I'll Drink to That, page 15
I never felt alone at work, and not just because of Cristina sitting knee to knee with me at the same table or the wide variety of women dropping into my department at any given moment. I had come to the store at a wonderful time of new beginnings.
Like me, the carriage trade was being transformed. Mr. Neimark gathered a young, talented, and experienced group of managers and buyers to overhaul the merchandise as well as the physical store. That included adding an escalator, during whose installation he liked to shout at me from the bottom, “I put the escalator in for you, Betty!”
The changes didn’t happen overnight but were exciting. The escalator wasn’t the only innovation; style itself experienced a major upheaval. Up until the late seventies, the majority of department and specialty stores carried predominantly American designers. The styles that were fitted on European models did not fit American women as well as homegrown designs did. Plus, there was still a belief that buying American-made products was the right thing to do. In the eighties, though, the store went in the opposite direction and devoted the whole of the second floor to new talent discovered abroad. These foreign imports included the exceptional tailoring of Giorgio Armani and Thierry Mugler’s tight, curvy, and way-out dresses. The second floor was filled with the outlandish. There were Claude Montana’s monstrous shoulders and military looks, as well as big plaids by Jean Paul Gaultier, who believed that the strange was beautiful, too.
Maybe so, but the strange wasn’t an easy sell. The store became known as a vanguard of style; nonetheless it took a while for the customer to get used to this whole new avant-garde look. With more casual pieces rather than ensembles and more layering, it was the beginning of fashion as we know it today.
The new buyers and executives all had a sense of experimentation that I admired. I found camaraderie among these women, who were younger than me and very different from anyone I’d ever known. Some had children, some didn’t. They were single, divorced, in relationships. But all of them had worked most of their lives.
The best-looking and quickest-moving of the bunch was Susie Butterfield, the store’s publicity and special events director. I kept seeing her out of the corner of my eye, pushing furniture with the cleaning staff, rarely giving a smile, intent upon her job. PR work is never-ending, and you really have to stand apart from the others. I began following her when she was “touring the territory” and found we had a lot in common. Susie picked out the best and most expensive from nowhere, and we became fast friends. The parties she held for the store were legendary—people remember them still. (Her last hurrah, before she left after having a child, was a Fendi fashion show where she turned the Pulitzer Fountain into a runway for the models. The extravaganza was a grand exit.)
Before she left, however, Susie or one of the buyers would call at the end of a long, harrowing day to say, “Let’s go have Japanese food.” Off a group of us went to a comfortable little restaurant on the East Side that was nothing special but where they knew us. Not nearly as insular as my married friends, they weren’t interested in the useless life of lunching, dinners, and dressing that had once made up the core of my existence. In these smart, ambitious women, I saw a reverse of my old self, the person on the other side of the mirror. Their confident example was an inspiration, their casual invitations to dine my biggest comfort.
Corinne, who was part of this close sorority, called at the end of one day to ask me out for a drink before her trip to Europe the following day. In the middle of our conversation at a bar near the store, a man approached us. He had a round, ruddy face, glasses, and white hair that must have been bright red when he was young. In his tweed jacket, there was a silk paisley pocket square, the only sign of dandyism in an otherwise elegant but conservative outfit.
“There’s a man at the end of the bar who would like to meet you,” he said to me with all the cool of someone with a gun to his back.
Corinne, truly a romantic, interjected, “Your friend? Well, what’s wrong with you? This is my friend Betty.”
I was absolutely humiliated. Still, not one to be rude, I made small talk with the man, whose name turned out to be Jim. Quite the sophisticate, I asked Jim if he liked movies. I couldn’t think of anything better. Yes, he said, he liked them.
As we learned, the poor, newly divorced soul wasn’t out of the house a week. That didn’t deter Corinne, who whipped out a card on which she wrote my name, address, and telephone number!
Jim took the card rather sheepishly and called me the following day. I wasn’t convinced. In Philip’s office I explained why it was a bad idea.
“We’re from two different worlds. He’s Irish Catholic,” I said.
“I don’t pick men up in bars,” I said.
Philip, always pushing me to break the Sonny habit, said, “You could step off the curb and meet someone, you know, Betty. Why don’t you brace yourself and try it?”
I returned Jim’s call and made a plan for him to meet me at the apartment after work. Then we could go from there to dinner somewhere in the neighborhood. I answered the door when Jim arrived, and the expression on his face was priceless. To begin with, he had never been in an apartment on Park Avenue, and certainly none that size. I put him at ease, for I was as frightened as he was. I poured him a scotch, and things became more relaxing.
If finding a different human being from Sonny was the medicine, Jim filled the prescription. Retired from a lifelong career in the insurance business, he was slow and methodical in everything. Where Sonny didn’t care a whit about clothes, Jim loved to dress. He was a real Ralph Lauren model in his wonderful tweed jackets, great neckties, sweater vests, pocket squares, and argyle socks. Tall and stocky, he carried his clothes well. But what really impressed me was how well he kept them. He had twenty-year-old coats that looked as good as new.
