Lauren Weisberger 5-Book Collection: The Devil Wears Prada, Revenge Wears Prada, Everyone Worth Knowing, Chasing Harry Winston, Last Night at Chateau Marmont

‘Hello there. Is Andrea Sachs there, please?’

‘Speaking. May I ask who’s calling?’

‘Andrea, hi, this is Loretta Andriano from Seventeen magazine.’

My heart lurched. I’d pitched a 2,000-word ‘fiction’ piece about a teenage girl who gets so caught up on getting into college that she ignores her friends and family. It had taken me all of two hours to write the silly thing, but I thought I’d managed to strike just the right chords of funny and touching.

‘Hi! How are you?’

‘I’m fine, thank you. Listen, your story got passed along to me, and I have to tell you – I love it. Needs some revisions, of course, and the language needs some tweaking – our readers are mostly pre- and early teens – but I’d like to run it in the February issue.’

‘You would?’ I could hardly believe it. I’d sent the story to a dozen teen magazines and then wrote a slightly more mature version and sent that to nearly two dozen women’s magazines, but I hadn’t heard a word back from anyone.

‘Absolutely. We pay one-fifty per word, and I’ll just need to have you fill out a few tax forms. You’ve freelanced stories before, right?’

‘Actually, no, but I used to work at Runway.’ I don’t know how I thought this would help – especially since the only thing I ever wrote there were forged memos meant to intimidate other people – but Loretta didn’t appear to notice the gaping hole in my logic.

‘Oh, really? My first job out of college was as a fashion assistant at Runway. I learned more there that year than I did in the next five.’

‘It was a real experience. I was lucky to have it.’

‘What did you do there?’

‘I was actually Miranda Priestly’s assistant.’

‘Were you really? You poor girl, I had no idea. Wait a minute – were you the one who was just fired in Paris?’

I realized too late that I had made a big mistake. There’d been a sizable blurb in Page Six about the whole messy thing a few days after I got home, probably from one of the Clackers who’d witnessed my terrible manners. Considering they quoted me exactly, I couldn’t figure out who else it could’ve been. How could I have forgotten that other people might have read that? I had a feeling that Loretta was going to be distinctly less pleased with my story than she was three minutes ago, but there was no escaping now.

‘Um, yeah. It wasn’t as bad as it seemed, really it wasn’t. Things got totally blown out of proportion in that Page Six article. Really.’

‘Well, I hope not! Someone needed to tell that woman to go fuck herself, and if it was you, well, then, hats off! That woman made my life a living hell for the year I worked there, and I never even had to exchange a single word with her.

‘Look, I’ve got to run to a press lunch right now, but why don’t we set up a meeting? You need to come in and fill out some of these papers, and I’d like to meet you anyway. Bring anything else you think might work for the magazine.’

‘Great. Oh, that sounds great.’ We agreed to meet next Friday at three, and I hung up still not believing what had happened. Kyle and Jill had left the baby with Lily while they went to dress and pack, and he had commenced a sort of crying-whimpering thing that sounded as though he was two seconds away from all-out hysteria. I scooped him out of his seat and held him over my shoulder, rubbing his back through his terry-cloth footie pajamas, and, remarkably, he shut up.

‘You’ll never believe who that was,’ I sang, dancing around the room with Isaac. ‘It was an editor at Seventeen magazine – I’m going to be published!’

‘Shut up! They’re printing your life story?’

‘It’s not my life story – it’s “Jennifer’s” life story. And it’s only two thousand words, so it’s not the biggest thing ever, but it’s a start.’

‘Sure, whatever you say. Young girl gets super caught up in achieving something and ends up screwing over all the people who matter in her life. Jennifer’s story. Uh-huh, whatever.’ Lily was grinning and rolling her eyes at the same time.

‘Whatever, details, details. The point is, they’re publishing it in the February issue and they’re paying me three thousand dollars for it. How crazy is that?’

‘Congrats, Andy. Seriously, that’s amazing. And now you’ll have this as a clip, right?’

‘Yep. Hey, it’s not The New Yorker, but it’s an OK first step. If I can round up a few more of these, maybe in some different magazines, too, I might be getting somewhere. I have a meeting with the woman on Friday, and she told me to bring anything else I’ve been working on. And she didn’t even ask if I speak French. And she hates Miranda. I can work with this woman.’

I drove the Texas crew to the airport, picked up a good and greasy Burger King lunch for Lily and me to wash down our breakfast donuts with, and spent the rest of the day – and the next, and the next after that – working on some stuff to show the Miranda-loathing Loretta.

