It was a major newspaper under the leadership of John Fairchild, who had inherited it from his father.
“I am the boss, and don’t you ever forget it,” Mr. Fairchild once said to me as we sat together on the front row in Paris, during haute couture. While he could be intimidating and threatening, I still had so much respect for him. He taught me how to analyze the beat of fashion and the rhythms of the high rollers, the social doers and achievers of the fashion battlefield. “I don’t give a damn about clothes, I care about the people who wear them,” was a phrase he oft repeated. From him I learned how to embrace what was going on around me in 360 degrees. What makes a beautiful dress? Hems, seams, the way it’s put together. The ruffles. How’s the ruffle? How’s the bow tie? What’s the combination of colors, what’s the combination of fabrics? There’s Mounia on the runway, in what? What was Yves’s inspiration? What is the music behind her? And what is the chandelier behind her? And there are roses, why are they there? Why is she wearing that shoe? And what is the lipstick? What is going on in the mind of the designer? That’s my role, taught to me by Mr. Fairchild.
There was no set standard of writing style at WWD, not like The New York Times with its manual that all reporters had to follow. We wrote at a brisk pace, hoping it was all up to Mr. Fairchild’s standard. People at WWD were thrown in the tank and sank or swam, and I just happened to swim.
My first reporting assignment was to cover a party given by Diane von Fürstenberg.
She was married to Prince Egon von Fürstenberg. They were the current “it couple,”
appearing on the cover of New York magazine. I stood outside of her apartment, having not been able to score an invite to the actual party, along with a bunch of other journalists and photographers. I wore a silver asbestos fireman’s jacket as an evening topcoat as I jotted down the names of all the various people going into the party. I recognized almost everyone; that’s the kind of knowledge I’d gained from reading every issue of Vogue since I was a child.
I soon made it from the sidewalk to the sitting rooms of the plush homes of the fashion elite as they began inviting me into their parties. New York Times fashion editor Bernadine Morris wrote about my attendance at a party thrown by Calvin Klein: “André Talley, reporter for Women’s Wear Daily, wore white Bermuda shorts with a striped high-collared Victorian shirt. Mr. Talley kept telling people that the initials on the pocket were not Kenneth Lane’s but Karl Lagerfeld’s.”
It was the first time my name appeared in a fashion column.
I assume my Southern manners were considered appealing, paired with my knowledge and sense of style. Halston had already gotten to know me quite well from my time at Interview, and he invited me to his house often. He dressed me in his beautiful old castoffs, as I was tall and thin, with the same measurements. Thanks to Halston, I had incredible cashmere sweaters, summer smokings, and five or six Ultrasuede safari jackets that could be thrown in the wash and come out of the drying machine looking perfect, no wrinkles. Halston even sent over an antique Chinese chest, which I used to decorate my room at the Twenty-third Street Y.
Mr. Fairchild saw in me, as Mrs. Vreeland saw in me, that I loved fashion. And for that, a great deal is owed. And after being assigned to write about the legions of friends of Mr. Fairchild, I started to become friends with many of them myself, including the de la Rentas, who took me under their wings like I was an orphan child. When Oscar de la Renta presented his collection, in his narrow showroom, I would be seated on the front row beside Françoise (his first wife). On the other side would be the guest of honor, Diana Vreeland one season, Pat Buckley or Nancy Kissinger another.
During an August resort collection, Françoise turned to me and said, “Now, DéDé, you know Oscar and I are going to build a pool at our country house, in Kent, Connecticut. Don’t you want to be invited to swim in that pool when it’s completed?”
I smiled politely as though I hadn’t quite heard her blatant quid pro quo over the preshow musical arrangement. I never shared that exchange with Mr. Fairchild. The de la Rentas would have suffered.
Mr. Fairchild fueled his viciousness with the details of the parties his editors had gone to the previous evening. I once told him Maxime de la Falaise, a French high society transplant, had complained that Oscar and Françoise de la Renta’s shih tzus had remarkably bad breath. Mr. Fairchild immediately went to his desk and phoned Françoise, to share what I had just told him.
