I'll Drink to That: A Life in Style, with a Twist Page 21

  “Every morning I’ve gotten up, I couldn’t wait to get here,” Mother told the Chicago Tribune in the last days before the shop’s shuttering. That wasn’t public-relations nonsense, but the God’s honest truth. She never took a day off, not even when I visited her in Chicago. I went from the airport to the bookstore, where I sat all day long watching her greet patrons and roll her eyes. (Mother had very large, expressive blue eyes that she used to great effect.) I was lucky if we went to dinner at a proper hour.

  Without the Oak Street Book Shop, suddenly there wasn’t a reason for her to get up at all. When she closed the store and got rid of her car, her running days were officially over. (She still kept a car in the garage in her building long after she stopped driving. Proud of the fact that she had been driving since sixteen, she didn’t want her freedom taken away. But my Jim finally convinced her to get rid of the expense, which she did by selling the vehicle to the garage’s porter for five hundred dollars—a nice tip!) With no more arguing about bestseller lists, driving to the grocery store, rolling her eyes in the bars with the young, she became uninterested in life and took to her bed.

  Although her health started to deteriorate, she never went to a doctor. She knew the best doctors on a social level, and they all loved her, but she practiced her own medicine: a lot of aspirin. “Everyone should practice a little Christian Science,” she used to say. After her independence went, all the ailments that were on stall opened up: her eyes, her back, even eating became a huge problem.

  Before she really went downhill, she had friends in the building who would look in on her, but she was ashamed of her appearance. Her dear friend and hairdresser Jim Foley came when she allowed it. His coiffing of her lifted her spirits, and for a few days she did feel a little better. She hated how she looked and declined invitations. As she retreated, all the pains she had endured crept up.

  I felt so bad that I couldn’t be there to look in on her. We spoke many times during the week, but it wasn’t enough. My job and a hatred of flying meant I didn’t get there as much as I would have liked. She always assured me she was fine; the women we had hired were fine, too. She became Mrs. Fine-Fine and never complained, even though the days were long and her eyesight didn’t allow her to keep up with her beloved reading. She suffered alone, but didn’t she want it that way. She wasn’t going to lose her dignity and wanted to leave as those who lived on had known her: vibrant, intelligent, and witty.

  We had a memorial for her with flowers she would have approved of after she died on October 21, 1998. In the days leading up to it, I set about cleaning her closets as I had done for many clients. The clothes I found were things she hadn’t used in a very long time. It was like going through a stranger’s closet. She had packed herself up and gone years before. I gave away almost everything except for her monogrammed handkerchiefs and many scarves. Monogrammed handkerchiefs were something Mother loved. We all had an abundance.

  At Rosehill Cemetery, which was as pretty as a park, we eulogized Mother around a giant array of flowers instead of a coffin. Somehow the florist found peonies and roses in pinks of all kinds, very feminine and not funereal. She would have liked that. It was the ultimate centerpiece.

  Just a small box, and she was buried next to my father. My son John put it into the ground with stationery and bookmarks from the store. Before we left, Kathy turned to me and said, “Now you can really start to live, Mom.” I don’t know what possessed my daughter to say that. My mother didn’t stop me from living; that was my choice. I hid behind her.

  We had been attached at the hip for a lifetime. In trips to the butcher, the baker, the greengrocer; lunches at the Pump Room; visits to Nana; breakups with boyfriends that she negotiated; my doomed marriage, so unlike the love affair she had with my father; my choice for a second act in Jim, who was decidedly not accomplished or glamorous enough for her taste; and afternoons in the bookstore watching her trade witty barbs with Chicago’s most intelligent men, I was always in her shadow. My mother and father glorified me in a way that unintentionally diminished me. In telling everyone how beautiful I was, they created a hothouse rose. They would have done anything short of murder to see me married to the richest man in the world and living on a yacht, in a penthouse, and more. They made me a fairy princess that I really didn’t want to be.

  I thought she was much smarter than I was. She was certainly much more assured. (The Chicago Tribune reported in her obituary that “she once told Lawrence Sanders . . . that his last book was so bad he must be in the cocktail hour of his life.” Then, just as I had goaded my first assistant, Cristina, into cutting her hair, Mother had told the novelist, “You can do better than this, Larry.”) With her silk violets, gardenias, or roses (according to the season) clutched at the neck of her dress, she rolled her big blue eyes in her dramatic Fanny Brice way and told it like it was. And people think I’m a character!

  There was one way in which we weren’t so different: work. When Carol Luiken, the All My Children costume designer, called my office “a salon of the grand order,” it made me think of Mother, coffee and cigarettes always close. She, too, ran a grand salon, no doubt about it.

  We were identical; we both listen to the world’s problems. As I’m dressing my clients, I learn so much about them. As she sold her books, and her patrons smoked their cigarettes and drank their coffee, she did the same thing. She was a super salesperson, soft and very savvy. In the same way that some people say I have a hand when fingering a supple glove-leather jacket or the beaded trim of a shift, so that they see the garment in a way they never would on the rack, Mother had a very sensuous way of selling.

