White Girls

by Hilton Als

  The Michael Jackson cacophony is fascinating in that it is not about Jackson at all. I hope he has the good sense to know it and the good fortune to snatch his life out of the jaws of a carnivorous success. He will not swiftly be forgiven for having turned so many tables, for he damn sure grabbed the brass ring, and the man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo has nothing on Michael.

  Baldwin goes on to claim that “freaks are called freaks and are treated as they are treated—in the main, abominably—because they are human beings who cause to echo, deep within us, our most profound terrors and desires.” But Jackson was not quite that articulate or vocal about his difference, if he even saw it as such after a while. Certainly his early interest in subtext—expressed primarily by wordplay and choice of metaphor—receded after he released his synthesizer-heavy 1991 album, Dangerous. That album gave us “In the Closet,” where an uncredited Princess Stéphanie of Monaco pleads, at the beginning of the song, for the singer not to ignore their love, “woman to man.” (It’s another link in the chain of influence; she sounds like Jackson doing Diana Ross.) In a later part of the song, Michael pleads: “Just promise me / whatever we say / or whatever we do / to each other, / for now we’ll make a vow / to just keep it in the closet.”

  But this would be his last engagement of this kind. Unlike Prince, his only rival in the black pop sweepstakes, Jackson couldn’t keep mining himself for material for fear of what it would require of him—a turning inward, which, though arguably not the job of a pop musician, is the job of the artist. After Dangerous, Jackson became a corporation, concerned less with creative innovation than with looking backward to re-create the success he had achieved almost ten years before with Thriller. In contrast, over a career spanning roughly the time of Jackson’s own, Prince has released more than thirty albums, not all of them great, but each reflective of the current permutation of his musical mind, with its focus on sex and religion as twin transformative experiences. When not content to sing as himself, Prince has created an alter ego, Camille, to explore his feminine side and thus help promote his stock in trade: androgyny (which is Prince’s freakishness, along with his interest in bending racial boundaries without resculpting his face). For Jackson to have admitted to his own freakishness might have meant, ultimately, being less canny about his image and more knowledgeable about his self—his body, which was not as impervious as his reputation.

  James Baldwin did not live long enough to see Jackson self-destruct. And the most interesting aspect of his essay in light of Jackson’s death is Baldwin’s identification with Michael Jackson, another black boy who saw fame as power, and both did and did not get out of the ghetto he had been born into, or away from the father who became his greatest subject. But the differences are telling. While Baldwin died in exile, he did not presumably die in exile from his body, and while Baldwin died an artist, Jackson did not. After 1991, Jackson’s focus was his career—which is work, too, but not the work he could have done. And his tremendous gifts as a singer and arranger, and as a synthesizer of world music in a pop context, became calcified. He forgot how to speak, even behind the jeweled mask of metaphor.

  In the end, the chief elements of his early childhood—his father, his blackness, the church, his mother’s silence—won, and the prize was his self-martyrdom: the ninety-pound frame; the facial operations; the dermatologist as the replacement family; the disastrous finances; the young boys loved and then paid off. Michael Jackson died a long time ago; it’s just taken years for anyone to notice.

  THE ONLY ONE

  ONE NIGHT IN the spring of 1993, the fashion editor André Leon Talley attended an all-male nude revue at the Gaiety Theatre, on West Forty-sixth Street. He was dressed in a red waist-length military jacket with gold epaulets and black cuffs, black military trousers with a gold stripe down each leg, black patent-leather pumps with grosgrain bows, gray silk socks with black ribbing, white gloves, and a faux-fur muff. Accompanying him, rather like another accessory, was the young English designer John Galliano.

  As the driver opened the car door in front of the theater, Talley, characteristically, issued a directive followed by a question: “I shall expect you here upon my return at once! Lord, child, how am I gonna get out of this car in all this drag?” He did not pause for an answer. He stretched out his long left leg, placed his foot on the sidewalk, and, grabbing the back of the driver’s seat, hoisted himself up and out—a maneuver whose inelegance he countered by adjusting his muff with a flourish.

