Everyone worked together at Bonwit’s. When those winter blizzards hit the city, all the men, from the top manager down, had to come in and help shovel the block-wide sidewalks. We didn’t have motor shovels then, just lots of backbreaking hand shoveling. Each season the store would put on a big evening show and cocktail party for the employees. This was to introduce all the new clothes. I had a ball dressing and helping to accessorize the salesgirls who modeled the clothes, and during the showing I would dash around with my five-dollar camera, taking pictures of everything I thought was newest. Mrs. Rosalind DeHart, the second manager of the store, taught me one of the most important lessons of my life. She showed me how to observe every woman I saw, seeing how she was dressed and accessorized, and then taking her apart in my mind’s eye and putting the right kind of clothes on her. I never go down the street or enter a room without automatically deciding what the woman should wear. It’s probably the reason for the heavy development of my eye toward fashion.
The summer of my first year, the president of the New York store gave me a two-week all-expenses-paid trip to New York so I could experience the workings of the Fifth Avenue store. I was beside myself with excitement. At long last I was going to see the most glamorous city in the world. The trip was planned for the first two weeks in August. I lay awake nights with imaginary visions of the fantastic city racing through my head. The day of my departure dawned. It was a hot Sunday. I was to take the five p.m. Merchants Limited train from Boston’s Back Bay Station. Needless to say, I was dressed and packed at seven in the morning, all ready for my big trip to the unknown. Mother nearly called a halt to the whole trip, as she thought New York was the hellhole of the world; only foreign people lived there. Then Dad reminded her that her brother lived in New York in total respectability, and after all, I was to stay with him and his family. Mr. Harrington, my uncle, was president of a large advertising firm, and my two cousins were there for company. Plus, my aunt had been my mother’s childhood friend. With everyone satisfied and feeling I would be safe in the tall-building city, Dad drove the family and my one suitcase from the summerhouse. The Sunday beach traffic was so slow that the car engine boiled over on the way. We had to stop and wait for it to cool off, and I thought I’d have pups for fear of missing the train. But luckily Dad was always an hour early.
As I got on the train, neither Mother nor Dad shed a tear. I was so excited at my first long train trip, I only remember trying to be very sophisticated. As soon as I sat down, I promptly began eating the sandwiches Mother had packed, and then pulled out a copy of Women’s Wear Daily, thinking I’d appear professional, as this was the train all the buyers took to the city.
The train seemed to take hours, and I was so nervous I visited the toilet a dozen times. When we finally arrived at Grand Central Station, I wasn’t scared at all. As a matter of fact, I felt like a big shot. My aunt and uncle weren’t there to meet me, as they were at their summer home until Monday. Bonwit’s had arranged for me to stay the one night at the Hotel Fourteen on East Sixtieth Street. Everything seemed to be deserted as the taxi sped between the tall Madison Avenue buildings. I had never been in a hotel before, and I was impressed and sure that this one was chic, as it seemed to be decorated with French furniture.
The first place I wanted to see in New York was the Waldorf-Astoria hotel. I had listened to Helen Hayes on her radio program, where she was always trailing in and out of the Waldorf in her most spectacular gown. I had hardly unpacked my bag when I left the hotel at ten p.m. and told the taxi driver in my most sophisticated high-pitched voice that I wanted the Waldorf on Park Avenue. When the cab pulled up, I didn’t want to get out, as I thought the driver had misunderstood me. The building outside the cab window looked like an ugly insurance company. Surely this wasn’t the glamorous Waldorf, where movie queens swept in and out. As I entered the lobby, a second disappointment: there wasn’t an inch of old-world glamour. The whole immense place was seething in drab, flashy 1930s decor. All my imaginary dreams were smashed. There were no great crystal chandeliers, and the few people milling about certainly didn’t look like Helen Hayes. I left brokenhearted and walked back to the hotel with the French furniture. As I rambled along Fifth Avenue, the bright lights and imaginative window displays gave me new hope and brought back the thrill of New York to my mind. There were Saks, Bonwit’s, Bergdorf’s, and all the others. The clothes in the window displays were eight inches off the ground. This was really the New Look we had all read about in Boston, but hardly anyone wore. As I passed Bergdorf’s I remembered what a New York lady then living in Boston had told me about the fabulously chic women who passed through its doors, dressed to the teeth. The clothes in the windows were not the birthday pastels that women in Boston were wearing—these were midsummer dresses of black and brown, dark colors. I knew I was where chic people would be.
