The style Mary Quant was trading in emphasized comfort and freedom, yet at the same time, it made the wearer a prisoner of male lust. Quant’s half-naked appeal to voyeurism could not help but make the wearer feel self-conscious. Still, wasn’t showing off the essence of fashion? The idea was to turn men on. The APGs became millionaires on Quant’s mini (named after the MINI Cooper) and tights, her white detachable Peter Pan collars, her Jeepers Peepers eye shadow, her Blush Baby rouge, her Starkers foundation, her Pop Sox, her Booby Trap unwired brassieres. Quant went chemical, designing coats and dresses made of PVC, or polyvinyl chloride. The same way Mary Wells used color to spice up gray airplanes for Braniff, Mary Quant used colors to spice up gray postwar British faces and bodies. Even makeup became psychedelic, years before people started tripping.
Quant was nearly as skilled at creating advertising as she was at creating fashions. She designed the “Crybaby” campaign for her new waterproof mascara that wouldn’t run, in tears or in rain. A huge poster of an eye, a tear, and unsmudged mascara became a totem above the Kings Road, a London version of The Great Gatsby’s Dr. T. J. Eckleburg optometry poster above the wasteland of Queens. In 1965, Quant joined the British invasion of America, creating a mass-market line for JCPenney. The strange bedfellows proved to be—at least dollar- and poundwise—a match made in the heaven of Wall Street, though women’s-liberation skeptics complained that Mini Mary was turning the teens of two continents into jailbait. By 1966, for her contributions to the suddenly booming British economy, Mary Quant was invested by Queen Elizabeth with the Order of the British Empire. Contrary to expectations, she refrained from wearing her miniskirt to the ceremony. The OBE for the APGs with their PVC was fitting proof that the rebels, and England itself, had come a long way, baby, in the transformational speed that was typical of the jet age.
SHORT CUT. London designer Mary Quant in one of her trademark miniskirts, flaunting her Order of the British Empire medal, 1966. (photo credit 12.3)
Across the Channel in France, too, young women were wearing miniskirts, and not always purchased at Bazaar on ferry hops to London. The space-age designer André Courrèges was flashing minis around the same time as Mary Quant, who loved wearing his thigh-high boots with her tiny skirts. Courrèges also did his own PVC line. Yet somehow Mary Quant got all the credit, if only because fashion itself, any fashion, seemed such a dramatic departure in dowdy London that it became pressworthy. Once the Beatles emerged, adding to the youthquake started by the APGs, Vidal Sassoon, and the David Bailey photographic school of cool, Paris, barely two hundred miles away, suddenly seemed square and quaint, eclipsed by the British upheaval. France appeared almost unaware of the new youth culture. The “French Elvis,” Johnny Hallyday, was actually a Belgian truck driver named Philippe Schmidt. His wife, the “yé-yé” girl Sylvie Vartan, was a pretty blond Bulgarian, but her record sales didn’t begin to approach those of Marianne Faithfull or even Annette Funicello. French rock, or whatever it was, did not travel. When Brigitte Bardot did her shopping at Bazaar in London, one knew Paris was in trouble.
Yet one Parisienne did emerge as a beacon for women’s success. And she did it without marrying the boss (even Jackie Kennedy did that) or turning women into fetish objects or trading on their (or her) sexuality. Hers was a completely pure success story, based on an uncanny understanding of the needs of the Jet Set. She was an unlikely beacon, but she would soon shine all over the world. This lighthouse of the night was Régine, the Queen of Clubs, who proved that for all the talk of democratization, for all the Pan Am tourist fares, for all the Frommer guides, snobbery and elitism still had a powerful effect. In nightclubs, as in restaurants, Parisian exclusivity proved to be an exportable commodity. Nothing could make a place more in than keeping people out.
Régine Zylberberg (an easy last name to drop) was precisely the kind of person most Paris maître d’s would have given the bum’s rush. She was chubby, small, unimposing, a sub-mouseburger in looks and presence. She looked like what she was, a Galician peasant, Sam Spiegel with a red wig. Régine was born in Brussels in 1929 to poor Polish-Jewish émigrés who couldn’t even afford to get married. Belgium was the butt of most French ethnic jokes, and the other components of Régine’s heritage didn’t give her much of a leg up. Nor were her own legs anything like the Wells-Quant gams that might have propelled her—at least by sex appeal—out of her seemingly guaranteed obscurity. Furthermore, she was quickly abandoned: Her mother moved without her to Argentina when she was four.