  Appearances are significant to André Leon Talley, who seeks always to live up to the grand amalgamation of his three names. He has sienna-brown skin and slightly graying close-cropped hair. He is six foot seven and has large hands and large feet and a barrel chest. He has been described as “a big girl.” He is gap-toothed and full-mouthed. His speech combines an old-school Negro syntax, French words (for sardonic emphasis), and a posh British accent. Though a wide audience may know him from his periodic television appearances on CNN and VH1, it is in the world of magazines that he has made his name. Currently the creative director of Vogue, formerly the creative director of HG, and a writer, stylist, and photographer for Women’s Wear Daily, Interview, and the New York Times Magazine, André Leon Talley is, at forty-six, fashion’s most voluble arbiter, custodian, and promoter of glamour.

  Inside the Gaiety—a small, dark space with a stage, a movie screen, and two tiers of seats—some men sat in various states of undress and arousal while others dozed quietly. Talley and Galliano stood in the middle of the aisle to the left of the stage and waited for the dancers to appear. Talley was hoping for a “moment.” He finds moments in other people’s impulses (“I can tell you were about to have a moment”), work (“What Mr. Lagerfeld and I were after in those photographs was a moment”), architecture (“This room could use a certain...moment”), social gatherings (“These people are having a moment”). When the dancers entered, one by one, Talley said, “This is a major moment, child.” Swaying to loud disco music and against a backdrop of gold lamé, the young men, who were either nude or partly so, offered the men in the front row a thigh to be touched, a bicep to be rubbed.

  “Ooh!” Talley exclaimed. “It’s nostalgie de la boue! It’s Déjeuner sur l’Herbe, no? Manet. The flesh. The young men. The languorous fall and gall of the flesh to dare itself to fall on the herbe.” André Leon Talley came down hard on the word herbe as he caught sight of a lavishly tanned young man onstage who was naked except for cowboy boots and, as his smile revealed, a retainer. “What can one do?” Talley moaned. “What can one do with such piquant insouciance? How can one live without the vitality of the cowboy boots and teeth and retainers and so forth?”

  Before the end of the performance, Talley led Galliano into a room on one side of the theater, where several other men were waiting for the dancers. Upon identifying André Leon Talley as “that fashion man off the TV,” a black drag queen, who wore jeans, a cream-colored halter top, and an upswept hairdo and sat on the lap of a bespectacled older white man, said, “That’s what I want you to make me feel like, baby, a white woman. A white woman who’s getting out of your Mercedes-Benz and going into Gucci to buy me some new drawers because you wrecked them. Just fabulous.”

  “This is charming,” Talley said, calling attention to a makeshift bar with bowls of pretzels and potato chips and fruit punch. “For the guests who have come to pay homage to the breathtaking ability of the personnel.” His muff grazed the top of the potato chips.

  The room contained framed photographs from Madonna’s book Sex, which depicted scenes of louche S&M violence (Madonna, in an evening dress, being abused; nude dancers, with collars, being ridden by Daniel de la Falaise in a dinner jacket). The scenes had been enacted and photographed at the Gaiety. “Miss Ciccone,” Talley said, with disdain, barely looking at the photographs. “My dear, we do not discuss the vulgar.”

  In inspecting and appraising his surroundings, André Leon Talley was working—the creative director in pursuit of inspirati
on. It is the same sort of work he does in the more conventional environs of his working day. At Vogue, Talley is many things—art director, stylist, fashion writer, and producer. As a producer, Talley suggests unlikely combinations, hoping for interesting results. Recently, he arranged to have Camilla Nickerson, a young fashion editor at Vogue and a proponent of the glamour-misshapen-by-irony look, design a photo spread on Geoffrey Beene, a designer committed to glamour not misshapen by anything. As an art director, Talley from time to time oversees cover shoots, especially those involving celebrities. He tries to ensure that the photographer will produce an image that makes both the clothes and the celebrity look appealing and provides enough clear space in the frame for the magazine’s art director to strip in cover lines. At the same time, Talley encourages the celebrity to project the kind of attitude that Vogue seeks to promote on its covers: relaxed and elegant but accessible. He does so by acting as both therapist and stylist. He soothes his subjects’ anxieties about the cover shoot by exclaiming, as he dresses them, that this or that garment has never looked better.