As I went back to my hotel, I noticed that a nightclub, the Copacabana, was located on the ground floor off the lobby in the same building. I peeked through the door, but a maître d’ in full dress promptly froze me out. In the lobby of the hotel, I bought a postcard showing the notoriously famous nightclub. This I sent off to Boston, advising my parents of my safe arrival. From what I heard later, Mother nearly fainted when she got the card showing the almost nude dancing girls prancing across the club’s stage—to think her little boy was corrupted on his first night in the Big City! My parents thought the people at Bonwit’s must be shady characters for arranging my stay in such a rowdy hotel. The truth of the matter was, it was a very respectable hotel, three blocks from the store.
The next morning I was at Bonwit’s hours before the store opened. The president, Mr. Rudolph, received me in his office, which was decorated like something off the 20th Century Fox movie screen. I was introduced to all the buyers and enjoyed a two-week training program, where the inside workings of each department were shown and explained. The people I met were all so kind, and many are still my friends. I was surprised to find they were no different from Boston people, and I never saw any of the “creepy foreigners” my mother was so worried about—the only difference was that people dressed with lots of fashion flair. It was a wonderful trip. Every minute was filled with fashion. The suit buyer took me on my first adventure to Seventh Avenue. We went to the Davidow showroom. They made the suits that sold best in Boston, with their thin collars and lush tweeds. Mr. Davidow and his brother were very kind and normal—they weren’t anything like the highfalutin designers Hollywood movies had shown, and their showroom wasn’t glamorous at all. Neither were their models the exotic, fascinating vamps that had floated across the screen and prepared me for outrageous glamour.
Meanwhile, the Bonwit’s New York store was a big twelve-story affair with none of the charm the jewel-like Boston store had. The New York store was in the process of being redecorated, and many of the nine selling floors were in the old 1930s mood; although the street floor and the sixth-floor gown shop were decorated with some of the feeling of the Boston store, there was none of the friendly intimacy. The departments I loved best were the custom millinery and the private salon of Chez Ninon. It seems Mrs. Park and Mrs. Shonnard, the owners of Chez Ninon, were close friends of the Hovings, who owned Bonwit’s at the time. Mr. Hoving wanted a prestige salon, so he leased the ninth-floor space to the exclusive shop. I fell immediately and madly in love with Chez Ninon, for here they were actually designing and making the most ravishing clothes I had ever seen. I was put in a room with a huge pad of white paper and a fistful of pencils and given a chance to show my design ideas. The door was shut, and my big opportunity was at hand. I nearly died of fright, and couldn’t think of one idea, so I made horrible funny sketches of everything I remembered from the stockrooms of the Boston store. After the day of drawing, I was taken into the plush sofa-ed inner sanctum of the high priestesses, Mrs. Park and Mrs. Shonnard. There they sat like Dresden duchesses. Mrs. Park’s white hair had been blued and curled in a fuzzy halo around her head; she wore a simple black dr
ess, and around her neck and wrist were ropes of pearls, which she kept taking off and on, and she topped this off with brilliant blue sapphire pins and rings that matched the clear blue of her eyes. She perched on a low beige satin damask sofa, with her feet in the most comfortable shoes, a sort of bedroom mule. Mrs. Shonnard sat at the desk. She smiled warmly, where Mrs. Park was brisk and had a let’s-get-right-to-the-point attitude. Mrs. Park was from a Philadelphia Main Line family; her father was William Gibbs McAdoo, secretary of the treasury under President Wilson. Mrs. Shonnard, a real beauty with a gentle voice full of Southern hospitality, put me at ease. She had golden hair softly falling around her face, and a large white organdy scarf draped about her shoulders; a gold seashell pin held it in front. The two ladies, who many people said had the finest taste in New York, looked through my sketches. Out of the bunch they chose one dress, which was the only one that was really my own idea. I admired them so much for being able to pick the creative thought. Although Mrs. Park thought I was hopeless as a designer, Mrs. Shonnard felt the boy should have a chance.
