I'll Drink to That: A Life in Style, with a Twist Page 10

  He was tough but wonderful, and we made a very good team. He showed the clothes, and I would get the coffee. People wondered why I let him push me around, but being ordered around was just what I needed. With my personal life growing more and more chaotic, the last thing I wanted was responsibility at work. Instead ours was an apprenticeship where Ernst taught me that it’s truly possible to be a gentleman—or a gentlewoman—and be successful in business.

  I watched as Ernst dealt with the buyers in his soft Germanic way, no matter how difficult or demanding they were. They needled for 20 percent off, complained about the hemline, wanted quicker deliveries, and left with only two dozen pieces after hours of debate. Until you got an order from somebody, you could choke to death. All the while Ernst showed the utmost patience, applying his precision to their maelstrom. As soon as the door closed, however, he let it be known how he really felt. Those clients would never have come back if they could have heard him.

  While Ernst did the selling to stores like Saks or Neiman Marcus, he designated to me the small specialty stores across the country. Although a particular store might buy only four pieces, I found working with them extremely gratifying. They had a direct connection to their customers and knew exactly when something they bought worked or didn’t. I never thought I would feel the satisfaction I did when they said, “Betty, that dress you sold us was brilliant.” Not to mention when they reordered a piece.

  We had to drag Mr. Beene out to meet the head of Saks or someone similarly important to sales when anyone like that was in the showroom. A private and mysterious man, he much preferred the company of his two beloved dachshunds in his office where the door was always closed. The chance of spotting our reclusive mentor on any given day was unlikely. However, we always knew he was “behind the door,” and that was enough to strike fear into our hearts. He wasn’t a communicative man but rather the quintessential designer hiding behind his bolts of exquisite cloth. Still, in his secretive way he knew everything and everyone (I always thought he ran a spy system). He would never tell you directly that he didn’t like what you were wearing that day or how something looked during a fashion show. Instead the message came down with alarming alacrity from the powers that be.

  Mr. Beene gave constant agita to everyone at the company, from the executives to the men in shipping, not because of his elusive style but because no one ever knew what he was going to do next. Mr. Beene listened to the press and fashion editors and then went on to do exactly what he wanted. That included creating dresses, coats, jackets that were way before their time and could never make it to the selling floor. (If they were presented today, the whole world would wear Geoffrey Beene.)

  In his fetish for fabrics, he traveled to family-run European factories where he picked up bolts of rare and opulent cloth that upon his return he cut into the most divine pieces, which could never go into production because he had only that limited amount of material. The head of production tore his hair out. The business manager screamed. But there was nothing to be done about it; the styles couldn’t be included in the new line. (Much later Mr. Beene opened a little shop in the Sherry-Netherland that became a marvelous outlet for his lavish, one-of-a-kind clothing.)

  Although I worked for Mr. Beene in the smallest way, I swallowed the whole experience in gulps, including his clothes, which I wore religiously. I loved his beautiful dresses and wonderfully structured jackets. During my time at Geoffrey Beene, he introduced the jumpsuit. This was before the era of separates, and women like me didn’t wear trousers. But I did wear his jumpsuit. They zipped in the back, which made going to the bathroom impossible, but made from his soft, supple jersey material they looked great with any one of my lapel pins. (Isaac Mizrahi later copied Mr. Beene’s jumpsuit, except the younger designer put the zipper in the front, making trips to the restroom much more reasonable.)

  I followed Mr. Beene in his revolutionary move to introduce pants, but that was the extent of my rebellion. Although the city was home to more radical elements through the sixties and seventies, I still lived a booked life. There were funkier places to go, but I didn’t attend them. Sonny and I still made reservations.

  Unfortunately, the midpriced line I was working for at Geoffrey Beene didn’t stay at the party too long. After the division was closed, Ernst and I were invited to join couture, but that was way out of our milieu. The couture people were very vigorous sellers on the road with the clothes—traveling, doing trunk shows, and dining with the heads of couture departments across the country. They were too aggressive in their manner of selling for my mind-set. Plus, the idea of traveling alone and being responsible for large orders was too terrifying.

