Free The Pink Suit: A Novel by Nicole Kelby Page B

up—”
    â€œYes. Please. Tidy up—”
    â€œAnd then run to The Carlyle—”
    â€œBut you’ll have to tidy up first—”
    â€œThe First Lady is at the hotel, waiting with a reporter. They’re waiting for us—”
    â€œThey’ll be very disappointed it’s not us, so go into the sample room and choose something nice to wear. Something that says, ‘Please don’t be furious—’”
    Kate had no idea what they were going on about. “What are you saying?”
    â€œWe trust you,” Miss Sophie said.
    When it came to the Ladies, trust was the only word that was more ominous than urgent . Miss Nona smiled and patted Kate’s hand gently. “We trust you implicitly, but do find a nice outfit to wear in the sample room. Make sure it’s something smart. And fix your face. You need to charm them.”
    â€œYou want me to be interviewed?”
    â€œNo!” They nearly screamed the word.
    â€œHeavens, no,” Miss Sophie said. “We just want you to say you were sent to do the fittings.”
    â€œWe’ll call later and tell them we misunderstood.”
    Kate did not like the sound of this at all. “Couldn’t you just tell them no?” The Ladies both laughed. Apparently, they could not. They also could not honor the request for a feature story about the Ladies themselves: “A personal look into the lives of the women behind the Woman.”
    The Ladies explained that they had led colorful lives—too colorful for some of their Blue Book society clients. Kate suspected that for once the Ladies were not exaggerating. They were not.
    In 1928, Nona Hazelhurst McAdoo De Mohrenschildt Cowles Taylor Park and her partner, Sophie Meldrim Coy Shonnard, opened Chez Ninon because they were between husbands—and broke. A dress shop was the only solution. Both loved fashion, especially French fashion. Both had lived in Paris. Both were Blue Book. They knew everyone and knew what they wanted—but their collective pasts were dicey, at best.
    Miss Sophie was the first wife of Ted Coy, one of the greatest football players to ever play the game and a literary model for F. Scott Fitzgerald. After a whirlwind romance—they met while skiing—Miss Sophie and Mr. Ted eloped. That act prompted Miss Sophie’s father, Civil War veteran General Peter W. Meldrim, a self-proclaimed Southerner of the old school, to announce that theirs was a family not keen on eloping. Sophie was forced to promise her father she would not make that mistake again—and she did not.
    In 1925, Miss Sophie became engaged to the elderly publisher Frank Munsey. Unfortunately, she was still married to Mr. Ted when she decided to give marriage another try. In a stroke of exceptionally bad luck, days before her divorce was final, the pending groom died, leaving Sophie relatively penniless while the bulk of his fifty-million-dollar fortune went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
    Soon after, Miss Sophie married Munsey’s equally elderly stockbroker, Horatio S. Shonnard. It was a church wedding. “I promised my family,” Miss Sophie told the press. Her father was not amused.
    Miss Nona, on the other hand, was the second daughter of William Gibbs McAdoo, the Ku Klux Klan–endorsed California senator, Teapot Dome scandal participant, and forty-sixth secretary of the treasury, who saw World War I on the horizon and closed the U.S. stock exchange for four months, saving America from financial ruin. He’d had three wives, one of whom was President Wilson’s daughter Eleanor Randolph Wilson.
    Miss Nona married her first husband, a Russian diplomat, in 1917 at St. John’s Church in Lafayette Square, in Washington, D.C. The New York Times reported that the bride’s gown, which she designed herself, was “handsome enough for a presentation at court with a round skirt covered in tulle falling in billows from the