back, pointing at her as if he were the injured party. “You don’t ever come into my office screaming again.”

  The fact that he was defending himself took her by shock, and she opened and closed her mouth, suddenly unsure of what to say.

  “I saw those pieces . . .”

  “Yeah? So what?” he said, bending over to pick up the newspaper. “So you saw some clothes. And then you come in here, screaming like a crazy woman . . .”

  Her rage flared up again. “You stole my designs,” she shouted. “You can’t do that. You can’t rip me off.”

  He screwed his face up into an expression of distaste. “You’re insane. Get outta here.”

  “You can’t do that!”

  “Can’t do what?” He shrugged scornfully. “This business is all about copying—everyone knows that.”

  “Let me explain something, Howard,” she said threateningly. “You don’t mess with me. And don’t think you’re going to see another penny from my hard-earned profits . . .”

  “Oh yeah?” he said, his face reddening. He walked up to her and jerked her arm, pulling her toward the door. “I got a piece of paper that you signed that says different. So don’t even think about it.” And in the next second, she suddenly found herself out in the hallway and Howard was closing the door in her face.

  Every vein in her head throbbed with anger and humiliation. For a few seconds she stood in the hallway in shock, unable to comprehend what had just happened. Howard should have been scared of her; he was in the wrong, and he should have at least had the decency t
o look frightened. But instead he’d somehow turned it around so that she was the ogre, the crazy woman, and she suddenly realized that she’d lost all her power the minute she started screaming.

  And goddammit, now he knew that she knew. Walking to the elevator, she punched the button several times, in a panic to get out of the building. She didn’t want Howard to come out of his office and find her there—she wasn’t ready for another confrontation. She should have kept quiet about the fact that he was ripping her off until she’d gotten some information about what to do about it. The elevator door finally creaked open and she got in, leaning against the wall as her eyes filled with tears. It wasn’t fair. She’d spent her whole life working her ass off to try to create a name and a company, thinking she’d be rewarded for her good work, and all that happened was some creep had come along and ripped her off. She couldn’t let him get away with it.

  “You’ve got to stop acting like a little girl and grow up,” her banker friend advised. “You’re a businesswoman. You don’t get into a personal confrontation with this asshole. You put your money where your mouth is. You sue. Take him to court and sue his big fat white butt.”

  “I can’t hire a lawyer,” she said. “It’s too tacky.” But then she thought about it. If she was going to survive in this business, she needed to send a message to the fashion industry: If you messed with Victory Ford, she would retaliate. There would be consequences.

  She got Kit to pose as a buyer from a chain store, and sent her in to meet with Howard at Viceroy Fjord. Kit pretended to love the clothes and took pictures with a Polaroid camera. Then Victory took photographs of her own designs. She found a lawyer through Myrna, who felt bad about what had happened to her.

  Three months later she saw Howard again in the courtroom. He was as smelly and badly dressed as ever, and completely unconcerned, as if this kind of thing happened to him all the time. She laid out the photographs of Howard’s clothing next to those of her own designs, and when the judge took a recess to make his decision, Howard’s lawyer agreed to settle. If she would pay Howard back his $80,000, they would forgo his thirty percent, and she would be free.