A Ticket to the Circus (30 page)

That night, there was a simultaneous chess tournament in town with Nat Halpern, one of the grand master chess players who lived in Ptown, and Norman and Bob were playing in the tournament. We picked up Bob, wedged him into the car—Lord knows how (thank God he was skinny)—and then dropped him and Norman off at the chess tournament while I took the kids—Michael and Stephen, Betsy, Danielle, Kate and Matt—to eat pizza and see a movie, one of those stupid beach movies where some monster eats the kids, like a
Jaws
knockoff. Maggie stayed home with Myrtle.

As it turned out, Norman was one of the few who won at the chess tournament, which put him in a good mood, and then all nine of us crammed ourselves back into the Porsche for the thirty-minute ride home. I had Michael and Stephen sitting on my lap in the front seat, which quickly made my legs go numb, and the others were stacked on laps in the tiny two seats and the console in the back. What were we thinking? No one used seat belts or child seats in those days, but I’m sure there were rules about this kind of thing, and if we had been spotted by a cop, we would have been in big trouble.

Of course we got to the road too late, and the water had already
covered it. We had two options: one was to leave the car, wade through the water, and hope it wasn’t too high, and the other was… well, we had one option. It was a warm night and the water was covered with glowing green phosphorescence. We parked the car off the road and piled out like clowns from a circus car. My legs were so dead from the weight of the boys cutting off my circulation that I fell to the ground, and everyone had to rub them to get the feeling back. That pins and needles feeling you get when they come back to life was excruciating. Then Norman put Matt on his shoulders and we all held hands as we started wading across. It was probably a hundred yards to the other side. We had to feel the roadbed with our feet to keep from falling off and getting into deeper water, and it was touch and go.

When we were about halfway across, the boys started singing the theme song of
Jaws.
Dada. Dada. Dadadada dadadada… Something slithery brushed against my leg and I started screaming, so all the kids started screaming, and we tried to run though the water, half of us falling in and getting totally soaked. Poor Matt was hanging on to Norman’s head for dear life, bouncing around, and he nearly fell off into the water. We finally made it and then had to walk about a mile to our house, our shoes sodden with seawater and packed with sand. I rinsed myself and Matt off, the other kids took showers and got themselves to bed, and I left Norman and Bob talking over a huge bottle of red wine. In the morning, when I got up to make breakfast, Bob was still there, sound asleep in a chair beside the fireplace, tenderly hugging the empty wine bottle.

The summer brought us all closer together, in spite of the lateness of my and Matt’s arrival and the fact that the house was in a salt marsh and the drains smelled vaguely like baby urp. The girls accepted me as something between a girlfriend and an older sister. We all shopped and cooked, did mountains of laundry, and took care of the smaller kids. Michael and Stephen were normal rowdy boys who half loved me and half were wary of me, now that I was a figure of authority. The kids really knew after that summer that the guard had changed.

I met Carol for the first time the week I arrived in Wellfleet. She had rented a house down the road to be near Maggie. I was watching out the window as she drove up into the yard and got out of the car. I was nervous. Norman talked about her constantly, and she had achieved
epic status in my imagination. I knew she was a great beauty from seeing her pictures. I wanted to look good, but not as if I were trying too hard, so after changing outfits several times, I finally put on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt and some big earrings.

She was as beautiful as I had imagined, wearing a low-cut silk top and pants (I remember a lot of cleavage, something I didn’t have much of), and sandals, with shimmery toenail polish. Her skin was tanned to a dark bronze, which made me envious, as I never got a tan. My milky skin only burned and got freckles. She was wearing copper eye shadow, the same color as her toenails, and looked alarmingly like Elizabeth Taylor. I’m not sure what she thought of me, but we hugged and said, “Oh, you’re so beautiful!” over and over, and we both meant it. Of course, there was tension (how could there not be?), and for years we were jealous of each other, but with the passing years, we have somehow become friends. I wish we could have been friends from the beginning. It would have made things so much easier on Maggie, but that was not in the cards.

Carol.

It’s funny now to compare notes and realize how our relationships with Norman paralleled, how he had done the same things to each of us, told the same jokes, made the same comments. One of his little tricks was to come up to Carol at a party where she was talking to a handsome man and whisper in her ear, “You’ve lost your looks,” hoping to throw her off in case she was enjoying herself too much. I’m not sure how she reacted, but he did the exact same thing to me. I just said, “Yeah, thanks, pal. I’ll work on it,” and I’d go on talking. I used to tease him that the reason he got married so many times was that he kept running out of stories and jokes, and had to keep getting a fresh audience. Maybe there’s more truth than poetry in that.

When we got back to New York from the summer, I managed, with the help of Chuck Neighbors, to get
Cosmopolitan
magazine to print a story I had written about my experiences of becoming a model. It was called “Getting My Book Together.” I wanted Francesco Scavullo, who did all the covers for
Cosmo
, to do my picture for the article, and they agreed. They even let me do a cover try. I went up to Scavullo’s studio wearing a pair of khaki blouson pants and a white shirt, with a pair of L.L.Bean rubber and leather boots—don’t ask me why, I thought it was terribly chic—and he did pictures of me in that outfit first. Then Way Bandy, who was the top makeup man in New York at the time, did my makeup, and Harry King, a famous hairdresser, did my hair. I felt like one of the big girls. I wore a pink silk low-cut top with skinny pants. I apologized for my flat chest, but they said, “Don’t worry about it, Norris. They’ll airbrush some boobs on. Never fear.” I didn’t make the cover because Helen Gurley Brown said my hair was too short. I gnashed my teeth over my lost long hair, but there was nothing to do about it.

