by Nora Ephron
In the early sixties, when designer names began to appear on manufacturers’ labels and American designers became celebrities of sorts, Blass began making extensive public appearances around the country with his models and clothes. “He’s a superbusinessman,” says New York Post fashion editor Ruth Preston. “He can sell the eyelashes off a hog.” Some of the other designers traveled, but few went at it as relentlessly as Blass. “Anyone’s a damn fool to think it isn’t important to go on the road,” he said. “New York is not America. New York women are fickle about designers. But if Sarmi comes to Minneapolis and tells someone she looks sensational in green chiffon, that lady will be Sarmi’s forever.”
Several hundred thousand miles and three Coty Awards later, Bill Blass has become a household word—“Almost as well known as Dior,” says Bonwit’s president Mildred Custin. Nothing did as much for Blass as a series of AT&T advertisements, picturing a group of models in fluffy Blass dresses, surrounding the designer. The caption read, “Fashions by Bill Blass. The Trimline Phone at Your Bell Telephone Company.”
Publicity seems to fall Blass’s way without his lifting a finger: the AT&T people came to him; so did the Haig-Pinch bottle ads, showing a group of identified Beautiful People surrounding an unidentified Blass. And then there was the time when Jean Shrimpton posed for a Revlon ad in an antique white Chantilly lace dress by Blass. Minutes after the lipstick placard hit the drugstores, the Revlon switchboard lit up with calls from women demanding to know where they could buy the dress. Rentner sold sixteen hundred of them, at $160 and $225, thus making it the best-selling, most publicized dress in Seventh Avenue history.
Designing dresses, raincoats, swimsuits, luggage, furs and children’s clothes might have been quite enough for most designers; not for Blass. “As busy as you can be with the women’s thing,” he said, “I felt it wasn’t enough. I like making clothes, but I can’t get emotionally carried away by them. Adolfo, who does the hats for my shows, told me that one designer was describing one of his dresses to him and burst into tears. And at the Coty Awards, I sat in front of one of the winners, and he wept right through the fashion show of his own clothes. I think that clothes are a very necessary part of our lives, but to get so carried away by them.… Anyway, I would work on Seventh Avenue and have hours empty.”
Two years ago David Pincus, a Philadelphia men’s-wear manufacturer who realized that women’s-wear designers like Cardin were about to strike it rich in men’s wear, decided to hire an American designer for his firm, Pincus Brothers-Maxwell (PBM). He asked his wife, his sister Sylvia, and several of his female cousins for suggestions, and the name that kept coming back was Bill Blass. Pincus went to see Blass, who agreed to a deal on the spot. “I had anticipated going into men’s wear,” said Blass, “and I wasn’t nervous about it at all. It seemed like such a natural evolution for me. And after all, I knew something about men’s clothes, if only from forty years of dressing myself.”
The first Blass collection for PBM made its debut in June 1967, and except for one green plaid kilt, shown with a green velvet jacket, it was a smashing success. Blass called the show his getaway collection, and its strength lay in its English country suits, in windowpane plaids, that had a marvelous outdoors, masculine feeling. Bonwit Teller decided on the spot to build a boutique for Blass. “Without even seeing a Bill Blass collection, both Miss Custin and I knew he couldn’t do anything bad,” said Bonwit’s Danny Zarem. “The way he dresses, his marvelous eye for color, shape, and fit—we could visualize just who he was designing for and what he would design.”
Among the men who wear Bill Blass clothes are Senator Jacob Javits, William Paley, Mayor John Lindsay, William Buckley, and Kirk Douglas. But the typical man in the Bill Blass suit is an affluent suburbanite who once owned a Madras jacket, plays golf at his country club, drives a Thunderbird which he thinks is a sports car, and brings a bottle of liqueur back from the islands every February and makes all his friends drink it. “He’s over thirty,” said Blass. “He’s tall, a little thick in the middle and heavy in the legs. He’s apt to be a business type. Sounds awful square, doesn’t he?”
