I first met Herbert when I was seventeen years old, just before Iris and I graduated from Chapin. He was the father of a friend of mine, we’ll call her Rosie. Nice girl, Rosie. She and I performed in the school play together, that spring of our senior year. We put on The Pirates of Penzance—she played Mabel and I played the major-general, twirling my mustache to great acclaim—and Herbert hosted a little cast party afterward at his handsome Park Avenue apartment, in the course of which he cornered me on the roof terrace and asked me if anyone had ever told me I should model for photographs, that he was the president of maybe the biggest modeling agency in the world and he would love nothing more than to launch my career as a world-famous fashion model.

Now, even at seventeen I was no idiot. I understood that I was no more than ordinarily pretty, not the stuff of the world famous, and what was more, I perfectly comprehended the nature of the proposal Herbert was laying out for me. Finally, and most importantly, I was seventeen years old and had no intention of losing my virginity to Rosie Hudson’s portly, red-nosed fifty-four-year-old father, and long story short, Herbert found a more gullible girl to keep him company that night, and I lost my virginity some years later to a genuine Russian prince, I kid you not.