Martin Snaric was my best friend. That’s a phrase people often use to emphasize the undying love between two spouses, but for Martin and me, it meant we were close pals and probably should have remained so. Martin was an American actor and model (born of first-generation immigrants—Yugoslavian on his dad’s side and Italian on his mother’s) whom I had known since the early seventies, when Antonio Lopez had introduced us, then shot us naked for his photography portfolio. By the late seventies, Martin, like me, was sick of what I’ll call (for lack of a better term) the dating game. Essentially, we decided to get married as a way to get other people out of our hair, to tell them, “Keep off!” We would try marriage, he and I agreed, give it five years, and if it didn’t work out, we’d get divorced—no harm, no foul.
What were we smoking? As if any relationship, let alone marriage, could ever be that simple, especially for a diehard romantic like me.
Martin and I ran in the same circle, and we were both extremely social and extroverted. One November evening in 1977, we happened to be in Paris at the same time and were riding in a taxi with Maning Obregon, the illustrator I’d worked with at Vogue, who was Martin’s friend as well as mine. All three of us were laughing our heads off about something or other when Martin suddenly kissed me and said, “Will you marry me?”
“Sure!” My response was instant and nonchalant.
That was when Maning got the brilliant idea that we should all go to London that night, via the ferry from Paris to Dover, and show up at the office of Adel Rootstein, the world’s preeminent maker of mannequins, first thing in the morning to see about having my mannequin made. Martin had already had his perfectly proportioned physique reproduced by Adel, and replicas of it were in store windows all over the world. Adel, who had emigrated to England from South Africa, had started out making mannequins in her kitchen and became famous for them because she created them in the images—including the bodies and the faces—of stars like Twiggy and Joan Collins. No one else had ever done that (though she also made mannequins, like the one based on Martin, that were excellent at their primary job: looking good in clothes).
Adel’s method was painstaking and artistic: First her in-house artist, John Taylor, would sculpt a clay version of the model, who sat for days (or in my case, stood with my arms crossed) like any artist’s model as John threw clay on a metal amulet and shaped it into the model’s form. Once finished, that clay statue would be cast in fiberglass and, from there, replicated and mass-produced for sale to stores all over the world. Adel’s great innovation, in addition to modeling her mannequins on real people, was to have them assume natural, realistic poses rather than look stiff and unnatural like . . . well, mannequins.
I think it was that moonlit ferry ride across the English Channel from Paris to Dover that sealed the deal for Martin and me. The three of us stood on the deck, huddled in Scottish blankets, and acted out our idea of a glamorous little movie. Martin gazed at me adoringly and sang, “Blue Moon, you saw me standing alone / Without a dream in my heart / Without a love of my own . . .” Yeah, sparks definitely flew between us that night.
We got to London around dawn and killed time in a coffee shop on King’s Road until it was time for Adel to arrive at Shawfield House, where the Rootstein offices were located. Kevin Arpino, the company’s creative director, whom I knew from the Paris shows, met us there, and he and Maning talked me up to Adel, trying to convince her that I would make a great mannequin. I got lucky. “I’m going to do new batch of mannequins next month,” she told me. “And I’d like you to come back in December to take part.” I could scarcely believe my ears. I floated out of her office.
Martin and I flew back to New York, where I met his parents, devout working-class Catholics who lived in an unassuming house in Brooklyn, and his twin sister, Pat. We definitely felt engaged but decided not to tell anyone. Then we jetted back to London, where I had one of the most wonderful months of my life. I spent my days sipping tea and posing for John Taylor as he sculpted my mannequin out of clay in his lovely little English house with a garden. At night Adel and Kevin wined and dined us all over London. I remember one evening we went to the Royal Ballet; after a superb performance of Swan Lake, Kevin took us backstage to meet the principal dancer, who was a friend of his. After we’d all shaken hands, the dancer said to Kevin, “I have so many runs in my stockings, I almost couldn’t dance.”
