The Rumour Mill Page 4

  There were zillions of accounts out there that they could go after together and it would get Diane off my back when it came to trying to upstage my events. She would be so busy getting everything set up with Ivan and Svetlana that she would scarcely have time to come up for air.

  But how to get them together? With Marshall’s help I would pen a letter to Ivan and Svetlana, thanking them for their interest in Queen Bee but informing them that Fifi’s birth had made me want to retain my own agency. However I would be happy to recommend Wilderstein PR as the most suitable agency for them because Diane Wilderstein is one of the most respected PRs in the industry and had actually taught me everything I know.

  4

  Checking out of the Prince of Wales Private was the first thing on my mind, but seemed to be the last thing on everyone else’s. Nurse Ratched and all her underlings, the ‘Ratcheds’, seemed determined to keep Fifi and me there as long as possible. We were to be hostages to lousy food, ridiculous visiting hours and a smell of antiseptic that no amount of Agent Provocateur or monster bouquets from Mr Cook and Grandiflora could overpower.

  The one saving grace was that Michael had been busy bringing me my favourite meals from Jackies (breakfast), Bills (lunch) and Azuma restaurant (dinner). I sound spoilt but when you work the hours I do, cooking is the lowest thing on your priority list. Besides, I regard eating out as a legitimate expense because I meet so many contacts that way and I can see what all of them are wearing. You can’t be in fashion PR and not pay attention to what’s being worn in some of the hottest destinations in Sydney. So it wasn’t as if I was going to sacrifice my A-list diet while being stuck in hospital. I had just given birth to a beautiful daughter. I wasn’t supposed to be doing penance.

  Admittedly, I was still very sore and on painkillers but surely it was better to make a move now than to be treated like an invalid here? Besides, I could always call some kind of home nursing service and get all the help I needed, plus there was Anna, our fabulous nanny who had been in the family for years. Fifi would have nurses on site 24/7. Most importantly, our home would be a much more secure base to deflect any sudden visitors speaking with a Russian accent. I was already concerned about waking from a sleep and seeing Ivan and Svetlana standing next to my bed at visiting time.

  ‘You’ll be with us here for another two days at least, until you start to heal from the surgery,’ Nurse Ratched informed me.

  I started to wonder whether she was bribable. Would a famous Queen Bee goodie bag do the trick? Or perhaps I could get her a couple of tickets to Beyoncé’s next concert, or slip her a wad of fifty-dollar bills? If that didn’t work I told myself we would walk anyway, although even I could see that in my current state, making a fast getaway with Fifi would be tricky. Hell, I almost needed Noah, my Israeli personal trainer, to set up camp at my place just to help me out of bed and to the bathroom so I could take what had become some of the most uncomfortable pees of my life. It would certainly be a long time before that ‘end of town’ was back to normal, and the thought of trying to have sex again was something I was prepared to postpone till this time next year. I’m sure Michael and I would have learnt about the after-effects of a caesarean during the birth classes – if only we’d been able to schedule one in.

  I checked my Rolex, which I found in the top drawer of the table next to my bed. It read twelve o’clock but for a moment I didn’t know whether it was midday or midnight.

  Now the light was flashing on my mobile phone again. The number on the screen lit up in front of my eyes but it was meaningless to me in my current state. This having-a-baby thing was definitely worse than jet lag. That’s another thing they don’t tell you about. Or maybe they would have . . .

  ‘Yes,’ I said weakly as I picked it up. ‘Queen Bee.’ What the hell was I thinking answering the phone in this state? I had officially lost it!

  Rochelle Crawford, the fashion editor of Bizarre, must be the only fashionista in town not to have caught up on the fact that my waters had broken just before Allison’s show. Rochelle is so self-obsessed that she is officially beyond gossip, except when it directly involves her or her competition. So it was not at all surprising she would ring now to complain that her assistant was seated two rows back in Trelise Cooper’s show. Oh, the indignity of it all – the queen of the fashionistas must have her entourage around her at all times.

  ‘Jazzy, remember I sent you an email about this last week,’ she shouted down the phone.

