The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup

by Susan Orlean

  In Millerton, we stopped to buy out-of-town newspapers at Terni’s, a fishing tackle/newspapers/camping goods/candy store on Main Street. The day before, Millerton had celebrated Phil Terni Clean-Up Day, in honor of the store’s owner, who is famous in town for sweeping up around his store every morning. Heather had subsequently written a front-page feature about the event and had taken a picture of Phil to accompany it. Phil was behind the soda fountain when we went in. The store’s counter is made of cool marble, and the wood of the cabinets is old and silky. Years ago, when Millerton still had a milk-processing plant, the farmers would bring their milk cans to town every morning, drop them off, and then head for Terni’s to get cigars and newspapers before they went back to their farms. Now the milk-processing plant has been converted into an apartment building, and some of the grandchildren of the dairy farmers work at Hipotronics, a small electronics plant that is just outside the town, beside fields of sweet corn and hay. “Nice article, Heather,” Phil said. “You know, you wrote every single article in that paper.”

  “I know,” she said. “I’m supposed to. Hey, I hope you sold a lot of them.”

  “Sold out,” he said. “I’ll order more today.”

  A few doors down from Terni’s is Oblong Books. One of the owners of Oblong, Holly Nelson, is the head of the town planning board. Up the street is an appliance store called Campbell & Keeler; Heather planned to call Jimmy Campbell, one of the owners, about a story she was going to write on the dangers of lightning. Campbell was also one of the organizers behind Millerton Days, so she’d be in touch with him about that, too. Heather told me that not long after she started reporting in Millerton, she called a village board member named Glen White, and then called a schoolteacher named Glen White, and was about to call someone named Glen White about a third story when she realized that there weren’t three men named Glen White—there was one Glen White who was involved in three different things. To some people, this state of affairs is what makes a small town seem monotonous, but to others it is what makes a place seem anchored and secure, even as it bumps around and changes. In small towns like Millerton, the same people pop up over and over in slightly different positions, but they always stay tied to the same deep place, like buoys.

  THE WEEK BEGINS at the Millerton News on Thursdays, when Heather and the staff of the Lakeville Journal—Charlotte Reid, Marsden Epworth, and Tim Fitzmaurice—meet with David Parker and Kathryn Boughton, the editor and managing editor of both papers, to talk about their stories for the upcoming issue. That Thursday, Heather told David she was working on the O’Connell resignation, the Scoland Farm gravel mine hearing, and the story about safety precautions during electrical storms. She also said that she was hoping to borrow a cache of Eddie Collins photographs for a pre–Millerton Days feature, but added that the local man who had most of the Collins memorabilia didn’t seem eager to lend the photographs to the paper. She said she’d keep trying.

  “Great,” David said. “What else?”

  “Well, as soon as I get enough information, I want to do that big story about how Dutchess County is changing.”

  “Your ‘dying farmers’ story?” Kathryn Boughton asked.

  “I changed the description of it on my list,” Heather said, glancing up at Kathryn. “I didn’t actually mean ‘dying farmers.’ I meant ‘dying farms.’ ”

  Over the next few days, Heather and I drove from Lakeville to Millerton, to Amenia, and back to Millerton, to the elementary school, to the Gun Club, to Terni’s for the papers, to the sheriff’s substation in Amenia for the weekly crime report, back to Lakeville, back to Millerton, to the Burger King for lunch, to the town hall, to the village hall, around the fields and the farms, back and forth through the center of Millerton—around the bend in the road where the low, square buildings of the village huddle—and to the ends of town, where the buildings thin out and finally disappear. Covering a town keeps you busy. At the elementary school, Steve O’Connell was packing to leave. The school is perched on a bald gray hill, and in the summer stillness it felt a little forlorn. Steve was in a great mood because of his new job, in Westchester County. “I read the description of your new school,” Heather said to him. “It sounds like a country club.”

  “Well, it’s gorgeous,” he said. “It’s gorgeous, Heather. I’ll tell you all about it, because I know you’re not from New York. I know I’m talking fast, but that’s the kind of guy I am.” At the end of the interview, Heather took half a dozen pictures, because she suspected that the story would end up as her lead.

