by James Brady
22 Howling, cursing, singing, often in Gregorian chant.
FOR a year I did pieces on the European designers. Not only Paris. Mary Quant in London and this new man Armani in Milano, the odd Japanese setting up shop on the Faubourg Saint-Honoré. At first I was shy about imposing myself on them, exotic creatures of rare plumage. It was one thing to play rugger with Courreges or hang out with Ungaro or get tipsy with Chanel; then I had the Times behind me. A simple reference to the paper opened doors. Now I was a freelance, representing something called… Fashion.
What I failed to realize was that in this milieu, Fashion was as potent as the Times. Maybe more so.
Bergé arranged an interview, and I asked Saint Laurent about fashion, whether it was an art. He responded more eloquently than any of them, which was odd, for Yves was faun-shy, self-conscious, nearly tongue-tied with strangers.
“Fashion isn’t art,” he said, “that’s too important a word. It’s a trade, a métier. Un métier poetique.”
“A poetic trade.” I used his phrase to open a profile of Yves, and Marsh cabled his delight. I was not always as fortunate. Touted on his talent by several dubious sources I wrote what could only be termed a “puff piece” about another, “promising,” young designer. His collection was an enormous flop.
Bingo called from New York. “What did you expect? The man’s happily married.”
Marsh had the knack of fashion, not only the clothes but the men and women who conjured up the magic. I didn’t. Not that I didn’t learn something. Certainly I got to know them, the designers. Theirs was a narrow, special gift, the proper draping of cloth, the comprehension, without desire, of a woman’s body, and more than the body, knowing how a woman felt and what she wanted. A sense of proportion, an eye for color, an understanding of time and place so that the clothes would work now, and not a year ahead, a year ago, or on some wench in another country.
Not an art, yet I haunted fashion’s ateliers. “The designers, the designers, the designers,” Bingo carped at me by phone and cable, “they’re the engines of fashion.”
And when you got to know the designers, sitting late with them over dinners on the Ile or lunches Chez Allard, you were inevitably invited to the new fashion show.
“It is my work, it is what I do, it is my life. If you care anything for me you must come and bear witness to my genius.”
So ran the appeal. And so I became a regular at the fashion shows of Paris, and surprised myself by enjoying them. The clothes held interest mostly because I knew who had designed them. I was intrigued by the beautiful young women who wore them on the runway and by the less beautiful and somewhat more mature women who could afford the clothes. I’d begun learning about fashion shows from Coco and from Gillian. Now I was tutored by Bingo, from whom I would learn the fashion show had a dynamic, a flow, even an ethic all its own.
“You simply must sit in the front row and on the first day,” Bingo lectured me. “If there are two shows the first day, attend the earlier. The models get sloppy and the energy goes, and at the second show there are Germans.”
By “Germans” Bingo subsequently made clear he meant any Europeans who were not French.
“If when you get there and there’s no front-row seat reserved, leave instantly. The designers have utter contempt for people who accept a place in the second row. It’s far better to insult a designer by walking out. He’ll respect you for it. And don’t fret if he bursts into tears. Designers always weep on the day of the collection. It’s how they pay homage to themselves.”
Gillian had had her own set of rules, agreeing with Bingo about the necessity of the front seat but enlarging on it.
“You’ve got to sit up front, of course, but you must also smoke cigarettes constantly, lighting one from another, and laugh a lot and when John Fairchild or the editor of Vogue rolls his eyes backwards, you look stern. And after the show has gone on for a certain period of time, anything over an hour, pretend to be Italian and cry ‘Basta!’ and perhaps throw your program. At some shows, the Cardin for example, crying ‘Basta!’ commences quite early.”
I also learned it was permitted to faint at shows. The woman who wrote fashion for the Herald Tribune in Paris did this frequently in order to escape early.
I had an advantage over most newcomers writing for fashion magazines. I had the Times; its severe disciplines and its stylebook, to which its writers adhered with the fervor of religious conversion; and I had something else, a conviction that as lousy as I might be writing books, I was pretty good at short pieces. Maybe very good. And there was one more thing: Da Xiang and the cockiness combat gave a young man that he would never entirely lose no matter what happened.
