Satin Doll Read online

  Satin Doll

  Maggie Davis

  The author wishes to thank the Paris office of Condé Nast/Vogue for their help with some background details, and also the staff of Grès, la première couturière classique de Paris. Also, the Rt. Hon. Patrick Baker and Steven Baker, Wokingham, Berks.

  Prologue

  Paris, 7:12 a.m.

  She came down the great space-age plastic tube that enclosed the escalator of the international arrivals building at Charles de Gaulle air terminal, and even the customs agents stopped to stare at her.

  “Houston,” the first passport inspector muttered under his breath.

  The other agent shook his head. She didn’t look at all like the oil-rich Houston ladies in their Oscar de la Rentas from Neiman-Marcus, with their Mark Cross luggage and their jewels from Peter Brent. As she came up to the desk, they could see a leather designer label on the breast pocket of her denim jacket of a girl swinging a lariat and under that the words “Sam Laredo.” The name on her passport was Samantha Whitfield. Birthplace: Shoshone Falls, Wyoming.

  “Une vraie cowgirl,” the second passport inspector murmured. Wyoming was better than the mixed bag of Houston, any day.

  She was beautiful enough, he thought as he stared, to be some American film star. Or perhaps a country and western singer, although there were not enough sequins and beads on her costume for it to be that wonderful American art form. Even her passport photo was très ravissant, unlike the usual which is so cruel to the ordinary traveler. She had been photographed with her shimmering mane of pale gold hair loose and trailing over her shoulders like a delectable schoolgirl’s. And in the passport photograph her great earnest gray eyes viewed the camera lens with a dead-level, faintly disarming expression that was so unaffectedly sensuous that they both sighed.

  The first passport agent smiled as he gave her passport back to her. “Welcome to Paris,” he said in English. And then because she was so beautiful, “Et bonnes vacances, mademoiselle.”

  She actually jumped in awkward surprise. Then she gave them a look from those wide gray eyes that was uncertain, tremulous. After a moment, she shifted the black duffel bag over her shoulder and turned away.

  The younger agent could not resist following her with his eyes as he took passports from the hands of an elderly couple in Bermuda shorts and with a mountain of aluminum suitcases. She knew, he realized, absolutely no French. In fact, she looked stunned when he had wished her a good vacation. But she was so enchanting, what did it matter?

  “Ah, lucky Paris,” he murmured under his breath.

  New York, 12:17 a.m.

  From the fortieth floor of the condominium tower the sweep of the night skyline of New York was a fabulous geometric pattern of lights, cube on glittering cube of shadowy concrete and glass against a velvet black sky. The small woman in front of the glass panel that formed one wall of the room had been studying the spectacular view for several long minutes, a frown on her face. She was not looking forward to this meeting. Jackson Storm hated being a bastard, and he was going to be one now.

  She turned quickly when she heard him enter the room.

  “She’s in Paris?” The big, silver-haired man in his elegant hand-tailored suit was abrupt, the strain in his voice carefully hidden. He was already loosening his tie as he strode toward the desk in front of the wall of plate glass.

  Mindy Ferragamo watched Jackson Storm drop the tie on the polished surface of the desk. She couldn’t guarantee him anything, especially that this problem was taken care of satisfactorily, and that was what he wanted—guarantees. She sighed and made a point of checking her wristwatch. She had to lift her wire-rimmed spectacles to peer somewhat farsightedly at the tiny, diamond-encrusted dial. “She’s probably just landing at Charles de Gaulle.”

  He grunted noncommittally. He sat down in the white leather and chrome desk chair, a man not yet in his fifties, with a leonine mane of silver hair that had become his famous fashion-world trademark—that and the urbane elegance of his tanned, rather fleshy, good-looking features. He unfastened the top buttons of his custom-made silk shirt, while with the other hand he flipped through the pages of a leather-bound appointment book. Behind him, the panorama of sparkling city lights winked and glittered against the velvet sky.

  The woman in her black business suit waited patiently. Jack knew his appointments for the next twenty-four hours like the back of his hand; he was playing for time.

