I'll Drink to That: A Life in Style, with a Twist Read online

  From that moment, through all the wedding preparations, and right up until the day of the big event, no one could talk reason into Otto. Toward the end we didn’t know what he was doing. My mother, getting paler by the minute, had two hundred invitations out for the wedding at the Standard Club. Still, he kept inviting people by phone, in person, or by carrier pigeon up until the three cars he commanded on the Broadway Limited pulled out of Penn Station. New York was coming to a party.

  As the date of June 7 neared enough to reality amid the crushing rounds of trousseau shopping, teas, and thank-you-note writing, I took refuge at the flower shop in the Drake Hotel, where the florist and I went over every petal and leaf. We were going to bank the club walls with tall spruce trees so it would look like a forest when one entered the candlelit room. The table arrangements were lily of the valley, lilacs, and peonies. My bouquet was lily of the valley and gardenia. The smell and sight of those delicious flowers were the only thing that seemed to bring me happiness.

  I began to have a suspicion that this was not how a bride-to-be is supposed to feel two weeks before the event, and I became downright panicked. Sonny, in town early for the endless number of dinners and demands, and I were having lunch in a quiet corner of the Standard Club when all of a sudden I was overcome by the strongest urge to run out of the dining room and keep going until I was far, far away. I couldn’t move to New York. I just couldn’t do it. I didn’t like it there. How had I let things get this far? In a strict upbringing such as mine, children don’t say no. Now I felt I would stop breathing if I didn’t speak up.

  “I don’t think I can do this,” I blurted out.

  Sonny pretended he didn’t know what I was talking about, but the look he gave me said otherwise. He worked his jaw, and I saw anger in his eyes.

  “I can’t go with you to New York,” I said. “I’m frightened and not ready.”

  He leveled a furious and threatening gaze at me.

  “Yes, you can,” he said in tone so flat it was scary, “and you will.”

  There was great strength and determination in that anger. I had never seen Sonny this way. I went silent, thinking that perhaps this was the assurance I needed to get me down the aisle.

  As I walked the long, long road in the big, proper, satin-and-lace, off-the-shoulder wedding dress from Saks and a French tulle veil made in Paris with an apple-blossom crown, while all the guests oohed and aahed, my insides were still insecure. My chin always seems to get higher the more nervous I am. I did love the man, and despite whatever fears I had, I knew he would care for me.

  Sonny and all his groomsmen wore white dinner jackets while my many, many bridesmaids were in long, soft pink dresses—except for my beautiful sister-in-law, who went rogue in a shocking, hot pink, jewel-encrusted dress that made her look like she was the member of an altogether different kind of wedding. My mother, in her simple soft blue taffeta dress by Pattullo, turned ashen.

  The strain of the wedding on my mother—its myriad expensive details, inane for one evening—was staggering. If she looked like she needed a long winter’s rest, though, my father, standing by her side, was even worse. He looked as if he’d just been shot out of a cannon (he had a kidney attack two weeks later). He wasn’t my biological father. Still, I was his daughter, the only one he ever wanted. To him I was perfect. Once, while showing me off (something he did all the time) at the Standard Club, he asked a man he knew well, who was having a drink at the bar, “Did you ever see anything more beautiful?”

  The man gave me a once-over and replied, “Yes, I’ve seen better.”

  My father never spoke to him again.

  For my whole life, Daddy’s concern over “watching the baby” bordered on obsession. To relinquish that control in one short ceremony, even to someone he liked as much as Sonny, was disorienting. After the reception, seeing me in my traveling outfit—a Suzanne Augustine dress of gray silk and alpaca with white collar and cuffs, white gloves, handbag, and a hat to go ten minutes from the Standard Club to the Ambassador East hotel—he looked so sad.

  Hawaii, where we honeymooned, was the antidote to so much reality. Not that the trip wasn’t some kind of production in its own way. The enormous beige cowhide Hartmann steamer trunk I traveled with contained enough clothes for an unlimited stay.

