Little Pink Slips Part 6

"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 downshifted 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.

"He said you were totally behind the Bebe change, that you'd be working with her." Sasha paused and bit her lip.

"Spit it out," Magnolia said.

"I'll still work for you, right? I'm not going to have to work for her, am I?"

Magnolia hated to admit she didn't know the answer to the ques tion almost as much as she hated the thought of losing Sasha. "We're working that out, Sash," she said, hoping Sasha would buy it. "Don't worry. Change is good."

Magnolia walked to her new office and slumped at the desk. The s.p.a.ce was cramped. The office's most unfortunate aspect, though, was that-inspired by newsrooms-one wall was transparent gla.s.s. The architect's fantasy might have been to motivate editors to feel like Lois Lane chasing the page one story, but for the staff who inhabited these quarters the primary activity seemed to be carping about lack of privacy. Magnolia knew her new office would make her feel like a monkey at the zoo.

Cam knocked softly on her door. "There's no use talking about this," he said. "For now, I have the solution." "A brick wall?"

"Getting hammered." Cameron enclosed Magnolia in a quick bear hug.

In ten minutes, Cam and Magnolia were sitting at the bar at the Mesa Grill, and by six o'clock Magnolia had lost count of how many margaritas she'd downed. One by one, the wake expanded to include all of the top Lady edit staff-a very pregnant Phoebe Feinberg-Fitzpatrick, Fredericka von Trapp, Ruthie Kim, and several others.

As the afternoon turned into evening, the digs about Bebe got deeper, and the jokes, increasingly lame. "Do you think she'll do a cat cover?"

Phoebe Feinberg-Fitzpatrick asked while she absentmindedly pattered her pregnant tummy. "Catwoman, the prequel? Halle Barry, get out of town."

"My fashion department can supply a red leotard," Ruthie suggested.

"That would put the scary back in Scary," Cameron said. "Nein," Fredericka said. "She'll vant boys on the cover. Young boys." "There could be a tagline: Where IQ doesn't count."

Magnolia realized she had to shut down the conversation. "We're going to make this work," she said, hoping she didn't sound as drunk as she was. "Celebrities are the future." At that, she whipped out her corporate AmEx card, paid the $350 tab, and escaped into a taxi. A half hour later, when she arrived home, her phone indicated fourteen phone messages. All were from editor pals, and except for Natalie Simon, she didn't return any of them. Nor did she reply to the dozens of "Oh, s.h.i.t" e-mails.

"Of course, you know I had nothing to do with it," Natalie said the minute she heard Magnolia's voice. "Obviously, it's dreadful. But, Cookie, just deal. Rise above."

Natalie completely understood about Magnolia's not wanting to give up Sasha, however. Natalie's two a.s.sistants kept her life humming with gracious precision. The First Lady could take lessons. "Power's for the taking," she advised. "Proceed as if you a.s.sume Sasha will continue to work for you. Believe me, n.o.body's thinking about her right now."

"Do you think I can pull this off ?" Magnolia asked. "My G.o.d, of course!" Natalie all but screamed into the phone.

"You're so talented, so everything, but sometimes I absolutely want to b.i.t.c.h slap you. Or at least send you to my mother for a self-confidence tune-up."

Magnolia had met Estelle, Natalie's mother, numerous times. The woman could have run General Motors if she hadn't been too busy negotiating delicate country club politics, taking on issues as onerous and portentous and divisive as whether kids in diapers should be allowed in the pool. Certainly, Estelle had done a number on Natalie.

No flagging confidence there.

"The press conference is what you should be concentrating on,"

Natalie said. "Look sharp. Wear your Michael Kors suit."

Later in the evening, while walking Biggie and Lola, she thought again that in the avalanche of attention, all unwanted, there was still one person she hadn't heard from who might have made her h.e.l.lish day easier. Why hadn't Harry sent flowers or at least called? But her head reverted to work. Change is good, she repeated to herself.

Change is good.

What a lot of c.r.a.p, she decided. Whoever thought up that proverb clearly had always been in charge of her changes.

Chapter 1 2.

Bushwhacking at the Pierre.

