Death Wore High Heels

By Lawrence Wagger

Death Wore High Heels exposes the symbiosis of the needs of the of today's fashion marketers with the arrogance of today's fashion designers.

Shoe manufacturer Barry Howard has a fascinating conversation with the very famous Oscar de la Renta where they form an extremely unlikely business partnership, and makes Barry feel dizzy at his first experience with Oscar's haute couture.

The book's centerpiece is the party that Barry has at the famous New York City's Plaza Hotel's Presidential Suite. Here, Barry has presented a
new line of shoes together with Oscar's new dress line that requires Barry's shoes to have extremely high heels.

The party's unique oleo of designers from Italy, Spain and Singapore and famous marketers of the great stores of the United States and Europe all of whom become involved one way or another in the murder of Ellen Hahoney, the world's most recognized merchandise manager,

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Oct 3, 2012
• ISBN: 9781479709823

Lawrence Wagger

After having attended 4 different colleges,one of which was Christ College at Oxford University without having a degree, I finally realized, at the age of 23 there would be no M.D. attached to the name of Larry Wagger. Compounding my age of discontent after getting out of a military hospital Fort Dix from the war to end wars, I headed to Hollywood. I stopped by Savannah, Ga to pay my respects to a family that gave comfort to me while I helped form the Eighth Air Force.but I was short-stopped by this four foot eleven inch angel with a halo that included a job at a shoe store where I must have been infected with a shoe disease caused by being punctured in the ass by a high heel. Whatever! It took! From traveling four years on the road as a shoe salesman, rising to sales manager of the company, buying a small shoe factory in Spain to making fifteen hundred pairs of shoes a day to traveling nearly four million miles all over the world making and selling shoes, and here I am. I hope you like the book..

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Copyright © 2012 by Lawrence Wagger.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted

in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system,

without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the

product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance

to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

1. Gran Sol, Inc. was an operating company headquartered in Alicante, Spain

2. Gran Sol had a contract and did manufacture shoes under license with designers Oscar de la Renta and Sasson.

3. Gran Sol did introduce the lines for Oscar de la Renta at the Penthouse House Suite at the Plaza Hotel in New York City.

4. Gran Sol introduced the Sasson line at the famous Studio 54 in New York City.

To order additional copies of this book, contact:

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Contents

Prologue

The Plaza Hotel

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Epilogue

I DEDICATE THIS BOOK

TO THE LOVELY FRANCES

WHOSE LOVE AND DEVOTION

HAS SUSTAINED ME FOR SIXTY YEARS

I also dedicate this to Stuart Tromberg,

my adopted son, who helped get this book published.

I would like to acknowledge my number one fan, Dr. Leon Aronson. Leon read this manuscript, the first thing I ever wrote when I was 85. It was discarded and slept peacefully in a musty file. I had to quit playing golf and was bored with nothing to do. He urged (made) me to re-write it. It has come to the surface as DEATH WORE HIGH HEELS. The first half of the book is close to my autobiography. I hope Leon is right and you enjoy the book.

Forever to my drinking friend Thomas Coffey, retired editor of the Savannah Morning News, for his always insightful, thoughtful and helping support. You’ve always been there, Tom.

Prologue

You can tell how a party is going by the thrum surrounding the room… a happy greeting, a smiling response to an unexpected hug, a quiet group laugh to a sexy joke, a hushed political harangue, a general warmth engulfing a bunch well lubricated by good wine and expensive liquor.

You could also feel the effect of a stun gun exploding. The hush, the sudden silence was palpable.

The door to the entrance swung open with enough force to make it hit the back wall. She stood there, preening like the Cheshire cat. Smiling, royally, she must have been thinking. She knew she was making some Princess Grace Lookalike feel tawdry. But I knew hauteur when I saw it

I looked at her with mixed feelings. As Rick said when Ilsa walked into his bar in Morocco, "Of all the gin mills in all the joints in all the world, she had to walk into mine."

I would like to have the money back from all the nights I took Ellen Mahoney, general merchandise manager of one of the most prestigious department store chains in the U.S. to dinner (at only the very best restaurants for Ellen, my dear). If I had that money back, I would use it to fix her hollow leg. She drank like a fish, and only single malt scotch at nine bucks a pop at the Lungarno Bar.