  The next stop was the village pool, to cover McGruff the Crime Dog’s presentation. Angela White, who is married to Glen White and is the Millerton recreation director, was waiting, with an unhappy look on her face. “I spoke to McGruff this morning, Heather,” she said. “He canceled. He said it was so hot yesterday that he almost passed out. I thought there was a fan in his costume, but I guess I was thinking of Smokey Bear.” She said he had promised to reschedule, but meanwhile there would be no MCGRUFF COMES TO TELL HOW TO PREVENT CRIME—at least, not until the following week.

  “I think I’ll just take pictures of the kids swimming,” Heather said. “The only trouble is, I have a lot of pictures of cute little kids this week.”

  The days had a jerky rhythm. After the canceled McGruff appearance was a stop at the town hall to get information on the Scoland Farm rezoning. It was a local tale without whimsy: an old farm, a fire that destroyed barns and silos, a son killed in a car accident, a family belt tightening, a petition to mine gravel from dairy land. We went to the pig races at the agricultural fair, in Goshen, where the master of ceremonies announced the contestants as Roseanne Boar, Tammy Swinette, and Magnum P.I.G. Back at the office, after Heather called the medical examiner about the outcome of the autopsy of the man killed by a train, she explained the small-town rule on obituaries: “Everyone is an avid something. An avid gardener, an avid walker. Charlotte told me we once had someone who was an avid coupon clipper.” Another rule: If you crop the Pet Parade photo so that the animal’s ears poke out of the frame of the picture, the pet will be adopted more quickly. Everyone at the paper got distracted for a while, listening to reports on the scanner about an ex-convict engaged in a gun battle with a local deputy sheriff. Heather called several appliance stores to catch up on her electrical storm story. And after that she drove to the Gun Club, where three chubby old men smoking Tiparillos were shouting a conversation—“His goddam blower went out!” and “I don’t know what the hell he paid for it!” and “Well, he’s tougher than whalebone!”—and firing shotguns at neon-orange clay disks. Heather chatted with them, mentioning the fact that she wouldn’t be able to come to the Gun Club clambake. The men looked sad for a moment, then resumed shooting. One of them cocked a thumb at the trap and said, “You girls shoot? Oh, no, you’re reporters.”

  “Tell me about your gun,” Heather said.

  He patted it and said, “Darling, it’s a 12-gauge Browning.”

  “Nice,” Heather said. “How do you spell that? Like the food brownie?”

  “Exactly,” the man said. “You’re learning.”

  Near the end of my visit, Heather went to talk to a shiny-faced young man named Todd Clinton, who was on the organizing committee for Millerton Days. Todd is a local banker, a Lions Club member, the treasurer of the volunteer fire squad, a Chamber of Commerce vice president, and the husband of the woman who owns the new seamstress shop on Main Street. He was in his office, at the Salisbury Bank & Trust Company, and he had a lot of information for Heather about Millerton Days. “We’re doing Sno-Kones and cotton candy,” he said. “There will be clowns. And 50 percent of the proceeds are going to the Eddie Collins ball field restoration. We’ve hired a Mickey and Minnie—wait, don’t say that. Say, ‘There will be a cute mouse couple.’ We don’t want to get in trouble with copyright people at Disney.” Heather scribbled. Todd called his secretary to find out who was lending the freezers to store the ice for the Sno-Kones. She told
him that it was Jimmy Campbell, of Campbell & Keeler. Todd said that one of the local restaurants would be donating tablecloths, but that there weren’t enough tables yet for the Millerton Days clambake. Heather said, “I could put in ‘Please call Todd if you have tables.’ ”

  “Great,” Todd said. “Because it’s a little bit of an issue with the tables. Oh, and for the antique tractor show you can put in that anyone interested in showing their tractor can call me.”

  Heather said, “Sounds like I have it all. I just have one question. Will the clowns be free?”

  Todd nodded and said, “Absolutely free.”