Her baker-drinker-gambler father took Régine and her brother, Maurice, with him to Paris, where he managed a bistro in the poor, Arab-intensive district of Belleville. Eventually, he vanished as well. Régine spent the war years hiding out in the French countryside, first at a convent, where the Catholic girls tormented her for being Jewish, and then at an old-age home. She would later learn jujitsu to defend herself. It was said that all the lavish parties she threw as an impresario were to make up for the total absence of birthday celebrations in her bereft childhood.
After the war, teen Régine reunited with her brother back in Paris and worked as a maid and as a peddler, hawking brassieres and neckties on street corners. Her big break, in 1953, was getting hired as a hat-check girl at the Whisky à Go-Go, behind the Palais Royal, near where she had been street-selling on the Rue de Rivoli. She didn’t stick to the job description for long. Instead, she became the entertainment. Régine had a mouth and she had a voice, which she used to sing Piaf chansons with wild abandon while balancing a champagne glass atop her head. She was also a great dancer and knew how to get a party started, leading the reluctant likes of Aristotle Onassis onto the tiny floor. The customers took to her, and what customers they were. Jean-Paul Belmondo. Alain Delon. Porfirio Rubirosa, the ultimate bon vivant, whom Régine would sit and listen to, drink after drink, until closing time at six A.M., when Rubirosa drove off to the Bois de Boulogne in his Ferrari. She had iron discipline; she never drank or smoked.
The Whisky à Go-Go owed its origins to a World War II Aryan no-no. During the war, the Germans had shut down Paris’s dance halls, which, the Germans feared, were playing black jazz. An alternative club, La Discotheque, opened in 1941, giving Parisians the chance to dance to records. In the austerity after the war, other discotheques proliferated, as it was far cheaper to play records than hire a band. The Whisky à Go-Go was one of these clubs, decorated with a tartan theme and crates of Scotch from floor to ceiling. The name was derived from an Ealing comedy called Whisky Galore!, about a little Scottish island that tries to plunder a huge cache of whiskey from a marooned ship. The French title of the film was Whisky à Go-Go, the “à go-go” a French idiom for abundance. The Whisky’s chief claim to fame, aside from its wild hat-check girl, was that it had Paris’s first jukebox, with a lot of American early rock on it. Soon Régine was promoted to disc jockey. She proved to be a masterful mixer and was surely the first celebrity DJ who didn’t build her reputation on the radio.
By 1958, Régine had charmed enough rich men, in particular one of the Rothschilds, at the Whisky that she got backing to start her own disco, called Régine’s, on Rue du Four in the heart of the Quartier Latin. Her first Jet Set client was the dour J. Paul Getty, whom she cajoled into dancing with her. Among her other big names were Sam Spiegel, Zsa Zsa Gabor (Conrad Hilton was long gone), Darryl Zanuck, Salvador Dalí, Brigitte Bardot, Françoise Sagan, Frederic Chandon of the champagne dynasty, fellow Pole Roman Polanski, and Claude Terrail, there every night after he closed the Tour d’Argent. From the day she opened, she hung a “complet” (full) sign at the door, making it impossible to get in unless she knew you. At the beginning, the place was completely empty a lot of nights. But it kept its impossible standards, and in time, a star was born.
Régine did things that no other disco owner did, like serving her clientele a spaghetti dinner at three a.m. and giving all the regulars the most thoughtful gifts. She cultivated the French intelligentsia, like Sagan and Sartre and André Malr
aux, and invited them to special dinners at her apartment above the disco. Even in Belleville with her father, she always lived above the store. In France, an intellectual clientele provided a unique cachet, proof that Régine’s was not just for the mindless rich. She put on special events, like an all-white Jean Harlow night, where all the women wore white satin and the men white tie, a white entrance carpet was rolled out, and white Rollses ferried the guests. Also, Régine was known to have the most sympathetic ear in Paris. Even men like Rubirosa and Onassis could get lonely, and she was always there. A major turning point came in early 1961 when the traveling cast of West Side Story visited the club and brought Régine the Chubby Checker recording of Hank Ballard’s “The Twist.” It never stopped playing. The Jet Set had found its dance.
