Wallflower at the Orgy

by Nora Ephron

  That its concepts arrive so quickly in the cemetery of old fads does not bother anyone at Women’s Wear. “Fashion is change,” says John Fairchild. And Women’s Wear considers part of its function to nudge that change, spot the trends, push the merchandise. That WW has been wildly successful in performing this function has as much to do with its superb instincts as with the nature of the fashion itself.

  “Elizabeth Hawes (one of the first great American couturières) once said that fashion is spinach, and no one has ever put it more accurately,” said Leonard Hankin, vice-president of Bergdorf-Goodman. “The essence of what makes fashion news and excitement is hardly as clear as the science of building a skyscraper. You’re not working with scientifically provable facts—we don’t merely clothe the body, we clothe the spirit; we’re enhancing the way a woman thinks about herself. As a result, if the average department-store buyer reads in Women’s Wear that a certain collection is hot, he’ll rush out to buy it. If, on the other hand, he buys what turns out to be a clinker, he can always remind the merchandise manager that he got the information from the ‘Bible.’ ”

  Designers are swept up in Women’s Wear’s enthusiasms, too. “Look how few really creative designers and firms there are,” says Deanna Littell, one of Seventh Avenue’s most dynamic young talents, “just a handful. The rest of the industry cribs and copies any way possible. If Women’s Wear tells them to go see Bonnie and Clyde, there are some groovy clothes in it, they’ll all go see it and start making Bonnie and Clyde clothes. I’m convinced the paper started a lot of things itself: They gave tremendous impetus to the Zhivago look, the Russian bit, and my God, sportif—that was John Fairchild’s biggest joke on the industry.”

  Women’s Wear’s writing style meshes perfectly with its messages: It is catty, breathless, loaded with shorthand expressions and non sequiturs. SENTENCES ARE CAPITALIZED FOR NO APPARENT REASON AND SEEM TO SNAP AND CRACKLE RIGHT OUT OF THE PAGE. French expressions punctuate the prose, no doubt sending many Seventh Avenue manufacturers thumbing through French-English dictionaries. “Annie is not going to become brisée by success,” WW wrote of one unbroken French starlet who had made it big. “Les hotsies” and “Les locomotives” they christened two groups of fashion-conscious young women who scamper through the paper regularly and whose every activity, no matter how trivial, is detailed. “Je m’en fous,” said an apparently blasé French actress in a recent interview, to which Women’s Wear retorted: “IF SHE DOESN’T CARE, WHY DOES SHE BITE HER NAILS?”

  Mixed in with this grab bag of French and frenzy is a range of news catering to both the paper’s private readers (most of them upper-class WASPS) and industry sellers (mostly middle-class Jews). For Seventh Avenue manufacturers, for example, WW prints lists of buyers in town, statistics on “pantihose” sales, or the latest word on fashions for infants and children—sometimes described in such cozy Yiddishisms as boyela and boytshikleks. For Fifth Avenue ladies, there are pop-art headlines (“Pow, Zowie, Zap, Wap, Zonk” ran one recent tribute to Yves Saint Laurent); offhand irreverence (“ ‘KISS ME, FOOL,’ CRIED WILLFUL LITTLE HYDRANGEA AS HER SENSUOUS FINGERS TOYED NERVOUSLY WITH THE WRITHING TENDRILS OF HER NEW WHITE BACK-TO-SCHOOL DRESS BY X BOWAGE INC.,” read a headline for a children’s dress sketch); and incidental information on a dandy place to go to avoid the overcrowded French Riviera (Dubrovnik, Yugoslavia), what to bring to Russia (your own hairdresser), and how to keep up with the Winston Guests (Cee Zee’s beige mastiff has his hair done).

