Lauren Weisberger 5-Book Collection: The Devil Wears Prada, Revenge Wears Prada, Everyone Worth Knowing, Chasing Harry Winston, Last Night at Chateau Marmont. Lauren Weisberger
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‘What do you need me to do? Miranda’s going to be able to sense that I’m here in about ten seconds, so I should look like I’m doing something.’
‘Here, I’ll show you the table,’ she said, stepping into the elevator and pressing the button for the second floor. ‘It’s dynamite.’
We stepped off the elevator and cruised past another guard, weaved around a sculpture I couldn’t immediately identify, and made our way to a smaller room towards the back of the floor. A rectangular, twenty-four-seat table stretched down the middle. Robert Isabell was worth it, I could see. He was the New York party planner, the only one who could be trusted to strike just the right note with astonishing attention to detail: fashionable without being trendy, luxe but not ostentatious, unique without being over the top. Miranda insisted that Robert do everything, but the only time I’d ever seen his work before was at Cassidy and Caroline’s birthday party. I knew he could manage to turn Miranda’s colonial-style living room into a chic downtown lounge (complete with soda bar – in martini glasses, of course – ultra-suede, built-in banquettes, and a fully heated, tented balcony dance floor with a Moroccan theme) for ten-year-olds, but this was truly spectacular.
Everything glowed white. Light white, smooth white, bright white, textured white, and rich white. Bundles of milky white peonies looked as if they grew from the table itself, deliciously lush but low enough to allow people to talk over them. Bone white china (with a white checked pattern) rested on a crisp white linen tablecloth, and high-backed white oak chairs were covered in luscious white suede (the danger!), all atop a plush white carpet, specially laid for the evening. White votive candles in simple white porcelain holders gave off a soft white light, highlighting (but somehow not burning) the peonies from underneath and providing subtle, unobtrusive illumination around the table. The only color in the entire room came from the elaborate multihued canvases that hung on the walls surrounding the table. A quick glance at their descriptions told me that B-DAD’s brother would be celebrating his engagement in the presence of oil paintings by Rothko, Steel, Kline, and of course, de Kooning. The white table as a deliberate contrast to the larger-than-life canvases that literally burst with color was exquisite. As I turned my head around to take in the wonderful contrast of the color and the white (‘That Robert really is a genius!’), a vibrant red figure caught my eye. In the corner, standing ramrod straight under Rothko’s Four Darks in Red was Miranda, wearing the beaded red Chanel that had been commissioned, cut, fitted, and precleaned just for tonight. In that moment I knew immediately why she’d insisted on both the gallery and the dress, knew that she’d planned for that painting to highlight that dress – or perhaps it was the other way around? Either way, it was perfection. She looked breathtaking. She herself was an objet d’art, chin jutted upward and muscles perfectly taut, a neoclassical relief in beaded Chanel silk. She wasn’t beautiful – her eyes were a bit too beady and her hair too severe and her face much too hard – but she was stunning in a way I couldn’t make sense of, and no matter how hard I tried to play it cool, to pretend to be admiring the room, I couldn’t take my eyes off her.
As usual, the sound of her voice broke my reverie. ‘Ahn-dre-ah, you do know the names and faces of our guests this evening, do you not? I assume you have properly studied their portraits. I expect you won’t humiliate me tonight by failing to greet someone by name,’ she announced, looking nowhere, with only my name indicating that her words might somehow be directed toward me.
‘Um, yes, I’ve got it covered,’ I answered, suppressing the urge to salute and still acutely aware that I was staring. ‘I’ll take a few minutes now and make sure I’m positive.’ She looked at me as if to say You sure will, you idiot, and I forced myself to look away and walk out of the gallery. Ilana was right behind me.
‘What’s she talking about?’ she whispered, leaning toward me. ‘Portraits? Is she crazy?’
We sat down on an uncomfortable wooden bench in a darkened hallway, both of us overwhelmed with the need to hide. ‘Oh, that. Yeah, normally I would’ve spent the last week trying to find pictures of the guests tonight and memorizing them so I could greet them by name,’ I explained to a horrified Ilana. She stared at me incredulously. ‘But since she just told me I had to come today, I only had a few minutes in the car to look them over.’
‘What?’ I asked. ‘You think this is strange? Whatever. It’s standard stuff for a Miranda party.’
‘Well, I thought there wouldn’t be anyone famous here tonight,’ she said.
‘Yeah, there won’t be anyone we’d recognize right away, just a lot of billionaires with homes below the Mason-Dixon line. Usually when I have to memorize the guests’ faces, they’re easier to find online or in WWD or something. I mean, you can generally locate a picture of Queen Noor or Michael Bloomberg or Yohji Yamamoto if you have to. But just try to find Mr and Mrs Packard from some rich suburb of Charleston or wherever the hell they live and it’s not so easy. Miranda’s other assistant was looking for these people while everyone else was getting me ready, and she eventually found almost everyone in the society pages of their hometown newspapers or on various companies’ websites, but it was really annoying.’
Ilana continued to stare. I think somehow I knew that I was sounding like a robot, but I couldn’t stop. Her shock only made me feel worse.
‘There’s only one couple I haven’t identified yet, so I guess I’ll know them by default,’ I said.
‘Oh, my. I don’t know how you do it. I’m annoyed I have to be here on a Friday night, but I can’t imagine doing your job. How do you take it? How do you stand being spoken to and treated like that?’
It took me a moment to realize that this question caught me off-guard: no one had really ever volunteered anything negative about my job. I’d always thought I was the only one – among the millions of imaginary girls that would ‘die’ for my job – who saw anything remotely disturbing about my situation. It was more horrifying to see the shock in her eyes than it was to witness the hundreds of ridiculous things I saw each and every day at work; the way she looked at me with that pure, unadulterated pity triggered something inside me. I did what I hadn’t done in months of working under subhuman conditions for a nonhuman boss, what I always managed to keep suppressed for a more appropriate time. I started to cry.
Ilana looked more shocked than ever. ‘Oh, sweetie, come here! I’m so sorry! I didn’t mean anything by it. You’re a saint for putting up with that witch, you hear me? Come with me.’ She pulled me by the hand and led me down another darkened hallway toward an office in the back. ‘Here, now sit for a minute and forget all about what these stupid people look like.’
I sniffled and started to feel stupid.
‘And don’t feel strange, you hear? I have a feeling you kept that inside for a long, long time and you have to have a good cry every now and then.’
She was fumbling around in her desk for something while I tried to wipe the mascara from my cheeks. ‘Here,’ she proclaimed proudly. ‘I’m destroying this right after you see it, and if you even think of telling anyone about it, I’ll wreck your life. But just look, it’s amazing.’ She handed me a manila envelope sealed with a ‘Confidential’ sticker and smiled.
I tore off the sticker and pulled a green folder out. Inside was a photo – a color photocopy, actually – of Miranda stretched out on a restaurant banquette. I recognized it immediately as a picture taken by a famous society photographer during a recent birthday party for Donna Karan at Pastis. It had already appeared on the pages of New York magazine and was bound to keep showing up. In it she was wearing her signature brown and white snakeskin trench coat, the one I always thought made her look like a snake.
Well, it seems I wasn’t alone, because in this version, someone had subtly – expertly – attached a scaled-to-size cutout of a rattlesnake’s rattle directly where her legs should have been. The effect was a fabulous rendition of Miranda as Snake: she rested her elbow on the banquette, cradled her chiseled chin in her palm, and stretched out across the leather, with her rattle curled in a semicircle and hanging off the edge of the bench. It was perfect.
‘Isn’t