Wallflower at the Orgy

by Nora Ephron

  The First Lady’s return to civilian life has not daunted her friends at Fairchild. Almost every purchase she makes is reported and usually applauded. “It’s the casual Jackie,” went one recent article, “that calls Paraphernalia, orders the Bush Blouse in blue. Will she wear it with her new gold chain belt? Her Gucci shoes? And maybe pull everything together with a suède skirt, knee socks … even pull her hair back with a signature scarf?” Tune in tomorrow for the solution to these pressing questions.

  In December 1966 John Fairchild spotted Mrs. Kennedy at lunch at LaFayette in an above-the-knees skirt. He called his office, which in turn signaled a photographer who travels with an electronic bleeper device in his pocket for just such emergencies. The photographer rushed to the restaurant and snapped the picture that was reprinted in nearly every American publication. “Jacqueline Formidable,” said Women’s Wear commemorating the raised hemline.

  Women’s Wear’s relationship with the White House has withered considerably during the Johnson years. It called Mrs. Kennedy Her Elegance. It calls Mrs. Johnson Her Efficiency, and her clothes are seldom applauded and only reluctantly. “The First Lady of the United States can, within reason, wear whatever she chooses,” Women’s Wear wrote tartly of one of Mrs. Johnson’s recent appearances. “Thursday she did.”

  Lynda Bird Johnson is referred to as Lovely Lynda—LL for short—and the term has a distinct edge of sarcasm. Women’s Wear could be pleasant enough to Miss Johnson, particularly during what it considers her Golden Age—the months she was escorted by Gorgeous George (GG). But when Miss Johnson announced her engagement to Marine Captain Charles Robb Women’s Wear began to fret about her future as clotheshorse. Shortly thereafter, it published a devastating series of photographs entitled “The Metamorphosis of Lynda Bird,” which prominently displayed several pictures taken before the ugly duckling became a swan. “George Hamilton may never go to Vietnam,” wrote Women’s Wear in crediting him with the transformation, “but he has done his bit for his country.” But the future looked grim to Women’s Wear, which asked: “NOW WILL LYNDA CONTINUE TO FLUTTER THOSE LOVELY WINGS? OR WILL SHE SLIDE BACK INTO PROVINCIAL ATTITUDES? She’s certainly come an amazing way in just two years. With George’s help, of course. And now it’s up to the Marines. Will Chuck get the message across to her about those cheap accessories? Will he find her a good shoemaker?”

  LL, GG, Her Efficiency, and Her Elegance made regular appearances in Women’s Wear, along with an extensive supporting cast that includes Gloria Guinness (The Ultimate), Happy Rockefeller (Her Happiness), Princess Margaret (Her Drear), Ohrbach’s head buyer Sydney Gittler (The King), Balenciaga (The Monk), and, of course, The Ladies—Babe (Paley), Amanda (Burden), Chessy (Rayner), Didi (Auchincloss), Pamela (Zauderer), Linda (Hackett), Isabel (Eberstadt), and Judy (Peabody)—all of whom John Fairchild has favored at one time or another for one reason or another. “I sometimes wonder,” mused designer Bill Blass, “if we’d ever have heard of Isabel and Chessy and Didi if it weren’t for John.”

  The Ladies themselves are rather fed up with the whole business. “At first it was flattering,” said Judy Peabody. “After all, what woman doesn’t like to think she’s pretty?” But after a while, it got to be rather a responsibility knowing that whenever one went out a photographer might be lying in ambush. “There are times,” said Mrs. Peabody, “when I would like to go out and not feel that I’m making an appearance.” (It must be noted, however, that whenever Mrs. Peabody is photographed by WW she smiles.)

  And it must be further noted that, for its part, Women’s Wear seems to be wearying of The Ladies. For one thing, The Ladies have begun to commit new and practically unforgivable fashion sins. “They’d rather be Socially Secure than Individual,” lamented one recent article criticizing The Ladies for not wearing dark stockings and buckled shoes. “AREN’T THEY TOO YOUNG TO BE SET IN THEIR FASHION WAYS?” Women’s Wear’s ambivalence toward The Ladies has been heightened recently: it ran a series of fictional adventures, written by one of their brightest young writers, Chauncey Howel, about two frigid postdebutantes named Didi Aubusson and Mimi de Nebbisch who take their decorators to lunch, shoplift at Lamston’s for kicks, and behave in several other ways that may or may not be Ladylike.