I think the designers sensed it, opening themselves, their minds, even their homes to me so that I was able to write about them with a familiarity, a near intimacy, that brought the pieces vibrantly to life. Other fashion writers asked them about their designs, about the clothes; I asked them about themselves. It worked, and more and more often my pieces found their way to the cover of the magazine and it was by cover stories, as much as by money, that a magazine writer’s worth was calculated.
Not that I had no other life. This was still Paris; there were women.
The designers sent them, they came on their own, some I sought out. The designers tried me early with the subtle bribe, the bespoke suit, the pricey meal, the case of Latour, sometimes blunt and vulgar cash. I took the meals and a discount on the clothes, and the occasional vintage bottle (an entire case I rejected righteously as immoral!), but turned down the rest. Bingo’s warning echoed: “They’ll try to buy you. They tried to buy me.” It was apparently an honored and ancient tradition among French fashion editors to be bought; the Italians insisted on it as an inherited right. So I said no to the cash.
It was more ticklish with the women. To reject them without at least sharing an apéritif or an evening would have been unconscionably rude, since they were amiable young persons but doing their job.
One of the Paris designers not only sent no bribes but refused to receive me.
This was Paul Profonde, the “intellectual,” known more familiarly as “Pipi.” Profonde was said to be “too grand” at this stage of his career to receive the press. He was contemptuous of publicity; too busy thinking.
“A genius!” cried his small but growing cult of admirers. As profound as his name, Profonde was known to slave through an entire day and night over a shoulder pad, howling, cursing, singing, often in Gregorian chant (vestige of an education by Jesuits in Lille), occasionally crying out in anguish to God to witness the perfidy of silk prices and the embroiderers’ union, pointing an elegantly narrow foot (he’d done time at the barre as a child in ballet class), and slavering slightly at the corners of his aristocratic mouth.
“Secretly a heterosexual,” the nasty-minded whispered.
Others, knowing Pipi, thought this unlikely. And when unconfirmed reports surfaced from Tangier that Pipi on holiday had been beaten up by Arab boys in a communal bath, had in fact been severely bitten, and painfully so, in strategic places, there was in Paris considerable smirking.
So ran down the seventies. Hostages rotted in Tehran, a movie actor was running for President, Ethiopians starved, governments were over-thrown, continental plates shifted, the Amazon forests were set ablaze, while in Paris at Regine’s and Castel’s I played with the boys of Paris Match and strapping Swedish blondes from the cabine of André Courreges, and wrote long pieces about fashion designers like Karl Lagerfeld, who drove a Bentley, denied his mother was a Nazi, wore a pigtail, and everywhere carried a tortoiseshell fan with which to stir the languid air.
I felt only the occasional guilt which, as a Catholic, I was able to enjoy fully.
23 Terrible for the country. And Hart Schaffner and Marx.
EVERY few months, Bingo descended. I don’t know that Henry Luce flew about so, inspecting Time’s correspondents. The difference was, Luce terrified his employees. I began to look forwa
rd to Bingo’s descents. Well, most of them.
We were on a Channel ferry, the two of us, crossing from France to England on an April day, tossed and bucketed about on a Force 9 gale.
“We could have flown,” I complained, “Paris to London, less than an hour…”
“Nobody flies who has time for the ferry,” Bingo lectured me tolerantly, “just inhale that salt breeze.” He then broke into a little sea chantey.
All about us tourists and day-trippers vomited on their shoes and clung grimly to railings, apparently convinced none of us would survive to see the white cliffs of Dover or anything else, blotted out by spray coming over the bows. Marsh and I were headed for London so he could buy some suits and attend a dinner given by the British menswear industry, where he would receive some sort of decorous honor. I was fetched along for company and to gather material for a column.
The dinner was being jointly sponsored by the Bespoke Tailors & Cutters Guild of the United Kingdom and by the Woolmark label.
