Part 6 (1/2)
”Jack's secretary said it was important.”
Jack from IT had a beeper, not a secretary. ”Could that have been Jock Flanagan's office?” Magnolia may as well have asked her to recite the periodic table. The temp stared at her, blankly. ”Did the sec retary have a name?”
”Vera? Viola?” This temp had just graduated from Penn and, four hours ago, told Magnolia she'd kill for a magazine job.
Magnolia called Jock's office herself. ”Magnolia, we were expect ing you fifteen minutes ago,” Elvira said. ”Jock's waiting, and he's got a three o'clock.” He could keep you waiting, but the behavior wasn't tolerated in reverse. ”Be right up,” Magnolia said. ”Minor administrative snafu.
Sorry. You don't need to hear explanations.”
As the elevator opened on the tenth floor, Magnolia collided with Darlene.
”Cute skirt!” Darlene bellowed as she rushed by at her I'm-more important-than-you pace.
Jock's door was closed. Twenty minutes later Elvira allowed her in.
His office looked like a movie set-it rarely showed any evidence of an executive who did actual work. Jock motioned Magnolia to a black leather chair.
”Water?”
”No, thanks,” she answered, her heart thumping like Biggie's tail when he sniffed a pig ear hiding behind her back.
”Magnolia, you've been courageous in defending your position on Lady.”
Whenever someone called you courageous you knew they really meant nuts.
”I'm sure you've recognized that going with Bebe is, however, too good a deal not to do,” Jock said. ”It's plain and simple.”
Plain, simple, shatteringly mediocre-take your pick, Magnolia thought. She held her breath, waiting to get voted off the island, deter mined not to be embarra.s.sed by a meltdown. She'd never been fired, not even from the babysitting job in high school when the Gustafsons arrived home early and discovered her making out with Tyler Peterson in their bedroom.
”I'm going to count on you to teach our girl Bebe the ropes,” he continued.
”Excuse me?” The words stuck in her throat. Magnolia coughed, lowered her voice, and started over. ”Excuse me, Jock. Could you, uh, clarify?”
”Bebe Blake will be big picture. I'll expect you to work with Felicity Dingle to turn Bebe's vision into a magazine.”
”Her vision?” Jock walked back to his ma.s.sive mahogany desk, raised one brow, and eyeballed Magnolia.
”Of course, you don't have to stick around. Your choice. If you wish to break your contract, HR has been alerted. Which will it be?”
This could be her moment to impersonate Katharine Hepburn and tell Jock where he could put his big idea.
Magnolia thought of how much she loved her work, the only thing she'd ever wanted to do-perhaps the only thing she could do. Was she an idiot savant? She didn't care. She pondered the pleasure of writing a clever headline, teaming the right idea with the right writer, finding the one photo image among hundreds with the best smile on the best star, which yielded a stupendous sale. She considered the high she got seeing Lady lining the airports' racks-and the kick of observing a real reader take a crisp copy to the register.
Magnolia thought of her $3,500 mortgage payments; her $1,900-a month in co-op maintenance, the $1,000 she donated every year to the University of Michigan, and Biggie and Lola's vet bills. She thought of how she had no man to share her financial load, or parents who were still giving handouts, and pictured herself home at 12:30, in need of a shower, her dark roots three inches long, trying to concen trate on the Tom Friedman column when everyone she knew was at Michael's. Perhaps someone there would be saying, ”Whatever became of Magnolia Gold?”
The plebiscite approach to editing a magazine-she couldn't begin to imagine it, but she didn't feel she had a Plan B. ”Sure, Jock, I'll give it a go,” Magnolia said, in a jaunty voice she didn't recognize.
”I thought you'd see it that way. And I think you'll be able to man age just fine in the office we'll move you to.”
”Bebe's getting my office?” she asked. Her voice quivered with just the faintest tremor, but in her stomach she felt sucker-punched.
”Not right away. The decorator will be in first thing in the morn ing, though, so you'll need to move out. Don't worry-you'll get plenty of help with that.”
Chapter 1 1.
Avalanche of Reality.
Bebe Blake Beheads Lady. That's how the Post summed it up, accompanied by a photo of Magnolia, mid-bite, at a c.o.c.ktail party four years earlier. Magnolia could carbon-date the shot from her unfortu nate short hair. She had a lamb chop in her hand, as if it were a weapon.
BOLD GOLD FOLDS was the New York Daily News spin. Usually Magnolia didn't give the Snooze a glance, but today she made a run to the closest newsstand to gather all the papers, even the ones that would be delivered to her office later.
The New York Times treated the Bebe takeover in a subdued Business Day item alluding to Lady as one of many beleaguered women's service magazines. The Times reporter suggested that the whole category, with its fifty million readers-enough to sway a presidential election-might, by the end of the decade, vanish, like the VCR.
The Wall Street Journal ignored the story. They generally hung back and, months later, came out swinging. Magnolia could imagine their suggesting-on page one of a slow news day-that both readers and advertisers were shying away from magazines in favor of digital media. Young people don't read anything but blogs, they'd lecture.
