Lauren Weisberger 5-Book Collection: The Devil Wears Prada, Revenge Wears Prada, Everyone Worth Knowing, Chasing Harry Winston, Last Night at Chateau Marmont

‘Of course, Miranda. Emily has been trying all the numbers in—’

‘And are you aware that Mr Lagerfeld said he’d be available on his mobile phone while he was in Paris?’ Every muscle in her throat strained to keep her voice even and calm.

‘Well, no, we don’t have a cell number listed in the directory, so we didn’t know that Mr Lagerfeld even had a cell phone. But Emily is on the phone with his assistant right now, and I’m sure she’ll have that number in just a minute.’ Emily gave me the thumbs-up right before she scribbled something and exclaimed, ‘Merci, oh yes, thank you, I mean, merci’ over and over again.

‘Miranda, I have the number right here. Would you like me to connect you now?’ I could feel my chest puff out with confidence and pride. A job well done! A superior performance under the most pressure-filled conditions. Never mind that my really cute peasant blouse that had been complimented by two – not one, but two – fashion assistants was now sporting sweat stains under the arms. Who cared? I was about to get this stark raving mad lunatic of an international caller off my back, and I was thrilled.

‘Ahn-dre-ah?’ It sounded like a question, but I was only concentrating on trying to figure out a pattern for indiscriminate name mix-ups. At first I’d thought she did it deliberately in an attempt to belittle and humiliate us even more, but then I figured out that she was probably quite satisfied with the levels of belittlement and humiliation we endured and so she did it only because she couldn’t be bothered to keep straight details so inane as her two assistants’ names. Emily had confirmed this by saying that she called her Emily about half the time but called her a mixture of Andrea and Allison – the assistant before her – the other half. I felt better.

‘Yes?’ Squeaking again. Dammit! Wasn’t it possible for me to have just a tiny bit of dignity with this woman?

‘Ahn-dre-ah, I don’t know what all the fuss is over finding Mr Lagerfeld’s mobile number when I have it right here. He gave it to me just five minutes ago, but we were disconnected and I can’t seem to dial correctly.’ She said the last part as though the entire world was to blame for this irritation and inconvenience except for herself.

‘Oh. You, um, you have the number? And you knew he was on that number the whole time?’ I was saying it for Emily’s benefit, and it only served to enrage Miranda even more.

‘Am I not making myself perfectly clear here? I need you to connect me to 03.55.23.56.67.89. Immediately. Or is that too difficult?’

Emily was slowly shaking her head in disbelief as she crumpled up the number we’d both just fought so hard to get.

‘No, no, Miranda, of course that’s not too difficult. I’ll connect you right away. Hold just a minute.’ I hit ‘conference,’ dialed the numbers, heard an older man shout ‘Allo!’ into the phone, and hit conference again. ‘Mr Lagerfeld, Miranda Priestly, you’re connected,’ I stated like one of those manual operators from the Little House on the Prairie days. And instead of putting the whole call on mute and then hitting speaker so Emily and I could listen in on the call together, I just hung up. We sat in silence for a few minutes as I tried to refrain from badmouthing Miranda immediately. Instead, I mopped some dampness from my forehead and took long, deep breaths. She spoke first.

‘So, let me just get this straight. She had his number the entire time but just didn’t know how to dial it?’

‘Or maybe she just didn’t feel like dialing it,’ I added helpfully, always enthusiastic for the chance to team up against Miranda, especially considering how rare the opportunities were with Emily.

‘I should’ve known,’ she said, shaking her head like she was horribly disappointed with herself. ‘I really should’ve known that. She always calls to have me connect her to people who are staying in the next room, or who are in a hotel two streets over. I remember I thought that was the weirdest thing, calling from Paris to New York to have someone connect you to someone in Paris. Now it just seems normal, of course, but I can’t believe I didn’t see that one coming.’

I was about to run to the dining room for lunch, but the phone rang again. Operating under the lightning-doesn’t-strike-twice theory, I decided to be a sport and answer the phone.

‘Miranda Priestly’s office.’

‘Emily! I am standing in the pouring rain on the rue de Rivoli and my driver has vanished. Vanished! Do you understand me? Vanished! Find him immediately!’ She was hysterical, my very first time hearing her that way, and I wouldn’t have been surprised to learn it was the only time.