The two weeks dashed by like two days. I had stayed at the fifteen-room Park Avenue apartment of my cousins for the last week, although I didn’t see them, as they were away for the summer. It was all very glamorous, and the New Haven railroad trains would vibrate the apartment as they glided down under the glittering swank of Park Avenue. I remember the first night I stayed in the apartment, high on the tenth floor, I went around and locked all the windows, being still slightly afraid of the Big City.
Becoming William J.
I arrived back in Boston, and nothing was the same after the razzle-dazzle of New York. Bonwit’s gave me a scholarship to Harvard, where I started in September 1948. But let’s face it, after the glamour of the big city, the dull life of Cambridge wasn’t going to soothe me. Nothing could stop me; I wanted to live and work in New York City. The classes at Harvard were like being in prison; I nearly drove my family mad begging and pleading to be set free.
After a lot of letter writing, I convinced Bonwit’s to offer me a training program at the New York store, and I was welcome to live with my aunt and uncle. After a month of hell-raising with Mother and Dad, they decided they would let me try it. For the week before I left, all I did was tell my parents how good I’d be and that I would write them every day. Mother and Dad had reached the conclusion that they couldn’t live with me as I was and that I might as well go and get it out of my system. Plus, they were absolutely positive that I would become lonely, missing all my friends, and be back in Boston before the month was up. Well, I’m almost ashamed to say I’ve never been lonely in my life. I took to New York life like a star shooting through the heavens. And my parents always regretted letting me go. They could never believe that I would fall so completely in love with the city. When I arrived, the family had one rule: that I must continue a general education at night, at New York University, after my Bonwit work each day. After a few nights of school, I found myself playing hooky, and I would be at the opera each Monday, watching the elderly ladies. On other nights I would go as an observer to the fashionable balls, where I would take notes on all the styles, new and old, watching the way the gowns moved on the wearers, how the jewels hung, and how the hair laid on each head. This was my education. I scarcely attended any of the classes the family paid for—although they never knew the difference. To this very day my favorite pastime is people watching. It’s one of the great educations of life.
It’s a crime families don’t understand how their children are oriented, and point them along their natural way. My poor family was probably scared to death by all these crazy ideas I had, and so they fought my direction every inch of the way. American society has a lot to understand about the natural creative desires of children. Parents should stop feeling ashamed of the arts, and this trend of thinking men who are interested in ballet, opera, and fields of design are just a lot of sissies has caused more unhappy family breakups. The country would not have half the trouble with mentally disturbed people it has if parents would accept each child’s God-given personality and stop trying to force what they feel is more suitable for their offspring.
In November 1948 I arrived in New York to live, on the opening Monday night of the opera. That was the night Mrs. Florence Henderson, a rich society matron, put her feet up on a table at Louis Sherry’s restaurant during intermission. The next morning the world press was full of her picture, and I knew my fashion-climbing days had really begun. This act of public defiance to the old order was something Mrs. Isabella Gardner might have shocked staid Boston with fifty years before, but no one has so much as wiggled a toe in Boston since. Now I was in the swing of life, the very night the opera opened and Mrs. Henderson’s legs on the table caused a near riot.