  The contents of the trunk were part of my trousseau, which included a complete wardrobe from morning to gala evenings. For my honeymoon wardrobe, there was a knowledgeable salesperson at a Chicago department store who knew every climate and resort. It was all effortless but took a great deal of time. I didn’t even have to pack my own trunk. A woman, who came to the house, crumpled tissue and worked it up the arm of a garment until it looked as if an arm were actually wearing it. Then she used another piece of tissue, folded in three sections, to envelop the whole garment so that each item was individually wrapped (including stockings!). This was to ensure there wasn’t a crease or a wrinkle in a single dress, blouse, or pair of underwear. For good measure she inserted a piece of flat tissue to divide different sections. When I unpacked, I was awash in tissue.

  We were to be gone for a month at the posh Royal Hawaiian, recently reopened after the war (submariners had used it for R&R) and redecorated by Frances Elkins in island-themed chintzes, so we required a lot of changes of clothing. I didn’t mind at all. All my new clothes were exciting. And the salt and sun, leis of fragrant ginger blossom, and volcano explorations, once we arrived in Hawaii, only made them more so.

  We were very busy dressing, sometimes three times in one day. For lunch at a private surf riders’ club, which my darling husband somehow talked himself into, I knotted a brightly colored sarong on the side over a new Mabs suit. On a tour of Dole’s pineapple plantations, where workers were still finding grenades from the war between the rows and rows of fruit, I paired a striped long-sleeved blue-and-white boatneck T-shirt with white shorts that zipped down the left side so they didn’t bag but truly fit a feminine waist.

  For formal dinners at the hotel, I wore Clare Potter, who practically invented modern American sportswear with her incredibly easy and becoming clothes. Like the rest of his family, Sonny was such a good dancer that the only thing keeping me on my feet were her great floor-length silk skirts and matching long-sleeved blouses with a lapel in Asian-motif prints of soft yellows, navy, and red. At least a few nights out of the week, we went to raucous pig roasts with hula girls, where my ever-charming Sonny made more friends in one evening than most people do in a lifetime. There I opted for either a dirndl skirt and an off-the-shoulder peasant blouse or a Claire McCardell dress. McCardell, a considerable innovator during that fabulous period of American fashion, married quintessentially domestic fabrics such as cotton, denim, and wool with flattering shapes to give every woman what she wanted: simple, useful, interesting, and affordable clothes. My cotton dress had a halter bodice that crossed at the front—a typical McCardell touch—and opened up to a very revealing back.

  My trousseau also contained the most delicate and lovely lingerie. Most of it was hand-monogrammed with my new initials and all of it also stuffed with tissue. There were full slips, half slips, nightgowns, pretty lacy bras, stockings, and garter belts. For my wedding night, I had the most extraordinary blue chiffon gown and robe. The first night together for newlyweds in 1947 was a novelty enhanced by exquisite silk and lace. (Bergdorf Goodman’s once-legendary lingerie department became inconsequential when people started living together before marriage. Why spend a lot of money where there’s no surprise?) I met the fright and mess of true sexual experience in a gown imported from France, which draped my body light as air and was held up by two blue ribbons that tied with bows at my shoulders.

  What I was even more scared to face than my wedding night was the new reality waiting for me in Manhattan. I much preferred the impossibly romantic evenings of dancing under the stars and having Sonny all to myself. But after extending our honeymoon to a ridicu
lous six weeks, it was finally time to go home.

  CHAPTER

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  Three

  Let’s give a hand for all the beauties here today at Lido’s pulchritude contest,” the emcee said before announcing the winner to the crowd gathered on the beach.

  “Mrs. Lido Beach 1947 is Mrs. Sonny Halbreich!”

  I was going to be sick. Worse than standing in front of the assembled guests now clapping politely, which was bad enough, was the fact that the halter bathing suit I wore was jersey. I had never worn a jersey suit in my life! Without Lastex there was no hold. I felt completely naked.