  In the last year, Women’s Wear Daily has added fashion columnist Eugenia Sheppard. And its coverage of nonfashion events has broadened considerably. It prints articles on poverty, nuns’ orders, the Vietnam black market, and dragqueen beauty contests; its art, movie, and drama critics have always been first rate—drama critic Martin Gottfried is nationally recognized. And when reading Women’s Wear for its criticism is a little like reading Playboy for its fiction, there nevertheless are indications that WW is making a real attempt to place fashion in a slightly larger context. Despite the improvements, however, serious members of the fashion business wish that Women’s Wear would concentrate more of its efforts on being at least accurate, at least ethical, at least mature, at least responsible—traits that WW displays only on rare occasion.

  If Women’s Wear Daily were writing about politics, its failings would be reprehensible. As it is, they are at worst, a scandale. For Women’s Wear is, after all, only writing about fashion. AND FASHION, NO MATTER WHAT WOMEN’S WEAR DAILY SAYS, IS AFTER ALL, ONLY SPINACH.

  Mush

  “… there may be a new trend gathering momentum. It is a return to romanticism, a yearning for years past, when life was simpler and values stronger.”

  —TIME MAGAZINE

  The media have been calling it a return to romance, but of course the return is only on the part of the media. The rest of the country never went away. The poems of Kahlil Gibran and books like A Friend Is Someone Who Likes You and Happiness Is A Warm Puppy have been selling hundreds of thousands of copies in recent years. Heart-shaped satin boxes of chocolate candy, single red American Beauty roses, record albums by Mantovani and the George Melachrino Strings, rhinestone hearts on silver chains—all of it sells to the multitudes out there.

  What has changed, however, is that sentimentality is now being peddled by people who seem to lend it an aura of cultural respectability. Take Rod McKuen and Erich Segal. Both of them have hit the jackpot in the romance business: one is a poet, the other a professor. And each thinks of himself as much more than the mush-huckster he is. McKuen, the author of five slim volumes of sentimental poetry and countless songs, is the fastest-selling poet in America; Segal is the author of Love Story, which has sold almost 500,000 copies in hard cover, had the largest paperback first printing (4,350,000 copies) in history, and is on the way to being the weepiest and most successful film ever made. All of it is treacle, pure treacle, with a message that is perfect escapism to a country in the throes of future shock: the world has not changed, the old values prevail, kids are the same as ever, love is just like they told us in the movies. This optimism comes in nice small packages that allow for the slowest reader with the shortest concentration span and the smallest vocabulary.

  To lump Segal and McKuen together here is not to say that they know each other—they don’t—or that their work is alike. But there are some disarming similarities. Both appeal primarily to women and teen-age girls. Both are bachelors who enjoy referring to themselves as loners. Both belong to professions that rarely lead to commercial success. Both have the habit of repeating compliments others have paid them, and both do it in a manner that is so blatant it almost seems ingenuous. Segal, for instance, speaking on the prototype of his book’s heroine: “JENNY exists and knows she is the inspiration for one of the strongest feminine figures in modern literature—honest to God, that’s really what one critic wrote.” Or McKuen: “There are a lot of people who take potshots at me because they feel I’m not writing like Keats or Eliot. And yet I’ve been compared to both of them. So figure that out.”

  More important, both of them have hit on a formula so slick that it makes mere sentimentality have the force of emotion. Their work is instantly accessible and comprehensible; and when
the reader is moved by it, he assumes that it must be art. As a result, Segal and McKuen, each of whom started out rather modest about his achievement, have become convinced that they must be doing something not just right but important. Can you blame them? The money rolls in. The mail arrives by the truckload. The critics outside New York are enthusiastic. And to those who aren’t, Segal and McKuen fall back on sheer numbers. Millions of people have read and loved their work. The stewardess on American Airlines Flight No. 2 from Los Angeles to New York loves every bit of it. “I’m so sick of all the crap in the world,” she says. “All the killings, the violence, the assassinations. This one getting it. That one getting it. I don’t want to read any more about that kind of thing. Romanticism is here to stay.” She really said it. Honest.