  ‘Rochelle, I’m a little, um, indisposed right now, but Lulu is right on it,’ I assured her, trying to sound both conciliatory and efficient. And with that I hung up and sank back on my pillows. If the worst thing that happened at Fashion Week was that Rochelle Crawford was unhappy with the placement of her assistant, then it was a stellar success. Let her swelter in Row C, I thought, glancing at my watch; Trelise’s show was about to start and then it really wouldn’t matter at all because Rochelle would be concerned about the next possible slight from a designer at the other big show of the day. What’s more, something told me that if Rochelle was going to be that petty, she could be on shaky ground. Fashion editors were officially an endangered species at the moment because there were so many innovative bloggers coming along. And Rochelle Crawford should have received the memo others had, including a couple of blogger superstars.

  All morning the flowers had been arriving, because when you’re the PR queen of Sydney and you’ve just had a baby they’re more or less a given. But even I was blown away when two hundred pale pink Brazilian roses were delivered to my room by three giggling nurses.

  ‘Congratulations, you’ve just made Prince of Wales Private history,’ said the cheeriest nurse, whose curly ginger hair made her look a little like a cherub. Huffing and puffing with the weight of my bouquet on steroids, they put it down on the floor in the corner because none of the hospital-issue furniture was strong enough to support that weight.

  But who could they be from? Sure, Queen Bee had a lot of wealthy clients, but none who would wish to throw their money around like that. I thought of all the celebs I’d done favours for lately, including a certain US actor I’d introduced to a lesser-known star here. But surely they hadn’t hit it off that well?

  The podgy nurse passed me the card from the bouquet. Congratulations on the birth of your daughter. We look forward to a long and fruitful future with you both. Ivan and Svetlana. It was from the Russians. I should have guessed.

  Great, clearly they hadn’t got the bloody email from Marshall Coutts telling them the deal was off, plus my personal note recommending the dreaded Diane. But of course they were well aware, they were just refusing to accept it. This was about to get trickier than naming the winner for the Coco Man of the Year Awards when you had so many ‘worthy’ entrants.

  I hit the buzzer next to my bed with all the gusto of a competitor on Sale of the Century. Almost immediately, Charna, my favourite nurse, stuck her head around the door. ‘Everything okay, Mum?’ she asked brightly. (I hated the way all the staff addressed the women as ‘Mum’ once they had delivered their babies. It was patronising.)

  ‘Why don’t you take these flowers and share them with the other mothers?’ I said. ‘You could get several decent bunches out of this.’

  ‘Really, are you sure?’ she said, attempting to pick up the hefty container before I changed my mind. ‘Everyone would love them.’

  ‘Absolutely,’ I replied. ‘I have more than enough.’ Quite frankly, that mega bunch of roses was not only making me nervous but the fragrance was almost suffocating me. It was a symbol of how I had royally screwed up my life. ‘Just bring me back the pot, okay?’ It was a French antique from Parterre in Woollahra. I didn’t have to get up close to recognise it because I’d had my eye on it for ages – not that the Russians would have known that, unless they could read my thoughts.

  The next call I made was to Marshall again, telling him about the flowers and asking him to send another letter to the Russians stating the current positi
on.

  ‘Absolutely Jasmine,’ he responded. ‘I’m afraid that it looks increasingly as though your friends Ivan and Svetlana did make a false declaration on their visa applications and they are currently being investigated for money laundering.’

  OMG! This was getting ridiculous. The sooner I could get the Russians to hook up with Diane Wilderstein the better off I would be – although they were starting to look a bit shady even for her. But in the meantime, I definitely had to get out of this hospital and into the safety and security of my own home. And maybe it would be an excellent time to change all the locks.