19 (#ulink_d027c7fb-63fe-5e56-82fd-07e250581a97)

‘Tall vanilla cappuccino, please,’ I ordered from a barista I didn’t recognize at the Starbucks on 57th Street. It had been nearly five months since I’d been here last, trying to balance a whole tray of coffees and snacks and get back to Miranda before she fired me for breathing. When I thought about it like that, I figured it was far better to have gotten fired for screaming ‘fuck you’ than it was to get fired because I’d brought back two packets of Equal instead of two raw sugars. Same outcome, but a totally different ballgame.

Who knew Starbucks had such huge turnover? There wasn’t a single person behind the counter who looked remotely familiar, making all the time I’d spent there seem that much farther away. I smoothed my well-cut but nondesigner black pants and checked to make sure that the cuffed bottoms hadn’t collected any of the city’s muddy slush. I knew there was an entire magazine staff of fashionistas who would emphatically disagree with me, but I thought I looked pretty damn good for only my second interview. Not only did I now know that no one wears suits at magazines, but somewhere, somehow, a year’s worth of high fashion had – by simple osmosis, I think – crammed itself into my head.

The cappuccino was almost too hot, but it felt fantastic on that chilly, wet day. The darkened, late-afternoon sky seemed to be misting the city with a giant Snow-Cone. Normally, a day like this would’ve depressed me. It was, after all, one of the more depressing days in the year’s most depressing month (February), the kind when even the optimists would rather crawl under the covers and the pessimists didn’t stand a chance of getting through without a fistful of Zoloft. But the Starbucks was warmly lit and just the right state of crowded, and I curled up in one of their oversize green armchairs and tried not to think of who had rubbed his dirty hair there last.

In the past three months, Loretta had become my mentor, my champion, my savior. We’d hit it off in that first meeting and she’d been nothing but wonderful to me ever since. As soon as I’d walked into her spacious but cluttered office and saw that she was – gasp! – fat, I had a weird feeling that I’d love her. She sat me down and read every word of the stuff I’d been working on all week: tongue-in-cheek pieces on fashion shows, some snarky stuff on being a celebrity assistant, a hopefully sensitive story about what it takes – and doesn’t take – to bring down a three-year-long relationship with someone you love but can’t be with. It was storybook-like, nauseating, really, how well we’d instantly hit it off, how effortlessly we shared our nightmares about Runway (I was still having them: a recent one had included a particularly horrid segment in which my own parents were shot dead by Parisian fashion police for wearing shorts on the street and Miranda had somehow managed to legally adopt me), how quickly we realized that we were the same person, just seven years apart.

Since I’d just had the brilliant idea of dragging all my Runway clothes to one of those snooty resale shops on Madison Avenue, I was a wealthy woman – I could afford to write for peanuts; anything for a byline. I had waited and waited for Emily or Jocelyn to call to tell me they were sending a messenger to pick it all up, but they never did. So it was all mine. I packed up most of the clothes but set aside the Diane Von Furstenburg wrap-dress. While going through the contents of my desk drawers that Emily had emptied into boxes and mailed to me, I came across the letter from Anita Alvarez, the one in which she expressed her worship of all things Runway. I’d always meant to send her a fabulous dress, but I’d never found the time. I wrapped the bold-printed dress in tissue paper, tossed in a pair of Manolos, and forged a note from Miranda – a talent I was unhappy to discover I still possessed. This girl should know – just once – how it feels to own one beautiful thing. And, more importantly, to think there’s someone out there who actually cares.

Except for the dress, the tight and very sexy D&G jeans, and the utterly classic, quilted, chain-handle purse I’d given to my mom as a gift (‘Oh, honey, this is beautiful. What’s this brand again?’), I sold every last filmy top, leather pant, spiked boot, and strappy sandal. The woman who worked the register called the woman who owned the store, and the two of them had decided it would be best if they just closed the shop down for a few hours to evaluate my merchandise. The Louis Vuitton luggage – two large suitcases, one medium-size accessories bag, and an oversize trunk – alone had netted me six grand, and when they were finally finished whispering and examining and giggling, I cruised out of there with a check for just over $38,000. Which, by my calculations, meant that I could pay rent and even feed myself for a year while I tried to get this writing gig together. And then Loretta strolled into my life and made it instantly better.

Loretta had already agreed to buy four pieces – one blurb, only slightly larger than a pull quote, two 500-word pieces, and the original 2,000-word story. But even more exciting was her bizarre obsession with helping me make contacts, her eagerness to get in touch with people at other magazines who might just be interested in some freelance stuff. Which is exactly what put me at that Starbucks on that overcast winter day – I was headed back to Elias-Clark. It had taken a lot of insisting on her part to convince me that Miranda wouldn’t hunt me down the minute I walked in the building and knock me out with a blow dart, but I was still nervous. Not paralyzed with fear like the old days when a mere cell phone ring was enough to cause my heart to flip-flop, but jittery enough at the thought – however remote the possibility – of catching a glimpse of her. Or Emily. Or anyone else, for that matter, except for James, who had kept in touch.