‘Miranda, just a moment. I have his number right here.’ I turned to scan my desk for the itinerary I’d set down a moment earlier, but all I saw were papers, old Bulletins, stacks of back issues. Only three or four seconds had passed, but I felt as if I were standing right next to her, watching as the rain poured down on her Fendi fur and caused the makeup to melt down the side of her face. Like she could just reach out and slap my face, tell me I’m a worthless piece of shit with zero talent, no skill set, a complete and total loser. There wasn’t time to talk myself down, remind myself that this was merely a human being (theoretically) who wasn’t happy to be standing in the rain and was taking it out on her assistant 3,600 miles away. It’s not my fault. It’s not my fault. It’s not my fault.

‘Ahn-dre-ah! My shoes are ruined. Do you hear me? Are you even listening? Find my driver now!’

I was at risk of some inappropriate emotion – I could feel the knot in the back of my throat, the tightening of the muscles in the back of my neck, but it was too early to tell if I would laugh or cry. Either one: not good. Emily must have sensed as much, because she leapt out of her seat and handed me her copy of the itinerary. She’d even highlighted the driver’s contact numbers, three in all, one for the car phone, his mobile phone, and his home phone. Naturally.

‘Miranda, I’m going to need to put you on hold while I call him. Can I put you on hold?’ I didn’t wait for a response, which I knew would drive her crazy, and threw the call on hold. I dialed Paris again. The good news was the driver picked up on the first ring of the first number I tried. The bad news was he didn’t speak English. Although I’d never been self-destructive before, I couldn’t help but smash my forehead firmly into the Formica. Three times of this, and Emily had picked up the line at her desk. She’d resorted to screaming, not so much in an attempt to make the driver understand her own bad French, but simply because she was trying to impress upon him the urgency of the current situation. New drivers always took a little breaking in, mostly because they foolishly believed that if Miranda had to wait forty-five seconds to a minute extra, she’d be all right. This was precisely the notion of which Emily and I were to disabuse them.

We both put our heads down a few minutes later, after Emily had managed to insult the driver enough that he’d high-tailed it back to where he’d left Miranda three or four minutes earlier. I wasn’t particularly hungry for lunch anymore, a phenomenon that made me nervous. Was Runway rubbing off? Or was it just the adrenaline and nerves mixing together to guarantee no appetite? That was it! The starvation so endemic at Runway was not, in fact, self-induced; it was merely the physiological response of bodies that were so consistently terrified and all-around anxiety-ridden that they were never actually hungry. I vowed to look into this a little more and perhaps explore the possibility that Miranda was smarter than all of this and had deliberately created a persona so offensive on every level that she literally scared people skinny.

‘Ladies, ladies, ladies! Pick those heads up off those desks! Can you imagine Miranda seeing you now? She wouldn’t be very happy!’ James sang from the doorway. He had slicked back his hair using some greasy, waxy stuff called Bed Head (‘Hot name – how can you resist?’) and was wearing some sort of skintight football jersey with the number 69 on both the front and the back. As always, a picture of subtlety and understatement.

Neither of us so much as glanced at him. The clock said it was only four, but it felt like midnight.

‘OK then, let me guess. Mama’s been calling off the hook because she lost an earring somewhere between the Ritz and Alain Ducasse and she wants you to find it, even though it’s in Paris and you’re in New York.’

I snorted. ‘You think that would put us in this condition? That’s our job. We do that every day. Give us something difficult.’

Even Emily laughed. ‘Seriously, James, not good enough. I could find an earring in under ten minutes in any city in the world,’ she said, all of a sudden inspired to join in for reasons I didn’t understand. ‘It’d only be a challenge if she didn’t tell us what city she’d lost it in. But I bet even then we could do it.’

James was backing himself away from the office, a look of feigned horror on his face. ‘All right, then, ladies, you have a great day, you hear? At least she hasn’t fucked you both up for good. I mean, seriously, thank god for that, right? You’re both tooootally sane. Yeah. Um, have a great day …’

‘NOT SO FAST THERE, YOU PANSY!’ shrieked someone very loud and very high-pitched. ‘I WANT YOU TO MARCH YOUR WAY BACK IN THERE AND TELL THE GIRLS WHAT YOU WERE THINKING WHEN YOU PUT THAT SHMATA ON THIS MORNING!’ Nigel grabbed James by the left ear and dragged him into the area between our desks.

‘Oh, come on, Nigel,’ James whined, pretending to be annoyed but obviously delighted that Nigel was touching him. ‘You know you love this top!’

