Free The Secret by Harold Robbins Page B

Discovering that the woman they had the hots for was in fact a man was only the first surprise. Occasionally one of them would turn aggressive, which generated the second surprise: Larkin Albert held a black belt in karate. He had made for himself an interesting life.
    In his studio, he wore one of his many wigs, skin-tight leggings, high heels, and stuffed-bra T-shirts. He smoked cigarettes in a holder, which he brandished effeminately, even with people who knew full well that he was a man.
    But he was a genius designer, as Melissa had promised. I was soon to learn how much a genius.
    I talked to him about a design for a swimsuit.
    “You know, Jerry,” he said. “We’ve gone about as far as we can go with the bikini. Some beaches girls can go with tits bare. But not with pussy bare. I … a lot of women are uncomfortable with the bikini, anyway. On the other hand, the maillot looks like an old maid’s suit, like something a candidate for Miss America would wear. So—I’ve been thinking. I have an idea in mind.”
    What he was thinking of was a one-piece, form-fitting nylon swimsuit cut out all the way to the waist, exposing all of the thighs and a broad expanse of the backside. Being one-piece and covering the navel, it seemed modest. One had to look a second time to see that on each side it bared what no bikini designer had ever yet exposed: everything from knee to waist. The crotch was covered by a narrow strip of fabric, just enough to cover the pubes themselves, while in the rear only the actual cleft was covered, leaving the fleshy butt bare.
    I told him to go ahead, make me a prototype. And make it to fit Melissa.
    A week later I went back to his studio to see Melissa model the first Cheeks original design. Larkin had chosen international orange for the first suit, the color of a traffic cone. He pronounced it stunning. That was a word I didn’t use, but I agreed that it was stunning. I judged it would make a real splash in the market. Giselle agreed.
    Whether or not stunning was the word for it, it was an instant success. I hardly have to say that newspapers and magazines made much of the inevitable play on words—that Cheeks was putting female cheeks on show. At first the cut of the suit was dramatized by the fact that the skin newly exposed was white, showing the boundaries of the bikini the woman had been wearing before.
    Newsweek ran a quarter-page color photo showing the tan, the white, the orange.
    Of course the white skin, too, tanned in a little while, but while the contrast lasted it was to our advantage. It sold suits.
    It didn’t hurt either that a crew of Florida beach cops arrested three spring-weekend beachgoers for appearing on the sand in “indecent” swimsuits.
    The orange Cheeks suit became an international symbol. They began to appear on beaches from Florida to Maine, at country-club pools from New York to Ohio. Because of the distinctive orange, they were identified at a distance.
    The quality didn’t hurt us. As Sal had promised, Charlie had things sewn right. There were no incidents of seams opening. The suits did not fade in saltwater and chlorine water, plus sunlight.
    We couldn’t make the things fast enough. When the word got around that if you wanted a Cheeks suit you had better buy it while you could, that didn’t hurt us either. We got calls from Big Store Corporation, wanting to know if they could stock our suits. In cities where we had a store, we let no one else sell the suit. When we did let other stores handle our swimsuits, they were sporting-goods stores, not Big Store department stores. If you wanted a Cheeks suit, you had to go where they were sold.
    Naturally, that meant a new flow of traffic through our stores. People came in and discovered our line of merchandise. I can’t say that many people who came in for swimsuits left with packages of scanties, but their visits did help our reputation. Some bought other things. Many came back and bought something else