  Again I told myself I didn’t care. This time it was harder to rationalize. It was summer, and Sonny and I were off to the Berkshires for a very troublesome season. Without the structure and camaraderie of work or the company of my husband, whom I suspected was finding comfort in arms other than mine, I searched for an antidote for my loneliness. It’s an old story, but I found my diversion one evening at a large party, in another man.

  How easy it was to cross the line. Each time I knew it was wrong, as anyone entering into a similar situation does, but I plunged in, and when I came up, it was as if I had resurfaced from a pool to see blue, uncluttered sky. The fact that I was still attractive enough to excite someone thrilled me.

  Rather than being all about having a sexual experience, I needed a man to talk to. Sonny was so gregarious in public, with his light, airy talk, but not one-on-one. He truly could not express himself. So the men I picked all shared two common factors: They were attracted to me, and they talked to me.

  As for this man at the party, we talked about marriage (for he was married with children as well), work, lives, romance, longing. For a while the communication was enough to let me forget about everything else, but I soon discovered that sneaking around corners is not wonderful. We couldn’t sit in a restaurant and have lunch or hold hands and walk down the street. We had to steal a few hours here and there, meeting at his brother’s apartment or in a hotel room at 1 Fifth Avenue.

  Trysts are for the lighthearted, and I’m not a lighthearted woman. I began to want more than furtive meetings and late afternoons. But you can’t get much more out of an affair. I quickly became too intense in my need and longing, and just as quickly my lover decided he couldn’t see me anymore.

  The old hurt resurfaced. Abandonment, this time in the form of a man whose tie to me was no bigger than a hotel key, fueled my desperation. Why did I set myself up for rejection again and again? Locked in a terrible loop, I became depressed and knew I had to find something to do with myself or I would fall apart. I felt I couldn’t get out of bed in the mornings.

  When someone from Oscar de la Renta’s office called asking if I could come in and help out, I said yes immediately. The fit, however, was not good. I spent two months ineptly trying to sell Mr. de la Renta’s famously ornate ball gowns. I tripped over tulle while his devoted clientele, social ladies of the highest order, acted as if I had just popped in from the Bowery to sell them a dress.

  What made the job truly unbearable, however, weren’t the dresses but the people. Mr. de la Renta swept in, swept out, and never looked at anyone. I don’t care if you are making hot dogs—to create a work environment without camaraderie is not fair to anyone. Mr. Beene might have been the quietest, most behind-the-scenes human being I’ve ever known, with those who worked for him often arguing like a big family, but we had fun. There’s no point if you don’t have that.

  When the people at de la Renta finally realized they didn’t care for my work either, my dear friend Ernst contacted me to come interview with the Japanese designer Hanae Mori, and I went happily. Madame Mori, in the vein of Mr. Beene, was rarely seen. She glided in and out of her sumptuous whitewashed town house on East Seventy-ninth Street, but hers was a good group. I instantly picked up where I’d left off, following my old routine of
soft selling from behind Ernst, only Madame Mori’s clothes were flowing and ethereal, so different from Mr. Beene’s architectural designs, in fabrics with the printed motifs of sea, mountains, and flowers of her native Japan.

  I liked work (except when an ex-general and company executive came to America, and then we were in detention camp!), but home was so very bad. With Sonny growing ever more distant through drink, I threw on top of my accusations against him new, hurtful admissions of my own infidelity that I recognized were motivated more from getting a rise out of him than from any kind of personal passion. If that was my aim, then I failed miserably. He remained mum.

  As far as I was concerned, I had failed miserably at everything. I didn’t even know how to end my own marriage. My mother had always been the one to get rid of boys for me, but this I had to do myself.

  I asked Sonny to leave. Again.

  While the two of us sat in the den, I said, “You know what, Sonny? I think the both of us will be happier.”

  He didn’t need convincing. This time Sonny was leaving without complaint.

