Chapter 13 #2
The next casualty was Jennifer Hobart, the entertainment editor.
J.Ho, as she was known around the office, had a reputation for sleeping with every major male star she interviewed.
According to NuVoices lore, homegirl had even bedded one or two of the female celebs.
She was maybe five feet tall with short round legs, a thick neck, and enormous breasts, the top half of which were in full display every day, jiggling like Jell-O above low-cut shirts.
I didn’t want to believe the whispers since urban culture loved to brand women as “hoes,” and having an ample chest and a penchant for button-downs a size too small didn’t automatically make her promiscuous.
But it was a little suspect that Jennifer lived in a West Village loft, owned a condo in Miami, and had an extensive wardrobe of designer bags on her meager editor’s salary.
One afternoon, I found her faxing our working July issue rundown.
“Where are you sending that?” I seethed.
“Uh, my apartment, so I can work at home?” she said too quickly, her voice lilting so her statement ended in a question. I glanced at the outgoing number: It was a Brooklyn exchange.
“Jennifer, you told me you live in the Village. And why would you have a fax machine in your home?”
“Well, see, I … um, sometimes work at a friend’s house, a friend who lives in Brooklyn and doesn’t have a printer, so I’m sending these there,” she stuttered.
J.Ho was out of there that day. I quickly pitched my vision for Sugar to my girl Sondra Lopez, a veteran entertainment writer and celebrity booker languishing in a junior role at People magazine.
Sondra agreed to take a risk and join me at NuVoices, where I promised that she would now get to cast covers and write features.
I also had to make a major change in the fashion director, Cindy Bonham, the only other person on the Sugar staff with mainstream fashion magazine experience.
Although I wasn’t particularly impressed by the fact that she’d been fired from her job as the assistant to the associate fashion director at Vogue, she carried the Condé Nast title’s name around like it was a crocodile Hermès Birkin bag filled with gold bars.
Cindy was petite, with pinched features and acne-pitted skin, and she layered on foundation and dressed in off-season designer gear every day as if she might run into Anna Wintour in the elevator.
It was obvious from the beginning that Cindy resented my presence because she valued having the lone claim to being a “real” fashion magazine editor.
She’d heave an irritated sigh every time I asked her anything. “Just let me figure it out, Nikki,” was her standard offhand response. “I can only imagine you have much more important matters to deal with.”
One afternoon, Barbara burst into my office while I was writing an article assignment letter for a freelance writer and shut the door behind her. “Have you been accepting gifts from fashion designers?” she blurted without prelude.
“What are you talking about, Barbara?” I’d replied, stunned. “High-end designers hardly know we’re alive. They’re certainly not sending me gifts.”
“And have you been raiding the Sugar fashion closet?” she demanded next.
“Not to be rude, but we don’t have anything but sweatsuits.” My smirk disappeared when I realized these questions weren’t coming out of nowhere. In a more serious tone, I asked, “Where exactly are you getting this information?”
Barbara hesitated, then proceeded to spill that Cindy was the occasional mistress of NuVoices’ notoriously adulterous CFO and had apparently been telling him monstrous tales about me.
After another ten minutes of interrogation, I finally gave Barbara an incontrovertible piece of evidence: “Will you please look at what I’m wearing?
” I motioned toward my StyleList closet outfit of a Versus by Versace minidress and tall Doc Martens.
“Do you actually think that I’m going to pilfer our precious supply of velour hoodies?
Seriously, Barbara, why would I do that? ”
“Look, I don’t trust anyone until they’ve proven themselves to me,” she retorted. “You and I are in the process of getting to know one another, and as far as I’m concerned, the jury’s still out.”
Barbara was living up to her tough-as-nails reputation.
The only thing that prevented her from being as bad as Lucifer was that she didn’t have the same mind-fuckingly unpredictable mood swings.
Instead, Barbara was consistently and unrelentingly difficult.
Ultimately, the logical evidence of my wardrobe full of designer StyleList rejects prevailed.
Barbara agreed that Cindy was clearly holding a grudge and had to go.
