Audrey Hepburn walked in wearing a black raincoat to the knee, a kerchief over her hair, and dark glasses. Her arrival was greeted with no more fanfare than anyone else working in the studio that day. She went straight to Suga, whom she loved and trusted. Dick took me over and introduced us, then left us alone to make further preparations. She was smaller than she appeared to be in movies and had a big, photogenic head, huge, slanted eyes, the anomalous almost pudgy nose, all the features that had long mesmerized me—edged by the crepe that comes with being sixtyish. There was a wistfulness to her demeanor, a languor, an almost sadness that she did nothing to hide. When we were alone I froze, but she immediately made me feel at ease. She asked me for a cigarette, and we smoked together.
She had a jewelry roll with her; she unrolled it and started pulling out all sorts of tasteful earrings and necklaces. She held them up to her face and sought my opinion. At first I was amused by these old-fashioned necklaces and earrings from a bygone time—tasteful Schlumberger, discreet Cartier things—but as she held them up, they began to irritate me. Dick returned to the room, and I mustered a very authoritative voice and said: “No jewelry. Anything will just be a distraction from that face.”
There was a long silence in the room. The chopping off of my head was being contemplated. Dick looked at Julie and finally cracked a smile and said “Absolutely!” and it seemed like the committee exploded into spontaneous applause.
Hepburn and Kevyn got along famously. She had a few directives and brought a few of her own makeup items, and he respectfully worked his magic. Next it came time to dress her, and I hesitated. She intuited how nervous I was and said, “But that’s your job, silly!” When she saw the coat on the hanger she sighed and said “Beautiful!” in a vocal expression of hers I’d noted before, which sounded almost like crying.
Sitting on the set that day watching her and Dick work together was like witnessing a miracle. Dick said, “Okay now, Audrey. Look down. And each time you look up at me I want something fresh and new.” She looked down. Then up with a half-smile. Then down. Then up with a mysterious gaze. And so on. Down. Up with a huge grin. Snap. Snap. My coat looked flawless. And her neck looked about a mile long. Her hand was in the shot, touching the big ruffle around the neck. I remember the discussions at Dick’s studio afterwards, the art directors felt her hand looked too big. To be fair I think it was an ad for nail polish, so in the end they swapped it out for that of a hand model, and if you look at the picture now the hand seems way too small.
At the end of that long day, well after four in the afternoon, I left Dick’s little brownstone. There were throngs—and I mean throngs—at least thirty photographers—waiting for Audrey Hepburn’s exit. Nowadays agents call paparazzi to whip up attention for their star clients, and it’s all trim and orderly by comparison. This was way before that. I watched her emerge from the building, this wisp of a woman, to face that big mess of photographers shooting her on the sidewalk, harassing her as she walked politely to her car. These men were not Avedon, lithe in his grey flannel suit and his perfect lighting. These were fat, sweaty men in shorts. Huge men with massive cameras dangling around their necks, all there for those terrible pictures. It was feral. Predatory.
Since my childhood days of watching old movies on TV, I’d certainly never dreamt I’d meet the great one herself. As a young adult I thought I would encounter women of my generation who might live up to Audrey Hepburn. But there was never anyone who could come close to her. There have been so many stylish, beautiful women in my time. So many more beautiful than her, and many who have impacted fashion more, but never anyone with that kind of gravity. Am I deluding myself? Do we all feel this way about iconic people we grow up idolizing? Or might it just be true in this case, that no one else will ever come close.
22
For me, one of the greatest developments of 1986 was the discovery of an aboveboard traveling gay cocktail party that happened the first Friday night of every month in a surprise location. It was called “Boys’ Night,” and it was organized by a bunch of young men who worked for the Italian designer Massimo Vignelli. Boys’ Night brought out all the aspiring young men in New York. There was a kind of heady freedom in the idea that one could go to a gay dance or a party without being hidden in some back room. One time Boys’ Night took place at a hall in Columbia University, the next in the lobby of an ad agency. This idea of going to a grown-up cocktail party without a shady underside, where you could meet other interesting gay people and talk about politics and books, filled me with hope.