  It was typical of Jackson Storm’s life-style that he was in his private study in his midtown Manhattan condominium at midnight and that she, his executive vice president, was there waiting for him. For years now both his business and his personal life had meshed with complicated precision. This evening a corporate Lear jet had delivered him to New York after a six-hour flight from San Francisco. His chauffeur-driven Mercedes limousine had then speeded him to his Manhattan condo tower, where a cocktail party for fashion buyers from Midwestern department stores was in progress, and after playing host to the retailers for exactly forty-five minutes, the head of the Jackson Storm empire had turned his guests over to a public relations team and retired to his private study to get some work done.

  It took power, money and unlimited physical stamina to maintain a schedule as tight as that of English royalty, and Jackson Storm thrived on it. The stack of papers waiting for him on his desk had been neatly assembled, labeled in order of priority and ready for his inspection, as they always were when he had been out of town for any length of time. This evening he kept his shoulders hunched, his handsome head lowered, staring at the papers but not making a move to go through them, apparently waiting for the woman at his side to tell him what he wanted to know without his having to ask for it.

  This means more to him than he thought it would, Mindy Ferragamo was thinking. She had assumed this episode would be just like the others.

  There had been a fairly long parade, in Jackson Storm’s career in the mass fashion market, of beautiful women known as the Storm King’s “discoveries.” And most of them, it could be said to Jack’s credit, had profited by the association. Several former Storm King models had gone on to successful careers in television and films, and another, a titled young European aristocrat with ambitions to become a designer, now had her own successful fashion house. But, Mindy told herself, he should have known Sammy Whitfield was going to be different. For one thing, this one thought she was in love with him.

  “She was expecting you to see her off at the airport. That really disappointed her, Jack.” Disappointed was a mild word for it.

  She saw the famous brilliant blue gaze fix on the stack of folders in front of him as though he hadn’t heard her. There was little or nothing now in this assured magnificent man that even faintly resembled the Jacob Sturm that she had once known, the brash Seventh Avenue tie salesman, the relentless wheeler-dealer who had fought his way to the top of the heap of the cutthroat New York mass-market fashion world. But there were times like this when she saw a little of the old Jake showing through. His silence was ominous.

  The big man pulled the first plastic-bound file on top of the pile toward him. Inside the folder were the four-color proofs of the Sam Laredo Western wear ads scheduled to run in the fall. “What did she say?” he wanted to know.

  Say? Mindy tried to think. The flowers, she remembered. The armful of red roses, several hundred dollars’ worth, had been delivered to the TWA VIP lounge in place of Jack’s coming in person. “She liked the flowers,” she said carefully. “Three dozen red Duchess of Kent, yard-long stems. I wrote ‘Love,’ no name, on the card.”

  He gave another grunt as he picked up the advertising agency’s proof sheet.

  The large glossy photographer’s print was that of an engagingly leggy model in cowboy boots with her back
to the camera. The blonde girl was nude from the waist up, presenting a provocative view of a tanned, silky bare back down to the waistband of her jeans. The logo, an embossed cowhide label with the figure of a girl swinging a lariat and with the words “Sam Laredo,” were plainly visible on one denim-covered hip.

  “Jesus, what a bomb.” He glared at the ad agency proofs. “What drek! Are we supposed to buy this stuff?”

  The layout wasn’t all that bad, as they both knew. The shot had been taken by one of New York’s top-flight fashion photographers, a slick, atmospheric frame of a girl and the Arizona desert with a sere background of rocky desert and mountains slightly out of focus—a very artsy, appropriately low-key sell. In the same vein, Calvin Klein was using very trendy ads in W and Vogue of girls in frayed, worn-out jeans with holes in the knees.

  In the Sam Laredo layout the model’s head, partly turned to look over her shoulder at the camera, was not Sammy Whitfield, but it could have been. The girl had the same mane of straw-colored hair chopped short and straight around her face and long in back, a clear, finely delineated profile with a tangle of black eyelashes brushing satiny cheeks, a short straight nose, the full upper lip of her mouth lifted innocently over small white teeth. She was part lanky child-woman, part sensuous, gray-eyed siren. Almost Sammy, but not quite.

