The Secret Read online

  Narcotics? No way. The problem there was that dope had been sold to the dregs of the community for years, and as long as that was where it was sold nobody much cared, but in the sixties, the trade was expanding into the good neighborhoods and the suburbs, which meant that the law was going to turn fanatical. Ohio, for example, had already made it law that a guy would go up for life for selling just one hit. Imagine that! Life in the slammer for selling just one hit of heroin! And I’m not saying that was wrong. Bad chemicals make people into animals. Worse, it makes them into walking corpses.

  Buddy suggested a chop shop—that is, a garage where stolen cars were modified, numbers filed off, repainted, and so on. Sure. Okay. A small profit. A small-time operation.

  I wanted a legit business.

  Okay. Sell people something they want. Better than that, make them want something they didn’t know they wanted, and then sell them that. A thousand billion-dollar businesses had been built on selling people what they didn’t know they would ever want—what, in fact, they didn’t want when they bought it, and had no need for.

  My idea came to me when I wanted to buy Giselle a present, as much for me as for her, something very sexy to wear on her gorgeous body. Remember the fifties? Where would you have bought a really brief bikini or a G-string or a pair of crotchless panties? Department stores did not carry much in the way of intimate apparel. Neither did women’s shops. White rayon panties and white cotton bras from Woolworth’s or Penney’s were standard underwear. I remember a nylon panty-and-bra set based on a leopard-skin print. It was considered daring, even though the waistband covered the navel.

  You might try a sex shop, almost all of which were so sleazy a man or woman would be embarrassed to be seen coming out of one. You could order something by mail from Frederick’s of Hollywood, but that was about it.

  It’s unbelievable, when you think about it. In those years young women still wore girdles! Also panty-girdles. And rigid bras of nylon and rubber that forced their breasts into unnatural pointy shapes that were ogled on television. Nothing was too hideous for women to force their suffering flesh into in those years. Giselle wore no bras most of the time, and seeing her breasts moving naturally under a blouse or sweater caused some men to ogle and some women to cluck.

  The fifties ended, the sixties began, and it didn’t get much better. We were on the verge of the so-called Sexual Revolution, but—okay, I’ve made my point.

  It occurred to me that here was a business: selling sexy scanties in respectable shops in silk-stocking neighborhoods. Men would buy to please their wives and girlfriends. Women would buy to please their husbands and boyfriends. We could go into that business on the basis of a cautious investment, and who could guess what would follow?—utter failure, modest success, or a big business all our own that the Families had not thought of and didn’t want.

  Giselle thought a fine name for the shops would be Presque Nu—almost naked. I liked her idea of using French words. In those years, “French” still connoted something naughty. I liked the idea but knew Americans wouldn’t understand its meaning. Finally, we came up with a name. It was simple, yet carried a suggestive double entendre. We would call our shops Cheeks. The fashion was chic, a woman might need cheek to wear it, and she might show something of her nether cheeks to anyone who saw her from behind.

  Buddy thought the idea was insane. “Oh, man! You want to open a buttons-and-ribbons store? What kind of man sells ladies’ undies? What kind of business is that?”

  It is a business that last year had almost eleven billion dollars in gross sales, through almost seven hundred stores, plus catalog sales.

  Not bad. But it didn’t come easy.

  Giselle and I talked about it. She would be my partner in Cheeks, in every sense of the word. I talked to Frank Costello. All he could do was shrug. “It’s an original idea, I gotta say.”

  “Nobody’s gonna object?”

  “Nobody’s gonna object. You could go into other lines and nobody would object. You got friends, Jerry.”

  Giselle heard him say that. She had no idea what he meant. In Paris, I had learned, there was an organization vaguely referred to as les Messieurs, and she’d had contact with it through Paul and still knew nothing of it.

  Anyway, we had to define what we would sell. We ordered a substantial shipment from Frederick’s of Hollywood and decided, essentially, that what Frederick’s offered was not what we would offer.