I also ran into her twice at the designer fair in Montecotini (Italy’s most famous spa).

The ladies’ fashion shoe business over the years has been belabored by the handicap of too many vagaries in styling . . . definitely caused by the changing styles of the ladies’ dress business . . . the two as symbiotic as identical twins. This has spawned hundreds, nay, thousands of shoe designers. Anyone with a thought, a wild idea and can sketch . . . ergo . . . a designer.

There was only one decent restaurant in that little town, and I had to make reservations six months in advance for me and my crew. Barry, would you mind if I had the waiter slip in an extra chair? She would insert herself. She has no shame.

Ellen would try to make a big deal around the show, cozying up to the fledgling designers. She loved making them feel important being catered to by a big time potential buyer. Then, when the time came for one of them to try and sell her back at her offices, she would hardly know them. Everyone in the business knew Miss Hard Ass… some, in the biblical sense.

She endeared herself to no one I knew.

It’s been too long, Barry. You’ve come a long way from the Gran Sol stuff, she said as she tenderly squeezed my hand.

I haven’t come too far, my dear. Gran Sol is paying for all this, no thanks to you. I’m nailing your sweet ass to the wall this time, Ellen.

That’s not the way you nailed my sweet ass before, darling.

Don’t darling me now. I’m serious, Ellen.

So am I. What’s the problem?

Damn it, Ellen, I’m talking about Oscar’s shoes. You’re buying them.

"You know I don’t buy any shoes, Barry. I don’t buy anything."

"No, you don’t buy anything, but those puppets you call buyers don’t buy anything unless Mama says buy.

Barry, Darling, she cooed, You know that’s not true.

Listen! No more fucking excuses about reluctant store managers. No more I can’t use my position to influence the buyers" bullshit. No one in your whole chain has anything to compete with this line of Oscar’s.

"It’s payback time, pussycat. I didn’t insist before because I didn’t want to take advantage of any of the times we had together, in which I took as much pleasure as I’m sure you did. But not this time. I need you. I need what you and your stores can do for me. I need you to do this because of all the stores in the whole U.S. none can get these shoes accepted quicker.

"You owe me. I might, one of these days, think of going upstairs to talk to Chester. On second thought, it wouldn’t do any good because you are probably screwing him too. But don’t push me. We are going to have a private showing here after dinner, and I want a fucking commitment from you, in spades—tonight! O.K? Darling?"

As she strode into the room, I noticed something unusual about her. This always-all-business-Prada-pants-suited paragon of the fashion world had on a dress!

A real god dammed dress! And instead of those clunky shoes, she wore high heels!

Maybe I shouldn’t have been so hard, so harsh, because by the end of the evening she would be dead.

The Plaza Hotel

The crown jewel of Manhattan’s fabled Fifth Avenue, The Plaza reigns over New York with a grace and glamour that has drawn visitors from around the globe throughout the century. From glorious meeting rooms and palatial ballrooms to the brilliance of the legendary restaurants, the Plaza dwells in a class by itself. Whether for business or pleasure, a stay at the Plaza entails the ultimate in gracious luxury, attentive personal service and the pleasures of an incomparable location at the foot of Central Park.

Built in 1909 at an unprecedented sum of 12 million dollars, it took two years to construct the 19 stories, a skyscraper in those days. Henry Janeway Hardenbergh, the same architect who designed the famous Dakota Apartments overlooking Central Park in New York, and the Willard Hotel in Washington, D.C., wanted to have the pomp, glory and opulence of a French chateau. No cost was spared—the largest single order for gold-encrusted china was placed with L. Straus and Sons, and the order for 1650 crystal chandeliers were purchased.

The Plaza is so well known that Ernest Hemingway once advised F. Scott Fitzgerald to give his liver to Princeton and his heart to the Plaza. The Plaza has provided the location for many movies such as Plaza Suite, The Way We Were, The Great Gatsby, Barefoot in the Park, Crocodile Dundee 1 and 11.

The worn marble floors in front of the bank of elevators on the fifty-ninth street side of the lobby testify to the millions of foot-steps of people from all walks of life that can come up with the bucks to be able to live here for a couple of days. Many, many times those were the foot-steps of kings, queens, champions of sports, czars of movies, captains of industry, and this week hundreds of shoe salesmen.