Yes, indeed. The man in the Bill Blass suit does not want to look silly—or worse, effeminate (the polite word he uses for homosexual). He wants to look with-it—which he does in his fitted, striped-checked Blass suit. He wants to feel secure—which he does when the suit is lined with silk covered with the Bill Blass double B insignia (the first B is printed backward) and buttoned with brass BB buttons. And he wants to look as if he had taste—which he does, his wife assures him, because Bill Blass was in town only last month, and he looked as if he had taste.
“I really believe the American woman is one of the reasons it’s taken so long for anything to happen in men’s clothes,” said Blass. “Years ago you’d go out of town and see some dame who was voting for Nixon and she would tell you she didn’t want her husband to wear anything but a navy-blue suit. She didn’t want to lose control of him, and she was terrified that if he dressed in anything that might be construed as effeminate, people might see what the true nature of their relationship was.
“But now I find women have rallied to my side. It’s the woman who says, ‘Oh, Fred, go ahead and buy those red loafers. They’ll be just wonderful in Boca Raton.’ And when women go out at night in minidresses, they don’t want their husbands to fade away into the background. They want their men to be part of the whole picture.”
The Blass look for men is not without its critics. There has been widespread disapproval throughout the industry of Blass’s use of signature linings and buttons. “To me,” says one men’s-wear manufacturer, “it’s like sticking a $150 price tag on your lapel.” Women’s Wear Daily’s publisher James Brady conceded that Blass has a great color sense and good taste, but said, “He’s not the most creative designer. He’s never created a new shape.” And George Frazier, the immaculately tailored Esquire fashion writer, thinks some of Blass’s resort clothes are very so slightly effeminate—a charge Blass finds more interesting than accurate.
“Isn’t this fear of looking homosexual a peculiarly American thing?” he said. “There’s no group of men as vain as the Latins. Spanish men are immaculately tailored and each hair is perfectly combed. Even the bullfighter is as vain as any person can possibly be, but there’s never any question of his masculinity. I suppose it’s partly because the women in Latin countries have very little status, unlike American women.”
The success of his men’s line has done much to fill up Blass’s empty hours. When he is in New York, he leaves for his Seventh Avenue office at nine a.m. in a rented limousine. His secretary, Sandy Price, is waiting with coffee, three packs of True cigarettes, and a stack of letters, a few from would-be designers seeking advice on how to break into fashion. At ten, the phones start ringing, and Blass begins the work day, choosing fabrics, fitting clothes for the next collection and seeing important buyers. Lunch, observed religiously from one to two-thirty p.m., is usually taken at one of the Three La’s—La Grenouille, La Caravelle, or La Côte Basque—either with friends outside the trade or designers, like close friends Jacques Tiffeau, Norman Norell, and Oscar de la Renta, to whom Blass is “Bilbo.”
After lunch, Blass returns to his office until four p.m., when he goes up to the men’s showroom on West Fifty-eighth Street. At six, he walks ten blocks crosstown to his apartment, where the valet, a Scotch and soda, and a crackling fireplace are waiting. He may spend the evening out—at a small dinner party at Mrs. Gilbert Miller’s, for example, or at the Horse Show—or he may order sandwiches from Reuben’s for himself and a friend.
Such New York days are dwindling down to a precious few: in a recent three-week period, Blass went from New York to Minneapolis (to do a men’s-wear show), to Chicago (for an Evening with Bill Blass to benefit a local hospital), to New York (to open his spring collection), to Maine (to spend a quiet weekend at his fishing shack), to Lancaster, Pennsylvania (to discuss watch design with the Hamilton people),
to New York (to speak before the Advertising Women of New York), to Scotland (to pick the plaids for next year’s collection), and to Italy (to consult with his shoe people). Not surprisingly, his friends think he is working too hard. “He has an image as a party boy,” says fashion publicist Eleanor Lambert, “but three or four times a week he’s simply home in bed, collapsed.”
“If I didn’t have the house in Maine, I’d probably blow my top,” Blass said one night as he sat at home, collapsed, in front of his fireplace. “Your private life and your public life have to be separated. You cannot be all things to all people. You spread yourself too thin. I had lunch today with a client from San Francisco and she asked me if I minded traveling and talking to so many people. Actually, I find it interesting. But you do get tired of smiling.”
