White Girls

by Hilton Als

  As a teenager, Talley made regular trips to the white section of Durham to buy Vogue, and these forays were another significant influence on his development. “My uncles cried ‘Scandal! Scandal!’ when I said I wanted to grow up to be a fashion editor,” he says. “I discovered so early that the world was cruel. My mother didn’t like my clothes. Those white people in Durham were so awful. And there I was, just this lone jigaboo...creature. And fashion in Vogue seemed so kind. So opulently kind. A perfect image of things. I began to think like an editor when I began to imagine presenting the women I knew in the pages of Vogue: my grandmother’s style of perfection in the clothes she made; her version of couture.”

  In a snapshot of Talley from his college days, he is sitting with two female friends. What makes him recognizable is not just his physical appearance—the long, thin body; the large, vulnerable mouth jutting out from the long, thin face—but also his clothes. Unlike the other students, who are dressed in T-shirts and jeans, Talley wears a blue sweater with short sleeves over a white shirt with long sleeves, a brooch in the shape of a crescent moon, large aviator glasses with yellow lenses, and a blue knit hat. He looks delighted to be wearing these clothes. He looks delighted to be with these women.

  Talley earned a BA in French literature at North Carolina Central University in 1970. His interest in the world of allure outside his grandmother’s closet, away from Durham, coincided with his interest in French. He says of his discovery that couture was a part of French culture, and that his grandmother practiced her version of it, “You could have knocked me over with a feather! And it was stretching all the way back to the Ancien Régime, darling! Introduced to me by my first French instructor, Miss Cynthia P. Smith, in the fields of Durham, North Carolina! The entire French œuvre of oldness and awfulness flipping one out into the Belle Époque bodice of the music hall, Toulouse-Lautrec, an atmosphere of decadence, leading us to Josephine Baker and... me!”

  Talley’s immersion in French gave him a model to identify with: Baudelaire, on whose work he wrote his master’s thesis, at Brown University in the early seventies. And it was while he was at Brown, liberated by the Baudelairean image of the flaneur, that Talley began to exercise fully his penchant for extravagant personal dress. He was known for draping himself in a number of cashmere sweaters. He was known for buying, on his teaching-assistant stipend, Louis Vuitton luggage.

  “Obviously, he was not going to teach French,” Dr. Yvonne Cormier, a schoolmate of Talley’s at Brown, says. “André thought it was just good manners to look wonderful. It was a moral issue. And his language reflected that. André could never just go to his room and study. He had to exclaim, ‘They’ve sent me to this prison! Now I have to go to my chambers and have a moment.’”

  After Talley left Brown and completed his stint as a volunteer with Diana Vreeland at the Met, he became known in New York fashion circles for these things: insisting, at his local post office, on the most beautiful current stamps and holding up the line until they materialized; serving as a personal shopper for Miles Davis at the request of Davis’s companion, Cicely Tyson; answering the telephone at Andy Warhol’s Interview, in his capacity as a receptionist, with a jaunty “Bonjour!” and taking down messages in purple ink (for bad news) and gold (good news); wearing a pith helmet and kneesocks in the summer; being referred to by the envious as Queen Kong; becoming friends with the heiress Doris Duke and attending, at her invitation, many of her appearances as a singer with a black gospel choir; overspending on clothes and furnishings and running up personal debts in his habitual effort to live up to the grand amalgamation of his three names.

  André Leon Talley came into his own in the late seventies, when designers like Yves Saint Laurent and Halston produced the clothes that he covered at the beginning of his career as a fashion editor at WWD, clothes often described as glamorous. It is the period referred to in the clothes being produced now by designers like Marc Jacobs and Anna Sui. “It was a time when I could take Mrs. Vreeland and Lee Radziwill to a LaBelle concert at the Beacon and it wouldn’t look like I was about to mug them,” Talley says.

  Daniela Morera, a correspondent for Italian Vogue, has a different recollection. “André was privileged because he was a close friend of Mrs. Vreeland’s,” she says. “Black people were as segregated in the industry then as they are now. They’ve always been the don’t-get-too-close-darling exotic. André enjoyed a lot of attention from whites because he was ambitious and amusing. He says it wasn’t bad, because he didn’t know how bad it was for other blacks in the business. He was successful because he wasn’t a threat. He’ll never be an editor-in-chief. How could America have that dictating what the women of America will wear? Or representing them? No matter that André’s been the greatest crossover act in the industry for quite some time. Like forever.”