  As Nurse Ratched had threatened, it took another two days before we were able to leave the hospital. This despite the fact that Anna was ready and waiting to look after Fifi, plus Charna was also going to be there when she wasn’t rostered on at the hospital, which would give Anna some valuable time out. Charna was happy to help me out for the extra money but asked me to keep the arrangement top secret. The nurses weren’t supposed to freelance but to keep their relationships with all new mothers inside the walls of the hospital. It was regarded as a conflict of interest if they all started running off with every neurotic new mum who needed them. Meanwhile, Queen Bee had been under siege. When word got out that I was out of action, every opportunist in town came to visit our office in Alexandria to try to get as much stuff as possible without me there watching them like a hawk.

  The worst offender was the ageing stylist Jamie Moore. Jamie had unfortunately done one line of coke too many during his time in the fashion industry, and his behaviour was growing increasingly bizarre. He was now more famous as a serial freeloader who seldom returned the clothes than he’d once been as one of the city’s hottest stylists. This was the sad downside of the fashion industry – the stylists who thought they were still relevant despite the fact that the industry had quickly moved on. These days, when you had eighteen-year-old bloggers being flown around the world for fashion shows, it mattered even less what magazine stylists on the fashion periphery decreed was cool. Jamie Moore was as ‘current’ as last year’s obsession with jeggings. Meanwhile many of the fringe titles with limited circulation and resources were seriously out of date before they even hit the stands, and the platoons of fashion journalists who had once been feted had been totally upstaged by young kids with an entirely different and much more accessible agenda. The fashion hierarchy was rapidly being dismantled, and the beauty of the Queen Bee agency is that we were across it all, especially with our newly set-up talent arm to hook up the bloggeratti with some serious commercial deals.

  Lulu called shortly after I arrived home from hospital informing me that Jamie, clad in a Miss Jay beret, a fake Burberry trench and toting a ‘Birkin’ fresh from the streets of downtown Bangkok, seemed ready to mount his version of a smash-and-grab raid on the Queen Bee showroom. (You ask how Lulu knew he was wearing cheap Asian copies of the fashion classics and that his career hadn’t suddenly come good again? This was one of the first lessons my Bees learnt when they came to work for me and made the fatal mistake of bringing in a fake designer item to impress their workmates. We could smell it a mile off: the shade of leather was never quite right, the zippers were wobbly as hell and items of clothing just didn’t sit right.)

  ‘What do you want me to tell him?’ Lulu whispered into the receiver. ‘He says he’s shooting for Hush magazine.’

  Trust Jamie to pick a publication that only comes out a few times a year – by then he presumably hoped we would have forgotten all about his supposed shoot. Should we give him the benefit of the doubt, especially with Hush’s fashion editor currently in London? Lulu couldn’t exactly ring around to check while he was still on the premises: it would be too obvious. Jamie was going to be ultra pissed off if he really was working for Hush. Besides, everyone deserves a second chance. Even a has-been like Jamie Moore.

  ‘Okay, let him at it,’ I instructed Lulu. ‘But watch him closely on the monitor and make sure you run an inventory of everything he’s taken. Call me after he leaves and let me know how it went.’ Well, that would be the Bees’ morning’s entertainment taken care of. With the closed-circuit TV trained on every area of the showroom, it would be easy to see what Jamie was up to when he was given free rein among the racks. That was how we had caught many a klepto in the past.

  The phone rang again less than five minutes later. It seemed Jamie had reverted to his bad old ways. ‘No sooner was he shown to the racks when he stashed a six-pack of Omni sparkling wine in his bag,’ said a breathless Lulu. ‘We were going to let him keep it – after all, it’s hardly Cristal, is it? – but then he went for the Benefit makeup kits and the one-off Oliver Peoples collection that’s supposed to be shot next week. We went in there and caught him red-handed. At first he pretended it was all for the shoot, but we kept questioning him. Finally he dropped everything except the Omni bubbles and we put him in a cab, clutching a twenty-dollar note in his hand.’

  Thank goodness for Lulu, who was one of Queen Bee’s most valuable assets. Leaving her in charge was definitely a gift from above. But with the action heating up faster than a Sydney summer, I knew that I would have to get back to work again really soon.

  5

  As it seemed the Russians wouldn’t take no for an answer, insisting to Marshall of all people that there was an agreement set in place, there was only one way to get the message through to them. We had to make it very public.

