PARIS ONE

by James Brady ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 18, 1977

Drop that name! Follow that Porsche! Take off that dress! Things--like a nothing story about everybody fighting to buy the perfume-flower farms of Grasse--are adroitly arranged here so that fashion-mag editor Brady can take us down Paris streets into couturier baclcrooms, brush us up against the celebrities in the background, and heat us up with kinky sex and a corpse-laden chase when the tour starts to pall. Tall Tony Winslow from Princeton (Hi, Bill Bradley) left a New York City salvage job (Hey there, Felix Rohatyn) to be a banker, and now he's in Paris, assigned to find out why a US corporation wants to buy the salon of the late, bisexual Jacques Fayol for a super-inflated $100 million. Perfume power is the answer, and the trail leads from a chic rugby match to a fashion show (Bonjour, Bianca Jagger in a bowler) to the Cannes Festival ('allo, Roman Polanski) to a farmhouse in Grasse where Tony and his alternating bedmates meet up with thugs who want to scotch the perfume deal and rape the ladies. One of the girls--the Fayol heiress but an enthusiastically employed hooker--uses a diversionary, oral tactic here and then says, ""I'm going to brush my teeth."" Amen, but the obvious appeals of dinner at La Coupole, a heroine who works for Vogue (A bientot, Avedon!), and unzippered haute couture will probably overwhelm the bad taste in the mouth and the half-bad writing on the page.

Pub Date: May 18, 1977

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Delacorte

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1977

Categories: FICTION