GLAMOUR. G-L-A-M-O-U-R! WHAT MORE COULD I want? The iconic women’s magazine took up the entire sixteenth floor of 4 Times Square. It felt very different from Teen Vogue up there: instead of high-strung fashionistas in Lanvin, Glamour was staffed by very nice editors and assistants with shiny hair, headbands, and wedding bands. The editor in chief, Cindi Leive, wore turtlenecks under her jumpers, and everyone was very kind. No “Nuclear Wintour”—to borrow a phrase from the British press—frost anywhere.
Working there—even as a ten-dollars-an-hour “beauty freelancer,” my new title—was a good look. So while Vogue got the most attention, it was Glamour that Adweek called Condé’s “biggest cash cow.” According to condenast.com, one in eight American women “engage” with Glamour, and the print audience is 12.2 million readers. What does this mean? Money! The higher a mag’s circulation is, the more it can charge their advertisers. That’s why those subscription cards are always falling into your damn lap at the nail salon.
At least that’s how I think it all works (I’m a real know-it-all for a dope fiend with no job). What I do know for sure is that every issue was full of expensive ads for skin care, hair products, and perfumes. They ran alongside the editorial content in the beauty section, which was considered the best in the business. Felicia Milewicz ran that shit. She was born in Austria and raised in Poland, and had started her career as a lowly fashion assistant in the early seventies. Now she was considered the most powerful beauty director in publishing. When I arrived in 2005, she’d been killing it at Condé for over thirty-five years.
She was an industry legend! And I knew this because everyone kept telling me so.
“She’s the Coco Chanel of beauty editors,” Mary, her second in command, liked to tell me.
What did this actually mean? No idea. But Felicia sure looked the part. She rocked black tuxedo jackets with white Chanel camellias in the lapels, immaculate blouses buttoned up to the collars, eyeglasses, and red lipstick, always (“Mrs. Lauder” had personally advised her to start wearing it years ago, and she had ever since). Her signature red hair was maintained by the colorist Gad Cohen, and she wore it bobbed above her shoulders. She wore Guerlain Vol de Nuit parfum, and she had a wonderful, heavy accent.
She was an icon. And I could not pronounce her last name.
ME-LAY-VICH, I wrote on fifty thousand Post-it notes. It didn’t help: I always panicked when I was put on the spot. This was unfortunate because I often had to sit in Felicia’s assistant’s chair—right outside the boss’s office—and answer the phone.
“Felicia”—pause—“Me-a-leeel-a-weave-itz’s office,” I’d mumble. It was a thousand times more painful than Nylon! And forget relaying messages from the fashion director Xanthipi Joannides. She’s probably still waiting for Felicia to call her back.
Felicia was the last of the old-school beauty directors. I never saw her put a pen to a proof—those are oversize pages that circulate between editors—though surely she did. She oversaw the concepts, darling. The vision.
“Peenks,” Felicia would declare grandly, waving her manicured hand in the air. “Eet’s all about beautiful peenks this month.” She’d be holding court at her desk in a department meeting, while everyone else—all five of us—squished on to her love seat. It was my responsibility to open the dozens of bags that arrived for Felicia every day and place the products—neatly—on that very midget sofa. She’d keep what interested her (not much—maybe a By Terry Baume de Rose here and there) and dump the rest into plastic bins outside of her office. I would haul that stuff into the beauty closet and file it away.
My other big Felicia-related job was getting her a piece of seven-grain toast with peanut butter and a small coffee with a “leetle beet of meelk” from the cafeteria every morning. With so much beauty director breakfast-fetching experience under my belt, you’d think I’d be awesome at this, but no.
“Cat,” Felicia would call out thirty seconds after I left the toast and coffee on her desk.
I’d double back.
“Yes, Felicia?” Pleasant as a picnic basket. I knew what was coming.
“Eet’s not hot enough,” she’d say, apologetically.
“I’ll get you another!” Sometimes I got her a third.
The coffee thing drove me fucking bananas for months. How could I make it hotter? I didn’t want to put the Felicia Milewicz’s cup in the Glamour kitchenette microwave; it was gross. I decided it would be okay to zap just the “leetle beet” of milk to a boil in there, then pour it in separately. It worked! Felicia was happy with her coffee. I was elated. I’ve said it before: interning is strange heaven.
