Chapter Text
“It’s not about having something to say, it’s about controlling the mouthpiece,” he says, elegantly swirling whiskey in his glass.
The year is 1926. Herbert Jean Winstreet finds himself, as he often does these days, in a smoky speakeasy. Next to him, someone beautiful. Her name is Claire, or at least that’s what it is at night. In the morning, his name is Claude, and he is a lithe French expat chasing an oil painting residency at The Met.
Claude’s father, an old money holdout of the valley, tells the well-to-do visitors of their exclusive vineyard and winery that his youngest son has gone to seminary school across the pond. They nod approvingly and sip red vintage and pretend to believe him, while remembering Claude in their minds eye– a fairy, a pansy-ass. Seminary school, indeed.
But tonight, in the Southside of Harlem, the dim light casts shadows on Claire’s face. Her angular jaw, her slow crooked smile, her black painted eyes.
“So which one are you?” she whispers. She shifts her weight on the stool, inviting him to lean closer, speaking just quietly enough that he has too, being subtle enough that it feels like his idea. A practiced gesture– he recognizes this, but he takes the bait nonetheless.
“Which one am I?” he questions, leaning in.
Claire is wearing a French lavender perfume that reminds her of home. The scent is so light, and so sweet, and so incongruous with the dim lights and hidden corners of this place. It almost puts him off completely. Context, he finds, has a way of complicating a good time.
“Which one am I?” he starts again, “Baby, I’m the mouthpiece, the megaphone, AND the message. I’m the god damned movement incarnate!”
It is December 12th, 1926. Today is Herbert Jean’s 32nd birthday. It is his fifth 32nd birthday.
“And what are we moving towards, Mr. Wingstreet?” she asks. He tries not to wince when she calls him “Mr. Wingstreet.” She thinks you’re pushing 40, he reminds himself. But he is starting to look too young to pass for middle-aged.
God, she is gorgeous, in the dusky evening as Claire, and in the smoggy morning as Claude, he knows this. She is beautiful, and she is smart in a way, but she is complacent. In the words of his father, “you’ve got to be born with that dog in you,” and Claire, well, Claire is more of a cat person. Dazzling, yes. Ambitious, no. The part of him that will always stay young contemplates embracing her. But the part of him that is already five years older knows better. She isn’t Ventrue. Not like him.
“We’re moving towards the future, baby,” he says, smiling, showing teeth, but not all of them.
Claire laughs elegantly, trailing a delicate hand from her drink, to the bar, to his shoulder. She kisses him in the space under his ear, leaving a lipstick stain on his neck.
He can have Claire tonight. He can have Claude in the morning. And on Monday, he can have Wingstreet Enterprises, his publishing company that can sell a story without ever printing a paper.
***
The Toreadors embrace Claire five years after that night, around the same time HJ starts carrying a scepter. He’s trying to look older, but his pride won’t let him walk around with a cane.
On Herbert Jean’s seventy-sixth 32nd birthday, Claude invites him to come back to France– with Claude’s parents gone, sitting around a sun-soaked vineyard selling overpriced wine didn’t seem so bad. And Claire could still have her cabarets in Paris on the weekends.
The past two decades had been such an effort, playing the parts of both Herbert Jean, an industry titan in declining health, and his own upstart son, Herbert Jean II, or HJ as he is calling himself now, primed to assume the throne. He had elegantly staged his own death, inherited Wingstreet Enterprises from himself, and walked back into the world with the swagger of a 25 year old multimillionaire born after the Great Depression, after both Great Wars. No context to spoil his good time. Leaving now to go laze around in the French countryside would be wasting all these years of planning, he said.
“Let me know if you get tired,” Claude said. “I won’t wait up, but I’ll be around.”
He had been wearing a loose fitting madras shirt, the top two buttons undone. Claude was much better at keeping up with the trends of fashion. HJ knew his double breasted suits had fallen off long ago, but now that fact was becoming part of his character.
HJ II is a lot like Herbert Jean I: practical, ambitious, charismatic. But he is also other things.
He is sitting at a round table in his office in Manhattan. Wingstreet Enterprises corporate headquarters has just moved into a bigger, shinier, skyscraper. He had paid his architect and interior designer god knows how much to make the space scream wealth, and they had succeeded. HJ’s office is the picture of modernity, with its shiny chrome fixtures and smooth edged wooden furniture and brand new asbestos ceiling tiles.
HJ is sitting at the head of the table, hearing a pitch from John. Wingstreet Enterprises has kept its iron-fisted grip on the mouthpiece, moving beyond newspapers into television, and radio, and most recently, advertising.
John is showing the assembled suits at the table a large posterboard advertising a luxury cologne. It’s a two-page magazine spread. One one page, an illustrated picture of a glowering lion; on the second page, a photograph of a similarly glowering man. HJ thinks both man and beast look constipated. The byline reads: “Musk: The civilized way to roar.” Gross.
“So I think THIS is the way we tap into the luxury fragrance market for men,” John starts (His name is John, right? HJ thinks to himself, Yeah, this one is definitely John.). “It’s not about what men want, because, let’s face it, men are not doing their own shopping.”
