Free Face Value by Kathleen Baird-Murray Page A

beauty products than Kate was. That didn’t seem to make her any less intelligent; if anything she was overqualified to write “Madonna on Mole-Checking” or “Gray Eyeshadow Is the New Black Kohl.”
    Clarissa . . . well, Clarissa was another story, still floundering in a sea of frigid mistrust and implacable anger.
    As for her own work, she had confronted Alexis head-on with her confusion as to what she was and was not allowed to do regarding the dreaded plastic surgery supplement.
    “You can do whatever you want, go wherever you want, we have the budgets, we have the advertisers,” Alexis had briefed her, while flicking frenziedly through a pile of uncorrected proofs. “But you have to deliver the goods. We have so many imitators, so many rivals on the surgery front, that whatever you produce has to be the best. I want luxury, I want celebrity, I want entertainment!”
    “And facts, Alexis?”
    Alexis looked nonplussed. "That goes without saying! That’s a given! I want original stories—you have thirty pages to fill, remember. But not freaky, mind you, we are not the National Enquirer. Kate, it’s of paramount, and I really mean paramount, importance that you get this right.” She rested her cigarette in an ashtray. You weren’t supposed to smoke in the offices of Nouvelle Maison Editions, indeed you weren’t supposed to smoke anywhere in New York unless you were some low-ranking secretary and had time to take the elevator down fifty-two floors for a crafty puff outside with all the other low-ranking secretaries.
    Kate was dying for a cigarette, dying to be a low-ranking secretary instead of an uptown, top-ranking, health-loving beauty director.
    “By the way, did you know we can’t use that bastard Gustav anymore? He’s switched allegiances, after all I’ve done for him, he’s just signed with Vogue . . . . What’s wrong?” Alexis looked up, her glossy pages of color proofs for the next issue held in midflow like a dealer’s cards frozen in slow motion.
    “Nothing. I just gave up smoking, that’s all.”
    “Oh, c’mon then . . .” She held out her cigarette and let Kate take a slow, satisfying draw. “Don’t tell anyone.”
    Maybe it was the cigarette, maybe it was knowing that Nouvelle Maison Editions had a lot riding on this supplement, maybe it was the fat paycheck that had just arrived, or her new address in the city that never sleeps, but Kate wanted to do her best for Alexis. Along with Cynthia’s package of the last ten years’ worth of plastic surgery supplements, she had also been given a huge pile of publicity cuttings, as well as DVDs of TV interviews featuring plastic surgeons and their patients being interviewed by Diana, the previous beauty editor. Diana was an impossibly glamorous blonde, with what looked like flawless skin, lips enhanced with MAC Spice lip color, and a classic root-lift blow-dry to boot. And as far as the supplement went, she seemed to have done it all already. Just when Kate was starting to agree with Cynthia and Clarissa that there really was no room for air in the tires, every before-and-after “Look at me, I’ve had my tits done” story having been done countless times before in varying permutations, inspiration struck her at what she was quickly coming to understand was the spiritual home of every beauty director: the hairdresser’s.
    “You doing the surgery supplement again this year?” asked Lolly Bergerstein, while chopping haphazardly into Kate’s shoulder-length tresses for the second time in a month. “Guess you’ll be going to L.A. then.”
    Lolly had created the hairstyles of every female Oscar winner in the last five years so convincingly that an urban myth had sprung up propagating the idea that if you didn’t have your hair done by her, you wouldn’t win. She was brash and short, with long, wavy brown hair that belied the masculinity of her strident, booming voice.
    “Chiara! Where’s my fucking tail-comb?” She tugged so hard at