In those days exclusivity was part of being gay. A double-edged perk. Though it may not seem so, there were fun aspects of being a subculture. After I got past the initial hysteria about my sexuality, the very outsideness of it became a kind of turn-on. Knowing you were different. For every disappointment in a loved one’s assessment, there was joy in the discovery of an ally. The instant bonding with others you knew to be gay or supportive. It was like belonging to a secret, dangerous, and exclusive club, something I can’t imagine anyone today would miss, but which was a fun bonus for me and my peers. The heady, glorious feeling of walking into a gay event or party, the knowledge that everyone was fair game, the beautiful solidarity, the instant feeling of community against all odds.
One Friday night I hosted a Boys’ Night event at my loft on Greene Street. It felt like I was flying in the face of caution. Harmless as it seems now, and hard as it is to believe, any sort of gay event in the mid-eighties connoted more than a slight bit of edge. We were busy working on my first collection show, which would be some time that winter of 1986, so Annica stayed and worked while the cocktail party was in progress. I was correcting patterns while men were milling about and drinking. Interesting, good-looking, smart men.
That night I met a guy named Wayne who I ended up dating for a short time. He was from Memphis and waited tables at Mike’s Bar and Grill in Hell’s Kitchen, a place that served margaritas made with what must have been grain alcohol. Wayne had a strong, attractive look, dark spiky hair, black eyes, and a thick drawl. Also, he had a wicked sense of humor. He teased me a lot about being so organized and pulled together. He referred to my tiny apartment, which was overdecorated with mirrors, plaids, and animal prints, as a perfect “starter apartment … for Diana Vreeland.” There was another boy from Tennessee, Wayne’s best friend, whose name I forget, let’s call him Don, also gay, heavyset, butch, who waited tables at Mike’s and also worked the graveyard shift tending bar at an East Village dive where we used to hang out. Like Wayne, Don’s sexuality seemed completely integrated, unapologetic, homosexuality in-your-face, no easy feat in 1986.
Late one night around that time, after Don pumped me with margaritas (I was always a cheap drunk—I drank very little owing to the sleep disorder), I was dancing and singing around my apartment. I had Liza’s Live at Carnegie Hall record blasting when I slipped on my zebra-skin rug and broke my ankle. The following morning I couldn’t move it. Somehow I managed to get myself to NYU Langone, where my ankle was X-rayed and put in a cast. Just as my career began to soar, I was making every attempt at sabotaging myself. (Not to mention how embarrassed I was by the gayness of slipping on a zebra skin while lip-syncing to Liza’s Carnegie Hall album.)
That day I got a call from Vogue saying Elizabeth Saltzman wanted to meet me in her office and look at some clothes. I wasn’t sure how she knew about me, and I had no idea how I was going to get all those clothes uptown while on crutches, my ankle freshly casted. Wayne helped me load up two garment bags and shouldered me and my crutches into a taxi and up the elevator in the Condé Nast building at 350 Madison Avenue.
I was inspired by Elizabeth, as were so many designers at the time. She was the “it” girl. Beautiful, funny, and tinged with scandal. Her first marriage, which she undertook in her Sprouse gown the year before, had already ended. Now she was dating Ron Perelman, jetting and yachting to places most of us dream about. I couldn’t tell what she was planning—whether it was a story
for the magazine or just covering her bases to know what was going on out in the market. That evening there wasn’t a lot of conversation—she did a lot of screaming as she tried things on. When we did speak it was about sex and boys and movie stars. I spent about two hours in her office, and we bonded; that night I was her discovery. She was a gadabout, and I was a little bit of a bore, always too tired from work to really partake in all the beautiful-people stuff. We gave each other nicknames that people used to roll their eyes over: She was Eenie and I was I-nee. We hosted parties for each other a lot, and the following summer we shared a house in Watermill. There was only happiness around Elizabeth, and I smile when I think about her.