A few of the older guys across the table laugh knowingly. Of course, a real man would not deign to do his own shopping. One of them smooths out his oiled mustache. (Maybe THAT one is John, HJ thinks. Yeah, John definitely has a mustache.)
“So it’s not actually about showing men what they want. It’s about showing what women want. And not just what women want. It’s what women want men to want,” John-maybe-not-John continues emphatically.
The suits around the table start to nod in sage agreement, taking this horseshit like it’s the gospel. HJ looks into the constipated, sultry stare of the shirtless male model, then looks into the domesticated, artificial eyes of the lion. He feels rage curl at the base of his stomach.
“You think you really did something here?” HJ says cooly. “Is this the best we can do?” He turns his gaze dangerously towards the entire table.
“HJ, I agree, this is disappointing,” says the oldest man at the table. THAT’S John! HJ thinks. John was the old guy, not the guy with the mustache, and definitely not the loser selling musk.
“Yes, this is extremely disappointing, this whole, animalism thing. A woman with enough disposable income to buy designer cologne is never going to go for something so… virile,” Old John says. “HJ, when I worked with the late Mr. Wingstreet, he never would have gone for something like this.”
The rage explodes into something incandescent. The old timers at his meetings are always mentioning his father, always claiming to have some close personal relationship with him, when HJ knows for a fact he has never spoken to this man in this life or the life of Herbert Jean I.
HJ forces himself to breathe. He doesn’t have to breathe anymore, but he likes to sometimes for the dramatics. He inhales deeply and rises from his seat.
“Do we really think THIS is what women want?” HJ says in a deadly calm voice.
Nobody dares respond. HJ turns his attention back to John-maybe-not-John at the posterboard
“John, I need you to write this down,” HJ says. A different man entirely, the red-head, takes out a legal pad and pen and starts furiously taking dictation. Fuck, THAT guy is John?
“Did I fucking stutter, John? I need you to write this down!” HJ says, raising his voice.
“Mr. Wingstreet, my name is Michael—”
“I don’t care! Until you give me a reason to remember you, you’re ALL JOHN and I need you all to WRITE THIS DOWN!” HJ yells.
Frantically and obediently, six other legal pads and pencils land on the table.
“Let’s talk about what women want,” HJ says, really breathing heavy now. “Women do not want a lion. They want a man. They want a man that can walk through life with a big swingin’ dick.”
It’s silent except for the sound of pencils scratching “big swinging dick” onto six different pages.
“Yeah. A big swingin’ dick. They want you to skip breakfast, chug a black coffee, put on a sharp suit, bust your ass at work, and bring home a paycheck!”
The Johns around the table all nod and write. They do this. They know what a man is. They know what women want.
HJ continues, “And then, they want you to come home, and ask THEM about THEIR day,” he feels the slightest pause. “Oh! I bet you weren’t expecting that, JOHN. Yeah, your wife wants you to talk to her like a person, you incompetent fuck! She wants to tell you about the radio program she listened to while she was washing your skid-marked tighty-whities, and about how she’s never understood her own mother, and about how she isn’t sure if God is real. ARE YOU WRITING THIS DOWN, JOHN?”
More frantic scrawling. HJ steps up onto his chair, taking his scepter (excuse me, his father’s scepter) into his right hand, and strides into the center of the round table.
“And then after you’ve made a fraction of an effort of understand her as a complete human person, women want to get fucked. Have you ever made your wife cum, John?” HJ says, to no one specifically. In turn, no one responds.
“Okay. So here’s what I need you all to do,” HJ says, sighing deeply. “I need you to go the fuck home, I need you to have a conversation with your god dammed wives, and maybe after you make a woman cum for the first time, you can write me some decent ad copy that doesn’t make me want to throw myself off the Empire State building! And maybe, just maybe, after that, you can have a name that ISN’T John!”
“But my name actually is John–”
“GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE!”
In a matter of seconds his office is blessedly empty again. In moments like these, he thinks of a conversation he had with his Sire several decades ago in that same speakeasy in Harlem.
“After about a century,” his Sire said, “people will stop surprising you.”
HJ laughed and took a swig from his drink, newly-turned, remembering too late that he could not actually swallow it. His Sire smirked at him as he discreetly spit whiskey back into the glass.
“You don’t think the world will change enough in the next century to keep surprising me?” HJ replied.
His Sire shook his head, “I didn’t say the world wouldn’t be surprising. I said the people. The world will change, sure, but the people won’t.”
HJ looked across the crowded bar. In one corner, a Jazz trio wailed out blues music brimming with sex and desperation and sadness– new, shocking, music that forced blood through his veins even now. In another corner, two women with slicked hair and pantsuits posturing like men put a few dollars in the bra of tonight’s entertainer (not Claire, but someone else with a double-life, maybe Dorothy tonight, Don tomorrow). The people in this room were politicians. Socialites. Inventors. Dreamers. And he was one of them.
“We’ll see,” HJ said. He picked up his glass. “Cheers. To the next hundred years of surprises.”
How young and naive he had been back then.