  Although fewer than one-sixth of Women’s Wear subscribers are consumers, they are unquestionably the most consuming consumers of fashion in the country. Jacqueline Kennedy once declared indignantly that it was impossible for her to spend thirty thousand dollars a year on clothes (she would have had to buy sable underwear, she said), but experts estimate that it costs each of The Ladies well over that figure to dress the way she does. Small wonder that Women’s Wear delights in aiming masses of information at them. Mrs. Charles Revson of lipsticks, Barbra Streisand of records, Charlotte Ford Niarchos of automobiles, Mrs. William (Babe) Paley of broadcasting, and the Duchess of Windsor of abdications all subscribe. So do Mrs. Ronald Reagan of California, Mrs. Nelson Rockefeller of New York, and Mrs. Winthrop Rockefeller of Arkansas; also Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Gloria Vanderbilt Cooper, several Italian principessas with backgrounds too confusing to go into, and George Hamilton’s mother. Gloria Guinness, who is married to the banking Guinness, has two subscriptions—one for her Palm Beach home, the other for Paris. Mary Lou Whitney of the horse-racing Whitneys says that when she is summering in the Adirondacks, Women’s Wear is the only publication that arrives on time; she may not be up-to-date on what is happening in the world, but she knows what everyone wore when it happened.

  The group that Women’s Wear calls The Ladies began to read WW in 1960, when John Fairchild returned from Paris and began to write about them. The Ladies are those socially registered women who summer in Southampton, winter in duplexes on Park or Fifth Avenue, and make a career out of looking beautiful and having lunch—a full-time job, requiring an early rise and a packed day. One must plan one’s dinner parties, go to one’s sinister Hungarian skin doctor, have one’s biweekly massage at Elizabeth Arden and one’s triweekly combout or set at Kenneth’s, lunch at one of five recognized places for The Ladies to lunch (as of now: The Colony, La Grenouille, La Caravelle, LaFayette, Le Pavillon). One must exercise at Kounovsky’s, discuss one’s charities, shop for one’s perfect dress with the perfect label and status shoes (by Fiorentina), stockings (opaque), belt (gold chain from Saint Laurent), bag (Gucci), face (Estée Lauder), false eyelashes (Bendel’s), and return home in time to greet one’s hobby (the husband, who, more often than not, is an investment banker or stockbroker, and the children).

  The Ladies, unlike the fashion industry, learned to love Women’s Wear, and with good reason: before Women’s Wear became the swinging newspaper it is today, it was not really chic to be a Lady. There was something a little embarrassing about just doing nothing and having lunch in between. Oh, there were the charities and the children to be sure, but The Ladies occasionally sensed there might be Something More. Then, with their glorification in Women’s Wear Daily, their elevation to a pantheon of heroines built somewhere in John Fairchild’s noggin, and their constant pursuit by Women’s Wear photographers, The Ladies suddenly relaxed and became quite content. Women’s Wear had created a profession: It was enough just to have found that divine little pendant made from a Coca-Cola bottletop; enough to have thought of using one of those wide French neckties on one’s skinny shirt; enough to have divined that what one really needed drooping from one’s hair at Truman Capote’s gala was a single white begonia.

  The Ladies subscribe to Women’s Wear to read about themselves, to find out what clothes they are buying and what they should buy, what designers they will patronize next, what restaurants are fashionable, where their friends are this month and whom they are in love with. But there is one more reason The Ladies read Women’s Wear Daily: it serves as their Surrogate Bitch. Delightful, delicious, delectable, and delirious the newspaper is, but it is also bitchy as can be.