Felicia did the hiring, and it was obvious she had a type: good girls. Glamour’s two full-time writers, Stephanie and Tram, were pretty, supersmart, and mature. Even though they were only in their late twenties, they were both married. They spoke in quiet voices. They drank tea and pulled pashminas from their desks when they got cold. Felicia’s assistant, Alix, was only twenty-six, and she was engaged. They’d all gone to really good colleges: Penn, Georgetown. (Incidentally, I was by this time a senior at Sleeping Pill College of Tanning Bed University—no, at Eugene Lang—and on track to receive a degree in nonfiction writing the following year.)
Slaggy prescription crackheads like moi were surely a Glamour “DON’T.” I never, ever revealed my “wild side” at the office. Instead, I did my best to fit in: I started wearing red lipstick like Felicia’s; I attempted tidy ballerina buns. I dressed in tangerine, polka-dot Marc by Marc knee-length skirts and Diane von Furstenberg cardigans. I even used to put Scotch tape in Xs over my nipples in the morning so they wouldn’t show if they got hard. (Try it! Especially for job interviews.) Still, I felt like a back-door teen mom in church around the women of Glamour. I mean, no one even swore!
Or maybe Mary did. The executive senior beauty editor was Felicia’s right-hand woman; they’d been a dynamic duo since Mademoiselle. It was she who executed Felicia’s fashionably vague ideas and made sure they turned into stories with gorgeous photographs and placement for all the latest advertiser-brand launches. Mary was different from anyone I’d worked with at Condé. She didn’t wear makeup and she didn’t color her hair. She wore sneakers for her rush-hour Metro-North commutes back and forth from upstate New York, where she lived with her husband and two young kids. Mary was go-go-go all of the time. She went to like thirty beauty events a day! Truly a force of nature. The only time I ever saw her relax was when I spotted her puffing a ciggie out on West Forty-Third Street by the town car lineup. I’d never seen a beauty editor smoke before. It was nice to know someone at Glamour had a vice.
Mary could be intense—it was all about the deadline, the deadline, the deadline—but her anxiety kept the trains running on time. Besides, by then I could handle anything. Mary would burst into the closet with a no-name foam roller she wanted to shoot for Hair Guide and I’d track down the manufacturer in Florida and get someone on the phone to confirm credit information in fifteen minutes flat. Or if an eyeliner I’d called in that morning for a how-to story hadn’t arrived and Mary was bugging, I’d go down to the messenger center and personally rummage through the bags instead of waiting for them to come up. And if it still wasn’t there, I’d run back up to Glamour, grab another product from the closet, bolt to Sephora in Times Square, and exchange it for the product we needed. Then I’d hurtle back up to sixteen and careen into Mary’s office.
“Here we go!” I’d say.
“Thank God!” Mary would exclaim. “Digital studio!” And I’d fly back out to the elevators. Only when I’d returned—with confirmation that the eyeliner would absolutely be photographed that evening, so the art department would positively have the image for the layout tomorrow morning—could Mary relax. She’d pop her head into the closet, where I’d be fanning myself with a press release, waiting for my heart rate to go down.
“Always remember,” she’d say. “This is just beauty. We’re not doing open-heart surgery!”
“Right,” I’d answer. Then we’d both laugh sort of nervously.
I had more Adderall than ever, so I took more than ever. My addiction was progressing, as addictions do. Stimulants made monotonous jobs bearable—and Mary always had a monotonous project for me. Have you heard of “the Glammies”—the magazine’s beauty awards? Over eighty thousand readers snail-mailed their handwritten paper ballots in 2005. Crates full of them piled up in the conference room. And guess who sat in there with a spiral notebook tallying the results—ballot by ballot—two years in a row?
Best Drugstore Mascara: Maybelline Great Lash. Check. Best Department Store Mascara: Lancôme Defincils. Check. Best Department Store Fragrance: Britney Spears Curious. Check. Adderall. Check!