  Talley’s fascination stems, in part, from his being the only one. In the media or the arts, the only one is usually male, always somewhat “colored,” and almost always gay. His career is based, in varying degrees, on talent, race, nonsexual charisma, and an association with people in power. To all appearances, the only one is a person with power, but is not the power. He is not just defined but controlled by a professional title, because he believes in the importance of his title and of the power with which it associates him. If he is black, he is a symbol of white anxiety about his presence in the larger world and the guilt such anxiety provokes. Other anxieties preoccupy him: anxieties about salary and prestige and someone else’s opinion ultimately being more highly valued than his. He elicits many emotions from his colleagues, friendship and loyalty rarely being among them, since he does not believe in friendship that is innocent of an interest in what his title can do.

  Talley is positioned, uniquely, at the intersection of fashion, magazine publishing, television, and high society. He regards his position as a privilege, and he flaunts it. “A large part of his life is Vogue,” Candy Pratts Price, the magazine’s fashion director, says about him. “Which explains the vulnerable, intense moods he goes through when he thinks someone here is against him. We’ve all been there with those moods of his, and they are pretty intense.”

  Talley’s emotional involvement with women rises in part from nostalgia. He seems to project his grandmother’s intentions and concerns for him, and Cynthia P. Smith’s and Diana Vreeland’s as well, onto his female colleagues at Vogue, and he seems to feel spurned when they exercise the independence inherent in a modern-day professional relationship. Often, the results are disastrous. When Talley is in favor, his colleagues adopt him as a totem of editorial success; when he is not, they regard him as a glittering but superfluous accessory.

  His interest in romance is nostalgic, too. For him, romance is not about ending his loneliness; rather, it flows from the idea, expounded by Baudelaire, that love is never truly attained, only yearned for. (Talley’s contemporary version of this: “No man, child,” he might say, telephoning from his apartment in Paris. “No man. Just another video evening alone for the child of culture.”) Talley’s romantic yearnings are melancholic: he is susceptible to the prolonged, unrequited “crush” but is immune to involvement. He avoids engaging men he is attracted to. Generally, he is attracted to men who avoid him. He avoids the potential rejection and hurt that are invariable aspects of romantic love. Going to a gay bar with Talley, then, is an odd experience. In gay bars, as a rule, all bets are off: everyone is the same as everyone else because everyone is after the same thing. In a sense, the common pursuit divests everyone present of his title. Talley rarely speaks to anyone in this sort of environment. Mostly, he glowers at men he finds appealing and lays the blame for their lack of immediate interest in him on racism, or on the sexually paranoid environment that AIDS has fostered everywhere. Perhaps he just prefers the imagery of love made familiar by fashion magazines: images of the subject exhausted by “feeling,” undone by a crush, recuperating in an atmosphere of glamour and allure.

  Once, in New York, I had dinner with Tal
ley and his friend the comedian Sandra Bernhard. She asked me how long I had known André. I said, “I fell in love with him in Paris.” There was a silence—a silence that André did not fill with being pleased at or made shy by my comment. He grew large in his seat. He grew very dark and angry. And then he exclaimed, with great force, “You did not fall in love with me! You were in love with Paris! It was all the fabulous things I showed you in Paris! Lagerfeld’s house! Dior! It wasn’t me! It wasn’t! It was Paris!”

  When I first met Talley, I did not tell him that my interest in him was based in part on what other blacks in the fashion industry had said about him, on the way they had pointed him out as the only one. Blacks in the fashion industry have spoken of Talley with varying degrees of reverence, envy, and mistrust (which is how nonblacks in the fashion industry have spoken of him as well). One black American designer has called André Leon Talley “a fool. He’ll only help those kids—designers like Galliano—if they’ve got social juice, if they’re liked by socialites, the women who tell André what to do.” Talley complains about people who underestimate the difficulty of his position. “It’s exhausting to be the only one with the access, the influence, to prevent the children from looking like jigaboos in the magazine—when they do appear in the magazine. It’s lonely.”

