I'll Drink to That: A Life in Style, with a Twist Page 12

  Ms. Fendi’s compliment on my first-day-of-work outfit, delivered by way of a San Marco–style carrier pigeon, made me cringe. Husbands at cocktail parties, buyers at Mr. Beene’s showroom, and mental patients were interested in me because of my clothes. It proved my hunch that I was nothing but a fraud. Ms. Fendi saw a woman with her chin up as if she owned the store, not the real terrified wreck who was in way over her head. So she liked my suit, my blouse, my jewelry. So what? It didn’t help. With the suspicious eyes of the vendeuses on me, I had no idea what I was doing.

  My instincts were right; I was a dreadful salesperson.

  Years before, I’d confided in my mother that I was bored and wanted to work. My father, who forbade me to work my entire life (he didn’t see room for a job on my pedestal), was no longer alive. I thought I would find a sympathetic ear with my mother, who always loved working. (My father encouraged her to work at a hospital shop, because its unpaid status gave it a dignified air—and it meant he didn’t have to come home from the office.)

  “Do anything,” she said. “Just don’t take clothes on and off of people.”

  In other words, don’t become a salesperson.

  Here I was doing just that—even if the clothes were costly couture coming off very wealthy backs. I had always listened to the advice of my mother as if my life depended on it. Was my job at Bergdorf nothing more than an act of rebellion at the less-than-tender age of forty?

  My mother, however, was wrong. Taking clothes off and on people wasn’t so bad. In fact, I rather liked it. I loved dressing the women who came into the store, either putting together entire outfits or showing them how to change what they had on with accent pieces. I found the way they glowed when they saw themselves in a different, more beautiful light peculiarly gratifying. I marveled that something so easy for me could mean so much to others.

  What I detested was selling on the floor. As soon as the process of shopping became a commercial transaction, as opposed to a creative endeavor, I chilled to the whole enterprise. In the showrooms of Mr. Beene, Mr. Weinberg, and Madame Mori, I was working on a salary, so when buyers ordered pieces for their stores, it came across as a testament to their faith in the product and a belief in my ability to convey its beauty. On commission, which was the law of the fourth-floor jungle, each sale one had to enter in a ledger like some bookkeeper was a predatory act—and I was nowhere near as hungry as the vendeuses.

  They were a mixed group from all nationalities and walks of life. (Some were quite eccentric: Miss Violet, in her sixties when I met her, was known for ice-skating in Central Park during her lunch hour when she started working for the store at fourteen.) What they all shared was an ability to sell. As a shopper entered the store, a woman sitting behind a glass cage alerted them to her presence over a public-address system. Hearing “Miss Violet, come forward; client is here” over the loudspeaker set my teeth on edge. But it didn’t have that effect on the salespeople. For them selling was a mercenary sport that included cutting customers off at the elevator on the way to a colleague or hiding clothes for their clients in the most inconceivable and inaccessible places. They layered items of clothing on top of each other and then threw a coat over the whole thing, so that no one had a clue what was way underneath. Talk about hiding in plain sight!

  I dodged the whole thing. I was never on the call system, and I did everything—including give my sales away—to avoid learning how to use the cash register. I’d never cared much for mathematics. The whole system made me feel incompetent and stupid. In those days one used a cash register and wrote down the sale in a sales book. I never did. I waited on people, showed them clothes, fit them, and, once the sale was complete, walked the receipt straight over to one of the other saleswomen, who was more than happy to do the arithmetic and add it to her sales numbers. There was a special room where the women wrote up their sales and made their phone calls to clients. I never had a section of that room. I wondered, observed, dressed clients, and grew to love those women who would kill for a sale. In the end they were like old relatives who tell all sorts of tales that no one is ever sure are true.

  Not surprisingly, I didn’t stay too long at the coldly exclusive fourth floor. By the fall I had a new assignment two floors down, in a new department devoted to Mr. Beene’s clothes. The World of Geoffrey Beene, flanked by the fur department and Givenchy, was a beautiful store within a store and very Mr. Beene. Done in the designer’s favorite silver and black, the nook featured a divine French window overlooking Fifth Avenue. It made for a perfect satellite to house Mr. Beene’s revolutionary clothes and in which for me to hide out.