But Bill Blass goes right on smiling that genial smile. The customers come into the store and dumpy men from Detroit slip into corduroy knickers, and Bill Blass smiles and tells them they look wonderful. Dumpy ladies in Atlanta come to meet him at Rich’s and he smiles and they walk out with five dresses. Last year, he was even asked to design a tire. He turned it down, smiling. And jewelry. He turned that down, too. “I don’t believe in jewelry for men,” he said.
And there have been offers to design carpeting, wallpaper, fountain pens, sunglasses, and kitchen equipment—all of them rejected. “You have to evaluate those products very carefully,” says Blass. “Do they fit in? Do they have validity for you? Kitchen equipment doesn’t have any validity for me. But I’ll tell you what I would like to redesign. American automobiles. Why shouldn’t your convertible have a bold brown-and-white plaid upholstery instead of green brocade plastic? Why shouldn’t sports cars have white linen slip covers in the summer time?” He paused and grinned. “I’ll tell you this,” he said. “I wish all those gray-flannel-suited men had their cars upholstered in gray flannel. It would look much better on cars than on them.”
A Rhinestone in a Trash Can
and The Love Machine Phenomenon of J. Susann
I wanted to write about Jacqueline Susann for a couple of reasons: I think that anyone who can play such a colossal joke on the publishing business cannot be all bad; and more important, I think that her trash is better than it has been made out to be. Unfortunately, a number of other critics said this at about the time my article appeared, which took some of the perversity out of it.
May 1969
Robin Stone is the love machine. My goodness yes. Robin Stone, who drinks his vodka straight, who is positively insatiable in the kip, who runs the largest television network in the country, and who is not only a magnificent sadist but a weak and vulnerable one at that, is the love machine. “I think Robin Stone is divine,” says Jacqueline Susann. “Don’t you?”
Yes.
Robin Stone is, of course, the hero of Miss Susann’s new novel, The Love Machine, and if he has brought happiness to almost none of Miss Susann’s fictional heroines—who are, incidentally, the most willing group of masochists assembled outside the pages of de Sade—he is nevertheless on the verge of transporting the book sellers of America to unparalleled heights of ecstasy. Hot on the heels of Alexander Portnoy and his Complaint (Philip Roth’s novel now has a staggering four hundred fifty thousand copies in print) come Robin Stone and The Love Machine (with a first printing of two hundred fifty thousand copies). And along with the book, as an added dividend, come Miss Susann and her husband, producer Irving Mansfield, who have already begun the first of a series of nation-wide tours dedicated to knocking Roth off the top of the best-seller list.
“It’s wild,” said Michael Korda, editor-in-chief at Simon and Schuster, which is publishing Miss Susann’s novel. “You have these two giant books out at the same time, and their merits aside, one of them is about masturbation and the other is about successful heterosexual love. If there’s any justice in the world, The Love Machine ought to knock Portnoy off the top simply because it’s a step in the right direction.”
The publication of The Love Machine should not be confused with a literary event. Not at all. There is nothing literary about Miss Susann—a former actress who became somewhat successful in the fifties doing Schiffli embroidery commercials with her poodle Josephine—or her writing. She is a natural storyteller, but her characters’ motivations leave much to be desired and their mental processes are often just plain silly. I give you, herewith, a couple of typical sentences from The Love Machine, on what Miss Susann’s heroines think while crying, an emotional act in which they indulge thirty-five times in the course of the novel (a figure that does not include the number of times they refrain from bursting into tears in order to prevent their mascara from running):
“She was sobbing for all the rejections, all the men she had loved for just one night, all the love she had never had.”
And “She walked down to the river and knew the tears were running down her face. Oh God, it wasn’t fair! It wasn’t fair to put the heart and emotions of a beautiful woman into the heart of a peasant.”