  “I suspect I’ll be married within the year,” I said defiantly.

  “I suspect you will,” he said.

  The minute he went out the door, however, I knew I had made a mistake. Whether it was my parents leaving me home over Christmas or my college boyfriend breaking up with me, desertion was always my undoing.

  I walked into the kitchen. The flower-patterned wallpaper from the fifties and the white wooden cabinets reaching to the ceiling were relics. The scene of bustling, careful preparations for many children’s meals, dinner parties, and holiday feasts was now solitary and unused. Pots, pans, and all, left just as it had been when we were a family.

  In the month after Sonny’s departure, I swallowed nothing. I was so engrossed in myself and filled up on self-pity that I never gave a thought to eating. Not even my little family at Hanae Mori, where everyone worried about the great deal of weight I had lost, moved me from my misery. I looked at the job as filling time (completely unaware of how much I was learning and to what end it would come).

  My worst fear—of being alone—was realized. And I had brought it on myself. I didn’t know what to do with myself. I tried another liaison, this time with a doctor in the vein of my nana’s particular fondness for men in the medical profession. But unlike Nana, I wasn’t indulging myself in a pleasure but rather trying to hang on to something I had already lost. In my absurd attempt to replace Sonny with another man, I scared off the doctor, who was decidedly not interested in my particular case of the clinging syndrome. The breakup compounded my dejection, leaving me feeling lonelier than before.

  Now, in the kitchen, I opened the middle of three wooden drawers, which was in turn divided into three horizontal sections: the first for small knives, melon scoopers, can openers, and other small kitchen equipment; the second for my sharpest carving, bread, paring, and other knives; and the third for gadgets, like biscuit and pizza cutters, that I rarely used.

  My hand reached for the middle section and chose a small ordinary paring knife. I understood perfectly well where my actions would take me. I wanted to be in a hospital. I wanted to sink. Sonny will feel sorry for me, I reasoned. And he will have to come back.

  I swept the blade across my wrist in the merest nick, a brushstroke really, not deep but a cut nonetheless. It would do. I did not want to take my own life; I wanted attention to be paid to me. Most important from Sonny, who would have to come home now and make everything fine. I picked up the phone on the kitchen wall and called Helene, a friend who also happened to be the wife of my personal physician.

  “I think you had better come get me,” I said.

  She arrived so fast and did just what I wanted, calling her husband, who made the arrangements at Payne Whitney, a psychiatric hospital in a gloomy mansion-style building on the Upper East Side that overlooked the equally forbidding waters of the East River. We sat in a very small waiting room and talked, although not about what I’d done to myself. While she was doing everything to make me feel that “it was going to be all right,” I could tell she was more frightened than I.

  When I went into the admitting office, I knew full well what I was doing, and I committed myself. Once I heard the set of huge iron doors slam shut, however, I had a complete change of heart.

  What have I done? What am I going to do? I have a dog to care for. Frieda will wonder where I am.

  That slam woke me up to reality: No one was going to come get me. With the realization that I had literally locked myself in, fright turned to overwhelming anxiety.

  After a doctor looked me over, I was taken to a room with eight beds, each covered in sad, gray bed linens. As the day wore into night, the other beds filled with women, ill, ghostlike characters out of a Fellini movie, until the lights went out on our silent group. The burning end of a cigarette made a little glowing loop around my bed as one of my bunkmates circled and circled without end. Every hour on the hour, an attendant with a flashlight appeared, shining his beam on each of us individually. However, what frightened me more than my circling roommate or the alarming hourly inspection was the communal bathroom. I had never shared a bathroom with anyone. Sharing one with eight strangers was horrid, horrid, horrid. I did not close my eyes that night. At midnight I was sent for. A pair of attendants fetched me from my room to be weighed by the doctor in the middle of the night as if it were Auschwitz. I weighed ninety-eight pounds.

  The next day Frieda came to visit. Arriving with my own pillow and fresh pillowcases to replace the ones on my bed, she took one look at me and cried. This is wonderful, I thought. I’ve reduced Frau to tears. I didn’t even know that was possible. When she left, her departure marked by the sound of the iron door clicking open and clacking shut, the outside world ceased to exist.