Somehow, someway, for some reason, Loretta had called her old college roommate who just so happened to edit the city section of The Buzz and told her that she’d discovered the next new ‘it’ writer. That was supposed to be me. She’d arranged an interview for me today, and even forewarned the woman that I’d been summarily dismissed from Miranda’s employ, but the woman had just laughed and said something to the effect that if they refused to use anyone whom Miranda had fired at one point or another, they’d barely have any writers at all.

I finished my cappuccino and, newly energized, gathered my portfolio of different articles and headed – this time calmly, without either an incessantly ringing phone or an armload of coffees – toward the Elias-Clark building. A moment or two of reconnaissance from the sidewalk indicated that no Runway Clackers were amid the crowds in the lobby, and I proceeded to heave my weight against the revolving door. Nothing had changed in the five months since I’d last been there: I could see Ahmed behind the register in the newsstand, and a huge, glossy poster advertised that Chic would be hosting a party at Lotus that weekend. Although I technically should’ve signed in, I instinctively walked directly toward the turnstiles. Immediately, I heard a familiar voice call out, ‘I can’t remember if I cried when I read about his widowed bride, but something touched me deep inside, the day, the music died. And we were singing …’ ‘American Pie’! What a sweetie, I thought. This was the good-bye song that I’d never gotten to sing. I turned to see Eduardo, as large and sweaty as usual, grinning. But not at me. In front of the turnstile closest to him stood a toweringly skinny girl with jet black hair and green eyes, wearing a dynamite pair of tight, pinstripe pants and a navel-revealing tank top. She also happened to be balancing a small tray with three Starbucks coffees, an overflowing bag of newspapers and magazines, three hangers with complete outfits dangling from each one, and a duffel monogrammed with the initials ‘MP.’ Her cell phone began to ring just as I realized what was happening, and she looked so panicked I thought she might cry on the spot. But when her repeated banging against the turnstile failed to elicit entry, she sighed deeply and sang, ‘’Bye, ’bye, Miss American Pie, drove my Chevy to the levee, but the levee was dry, and good old boys were drinking whiskey and rye, singing this will be the day that I die, this will be the day that I die …’ When I looked back to Eduardo, he smiled quickly in my direction and winked. And then, while the pretty brunette girl finished singing her verse, he buzzed me through like I was someone who mattered.

Acknowledgments (#ulink_656527c9-4abc-561a-ae78-3d7c57e31124)

Thanks to the four people who helped make it happen:

Stacy Creamer – my editor. If you don’t enjoy the book, blame her … she edited out all the really funny stuff.

Charles Salzberg – writer and teacher. He pushed me hard to keep this project going, so if you don’t enjoy it, blame him, too.

Deborah Schneider – agent extraordinaire. She keeps assuring me she loves at least fifteen percent of everything I do, say, or, especially, write.

Richard David Story – my former boss. Easy to love him now that I no longer have to see him before nine A.M. each day.

Thanks also to Lynne Drew and Jennifer Parr, my U.K. editors.

And of course a huge thanks to all those who offered no assistance whatsoever but who promised to buy multiple copies for a name mention: Dave Baiada, Dan Barasch, Heather Bergida, Lynn Bernstein, Dan Braun, Beth Buschman-Kelly, Helen Coster, Audrey Diamond, Lydia Fakundiny, Wendy Finerman, Chris Fonzone, Kelly Gillespie, Simone Girner, Cathy Gleason, Jon Goldstein, Eliza Harris, Peter Hedges, Julie Hootkin, Bernie Kelberg, Alli Kirshner, John Knecht, Anna Weber Kneitel, Jaime Lewisohn, Bill McCarthy, Dana McMakin, Ricki Miller, Daryl Nierenberg, Wittney Rachlin, Drew Reed, Edgar Rosenberg, Brian Seitchik, Jonathan Seitchik, Marni Senofonte, Shalom Shoer, Josh Ufberg, Kyle White, and Richard Willis.

And especially to Leah Jacobs, Jon Roth, Joan and Abe Lichtenstein, and Weisbergers: Shirley and Ed, Judy, David and Pam, Mike and Michele.

Everyone Worth Knowing (#ulink_95ee2b1c-a3dd-5f51-a389-25d2cb7a7acd)

EVERYONE WORTH KNOWING

Lauren Weisberger

To my grandparents: This should help them remember which grandchild I am.