New York wasn’t to be so fabulous for me for a while, as the Harringtons were a very rich and a very conservative family, plus my uncle and my two cousins Dick and Donald were ashamed to tell their friends that I wanted to be a fashion designer, making women’s clothes. My aunt, not wanting to get mixed up in a family fight, stayed neutral, explaining that each person has a right to do what they wish, so long as it pleased the eye of Almighty God.
Life at the Harringtons’ was very grand—candlelight at the table each night as the maid and the cook served dinner. Weekends were spent at the lovely country house in Connecticut. This was a big change from Boston, where we lived a very quiet, unpretentious life of baked beans and hamburgers every Saturday night. Occasionally, wealthy friends of my cousins would zoom us down Park Avenue in their chauffeured limousines to parties in magnificent apartments. I remember one where all the bathroom fixtures were made of gold.
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AT BONWIT’S I SPENT A MONTH learning the way of each department. It was a fabulous training I’ll be thankful for the rest of my life. Miss Ross, the head of stock, and Miss Dawson, the buyer, would explain the signatures of all the designers and what made their designs worth the money. I became enchanted with the millinery department, and spent all my free Saturdays in the workroom learning to make hats. The young milliners showed me the first steps in making millinery. I saw the ladies of Chez Ninon almost every day, and they became my guardian angels. The first Christmas I worked in the 721 Club, a gift shop for men on the store’s second floor. It was wonderful excitement, going around to pick up from all over the store what you thought would be just the right gifts for men to give women. The men were given cocktails, and with a little encouragement from the beautiful salesgirls, the sales were phenomenal.
All during this holiday time, there were lots of fancy headdress balls, and masquerades being given by society for charity. There were small dances and supposedly only the best people attended. These were the beginning of the avalanche of charity parties that marked the main divertissement of New York swells during the 1950s. Of course, I never had tickets for any of these parties, and would gate-crash just to be an observer, always peeking from behind some silk curtain or potted palm. The first ball I remember well was a headdress ball given at the old Ritz Hotel. Many of Chez Ninon’s customers and friends were going. Nona Park and Sophie Shonnard suggested I make some fancy headdresses to go with the ball gowns. I was thrilled to my toes; this was my first real designing assignment, and the headdresses were going to be worn with the most original Paris gowns, by some of the leading New York society women. My aunt let me turn one of the maid’s rooms at the apartment into a tiny workroom. This was my first shop, and I worked every night until the early morning hours. The feathers and flowers were really flying; birds’ wings were my favorite form of expression, as their grace and movement were full of romance. The millinery supply houses on Thirty-Eighth Street soon became familiar to me, and I found huge black wings left over from the extravagant 1910 period. I made nearly twenty-nine headdresses, without my uncle or cousins ever knowing what I was doing, as they rarely set foot beyond the kitchen. But on the night of the ball, when I was frantically rushing to finis
h the work, my uncle wanted to know why I had not gone to Bonwit’s and why I was missing from the dinner table. When my aunt broke down and told him, he stormed into the makeshift workroom and nearly killed me.
It was bad enough that I was working around women’s clothes, but to be designing and making hats, right under his own roof, that was too much. For the following year, my uncle scarcely spoke to me, and everyone in the household was forbidden to speak about fashion. I’m sorry to say we lived like complete strangers, and it’s a shame, as he was one of the kindest men on earth. I guess he was scared to death of all the homosexuals he had heard about in fashion. At any rate, my aunt was trying to keep peace, and my cousins, when they wanted to get me in trouble, would casually say I was making hats during dinner, and the whole situation would boil over again.
By the end of the first year in New York, I was working in the advertising and publicity and art department of the store, and making a few hats from the store’s workroom, as continuing them at home was out of the question. One of Bonwit’s artists, Miss Janet Kegg, liked my work and enjoyed wearing my creations out to lunch in hopes of getting me a customer. Often she did. Janet also designed my trademark—a lady with a dozen hats piled one on top of the other on her head. It was a great success all throughout my career.
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