  Why, remember the time WW printed that terrible picture of Lady Bird Johnson with the ironic caption: “Welcome to the Best-Dressed List”? The Ladies had a good giggle over that. And another giggle when WW cited Princess Margaret for being “The individualist of 1965 … the woman who proved fashion doesn’t count.” When Mrs. Hubert Humphrey arrived at the Capitol to hear President Johnson’s State of the Union message, Women’s Wear commented, “That little old dressmaker is at it again.” One of The Ladies, Jean vanden Heuvel, was found wanting at the opera: “Jean vanden Heuvel,” snipped WW, “needs a new hairdresser.” Even Caroline Kennedy was singled out for bitchery this past summer. “THERE IS NO QUESTION,” wrote Women’s Wear, “THAT CAROLINE DRESSES MUCH YOUNGER THAN HER AGE. Her smocked-to-the-waist dresses, her short white socks, her semifitted velvet-collared coats all point to another
era. Today, ten-year-olds wear boldly striped knits, chain belts, bright tights. Said one executive of a New York store where Caroline’s clothes are bought, ‘The surprise is that Jackie dresses her like a little girl of six or seven. Perhaps Mrs. Kennedy wants to keep Caroline a little girl so that she herself will look younger.’ ”

  “Women’s Wear,” said Marian Javits, wife of the New York Senator, “is like having a morning gossip with a pal who has taste, who’s a little bitchy, and who goes to all the parties, my dear. It never condescends, it judges all the time. It is a giggle, a bubble, fun, fun.” It is, in other words, a surrogate bitch.

  The evolution of Women’s Wear Daily into a fashion oracle and surrogate bitch began in 1960, but its history goes back a good deal further. Women’s Wear Daily was founded in 1910 by E. W. Fairchild, the son of a Dutch Reform minister who in 1890 started to print a trade paper containing the business news he picked up while selling homemade yeast cakes to grocery stores. The Fairchild Publishing Company, which now publishes nine newspapers including Home Furnishings Daily, Drug Weekly News, and Metalworking News, picked up considerably with the addition of Women’s Wear: it was a newspaper that supplied exactly what the garment business wanted—news of latex futures, new trends in sewing machines, and indiscriminate reports on every collection from shoes to hatpins. “It was encyclopedic,” said New York Post fashion editor Ruth Preston. It was also dull as denim. “It sat on every merchandiser’s desk, unread indefinitely,” said Leonard Hankin. “You got it because you were in the business but you never looked at it.”

  E. W. Fairchild was proud of his newspapers; he often said he would never allow editorial comment to appear in his pages. “Our job is to mirror the industry, not to lead it,” he declared. When his son, Louis, began to assume editorial responsibility in the late 1930s, the paper continued to have minimal impact; its reporters were seated ignominiously in the back rows of fashion shows and shunted around to the service entrance for outdated press releases.

  Louis Fairchild began training his son to take over the company when John was fourteen; a student at the Kent School, he spent summers as an errand boy in the company offices. After graduating from Princeton, marrying the former Jill Lipsky, and working at a retailing job that consisted, John claims, of ordering paper panties for bathing suit tryons, he went to work for Women’s Wear as a reporter. In January 1955, at the age of twenty-nine, he was sent to head the Fairchild operation in Paris; before long, the leaders of Paris couture were referring to him as le blouson noir and wishing for the old days when Women’s Wear could be ignored.

  During his indoctrination years in Paris, Fairchild went to parties at Pierre Balmain’s and learned to stand on one foot on a bottle of Dom Perignon 1947. He listened while Italian designer Simonetta told him her collection was inspired by the egg, and while Christian Dior told him, “Fashion is something of the marvelous, something to take us away from everyday life.” He ran a long series of interviews with the grande dame of haute couture, Gabrielle (Coco) Chanel, who said, among other things, “I hate breasts that show” and “Anyone past the age of twenty who looks into the mirror to be pleased is a fool.” He feuded with Balenciaga and Givenchy, calling them the Dullsville Boys and dubbing their collections Flop Art.