  IT WAS ALL THERE in the Millerton News the next week: O’CONNELL LEAVES FOR POST AT ARDSLEY MIDDLE SCHOOL and STORM CLOUDS REQUIRE PRECAUTIONS TO PROTECT HEALTH AND PROPERTY and MAUREEN BONDS ENDS WORK AS VILLAGE CLERK and PREPARATIONS PICK UP FOR MILLERTON DAYS, and a late-breaking story about a lawsuit filed against the town board of Amenia. A few stories had evaporated, and Heather had saved a few others for a later week. It turned out that the man who had squirreled away all the Eddie Collins memorabilia died over the weekend, and the paper had been able to get the pictures for the special Eddie Collins section from his widow. His avidity for local history was noted in his obituary, which also ran that week. By then, I had left Millerton and was back in Manhattan. Heather sent me the paper, and when I had read it I called her. I could hear the hum of the newspaper office in the background. We talked for a while, and then she said she had to go, because she was expecting another busy week.

  KING OF THE ROAD

  WHAT AMAZES BILL BLASS IS AMAZING. LAST year, he was in La Jolla, California, and someone took him to a supermarket, which was somewhere he had never been before in his life; he found the supermarket, and especially the do-it-yourself ice-cream-sundae bar, amazing. In Nashville, where I joined him recently for a trunk show—an in-store event, when a designer’s entire collection, and sometimes the designer himself, are on display—he caught me admiring a blazer, made by the designer Richard Tyler, that cost $1,859; even though some of the ensembles in the Blass couture collection cost more than $6,000, he found the price of the Tyler blazer amazing. He is someone who seems fascinated by something or other much of the time. He is a virtuoso of the high-pitched eyebrow and the fortissimo gasp. These give him a puckish air, without which he might seem irritatingly regal. Blass is classically good-looking in the manner of a country gentleman, with a wide forehead, a boxy jaw, a direct gaze, and a chest like a kettledrum. Almost any time you see him, there will be a cigarette in the corner of his mouth, bouncing like a little diving board. He usually stands with his hands poked into his pockets and his jacket hitched up around them. No matter where he is, he looks as if he might be standing on the deck of a big sailboat. He is now seventy-one years old, fond of candy, and settling into leonine stateliness; as a young man, he was long necked, blade thin, and so wolfishly handsome you could weep. I love to hear him talk. His voice is rich, gravelly, and carefully inflected, like a film narrator’s. He also has a wonderfully intimate and conspiratorial-sounding whisper. At times, he can sound like an American schooled in Britain, but in fact he is a Depression-era kid from Fort Wayne, Indiana, who came to New York at seventeen and has never left. Like all elegant people, he curses with charming abandon and to great effect. Like most successful, wealthy people, he knows how to deploy a sort of captivating brattiness, to which other people quickly yield. One of the funniest things in the world is to sit in his office at his showroom and listen to him bellow questions to his staff without moving a muscle, or even an eyeball, in their direction.

  Universal adoration is one of the reasons Blass goes on trips to places like La Jolla and Nashville. Most stores don’t buy a designer’s entire collection but will hold trunk shows, during which customers can see samples and place orders. There are trunk shows going on all the time, all over the country. Sometimes the trunk show is brought to the store by a sales representative. Sometimes the designer sends along a model, who throughout the day will stroll around in outfits from the collection. Occasionally, the designer himself escorts the clothes, in which case the store often stages a fashion show and luncheon for good customers. After lunch, while the customers are trying things on, the designer may hang around and editorialize. This year, Bill Blass’s collection traveled with salespeople to Boston, Houston, Dallas, Fort Worth, St. Louis, Palo Alto, Midland (Texas), San Antonio, Beverly Hills, Pasadena, Tulsa, San Diego, New Orleans, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Baltimore, and Pittsburgh; he appeared with it in Atlanta, New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Washington, San Francisco, and Troy, Michigan. Couture clothes cost a fortune, but they have a tiny market and seldom make any money. What they do is endear a designer to those customers whose clothing choices are newsworthy, and this in turn makes the designer famous. Then, when he is famous enough, the designer can sell other companies the rights to manufacture profitable items like underpants and perfumes under the designer’s name. Bill Blass was one of the first designers to travel with their collections, and he’s one of those who have done it the most. He is generally regarded as the king of the trunk show. His clothes are rarely thought of as artistic or trendsetting or remarkable, but his customers have never abandoned him; they turn out at the trunk shows, and the trunk shows have kept him famous, by fashion standards, for a remarkable number of years.