  I quickly adjusted to the wrapped-in-batting feeling of life in the hospital. Sick people became my friends, horror stories replaced polite conversation, and time was organized by orderlies in white. None of us patients relinquished our problems so easily, though. Locked up, I still found a way to hold on to my ability to control—through getting dressed.

  The default style in Payne Whitney was disheveled. Most patients spent their day in robes, as if announcing their depression through the sad and nubby material around them. I had lost so much weight that I needed safety pins to keep my pants up, and my shirts were far from pressed, but that inner compulsion to get up every day and put myself together never left me. It wasn’t vanity—rather the remnants of my sanity.

  Others admired my clothing and didn’t recognize it for the safety blanket it was. In group therapy the other patients poked their fingers at me and said, “But you don’t really belong here.”

  Why? Because of the way I looked?

  Dressing has always been easy for me. I have never in day-to-day living given a lot of thought to it. I guess it was what’s known as a gift. “You always look so put together” was a common refrain. Feeling people looking, however, filled me with dread. Having my mother always telling me, “You’re so pretty,” made me jump, like a person being shocked by a loud noise. I don’t care how pretty you are—if you don’t feel pretty, hearing someone say you are makes you so miserable. With each compliment I withdrew more into nameless bad thoughts and buried fears.

  Even in Payne Whitney, I had them fooled. During group sessions the other patients spit out, “You look and act normal.”

  “What are you doing here?” everyone wanted to know.

  “I belong here, too,” I said.

  My insides were as debilitated as theirs. In reaction to the chaos I’d felt ever since I was a small child, everything had to be my way. From the placement of a button on a skirt to the presents my husband purchased for me, inflexibility was my armor. Only the trait I’d developed as protection had turned on me—something I was forced to confront when Sonny finally came to visit.

/>   When I first spotted him through the window, coming up the walkway to the entrance surrounded by all of April’s growing things, I was elated. Although I was behind bars, the buds on the trees burst with green and my favorite lilacs were in bloom (anyone who came to visit always brought a small bouquet of spring). Regarding the man from afar, I could see that he was so different from the one I’d married. The laughing playboy was bloated and heavy-lidded. Nonetheless I was so glad to see him; he was going to get me out of this living hell.

  I was led into a room with four doctors waiting and told to take a seat. Sonny then walked in. I got up to greet him and received a very cold greeting in return. He sat down, and I sat down. The doctors proceeded to lob a series of questions at him, each one ending in an answer that pained me as if my seat had become an electric chair. No matter how dire his responses, I clung to the hope that he was there to save me.

  “What would you say is the future of this marriage?” a doctor asked.

  “I’m ninety-nine percent sure it’s over,” he answered.

  One percent!

  Taking those bad odds, I humbled myself before him.

  “I know we can do this,” I begged. “I’ve learned so much here. Look at me. I’m a different person.”

  In typical Sonny fashion, he buttoned his lip—and broke my heart.

  I was more adrift than when I had entered the hospital. The pain was everywhere. The sadness in Mother’s big blue eyes during her visits was unbearable. I knew that as she gazed upon me, she not only felt the concern of any mother for a sick child but also saw something of herself. When my father died eight years earlier of a heart attack at the age of fifty-six, Mother was inconsolable and stopped eating. Although they’d had some beautiful fights, she worshipped him, and his dying sent her to the psychiatric ward of a hospital with a broken heart for almost a month. After she was discharged, Sonny and I moved her from the brownstone she loved into an apartment in a new high-rise around the block, a place she hated. It didn’t matter that it faced Lake Michigan; her new apartment was too small for her taste. She had never lived in a one-bedroom apartment, and despite how charmingly the designer and Mother’s friend Bruce Gregga had decorated it in blue and white, she never really lived there. When anyone who walked in gushed over the wonderful view, she said, “I don’t live looking out a window at the view.”