Them

by Francine du Plessix Gray

  Throughout history, hats have been more freighted with associations of sexuality, authority, and status than any other vestment that comes to mind. It was the earliest and most potent symbol of leadership devised by man: coif of Egyptian pharaoh, bishop’s miter, medieval crown, headdress denoting military status or police control—and, conversely, the doffing of hat as an essential sign of respect in church, court, and society.

  But hats and the general etiquette of headgear were also powerful tools for subjugating women’s sexuality. While a male’s abundant hair was a flaunted and esteemed symbol of sexual potency, for a woman to show her hair unbound was a sign of emotional imbalance (Ophelia) or promiscuity (Mary Magdalen). And from the beginning of recorded history, women in most cultures were required to cover their heads in public, often even at home, with veils, wimples, bonnets, or coifs. Into the first decades of our own century, hats, except upon formal evening occasions, remained essential emblems of female modesty, and a woman emerging from her house en cheveux, hatless, was seen as lower class or morally suspect. These sumptuary codes were somewhat relaxed after World War I and further loosened after World War II, but hats still remained obligatory for formal daytime occasions—lunches, business meetings, church. “It was even a sign of rank to wear them to the office,” says cultural historian Rosamund Bernier, a former client of Mother’s. “Whereas Vogue’s secretarial staff had to take their hats off upon arrival, editors wore them throughout working hours, staring at their typewriters right through their veils…soon after I joined the magazine, I was told that if I wanted to keep my job it was advisable to buy a hat from Tatiana—they cost ninety-five dollars, a week’s salary.”

  Might my awe and dread of Tatiana have been deepened by this symbolic freight of caste, etiquette, and paramilitary order (Mother as policeman of the body?) Would I have cloaked her with an equally potent aura of authority if she had been America’s leading designer, say, of swimwear (Madame Cole of California) or of just plain dresses (Claire McCardell, Anne Fogarty)? Who knows.

  “The attachment to the mother is bound to perish,” Sigmund Freud wrote, specifically discussing daughters’ relationship to their mothers, “precisely because it was the first and was so intense. The attitude of love probably comes to grief from the disappointments that are unavoidable and from the accumulation of occasions for aggression.” Dr. Freud never did give us girls much of a chance to bond. What his writings on this issue have helped me to realize, however, is the byzantine complexities of daughters’ struggle for independence from their mothers. A boy has a relatively easy time of it, achieving the necessary separation from his first love object—mother—by identifying with his father. But since a gender-role identity is equally essential to the development of a healthy female psyche, a girl faces the paradoxical task of having to detach herself from her mother while continuing to identify with her to some degree. And this ambiguous process of disentanglement is all the more complex if the mother is a high priestess of the very rite that every teenager wants to master above all others: seduction.

  Between my thirteenth and eighteenth years, when I left home for college, Mother inevitably talked me into passing canapés to the world-class fashion icons (Babe Paley, Gloria Guinness), the members of Vogue’s sartorially exquisite editorial staff, and the dozens of meticulously starved fashion models who attended the Libermans’ gatherings at Seventieth Street. Mother always wanted me to appear at her parties—not that many professional women had children those days, and as I grew up and became more “presentable,” as she put it, she increasingly wished to show me off. Just before such events, after perusing every inch of my bodily surface—“Not that sweater again, your breasts are too large” “How many times have I told you that your face is too wide for straight hair?”—she propelled me into the living room with a shove at the small of the back and the following command: “Charmes!” (“Charm!” in the imperative tense.)

  Beyond exposure to the confusing and often triadic sexual arrangements prevalent in any milieu of high style (“no, chérie, Alexis de Rédé is Arturo Lopez-Willshaw’s lover, not Patricia’s”), the chimeric world of couture in which both Mother and Alex moved is bound to have complex effects on any adolescent girl. For she is confronted with those arbiters of seduction who dictate the fall and rise of hems in the West; who advise hundreds of thousands of women on how to comb their hair, improve their figures, seduce their men, feed their guests; who proclaim the gospel of instant gratification with headlines such as “Needed Immediately for Winter! The Bold, Courageous Trapeze!” or “Essential for Evening: Banana Velvet, Fabulous with Sables!” And however we may rage against such tyrannical frivolity, we tend to be bewitched by its goodies. The problem is exacerbated if our fashion-icon parents are as seductive as mine were, and if we have to work as hard as I did for their affection and attention. So well into my twenties I whirled through several contradictory cycles—periods of servile obedience to my parents’ swank milieu, followed by cycles of turbulent rebellion against it.