  Sonny’s parents were in residence for the summer at the Lido Beach Hotel, and although Sonny and I were just recently married, we spent the season with them on Long Island. The three-hundred-room hotel right on the Atlantic Ocean, recently reopened after the navy had used it as a discharge center during the war, was the utmost party place. There was a lot of dressing—even to the beach. Among the very exclusive and fashionable guests, one carefully considered what bathing suit and cover-up to wear before heading out to the cabanas.

  Every night at the enormous Moorish-style resort, dubbed the “Pink Lady” because of its color, was like hitting the town. Its restaurant, where women wore gowns, mink stoles, and jewelry, had a retractable domed roof to allow for dining under the stars. Headliners such as Sammy Davis Jr. and Milton Berle provided the entertainment at the circular nightclub before it was off to the ballroom for dancing and more dancing. It was very New York, and very scary. People were so different from what I was used to. All gay and laughing, they carried on day and night. Compared to my insular South Side world, New York society was strange and aggressive turf.

  I came from gentrified but very low-key people, who discussed clothes, food, business, and politics—anything but money. It was a good thing to have, but not to talk about. At the Lido, money was everywhere, including the tip of the tongue. This was a high-living crowd for whom no stakes were too high in a card game, no dress too glittery, no piece of jewelry too large. I had trouble following the conversations; I couldn’t comprehend their lingo or their accents. Although I did understand the oft-repeated phrase “You’re from Chicago?” I found their incredulity curious. All the guests of the Lido did was talk about going to Europe, but they didn’t have a clue as to the location of Nebraska.

  My husband and my family fit right into this society. Watching the four of them dance every night, I was overwhelmed by the whole situation. The Halbreichs—Millie always her father’s partner, Sonny his mother’s—were such good dancers that I became increasingly self-conscious with every perfect rendition of the rumba, cha-cha-cha, waltz, or boogie-woogie. I grew so intimidated by their performance that I refused to join them or anyone else on the floor.

  Daytime diversions included distance swimming and dance lessons (no thank you). The men played marathon card games, smoking large black cigars under the hot sun, while cabana boys catered to them for huge tips (they could make a hundred dollars easy). There were also pageants where guests of the hotel paraded around. I don’t know who pushed me out there (I could be pushed into anything except under a bus, where I longed to be in that particular moment), but someone thrust me into this exercise in humiliation. I didn’t know how I ended up in that bathing suit, let alone winning the contest.

  I was not fun-loving, like all the people I was surrounded by. The transience I experienced living in a hotel was compounded by the fact that I didn’t belong there. I called my father to say I was unhappy, I wanted to go home. “Stick it out,” he said. “Everything will be okay.”

  My summer at Lido Beach was just the beginning of a whole new life that didn’t settle very well with me. Even the pampered art of shopping took on a tough veneer.

  A nondescript shop hidden away on the twelfth floor of a midtown Madison Avenue building was not only the origin of my first Traina-Norell, generously purchased by my mother-in-law, but also a lesson in the rough-and-tumble world of New York retail. Long before the shop’s owner, Martha Phillips, opened her famous Fifty-seventh Street salon catering to the couture needs of the likes of Brooke Astor and Gloria Vanderbilt, she spun me around like a top, praising this and that about the gown. While I turned, I caught a glimpse of Florence, in the Hattie Carnegie suit that fit her well-preserved frame like a glove, arching an eyebrow skeptically from under her close-fitting Mr. John hat.

  Other than the deep blue and green moire taffeta print, the dress didn’t look at all like the one I’d tried on weeks earlier. The sleeves were shorter, the low neck rounder, and the waist on the big dirndl skirt higher. Instead of altered, the dress had been remade, because in its original state it had been way too large.

  Martha—a tiny woman who gained a few inches with her impeccably coiffed hair, which didn’t move as she burst into fitting rooms to tell half-naked customers what they should buy—was a saleswoman true as God made little green apples. From the time she was eight years old, selling blouses to bemused women by standing on a crate behind the counter in her father’s Brooklyn shop, she knew how to get people to buy. She had originally tried to push the Norell on Millie when she, my mother-in-law, and I originally visited the store a few weeks earlier. “Oh, no, no,” my stunning sister-in-law demurred. She had her eye on a much more seductive Galanos crepe gown embellished with enough faux diamonds and rubies to make a sultan blush. “But it would look positively wonderful on Betty. Don’t you agree, Mother?”