  It had taken weeks to find a duplicate model for the Sam Laredo ad campaign, all done in absolute secrecy, even though they had all known it was going to be a lost cause. The ad campaign roughs, sure to be killed, were only an exercise in futility.

  For a long moment the silver-haired man at the desk said nothing. Then he snarled, “Jesus, what a fake. It’s shit! How much money did we spend on this crap?”

  Money, Mindy thought, sighing. When hurt, he always goes back to that. “It’s not so bad,” she said neutrally.

  “Bad? It’s not even bad—it’s a fake! It even looks like a fake. In case you should forget, Jackson Storm has never put out a fake in his life.” He allowed himself the gesture of skittering the photograph across the desk. It sailed into the air and fell on the floor. Mindy made no move to pick it up.

  He grabbed the next sheet, the cost figures the advertising agency had attached. “Christ, these are even worse!” In the privacy of his study he was allowing himself the luxury of dropping Jackson Storm, the urbane, unflappable emperor of the mass-market fashion world, for the more satisfactory role of Jake Sturm losing his Seventh Avenue temper. “So tell me, what are we spending this goddamned fortune for, when this quarter we can’t give Sam Laredo sportswear away? I couldn’t sell her jeans off a pushcart on Forty-second Street during lunch hour, but the goddamned bill for this drek busts my balls! Who the hell,” he demanded, raising his voice, “do these slick agency bastards think they’re dealing with?”

  The dark woman listened with a calm face. They hadn’t really expected to duplicate Sammy Whitfield’s look. It was a last-ditch try, an effort by Jack to convince himself that there was something worth salvaging, a justification of the money and time spent on a two-year advertising and media campaign intended to imprint the Sam Laredo image in the minds of every woman in the Western Hemisphere. Excepting, of course, those millions who were already committed consumers of Jordache, Gloria Vanderbilt, Calvin Klein and a hundred other jeans makers. And that was where they had made their mistake.

  She only murmured, “The Sam Laredo label was always up against big competition in a tight market. Even a year ago.” When you started sleeping with her, she added silently.

  The man at the desk lifted the computer printouts of the cost sheets and studied them, scowling. The trip to the deserts of Arizona to shoot the ad pictures had run wildly over budget. “What the hell’s this? Compensatory pay for the model’s skinned back? Are they kidding?”

  “The model slipped on the rocks. We paid her a bonus, Jack. The insurance company covered it.” She made a pretense of leaning over his shoulder to study the figures. “Medical costs, plus sick time until the scabs fell off.”

  “I’m not believing this.” He was studying the evocative shot of, the half-naked girl with her wind-swept hair against desert rock and Western sky. “We pay for scabs, now? On her back? On her tits? Someplace where nobody is going to see them—except her boyfriend when he’s in bed, screwing her?”

  After a moment’s silence they both lifted their eyes to the gold-framed picture placed next to the desk’s leather-bound appointments book. The photograph had been taken a year ago for a layout in Town & Country magazine, and it showed beautiful dark-haired Marianna Storm seated in the living room of her Connecticut house with two pretty teenage girls. Mrs. Jackson Storm and daughters.

  How many interviews, the small woman was thinking, had quoted Jack as saying he loved his wife as he could never love any other woman? And that he would never subject his family to the heartbreak of divorce? It was Marianna who always let Jack know when she’d had enough. Only the designer, the European princess, had lasted more than two years.

  “Oh, Christ,” she heard him mutter under his breath. He picked up the report on another project, the worrisome French acquisitions that had been forwarded from Jackson Storm’s brokers in London.

  Mindy Ferragamo knew he hadn’t forgotten about Sammy Whitfield any more than she. Two years ago Mindy had brought her into his office, a scrawny kid dragging a suitcase of sample dresses, original designs she’d been peddling with some success in the Western specialty shops in Denver. She was too tall, too skinny, a raw, towheaded ragamuffin from the cattle and wheat country of Wyoming and she looked it. Later they would find out she’d been raised in hard-scrabble poverty, the father a drunk, a drifter, a sometime rodeo rider with too many kids, all of them living in a broken-down trailer on the outskirts of town.