  I suspect that Mr. Beene had requested me; he liked things that were familiar, and I was familiar. I couldn’t be sure, however, because even though he came in regularly to dress the department, his private toy, he wasn’t the friendliest or most communicative man. But it didn’t go unnoticed that I knew his clothes on an intimate level. I had shared many meals and celebrations with the people who cut and sewed the airy jumpsuits, the long-sleeved dresses, and the crisp boleros with hidden spiraling seams that worked like magic on a woman’s body. In his very silent way, he liked how I dressed and the fact that I wasn’t the typical needy salesperson. Most important, he trusted me.

  I turned the World of Geoffrey Beene into my world. Like me, Mr. Beene was a maniac about order, and he saw to every detail of his department, including the furnishings. A small obelisk in onyx pointed upward toward a rack of knit dresses. A lovely Jean Arp pencil work of small black shapes hanging on the wall mimicked the skins of two overlapping zebra rugs Mr. Beene had brought from home.

  If the designer loved a pattern or form, it could pop up anywhere from a fauteuil’s upholstery to an evening gown of silk panne velvet. The hunt for special objects to pique his imagination was a relentless pursuit. Dachshund statues, Chinese rock-crystal urns, American folk benches, or gilt mirrors with gold flowers growing through their middle all found a place in his world.

  These things plucked from Palm Beach antique stores, Paris flea markets, country auctions, and Manhattan galleries under his singular vision came together like his cocktail dress of black velvet, lace, and plaid silk taffeta. Only a genius like Mr. Beene could make such a hodgepodge of incongruous parts play together in modern harmony.

  The only chaos in my post was created by Mr. Beene himself, who could appear at the store with new merchandise, at any hour, at least a few times a week. Having cut these last-minute additions from his secret stash of unreproducible fabrics, Mr. Beene frightened most at the store the way he did in his own studio. His whims were the beauty, though, and the fun. And I made sure that women visiting the department understood Mr. Beene’s work. His clothes had to be put on, since they were not hanger clothes. The entire thing was to get women to try them on, which was not always easy. But when it came to making customers look beautiful, I didn’t mind becoming a little aggressive.

  Whatever I was doing, women liked it. Customers came to spend hours visiting even when they knew there was nothing new for them to try on. The shop was ever changing, and this brought the women in, if only just to see what was new or how it was newly put together. The same merchandise was placed differently or accessorized in a new way, much as when a store keeps changing its window displays. The same women returned again and again, and the World of Mr. Beene turned into a salon of sorts. Those who shopped there got something from me and I from them.

  Working at the store gave me a reason every morning to get out of bed, dress, and say good-bye to dear Frieda, upset that I had yet again skipped breakfast. No doctor could have ordered a better medicine.

  There was camaraderie as well, since I continued to pass my sales along to the ladies as I had done on the fourth floor. No sooner was I done with a client than I walked the items over to a salesperson in Givenchy and had her ring it up. Anything to avoid the dreaded cash register. After I’d been at Bergdorf for about a year, Mr. N
eimark cornered me in the fur salon and said, “Betty, there’s no record of your having a single sale!

  “What am I going to do with you?” he asked.

  I honestly didn’t know. It was clear that being on the floor didn’t suit me. Even the World of Geoffrey Beene wasn’t exactly right. Yet I didn’t want my time at the store to end. I felt the tempo changing and wanted to be a part of it. There was something for me to do here, something for me to invent, a new and exciting challenge.

  “We are fond of you here,” Mr. Neimark said.

  Even though I worked in Mr. Beene’s department, when a client found a jacket and she didn’t know what to pair with it, I couldn’t resist pointing her to a skirt I thought would make an outfit—and while she was at it, there was the perfect pair of pumps in the first-floor shoe department. Women, craving the kind of direction I had to offer, returned to me over and over. The experience led to the realization that the store lacked an individual way for women to shop with help from knowledgeable people who knew what was in the store.

