I'll Drink to That: A Life in Style, with a Twist Page 13

  All the while Philip was a tremendous strength to me in what he did not say. “You’re doing better” or any of its iterations never came out of his mouth. He showed me how to heal myself.

  The man helped me to grow up. Although in the adult world I was standing alone—totally alone—it was real, and unlike a child playing with her dollhouse, I had choices.

  As I took Mr. Beene’s letter and placed it in a fresh envelope with SOLUTIONS BY BETTY HALBREICH engraved on the back, I thought, This cannot be rote. I’ve got to get on with it and start a new story here.

  Mr. Beene, who thought he had me stamped in the World of Geoffrey Beene for life, clearly did not like change. That was fine, but he had his facts all wrong. Yes, I’d been sick but he had nothing to do with saving me. Finally realizing I was worth saving, I was doing it myself.

  “I’m going to tell Mr. Neimark,” his letter threatened. “He needs to know what he’s taken on.”

  Mr. Beene was absolutely right. Mr. Neimark should know what he had taken on. I knew from analysis how hard it was to understand my own motivations, let alone begin to unpack those of someone as mercurial as Mr. Beene. That didn’t mean I had to suffer for his neuroses by cowering from the threat. I wrote Mr. Neimark’s name on the envelope and sent it right up to his office without any accompanying explanation.

  Mr. Neimark and Mr. Beene were friends with a long history, and there was a good chance I would be dismissed from a position where I saw the possibility of doing great things for the store, the clients, and myself. Despite that, with the release of the letter I felt a lightness not typical in my overly toilet-trained personality. Out the window the summer sun gleamed against the white stone of the Pulitzer Fountain plaza and its central bronze figure, Pomona, the goddess of abundance. If Mr. Neimark wanted to get rid of me, so be it. (I never heard from Mr. Neimark on the matter and feel that since he knew Mr. Beene and his idiosyncrasies so well, he tore up the dreadful letter and forgot all about it.) Conflicts, like bedding removed from the closet after winter, are greatly improved with a good airing. With that I stood up to walk the store in search of any new and interesting merchandise that might have made it to the floor since yesterday.

  So that’s how you do it, I thought while exiting my little office. You get on with life by facing it.

  CHAPTER

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  Six

  The phone rang as if we were a police station. On one line I talked to a new person, a very reluctant mother of the bride, who needed a dress for her daughter’s wedding. I wrote down “16” in my leather-bound datebook by her name when she answered, to the question of her size, “Twelve to fourteen.” My assistant, Cristina, meanwhile, was on the other line, fielding message after message.

  Tomorrow Mrs. Rodgers is bringing in the dress she bought last week. The seams are coming apart.

  Mrs. Kleeman wants to locate a Victor Costa dress she saw on One Life to Live today.

  The two of us, sitting on either side of the same Early American wood-grain table, worked to avoid knocking knees. I turned to the window, my salvation, for a little break. Gardeners, planting new Callery pear saplings on the side of the Pulitzer Fountain closest to my window, withered in the summer-afternoon sun. A few pigeons and people cooled their feet in the fountain’s water.

  The phone calls were only a small part of our day, which, like most of our days, was busy, tough, and without lunch. Clients, with appointments and without, had streamed in ceaselessly—each with her own pressing need. I thought Cristina, a nurse by training, was going to have a heart attack when not just the first and second wives but also the third wife of the same real-estate magnate called in succession as if bound by an uncanny sense of competition. Instead Cristina lit a cigarette, and so did I.

  Nicotine got us through a lot, including the last “patient” of the day, as Cristina and I liked to call them. The rail-thin wife of a restaurateur, who ran a nationwide empire of casual dining eateries with big portions and modest prices, had a voracious appetite for fashion. She shopped a lot, but now, pregnant with her first child, she was in all the time. Every time she went up a size, she wanted more clothes.