  For a few minutes that morning all anybody could see were the negatives: freckles, a lean boy’s body, legs two miles long, that terrible mop of straw-colored hair—all adding up to a big-eyed, taut-faced absurdity with nothing going for her. Including the awestruck look on her face that said she didn’t believe she was actually in the office of the great Jackson Storm, but she was going to fight like hell to make the most of it. Desperate, ambitious, Samantha Whitfield was all of twenty-four.

  Her designs were strictly a no-go, at least for the mass market; Jackson Storm marketing heads had turned thumbs down on them after one quick appraisal. But Jack had taken one long, hard look at the girl, and it had come to him like a bolt of the famous Jackson Storm creative lightning—Sammy Whitfield personified the Western look that American consumers were going for. And he, Jack Storm, had rare authenticity in his hands, the breath, the soul of the Jackson Storm Great American Line that had made him famous. The new jeans project he was going to launch was just sitting there, like an act of God, waiting for her. In that moment he was sure she was going to make them millions.

  He had sketched out an ad campaign right then: the blacks, whites and grays of the desert as the sun was coming up, a camera tracking her against tumbleweed and sand as she strode toward the horizon in a halo of harsh, brilliant sunlight—wearing Storm King jeans. Their ragamuffin goddess would be wearing a Jackson Storm cotton chambray shirt bleached to a faded blue-gray, resinated so that the wrinkles were processed in, a virtuoso achievement of incomparable, understated Western chic. He would have her wearing Storm King’s Art Hammer of Dallas handmade cowboy boots, plain, no embossing, no colors, just beautifully fashioned American cowhide. All pure, beautiful lines, like the girl herself.

  They were going to have to name her “Sam” something because Jack liked the idea of an androgynous label for her. It evoked a certain style. The marketing consultants came up with Sam Laredo. She was going to be another Diane von Furstenberg—Sam Laredo—a name on a label the shopping mall masses wouldn’t be able to forget.

  Two years later it was all over. It was not the first failure Jackson Storm had ever had, but one of the worst. The demand for jeans had come full circle, the mass market was glutted, and buyer re
sistance was so great that the big houses were casting about desperately for something new. Ralph Lauren was advertising in the chic pages of W: “Dungarees, crafted in the spirit of an era when quality and durability were more important than fashion”—these were only loose-fitting denims that appealed to the inverse snobbery of old-fashioned ugliness. Jordache, Gloria Vanderbilt, even Levi Strauss were hurting. And Sam Laredo, the sales figures showed, had dissolved into nothingness.

  Mindy Ferragamo took a deep breath. “Look, Jack, why don’t you just go ahead and fire her?” She knew she was pushing him, but somebody had to say it. The way things were going he thought he was making a sacrifice, and Jackson Storm making a sacrifice was Jackson Storm making a mistake. “Jack, send her back to Wyoming.”

  When she saw the famous storm clouds gathering, she said quickly, “Okay, so send her to one of the Storm King boutiques. Give her one to manage in Dallas, L.A., Chicago—” She pushed the wire-rimmed glasses up on her nose a little nervously. “Or if she wants to stay in New York, you can set her up for something big with a modeling agency.” They both knew Sammy didn’t want to be a model; she still thought she was going to be a designer. “But not to this thing in Paris. My God, Jack, she’s just a kid from some Western cow town—she can’t handle it. And you’re asking for trouble!”

  He slammed the folder shut. “Jesus, knock it off, will you?” His handsome face contorted. Jackson Storm was being a bastard, but a masterful one. “What she gets is nothing,” he bellowed. He swept the appointments book, the advertising proofs, the financial folders away with a petulant sweep of his hand. “Nothing means nothing—get me?”

  He didn’t look up at her. Jack knew this woman to whom he owed so much, this middle-aged figure in the discreet, tailored black suit, still resisted him, as only she, out of the whole multimillion-dollar fashion conglomerate, could. When they were younger, he had slept with her, too.