  My mother-in-law wasn’t there to buy me clothes, but Millie cornered her into it. Martha, not one to miss a dynamic, quickly switched gears, and before I knew it, she was pulling in the back six inches while I looked at the front, then running around to the front to do the same magic while I looked at the back.

  “This dress suits a beautiful girl like you.” Martha clapped her hands together. “How well it fits!”

  Martha’s routine was just like that of the salesmen at the old Barney’s Boys Town, who pulled you in front, pulled you in back, and then exclaimed, “The suit fits!” The dress no more fit me than it fit the man on the moon, but Martha’s in-house seamstresses had spent the weeks since our last visit turning it into a dress that did.

  “Now that I’m looking at it, something isn’t quite right,” my mother-in-law said.

  “What do you mean ‘not right’? It’s perfect,” said Martha, who had mastered the art of the hard sale. You didn’t go back to see her unless you bought something the last time you were in her shop.

  The two tough ladies were off, hondeling until my mother-in-law wrestled a discount from Martha. My mouth dropped in embarrassment and confusion. To agree to buy a dress, have it altered, and then renegotiate its price was the height of rudeness. Admittedly, I was no bargain hunter, but where I came from it would have been unimaginable. Martha was much less upset than I. Once the sale was rung up, the two ladies were like best friends.

  Beautiful clothes surrounded me my entire life, not just since my arrival in New York, but my new home was an introduction to an aggressive pursuit of fashion I had never before known. Shopping in Chicago’s specialty stores was a serious, quiet, no-nonsense affair. One of my favorites was Stanley Korshak on Michigan Avenue, where no clothes were visible when one entered—maybe a hat or a handbag, nothing memorable. You were quickly ushered to a private fitting room whose only luxury was its size and its deep carpet. Then a fitter, coffee, cookies, and of course clothes followed. Stanley (Old Stanley, as we knew him) and his nephew (Young Stanley, groomed to be Old Stanley’s successor) saved for me the original couture pieces they bought in Paris to adapt line for line in the United States, because I was a size 6 and they liked to see me in their clothes.

  In this way I came to own a two-piece Givenchy dress in a deep blue-gray animal-like print that buttoned down the front in a low neck, small-sleeved jacket and tight skirt. The construction of another piece, the most beautiful ta
upe and black silk Dior wrap, no-waist chemise dress that gathered in the front, was something to behold. Everything was lined in the best silks—and beneath it all a bustier made underwear unnecessary.

  The only other place that rivaled Korshak’s serene luxury was Millie B. Oppenheimer. Tucked away in a small group of rooms upstairs in the Ambassador East Hotel, there was nothing more than a credenza and fresh flowers to connote a store. Her clientele was as small as her shop. The epitome of low-key graciousness, Miss Oppenheimer in her small hat and black clothing had the most exquisite taste; taste I have never seen matched. Beyond that, though, was her understanding of the women she dressed. Miss Oppenheimer cared about everyone who shopped with her; she was a rarity in that she bought with great insight for each individual customer. (Some specialty stores still do this; that is the great thing about them. Unlike department stores that buy a popular dress in a range of sizes, owners of these small regional boutiques will take a model in a size with a regular customer in mind.)

  It was through Miss Oppenheimer that I got my first Christian Dior dress. It had three bows, one at the breastbone, another in the middle of the torso, and a third at the waist, with transparent netting underneath to give the illusion of nudity in the front. The skirt, with an inverted front pleat, had four layers of crepe and moire. This dress, which Bobo Rockefeller later wore for her wedding, became the most copied dress of the season. (In the following season, fall of 1948, Christian Dior also dropped the hemline from the knee to the ankle, thus rendering my entire costly trousseau obsolete.)