I was wearing a gold woven-metal dress by Stephen Burrows, and I couldn’t resist chiming in. “You think you’ve got runs?” I said, lifting my skirt and revealing the dozens of zigzaggy tears the metal had cut into my tights. “Now, these are runs!” We all had a good chuckle over that.
A week or so into our stay, Martin and I went to the registry in Chelsea and got married. I had always loved the television show December Bride when I was a kid, and somehow I wanted to be one, too—fresh and white and crisp. I wore the wedding dress that was made for my mannequin. It was lovely but heavy and terribly uncomfortable because it wasn’t meant to be worn by a real woman. Fleetingly, I wondered whether my mom—or Martin’s parents—would have wanted to be there, but I put the thought out of my mind. This was a spur-of-the-moment thing; it was a nice ceremony, but not the kind of wedding you fly across the Atlantic to attend.
Somehow we had achieved celebrity status in London—Adel and her mannequins really did confer a certain kind of fame—and the local newspapers got wind of our marriage and put it on the front page. I don’t remember the exact headlines, but they were something along the lines of “Two Dummies Tie the Knot.” We laughed at that, too. We found everything hilarious during that brief, wondrous time. Adel put us up in a sweet little apartment at the Nell Gwynn House near her offices, and Martin would wake me in the morning with small gifts or by singing show tunes in my ear. We both adored Rodgers and Hammerstein, and I would sing back to him, “I’m in love with a wonderful guy.” And I was.
If only we could have sustained that feeling once we returned to our real lives. Instead, we got mired in the classic two-career trap, and my career was by far the more successful. That first year of our marriage, I realized one of my greatest career goals: I appeared on the cover of Vogue. No, it wasn’t American Vogue (that goal has proved elusive) but the September 1978 issue of Vogue Italia, which, as with its American counterpart, was the biggest, fattest fashion issue of the year. Not too shabby. I wanted Martin to be happy for me, and he was, but I could tell he was conflicted because my career was eclipsing his. His effort to move from modeling into acting had stalled. He’d been cast as Valentino in The Last Remake of Beau Geste with Marty Feldman and Michael York, which was released in 1977, but subsequent movie parts just weren’t materializing, and he was understandably frustrated. Martin was (and is) one of the most talented people I’ve ever known, but he was discovering a basic truism of life: It’s not easy to reinvent yourself.
We lived in my two-and-a-half-room apartment on Central Park South, though the demands of my job meant that I spent very little time there. Neither did Martin, evidently, because whenever I called him from wherever I was, he never answered the phone. I was constantly traveling for work, and my absence did not make our hearts grow fonder. Au contraire. Martin pulled away and grew closer than ever to his oldest friend, Alban, a chef who wanted Martin to start a pie-baking business with him. I felt like the odd person out. Even when I was in New York, Martin would be with Alban and I’d be in the apartment by myself, trying not to cry.
On the occasions when Martin traveled with me, as he did when both of us modeled for Kenzo on a working trip to Japan early in our marriage, we often quarreled. I remember vividly a side visit that we made to Bali during that job in Asia. We accidentally ate some sort of psychedelic mushrooms—dopey us, we thought we were simply enjoying mushroom soup and omelets—and we had terrible hallucinations for nearly three days. Martin and I got into a horrendous fight and I remember thinking, Here we are in paradise and we can’t get along. What hope is there for this marriage? Right the
n and there, I tied a ribbon to a tree, said a prayer to a murti of Lakshmi, the Hindu goddess of prosperity and good fortune, that I’d purchased—it was a small carved wooden statue—and vowed that if I were ever lucky enough to come back to Bali, it would be with my true love.
The word “divorce” surfaced early, though at first I didn’t take it that seriously. But I couldn’t help noticing that the subjects of our future together and the possibility of children were particular sore spots. Any time I broached them, Martin would get angry and accuse me of rushing him. “I wasn’t ready to get married,” he’d say. “You never gave me a chance to get on my feet.” When he wasn’t making me feel like I was pressuring him, he took to teasing me in a way that was supposedly affectionate but subtly stuck in the knife and twisted it. “Oh, look at you with your fuzzy hair,” he’d say. Or “Oh, you poor thing, you’re so skinny.”