  With a thick black ponytail that ran the length of her back, she was so very beautiful that whatever I put on her, even in pregnancy, looked good. I put her in clothes current for the eighties. Thankfully, it was an era of big shirts and trapeze dresses, which worked well in pregnancy. I even got her into a full-legged jumpsuit.

  Luckily, I was able to glean enough from the store’s merchandise that she could continue to be tailored. This was a woman used to dressing every day in suits, day dresses, pantyhose, and proper shoes. For her to go from that to the offerings of maternity stores would have been unthinkable.

  Pregnant women today are much more provocative. In that time a woman like this didn’t walk around in tight dresses, leggings, or low necklines exposing huge breasts. Back then maternity fashion went to the other extreme. There were smocked tops as refined as a tablecloth with full pants that had a hole in the middle to accommodate the stomach. A woman looked like a penguin by the time she was done dressing. The other option, dresses with drawstrings that expanded when waistlines did, turned women into walking inflatable balloons. It was the most hideous dressing that ever existed. No wonder most pregnant women hid behind coats.

  Many would have laughed, or been horrified, at the thousands of dollars of merchandise I gathered for my pregnant client, but I empathized with her thirst for clothes. While I was nine months pregnant with John, I went to my mother- and father-in-law’s lavish anniversary party at the Hampshire House in a strapless, full-skirted red tulle evening gown that I purchased from Lord & Taylor several sizes larger than I normally wore. If I had to rely on clothing from a maternity shop, I would not have attended the event!

  My understanding of my client ran deeper than a sense of style. Having lost her mother at such a young age that her father was not capable of caring for her, she was raised by a grandmother too depressed by her own daughter’s death to be much of a caretaker to anyone. My client was a woman without a mother, but when the two of us were in my fitting room, I temporarily stood in for one. Every time she tried on a new piece, before she even looked at herself, she looked up at me in the mirror to see whether I approved or not.

  “It’s wonderful—and different,” I said about a smock top with dramatic balloon sleeves and a gathered bateau neckline. “No one else will have it.”

  “Oh no, take that off immediately!” I said about a wrap dress that was a failed experiment.

  In those moments she was at ease, which was no small thing. A nonnative of this city, like myself, she had been thrust into the most difficult, the most competitive, the most über–New York world through her husband’s business. Gossips scrutinized her from head to toe. She deserved a moment of peace.

  As I walked her out of the office and to the elevator, she had a contented smile on her face, as she always did when we finished a session. I felt as if I had done something rewarding for her.

  Back in the office, Cristina had gone into the armoire that held the billings and other paperwork and come out with the bottle of wine we kept for when we truly had reached the end of our rope. It was also for many of our late-day clients who requested a glass—maybe to ease their consciences or for the camaraderie brought by sharing a drink.

  No sooner had I sat down at the wooden table than the phone rang. It was my client who had just left, calling me from a pay phone!

  “Should I wear a jacket or a sweater over the jumpsuit?” she asked.

  “I would do a jacket.”

  “Maybe I should come in, then, and get another jacket.”

  Now, this was a very smart woman (she had been in the middle of getting a Ph.D. in economics when she married); she knew the answers to the questions she’d conjured up on her way out the door. Like Hansel and Gretel an
d the crumbs they dropped, she threw them out so that she could return.

  “Put your feet up, dear. Call me tomorrow,” I said.

  I hung up and lifted my hard-earned drink to my lips, but before I could take a sip, Andrew Goodman passed by our office as he did almost every evening after the store closed. Although Mr. Goodman no longer owned the family business, he retained the title of chairman and a seventeen-room penthouse apartment on the top floor of the store. He reminded me of my father in the masculine way he smoked a cigarette, walked the store as Dad did in the department store he ran in Chicago, and dressed—right down to his brown English cordovan shoes.

  “Busy day?” he asked, poking his head into the door.

  “Yes, Mr. Goodman. Very busy.”

  I don’t recollect how word got around about my little department. I don’t even remember how I got my first break, but Solutions grew very quickly—as did I.