  My last years at Spence were still those of servility. I spent much of my energy trying to meet the demanding standards set by the Libermans and my summer mom, Nada. During my weekend escapes from the Seventieth Street gambling den, I wasted a good part of my time looking for contraptions—chest-flattening bras, feet-shrinking shoes—that would purge me of those bodily details so banned by the fashionable. I engaged in numerous diets that might help me to resemble the ghoulishly emaciated models who flocked to Mother’s parties: three days of buttermilk and soda water, three days of hard-boiled eggs and tomatoes, three days of stewed prunes and tea. Attempting to hone my measurements to the faddish thirty-four/twenty-four/thirty-four inches, I went to health clubs and stood in archaic pummeling machines, which have left permanent marks. My desire for emaciation, I later realized, was based on a need to simultaneously please Mother and differentiate myself from her: While slavishly emulating the prevalent standards of style for which she was a conduit, I was fashioning my body to be as dissimilar as possible from her own voluptuous frame. What tormented misunderstandings occur between mothers and daughters! A great deal of my own insecurity was based on my feeling that, compared to Tatiana and her ravishing women friends, I was dreadfully plain; meanwhile, her growing affection for me was fed by the satisfaction that I was becoming increasingly “presentable” and was also turning into what she would have liked to have been: a school-smart, tomboy skinny “intellectual.”

  So I was a very divided soul: Inwardly, very secretly, often feeling faint from my diets, while graciously continuing to smile and pass canapés to Elsa Maxwell, Jacques Balmain, Hubert de Givenchy, I was carving out a future for myself radically dissimilar to my parents’ lives. I, Francine Ludmilla Pauline Anne-Marie du Plessix, wanted to marry a country gentleman who would liberate me from all this shit. I’d continued to have a strong religious streak, and I dreamed of settling down with a scholarly, somewhat mystical gentleman farmer who wrote poetry or novels on the side, like the fellows in Country Life photographs with captions that say “Mr. and Mrs. Tertius Waugh and their five delightful children.” No more howling white rooms and ice-hard white furniture and freaky women who plastered their hair down with black shoe polish and decreed, “The Toreador look! Small heads are in this fall.” No, no, I yearned for a snug Tudor parsonagelike country home with dark wood paneling, chintz curtains, ottomans tufted in deep burgundy, cozy kitchens where I would put up blackberry jam much of the summer while listening to my husband talk about St. Paul’s view of the resurrection and the eschatology of the Patristic Fathers…. That was all in preparation for my next cycle of rebellion against Them, my cherished parents.

  My first two college years were spent at Bryn Mawr, my second two at Barnard, when I often came home to reoccupy my room at Seventieth Street. I seem to have flirted, during those years, with a variety of possible careers as drastically different from my parents’ as possible. I began as a medievalist, dallied midway with physics and
premed, ended up majoring in philosophy and religion, and came close to entering Union Theological Seminary for a graduate degree in divinity (“Ça fait trés bien de s’occuper de Dieu,” “It’s very elegant to busy oneself with God” was Mother’s comment about that possibility). And at the end of my junior and senior years in Barnard I enrolled for summer sessions at Black Mountain College, a community whose zeitgeist—rebellion against every form of established order, political or aesthetic—would thrust my antiparental cycle into full gear.

  At Black Mountain, I occasionally smoked pot, sat entranced through John Cage’s Zen-anarchist lectures, played strip poker with Bob Rauschenberg, and particularly appalled my mother by wearing leather motorcycle jackets and chopping my hair as short and jagged as a contemporary punk’s. (“She has shaved herself!” Mother cried. “You look like Port Authority Terminal,” moaned Alex, who had never been to an American bus or train station in his life but had published Gjon Mili’s daunting photos of them in Vogue.) The summer after graduation, I bought a thirdhand Plymouth with the money earned from winning Barnard’s Creative Writing Prize, drove to New Orleans, and spent two months in a haze of bourbon, hanging out with jazz clarinetists, and playing poker with a Communist Party cell (a salubrious experience: their humorlessness quickly inoculated me against the CP). I wasn’t good about staying in touch with Mother and Alex that summer. And Alex, fretting about the possibility of my becoming a fallen woman and a communist to boot, telephoned Mabel from the south of France, ordering her to fly to New Orleans and check up on me. Mabel, thrilled with the free trip, found me living in a one-room flat on Bourbon Street, “full of beans and hanging out with very different folk,” as her diplomatic report to the Boss and the Madam was phrased. Her trip was an education for me: Determined to give her a good time, I packed her into my car and took her for a three-day sightseeing trip of the bayou country, throughout which time we had to stay in “colored folks’ motels,” as such institutions then called themselves, in order to remain together.

  I returned to New York and worked for two years as a reporter on the overnight shift of the United Press radio desk, writing “World in Briefs” on murders, earthquakes, corn futures, and the latest developments in the Joseph McCarthy hearings. A hardworking tomboy—hadn’t my mother prepped me for being just that?—I was the only woman on the UP’s graveyard shift, relishing the martinis consumed at 8:00 A.M. in Third Avenue bars with my male colleagues. I went home to a basement room in the West Village that I shared with my dearest friend at Bryn Mawr, Joanna Rose, who was then working as a model on Seventh Avenue. My moving out of her house struck Mother as a personal affront, upsetting her so much that she took to her bed for three days, demanding morphine for an alleged migraine, and would never even deign visit my downtown quarters. However, Alex, always the peacemaker, did come down to the Village during my first fortnight there and reported to her that it was “a dignified, even distinguished location,” which restored a measure of peace between Mother and daughter for the rest of my stay in New York.