“What’s that?”
“If a manufacturer uses all wool in a suit and none of that synthetic stuff Du Pont foists on people, he gets to put a Woolmark label inside the jacket, and they buy lots of advertising for him and he gets invited to things and Prince Philip comes.”
This was about as clear as Marsh ever was on anything, so I accepted it. And the award the tailors and cutters were giving him?
“I believe it’s for my courageous statement on behalf of the double-breasted suit.”
“You wrote something about it?”
“No, I had a couple made and I’ve been wearing them recently, which made the menswear people happy. The industry loves it every ten years or so when everybody switches from single- to double-breasted or vice versa. It’s like women’s hemlines. That way we all have to buy new suits to be in fashion, and it stimulates business. Like the miniskirt. You ought to get one while we’re in London.”
“A miniskirt?”
He looked bleak. “You know what I mean, a double-breasted suit. We owe it to the retailers.”
Marsh was solicitous of good tailors, always was. He expounded on difficulties in the men’s suit trade as we did another lap around the ferry’s deck, buffeted by the wind but driven from the salons by the stench.
“Someone did a survey once, and it turned out the average American man buys one suit every eight years. And that included people like me, who might buy four or five suits a year, as well as suits for graduation and getting married and even navy blue suits to be laid out in by the undertaker. Though with cremation even that trade is said to be dying off…”
“Ha ha ha,” I said, pleasing him.
“… and people live in sports jackets these days, and jeans. And that’s terrible for the country. And Hart Schaffner and Marx.”
Bingo’s own suits, most of them, came from London.
“I used to go to Dougie Hayward on Mount Street,” he said. “Very nice suits, single stitching in the lapels and four cuff buttons, the usual thing, and Dougie liked to lounge about in the afternoon during fittings chatting and pouring an excellent dry sherry, not the Tio Pepe you get everywhere in London, and passing on cinema gossip and the latest about Princess Margaret and her current boyfriend, a boy called Rodney Something, whom they all called ‘sweet, impetuous Rodders,’ which made him sound rather dear and vulnerable and she a monster, and Michael Caine came to Dougie for suits and people like that and then they all got drunk and went to discotheques and places. It all became just too hectic for me, so I switched my custom to Gieves and Hawkes. They’re very good on Harris tweeds. You can actually smell the heather and the gorse and the eternal mists of the Islands on those tweeds, a sort of oatmeal odor.”
“I’ve gotten a few suits from Henry Poole,” I said, unwilling to let Bingo have all the Savile Row lines. “They’re really quite…”
“I know the house. They do the Queen’s riding britches and uniforms for Haile Selassie. Or used to, until he was bumped off.”
“… solicitous about fit. My man there had a client who insisted on getting down on all fours to crawl about before accepting a suit, just to be sure it didn’t bind.”
“I daresay,” said Bingo vacantly, hating as usual to let anyone else have a good story about fashion. “Isn’t that Dover just ahead?”
We stayed at the Connaught, Bingo in a suite, and went to Moss Bros. to rent white tie and tails for the Bespoke Tailors affair. While we were being fitted, Marsh skimmed the letters page of The Times.
“I think it’s so clever that Rupert Murdoch left The Times the way it was, nice and dull, and didn’t try to tart it up like the New York Post.”
“Well, they’re hardly the same thing…”
“Hello, hello!” He was peering intently at the paper now, not just skimming.
“What?”
“There must be a half dozen letters here, all on the same subject. The Bishop of Chichester apparently wrote to the editor recently, inquiring why English country inns and provincial hotels no longer offered chamber pots.”
“Oh?”
“And there are all these letters telling of hotels that still have them.”
“Letters to the editor of The Times of London, with all that’s going on in the world, and they’re about chamber pots?”
Marsh put down the paper.
“Isn’t it one of man’s most fundamental concerns, John?”
The dinner went off brilliantly. Prince Philip actually did attend, and it was reassuring to see that he walked about with his hands behind his back just as he does on television and in the papers. Marsh’s award went down quite nicely, and he wasn’t asked to speak, which was a relief to me, sure as I was that those letters to The Times about chamber pots were still very much on his mind and might conceivably work their way into his speech.