  I penned a strongly worded press release:

  Queen Bee No Longer Up For Sale

  One of Sydney’s biggest fashion public relations agencies, Queen Bee, is to stay in local hands following a well-thought-out decision by founder and owner Jasmine Lewis not to sell to Russian interests.

  ‘There has never been a more exciting but challenging time to be working in public relations,’ said Lewis. ‘I could not give it all up.

  ‘Just as the media landscape has changed so rapidly, the role of the brand publicist has become increasingly important to ensure that the client’s message is sent out to all the different forms of media, from established newspapers, magazines, television and radio stations to the most remote fashion blogger.’

  Lewis, who recently gave birth to her first child, commented that she was loath to hand over to others the business she had started from scratch.

  ‘I owe it to my staff of thirty and our high-profile clients to be here for them and take on the challenges side by side.’

  If our Russian friends were under the misapprehension that the deal was still going through, this should make it abundantly clear to them. We sent the press release out to the trade press and to the media pages of most publications, plus the media websites and the advertising and marketing pages of the major newspapers.

  Behind the scenes I also had my insider in the offices of Eve Pascal magazine talk loudly on the phone about how the Shavaliks were looking to buy into another agency now and it looked like they had Wilderstein PR in their sights.

  My insider, codenamed Prada princess, sat right outside the wild-maned editor Lillian Richard’s office – and Lillian was none other than one of Diane Wilderstein’s confidantes. Once she heard that intel, Diane would be on the phone to Ivan faster than you could say ‘blini with the lot’. Barely had I pressed send when my phone rang with another potential disaster, although on a much smaller scale.

  The frantic call came through from Anya, who was running a fashion show for the Meek & Mild label at Catalina restaurant.

  ‘I’m so, so sorry to bother you,’ she spluttered in that agitated way she had when everything was turning to shit. ‘It’s just that DJ M is missing in action from the set-up tonight, and when I called him he sounded quite sozzled. He put the phone down but forgot to hang up properly, and then I think he must have fallen asleep because all I could hear was him snoring.’

  ‘Have you tried to find a stand-in?’ I barked, waking Fifi. I couldn’t help raising my voice: I just couldn’t believe how my life had started to unravel – first there w
as a bunch of Russians less than thrilled with me for reneging on their suss deal to buy me out, and now a no-brainer client event had become a potential PR catastrophe. ‘How about Garnet Gold?’ Real name Deborah Planks: the celebutante and former media darling was always talking up her skills as a DJ. She would probably hold us to ransom on the price but at least she had some sort of ‘cred’.

  ‘We tried to call her already,’ said Anya, ‘but she’s promoting some product over in Fiji. I think it’s an energy drink or something.’

  Of course she is, I thought – trust Garnet Gold to try to get in on the act of flogging Coconut Crunch – a product that Belle Single had tried unsuccessfully to push. Belle’s main problem was that she took on far too many product endorsements, so she was no longer believable. Michael’s-ex would even plug steak knives if she thought there was a bit of coin in it.

  It was funny because, on a TV panel show, Garnet had paid Belle out big time for being so commercial and doing such a cheesy ad as the one for Coconut Crunch. Now here she was running around Fiji posing next to the coconut palms herself. Fabulous!

  The concept for tonight’s event was that DJ M would create just the right kind of chilled space for Meek & Mild’s fashion installation featuring live models, and the guests could wander around and get a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree view of the clothes. Jayson Brunsdon had done it at Fashion Week the year before; everyone had loved it because it was such a welcome relief not to sit through yet another fashion show in the tight schedule.

  ‘Anyway, Thelma has found a spare pair of headphones and she’s going to give it a try,’ said Anya.

  Dear Thelma. At twenty she really looked the part with long hair balayaged to within an inch of its life, thanks to her pal, Amy, who was a junior at La Boutique and was always getting her in for training nights. She was even more hip-looking than Sass & Bide accessories diva, Chip Edwards. Thelma was definitely the most tuned in of the Bees, and if anyone could pull off being a hip DJ it was definitely her.