The publicist for the Fairmont Hotels won’t tell you about all the internal everyday happenings at the Plaza. The hotel has more people inside than there are in my hometown. There are more and stranger things happening day to day inside the Plaza Hotel than in a fairly large city. Assassinations have been plotted, kingdoms have been exchanged, billions of dollars have been traded, stolen, or hidden, companies have been created and companies have been destroyed, world governments have signed pacts. The Plaza is probably the favorite assignation spot for hundreds of thousands of lovers the world over. There have been deaths by suicides from hangers, jumpers or drownings; deaths from the natural ravages of old age to the smothering of an infant in a crib. But in the century old history of the hotel, there had never been a murder.

Not until I arrived.

Chapter 1

I was one pissed off gringo. I was standing in the middle of the living room of the presidential suite at the Plaza Hotel staring down between my two shoes at a worn out carpet. How in the hell can they put a worn out carpet in a room that costs $2,500 a day plus 26% tax? I thought out loud.

Oh no, meestir Barry, es no worn out carpet, ees heestory, said the bellman as he took all that was left of my bags off his truck.

What kind of ‘heestory’ comes from worn threads? I asked.

Es famous Aubusson rug. Comes from castle of count in France. All furniture in suite from count’s castle. Verry much heestory, verry much money. They say this suite like a museum, Felipe, according to his nametag, responded.

Well, I moaned, right now, I frankly could care less. I gave Felipe a ten spot, and nodded o.k. as he was walking out the door saying, You only have to call Felipe if you want anything. Felipe, he knows everything. You just call Felipe.

I stared at the three bags by the door, the real reason for my being pissed off. There should have been nine bags. These three bags, my personal stuff, them, I could have done without. The six missing bags represented the most important part of my life.

My name is Barry Howard, and I just got off the plane from Madrid, connecting from Alicante, Spain, (the reason for the gringo. They called me that, lovingly, they said). I got on that plane in Alicante with, supposedly, nine pieces of luggage, three with my personal stuff, and six cases carrying 180 meticulously hand crafted gorgeous shoes made in my own factory, by the best Italian trained shoe workers in Spain from the original styles that were the result of the talented hand of the great Oscar de la Renta, Those beauties could now be on the bottom of the Atlantic, for all I know.

72,000 pesetas ($480) for the extra freight, and they are lost! Six weeks of counting every detail, every stitch, sweating out details, working till two and three in the morning, including Saturdays and Sundays. I made those poor guys give up their mariendas and siestas, paid an extra five bucks a foot for unborn calf and I’m a sonuvabitch if they are not lost!

I try not to get upset, for in this business you could get upset all the time. I try and ride with the punches, but this is above and beyond. This is how "Murphy’s Law" was created.

I suppose it’s time to play my trump card: call Spain and tell Juan what has happened. Juan Miguel Gomez is the front office manager of the Spanish factory. His English, except for some axiomatic words is as good as mine. He is my interpreter. Foreigners have to be very careful when using an interpreter. If you are not totally fluent in the language, be careful. Interpreters tend to absorb what you want repeated, edit it, and then say what they think you should have said. I think two interpreters will someday start world war three.

Juan, did I get you out of the bar? I was trying to make myself heard over the noise as I explained the problem at customs. I know you have packed all the samples, but you have to open everything and get the snake skins and lizards out. I said.

Does that include the ones with just a trim?

Hell, yes. Even with a shoe-string of snake

They are that strict? an astonished Juan asked.

Yes they are, and they can hold the whole shipment if they determine there is something endangered included in the manifest. I said.

You people have really got some weird laws. I could put a lizard in each pocket of my pants, have a boa constrictor around my neck and do a tango right through any customs anywhere in Europe. Juan laughed.

Wait till you see some of our tax laws. I replied.

O.K., I’ll put everything that even looks like snake or lizard in my personal stuff. And I’ll come through Boston. Juan assured me.

"I think I can get these out of customs in time, but if we don’t, we will need Boston’s shoes down here. Going through Boston won’t be as much of a problem, I said Plan on riding down with Joe with those babies under your arm. Have a nice trip, and call when you get to the warehouse."