  I witnessed her in action at the bookstore, patting a hardcover like it was a sweet small child’s cheek and saying, “Oh, this? This is the best, the best.”

  When she got into people’s heads, no one could resist her. Like me, she was really a schoolhouse psychiatrist. Both of us always got behind the diversionary dress or novel to the heart of the matter—except with each other. There we had no ability. Despite our closeness and deep devotion to each other, I never got any answers out of her about the secrets of our family, ever.

  When Mother was dying, I mustered the courage to ask about the story of her first marriage and my biological father. All I knew was that he had moved to California while I was in my teens. When Kathy was born, my husband received a call at his office from him, asking if he could visit us at home. My immediate reaction was the same as when I was little—no—and I never saw him again. I only became aware that he’d died during a trip I made to Chicago to see my mother, when we went back to the South Side and visited the grocery-store owner I’d loved as a child. He told me my father was gone.

  After I asked her, all that my ailing mother would commit to was that they’d met at the University of Chicago and that her parents were the ones to force her into it. I don’t believe it, but I’ll never know. That and so much more went with her to the grave.

  If by “start to live,” Kathy meant start telling it like it is, then she was right about what she’d said to me at the cemetery in Chicago. I inherited the full length of Mother’s tongue after she passed away. I thought of Gila replacing the image of herself after her mother’s death and the white-haired woman I now saw when I looked at my own reflection. Indeed, there were many times while standing in front of the bathroom mirror that I said, “Good morning, Mother!”

  I have always known my own mind, but with the death of my mother I lost any inhibitions in expressing it. Although my job was ostensibly sales, I couldn’t help but rail against the disturbing direction of fashion that mimicked the larger trends in society of disposability, ostentation, and inflation.

  In the 1980s clothes still had craftsmanship. There was pride in quality and much more luxury attached to everything, from the fabric to construction. At the same time, dressing was much simpler and more normal: a jacket, a dress, a skirt, and a blouse. A little more than a d
ecade later, everything was layered, provocative, cloned, mass-produced in Third World countries—and exponentially more expensive.

  Walking through the store, I felt like Alice after she’s fallen down the rabbit hole. The shoes grew taller and taller (an orthopedic doctor’s dream), the dresses shorter and shorter, the prices bigger and bigger, the evening wear glitterier and glitterier. I didn’t care how over-the-top it all had become—I refused to betray my sense of elegance. I would never entertain the paint-your-soles-red style of dressing. My clients did not attract attention with their fashion through shock value but rather through that classic American idea of dressing that I feared was quickly disappearing.

  More than ever women came in concerned more about brand names than whether a garment fit over their rear. I didn’t want them to love a suit because it was Dior but rather because it looked good. Whenever a client begged to know, “Whose is it?” I wanted to yell, “Who cares?” As I witnessed customers Prada themselves to death or go Oscar wild, in typical fashion I went contrary to the crowd and began almost to ignore the labels altogether so that when someone invariably asked, “Whose is it?” I would have to pull their collar like a naughty schoolchild’s and read the tag.

  The old-time costume designers joined my lament. Whenever they came to the store, they complained bitterly about the garments that lined the path to my office. I didn’t disagree, but I didn’t have the luxury of completely disdaining the clothing around me. I could only sell what was carried. If I grumbled incessantly, I would be a codger reminiscing about the good old days and out of a job. To stay sharp and ahead of the season, one must bend.

  Clothes that looked like they might fit were deceptively small. One day while I was in the middle of my morning rounds, the lovely young manager of a boutique stopped me to point out a new squarish dress that she thought would be good for my clientele.

  “You think that’s for a client of mine who’s larger, don’t you?” I asked, arching an eyebrow.

  “Well, it’s . . . it’s such a pretty dress,” she stammered, clearly nervous. I appreciated her enthusiasm for her boutique but wanted to teach her something about fit, which very few salespeople at the store understood. In general, women don’t understand fit, but current designers don’t make it any easier. Clothing, which now revolves around 0s, 2s, and 4s (which most of the world is not), runs smaller than it used to. What was once a size 12–14 is now an 8–10.

  “May I show you something?” I asked the manager.

  I picked up the sleeve of the dress, which went to the elbow. To the uneducated eye, it did look like an easy-to-wear, square, silk dress. However, the designer had cut from shoulder to underneath the arm in such a narrow way that it would not have accommodated a woman with a full arm. It didn’t matter how boxy the body of the dress was—no woman I knew could get her arm into that armhole. For some reason designers had come to believe that a small armhole and a narrow sleeve made the garment young, and all brands were fighting for this bizarre conception of youth (a big mistake, since no one can be all things to all people). Very tight and very short seemed to be everyone’s idea of young. No one I knew ever wore clothes like that when I was young.

  Part of the problem stemmed from the fact that many fashion stars in this new era were young men (mostly in their twenties), who didn’t have the first clue about real women. Among the biggest offenders of fit was the trend to cut the waist of pants below instead of on the waist. The uncomfortable, short crotch created problems of both the physical and mental variety.

  “Tell me what sizes you think they bought this dress in,” I asked the poor manager, who would surely never point out anything to me again.