Mary dug my “amphetamine work ethic,” if you will. She started asking me to come in additional days. Mary’s “special projects” were the worst—she knew they were the worst; everybody did—but I never said no. In fact, I cut college classes to come in and do them. I just wanted to be in the building as much as possible. To me, Condé was the happiest place on earth! Plus, Glamour paid ten dollars an hour. And I had doctors to see. When the beauty closet was renovated, I packed every cuticle cream and lip liner into dozens of crates, dragged them out, and then moved everything back in, and unpacked and reorganized it all a week later. Mary’s “new” closet looked exactly the same, just three feet wider. I also did beauty sales—huge ones. I donned a pink, long-sleeved Glamour logo T-shirt to take coats at a Fashion Week event at the Royalton Hotel. I never said no.
Sometimes I got a little bonus. It was on a “special project” of this kind that I first scored opiates—the doctor-shopping Holy Grail. Glamour sent me undercover on “consultations” with plastic surgeons and had me essentially try to bait them into telling me what was “wrong” with my looks and what I needed to have done. Or something like that. It wasn’t the greatest conceit for a story; I wasn’t writing it or anything. I was just the guinea pig.
“So, why are you here?” Dr. X would ask.
“Well,” I said. “I want something . . . improved . . . but I don’t know what.”
It was harder to get a bite than you’d think. These were Park Avenue doctors—they didn’t need my money! I booked a nose job (which I later canceled, swear to God) with one doctor and took home a folder of papers. A script for generic Vicodin was paper-clipped to the inside.
“You’re going to want to fill that so you’ll have them ready at home after the operation,” the office manager said. I strolled out and went straight to Rite Aid.
A week later, at another appointment for the same Glamour story, I booked the same procedure.
“Oh,” I told the doctor. “I’ve had a bad reaction to Vicodin in the past, so if it’s all the same to you . . .” And his office manager sent me home with a prescription for Percocet. I filled that one at Duane Reade. For weeks, I was always a little bit extra-high on the job, though of course, no one knew. I kept the orange bottles in the zipper pocket of my mom’s Chloé Silverado bag—hidden away. A secret.
When I wasn’t doctor shopping, I was grocery shopping—at four thirty in the morning! I’d return from a night at the Coral Room or Home or wherever, change out of my party outfit into something terry cloth, and hit the twenty-four-hour Food Emporium on Second Avenue. I’d be the only customer in the store, and the night employees would give me the eye as I walked up and down the aisles. The supermarket would be eerily silent—well, except for the smooth jazz playing over the sound system. But smooth jazz really creeps me out! And the lighting was always sort of green. I’d load a whole cart: Scooby-Doo fruit snacks, Nestlé chocolate milk, Pepperidge Farm Sugar cookies, Jif Creamy Peanut Butter, Smuckers Sugar Free Apricot Preserves, whole wheat bread. Throw in a carton of skim milk—that would make the PB&J come up easier. And if I was buying milk, I thought, I might as well buy a box of Cap’n Crunch or Lucky Charms. Or Cookie Crisp. Or all three.
BLLLLARRGGH. Shlosh. Those are the sounds of me vomiting. (Onomatopoeia! You can send my Pulitzer to my agent.)
I went through crazy phases. Like carrot cake. God, the carrot cake. Never has anyone eaten more fucking carrot cake than I did when I was twenty-three! The best was from a twenty-four-hour spot called Hot and Crusty on Lexington Avenue by the subway station. I was there so often that I eventually got embarrassed and started scoring it from other places (Starbucks, the supermarket bakery—anywhere I could find carrot cake). In rehab I’d learned that alcoholics switched up liquor stores to throw people off the trail of their addiction, so I gave it a shot. Which was a joke. Bulimics are very conspicuous! I mean, people are always telling me my face looks swollen on Instagram.
I binged during the day, too. Sometimes it was the first thing I did when I got up. Once I’d been to Food Emporium, Hot and Crusty, the Rite Aid junk food aisle, and the corner deli—my circuit—I’d hustle the two blocks home with my bags full and my heart pounding. Just so excited to binge. I couldn’t wait. And God forbid the streets be busy! Whenever people got in my way, or if the light at the crosswalk turned red and I was stuck at the curb for a minute—I’d feel just murderous. Same with when I was on a crowded elevator in my building with my grocery bags. Ping. Every time it stopped at a floor before sixteen I’d feel exponentially more homicidal.