  In the mid-1950s—the feminine, unquestioning Eisenhower fifties, the last golden years of the standards of beauty and elegance that had shaped my mother’s vocation—Tatiana of Saks’s career flourished as never before. “Nothing goes to a woman’s head like a hat by our own Tatiana,” the Saks in-house magazine boasted. “Her magnificent creations are the delight of our most particular customers.” The New York Times’s Virginia Pope wrote that Tatiana’s designs display “both wit and wisdom” and praised their “soigné look” and “well-groomed charm.” Mother’s hats were so popular that in 1955 Saks decided that she must produce a ready-to-wear line alongside her custom designs and sent her on the road to promote her creations in its midwestern branches. “Tatiana—so much the vogue!” an ad in The New York Times announced. “Charming for Easter but prophetic for summer are three black diamonds from her newest collection, the More-Hat Look…the Deep-Mushroom, shadowy sheer or all-velvet…the Theater Chignon…. Now available in all our out-of-town stores.”

  I was not that much in touch with the prime of Tatiana’s career. For at the age of twenty-three I had moved to Paris. And I had upped the ante in my new cycle of filial compliance—my gambit, this time, was to secure my mother’s love by emulating the life she had led at that age. With Alex and Mother’s help, I got a job with France’s leading fashion magazine, Elle, and set out to conquer precisely that same glittering beau monde Mother had wished to conquer forty years before as a young refugee from Russia. I sat in the showrooms of Chanel, Patou, Givenchy, and Dior, taking notes on the tweeds and tulles paraded at collection time. Living in a tiny, somber room on the Ile Saint-Louis, down to a bare 110 pounds and verging on anorexia, I masterminded fashion sittings, pinned dresses on zonked-out models, wrote fashion captions, which said, “Balenciaga’s newest chemise surprise! False double hem, single-breasted buttoning down the side.” Like Mother in the 1930s, I scrambled to get invited to the Rothschilds’ dinners and borrowed dresses from couture houses to attend them. (“Angel, do you have a little number to lend me for the evening?…Brown chiffon size six, oh, thank you.”) In sum, I was trying to replay my mother’s success on precisely her own past turf, the siren Paris.

  In those years, my correspondence with my parents reflected my fear that their success, their bonds with important friends, far superseded their need for me. “Maman adorée,” so one letter of spring 1955 reads, “I am crazed, crazed with joy at the prospect of accompanying you to Rome this summer…. I beg you not to change your mind…. I’m not so much thrilled by the prospect of Rome…as by the notion that it will be the only way we can be quietly together…. You and Alex remain, as you’ve always been, the center of my existence.” And then there were the missives in which I stated my solidarity in practicing their trade, couture (a vocation for which I felt increasingly unfit). “Monday the major hustling begins,” I wrote in 1955 as I covered the winter collections for Elle. “Three major collections a day to cover and then fashion shoots late into the night…. I’m in the photo studio where I’m going to live through the rest of the week, preparing the color pages, which are made before the collections begin in an atmosphere of atomic secrecy—a messenger just arrived from Dior in an armored truck, pistols in each hand, with the suit we’re using on the cover.”

  My frequently caustic descriptions of the Paris fashion scene and of Paris high society in the mid-fifties seemed to impress Mother immensely. Her crippled hand had always served as an excuse for never writing more than a few phrases, so her habit was to cable me rather than write or else to jot a few words at the end of Alex’s infrequent missives. But in the autumn of 1955 she must have found a pal willing to take dictation from her or hired a secretary, for I received a perfectly typed three-page letter from her in which she hints, for the first time, that I might be “a writer.” “Your long letter from…the Ile Saint Louis is, quite simply, a chef d’oeuvre of contemporary prose. And you’re totally mistaken if you think that it was too long, for I had Alex read it to me three evenings in a row.”

  But however thrilled my mother was by my modest success in her world of fashion and by my promising literary style, nothing delighted her more than the man I was going out with during my last year in Paris. In this particular mimesis of Tatiana I had aspired to be courted by barons and counts, as she had, and I bettered her: I ended up going steady—how corny can you get?—with an alcoholic prince. No earlier accomplishments of mine—no A+ college exams or Creative Writing Awards—evoked such a surge of maternal approval as I received during my affair with that particular cad. Every writer I know relishes above all others one particular line of their crafting. And my own favorite, from my novel Lovers and Tyrants, tartly resumes the subtext of my two-year stay in Paris in the 1950s: “fucking goons for mom.” For what was I really doing with that ridiculous prince, with my borrowed finery and my absurd bouffant hair, with my meticulously underfed mannequin’s body, with a fashion career that led me into deep de
pressions? I was running toward the arms of the beloved couple whose love I’d been trying to conquer ever since my father’s death, I was running as fast as I could, like a track star on speed, toward their affection and approval, all the time shouting, “I’m just like you now, please pay attention, pay attention at last….”