  There was no advertising. Quite the opposite; my office was as hard to find as a speakeasy. People from my old life came to gawk. Friends from when Sonny and I were together couldn’t imagine I was capable of holding a position, since none of them had nine-to-five jobs. A few returned to become clients, which was not a problem, because from the beginning I divided myself. When I took care of people I knew, I made it clear I did not own the store. This wasn’t Bergdorf, Goodman, and Halbreich. The store was a wonderful façade behind which I could stand my ground and become a true professional.

  Word quickly spread as I transferred my past life in clothes to my new department. I took the lady of leisure style off my back and put it on others, particularly women who didn’t have only wealth but also big lives. With charities, multiple households around the world, and complicated families to run, they wanted to be fashionable but not look like everyone else. And they certainly couldn’t be seen in the same dress twice—in the past I never would have either.

  These women didn’t have time to waste meandering through racks of clothes. The actual act of finding what one is looking for is the part of shopping that proves so difficult for people. Stores make it their business to be confusing. Shuffling merchandise in devious ways, they want customers to go around in circles and to create the impression that there is new merchandise every month when really it’s the same old stuff. To come in for a blazer and be able to go right to it, you would have to make shopping your life’s work (which, of course, some people do).

  I also found that many women were puzzled by fit and that I was much needed to help them with finding their correct size. Even salespersons had a hard time with sizing, which became a large part of my business. Fit is not in the forefront of most people’s sensibility. No one knows how to use a three-way mirror to see the rear either! For me an ill-fitting garment is as grating as nails on a chalkboard.

  Many people arrived in outfits that were ghastly in their fit and color, but they had to be convinced to part with them because of the clothing’s label. If one buys a piece because of a label or a particular store and it is not becoming, that item is worth nothing. It can be the most wonderful dress in the world (and marked down to the best price!), but if it doesn’t fit, it might as well become a mop-up cloth. Terribly costly mistakes like this are made all the time—and they come with a lot of guilt. (I know, because I have a dozen pairs of shoes in my closet that are so beautiful. Only my feet don’t think so. I would like to wear them on my hands. Then I could absolve myself of the guilt I feel at all the money I spent on the shoes themselves and on the shoemaker who tried to stretch them.)

  The women who came to Solutions wanted to be attractive and stylish, but otherwise they were of all sizes, psychological states, and statures. An early visitor was Estée Lauder, whom I’d met some twenty years earlier at the hair salon not long after I first arrived in New York. While other women sat under the hair dryers, the future cosmetics company founder produced little blue pots of homemade creams that she applied to our faces. When Estée came to the department, she brought along her daughter-in-law Jo Carole and her granddaughters, Aerin and Jane. While we did Jo’s fittings, the little girls in their snowsuits chewed bubble gum and begged to go home. (I think of this moment whenever I see Aerin, now the owner of a beauty-and-lifestyle brand, who is her grandmother reincarnated.)

  More than a few female politicians—such as then–San Francisco mayor Dianne Feinstein, who towered at five foot ten, and the late Texas governor Ann Richards, with her famous immovable white hair that swirled like a cone of vanilla soft-serve—arrived for last-minute (usually that night) occasions. My office became an emergency room for serious cases of desperation shopping.

  Betty Ford became a client after her own desperation-shopping visit. She and President Ford came in together with the Secret Service, who waited outside the door—not least of all because there wasn’t any room for them in the office. Mrs. Ford emerged to show the president each dress we had chosen. In that act of a woman trying on dresses for her husband, they radiated a love I admired greatly.

  After choosing a petite, dramatic dress for the evening event, Mrs. Ford left to get her hair done while the president, a delightful and attractive man, waited in my office for the alterations to be completed by my wonderful fitter Jeanne, who could work miracles with her scissors and needle.