Before he left London to go back to New York, we dined with Hardy Amies, not yet a knight but one of the glories of English fashion (“Such as it is,” quoth Bingo), and an officer in wartime British intelligence.
“I want John to write something juicy about “Bomber” Littlejohn while he’s here, Hardy.”
“He should, you know,” said Amies.
I knew a little about Littlejohn, who worked for Amies’s great rival, Norman Hartnell, one of several London couturiers whose principal role seemed to be making the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret, and even the Queen herself, look dowdy. “Bomber” Littlejohn, a corpulent Englishman who resembled my (and Hollywood’s) idea of an aging RAF wing commander, which he may well have been with his mustachios and puffs of fur on his cheeks and ruddy complexion, was said to be happily married, with a number of children; he reputedly kept an extremely ripe young mistress; and he was believed also to be Mr. Hartnell’s lover.
“I can’t write that, Bingo. It’s libelous on the face of it.”
“We’re too cautious, Hardy,” Marsh grumbled. “The magazine’s getting predictable and dull.” Then, brightening, “Hardy, have you been following the correspondence in The Times, the Bishop of Chichester and the country inns…?”
24 South of Rome you always carry your billfold inside your underwear.
USUALLY, I was more pliable than in the case of “Bomber” Littlejohn’s impressively busy sex life.
In July, Marsh was back in Paris for the collections. On the day of the last show he announced, “We’re going to Italy tomorrow. Oscar has a house and we’ve got to visit.”
I had no rational excuse, and we flew to Rome. I didn’t know Oscar de la Renta and he didn’t know me, but we were “to visit.” Once again, the absolute imperative. From Rome there was a fast train to Naples.
“Anywhere south of Rome,” Bingo confided, “you always carry your billfold inside your underwear.”
I resisted the temptation to go into the lavatory and shift my money to my jockey shorts, but in Naples no cut-purses attacked us and we got a courteous cab to the waterfront, where we boarded the aliscafi, the hydrofoil, for Ischia. It was a for
ty-five-minute ride, very rough, bang-bang-banging against the waves. When we got to Ischia Oscar de la Renta was at the quay. He was a tall, tan boy from the Dominican Republic who’d worked in Paris as an assistant to Castillo, the one who may have whipped Gypsies, and was now an important designer in New York. Oscar greeted us both very graciously and went off to summon his driver.
“Dominicans are all part black,” Bingo hissed.
I didn’t bother asking details or how he knew. Oscar was married to a very chic Frenchwoman, Françoise de Langlade, who’d been editor of French Vogue.
“She was Rothschild’s mistress,” Bingo informed me with some delight as soon as no one was listening.
The Rentas were very nice. They’d rented a large villa on a hill overlooking the sea, and the first night they had some people come over from Naples for dinner, Go Go Berenson and her husband.
“He speaks no known language, the husband, including Italian,” Oscar warned us before they arrived.
“We wanted Alex and Tatiana Liberman, too,” Françoise said. “They’re here, taking the mud.”
Ischia’s volcanic mud was imbued with apparently miraculous properties, I gathered, but the Libermans were unable to join us.
Go Go was a very attractive American who was the daughter of the great designer Elsa Schiaparelli. Go Go had two daughters of her own, Berry, who was married to the actor Tony Perkins, and Marisa, the cover girl and actress.
“I never had a chance in life,” Go Go complained in mock despair over dinner. “I used to be ‘Scap’s daughter’; now I’m ‘Marisa’s mother.’ ”
Her husband, the “barone,” smiled broadly but offered nothing beyond views of his excellent teeth. It was a very pleasant dinner and we got drunk and then a motorboat came, all mahogany and gleaming brightwork, to take Go Go and the barone home. Next day we were out diving and the skipper of the motorboat, speaking rapid Italian, told Oscar, who translated for us, that Go Go and her husband had been to Ischia before.