  I am a big crybaby. I want to tell you that before I tell you anything at all about Erich Segal. I cry at almost everything. I cry when I watch Marcus Welby, M.D. on television or when I see movies about funny-looking people who fall in love. Any novel by Dickens sets me off. Dogs dying in the arms of orphans, stories of people who are disabled but ultimately walk/see/hear or speak, having something fall on my foot when I am in a hurry, motion pictures of President Kennedy smiling, and a large number of very silly films (particularly one called The West Point Story) will work me into a regular saltwater dither.

  One other thing about me before I begin. I love trash. I have never believed that kitsch kills. I tell you this so you will understand that my antipathy toward Love Story is not because I am immune either to sentimentality or garbage—two qualities the book possesses in abundance. When I read Love Story (and I cried, in much the same way that I cry from onions, involuntarily and with great irritation), I was deeply offended—a response I never have, for example, with Jacqueline Susann novels. It was not just that the book was witless, stupid and manipulative. It was that I suspected that unlike Miss Susann, Segal knew better. I was wrong to think that, as it happened. I was fooled by his academic credentials. The fact is that Love Story is Erich Segal at the top of his form; he knows no better and can do no better. I know that now. I know that I should no longer be offended by the book. And I’m not. What is it that I’m offended by? Perhaps you will begin to see as we go along.

  “Dear Mr. Segal: I realize that you are a busy man but I must tell you something that will probably make you inspired and honored. This past summer a very dear friend of mine passed away. She was seventeen and hardly ever unhappy or sad. Leslie had read your book. Not once but three times. She loved it so much. It was funny but everyone related Love Story with Leslie. She cried and said the story was so beautiful and realistic. When she was buried a copy of your book was placed next to her.… I wish you knew her. She was so unpredictable. That’s what life is. She had an instant heart failure, and thank G-d she didn’t suffer. I hope you don’t think I’m a foolish college kid. I felt any person who could capture young hearts and old must be sensitive to life.”

  That is a typical letter plucked out of a large pile of mail on Erich Segal’s desk. There are thousands more, from old ladies who say they haven’t cried that hard since the Elsie Dinsmore books, from young girls who want to interview Erich for their high-school papers, from young men who have read the book and want to go to Harvard and play hockey and marry a girl who has leukemia. The mail has been coming in in sacks since about Valentine’s Day, 1970 (Love Story was published ten days before). The reviews of the book were exultant. The movie is now on the way to being the biggest film in history. And what has happened to Erich Segal as a result of all this? “I always was the way I am,” he says, “only I was less successful at it. The difference being that people used to think I was an idiot ass-hole dilettante and now—you can find a nice adjective.” Yes, Erich was always this way, only now he is more so. You can find a nice adjective.

  “Erich, Erich, you’re so pale,” shouts Mrs. Jessie Rhine, a lady from Brooklyn, as Erich Segal, the rabbi’s son, signs an autograph for her and rumples his curly black hair and stubs his toe and rolls his big brown eyes. His aw-shucks thing. Mrs. Rhine loves it, loves Erich, loves his book, and she would very much like to slip him the name of her niece except that there is this huge group of ladies, there must be a hundred of them, who are also surrounding Erich and trying to slip him the names of their nieces. The ladies have just heard Erich give a speech to eleven hundred New York women at the Book and Author Luncheon at the Waldorf-Astoria. Robert Ardrey, the anthropologist, who also spoke at the luncheon, is hanging around Erich, trying to soak up some of the attention, but it does no good. The ladies want Erich and they are all asking him where they can get a copy of his speech.

  Erich’s speech. Erich has been giving his speech for months on the book-and-author circuit and he has found that it works. The audience especially responds to the way Erich’s speech praises Love Story at the expense of Portnoy’s Complaint and then rises to a crescendo in a condemnation of graphic sex in literature. “Have you any doubt,” Segal asks the ladies, “what happened between Romeo and Juliet on their wedding night?” The ladies have no doubt. “Would you feel any better if you had seen it?” No, eleven hundred heads shake, no. “Fortunately,” Segal concludes, “Shakespeare was neither curious nor yellow.” Wild applause. Everyone loves Erich’s speech. Everyone, that is, but Pauline Kael, the film critic, who heard an earlier version of Erich’s speech at a book-and-author luncheon in Richmond, Virginia, and told him afterward that he was knocking freedom of speech and sucking up to his audience. To which Erich replied, “We’re here to sell books, aren’t we?”