She immediately arranged a sitting with the photographer Matthew Rolston, and the following week I sat in someone else’s loft in SoHo, my ankle broken, while Elizabeth styled my clothes and Matthew, wearing graduated pearls, like an old society matron, took pictures. Elizabeth’s column appeared a few months later: several pictures of my clothes and a picture of me looking slightly shell-shocked. It was a small story in Vogue—a breakthrough I didn’t know I was making—those outward signs only registering their importance for me in retrospect. I cared little about press then, but it really helped. By the time I announced my first fashion show I had everyone’s attention. Ironically, I was too busy to notice.
* * *
Either I didn’t have time or it didn’t strike me as an occasion to celebrate. After Bergdorf Goodman placed that first order my mother said, “If you don’t celebrate this, what the hell do you celebrate?” I didn’t see the little order as an accomplishment; I saw it as a challenge. I did everything myself. I oversaw the cutting and sewing—I even packed and shipped the clothes myself. Annica became like my sister, and we worked more closely than I did with anyone else up to that point and ever after. It was a tiny order, but it was Bergdorf Goodman and everything had to be perfect. Even that first handful of pieces—maybe a dozen total—overwhelmed me. A strapless velvet cocktail dress with satin-piped gores; a little puff of taffeta and tulle that couldn’t be called a jacket or even a shrug as much as sleeves; a few colorful jersey sack dresses, each in a small size range only because we couldn’t afford to have the patterns graded past a size ten. The first shipment sold out fast. Then came a tiny bunch of early spring clothes, including a white pique smocked “garden coat” that kept being reordered.
The first few shipments were driven up to Bergdorf’s in Sarah’s green Jaguar. She sat in the car while I dropped the boxes off at the loading dock and got the appropriate receipts. Within the first four days of the clothes getting to Bergdorf’s selling floor they called to tell me Jane Pauley bought a raincoat. (It was an easy-fitting knee-length thing made of one of the best fabrics I ever had: a natural handkerchief linen coated in a microfine layer of bone-colored rubber. I finished it with blond horn buttons that weighed more than the entire coat.) Eventually Bergdorf Goodman would become my biggest retail outlet. My first collections were sold predominantly through trunk shows arranged under the auspices of someone named Betty Halbreich, who still runs the personal-shopping business at the store. She and I became great friends over the years. A few weeks after our second and slightly larger delivery to Bergdorf’s, Betty called to say that Liza Minnelli had just been in and purchased a whole bunch of things, including one of the piqué garden coats. She also said that Liza was on her way down to see me and “She likes Coca-Cola.” I left Annica to straighten up while I raced to the corner and bought a six-pack and some flowers.
When Liza and her entourage flooded in that first time it felt like I’d entered an alternative reality. The first thing she said to me was, “I noticed that smock coat from the escalator!”
Within minutes she was stripped down to her bra-pantyhose one-piece, which did not go unnoticed by me, and my noticing did not go unnoticed by her. “You like it?” she asked. I swear I think the body-shaper movement originated with that one-piece of Liza’s. She has fabulous, disproportionately long legs and a short waist (like me), and she was able to pull her pantyhose up to meet her bra and sew the two pieces together without the bra pulling down and losing its hold. It formed one smooth line from toe to bustline.
She tried on literally every single thing I had in the studio and ordered it all. It was something I wasn’t used to, someone ordering things with such abandon. It felt excessive, and I began to discourage her from ordering more. It seemed based on a disorder more than her desire for good clothes, and my protective instincts kicked in.
It would be hard to overstate how thrilled I was to have Liza Minnelli standing there in various states of undress in the middle of my atelier, changing in and out of my clothes. I’m pretty sure I told her how much I idolized her from my childhood and what a huge part Cabaret and Liza with a “Z” had played in my life. For fear of coming across as a stalker, I omitted the parts where I had studied her every movement and vocal mannerism in order to impersonate her. I was also really nervous. I mean—the levels of perfection she had been held to growing up with those parents—the grandeur of the golden age of Hollywood, not to mention her legendary friendship with Halston. Was there any way I could live up to that? Also, I was nervous about the passing time, all the commitments and responsibilities I put aside in order to play dress-up with this living legend.
