“Pleasure to meet you,” Nigel replied in a real English accent.
Patric kept staring Nigel up and down. “It’s an honor to be working with you! I’ve worked with Mert and Marcus, Ines and Vinoodh, Bruce and Nan, Alexis and Tico, I’ve worked with them all! Now come with me. We’re having a minicrisis at the moment, but I think your presence will help calm things down!”
They entered the house, which was filled with more staffers rushing around frantically at full speed. “As you know, Mrs. Bing has spared no expense on this shoot. Oliver T’sien flew in the top hairstylist from New York, the top makeup artist from London, and the top set designers from Italy for this shoot. Everyone’s a top, and we’re having to compete for space with all these tops. It’s not how I usually like to work,” Patric said with an arched eyebrow. Climbing up the beautiful Arts and Crafts–style wooden staircase, he led Nigel to the door of the library.
“Brace yourself,” Patric warned as he cracked open the door slowly.
Inside, Nigel could see a woman seated in a hairdresser’s chair in front of a bank of lighted mirrors, her face streaked in tears, surrounded by half a dozen stylists.
“Kitty…Kitty…I have a little treat for you…” Patric cooed.
Kitty looked in the mirror and saw them approaching. “Nigel! Nigel Barker! Oh no, this isn’t how I wanted you to meet me for the first time. Look at my hair! Look what they’ve done! It looks terrible, doesn’t it?”
Nigel glanced at the floor quickly and saw that they had lopped off about ninety percent of her hair. Kitty now had a pixie hairstyle that actually looked incredibly chic. “Kitty, it’s a pleasure to meet you, and I think you look wonderful.”
“See? We wanted a radical change, and this is a terrific look for you. It’s very gamine,” Oliver tried to reassure her in a calm voice.
“You look like Emma Watson. Wait till we do the color,” Jo the hairstylist said.
“No, no, I’m not desirable anymore. I look like…a mother! Nigel, what do you think? Would you ever want to make love to me looking like this?” Kitty swiveled her chair around dramatically and gave him a piercing stare.
Nigel hesitated for a moment.
“Now, don’t make things awkward for Nigel! He’s a married man,” said a blond woman with a British accent.
“Hello, Charlotte, I didn’t know you’d be here,” Nigel said, giving the makeup artist a quick hug.
Patric continued to reassure her. “Kitty, by the time Jo Blackwell-Preston is done with your hair color, Charlotte Tilbury is done with your makeup, I’m done pouring you into an amazing gown, and Nigel works his magic, you will look like the very definition of MILF! All the husbands and teenage boys who see you in these photos will want to take the magazine into the bathroom with them, trust me.”
“Kitty, remember what we discussed,” Oliver said. “The entire point of this photo shoot is to reposition your image. You’re not supposed to look like a high-fashion temptress anymore. You’re going to look like a supremely elegant hostess who’s not trying too hard to impress. A cultural force and a rising civic leader. Charlotte, think of those photos by Skrebneski of Jacqueline de Ribes in her Paris apartment. Or C. Z. Guest bending down to pet her poodle. Or Marina Rust on her wedding day. We want young, regal, comme il faut.”
“Ollie, we’re going to comme-il-faut the hell out of her! Kitty, dry your tears. We need to give your face one of my emergency hyaluronic acid boosters right now, before it gets too puffy,” Charlotte commanded.
“And then we’re going to add the subtlest sun-kissed highlights to your hair. You’ll look like you just came back from a summer in the Seychelles!” Jo proclaimed.
Two hours later, Kitty was posed on a Regency settee in front of The Palace of Eighteen Perfections, the magnificent Chinese scroll painting she had purchased two years ago for a record-breaking $195 million. She was dressed in a pale pink Oscar de la Renta off-the-shoulder ball gown, the billowing duchesse satin skirt pooling gloriously around her, and on her head was a delicate Edwardian pearl headband.
Gisele, in an adorable Mischka Aoki cornflower blue dress with feathers and cascading ruffles was positioned lying on the settee, one leg dangling and her head resting on her mother’s lap. Harvard stood on the other side of his mother with his arms around her neck, looking precious in a white sailor suit with navy blue piping from Bonpoint and white socks that went up to his knees. At the foot of the settee lay a gleaming pair of Irish setters.
Nigel had imagined Kitty’s cover shot as a sort of modern-day re-creation of a Watteau portrait, and to achieve this he had brought all the way from New York the enormous Polaroid 20 x 24 camera. There were only six of these unique handmade cameras in the entire world, and so precious were the prints that every frame Nigel shot would cost $500. But the camera was somehow able to achieve an indescribable alchemy, creating images that were remarkably crisp and yet otherworldly. To go along with this concept, Nigel had confected an extraordinary blend of natural light fused with massive studio lights to create the sort of dappled, late-afternoon northern light straight out of an eighteenth-century atelier.
“Gisele, you have the prettiest smile,” Nigel remarked as he stared into his viewfinder. Harvard was distracted by the dogs and kept reaching down to try to pet them. “Harvard, give your mommy a kiss!” Nigel encouraged, and then at the precise moment, just as Gisele was relaxing into her smile, Harvard was planting kisses on his mother’s cheek, and the sunlight was hitting the painting at just the right angle, Nigel asked, “Kitty, what are you thinking?” Her expression suddenly took on a faraway look, and Nigel clicked the shutter, knowing he had just captured the defining shot.
Minutes later, the giant Polaroid was ready, and Toby, the first assistant, carefully placed the print on a special easel at the back of the room for all to see.
“Oh that’s the shot! It looks like a Sir Joshua Reynolds come to life! Isn’t this the most perfect tableau you’ve ever seen?” Oliver said to Patric.
“If only Nigel could join them in the photo. And take his shirt off. Then it would be perfect,” Patric whispered back.