I’ll call the office from the airport when I get in

I won’t be in the office. Ring the Plaza and ask for the penthouse.

"The Penthouse?"

"Yeah, the penthouse… C’mon, you know we need to make a big impression and no, you cannot sleep here. Vaya con dios."

Well, back to me. I am a shoe manufacturer and importer. What I am doing here, and what I am so upset about is that my marketing crown, waiting for its final jewel, is about to be turned into a crown of thorns.

I finally had been able to secure the rights to market ladies shoes under the label of the famous Oscar de la Renta. As I remained staring at the empty space where those missing bags full of samples should be, my thoughts flowed back to a little over four months ago.

I was ushered into Oscar’s office by his business manager with whom I had completed all the business and contract stuff. I have to admit that the palms of my hands were a little sore from rubbing them on my pants to dry the sweat. It was a little higher on the haute couture pole than a boy from Randleman, North Carolina was used to.

Barry Howard, Mr. de la Renta, I firmly said, as I took the hand of this imposing, suave, urbane man who had the look of having been pampered by many manicurists, hair stylists who did marvels with little amounts of hair, tailors and shirt makers. I was looking at a complete package of someone who was the personification of haute couture. His smooth light mahogany tan a testimonial to his devotion to the sun in his native Dominican Republic.

Oscar, please, Barry, he replied as he smiled warmly and took my hand. Sit down, and let’s get acquainted.

Fine, but you will have to be gentle with me. This is my first time with a real live designer.

Really? he asked. I’m surprised. I’ve seen your shoes, and I congratulate you on your originality. They look fresh and marketable.

I have had some modest success traveling the world; shopping stores and markets, taking pictures of what I liked in windows and displays, I said.

I’m amazed you can exist and keep your product new and updated that way

Well, I attend the shoe designer shows in Italy, Germany and France twice a year—buying a few models for legitimacy, and having my technicians sketch, surreptitiously, a few items here and there.

At a designer’s show?

Yes, a little chagrined

They let you get away with that? he asked.

No, not really, but if you buy one of their originals" . . . originals in quotation marks, I said. They actually expect you to snitch an idea here and there.

Why originals in quotation marks? he asked.

Because when you buy your original and leave the room, they open a drawer where they keep about 20 copies of their other originals, and sell them again.

You know that when you buy the pattern? You know that they will sell the same thing to someone else?

"Well, yes . . . Actually and technically it’s not the identical one. They move a button a sixteenth of an inch, or insert a slipstitch where there wasn’t one, but they are the same patterns. They know that you know, and you know that they know you know, but that’s the way it works."

Interesting, but deliver me, He smiled.

Yes, I know that sounds terrible but that’s about the only way to subsist in my segment of the market.

Still, I find it intriguing that you can run a business like that. he said.

It helps if you know your market and a good part of my market are the ladies who lunch.

The ladies who lunch?

"Yeah,today’s modern girls, Hadassah Meetings; the Lady Rotarians; office parties; the working women business luncheons."

I see, he said, not seeing.

"Strangely enough suburban and middle America tend to resist style change. You and your market exists on newness and excitement. I have found that an overwhelming number of Middle American women can live for years with the little black dress and a basic pump. So, I do everything I can to capture just as much of the small market that’s left with innovative updates of stuff that’s current."

We do have different challenges, he said with a quizzical smile.

For me, your shoes stand alone. Your shoes make a statement to a market of your own. my shoes say mostly, me, too", but they say that in a market so huge that I will gladly take one hundredth of one percent and be successful and happy.

I have hired two technicians that have been trained in Florence, Italy, specializing in hand crafting. It will be their job to bring some Italian spice to the product. Don’t get me wrong, my shoemakers are among the best in the world but I want the world to notice when Oscar de la Renta’s shoes hit the market.

Oscar said. "Both Jack Harris and Bob Knowles, the two techs we sent to your factory, were quite pleased with what they saw. And I like the quality and finish of the samples they brought back from Spain. Based on their report, I am ready to go ahead.

Our contract calls for my supplying you with 75 styles twice a year, he continued, and for our first shoe collection I want to go with what I think is a complete change—a challenge to the entire fashion market. My new dress collection will all have a hemline that will require higher heels on the shoes.