Meanwhile, her international habitués got busy knocking Régine off. The Cassini brothers loved what they saw, and with Eddie Gilbert’s backing, they re-created it in New York as Le Club, carefully not inviting Régine to the opening. Mark Birley, a frequent Channel-hopper when visiting his sister Maxime de la Falaise, a Régine’s regular with her daughter, Loulou, and Loulou’s boss, Yves St. Laurent, loved what he saw, and did welcome Régine to Annabel’s. She provided lots of helpful advice to Birley in starting his club. Still, like most of her countrymen, she had no interest at the time in France’s historical enemy. Mary Quant notwithstanding, she didn’t believe the British were capable of style and taste. Even Régine could make mistakes.
Régine had the elite Paris night all to herself until the latter sixties, when a tough ex–soccer player named Jean Castel opened his own disco a few blocks away from her on the Rue Princesse. Castel managed to pitch his appeal to the children of the rich and famous, the jeunesse doré, and because everyone wanted to feel as young as their kids, suddenly, Régine had a rival. In 1968, ceding St. Germain to Castel, she moved to new quarters in Montparnasse, where she called her club New Jimmy’z, Old Jimmy’s being one of the dance halls the Nazis shut down (the “Z” at the end was for Zylberberg). Paris wasn’t everything anymore. Régine had begun creating an empire, first in Monte Carlo, where her club Maona was named not after something in the South Seas but as an acronym of her top customers Maria (Callas) and Onassis. Soon Rio would follow, then the world.
Success seemed to run in the Zylberberg genes. While Régine was becoming queen of the night, her younger brother, Maurice, was becoming the prince of fashion. Starting in lowly jobs in the Paris sentier, or garment district, he rose to become a manufacturer, making the clothes for Pierre Cardin and Yves St. Laurent. The two would fight it out over who was more famous, the brother of Régine or the sister of Maurice. The one thing they could agree on was never to forgive their mother. Once her children had become famous, she returned to France from Argentina, assuming they would take care of her for life. Both refused to see her.
Régine was less successful in her private affairs than in her public ones. Soon after she moved to New Jimmy’z, at age forty, she finally fell in love, a first in a life lived totally on the defensive. The object of her affections was Roger Choukroun, a sensitive, handsome Moroccan Jewish computer engineer a decade her junior whom a Vogue editor brought to Régine’s new club. Choukron had preferred to go to Castel. Régine’s crowd was too famous, too intimidating. He wanted something less pressured. But the editor insisted. Régine dragged Choukroun onto the floor, then sent him right back. “You are a terrible dancer,” she passed judgment. “Go sit.” His interest piqued by the put-down, like that of the countless wannabe Jet Setters rejected at her door, Choukron began coming back to the club night after night. Although he may not have developed into a disco Fred Astaire, his persistence appealed to Régine, as did his good looks. They were married within the year.
The self-making of Régine, out of whole cloth, was surely an inspiration, a Dale Carnegie course, for sixties feminists. However, there weren’t that many of them to be inspired. Feminism was gestating in the mind of the housewife turned magazine writer Betty Friedan. In 1963, the same year her Feminine Mystique was published, her fellow Smith College alumna Gloria Steinem worked as a Bunny in the New York Playboy Club to do an article for Show magazine. Steinem’s boss was the model-chasing billionaire Huntington Hartford, the quintessential sexist male of the Jet Set. The bottom line of the era was that most women were anything but “liberated.” Liberation to them meant wearing a Quant mini or no bra, not so much to move easily and feel free but as a sexy means to achieve the Gurley Brown end of getting a man. Being a stewardess, a Bunny, a Playmate was, like becoming a movie star, a respectable fantasy. Just look at what the secret satyr John F. Kennedy was getting away with in the White House, cavorting with a panoply of females, from innocent interns to jaded celebrities.
When Adlai Stevenson, the Democratic presidential nominee, addressed the 1955 graduating class at Friedan’s and Steinem’s Smith College, he defended the housewife’s worthy task of catering to the needs and whims of the Kennedy-esque archetype he called “Western Man.” “Your job,” he exhorted the brainy graduates, “is to keep him Western. We will defeat totalitarianism, authoritarian ideas only by better ideas.” That was Stevenson’s idea of how the Smithies could best use their expensive liberal arts education, by being highbrow geishas to their Ivy League spouses and thereby inspire them to win the Cold War.