‘LOVE THAT TOP? YOU THINK I LOVE THAT FRATTY, GAY-JOCK LOOK YOU’VE GOT GOING? JAMES, YOU NEED TO RETHINK HERE, OK? OK?’

‘What’s wrong with a tight football jersey? I think it looks hot.’ Emily and I nodded in quiet alliance with James. It may not have been exactly tasteful, but he did look incredibly hip. And besides, it was kind of tough to be taking fashion advice from a man who was, at that precise moment, wearing zebra-print boot-cut jeans and a black V-neck sweater with a keyhole cut out in the back to reveal rippling back muscles. The whole ensemble was topped off with a floppy straw hat and a touch (subtle, I’ll give him that!) of kohl eyeliner.

‘BABY BOY, FASHION IS NOT FOR ADVERTISING YOUR FAVE SEX ACTS ON YOUR SHIRT. UNH-UNH, NO IT’S NOT! YOU WANNA SHOW A LITTLE SKIN? THAT’S HOT! YOU WANNA SHOW SOME OF THOSE TIGHT, YOUNG CURVES OF YOURS? THAT’S HOT. CLOTHING IS NOT FOR TELLING THE WORLD WHAT POSITION YOU PREFER, BOYFRIEND. NOW DO YOU UNDERSTAND?’

‘But, Nigel!’ A look of defeat was carefully constructed to disguise how pleased he was to be the center of Nigel’s attention.

‘DON’T “NIGEL” ME, HONEY. GO TALK TO JEFFY AND TELL HIM I SENT YOU. TELL HIM TO GIVE YOU THE NEW CALVIN TANK WE CALLED IN FOR THE MIAMI SHOOT. IT’S THE ONE THAT GORGEOUS BLACK MODEL – OH MY, HE’S AS TASTY AS A THICK, CHOCOLATE MILKSHAKE – IS ASSIGNED TO WEAR. GO ON NOW, SHOO. BUT BE SURE TO COME BACK HERE AND SHOW ME WHAT YOU LOOK LIKE!’

James scampered off like a recently fed bunny rabbit, and Nigel turned to look at us. ‘HAVE YOU PUT IN HER CLOTHING ORDER YET?’ he asked no one in particular.

‘No, she won’t choose until she has the look-books,’ Emily answered, looking bored. ‘She said she’ll do it when she gets back.’

‘WELL, JUST BE SURE TO LET ME KNOW AHEAD OF TIME SO I CAN CLEAR MY SCHEDULE FOR THAT PARTY!’ He took off in the direction of the Closet, probably to try to catch a glimpse of James changing.

I’d already lived through one round of Miranda wardrobe ordering, and it hadn’t been pretty. When at the shows, she went from runway to runway, sketchbook in hand, preparing herself to come back to the States and tell New York society what they would be wearing – and middle America what they’d like to be wearing – via the only Runway that actually mattered. Little did I know that Miranda was also paying particular attention to the outfits cruising down the runways because it was her first glance at what she herself would be wearing in the upcoming months.

A couple weeks after returning to the office, Miranda had handed Emily a list of designers whose look-books she’d like to see. As the usual suspects rushed to get their books put together for her – their runway photographs often weren’t even developed, never mind airbrushed and bound, before she demanded to see them – everyone at Runway was put on alert that the books would be arriving. Nigel would need to be ready, of course, to help her flip through them all and select her personal outfits. An accessories editor should be on hand to choose bags and shoes, and perhaps an extra fashion editor to ensure that everyone was in agreement – especially if the order included something big, like a fur coat or an evening gown. When the various houses had finally pieced together the different items she’d requested, Miranda’s personal tailor would come to Runway for a few days to fit everything. Jeffy would completely empty out the Closet, and no one would really be able to get any work done at all, since Miranda and her tailor would be holed up in there for hours on end. On the first go-round of fittings, I’d walked by the Closet just in time to hear Nigel shouting, ‘MIRANDA PRIESTLY! TAKE THAT RAG OFF THIS SECOND. THAT DRESS MAKES YOU LOOK LIKE A SLUT! A COMMON WHORE!’ I’d stood outside with my ear pressed to the door – literally risking life and limb if it were to swing open – and waited for her to upbraid him in that special way of hers, but all I heard was a quiet murmur of agreement and the rustling of the fabric as she removed the dress.

