Honorable Men Read Free Page A

on that laziness hangs my deepest purpose.”
    Gus paused to look inscrutable until I obligingly responded to my cue. “Which is?”
    â€œWhich is precisely to save him his labor. What I propose to get across to the evening press and to the fashion magazines is that if they all agree to cover one debutante, and make her the news of the day, they will save themselves the trouble of covering fifty. And you and I, my dear, have chosen that debutante!”
    The funny thing was that his crazy scheme worked. It all started with a few modest social notes, slipped by Gus into news and gossip columns in the form of discreet releases. “Miss Alida Struthers is far from the usual type of debutante; she has written a novel, hopes to do a screenplay and prefers the public sands and buffeting breakers of Jones Beach to the exclusive waters of the Creek Club Pool.” Or: “Everyone was at Newport last Saturday for the Frazer debut, except Alida Struthers, who was simply unable to forgo a morning sail to Block Island. ‘It was the one perfect day we’ve had all June!’ she cried.” Or: “It is
not
true that Miss Struthers smokes hashish; she inhales a rare and harmless form of...” Or: “Alida Struthers keeps a pet macaw in her bedroom.”
    Accompanying these handouts were beautiful photographs, including one by Gus’s friend Cecil Beaton. It did not take long for my publicity to accelerate until by Christmas it had become a minor avalanche. I was already on all the debutante invitation lists, but now I received bids from every socially ambitious mother in the Greater New York Area. Gus scrutinized these carefully and selected some surprising ones for me to accept.
    â€œWe can’t stay just with the Knickerbocker families. We have to branch out. I’m picking the people whose parties will make news. No matter how sensational!”
    I soon found that I was getting boxes of lovely things from fashionable stores and free tickets to popular shows, and I even, rather daringly for those days, endorsed a cold cream in an advertisement that was widely distributed. I was, of course, well paid for it. When I suggested to Gus that this sort of thing was bound in time to depreciate my social value, he cheerfully agreed.
    â€œBut by then you’ll have got what you want.”
    â€œAnd what is that?”
    â€œAnything!” he exclaimed, throwing up his arms. “It’ll be time enough to choose when we get there.”
    He thought it desirable that I should have a team to back me up, and I selected two classmates from Miss Herron’s Classes, Amanda Bayne and Dolly Hotchkiss, to whom I confided my project. Both were delighted to go along, hanging, so to speak, on my coattails. Amanda had dowdy old parents with very little money who were afraid of their beautiful daughter and gave her no trouble. Dolly, on the other hand, had a conservative banker-father who objected vociferously and who had to be (and usually was) got around, with the help of a mother who lived vicariously in Dolly. And we soon formed a squadron of some half-dozen college men who were intrigued at the idea of becoming nationally known and would cut any class at Yale, Princeton or Harvard to attend a dance or house party when I commanded. One of these was Chessy Bogart, an Eli who became a kind of protégé of Gus. Gus described him as one of the few members of the younger generation who had penetrated the falseness of every “ism” of our era, from the farthest right to the most extreme left. In time I was to realize that Chessy was just as bright as Gus perceived, if not brighter. But in those days I tended to regard him as a clown, my court jester.
    How did my parents take it all? Very complacently indeed. Mother attributed the old guard’s dislike of publicity entirely to its jealousy of new and more colorful arrivals, and as she had always pored over the social columns, she liked