  The phenomenon of the professor as performer is not a new one: many teachers thrive on exactly the kind of idolatry that characterizes groupies and middle-aged lady fans. Still, there has never been an academician quite as good as Erich at selling books, quite as … you can find a nice adjective. He checks in with his publicists once or twice a day. Is everything being done that could be? What about the Carson show? What about running the Canby review again? What about using Christopher Lehmann-Haupt’s quote in the ad? Is this anecdote right for Leonard Lyons? “I’ve been in this business fourteen years and Erich is the closest thing to what a publicist’s dream would be,” says Harper & Row’s Stuart Harris. “All authors feel they have to make a publicity tour, but they don’t know how to do it. Erich knows. He knows how to monopolize the time on a talk show without being obvious. I would know he’s obvious, you would know he’s obvious, but millions listening in don’t know. So many authors don’t know how to say anything about their books. They’re shy. Erich knows how to do it without being blatant. He had to make a speech the week he was number one on the Time magazine best-seller list. He wanted to get that over to the audience, that it was number one, so he got up and began, ‘I just flew down and made three stops. Every time the plane landed, I got off and went to the newsstand and bought Time magazine to see if I was still number one on the best-seller list.’ The audience adored it.”

  We’re here to sell books, aren’t we? Yes indeed. And Erich knows that every book counts. One night in a restaurant, an out-of-town couple shyly approached Segal and asked him to autograph a menu for a neighbor who had loved his book. “Why a menu?” Segal asked. Because, the couple explained, it was all they had. “I’ll tell you what,” said Segal. “There’s a bookstore around the corner that’s still open. Go in and buy a copy of Love Story, bring it back, and I’ll autograph that.”

  Erich has been around the country several times, giving his speech, talking about his book, never letting the conversation wander away from its proper focus. “My novel, Love Story, and Paramount’s film of it mark, I believe, the turning point in the morals of the younger generation.” Erich said that in New York several weeks after publication. Note how it is self-aggrandizing, but in the cause of public morality. Note how it is reassuring to older people. Note the way the name of the book is plunked into the sentence, along with a plug for the film and a plug for the film studio. Erich got so carried away with slipping these littl
e factual details into his sentences that Jacqueline Susann, who is no slouch herself in the self-aggrandizement department, felt called upon to advise him against it. “Every time you mention the book’s name,” she told him, “you don’t really have to add that it’s number one on the best-seller list.”

  Exactly what has made Love Story so phenomenally successful is something of a mystery. There are theories, but none of them fully explains what happened. Yes, it makes readers cry. Yes, it has nothing whatsoever to do with life today and encourages people to believe the world has not changed. Yes, as Segal points out, the book has almost no description; people tend to read themselves into it. And yes, it has come at a time when young people are returning to earlier ways. As the critic for Yale’s New Journal pointed out:

  “Segal has perceived that the revolution we all talk of being in the midst of is in large part a romantic one, a movement not so much forward as backward, away from technology and organization and toward nature and people.… Love Story is a trick, a joke, a pun on those among us to whom an alliance with the fortyish-matron set would be anathema. Segal has tricked us into reading a novel about youth today that has little sex, no drugs, and a tear-jerking ending; and worse, he has made us love it, ponder it, and feel it to be completely contemporary. We are, deep down, no better than the sentimental slobs who sit under the hair dryers every Friday afternoon. It’s all the same underneath. Segal has our number.”

  When Love Story was first published, Segal himself seemed to possess a measure of self-deprecation. He admitted that his book was banal and cliché-ridden. But as time went on, he began to relax, the self-deprecation turned to false humility, and he took his success seriously. He acknowledged in a recent interview that he might well be the F. Scott Fitzgerald of his generation. He says that he has been compared to Dostoyevsky. He claims that his novel is in the tradition of the roman nouveau developed in France by Alain Robbe-Grillet and Nathalie Sarraute. He implies that people who hate his book are merely offended by its success. When Love Story took off in France, he called an associate long distance and said, “We are no longer a movement. We are a religion.”