Fortunately for Cindy, the CFO still liked having her around, so she was shuffled over to Bella. While she was spared from being fired, she had unfortunately not been declawed. So, I’d added another enemy to my growing collection.
It was worth it, though, because CeCe hooked me up with Frederika “Freddy” Douglas, a celebrity stylist who’d worked with everyone from Mary J.
to Eve to Gwen Stefani. I was astonished that Freddy was interested in a position at Sugar, but she seemed truly committed to young women of color.
“Besides,” Freddy told me in confidence, “a sister is pushing forty over here, and following the latest spoiled brat singer around on tour is not as sexy as it was back in the day. Nahmean?”
The last key person I had to find was an executive editor.
Barbara had handed me a folder of undesirable candidates: former Groove editors with an axe to grind, newspaper reporters who were decent writers but had no style or flavor, fashion editors who had plenty of style and flavor but who’d never edited a sentence in their lives.
And none of them would be able to perform the real function of a number two: have my back.
One afternoon, as I was poring over the mastheads of every magazine Von could hold in two arms, looking for candidates, Denyse left a message on my work line.
“I know you’re in the middle of running thangs, but in case you need some help, I just talked to my girl Imani McKnight, who was in my NAACP leadership program.
I told you about her—she’s the one who dated that fine-ass Alpha who’s into historical fiction.
Anyhoo, she’s a freelance writer now, and I gave her your phone number because she wants to pitch an AIDS feature.
Hope that’s okay. She’s mad cool, Nikki.
Smart and funny. Give her a shot. And call a sister when you emerge. Love you.”
Imani called the next morning and came in that afternoon.
With her waist-length locs dyed a light sandy shade that matched her gold-flecked eyes, flowing tunic, and kaleidoscopic ethnic jewelry, I presumed she might only be interested in poetry slams, incense, and world music.
But our conversation made me feel stupid for being so shortsighted.
“So, what’s your profit model based on: Newsstand sales or advertising revenue?” was her first question.
I didn’t exactly want to reveal trade secrets to a virtual stranger, so I tried to be glib. “I, um, well, newsstand is very important,” I said, faltering.
“I see,” Imani replied. “So then, what percentage of your circulation is newsstand? Do you have a website?”
Thrown off guard again, I stumbled through my response. “I think the newsstand is about eighty percent of circ. Kind of high but that will shift toward subs as the brand gains awareness. And we have a site, but it’s pretty basic. We’ll need to redesign it along with the magazine.”
“Of course,” she said patiently. “And how do you plan on differentiating Sugar from its competitors: Groove, Essence, Glamour…?” Homegirl was no joke.
I thought she’d come in to pitch me on a feature, but here she was, cross-examining me on my growth strategy.
She turned red, laughed self-consciously, and said, “Wow, I’m sorry.
I’m acting like Five-O or something. I’m just very interested in magazines, always have been.
I read MediaWeek and The New York Times on Monday—when the media news comes out like it’s Entertainment Weekly. ”
“Why aren’t you on staff somewhere?”
“I have been, both as a writer and an editor, but I’m freelancing because there are no magazines I’m really into right now.”
“Really…”
I assigned Imani the AIDS story, which she handed in a week before her deadline.
It was well researched, insightful, and she’d captured exactly what I’d envisioned the Sugar voice to be: smart but accessible, funny but not corny.
I took her out to lunch, and we talked about how we felt the magazine could serve an audience we both loved—and be a viable business.
She and I were on the same page, and I trusted Imani because she was friends with Denyse.
It took me just one day to convince her to be my executive editor.
I’d sorted my colleagues into friends versus foes and built a small team of hungry, gifted overachievers in record time.
I was working around the clock, ordering pizzas for lunch, eating dinner from the kitchen vending machine, and watching the lights of downtown Manhattan recede behind me as my taxi rolled over the bridge to Brooklyn after midnight.
I’d go home to crash for a few hours, shower, rinse, and repeat.
I couldn’t stop to call my friends or thaw the frost between me and Joseph.
I was all too aware of the limited time I had to show that Sugar could be successful—and before Alonzo would rear his head again.
I was busy watching my back and my front.