  When Jeanne came back down with the dress, it was immaculately pressed, professionally stuffed with mounds of tissue, and perfectly packed into a long garment bag that Mr. Ford instantly grabbed and slung under his arm as if it were a football from his University of Michigan linebacker days.

  “No, no, Mr. President!” I said with no thought to the decorum one takes with a head of state and only of that dress, which I grabbed out of his arm. “If you’re going to carry that dress, you have to take it by the handle like this.”

  While I showed him how to hold the bag properly, he turned to his security detail and said with a big grin, “Look at Betty! She’s teaching me how to hold my very first dress.”

  My instruction to the president aside, Solutions was mainly about dressing. My clients included executives judged on their appearances in a way unimaginable to any man, those of social importance expected to be leaders of taste, and women who simply loved clothes. For all of them, fashion played a great part in defining themselves, and in that I felt a terrific responsibility. With the concern of a surrogate mother and the freedom of that girl who wore her cardigan backward during the war, I refused to create carbon copies of any trend. Instead I pushed the boundaries of a woman’s individual style to help her establish a unique persona.

  It was far more complicated than how well a woman looked in anything I put together for her. In the fitting room, I wasn’t dressing only her, but I was also dressing for a mirror, a husband, children, in-laws, and a group of people at a dinner party. After they leave my clutches, clients go out into the world in the clothes I put on them and expect to be congratulated on how they look. If they don’t, I get a lot of blowback. “I don’t know, Betty, my husband didn’t really like that dress.” My answer to the problem of a dress that has been altered, tailored, and pressed, and so can’t be returned is, “Don’t wear it in his presence.”

  The accolades meant just as much work.

  “Everybody who saw it looooved that dress,” a client said.

  “Well, then you can’t wear it again.”

  To do this job right required a lot of legwork, and the only one helping me was my assistant, Cristina, who had no fashion sense whatsoever but a lot of smarts. As a nurse married to a doctor who’d moved to New York to do his residency, she had the wisdom to see that her life in her new city was too insular. She also had the strength to try something completely new. After falling in love with the store’s Vanderbilt mansion, she applied for and landed a job selling Penhaligon’s English toilet water on the ground floor. That’s where I was lucky enough to find her for my own department. Cristina, thin as a reed, came to work sometimes looki
ng like an unmade bed. If it wasn’t a Brooks Brothers shirt, she didn’t feel comfortable in it. But I didn’t hire her as my assistant because of her style. (She is still my dearest friend, whom I would call in the middle of the night if I were in trouble.)

  I’ve had a number of assistants over the years. When I interview, I never look at what someone is wearing. Well, that’s not exactly true. If the applicant comes in all dressed up or as a mirror image of me, I know immediately she isn’t right for the position. This job is not about clothes; it’s about people. It’s also a learning situation that begins at the very bottom. When you’re working for me, you’re working on the farm picking apples, which, translated to the landscape of personal shopping, means answering the phone and dealing with paperwork.

  Regardless, I am a snob. I enjoy people with intellect. My assistants had all read a book and knew something about the outside world before they came to me. I don’t need someone teetering on Louboutin shoes. I need someone to work with me.

  Not only did I admire Cristina’s courage in risking herself in a job that was way out of her milieu, but I also thoroughly enjoyed her wonderful sense of humor and her intelligence. She kept the receipts in good order (something at which I was a disaster). She also did her best to distract clients who popped in unexpectedly while I was helping someone else.

  No matter how entertaining Cristina was, she rarely succeeded in diverting a woman who insisted on seeing me. I don’t care if you’re the king of England or the queen of Prussia; I cannot take care of two people at a time. Even if one of them is a simple alteration, I become absolutely unhinged running from dressing room to dressing room.

  Once a wealthy woman, in from Mexico City for a few days, blew into my office looking for a very costly gown for a museum event because she had decided at the last minute she didn’t like the one she’d brought from home. I was in the middle of contemplating the hem of a pant with Jeanne and one of my regular clients, so I asked the woman to come back a little later. I will never leave one client to help another.