This caused a major scandal. Mr. Fairchild was amused. I got on the phone and told Maxime what had happened, and she asked me what to do. I told her to call Mr.
Fairchild directly and ask him what to do. He recommended Maxime send along something special, like her homemade preserves or jelly. She did, and the whole thing cooled off.
I still went out with Andy Warhol sometimes, but I would never tell Mr. Fairchild.
He would have been livid. The friendships I made at Interview proved useful and beneficial for Mr. Fairchild’s paper, however.
Bianca Jagger was in New York and invited me to see her at the Pierre hotel. With her was Betty Catroux, one of the permanent icons in the pantheon of Saint Laurent androgynous style. The three of us talked while Bianca ironed her Valentino couture clothes on a board set out between the two twin beds in her room.
The next time Betty came to New York, she called and asked if I’d go shopping with her after lunch. Shopping with the Betty Catroux, the woman who inspired Saint Laurent’s pantsuits? How glamorous.
Or so I thought.
“Meet me at Woolworth’s, I have to buy T-shirts,” Betty said.
As we strolled the Woolworth aisles, I discovered the same hairnets my grandmother wore. Three for twenty-five cents. How fantastic, I thought. World-renowned Betty Catroux, who could freely wear whatever finest-quality designs she wants, buys her clothing from the same place my grandmother buys hairnets!
“Why on earth do you need these Woolworth shirts?” I asked Betty.
“I have to break down the elements of my Saint Laurent couture suits.”
Totally matter-of-fact. All of the beautiful Yves Saint Laurent couture pin-striped suits, Betty wore with T-shirts she bought as a pack of three. Most women would wear a pussycat-bow blouse, but Betty Catroux couldn’t have cared less about what “most women” would do. It was a very original way of thinking at the time.
Betty met Yves in 1967 and it was like lightning. She loved to tell people, “He cruised me in a nightclub.” It began a close brother-sister bond; Yves and Betty, attached at the hip, were the closest of friends. Never officially on the payroll, Betty abhorred fashion. Refused to be a slave to the rhythm of la mode. She had worked as a cabine model for Coco Chanel herself for two years but hated every minute of it. Of the great lady of twentieth-century fashion, Betty told me, “She was a viper, a mean viper.
Yves was also mean, two fashion dictators who found everyone else atrocious.”
Be that as it may, Yves wanted to be Betty Catroux. Once they got together, she forever became Yves’s surrogate and alter ego.
Betty always dressed, impeccably, like a man. Tall and lean, throughout her entire adult life. She has never slipped into a full, sweeping evening dress, as best I can recall.
She simply refuses. For the grandest ball in Paris, she would ring up the house of Saint Laurent, as she did every day in Yves’s lifetime, after which a little black van with the YSL logo would arrive at her apartment and drop off the look she’d selected, and the same van would pick up the original sample the next morning. This was her routine every day of her life when cocktail or dinner dressing was required.
Betty Catroux is the ultimate rogue, always in vogue. She never wears color, not even red. No prints, ruffles, or flounces. She loves everything black except for those ubiquitous white T-shirts. If she could wear a black leather jacket or biker-style look every day, she would. No jewelry adorns her neck, nor her ears. Her only great accessories are her long, long sheets of platinum hair, airborne once she
hits the dance floor. Betty dances like a dazzling rock star in high-gear performance mode.
At times, her look could be interpreted as somewhat “butch.” Marlene Dietrich and Katharine Hepburn had already been credited with creating androgyny, but with Betty, it existed spiritually and sartorially. Yves was inspired by Marlene Dietrich, who had gone to her husband’s Austrian tailor to have her pantsuits made for her. But Yves was more directly inspired by Betty and her effortless, impeccable style. With the master touch of Yves, Betty made the evening or le smoking pantsuit an international and global fashion trend. She was, and remains, one of the most influential personalities in high fashion. So many women and men—gay, straight, gender fluid, and transgender— and designers owe much to the Betty/Yves female-dandy style.
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Most of the fashion elite, including the top-tier designers—not the established designers, like Bill Blass, Oscar de la Renta, and Ralph Lauren, but the new wave of designers—were working, loving, and living on a regular diet of cocaine, then the drug du jour. Everyone was high on coke and cock.