  It is in the production of stories he conceives on his own that Talley employs all his talents simultaneously. Before a season’s new designer collections are shown to the press, Talley visits various houses to look for recurring motifs, in order to build a story around them. During a recent season, he discerned that two or three collections featured lace. Vogue then devised a story based on the mystery of lace, and had Helmut Newton photograph lace gloves, lace boots, and lace bodices in a way that enhanced the mystery. Talley chose which details of the clothes should be photographed. In conjunction with Newton, he also chose the models, the hair-and-makeup people, and the locations.

  Talley will sometimes write the text to accompany the fashion spread he has conceived. At other times, he will act simply as a cultural reporter, writing pieces on new designers and choosing the best examples of their work to be photographed. Talley has written on interiors, too, directing the photographer to capture images that complement his text. “My dear, an editor must, must be there to fluff the pillows!” he says, explaining his presence at these photo shoots.

  André Leon Talley’s office at Vogue in Paris, where he is based, is a high-ceilinged space, painted white, with large windows facing the Boulevard Saint-Germain; it is surprisingly bare, except for two desks and many photographs on the walls, including a large one in color by Karl Lagerfeld of Talley carrying a big fur muff. There Talley will sometimes perform a kind of boss-man theater—throw papers about, slam telephones down, noisily expel the incompetent. “This is too much. What story do we need to be working on, children? What story? Let’s get cracking, darlings, on fur. Fuh, fuh, fuh. One must set the mood around the fuh and the heels, the hair, the skin, the nipples under the fuh, the hair around the nipples, the fuh clinging to the nipples, sweat, oysters, champagne, régence!” He conveys not only dissatisfaction but also the promise that, once he is satisfied, his reflexive endearments (“darling,” “child,” and so forth) will be heartfelt.

  André Leon Talley, in a blue pinstriped suit, walked into his office one day making several demands that could not be met, since his assistant was not there to meet them. That Talley had, hours before, dismissed his assistant for the day was a fact he chose to ignore. He sat at his desk and began upsetting papers on it—papers that had clearly been left in some order. He then complained about the lack of order. He complained about the lack of a witness to the lack of order. He summoned by intercom a young woman named Georgie Newbery, an assistant in the fashion department, to be such a witness.

  “Georgie!” Talley exclaimed as she quietly entered the room. Her eyes were focused on Talley, who, as a result of the attention, seemed to grow larger. “I told Sam never, nevah to leave my desk in this state of...disorder! I can’t find my papers.”

  “What papers, André?” Newbery asked.

  “The papers, darling! The papers! I need a telephone number on the...papers! Can you believe this, child?” Talley asked of no one in particular. “I need the number of the soirée, darling,” he said, slumping in a caricature of weariness. He covered his face with his hands and moaned. Newbery picked a piece of paper off his assistant’s desk and handed it to him. Talley looked at the paper: on it was the telephone number. There was a silence; Talley seemed dissatisfied at having the phone number, the problem solved, the event over. He paused, as if to consider the next event he would create. Looking up at Newbery, Talley said, “Georgie, I need three thousand francs! At once!”

  André Leon Talley has been the creative director of Vogue for six years. During that time, he has seen many looks come and go—the grunge look, the schoolgirl look, the sex-kitten look, the New Romantic look, the reconstituted-hippie look, the athletic-wear-meets-the-street look. In the years I have known him, though, Talley’s own look has consistently been one of rigorous excess. In his way, he has become the last editorial custodian of unfettered glamour, and the only fashion editor who figures at all in the popular imagination. He is the fashion editor who, seemingly sparing no expense for models, clothes, props, photographers, and airplane tickets to far-flung locations—a farm in Wales, a burlesque house on West Forty-sixth Street—pursues that which the public will perceive, without naming it, as allure.