The year of Kennedy’s assassination, 1963, capped one of the vintage periods of international scandal and mystery that had kicked off with the death of Marilyn Monroe in August 1962. This period, a dark age for women, saw a climax of conduct-unbecoming Jet Set behavior, both decadent and lawless, that came to a sobering halt when JFK was gunned down in Dallas. Before that, the news seemed to be dominated by famous men, fine “Western Men,” in Stevenson’s phrase, behaving badly, very badly. The public was still feverishly speculating whether the sainted Kennedys killed Marilyn when Eddie Gilbert fled to Rio, shattering the myths of Wall Street probity, and then Igor Cassini plunged from grace to oblivion. In England, that greatest of all global sexcapades, the Profumo Scandal, would also erupt in this time frame, bringing an end to a certain type of English old-boy leadership and casting the revered British aristocracy in the darkest of shadows.
Aside from the Profumo Affair, England had another blockbuster in 1963, a reverse daily double for an embattled peerage. This was the case known as the Argyll Divorce. The action concerned Margaret, the Duchess of Argyll, the beautiful commoner daughter of a Scottish millionaire. Her husband, the Duke of Argyll, alleged that she had committed adultery with a grand total of eighty-eight men, including three royals; two cabinet ministers, one of whom was Duncan Sandys, the son-in-law of Winston Churchill; the German diplomat brother of ex-Nazi Wernher von Braun, the father of rocket science; and the American movie star and ex-husband of Joan Crawford, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.
In her day, the duchess, born Margaret Whigham, was considered the most beautiful girl in England. When she married the American playboy-golfer Charles Sweeny in 1933, Cole Porter immortalized her in “You’re the Top” with the lyric “You’re Mussolini, you’re Mrs. Sweeny, you’re Camembert.” The most titillating evidence in this longest (four years) of British divorce trials were the “headless horseman” photos of the duchess performing fellatio and other lewd acts on one of her lovers, cropped at the neck. No one knew or ever found out who had taken the pictures, which were authenticated by the courts. Chief suspect was Sandys, then minister of defense. The Conservative prime minister Harold Macmillan insisted that Sandys be examined by a Harley Street urologist, who concluded that Sandys’s pubic hair did not match that in the photos.
Now suspicion fell on Fairbanks, whose handwriting most closely matched the inscription “thinking of you” on one of the Polaroid photos, all taken in the duchess’s “party flat” in Mayfair while the poor duke was all alone up at his Inverary Castle in Scotland. Now happily married to an ex-wife of Huntington Hartford, the swashbuckling Fairbanks steadfastly denied the charges. Although the headless man’s i
dentity was never fully determined, the duke finally won the case and got his divorce. The presiding judge blasted the duchess as “a highly sexed woman who has ceased to be satisfied with normal sexual activities” and castigated her for her “disgusting sexual activities to gratify a debased sexual appetite.” She moved into the Grosvenor House Hotel, kept on partying, and would die penniless.
As Al Jolson had sung, the judge, Lord Denning, who would later that scandalous year of 1963 head a commission on the Profumo case, “ain’t seen nothin’ yet.” The Duchess of Argyll, for all her kinks, was in her fifties when all her perversions were going on. The world was riveted by her name and her fame, but the humiliation of a shameless middle-aged lady could not compare to the wild orgies of the teenage protagonists in the Profumo Affair. The duchess was Old Guard, old hat, and just plain old, but the Profumo girls, who were straight off the floor of Mary Quant’s Bazaar, were the faces of a new and swinging London. These weren’t debs or heiresses but real girls, poor girls, having real fun and infiltrating the Jet Set.
The whole world was vicariously riveted by these gorgeous English girls, Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies, who became role models of supersonic upward mobility. These were the girls other girls wanted to be. Most young ladies of the day didn’t want to be Mary Wells, because few could write great copy. They didn’t hope to be Mary Quant, because few could design great clothes. And they didn’t think they’d ever be Régine, because few could match her great outrageous chutzpah. But they could relate to Christine and Mandy the same way they related to the advice Helen Gurley Brown dished out in Cosmo. They just had to take Gurley Brown’s philosophy of pleasing a man one step further, to its inevitable conclusion. These blooming English roses were a new generation’s Horatio Algerettes. Their story could be called How to Win Friends and Influence People Through Sex.
Jet Set : The People, the Planes, the Glamour, and the Romance in Aviation's Glory Years (9780345536976) Page 29