  Remember, it was still the era of nylon and rubber. By no means everything offered by Frederick’s was like that, but some of it was; and we were firm in our commitment to offer something different.

  Giselle and I made some of the signature items of our early line. When I say made, I mean we sewed together and dyed items that we could show to makers and suppliers. It seemed the best way to give them the idea.

  Giselle bought one of the leopard-print panty-and-bra sets that seemed so bold. At home we snipped holes in the bra so as to expose the nipples. Then we dyed the thing black. Then we photographed it, on Giselle. When we showed that to prospective suppliers, they understood what we wanted.

  We didn’t cut down the panties, just dyed them black and folded them to make a bikini style.

  Giselle put on the black bra with her nipples bared, the panties, a black garter belt, and dark sheer stockings, and she posed for my camera. That outfit became one of the pilot styles for Cheeks.

  Nighties were not so difficult. The only problem was that most of them included modesty panels. A woman in those days might wear a nightgown that displayed her legs, her hips, even her butt through sheer nylon but expected a modest covering over her pubes and her breasts. We could easily induce manufacturers to omit the modesty panels. Our sheer nightgowns were sheer all over.

  Those became another one of our pilot styles.

  We couldn’t know yet how the public would receive our merchandise, but we had a philosophy—if it can be dignified by that name—and meant to venture on the market with it.

  11

  Apart from merchandise, the first problem was real estate. No point in opening one shop. I opted for three, one on the Upper West Side, one on the Upper East Side, and one in Midtown.

  Merchandise. I knew we would have to design and manufacture our own. For the moment, I hoped to import from France, where women no longer walked around in hip-length panty-girdles and bras of … well, there was something called a “whirlpool bra,” a contraption so horrid it was almost beyond imagination.

  I called on Paul Renard. Lingerie was not one of his many interests, but he had contacts in every business in France. Shortly, crates of “unmentionables” were aboard cargo planes destined for Cheeks, U.S.A. I also asked him to find me a supply of the briefest possible bikinis. Nothing flimsy. Only high-quality merchandise.

  We rented a ballroom in the Lexington Hotel and arranged a style show to introduce our line. The hotel was accustomed to fashion shows and set up a catwalk for our models. The hotel supplied the bright, dramatic lighting. I hired a rock band.

  Most of the guests for the show were people from the news media: fashion writers, commentators on city life. We made them comfortable with generous drinks, and then started our show.

  I employed six models. To my surprise, Giselle decided that she wanted to model, so she made seven.

  Immediately I had a decision to make.

  The bikinis were brief. So were the panties. In those days it was unusual for a girl to trim or shave her pubic hair. Few of the bikinis of the fifties required it. When the first model came out of the dressing room in an iridescent white bikini, she was grinning and pointing down. At least a quarter of an inch of her thick, dark bush overhung her bikini.

  Her name was Melissa Lamb. “Do you want me to trim it, Mr. Cooper?” she asked in mock innocence, giggling. She was a charming girl. I would know her for many years and would never forget that day when she offered to trim her dark pubic hair.

  For a moment I could not answer. My attention was fo
cused on her luscious breasts, which were spilling out of her bikini top.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “How do you feel about it?”

  “I don’t care. I’ve posed nude a lot. My pussy doesn’t embarrass me.”

  I may have been influenced by Giselle. I will never forget the first time I saw her nude on the stage. She’d been shaved, and her fleshy nether lips showed. She spread her legs without hesitation or embarrassment, showing her dark slit and the shiny pink parts outside it. Strippers today are close-trimmed, if not shaved, and flaunt their pink and glossy parts. The mere suggestion of it was shocking when we opened our stores. So has the world changed.

  “No, Melissa,” I said. “If it doesn’t bother you, it doesn’t bother me.”

  I had to see the reaction. If it had been negative, I would have sent the girls scurrying back to the dressing room to shave.

  But it was not negative. The style columnists and suchlike people gasped when Melissa appeared with that generous blossom of dark hair showing above her bikini bottom, plus strands showing around the sides. But then … then they applauded!