  This pursuit begins in Talley’s Paris apartment, which is situated near the Invalides, where Napoleon is entombed. The apartment is small but rich in talismans of allure: scented candles, flower-patterned draperies that puddle on the floor, a large flower-patterned screen, a Regency bed, books artfully arranged on a table in the vestibule. The walls are covered in beige rice paper. There is a small dark room off the vestibule with a VCR attached to an oversized television; on the walls are a number of drawings by Karl Lagerfeld and a poster-size, black-and-white photograph of a black man’s torso by Annie Leibovitz.

  Talley begins telephoning in the morning, often as early as six o’clock, to suss out what might be “the next thing.” When Talley telephones a designer, he may ask, “Darling, have you had a moment?” In an industry notoriously suspicious of language, Talley’s grandiloquence transports the designer into the role of artist. It does so by placing the designer’s work in the realm of the historic: “This collection is more divine than the last, Monsieur Ferrè, in that it is a high moment of Grecian simplicity, of fluted skirts in the material of a high rustling mega-moment, from room to room, à la the essence of King Louis XV, à la the true spirit of couture!”

  On the other hand, Talley does not see the work without the frame of commerce around it; in this sense, he is like an art dealer, whose survival is based on an evaluation of the market and of how the work at hand will shape the market, or be shaped by it, in future months. When Chanel, Dior, de la Renta, and other couture and ready-to-wear houses advertise in Vogue, they signal the affinity between their aesthetic and the world that André Leon Talley has created. Designers trust him, the moneyed women he brings to the designers trust him, and the women’s husbands trust him with their wives. Drawing on this fund of trust, Talley presents, in the pages of Vogue, the work of European designers in an atmosphere of guilt-free exuberance that an American audience, standing in line at the supermarket reading Vogue, can trust.

  “Magazines are not a Diderot moment of œuvreness,” Talley says. “They are monthly ventures that should amuse and earn money by showing how kind money can be.” In the stories that Talley has produced for Vogue in recent years—“The Armani Edge,” “Feets of Brilliance,” “Which Way Couture?,” and “The Couture Journals,” among others—everything is seduction. Talley’s delicate orchestration and manipulation of the designers and buyers and photographers and editorial staff contributing to his vision are never seen, of course. What matters most to André Leon Talley is the image in his head of a woman looking at the page and imagining herself on it, unaware of all that André Leon Talley has contributed to her imagination.

  André Leon Talley says he owes his desire to uphold what he calls “the worl
d of opulence! opulence! opulence! maintenance! maintenance! maintenance!” to the late Diana Vreeland, who was the fashion editor for twenty-five years at Harper’s Bazaar, the editor-in-chief of Vogue for eight years, and thereafter a special consultant to the Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute, where she mounted audacious shows on Balenciaga, the eighteenth-century woman, equestrian fashion, and Yves Saint Laurent. It was during Vreeland’s planning and installation of one such show—Romantic and Glamorous Hollywood Design, in 1974—that Talley and Vreeland first met, through the parents of one of his college classmates. He later came to work for her as an unpaid assistant.

  Vreeland was the most recognizable person in the fashion industry—indeed, the very image of the fashion editor—with her heavily rouged cheeks and lips, red fingernails, and sleek black hair; her red environments; her pronouncements (blue jeans “are the most beautiful things since the gondola”; Brigitte Bardot’s “lips made Mick Jagger’s lips possible”); her credos (“Of course, you understand I’m looking for the most far-fetched perfection”; “There’s nothing more boring than narcissism—the tragedy of being totally... me”); her standards (having her paper money ironed, the soles of her shoes buffed with rhinoceros horn); and her extravagance of vision (photographic emphasis on nudity, drugs, and jewels).

  By the time they met, Talley had gradually constructed a self that was recognizably a precursor of the André Leon Talley of today. And its most influential component was the formidable chic of his maternal grandmother. Talley was born in Washington, D.C., and when he was two months old he was sent by his parents to live with his grandmother Bennie Frances Davis, in Durham, North Carolina. “An extraordinary woman with blue hair, like Elsie de Wolfe,” is how he describes her. “You know what one fundamental difference between whites and blacks is? If there’s trouble at home for white people, they send the child to a psychiatrist. Black folks just send you to live with Grandma.”