The Bag Lady Papers by Alexandra Penney

Author:Alexandra Penney
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781401394998
Publisher: Hachette Books

A few weeks after the DC 37 class wrapped up, I was working on a Bloomingdale’s assignment when my phone rang. It was one of fashion’s fabulous women: Carrie Donovan. Carrie was so irate that she didn’t get Diana Vreeland’s job as editor in chief that she vamoosed from Vogue and set up a competitive domain at The New York Times Magazine.

“You’re such a breezy writer, Alex,” Carrie cooed into my ear. “We need you over here at this stuffy place. You’ll be a breath of fresh air.” This was Carrie-speak for “I need something from you right away.”

“Of course,” I replied. “What can I do for you?”

“You can be here at two and we’ll have a nice chat,” she said as if she were certain I didn’t have another plan in sight for the next decade. I could reach Forty-third Street by two, and still make it to school to pick up my son, so again I said “Of course.” My assignment was to write an article every other week for The New York Times Magazine in the fields of art, lifestyle, fitness, and beauty, or whatever Carrie Donovan deemed might “amuse” the readers. I accepted the job.

Carrie Donovan, a midwesterner at heart and by birth, was famous for her gargantuan horn-rim glasses, which reached from the tops of her eyebrows to the bottoms of her cheeks. She never ventured out into the world during working hours—which to her encompassed all hours of the day and night—without her two strands of creamy white, fake, bosom-level Kenneth Jay Lane pearls. Almost six feet tall, square-faced and waistless, she wore low-cut clothes to accentuate the pearls or the boobs, though we could never figure out which were most important to her. Some called her a jolie laide, others said she just wanted to get laid. She was handsome in a theatrical, drag-queen kind of way and commanded total attention whenever she was in the room.

One day I walked into her office and she was wearing a foot-high paisley-printed emerald-green turban. Hanging from the folds of fabric was a huge rhinestone-encrusted pin that just scraped the horn-rims. The rest of the outfit consisted of a revealing white ruffled peasant blouse, the two strands of pearls, of course, and an orange printed peasant skirt that twinkled with sequins and swirled to her ankles. On her feet were crimson espadrilles. Each element was a bit bizarre but she put them all together in her Carrie Donovan way, carrying off the look with nonchalance and in-the-know authority.

As we were sitting there, her phone rang and it was Abe Rosenthal, who was the managing editor of the paper at the time and who scared the bejeezus out of all the staff—except Carrie. She’d tell us, “He’s such an adorable man. You just need to flirt with him a bit.”

Abe Rosenthal adorable? Someone to flirt with? Whirling skirts and espadrilles at the newspaper of record, the stately New York Times? The whole routine boggled us. But she

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