  As model after model appeared, each showing more or less, interest grew. The musicians, who had been blasé about this gig, became spirited, as did their playing. Their beat dominated the room. I had a microphone, but I didn’t have to say anything.

  Each model showed a bikini. Then they began to show lingerie. When Giselle appeared in the black bra-and-panty set, with her shiny nipples peeking out through the holes in the bra, some in the audience actually stood—though whether it was to pay tribute or to see better, I couldn’t say.

  The next day the models gathered in a photographer’s studio and were photographed in the things they had modeled.

  I had invited Buddy to stop by during the shoot. He was no innocent, but he was rattled when he found himself sitting in a huge room, sipping Scotch, and watching naked girls running around, changing in and out of things and having body makeup patted on their skin. He had, of course, seen Giselle nude in Paris, but she was thirty-five now, and my wife, and I think it made him a little uncomfortable.

  I ordered big color prints made of the photographs. They would become the basis of the décor in our first shops. Notice I say they were the basis of the décor in our first shops. We did not put them in the windows, and in fact they were not visible from the streets.

  My wife’s photo appeared in each of our shops.

  We were demure. We kept drapes closed over our show windows and displayed nothing in them but walnut plaques with carved, gilded lettering. It said:

  CHEEKS

  LINGERIE FRANÇAISE

  Anyway … there are problems with starting a business in New York City.

  My first confrontation came in the Upper East Side shop. I was paid a visit by a tall, slender, coffee-with-cream complexioned man sharply dressed in a camel overcoat over a natty black suit. He strolled around the shop, taking an interest in the merchandise and in the big color photographs of models.

  “Nice new business you got here,” he said.

  I nodded. I guessed what he wanted, but I played it cool. “I figured there’d be a market for this kind of stuff.”

  “I’m sure there is. I’m sure there is. Uh … you got the place well insured?”

  “Oh, sure,” I said. I’d expected this visit and knew what was coming. “Fire, theft, the works.”

  He nodded, then walked around the store again, pretending to take an interest in some sheer and skimpy black panties. “Tough town, don’t you think?” he asked.

  “I’ve lived here all my life,” I said.

  “Really, now? Then you know the score. Who’s insuring you against accidents?”

  “What’s your name?” I asked.

  “I don’t give that information out very readily.”

  “Then when somebody else comes in to sell me insurance, who am I gonna tell them insures me against accidents? I mean, I can’t just say, ‘I got insurance.’ I gotta say ‘I got insurance with Doug or Mike or somebody.’ Otherwise, your insurance isn’t going to do me any good, is it?”

  “Okay. You tell ’em you’re insured with Leroy.”

  “And what does your insurance cost, Leroy?”

  “Oh, let’s say a C and a half a week. If your business goes real good, the insurance might be worth more. But we can start that way. Okay?”

  “Okay.” I reached in my pocket, pulled out a wad, and peeled off three fifties. “Tuesday,” I said. “This covers me till next Tuesday. Figure I’ll see you then. Right?”

  I called Buddy. He’d heard of Leroy.

  Leroy did not return for another $150 on Tuesday. He did not return any other Tuesday.

  A body that washed up on a Jersey beach a couple of months later might have been Leroy, but it was hard to say; too many fish had nibbled on it. The camel coat and black suit suggested Leroy.

  “Anybody else tries to sell you protection, you tell them you’re covered by Buddy.”

  Which I did. For some reason all his own, Buddy had become a sort of big brother to me. I thought I knew the city. He knew it better.

  12

  LEN

  My father said to Brad that he had wanted me to give my virginity to some nice little girl with pink knees showing under a pleated plaid skirt. I did, if my virginity could be said to be intact after I was sucked off by Brad.