Wilhelmina loved the piece and for many years had it photocopied and handed to every new girl who came in, along with her street guide.

   
THE WINTER OF ’76–’77
was a particularly snowy one, and I didn’t have a warm coat. I’d left all my coats, which weren’t heavy, behind in Arkansas, and the winter before, I’d made do with a black velvet coat with a fur collar I’d gotten in a vintage clothing store in the Village on Bleecker Street for twenty-five dollars. While it was striking for
evening, it wasn’t warm. I’d also gotten a purple wool cape in Italy, which was dramatic but not warm enough for the deep cold. Then I ran across some old pictures of Carol and Norman, and she was wearing a fur coat, a gray fox or whatever, and I got green-eyed fur lust. But how to broach the subject with Norman? I couldn’t let him know how jealous of her I was, and I hated to ask him for money. He had started having his secretary send me a check for a hundred dollars every week, which paid the rent and a few extras, but I wasn’t making enough at modeling to really fill in the gaps. It was tricky. I couldn’t ask him for a fur coat head-on, but one night when we were out in a snowstorm, he put his arm around me and felt me shiver. “Is that the warmest coat you have?” he said. I said yes, but maybe I could find a warmer one at a vintage store or something. He took a look at the purple cape, like he’d never seen it, which was entirely possible, given his obliviousness to his environment. “We have to get you something warmer than that!”

“How much would a fur coat cost?” I asked. “Not that I’d need to have a
fur
coat, but they’re really warm. Maybe I could get a secondhand one or something. I’ll look around.” Oh, I was so crafty!

I saw the wheels begin turning in his head. It would never occur to him on his own to get me a fur coat, but once an idea got into his head, he did it up in a big way. He asked one of his friends, who knew someone whose uncle or cousin or whatever was a furrier in the Garment District, and found we could get one wholesale. Norman said he would take me down there and just look and see what they had, no promises. I modeled in the Ben Kahn fur ads for
The New York Times
, and I knew a coat like those would be way beyond my wildest dreams, but I was sure we could find something reasonable for wholesale.

The place was called D’Cor and was run by a guy named Buddy. His assistant was a woman named Rita, who wore too much eye makeup, but then so did I, and we liked each other immediately. She started off showing us the cheaper furs like rabbit and raccoon, none of which Norman liked at all. I tried on a mink, which he didn’t like, either. Too plain. Then he saw a coat across the room. “What’s that one?” he said. We’d told Rita we didn’t want one that was too expensive, but the one he was looking at was a full-length red fox. Rita winked at me and went and pulled it off the hanger. I put it on, and it was like a slot machine in Las Vegas had gone off. With my red hair, it
was perfect. Norman was so transparent. I could see him thinking of me wearing that coat and nothing else. I could see it, too. I didn’t dare hope he would go for it, so I didn’t carry on too much, but after I tried on a few others, he said, “No, that’s the one we want. I’m not going to have you walk into a place in a drab ugly coat. It has to be the fox.” And he got it. I could hardly breathe, I was so excited. They were going to take a couple of days to embroider my initials “NC” into the coat’s champagne-colored lining, and then it would be all mine.

When I finally brought it home, the first thing I did was put it on with nothing else underneath. Needless to say, it was a huge hit. He loved sweeping into places with me in that coat and tall high heels. There was a picture of us in
Playboy
at a party at Studio 54 with me wearing that coat when I was nearly nine months pregnant. There were pictures in all the social columns of me in the coat. I wore it everywhere. I hated to take it off. I had that coat for thirty years, and it was worth every penny he paid. I’m sure he would agree.

Several years later, during the period when furs were getting splashed with red paint by crazy nuts, I was a little nervous. It was such a spectacular target, and sure enough, one night as I was standing in the street, my mind somewhere else, waiting for the light to change, someone came up behind me in a car and slowly and carefully ran into me. The heel of my shoe got crunched under the tire, and it was a wonder I didn’t fall and really get hurt. I was in such a rage that I yelled and screamed at the people in the car, who just laughed as they got out. I’m not sure if they were fur nuts or just nuts. If there had been a cop around, I would have called him, but I was also a little afraid of them. There’s a fine line for a woman alone between standing up for herself and being foolhardy. It did take some of the bloom off the coat, though, and even if I hadn’t been a fur nut target, I felt like a target of some kind. Besides, it was beginning to show its age. The elbows were nearly bare and it was becoming shabby, so I finally had to put it away, but I still have the shreds hanging in the closet. I can’t part with them.

(P.S. One Christmas when I was about thirty-two, I had Robert Belott shoot nude photographs of me in the coat, and I gave an album of them to Norman for a Christmas gift. He said it was the best present he had ever received. They were classic Victorian sepia nudes, not pornographic by any means. I totally trusted Robert. He was my favorite
photographer and a dear friend, and I told him that no one—
no one
—else was to see these pictures, not even his assistant. He swore.

In the red fox, with the naughty bits blocked out.

Then one day several months later, my downstairs neighbor, who was in advertising, called and asked if I knew there were nude photographs of me being circulated in some photographer’s book. I called Robert, got quite loud, and reluctantly he promised to take them out. “They’re just too good to not let people see them,” was his argument. “You can’t ask Picasso to put his work in the closet!” He was frustrated. Still, I think he took the pictures out of his portfolio.