I think I saw the curtain start to come down on our marriage during the historic world tour both of us made in September 1980 with Halston and his usual retinue of “Halstonettes”—ten of his favorite models—and around a dozen or so other advisers and assistants. The highlight of the trip, which included fashion shows, publicity, and round after breathless round of lunches, dinners, and sightseeing excursions in Los Angeles, Japan, China, and Paris, was unquestionably China, where Halston (thanks to some string-pulling by his brother, a high-ranking diplomat in the State Department) managed to get permission to tour the country’s silk factories with an eye to possible trade. Like all good designers, Halston understood that fashion is ultimately about fabric, and he wanted to show his clothes to the Chinese manufacturers so they could see firsthand some of the ways their silk—the best in the world—could be turned into beautiful garments.
The United States had established diplomatic relations with China only the previous year, and it was still rare for American businesspeople to get visas to travel there. Halston was under a lot of pressure, and he kept me and a few other key Halstonettes close to him throughout this trip because he knew he could count on us to smooth the way socially with all the people we were meeting and speaking to through translators (who, incidentally, were often the only nonwestern women anywhere in sight). Between the constant toasts with mao-tai, a distilled liquor that the Chinese men, clad in identical uniforms of gray, blue, or green, drank with abandon (often with what they claimed were thousand-year-old eggs that we unofficial goodwill ambassadors dutifully choked down), and our jam-packed schedule, we were worn out and had almost no downtime. Martin and I did not fight—there wasn’t a spare minute for that—but he stopped talking to me about midway through the trip. It was upsetting, but I chalked it up to stress and figured he’d get over it as soon as we were back in the United States.
He didn’t. I had to turn around and leave for Milan to do the collections almost as soon as we landed in New York City, and when I returned from Europe a few weeks later, he wasn’t at the apartment. He had moved in with Alban. After a week or two of sitting around feeling sorry for myself, I started venturing out to parties and other events on my own and spending weekends with Halston at his beach house in Montauk, at the tip of Long Island, where we’d sing, watch old movies, make homemade fettuccine with his state-of-the-art pasta maker, and leaf through his collection of exquisite art books. It was pure heaven to relax with Halston on Sunday afternoons, as he reclined on a chaise longue beside his living room bookshelves, blowing perfectly formed smoke rings into the air. We’d talk about our dreams and also our disappointments. During walks on the beach, he and I would cheer each other up. He was worried about his company and feeling a lot of stress, and I was licking the wounds of my failed marriage. He’d remind me how important my friendship was to him and how lucky we both were.
As I think about Halston now, more than a quarter century after he died of AIDS (like so many of the men I dearly loved in the seventies and eighties), those quiet walks are what I recall most vividly—more vividly, even, than our wild nights at Studio 54, where in its heyday he and I would party into the wee hours with Liza Minnelli, Bianca Jagger, Jerry Hall, Steve Rubell, and a host of other fashion-forward friends. Those were insanely fun times, but the weekends with H in Montauk restored my spirit again. Come Sunday evening, I’d always return to the city feeling renewed. Slowly and surely, I adjusted to being a single woman again.
My divorce was finalized on December 30, 1981. Clueless about legal matters, Martin and I used the same law firm, Jacoby and Meyers, which we found through their ubiquitous ads on New York City subways and television stations. I remember with crystalline clarity the feeling I had when I walked out of their offices that day. I was wearing a Thierry Mugler “power suit” (very eighties!) with big Joan Crawford–style padded shoulders. I felt light, unencumbered—I’d just signed over to Martin some property in the Pocono Mountains that I’d bought for us—and ready for whatever came next. As I stepped into the sunlight of upper Broadway, I lifted my chin and shouted to anyone within earshot, “Happy New Year!”
chapter 47
MAD ABOUT THE BOY
Paul van Ravenstein on the day I met him in 1977. A few weeks shy of his nineteenth birthday, he was the photographer’s assistant on a shoot at Club Hurrah in New York City.