  Sue Ellen did not want to be called Sue or Ellen. She was Sue Ellen. I met her at Amherst, of course. We met at a dance and at first didn’t much care for each other. I don’t know why, exactly. She was all too ready to tell anyone who would listen that her father was a senior partner in Hale & Dorr, in Boston, and was a friend of Joseph Welch. I didn’t tell her exactly what my father did for a living—I honestly didn’t know—which made her think I was either standoffish or was the son of someone in a dishonest racket. She didn’t find this attractive, and so didn’t find me attractive.

  It is odd to say this about a young woman, but I am going to say it because it was true. Sue Ellen was defined by her boobs. They were beautiful but so extraordinarily large that she was almost a freak. Her mother hired a woman in Boston to make bras especially for Sue Ellen. The things were expensive, and their purpose was not to thrust her up and out but to contain and support her. More than that, they were made to relieve her of the discomfort she experienced with off-the-shelf brassieres, whose straps cut into her shoulders and left red marks.

  There were cruel jokes about Sue Ellen. She didn’t pick the lint from her navel because she didn’t know it was there. She couldn’t play the piano or type because she couldn’t see the keyboard. She couldn’t drive because her tits would get caught in the steering wheel. She couldn’t play basketball because someone would confuse her boobs for the ball. And so on. I say cruel. I mean cruel. And I know she heard some of these jokes.

  Naturally, every boy who dated her tried to grope her. They couldn’t wait to get their hands on those enormous jugs. They were a disadvantage for her—though I must add that she never considered having them surgically reduced. In fact, she was proud of them.

  As for the rest of her, she was simply an attractive, appealing girl, no raving beauty, maybe, but regular in her features and taut in the remaining elements of her figure. I well remember watching her walk away, her tight little butt twitching. I supposed she was unconscious of that. She wasn’t. Sue Ellen was not unconscious of anything about herself.

  She was bright and personable and warm. I liked her. I persisted in asking her for dates, and she began to accept.

  When I graduated from Lodge, my father bought me an automobile for a graduation present. It was a brand-new black Oldsmobile Cutlass with a real leather interior. Maybe one of the reasons Sue Ellen accepted me was that I could drive her to Boston, or to Hartford, or other places she might want to go.

  Anyway, inevitably we began to park and kiss. And so, one night—

  “Len, I have to ask you a question.”

  “Sure.”
>
  “You’re the only boy I’ve ever gone out with who didn’t try to feel me up. Why?”

  “Because I figure you’ve had to put up with enough of that. Sometime, when we … respect each other enough, then I’d like to—Sue Ellen. I don’t want to just feel you up. I want to kiss you there.”

  It was the right thing to say. In a minute she had pulled off her sweater, unhooked the corsetiere’s masterwork, and bared those magnificent hooters.

  I kissed them, believe it. I sucked her nipples into my mouth, caressed them with my tongue, and felt them harden. She had been the victim of too much crude groping and was eagerly waiting for a guy to treat her right. Sue Ellen moaned with exhilarated pleasure.

  So did I.

  I kept licking and sucking. She kept thrusting her big, soft knockers against my face until she all but smothered me with them. I was painfully hard. She fumbled with my erection. I rubbed her panties. They were wet. Still, we didn’t do it that night. We knew we would another night. Unless something awful happens between two people, you don’t go that far and decide to go no farther.

  Well … inevitably, she got pregnant. Inevitably because we were a pair of stupid kids. We knew what would happen, but when you are that age you think you are invincible, that nothing bad can happen to you. Besides, it didn’t feel as good through condoms, not to either one of us.

  We couldn’t tell her parents in Boston. One Saturday morning we drove to New York and faced my father. He was at home. Nonreligious though he was, he usually took a day’s rest on the Sabbath.

  “Well, for Christ’s sake, kids,” he said.

  He was living at the time with a former model named Melissa Lamb. It was interesting. They were friends. He’d met her some years before my mother died. She was not just a romp in the sack—though for damn sure she must have been one: a brunette with a body that would have given Cardinal O’Connor an erection. She was a little vacant in the brains department, but she was good-hearted, as they say, and devoted to my father. I could tell by the way they looked at each other that they made each other happy.