As for her dialogue (“My forte,” says Miss Susann), I have never met anyone who talks quite the way the characters do in Miss Susann’s books. On the other hand, I have never met any of Jacqueline Susann’s friends, who apparently do talk that way. For example, James Aubrey, former president of CBS, who was convinced that he was the prototype for Robin Stone, called Miss Susann one day, and according to her, said, “Jackie, make me mean. Make me a son of a bitch.” Like that.
But if Jacqueline Susann is no literary figure, she is nevertheless an extraordinary publishing phenomenon. Seven years ago, she gave up acting to write a rather charming little book about her poodle. It was called Every Night, Josephine!, it was published by Bernard Geis Associates, and it sold quite nicely. Then, in 1966, Geis published her first novel, Valley of the Dolls. The story of three young women who come to New York to find fame and fortune and end up hooked on pills, the book sold three hundred fifty thousand copies in hard cover and, far more astonishing, eight million copies in paperback. It is now among the top all-time best sellers and has just gone into its fifty-third Bantam softcover printing.
“When you think of all those guys out there with pipes and tweed suits who’ve been waiting years to write the great American novel,” said Miss Susann’s husband, “and you think how the one who’s done it is little Jackie who never went to college and lives on Central Park South, well, it’s really fabulous, isn’t it?”
Yes.
As it happens, though, Mansfield’s analysis of his wife’s triumph is not quite accurate. Jacqueline Susann has not beaten out all those guys with pipes and tweeds, whoever they are. She has beaten out all those people who work in big cities, see the wages of sin thriving around them, read best-selling dirty novels, and say, “I can write that.” In fact, they can not write that. And neither can all the sloppy imitators of Miss Susann’s style—like Henry Sutton, Morton Cooper, and William Woodfolk, to name a few. Good kitschy writers are born, not made. And when Jacqueline Susann sits down at her typewriter on Central Park South, what spills out is first-rate kitsch.
What’s more, it is sincere: unlike Sutton, who is slumming at the typewriter, Miss Susann believes every word she writes. And unlike Cooper and Woodfolk, whose novels are barely fictionalized, badly written accounts of celebrity lives, Miss Susann is—well, let her say it: “I am a thematic writer. In other words, I pick a theme and then the characters fall into place. With Valley, I never sat down and said, I’m going to write about a prototype of Judy Garland or Ethel Merman. I sat down and wondered, Why are we with the pills and why are we with the funny farms today? The pills became my theme.” The theme of The Love Machine is that power corrupts; the title refers not only to Robin Stone, who becomes a machine as he gains power, but also to television itself.
When Valley of the Dolls was published, it was not favorably received by the critics. When it succeeded, most observers gave the credit to Mansfield and Miss Susann for their frenetic promotional efforts. But a boo
k that sells ten million copies in all editions has more than just promotion going for it. And Valley had a good deal more. For one thing, it was the kind of book most of its readers (most of whom were women and a large number of whom were teen-agers) could not put down. I, for one, could not: I am an inveterate reader of gossip columns and an occasional reader of movie magazines, and, for me, reading Valley of the Dolls was like reading a very, very long, absolutely delicious gossip column full of nothing but blind items. The fact that the names were changed and the characters disguised just made it more fun.
In addition, Valley had a theme with an absolutely magnetic appeal for women readers: it described the standard female fantasy—of going to the big city, striking it rich, meeting fabulous men—and went on to show every reader that she was far better off than the heroines in the book—who took pills, killed themselves, and made general messes of their lives. It was, essentially, a morality tale. And despite its reputation, it was not really a dirty book. Most women, I think, do not want to read hardcore pornography. They do not even want to read anything terribly technical about the sex act. What they want to read about is lust. And Jacqueline Susann gave it to them—just as Grace Metalious did. Hot lust. Quivering lust. High-school lust. Sweaters are always being ripped open in Miss Susann’s books. Pants are always being frantically unzipped. And everyone is always wanting everyone else. Take the women in The Love Machine:
Ethel Evans, the promiscuous chubby from Hamtramck, who “wanted Robin so bad she physically ached.”
Maggie Stewart, newscaster-turned-actress: “She adored Adam. Then why did she always subconsciously think of Robin? Did she still want him? Yes, dammit, she did!”