Jim was impeccable, dependable, and lovely. The sweetest human being on earth—there were times I could have massacred him. While I was very quick, he was incredibly slow. In the time it took him to put on his shoes, I would be fully dressed, made up, hair in place, pocketbook organized, ready to go, and going out of my mind. I recognized, though, that the balance was good for me and began to learn tolerance from him.
When he found out I didn’t have any insurance on my apartment, he set me up with a renter’s policy. I knew nothing. Jim introduced me to a money manager and the concept of saving for retirement. Sonny, who’d left my weekly allowance on the dresser, never let me have a bank account. Jim went with me to the manager’s office every quarter and patiently taught me how to build a nest egg. (I must say, to this day I really loathe doing my bank balance and writing checks—all due to my lack of mathematical skills.)
Jim showed me many things that no one ever had. I had never paid an electric or a telephone bill. He documented everything for me and then taught me how to keep manila envelopes to house them. He goaded me on to ask for a raise when I, too afraid to upset the applecart, was content to sit back and wait for one. (Good thing, or I’d still be waiting!) From childhood to child bride to a childish mother, I had always been taken care of. Always. That was a lot of growing up to do for a woman in her forties. But I had finally found a person who believed in my potential.
Jim made me more independent as we fell into a comfortable routine that began on Friday afternoons when he drove to Manhattan from his home in New Jersey to pick me up and shepherd me back there with him. We had the same fight every Friday at three o’clock. “Why aren’t you ready? I don’t want to go back in the traffic,” Jim complained. And every Friday—in traffic—we returned to the simple condominium with a wood-burning fireplace that we put together.
My life in Clinton, a sweet town on the Raritan River with cherry-tree-lined streets, picturesque old mills, and a real Main Street, was blissfully isolated. In his cozy little apartment, surrounded by Early American finds, I spent weekends cooking for him, driving him crazy that he didn’t vacuum or didn’t make the bed right, and doing little else. He was not big on friends. He had a few that went way back, but Jim didn’t require much in the way of a social life. Another only child like myself, he was content if he had a book in his hand (he relished detective stories, as did my father) and me by his side.
My weekend life was another playing house, which I just adored. I made Jim chauffeur me (I unfortunately never learned to drive) to an incessant stream of farm stands. “Betty, if I see one more strawberry . . .” he threatened. But he never refused me as I went straight into the strawberry patch, unable to pick enough of them, while he sat in the car reading the New York Times.
In that little apartment facing the pond, I made jam, pickles, and many of the foods of my youth. In the summer we had salads with fresh herbs and Jersey tomatoes and pickled peaches from the orchard served over ice cream. In the winter there were stews with sour cream and noodle pudding. We had his next-door neighbors over, because they knocked and asked what we were cooking—it smelled so good. His old pals came occasionally for an early supper of German potato salad and cold roast chicken or a brunch of eggs Benedict.
We made a good team. Jim learned to grocery shop. I told him what to get during the week, and, being frugal, he waited for the specials to buy the items. Jim measured all my baking ingredients, because I do not measure well. I put them together, and out came cakes, pies, and chocolate rolls. He loved to make biscuits or pancakes in the morning to surprise me.
Grocery stores, farmers’ markets, and the occasional outdoor church sale were the extent of my shopping desires. I’d spent enough time in Macy’s furniture department during my twenties to fulfill a lifetime of antiquing, and working all week as I did in the candy store, the last thing I wanted to see were clothes. Jim, however, did insist one time that we go to a mall. He thought I should have a pair of blue jeans.
Now, I have never worn blue jeans in my life; I hate the feel and the fit of them. By the time Jim took me to one of those enormous stores with jeans reaching to the heavens (too many not put back properly and thus even less enticing), most of the world was waltzing around in denim. We spent hours and hours at that store, where I must have tried on every single pair: straight, boot-cut, cowboy, and Indian chief. I still didn’t buy them. They were too heavy, and the bulky way the button lay on my waist made me feel like a child with a protruding belly. It had taken me a long time to get comfortable in pants, but this was going too far. I didn’t buy the jeans (and to this day cannot and will not try them on).
While we walked the vast parking lot to our car, Jim, his new pair of jeans in hand, said, “Betty, everybody wears jeans.”
If that was his sales pitch, boy, did he have the wrong customer. That word “everybody” did it for me. I heard my mother’s voice: “Betty doesn’t wear what everyone else wears. If everybody wore a head scarf, Betty wore the scarf around her waist.” Jim taught me to buy insurance, save for retirement, and ask for a raise, but wear jeans? No thank you. And I abhorred him in them with equal passion. Dear God, if he didn’t look like a Boy Scout who’d outstayed his troop’s welcome.
Out of all the marvelous things he and I did together, I think my favorite was our drives to and from Clinton. By the time I hopped into the car in the midst of snarled midtown traffic on Fridays, I was wound up from building an important business all week. The completely new feeling of making sales numbers, having women rely upon me, supporting my co-workers—being vital—turned me into a nervous wreck. Stretching oneself is always stressful.