Halston thrived on it. He was known to partake and afterward stay up and change a whole collection overnight. Presto: a masterpiece. I remember billowing, long grand taffeta evening dresses, floating away from the body, worn over Lycra one-piece leotards. The great Scottish photographer Harry Benson shot them for W, and they are some of the finest illustrations of American high style of the era.
If I went to Françoise de la Renta’s house for dinner, and said I had been to Halston’s, she would tell me that was “the wrong crowd.”
She of course was right. Halston used to have me over for dinner, just the two of us, and he would serve a baked potato with caviar and sour cream. For dessert: a small mountain of high-class cocaine served in an Elsa Peretti sterling silver bowl.
I snorted a line or two, to be polite to my host, and that was it. I never wanted to feel out of my sphere of control. My destiny was not to be hooked on coke. I feared God and my “ancestors as foundation,” to quote Toni Morrison, always lived invisibly on my shoulder.
My only addiction was pure Russian vodka, which I usually drank in Diana Vreeland’s red seraglio. We were always two, elevated by conversation, drinking small shots, one after the other, after dinner, in her dining room. I often left her apartment on weekends at three or four or even six A.M.
I managed to master social nuances between the old guard of fashion, like the de la Rentas, and Halston’s new wave of partying. I glided through this world with extreme caution and my usual armor: my fashion choices. Banana cable knee socks and elegant moccasins. Or Brooks Brothers penny loafers. Neckties, my Karl Lagerfeld castoffs, and Turnbull & Asser shirts. I never spent a dime on drugs. My money was spent on luxury.
Massive bouts of high-end retail shopping.
In this, Manolo Blahnik and I were kindred spirits.
Manolo Blahnik, the sum total of human genius in designing shoes for women, invited me to Fire Island one weekend. He arrived with matching sets of Louis Vuitton cases, filled with matching sets of tone-on-tone Rive Gauche shirts and custom-made linen trousers. If he wore a cerulean shirt, he had cerulean linen oxfords. If he wore a geranium-red silk Mao Rive Gauche shirt, then he of course wore matching Fred Astaire linen oxfords.
We went to a pool party where they spiked the punch with something, causing us to have nonstop fits of laughter for nearly fourteen hours. We took a walk along the beach, he in his matching look, me with a big panama hat, a huge Japanese parasol, and a black and white oversize cashmere blanket, wrapped over me like a pareo. We were quite the pair.
The half-nude men in thongs and Speedos near the surf kept screaming at us, laughing at us. “Get off the beach, you faggots. This isn’t the beach for you!”
Next we sauntered off to the woods, as we heard that was where men gathered in full view, to have group sex. There, under a tree, was a circle of men wearing leather chaps and nothing else, participating in group masturbation. It made us both burst out giggling, which caused the participants to boo and hiss at us until we left.
While I enjoyed checking out the scene under the influence of whatever I had been exposed to, when it came to sex, I was repressed. It was a conscious choice I had made.
Sex confused and bewildered me. In respectable Southern black households, it was simply not discussed. Physical intimacy of any kind was kept to a bare minimum. I can remember only two times in my childhood when my grandmother hugged me: The first time, in my early teens, was when I had an asthma attack. Then once again, when I was sick, lying on the sofa, she walked over and pulled up a throw blanket to my neck, and hugged me. Mama was not demonstrative of her love, not on a daily basis. She was loving but also stoic, strict, and severe. Too busy washing, ironing, preparing chickens, doing all the daily routines of a humble domestic maid who was also, in essence, a single mom to me.
I grew up with no inkling of what physical intimacy was, my parents long divorced and my grandmother widowed. My interior monologues about romance and love were confused. My only crush, like many others’, was on Anne Bibby, our high school homecoming queen. While I was in college and at Brown there was no one, no sexual interludes. But in New York sex was impossible to ignore; everyone was doing it and everyone was talking about it. And that forced me to come to terms with something I had long tried to forget.