Now that I had been there long enough, it seemed as though the honor of ordering Miranda’s clothes would fall to me. Four times a year, like clockwork, she flipped through look-books like they were her own personal catalogs and selected Alexander McQueen suits and Balenciaga pants like they were T-shirts from L. L. Bean. A yellow sticky on this pair of Fendi pencil pants, another placed squarely over the Chanel skirt suit, a third with a big ‘NO’ plastered across the matching silk top. Flip, stick, flip, stick, on and on it went, until she had selected a full season’s wardrobe directly from the runway, clothes that had most likely not yet even been made.

I’d watched as Emily had faxed Miranda’s choices to the different designers, omitting any size or color preference, since anyone worth their Manolos knew what would work for Miranda Priestly. Of course, merely being made to the correct size wasn’t enough – when the clothes did arrive at the magazine, they’d need to be cut and tucked to make them appear custom-made. Only when the entire wardrobe was completely ordered, shipped, snipped, and delivered expressly to her bedroom closet by chauffeured limousine would Miranda relinquish last season’s clothes and heaps of Yves and Celine and Helmut Lang would find their way – in garbage bags – back to the office. Most were only four or six months old, stuff that had been worn once or twice or, most often, not at all. Everything was still so incredibly stylish, so ludicrously hip, that it wasn’t yet available in most stores, but once it was last season, it was about as likely to show up on Miranda as a pair of pleather pants from Target’s new Massimo line.

Occasionally I’d find a tank top or an oversize jacket I could keep, but the fact that everything was in a size zero was a bit of a problem. Mostly we distributed the clothes to anyone with preteen daughters, the only ones who had a shot in hell of actually fitting into the stuff. I pictured little girls with bodies like little boys strutting around in Prada lipstick skirts and slinky Dolce and Gabbana dresses with spaghetti straps. If there was something really dynamite, really expensive, I’d pull it from the garbage bag and stash it under my desk until I could smuggle it home safely. A few quick clicks on eBay or perhaps a little visit to one of the upscale consignment shops on Madison Avenue, and my salary all of a sudden wasn’t so depressing. Not stealing, I rationalized, simply utilizing what was available to me.

Miranda called six more times between the hours of six and nine in the evening – midnight to three A.M. her time – to have us connect her to various people who were already in Paris. I fielded them listlessly, uneventfully, until I went to gather my things and try to sneak out for the night before the phone rang again. It wasn’t until I was climbing exhaustedly into my coat that I caught a glimpse of the note that I’d stuck to my monitor just so this very thing wouldn’t happen: CALL A, 3:30 P.M. TODAY. My head felt like it was swimming, my contacts had long before dried to tiny, hard shards covering my eyes, and at this point my head started to throb. No sharp pains, just that nebulous, dull kind of ache where you can’t pinpoint the center but you know it will build and build in a slow, burning intensity until you either manage to pass out or your head just explodes. In the frenzy of all the calls that had produced such anxiety, such panic, from across an ocean, I had forgotten to take the thirty seconds out of my day and call Alex when he’d asked me to. Simply up and forgotten to do something so simple for someone who never seemed to need anything from me.

I sat down in the now darkened and silent office and picked up the phone that was still a little wet from my sweaty hands during Miranda’s last call a few minutes earlier. His home line rang and rang until the machine picked up, but he answered on the first ring when I tried his cell phone.

‘Hi,’ he said, knowing it was me from the caller ID. ‘How was your day?’

‘Whatever, usual. Alex, I’m so sorry I didn’t call you at three-thirty. I can’t even get into it – it’s just that things were so crazy here, she just kept calling and—’

‘Hey, forget it. Not a big deal. Listen, now’s not really a great time for me. Can I call you tomorrow?’ He sounded distracted, his voice taking on that faraway quality of someone talking from an international payphone on the beach of a tiny village across the world.

‘Um, sure. But is everything OK? Will you just quickly tell me what you wanted to talk about before? I’ve been really worried that everything’s not OK.’

He was quiet for a moment and then said, ‘Yeah, well it doesn’t seem like you were all that worried. I ask you one time to call me at a time that’s convenient for me – not to mention that your boss isn’t even in the country right now – and you can’t manage to do that until six hours after the fact. Not really a sign of someone who’s genuinely concerned, you know?’ He stated all of this with no sarcasm, no disapproval, just a simple summary of the facts.