Magnolia knew she had talent. That, and the pluck common to those who hail from the middle of nowhere, who realize that if they want to succeed in a more stylish time zone, they must learn early the value of hard work. Her ability to toil like an inden tured servant was, Magnolia thought, one quality that might set her apart from editors who came from more privileged backgrounds. But was it true that she never doubted herself ? Every editor Magnolia knew possessed some measure of self-doubt, even the prep-school princesses and Ivy grads.

At thirty-seven, had she already redeemed her quota of hit-the jackpot coupons? Her cynical side understood that she and all the other top names on an editorial masthead owed their job security to serendipity. Only deluded egomaniacs-and Magnolia had a few of them on speed dial-convinced themselves that talent alone truly engineered big breaks and continued success.

The hiring G.o.ds giveth, but they also taketh away. Today was one of those away days. When you might least expect it, you're heading off to the Pierre to watch a celebrity begin the public tango of let's pretend-I'm-an-editor, while you try on the unfamiliar role of wall flower. Magnolia dressed in the suit Natalie had suggested. She unearthed her Chanel sample-sale handbag, and hoped no one thought she'd scored it at the Chinatown spider hole that her a.s.sistant Sasha swore by for dead-on knockoffs. She sat silently through her blowout. After ward, she stopped at Tiffany's and sent out an Elsa Peretti baby spoon to her college roommate's infant daughter. It was only June, and the sixth baby present she'd given this year, three to little girls named Isabelle. She arrived at work around 11:30, knowing her presence, just now, made everyone around her twitch with discomfort.

At 1:30, Elizabeth Lester Duvall, sunlight bouncing off her silver head, peered through the gla.s.s wall of Magnolia's new office, mouthing, "Time to go." The limo ride to the Pierre gave Elizabeth ample opportunity to bark a few more orders.

"If you're asked about Lady, defer to me," she said.

"Got it," Magnolia answered.

"When Bebe enters the stage, stand up, so everyone will do the same."

"I hear you."

"Make sure your hair isn't in your eyes," she said. That wouldn't be a problem for Elizabeth, since her hair literally stood on end. "And smile!"

Elizabeth continued, grinning at Magnolia just in case she'd forgotten what that facial expression looked like. "It's going to be great."

Why the president hadn't put Elizabeth in charge of FEMA, Mag nolia didn't know. No man-made crisis or natural disaster was beyond her range. In the time it took Elizabeth to call Jock and review a few more strategic details, she and Magnolia arrived at the Pierre.

The very fifth-arrondissment Pierre had always been Magnolia's favorite Manhattan hotel. Whenever she walked through its hushed lobby, a study in almost faded elegance, she looked forward to making a turn into the blue oval salon with its cloud-covered ceiling. She pic tured herself in a simple satin wedding dress, climbing the marble stairs to meet her bridegroom in the ballroom a short flight up.

Unfortunately, the anteroom to the ballroom was the very s.p.a.ce that Elizabeth had commandeered for today's press conference. Magnolia stepped into the room. Apparently oblivious to the charms of its gray stone trompe l'oeil walls, which created the effect of a cla.s.sical piazza, reporters were stuffing their faces with the pastry, cheese, and fruit the covey felt was their due. Magnolia realized that, from now on, the Pierre would be forever linked with Bebe. She'd need to manufacture a new dream.

"What's the deal, Maggie?" shouted Justin Fink from BusinessWeek. "Are we sitting shiva for Lady?"

She walked over to Justin. Despite his downtown affectation-geeky black gla.s.ses, thrift shop shirts, and Puma sneakers-she knew him as one of the sharper press journalists. At least he had a memory extend ing back further than a year. Magnolia swallowed hard, and greeted him with a friendly peck on the cheek.

"Lady's moving over for the next big thing, Justin. You'll see."

"But why?" Justin asked with a wide smile. "It doesn't compute, unless Scary's been putting out bogus circulation numbers. You guys selling half of what you claim? Any comment?"

"Justin, are you delusional?"

"A little off-the-record, Magnolia, just for me, your favorite reporter?"

Already, he'd bushwhacked into feral territory. From across the room, Elizabeth spotted them chatting, causing Magnolia to wonder whether she hadn't secretly been fitted with a house-arrest ankle bracelet. "Justin!" Elizabeth said, separating them with her skinny shoulder blades. "Patience, honey. You know better than to give our Magnolia the third degree. Bebe Blake will explain it all."