Then, finally—I’d be home. I usually ate with the blinds closed—my Upper East Side Central Park view shut out—and the lights low, if they were on at all. The TV would be on but I wouldn’t see it or hear it, and sometimes my shirt would be off, so I wouldn’t get food all over it. I would go in on a hoagie like I was the monster ripping the head off that little man in the Goya “Black Paintings”—the murals he did on the walls of his house before he died.
Then I’d go into my bathroom—the vomitorium, if you will—kneel at the toilet, strip my tank top off if I still had it on, pull my long, blond hair back into a ponytail, and glug tap water from an old Poland Springs bottle I kept in there. Water helped. Then I’d throw it all up.
Some days, I’d resolve to stop and would dump all the food in the house down the trash chute in the hall. But the next day, I’d wake up feeling depressed and go buy it all again. I was allowed to use my parents’ credit card for groceries, which enabled me for sure. Bulimia is expensive—a real rich-bitch disease, quite frankly. All that waste! It’s so wrong; I knew it was. But that never stopped me. Bingeing straight-up anesthetized me, and I was hooked. I mean, you could’ve shanked me so long as I had a box of Entenmann’s chocolate frosted donuts in my lap. That’s how numb I got.
I’d been at Glamour for over a year when I got to go on my first press trip for the magazine. It was with Ralph Lauren fragrances, which was owned by the L’Oréal Group (who also owned Lancôme, Shu Uemura, Kiehl’s, and more). They were flying beauty editors via private jet to Memphis for a day to tour Sun Studios, the “birthplace of rock ’n’ roll”—where Johnny Cash recorded back in the day—and Elvis’s home, Graceland. And this was to celebrate the launch of a perfume called Ralph Rocks. Get it? No one on staff at Glamour could go—but Ralph was such a big advertiser, someone had to. That’s when Felicia and Mary called on me.
“Are you sure you can handle it?” Mary called me into her office to give me the spiel.
“I’m sure!” I said. I was so down. I’d never been on a private plane before. And this one would be full of the crème de la crème of beauty editors—the people I wanted to know and impress most in the world!
On the big day, a town car picked me up at my building on East Eighty-Sixth Street. I felt so special climbing into the backseat! It took me to Teterboro Airport in New Jersey—and dropped me off on the tarmac. Wow!
I felt very shy as I boarded. A few editors were seated already.
“Hi,” I said to a publicist. “I’m Cat . . . from Glamour.” I found a cushy, creamy leather seat to sort of . . . hide in. I watched cars arrive one by one on the tarmac.
Last to board was Eva Chen, the new beauty director at Teen Vogue (Kara had left to write a book). Everyone said young Eva was being groomed by Anna Wintour herself to be a Condé editor in chief someday.
“I’m so sorry I’m late!” she exclaimed.
“No problem!” the publicists cooed.
I gawked from my little corner of the plane. Eva was wearing a tiny navy minidress over black opaque tights—she had long Edie Sedgwick legs—and a perfect little fur jacket. I wondered who made it. Probably J. Mendel.
We took off for Memphis. The day went well! I was shy at first, but it was fun seeing Elvis’s mansion, and I joked and chatted with the group as we took our tour and had lunch. I even talked to the vice president of Lancôme the whole flight back. The Ralph Lauren publicist thanked me warmly as she put me in a car home from Teterboro late that night. Playing editor for a day was like being Cinderella: the clock struck midnight, and it was over.
Someday, I thought as the car approached the Upper East Side, I’m gonna be a beauty editor for real. I couldn’t wait to be like Eva Chen. It was all going to happen for me; my dreams were going to come true. I mean, I’d been working so hard! I was sure of it.
When I graduated college that spring, I was officially on the job hunt. I liked Glamour and was freelancing there four days a week, but they weren’t about to put me on staff or promote me. It was time to move on.
Easier said than done! I wanted a staff beauty assistant job—a good one. But they didn’t open up often. My top ten choices were (in no particular order) Teen Vogue, W, Elle, Harper’s Bazaar, Lucky, Glamour, Jane, InStyle, Cosmopolitan, and Allure. Vogue was never on my list because I wasn’t delusional. You had to be really together to work there! And I hated getting blowouts.