  At a good show, he does a lot of business; two weeks ago, at a trunk show at Saks Fifth Avenue, he sold over half a million dollars’ worth of dresses, and that is the most any American designer showing at Saks has ever sold. He does bigger business, though, just selling his name and his designer’s eye. Blass licenses fifty-six products, including Bill Blass belts, ties, handkerchiefs, jeans, sheets, shoes, pajamas, outerwear, evening wear, watches, and window shades. For sixteen years, Ford manufactured a Bill Blass Lincoln Continental Mark IV; Blass chose the interiors, paint colors, and trim. Blass’s trunk show philosophy: “You don’t want to be on the road so much that the novelty wears off, but you want to get to know your customer and help move the clothes. If you are buying a Bill Blass dress for a couple of thousand dollars, I’d say it’s an added attraction to have Bill Blass there saying, ‘Babe, that looks great on you,’ or ‘Babe, that’s just awful.’ ”

  BECAUSE BILL BLASS is popular and fashionable, I expected him to have a drifty attention span, but he is actually quite dogged. In Nashville, for instance, after declaring the price of the Tyler blazer amazing, he pulled it off its hanger, inspected its seams, and pinched the fabric, and said he thought the cut and workmanship were amazing; then he asked me to try it on and told me I should buy it. This was at Jamie Inc., the Nashville store where the trunk show and a luncheon were being held. The show had just ended, and dozens of women were milling around the racks, placing orders. When he was able to tear his attention from the blazer, he remarked that he found the women’s ardor and stamina amazing. Then he turned back to being amazed by the blazer. He got everyone walking by to stop and take a look at it, because it had him so amazed. When I saw him several weeks later, in Manhattan, he asked me how I’d been and then immediately asked me if I had bought the Richard Tyler blazer. His enthusiasm made me feel that I should have done whatever it took to find a spare eighteen hundred dollars. He looked utterly crestfallen when I told him no.

  In Nashville, what he found amazing, to start with, was walking through the airport, looking at people’s clothes. We had just gotten off the plane and were heading down an endless concourse, and I was following his gaze. He gestured with his chin at a man and a woman walking toward us. He said, “My God, have you ever noticed how Americans dress? They dress like it’s summer all the time.” The man and the woman were both wearing pale T-shirts and acid-washed jeans sutured with lots of useless-looking zippers. Blass stopped and watched them walk by. He was dressed in his usual bespoke double-breasted English suit and a loosely knotted tie, and he had a topcoat tossed over his arm. The acid-washed couple passed. Behind them was a fat woman wearing a sho
rt red dress, red satin pumps, and a red fez. Blass lifted his eyebrows, shifted his coat to his other arm, and said, “That’s an outfit.” As she ambled by, he said, “I was the first designer to really go out on the road with my clothes, and I’ve done it for years and years and years, while the other designers were rushing back the minute they could, to go to New York parties. I didn’t do that. I’d stay out on the road for days at a time and meet people and keep my name out there. It allowed me to see what’s out here. And I can tell you that, no matter what anyone thinks, there’s a huge part of this country that still loves print dresses.”

  MRS. JACK MASSEY, a friend of Blass’s with whom he would be staying in Nashville, called me one afternoon before the trip. “Sunday night, when you arrive, we’ll be going to dinner at the Johnsons’. It will be just a little informal gathering of friends, so you can wear—oh, little velvet pants, something like that. Monday night is dinner here at my house, Brook House, and that’s not formal, either—it’s not black-tie or anything, so you can just wear dressy pants or a little silk dress. At the luncheon and fashion show, you could wear a nice suit. During the day, you can just knock around in a sweater set and pants.” Pause. “You know, of course, that Bill Blass is just the most entertaining man to ever walk down the pike. Everybody adores him. He is absolutely the best company in the world.”

  Bill Blass had never before gone to Nashville with his collection; in fact, he had been in Nashville only twice: in 1985, when he spoke at O’More College of Design, in nearby Franklin, Tennessee, and eighteen years before that, when he was the honored guest at Nashville’s fanciest annual social event, the Swan Ball, to which many women in Nashville wear his dresses. There is a picture of him on page 51 of a book called Reflections: Twenty-five Nights at the Swan Ball. The text says, “And then Bill Blass, the talented, sociable, and just-too-darn debonair designer, brought the clothes and paraded them around for everyone to die over while dining on shrimp and filet de boeuf.”