  Talley gave a luncheon in Paris a few years ago to celebrate the couture season’s start. The people he welcomed to the luncheon—held in the Café de Flore’s private dining room, on the second floor—included Kenneth Jay Lane, a jewelry designer; Inès de la Fressange, a former Chanel model and spokesperson; Joe Eula, a fashion illustrator; Roxanne Lowitt, a photographer; and Maxime de la Falaise, a fashion doyenne, and her daughter, LouLou, the Yves Saint Laurent muse.

  Following shirred eggs and many bottles of wine, Roxanne Lowit, her black hair and black Chinese jacket a blur of organization, invited the guests to assemble in order to be photographed. LouLou de la Falaise removed an ancient huge round compact from her purse and began to powder her nose as her mother sat in readiness. Joe Eula ignored Lowit and continued drinking. Talley got up from his seat to sit near Maxime de la Falaise, who had admired a large turquoise ring he wore.

  “Look, LouLou!” Talley shouted. “The color of this ring is divine, no? Just like the stone you gave me!”

  “What?” LouLou de la Falaise asked, barely disguising her boredom.

  “This ring, child. Just like the stone you gave me, no?”

  LouLou de la Falaise did not respond. She nodded toward Roxanne Lowit, and Lowit instructed her to stand behind Maxime de la Falaise and Talley. LouLou de la Falaise said, “I will stand there only if André tries not to look like such a nigger dandy.”

  Several people laughed, loudly. None laughed louder than André Leon Talley. But it seemed to me that a couple of things happened before he started laughing: he shuttered his eyes, his grin grew larger, and his back went rigid, as he saw his belief in the durability of glamour and allure shatter before him in a million glistening bits. Talley attempted to pick those pieces up. He sighed, then stood and said, “Come on, children. Let’s see something. Let’s visit the House of Galliano.”

  I AM THE HAPPINESS OF THIS WORLD

  I AM LOUISE BROOKS, whom no man will ever possess. Photographed in profile, or three-quarter profile, or full front, photographed and filmed for as long as I can remember (before and after I was forgotten); slandered and revered for as long as I can remember—I remain Louise Brooks, whom no man will ever possess. There is my hair, as black as all that, and the crest of my eyebrows, as black as all that, too, but they do not meet in the center of my forehead but nearly meet at the edge of my bangs, the enameled black of my bangs attached to the rest of it, my hair, which I wore less as a helmet than as a shroud. There is my face and there are my eyes, implanted in that absolutely alabaster exterior known as my face, seen time and again in profile and three-quarter profile and full front, which did not convey the vitality of youth so much as it conveyed the dissatisfaction one might have with one’s youth upon realizing one’s youth is there to be ruined, capsized, and sometimes one simply wants to get on with it. In my face you did not see death at work but death at play, hence my film “character,” the same one again and again, living in the mortuary of this world and knowing that Death, as an entity, has no regard for whether or not one takes one lover or sixteen, or seeks the ravages of gin to ravage and/or revenge one’s beauty, to accelerate hate or disappoint love—in the end, we are all assassinated. My “character”—in everything from Love ’Em and Leave ’Em to Pandora’s Box to Prix de Beauté to Diary of a Lost Girl—thinks of nothing beyond this moment, the moment of assassination (“It is Christmas Eve and she [Lulu] is about to receive the gift that has been her dream since childhood: death by a sexual maniac,” I wrote once, elsewhere). No Christian ethic to speak of for “her.” And yet I myself died a devout Catholic. I am Louise Brooks, whom no man will ever possess.

  I am Louise Brooks, whom no man will ever possess—not the biographer, chronicler, or fan. We are all the product of someone else’s dream. This I have known since childhood. It was then that a man, a neighborhood friend, did things to me that hurt and hurt. There was no Jesus for me then, just him, this man. And the things he did—my beauty was a conduit for violence against me. And yet I became “her,” desired to be seen time and again.