That’s fine, Oscar, but I’m sure you are aware today ninety percent of shoes sold in the stores today are medium heels or lower. I timidly said.

Barry, didn’t you just remind me that—what was it you said—’Middle America tends to resist change and my market requires newness’? He replied with a wry grin. Right now, my market really needs waking up and that’s what you and I are going to do. My new hemlines will not only rise, but will raise some eyebrows, and I want you to raise some heels heights.

Sheepishly I replied, Ouch, I told you to be gentle with virgins. In this high altitude of fashion. I guess that’s why it’s called ‘haute couture’. You just tell me what you want, and it’ll be done, but I work better when I’m comfortable. I would have been very uncomfortable if we were making a line of shoes with all high heels without knowing why.

Well, Oscar said, "We all agree that shoes, hats, gloves, hair, everything accessorizes the product—the dress—so that’s why the 75 styles I will submit to you will be high heels.

I was really shocked. Everything I had been making for the past three years were all medium and low heel shoes. That’s all the ENTIRE world was making. No one was buying enough shoes with high heels to justify making new molds.

But, if Oscar de la Renta wanted High Heels, he would get High Heels.

It’s time for the Fall International Shoe Fair, and we were going to introduce the new line here at the fair. Oscar is to be in attendance to greet everyone, and drop a few sage words on the importance of combining shoes and the haute couture of ladies clothing. We are going the whole nine yards, giving every woman a bottle of Oscar’s new perfume which, incidentally, he is bringing out at this show, a rose, plus a specially designed carry all.

Some of Spain’s best wines are coming down from where they are stored in my warehouse in Boston, to be served throughout the show. Six of the most beautiful models I have ever hired will be walking all over these two historical worn out eighteenth century Aubusson carpets. They will be barefooted, I guess, because I don’t have any of Oscar’s beauties to put on their pretty feet!

But that won’t be a problem because I can give a tour of this museum of a suite to the 150 special clients I have invited with an engraved invitation, I am sure that will make them deliriously happy, having flown a thousand miles for the opening of a new line of shoes, and end up looking through an empty suite.

No kidding, this suite really is something; the furniture is from the count’s castle and would make antique dealers foam at the mouth. The elevator opens into a small hallway leading to a parlor, which is sixty feet long, and twenty-four feet wide and into a dining room that has a magnificent mahogany eighteen-foot table that seats twelve. All the tapestries, paintings and wood furniture are from the castle. The rest, the five bedrooms, and their furbishing are all new (and lush), all with their own bath, new and modern, a billiard room, and a wine cellar so big and full you wouldn’t believe.

All this, a kitchen with a butler’s pantry! The special price, Mr. Howard, because you are taking it for a whole week of $2,500 plus 26% tax per day which is just $3,150 times 7 and that comes to ONLY $22, 050 a week.

Bargains like that don’t show up every day.

Hah! Little did I know, as I was walking around those fabulous surroundings, that one of those lovely rooms would be soon be the scene of a heinous murder? Soon, New York City’s paper’s screaming headlines of MURDER AT THE PLAZA PENTHOUSE SUITE would make missing shoes my smallest worry!

I guess I had better tell you about me before I got entangled in the shoe business. I carried a ratty hind leg from a Randleman North Carolina rooster for luck in the back pocket of every uniform I wore during my short adventure in the Vietnam thing. It must have worked. I spent eight months of celebrating that luck discovering and wallowing between the breasts of every show girl in every fancy hotel in Las Vegas until I sobered up enough to realize that the funds were fast depleting. I didn’t like to even think about working, but all I had was $914.74. I had two and three quarters of a degree in business from the University of North Carolina. I managed to fuck that up by running back and forth from Ann Arbor, Michigan screwing the beautiful Anne Hathaway.

I went back to my hometown of High Point, N. C. I played around working with what High Point was famous for, the furniture making capital of the world. I had no talent for anything they had to offer. I soon realized, I didn’t have any talent at all, except for talking and drinking. The only work I had done was as a Saturday salesman at a shoe store in Chapel Hill,

I was with my cousin who owned a ladies shoe store and