I interviewed and interviewed. And then I interviewed some more. I did informational interviews with Human Resources at Hearst Corporation, Condé Nast, and Hachette Filipacchi. I interviewed for nonbeauty gigs, like assisting Anne Slowey at Elle and Marvin and Jaclynn at Nylon. I interviewed for beauty assistant jobs at titles I didn’t even like, like Shop, Etc. It was Hearst’s low-rent knockoff of Lucky, the game-changing “magazine about shopping” that Condé Nast had launched to great fanfare in December 2000. Shop, Etc. offered me the position, but I turned it down. The magazine folded a few months later anyway.
My worst experience was at one of my top-ten titles. After our first interview, the beauty director asked me to write up a list of pitches for feature stories. I slaved over this fucking list! It was good, too: long, detailed, and creative. When I was done, I dropped everything off with reception at the magazine, along with a thank-you note. I was excited. I knew my test was strong.
I waited and waited, but I never heard from the beauty director again. No call, no e-mail—nothing! My follow-up messages went unreturned. Radio silence. I was crushed.
Less than a year later, I opened the magazine and saw a story I’d pitched. It was uncanny: the idea had been unique, and the specifics I’d laid out were all in there. The only thing missing was my byline. It was rotten business—all of it. I’d name the beauty director here, but the past is the past, dah-lings.
Then my dream job opened! Teen Vogue was hiring a new beauty assistant. The lucky girl would be working directly for the impossibly glamorous Eva Chen. Condé HR called to tell me I was on the short list and to schedule my interview. Whoa.
I took my “emergencies only” Discover card to Bloomingdale’s and bought two outfits: a $780 pleated Marni skirt (I wiggled the tags off the plastic chad, then fussed them back on again to return it) and a black, structured dress from DKNY with a chic silhouette and pockets. I got a neutral manicure. I got a blowout. I woke up the morning of the interview and did nude makeup. I arrived early. This job was mine.
“I have the same skirt,” she told me. “I love Marni. Don’t you?”
“Totally,” I said. It was a sign!
The interview was great. Four days later, I was in the editor in chief’s office for round two. Now it was down to me and another girl.
“Who are your favorite designers?” Amy Astley asked, just like Holly told me she would.
“Rodarte, Dries, Miu Miu, Rick Owens, Marc Jacobs . . .” I didn’t miss a beat.
I called my mom the second I left the Condé Nast building.
“This is it,” I said. “This is it! I can feel it!”
“Oh, Caitlin!” She was as excited as I was. “Don’t jinx it!”
On Monday, I got the call. This was it! The first day of the rest of my—
“I’m so sorry . . .” the HR woman, Kirsten, began. I fell to my knees on the floor of my studio. They’d chosen the other girl. I didn’t mean to cry on the phone with the HR operative, but I couldn’t help it. She told me that I was at the top of her list for other beauty assistant openings. Still, I was shattered.
Later that month, I got a handwritten letter in the mail from Eva. It was long, covering both sides of her Teen Vogue stationery. She thanked me for interviewing and told me she just knew I’d find an amazing job soon—and that I was so passionate and smart that I clearly had a big future in the industry. I read that note about twenty times a day for a year! I have never forgotten her generosity. That Eva Chen is a class act.
Months passed. I was getting desperate. I’d been at Glamour for over a year and a half. But at least I was in the building every day. If I left Condé Nast, I feared, I might never get back in. So I stayed at Glamour, on autopilot, waiting for another “dream job” to open.
Every magazine I’ve ever worked for has had a “giveaway table”: a designated space in the office where editors deposited things like bedazzled Betsey Johnson thongs from Fashion Week gift bags (I still have one and let me assure you—wearing it is always a mistake) and nail polishes that are too fug to bother filing in the beauty closet. One day I was walking past Glamour’s giveaway table and spotted a galley—that’s an advance copy—of a book called Free Gift with Purchase: My Improbable Career in Magazines and Makeup. It was by the beauty director of Lucky: Jean Godfrey-June.