  There is nothing unusual in that. There was nothing, ever, to recommend myself to myself except the alabaster skin, the hair I wore as a shroud, the combined effect of which was to make men want to disappear in it. Again and again, I wanted them to absent themselves in the perfection of a beauty I never owned. Believe me in this: my distance from it was so great that I viewed my face as one would a misremembered dream featuring a face and a story I would never come to know, that of Louise Brooks, whom no man will ever possess.

  And yet these men did seek to possess me, again and again, and primarily as authors of a text—biography, film criticism, memoirs—that features my name and descriptions of myself—or herself, the “star”—and sometimes photographs as well. But they did it for themselves. They did it by becoming authors of a text in which they are in control of me or herself, that thing that moves them to want to define and fix me through language that is not my own.

  The least an object can do is shut up. Speech is impertinent. And yet, although it was, primarily, as a silent film actress that I was known, the complexity and ultimate failure of language was what I conveyed. As one critic wrote upon the 1929 release of Pandora’s Box: “Miss Brooks is attractive and she moves her head and eyes at the proper moment, but whether she is endeavoring to express joy, woe, anger, or satisfaction it is often difficult to decide.” What we have here is language that is prohibitive; words fail the author in this case because the language I conveyed was not prescriptive. In which instance, as in life, is it not? There are those words—joy, woe, anger—and there is my expression of them: in the face that appears under my hair, in my neck that seems to be carved out of any and all the space surrounding it, through my body, which was a complete style unto itself.

  Again, I wrote once, elsewhere: “That I was a dancer and Pabst essentially a choreographer in his direction came as a wonderful surprise to both of us...As I was leaving the set, he caught me in his arms, shaking me and laughing as if I had played a joke on him. ‘But you are a professional dancer!’ It was the moment when he realized that his choice of me for Lulu was instinctively right. He felt as if he had created me. I was his Lulu.”

  But in creating movement that matters, there is no need to invent a “character”—it is the self that we strive to express. In that early self, that early Louise Brooks, neither Pabst nor anyone else “created” me in a role—I was there myself, in it.

  “Louise Brooks cannot act. She does not suffer. She does nothing,” wrote yet another critic of one of my early performances. In this review, the language is more to the point, although it, too, conveyed little of what I actually did: it does not analyze wh
y I chose not to “act” but, rather, to be, and was among the first of my kind to do so.

  One of the essential rules of screen acting is not to “do” anything at all. This happens when, and only when, one is free or absent enough from one’s self to believe we have nothing to lose. Which I did not: before I had lived, my life was lost to me at the hands of a man who did things to me that hurt and hurt. And about my “life” as it was lived: the biographer, Mr. Barry Paris, describes the events constituting it with such caution and at such a remove that my life, in the reading, becomes yet another experience of nonreading; I am less written about in his book than chronicled. There is nothing to suggest “How I Became Louise Brooks,” yet another thing I should have written.

  Several biographical details for the more documentary-minded among you: I was born in Cherryvale, Kansas, in 1906, and raised in Wichita, Kansas; from my father I inherited my eyebrows and love of scholarship; from my mother I inherited everything that was inattentive, moody, critical. I became interested in dance at an early age; I danced and danced; I left home to dance with Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn and their troupe, Denishawn, another member of which was Martha Graham; I left Denishawn at the insistence of Miss St. Denis (I was too critical of others, she said, and too lax with myself). I was asked to perform with the Ziegfeld Follies; I was the most hated Follies girl, ever (too well-read, too much attitude); I was loved then and only then by several lesbians of intellectual distinction and many fairy boys who drank and wrote; I left the Ziegfeld Follies to make films. I slept with Chaplin, Garbo, Pepi Lederer (Marion Davies’s niece), William S. Paley, G.W. Pabst—in no particular order. I married twice but, by my own admission, loved only one man, George Marshall, who never restricted himself to the role of fan. I made a number of films, here and in Europe—twenty-four in all; was roundly hated for doing as I pleased and was regarded by many as a child to be cast out, especially in Hollywood—the studio system as fucked family. Many years of drinking; years of writing or not writing. Several people along the way fell in love with me for what I once had been: that image played in their minds as my self, old, stooped, a recluse, talked some to some and little or nothing to others.