Courtesy of Ara Gallant.
You need a very bad man.” Those were among the first words spoken to me by Lukas Fischer, an extremely tall German rock musician, part-time model, and full-time deadbeat whom I met at a Hot Sox fashion show that we were both modeling in. Unfortunately, when I became involved with Lukas (I blame loneliness and his skills at seduction), “a very bad man” is exactly what I got. He was so very, very bad that I’m not sure I would have come out on the other side of the relationship in one piece had it not been for a very good man whom I was fortunate to meet a short time later.
Ah, that good man. I first saw him in 1977 when I was shooting for Playboy with the Dutch model Apollonia van Ravenstein—everyone called her “Apples” for short—who was a close friend and one of the kindest people I’ve ever known. The photographer, Ara Gallant, promised I could keep my clothes on. (I’d never be able to explain naked pictures in Playboy to my mother.)
The shoot was at Hurrah, the hot disco where I’d met my dance partner and former beau Sterling, from whom I’d recently separated. I arrived early in the day with Ara, and then Apples and I went into the ladies’ room to do our makeup. We emerged to total darkness. “Turn the light to the set,” Ara said to his assistant. Ara liked to use an intense tungsten light because it helped create the glamorous “old Hollywood” look for which he was known. I was chatting with Apples when I looked into the light and saw the silhouette of a tall, slim man who then shifted slightly so that his profusion of layered blond hair was backlit in such a way that it formed a halo. Whoever this person was looked actually divine. “Whoa!” I said to Apples. “Do you see that? I want some.” I was just joking around in the bawdy style we used when talking about guys. I expected her to join in, especially since she and I usually had similar taste in men. But she looked at me with a half smile, decidedly less enthusiastic than I was.
It was puzzling. How could this perfect specimen of manhood not be up to her standards? Before she could say anything, I was off to meet him. “Hello,” I said, looking up in the darkness. I couldn’t really see him, but I could feel the warmth of his body. And then a moment of paralysis overtook me and we were engulfed in silence. “Uh, hi,” I finally stammered. “I’m Pat. I’m a Cancerian.” Sharing your astrological sign was usually a safe bet.
A deep, accented voice replied, “I’m Paul. I’m a Cancerian, too.”
Excellent! Now I knew we could get along. The lights came back on and Apollonia gave me another odd smile. I walked over to her and she said something that solved the mystery: “That’s my little brother, Patty Cakes.”
Okay, I thought. That explains her apathetic response. But there’s no reason . . .
“He’s only nineteen,” she said. “He’s too young fo
r you.”
Nineteen. I would turn twenty-seven in a couple of months and had to admit that Apples was right. So I marched over to Paul and said, “You’re too young for me now, but I’ll get back to you later.”
Later turned out to be the spring of 1981, in Paris. I’d just seen Apollonia in Milan, where we both walked the shows, and she’d told me she was headed to Paris to meet her new boyfriend, Todd, and to work the collections there. She called me at my hotel on Rue La Boétie shortly after I arrived. “Pat, I need a favor. Todd and I need some time alone, but my brother, Paul, is staying with us in our hotel room,” she said. “Can you take him off our hands for a while?”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll take care of him.” After a long week of fashion shows, with all the changes of clothes and performing on the runway, I was grateful for a companion in Paris, especially the tall, handsome Dutch guy I recalled from the Playboy shoot.
He was waiting with Apples and Todd just outside the show garden. Tall Paul, with his straw-blond hair and wide shoulders, dressed in a T-shirt and loose jeans. Simple, easy, honest, so different from the overdressed fashionistas who were exiting the garden. The four of us strolled along the Rue de l’Université, and it was as if I’d known him for years.
Walking with the Muses Page 31