I started reading it on the train home that night, and whoa! Jean Godfrey-June was so weird! And self-deprecating, and funny. Her writing was so glamorous. Like, the way she used words was glamorous. And I ate up her anecdotes about wearing a bonnet during an unhappy phase of her Northern California childhood, her strange encounters with JFK Jr. at Hachette Filipacchi, the terrifying French editors at Elle, the time Tom Ford gave her bedroom eyes at the Bryant Park Hotel, and supermodels who couldn’t answer easy questions about their own skin-care lines. By the time I finished the book, I was obsessed—obsessed—with Jean Godfrey-June.
“How was the Sephora lunch?” I’d ask Mary as she bustled in with a bag. “Was Jean Godfrey-June there?”
“Uh-huh . . .”
“Did she say anything funny?”
“I didn’t sit with her,” Mary would say. Then: “She’s just a person, Cat!”
“I know,” I’d answer dreamily.
I read Free Gift with Purchase over and over. I highlighted it, I dog-eared it. I kept it in my handbag at all times. I e-mailed Jean herself—we both had Condé Nast e-mail addresses, after all—telling her how much I loved it. She wrote back thanking me right away! I almost fell out of my chair.
I’d still never seen her in person, though. I was dying to!
JEAN, I would think, looking around in the elevator every morning. Would this be the morning I finally spotted her in the verbena-scented flesh? GODFREY. JUNE!
Do you believe in the Secret? I do. I had never thought more positively about anyone in my life than I did about Jean Godfrey-June and her book and her column in Lucky, and then, in August—a month before my twenty-fourth birthday—Condé Human Resources called. The beauty assistant job at Lucky was open. Did I want to apply? Was autoerotic asphyxiation sexy? Of course!
One week later, I was being escorted to Jean’s office on the sixth floor of the Condé Nast building to interview with the woman herself.
“Hello,” Jean greeted me. She looked just like I’d imagined, with long, wavy brown hair (Sally “founder of the thousand-dollar haircut” Hershberger had made Jean throw away her blow-dryer, she’d explained in Free Gift). She had a sun-kissed glow that I knew came from frequent applications of Lancôme Flash Bronzer for legs. Her desk was obscene with incredible beauty products, as well as art books, four floral arrangements, about nineteen lip balms, a Chanel boomerang, and—curiously—a rolling pin–size syringe full of chocolate pudding.
“Hi,” I said. Breathe.
The interview went well. Jean remembered my e-mail about Free Gift with Purchase, and she seemed impressed with my résumé. Both Felicia and Charlotte (who had once been her assistant) had sent recommendations. Then she sent me away with a mock-up page of Lucky. The photos of the products were in the layout, but there was “dummy text” (TKTKKTKTKTX OXLXOIJDSXOTJTOEDSMA OAFXTTL, $tktk, sephora.com) for heds (headlines), deks (subheadlines), and captions. I’d be filling in the blanks for my edit test.
It wouldn’t be too hard. The secret to nailing an edit test is familiarity with the publication for which you’re “auditioning.” I brought that page right home, took an Adderall, and went to town. JGJ was Lucky beauty, and I’d read her book so many times that her irreverent tone wasn’t hard to mimic. I also knew Jean’s rules; they were right there in Free Gift with Purchase. For example, she hated “locks” and “tresses”—goofy synonyms for “hair” that other magazines, obsessed with not repeating a word on any given page, used interchangeably. In Jean-world, you were allowed to use the word “hair” twice on one page. So I did.
Jean was also a playful writer, so I wanted to show her that I, too, could play. For a hair-mask item, I wrote something like, “This appealingly hefty brown tub looks like it’s just been fetched from a palm tree by a mischievous monkey—and the goopy, ultra-emollient deep conditioner inside smells fantastic and coconut-y, too.” The sentence structure and adding a “-y” to “coconut” was lifted directly from other Lucky stories: I had a stack of back issues in front of me. You’ve got to really pay attention! I took the “mischievous monkey” thing in and out forty times before deciding to keep it.
Then I sent in my test. A week went by, and I didn’t hear a thing.
I was walking home from the subway with headphones on, listening to—swear to God—“Lucky” by Britney Spears when the familiar number lit up my phone. It was the same Condé HR rep who’d called with bad news from Teen Vogue. But this time, she sounded happy! It was official: I was the new beauty assistant at Lucky magazine.