  The practice of personal shopping was nothing new. It already existed at other big specialty stores like Bloomingdale’s and Saks, adding a layer of luxury—the luxury of personal attention—to the shopping experience.

  There were two ladies who shopped for clients throughout the store. The first, Madame Roux, a relative of Monsieur Givenchy (or so she said)—very coiffed, proper, well dressed, and French—spent most of her day in a small, neat office with a pen in one hand and a phone in the other. Her counterpart, Jo Hughes, who took care of the city’s biggest socialites, always had the remnants of lunch down her front. Tony, a dirty little shih tzu, accompanied her everywhere, even as she tended to the heiresses of the time. Tony even went with his owner, whose temper was legendary, to lunch at La Côte Basque or 21, where he was apparently checked in the coatroom. That was personal shopping at Bergdorf Goodman!

  In my time at the store, I had learned that I could put people together as well as I did myself. It wasn’t just about showing them the best blouse to fit a large bosom. First I gained their confidence, and then I taught them how to tie a scarf.

  “Betty,” Mr. Neimark said, “what would you like to do?”

  I had a sense, however dim, that this was my chance to create something. My gut feeling was as strong as my stomach was weak. This was an opportunity that would not come around again.

  “Bergdorf needs a proper personal-shopping office,” I said. “Take me off the floor and let me do something. I believe I can build a department around individual help.”

  Where did I get the nerve? Mr. Neimark didn’t say no. He didn’t say anything at all. My stomach lurched. What was I thinking, making such an outlandish request? He hadn’t known what to do with me when they hired me, but then again no one ever has.

  The answer to my request eventually came in the form of one of fashion’s greatest tests, when out of the blue I was summoned to the Givenchy department by Mr. Neimark “to help a very important client.”

  “We want to see what you can do for her,” he said.

  I walked into Givenchy to meet the client.

  Mrs. Paley.

  Babe Paley.

  The most fashionable woman in the world.

  What in God’s name was I going to do for her? The swan-necked wife of CBS founder Bill Paley, universally admired for her remarkable beauty and style, was the ultimate trendsetter. This was quite a trial all right. The powers-that-be were throwing me into the lion’s den to see if I would come up alive.

  After introducing myself with much politeness, I said the first thing that struck me: How did she get her thick crop of hair that magnificent blue-gray?

  “I really have to ask you this: Everyone says you use Tintex on your hair to get that gorgeous gray color. Is it true?” I asked referring to the powder dye intended for clothes. It was said she used white Tintex as a rinse.

  It wasn’t true she said.

  “Well, it’s a wonderful, interesting rumor.”

  From then on we had a lovely time. I admired her bone structure. I also wondered to myself if the news I’d heard that she was in the first stages of cancer was true. I can hardly say I did anything for Mrs. Paley’s style. She could have put on the stockroom clerk’s uniform and looked like a queen. What I did do was make her comfortable and entertain her enough for an afternoon that I earned a chance to run my own department: Solutions. (I did not come up with the name, nor do I particularly like it. “This isn’t a drugstore,” I said when I first heard it. “That’s where you find solutions.” Nobody, in all these years, has ever owned up to naming this department. And whoever it was, he or she is long gone. I still rarely use the name, and I guess it is so much my place today that I forget. I have never answered the phone, “Solutions department!”)

  One solution at least was my salary. The two hundred dollars I earned each week from the store meant I didn’t have to rely on a commission, or entirely on Sonny. Up until then I had been completely beholden to the man, who was still angrily paying my rent, my meat-market bills, Frieda, and Philip. For the first time in my life, I had a taste of independence. While Sonny continued to pay my rent and Frieda, taking my paycheck to the bank and opening my very first account was thrilling.