* * *
Aside from the amazing one-piece undergarment, Liza had a lot of tricks she revealed to me over the course of those fittings. Some useful things, but mostly crazy old-fashioned ideas that didn’t really pertain. She liked dress shields and had myriad ways of incorporating them discreetly. She extolled the virtues of these terrible dance shoes that “disappeared on the foot” because of the clear plastic upper. She wore them with everything, and trust me, they did not disappear. She showed me one thing I did utilize regularly—a configuration of elastic that ran between a woman’s legs in order to keep big heavy skirts in place. I dubbed it a “Whoopee Strap.”
Fittings lasted full days with Liza. She would come in the early afternoon and stay till dinner. Often she would take me out with any number of friends, such as Ellen Greene and Chita Rivera. Kevyn Aucoin was also good friends with Liza and we went out a lot together. But there were also many hangers-on, secretaries and the like, posing as stylists. I went out a lot with Liza. We often went to small downtown bars and clubs, including one called Eighty-Eights that had a wonderful, tiny cabaret upstairs, and which would become an important location in my future. Almost always, when Liza was in the house, it was all about her. Without fail, someone would convince her to stand up and do a number. After much cajoling and more declining she’d get up on whatever tiny stage and improvise a number with the starstruck accompanist. One night I went with her to the Rainbow Room to see her sister, Lorna Luft, who I had met at one of the marathon fittings. The show was meant to be a comeback for Lorna, but that night, with Liza in the house, the show was less about watching Lorna and much more about watching Liza watching Lorna.
I had a lot of fun with Liza, and I learned a lot. When I won my first CFDA award in 1988 she presented it to me. Standing backstage at the Metropolitan Museum of Art auditorium, where those events used to take place, I was frantic with nerves. She turned to me:
“What’s your favorite food?”
“Um. Ice cream?”
“Okay. Ice cream. What flavor?”
“Mint chocolate chip.”
“Imagine yourself two hours from now, no matter what happens, even if this night is a total bust, eating a big bowl of mint chocolate chip.”
When I did that I was no longer nervous: fabulous lesson number one.
Making clothes for Liza wasn’t exactly easy. For one thing, she was really fidgety in fittings. I used to say fitting Liza was like fitting a goldfish. She never stopped squirming and dancing and talking while I was trying to pin something on her. She’d break into a demonstration of her new dance routine. “Then I do a double turn and Wham! Kick! Then I whip off the skirt! Bam!” (Yes, I’m pr
oud to say I made Liza more than one breakaway skirt.) Difficult as those fittings were for actually fitting the clothes, they were enormously entertaining for me and my staff.
Liza was opinionated and had a real point of view, and I learned a lot in those fittings about how to listen and then gently steer people away from their own ideas in order to help them look better. Unfortunately, Liza was surrounded by people who didn’t seem to have her best interests at heart. An interchangeable group went with her everywhere. I couldn’t tell who they were, and I’m pretty sure she didn’t know either. On one of the nights we were alone I escorted her home after the ballet and supper. Seven or eight crazy fans awaited her in the lobby and the doorman did nothing to shield her from them. I felt obliged to stay and see her to her door, and then I realized she was eating it up, signing autographs and posing for pictures. My instinct was to protect her, but I’m not sure she really wanted protecting.
In 1992 I made her costumes for a big show at Radio City Music Hall. She committed to that show like she was Joan Crawford making Mildred Pierce. When we weren’t in meetings about the costumes, she was calling me with notes and ideas. I made her three or four beautiful things for the show, including, for her opening number, one of the most innovative dance dresses I ever made. It was nothing more than a white chiffon tank top with a really short white chiffon knife-pleated skirt attached at the waist with an exposed grosgrain ribbon. The thing that made it so fresh and revelatory was that the whole thing was embroidered with crystals in a kind of polka-dot pattern, which gave the chiffon a heft and sparkle and, best of all, when the pleats opened, the skirt moved like liquid, and you could see entirely through it. Her body was in top shape at the time. If you ask me, she never looked better.
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