USA Today focused only on Bebe, with the headline OPRAH, WATCH YOUR BACK. As if she were sweating one drop.
Magnolia dumped the newspapers in the recycling bin near her back door. By the end of the week, the weeklies-not just celebrity-studded periodicals but newsmagazines as well-would also feature the Bebe takeover. Then there would be the online newsletters, and e-mail blasts that each editor received, and they all received plenty-Mediaweek, Iwantmedia, Media Life, Media Industry Newsletter, Media This, and Media That. Since the media loves no subject more than itself, it would be a festival of narcissism.
The worst part was that thanks to Google, her misfortune would live on for years. According to Magnolia's unofficial tally, venerable had already been used nineteen times to describe Lady, causing Magnolia to refresh her understanding of the term. ”Commanding respect by virtue of age, dignity, character, or position” was the dictionary defini tion. Magnolia suspected no one a.s.sociated venerability with dignity, character, or position-the common understanding linked venerability simply to old age. The word smelled decrepit. Industry insiders who'd never bothered to study Lady (it was an open secret that most decisionmakers were ”too busy to read”) would believe the news and a.s.sume that Lady was a dentured, bunioned, whiskered old hag. This pained Magnolia almost more than the fact that she'd effectively be reporting to Bebe Blake, a fact she hadn't got her head around yet.
Hurt didn't begin to describe how she felt. Sick was more like it, too sick to eat or talk or even call her parents. But she couldn't waste time now being hurt or sick or humiliated. She needed to focus.
The most frustrating aspect of this avalanche of reality was that it was out of the question for Magnolia to tell her side of the story to anyone but her nearest and dearest-who, over the last day, failed to include Harry, who hadn't even e-mailed. One thing Scary did exceedingly well was to control its press coverage. Elizabeth Lester Duvall, their storm trooper of corporate communications, monitored every sound bite an employee might want to shout out. She delivered her gag order in person the previous day the moment Magnolia left Jock's office.
Elizabeth pulled Magnolia into the executive-floor conference room and shut the door. ”Don't worry, honey,” Elizabeth said in the rat-a-tat-tat speech which almost belied her Mississippi Delta roots. ”We'll handle this.
Bebe will give a press conference tomorrow afternoon. We've booked the Pierre. Be sure to get your hair blown out, because we're giving Entertainment Tonight an exclusive.”
”We'll have makeup at the ready,” Elizabeth continued, breath lessly. ”Back to the press conference. You won't speak. Darlene and Bebe will handle the particulars. Just go home. Have a c.o.c.ktail!”
She gave Magnolia a big grin and patted her hand. ”You're taking this so well!” With that, Elizabeth was off. A kiwi green cashmere cardigan knotted around her shoulders billowed in her wake and her silver hair sparkled under the hallway's fluorescent lights.
It wasn't until after Elizabeth had left that Magnolia realized, when she talked to Jock, her t.i.tle had never come up. Perhaps Bebe would get the ”chief ” and Magnolia would be downs.h.i.+fted to ”edi tor,” ”deputy editor,” ”executive editor,” or the truly opaque ”edito rial consultant.” Or maybe she'd remain ”editor in chief,” and Bebe would become, what, ”editorial director”?
Did it matter, really?
It did. An editor in chief was far more glorious than a plain-Jane editor, and usually got better pay. When a company wanted to be cheap, they'd promote an executive editor into the top job, and name her ”editor” with a token raise. But it was all very confusing. An ”edi tor” at one company might be paid four times the salary of an ”editor in chief ” at another, and even at the same company, people with seemingly identical positions had widely variable power, perks, access to upper management, and compensation. Magnolia suspected that at Scary, Natalie Simon, for example, was first among equals and earned at least $200,000 more than she did.
What a lot of bunk, Magnolia thought. Even if her t.i.tle became Your Royal Highness, everyone in her world would read the invisible ink and know that Bebe was running the show. Still, she would like to stay a chief, and if her t.i.tle hadn't been decided yet, perhaps she could bargain for it later. If Jock had a pixel of guilt, she might get him to agree. She took the elevator down to her floor. Magnolia had wanted to announce the change to her staff personally, but when she walked into her office, she could tell from the hush that everyone already knew. A flock of a.s.sistants was already helping Sasha arrange her belongings in neat brown boxes for the move down the hall.
Sasha pulled her aside and whispered a report. While Elizabeth had been delivering her orders to Magnolia, Jock had addressed the troops, using words like ”eye candy” to describe Bebe, a.s.suring editors that Bebe had a ”dynamite idea” she'd explain herself. Later. When ”later” he didn't say.
”Did Jock mention me?” Magnolia asked Sasha when her helpers had left the office to replenish supplies. It humiliated Magnolia to be seeking information from her a.s.sistant, but she had to know. Sasha stopped unpinning Magnolia's elaborate bulletin board collage, which she was carefully dismantling and putting into folders.