  My “office” was the last two dressing rooms in a corridor of them tucked away around a corner on the third floor. Concealment is the hallmark of exclusivity, but this was taking it a bit far. I wondered how anyone was going to find me. However rough or hidden, the space was immediately redeemed by the most marvelous six-over-six sash window with a glorious view of the Plaza that opened up to Central Park, which stretched optimistically uptown and met the gorgeous limestone buildings of Fifth Avenue. Oddly enough, it reminded me of the window through which I had watched the trees bloom while at Payne Whitney.

  If I thought I would disappear into my new department, I was sorely mistaken. Not a few days into the job, I arrived at work to find a plain unmarked envelope taped to the door. Across the heavy paper stock in a familiar elegant, low-slung cursive was my name. Clearly someone had found me.

  As I walked into my office, I began to read the letter, which shockingly turned out to be from Mr. Beene. Barely a sentence or two into the letter, its content went from mystifying to terrifying. The silent man I knew to show very little emotion had had a ghastly reaction to my leaving his department. “How could you leave?” wrote a furious Mr. Beene. “When you were sick, I saved you from a mental institution. I bailed you out.”

  I gasped at this claim, which came as swift and hurtful as a kick in the stomach, shocking. A year ago it would have sent me into a permanent fetal position. But instead, a year into my analysis with Philip, I sat down at my desk and took out my own envelope.

  Analysis can be very painful. For me, everything about it, even the hour I was given for my appointment, was difficult. The nine o’clock hour was never free in all the years I saw Philip. It was 7:00 or 8:00 A.M. that I’d have to run for. After the unsettling, tremulous elevator ride, I’d have to sit in his waiting room, where all the other patients were much younger than I. None of them looked anything like me.

  The sum total felt like a test to see if Betty was going to make it. But I never canceled an appointment (even the day after a cataract operation). I was still worse than desperate when I went to see Philip. I wasn’t behind bars, and I wasn’t behind a locked door. But in essence I was still in the same place.

  If it wasn’t for the fear of getting so sick again, I certainly would have left after the first session. Reiterating and reopening yet again, for another person, the same old themes made me want to run home to polish every piece of silver that hadn’t seen the light of day since my last dinner party before Sonny’s departure or get on my hands and knees to buff the floors to a high shine although there weren’t any little feet coming in from the park to scuff them.

  We usually began
with the marriage, and then he delved back into my childhood. We would leave childhood and return to Sonny. We seemed to be going over and over the same foolish territory like people lost in a desert rambling around the same dune. Philip was dig-dig-digging into my inner soul.

  On the couch staring at the latest flower bulb that Philip was trying to coax life out of in a pot, I was in the midst of a familiar litany against Sonny, the old trying-to-keep-the-dining-set syndrome, when he tapped into a new font of meaning with one single sentence.

  “Betty, get out of your dollhouse,” he said.

  Why in heaven’s name would I do that? A dollhouse is perfection.

  The one I’d had as a child, a Colonial house with papered walls and Colonial furniture, was the most important thing I ever owned. I loved it so and wished more than anything that I’d kept it, but I do not come from a family of keepers. When Kathy was young, Sonny and I put together a white Colonial house for her. He electrified it and wallpapered it. And I bought wonderful wooden furniture from Mrs. Thorne at the Women’s Exchange in Chicago. Oh, it was very sweet. Kathy never loved that dollhouse as I did. But it wasn’t for her, then or now. Sonny and I did things in that dollhouse together, not unlike when we took the house up in the New England countryside. That was all dollhouse living. Except it wasn’t. In a dollhouse one moves the furniture around, but there is always a family—a mother, a father, children, a dog, some sort of contentment.

  But I didn’t know contentment. I had spent my whole life looking in, wanting to be there, and not being able to get in. I still fantasized that Sonny was coming back, even though by then he was living with another woman. Faced with abandonment, I regressed to a more comforting, if completely unreal, place.

  The Dollhouse Disease? I suppose one could call it that. I was a carrier my whole life.

  In all that repetition—you can’t hurry the process of analysis or explain it—Philip shook my dollhouse upside down, scattering all its little appointments and inhabitants. It was hideous, and then it wasn’t. I upended every little item in my miniature household to purge that which was very hidden.