From the moment that car door shut until I opened it again in Clinton, I never stopped complaining. No matter what I said, though, Jim always helped me through, and by the time we got there, I was okay. He patiently listened to everything from petty squabbles to deep-seated fears. (Jim hardly ever lost his temper, but when he blew, I thought of the red hair of his youth.) He had a very good head on him and let me use him as the most solid sounding board anyone could ask for. I had finally found someone I could talk to.
Cristina described me as “wise out of the womb.” I’m not sure my poor Jim, a prison to my ranting as we sat in bumper-to-bumper traffic, would have agreed. But I took on the mantle of Solomon at Solutions, where my ladies dropped by for advice that stretched way past the realm of shopping. Perched on the little love seat in my office, they asked about everything from coping with divorce to finding a good orthodontist. Coming to see me became an event.
I’m going to a dinner party tonight—should I send flowers?
I have a friend who needs a good divorce lawyer. Do you know anyone in Waukesha, Wisconsin?
Why do I have to put rubber soles on my ballet flats?
How do I get a grease spot out of French lace?
Do you believe my housekeeper doesn’t iron?
Who’s the best invisible weaver in town?
How do you feel about after-school playgroups?
They imbued me with remarkable powers: tentacles that reached all over the country, eyes in the back of my head, infallible resources, and superlative taste. I researched storage out of the city to house clothes for one of my clients who had so many possessions she didn’t want to part with, and I negotiated the rate for her. I helped women line old pocketbooks, fix chipped china, or find a glass banana boat. I kept a life in my personal book with recommendations for the best wedding-dress atelier (Mark Ingram, who’d once worked at BG), shoemaker, dry cleaners, ad infinitum. I don’t know how often my own dear dentist was called on for an emergency toothache or a broken something-or-other. Requests for restaurant recommendations were so frequent that it was like a second job.
I like to make myself useful and therefore built a strong network of resources. Finding a resolution for problems involving the unknown, the difficult, and the rare was more gratifying to me than selling the costliest dress or handbag. Information, which women carried with them out of my office and far beyond, was power. I wanted to give my ladies fortitude in all things, and in that they felt better for just having asked. Like lighting a candle in church, coming to see me was a ritual of comfort.
CHAPTER
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Seven
I was aghast by what I found when I opened the garment bag that had been returned to my office—wire hangers.
Nothing in the store—or my closet—not even a cotton brassiere, hung on a wire hanger, those slippery harbingers of misshapen garments. I knew that the clothes, returned as if new, were used. A few weeks earlier, I had walked a wardrobe stylist for a photo shoot through the store to find clothes—a very new area of my business, servicing theatrical people.
Costume designers, an unknown entity to me when I began Studio Services as part of my department, needed a way to borrow clothes for a play, a movie, or an Estée Lauder advertisement—and return the pieces that didn’t work. This was as novel to the store as it was to me. Loaning clothes was very scary, because one doesn’t want them coming back with stains, or pins, or having been used. There is, unfortunately, a lot of sneakiness around clothes. (I once had a very devious private client who tore the buttons off a Chanel suit delivered to her home and called me to claim that the suit hadn’t come with buttons—as if I would ever send a garment that wasn’t in perfect shape, let alone without buttons! I pictured her having the extra buttons sewn onto a sweater in some kind of twofer.) Just to get the clothes out of the store, we had to go through security, credit ratings, everything short of asking for birth certificates.
The clothes from that early photo shoot came back on wire hangers, which told me they had been cleaned. It was a dead giveaway. All I was missing was the dry cleaner’s ticket. Wear-it-and-return was not a game I was interested in playing.
Although this was my first time in this game, I’d been on the playground for some time now and knew exactly how to handle the situation. I picked up the phone and put the fear of death into the stylist.
“You didn’t use a very good cleaner,” I said.
My office has always been known for establishing boundaries. I live in strict adherence to procedure and protocol and expect those in my orbit, no matter how briefly, to do the same. I came up with the plan of charging a fee of 15 percent, which was unheard of. That way if no clothes were kept from the pull, there was still a charge. I quickly established a reputation for being very tough, which was fine by me. I’m extremely particular about whom I work with and would rather turn a stylist down if something about it doesn’t sit right with me. The wire hangers were an early lesson in that!
There were so many productions with big budgets, big-name actors, and big wardrobe budgets filming in New York in the eighties that I didn’t have to worry about losing a few shifty stylists to my forthright manner. I suspect that some of them did stay away because of it, but then I was better off without them. Studio Services attracted the best in the business just as it became a very large and previously untapped source of revenue for the store.
The production designer Santo Loquasto and his costume designer, Jeffrey Kurland, were certainly counted among those at the top of their fields. I first met them in 1980 when they arrived in search of a high-end look for Lauren Bacall in a film called The Fan. For the thriller, in which Ms. Bacall played a glamorous star of stage and screen with a violent stalker, we went in for very extravagant clothes: Armani, Claude Montana, Chanel. The movie was a critical flop, but Jeffrey, Santo, and I, who share a love of beautiful fabrics and a wit that burns like acid, became family immediately.