  “Well, I think up to a forty. . . .”

  “Exactly.”

  That was the other problem: Many of the buyers, who had no rapport with anyone other than a computer, thought 0s and 2s made the store young and hip. They weren’t thinking about what anything looked like on anybody. In a store filled to the brim with 36s, 38s, and 40s—4s, 6s, and 8s—what was I to do with my 12s and 14s? Nothing, because unlike in the old days, when a garment had hems and side seams so that one had something to let out, everything now was mitered and finished. In the obsession with squeezing out a buck any way possible, there was not an extra scrap of fabric to be found.

  My poor clients. While fashion was supposed to boost the self-esteem of women by cloaking them in beautiful things, it seemed to me that its new aim was quite the opposite. Lovely older women were punished for not spending every waking minute in the gym, wasting away on a juice fast, or endangering their lives with liposuction. It wasn’t much easier for young women in an age when they’re all so mindful of being trim that they practically live in exercise clothes, which leave little to the imagination. In my day one boarded an airplane in a suit, gloves, and a hat. However, last time I went to the airport, I mistook it for a fitness center.

  All the rules of appropriateness have gone out the window—and not only in dressing. Just as women wear T-shirts and flip-flops so that they look like they’re going to the beach when in fact they’re off to their places of employment (let me say, no one wants to see your feet at work), so people use the elevator for their office. I will never get used to everyone plugged into mobile phones in restaurants, the ladies’ room, the middle of the street, or anywhere else for that matter. I attribute much of society’s downfall to the cell phone, a device I abhor. The iPhone that the store gave me has never left its charger on my desk; it’s a wonder anyone can find me.

  A particularly egregious multitasking client was conversing loudly and intimately as though the fourth floor of the store were her living room, while I tried to read her nonverbal cues like a domestic. When she snapped her fingers and pointed at a cashmere shawl, I decided I’d had enough.

  “I think we have to touch base here,” I said, interrupting her conversation. “I don’t really want to hear about somebody in Hungary who purged a husband or a castle or whatever. . . .”

  She looked confused. She didn’t realize how offensive her actions were. She figured the rest of the world does it—and she wasn’t wrong.

  “I’m selling clothes,” I said, “not writing a column.”

  Everyone who loves clothes, without exception, believes that what I do is the living end. I love clothes, too, but I began to suffer from the candy-store syndrome. Surrounded by sweet stuff all the time, you gag on it after a while.

  I still came to work earlier than anyone else and threw myself into the daily task of becoming a handmaiden who shortened dresses, found multiples of a new favorite silver platter, and any other errand my clients conjured up. I was at their disposal even as age lined my face, turned my hair white, and made my feet worse than they already were naturally.

  It wasn’t pride that spurred me to work even as I paid the senior-citizen fare for the bus to and fro. No, I was compelled to be of service, fulfilling the needs of others because I actually thought it was the right thing to do. It was a holdover from my upbringing as the responsible good girl who took proper care of her sweaters and straightened her picture frames every evening before bed: I could not rest until the completion of a project. Satisfaction is a very difficult concept for me. I don’t know what it is to sit back and say, “Well done!” There’s too much on the next page, and tomorrow rears its head with another problem to be solved.

  This relentless pursuit of perfection meant I stood out from most of the sales staff just as much as I had when I’d landed among the vendeuses of old. I didn’t approve of much of what I saw on the floor. One salesperson wore a pair of five-inch stilettos—with the price sticker still on the sole—in which she couldn’t even walk properly. Another in a microminiskirt who—to my absolute shame—chewed gum like a cow its cud and dragged the dresses she was carrying for a client so that they cleaned the floor. When I watched two saleswomen loaded down with shoe boxes disappear into one of the register ro
oms, I followed and caught them taking off their shoes!

  “You work, not shop, here,” I admonished them.

  I also did not approve of what I didn’t see on the floor—namely the buyers. Gone were all the members from the original group of women who’d befriended me when I first arrived at the store. Real buyers who were always on the floor, they knew fabrics and took a hands-on approach to their job. The new buyers had their offices off base on Madison Avenue, where they liked to hide. When I encountered one young woman who after months on the job still refused to do as much as make eye contact with me, I said to her, “I don’t even know you. Why don’t you say hello?”

  “I’m shy,” she said.

  Shy? She didn’t look shy around the other buyers as they tapped away on their cell phones and click-clacked away on their high heels. Whenever I tried to get someone at the store on the phone, I was always told he or she was “in a meeting.” I told one person who couldn’t have been in a meeting for the entire month I was unable to reach her, “Find a word other than ‘meeting.’ It’s getting worn out.”

  What happened to decorum? As far as I could tell, it went out with wearing gloves on a plane.

  At one point Barneys called me for an interview after I had gained some sort of fame in my position. (Newspaper and magazine reporters love me, partially because I know how to feed them one-liners to liven up the same old dull fashion stories, but also because I know how to answer the phone!) During the entire interview, the head of the store had his feet on the desk.

  “Well, it’s a done deal, Betty,” he said with the soles of his shoes staring up at me. “Prepare to be here in a month.”