During my childhood years, my innocence was shattered by a man who lived on the next street. His name was Coke Brown, or at least that was his nickname in the neighborhood. He lured me into the woodshed, directly underneath my wood-framed house, in the damp, dark earth, where he proceeded to take advantage of my youth and my naïveté when it came to sexual encounters. Afterward, as he zipped up his fly, he said, “This is our secret game.”
Was this happening to all the boys my age? I had no idea. I thought this was supposed to happen, and it did happen over and over again, in the dark place, often in daylight. Coke Brown was the first. He must have shared his conquests with others in the neighborhood. A series of older brothers often lured me into their woodsheds as I played innocently with their younger siblings.
Confused and deeply afraid of being discovered, I went about my daily life as if these dark games didn’t exist. As they progressed to frequent interludes, I retreated into my own world of silence. I couldn’t dare tell my grandmother that I had been under the house, in the dark, with a grown man. She would have been devastated, and I would have been shamed. I feared that telling my father, a wonderful man who loved me, would be wrong, and that I would possibly be blamed and sent away to some sort of sanatorium as a result. Or I would be brought before the church deacons and censured, which equaled exile. I felt I had no choice. I kept it all to myself. I simply pushed through the pain and betrayal in silence, never having counsel or seeking psychiatric help. I felt my childhood traumas were little compared to those of the rest of the world.
What saved me from my shame and silence was the sanctuary of church and the sanctuary of my grandmother’s house. But this dark zone of trauma consumed me and stunted my emotional evolution, until I sprouted up like a bean stalk and left for college, far away from my abusers. Somehow, I grew up, and eventually I realized there were others who had experienced the life I had secretly lived.
I survived the destruction and taking of my innocence, though I know it is the cause of many of my personal issues as an adult. The hard drive in my brain was scrambled early on. It kept me from ever knowing how to respond to romance. All I ever wanted up until that point was the approval of Diana Vreeland, Andy Warhol, and John Fairchild.
I shied away from dipping my fingers into the decadent, hedonistic cauldron of New York City, but I enjoyed hearing about it. One person I could always depend on to make me blush was the famous Picasso expert John Richardson. The darling of all of Park Avenue, he was a dashing figure of aristocratic provenance and a close friend of Paloma Picasso and Maxime de la Falaise, as well as Françoise and Annette de la Renta (Oscar’s
second wife) and Mica and Ahmet Ertegun. He moved in the best tone-on-high-tone circles. Yet he would tell me debauched stories about his Saturday afternoons at the West Village hard-core club the Anvil, a gay leather bar for men who preferred their sexual pleasure in harnesses, leather chaps, and slings hung from the ceiling. I sustained a long, long crush over the decades on Sir John Richardson. While I never told him about my feelings, his gaze remained intense. We remained good friends until his death in 2019.
Sometimes I’d go to the Anvil or another of these dens of S & M, as a fashionable last-minute visit after a night out on the town. One night, I went with Andy Warhol and Rudolf Nureyev. A black man in crotchless leather pants sidled up beside me and I
accidentally made eye contact with him. He began making gestures, rubbing his arm, from his elbow to his wrist, and nodding.
“What is he doing with his hands?” I said.
“He is trying to seduce you,” Nureyev said. “He wants you to anally fist him in the back room.”
Wearing matte jersey by Scott Barrie, a necklace made from a metal pipe on a grosgrain ribbon, and my Rive Gauche velvet trousers, when I was told this, I shrieked and ran toward the door.
Studio 54 was more my scene, where everyone danced with everyone. People just navigated from one end of the dance floor to the other and danced with total strangers. I would head to Studio 54 four nights a week, making sure I got to work at WWD by nine-fifteen the next morning. I was at the apex of my good-looking young self. And although I had just barely escaped the segregated Jim Crow South, I had style and attitude. I could shine with the best of them in sartorial splendor and élan.
Often one danced alone; it was all good in the neighborhood. No one judged you.
When I was not alone, my three favorite people to dance with were Manolo Blahnik, John Richardson, and Loulou de la Falaise, accessories designer and muse of Yves Saint Laurent (honorable mention goes to Diana Ross, with whom I danced one night in her Saint Laurent dress, dipping her head within inches of Studio 54’s parquet floor).
The Chiffon Trenches Page 4