  When he returned to New York to become Women’s Wear’s publisher in 1960, Fairchild set about changing the publication from fashion’s pariah to fashion’s arbiter. He opened the paper up to jazzier layouts, surrounded the sketches—which are considered superb—with lots of white space, gave his staff the freedom to do what it wanted, and brought in bright new personnel. One of them, the late Carol Bjorkman (a beautiful young woman who died of leukemia in 1967) wrote a column that left its readers charmed and chuckling. “Le Grand Charles,” she wrote of a de Gaulle press conference she covered, “appeared—in a gray double-breasted suit with huge lapels (I am sure he is right—he is too large for the Ivy League cut), white button-down shirt … enormous gold cuff links, and a sweet touch—A GOLD WEDDING BAND.” Miss Bjorkman covered prize fights, political campaigns, and went to see David Rockefeller, whom she referred to as her friend at the Chase Manhattan.

  Fairchild continued to print the hard news that kept the tradesmen reading, but he also began to run features about people who weren’t in the business at all. The most popular pages in the paper, the photo layout on pages 4 and 5, soon were filled with the marriages of Connecticut socialites, polo matches of Long Island horsemen, the lunches of The Ladies. “The Ladies … Are … BACK,” wrote Women’s Wear in a typical chronicle, “to the endless rounds … the forever decisions: Where to shop, what to buy, what to wear, where to wear what, when to go, how to go, why to be there … and—Who With? BACK: To the favored noontime spas … the Midtown Manhattan Muncheries.…” And printed next to The Ladies’ pictures were Fairchild’s comments on their clothes and ensembles: frequently, he would place large white Xs over their pictures to denote fashion sins.

  The days of editorial nonparticipation were over. “Burn their asses,” shouted Fairchild, as he stormed through the Greenwich Village city room in his three-piece suit. His face, which bears an oft-noted resemblance to Alvin the Chipmunk, sparkled with glee when his staff members treated fashion with the irreverence he himself felt. “We want the staff to be themselves,” he said. “We don’t want them to become part of the Fashion Establishment, which is like an ingrown toenail. We want them to have a fresh eye on fashion and treat it with a sense of humor.” (Except for his daily lunches with designers at the Midtown Manhattan Muncheries, Fairchild leads a quiet life away from the Fashion Establishment, with his wife and four children in New Canaan, Connecticut.)

  For its first exclusive, Women’s Wear took on Vogue magazine in a scathing attack that caused Vogue’s publisher Samuel Newhouse to cancel all his advertising in Fairchild publications. It began to expose the public to the designers behind Seventh Avenue clothes and give credit where credit was due—not to the man whose money paid for the production but to the man whose pencil determined the flow of fashion. It divided the designers into Greats, Realists, Classicists, Risers, and Giants and managed to infuriate all but the Greats. Eventually, it angered the Greats, too, and Women’s Wear achieved the sure sign of success in the fashion world when it was banned from James Galanos’s and Norman Norell’s collections for real or imagined causes. Designers’ collections were graded by WW like examination papers; the marks often depended as much on designers’ deportment—toward WW—as on their excellence.

  Fairchild’s policy was to get it first by any means necessary. He broke official release dates on press releases. He sent reporters scaling the walls of private collections. Once he instructed one of his male reporters to dress in leather jacket and boots and ride his motorcycle to interview a member of European royalty known for his penchant for boys. Designers who refused to go along with Women’s Wear found their seamstresses receiving bribe offers for sketches and themselves the recipients of Fairchild retribution. Priscilla Kidder of Priscilla of Boston refused to give Women’s Wear an advance sketch of Luci’s wedding dress; her reward was contained in Women’s Wear’s once-removed coverage of the wedding.

  “There was Priscilla in front of the President … in front of Lady Bird … in front of Pat—and at one point her backside completely blocked the camera’s view of Luci. All of this effort—just to carry the three-yard lace train … A keen-eyed Washington observer, very close to the White House, comments, ‘I was interested to see how Priscilla was fawning over Lynda all during the reception.’ ”

  When Mollie Parnis, who often designs clothes for Lady Bird Johnson, released sketches of several of Mrs. Johnson’s clothes to a competitive publication, Fairchild struck back. One day Miss Parnis was lunching at Grenouille and asked that her table be moved to a quieter spot to accommodate her luncheon guests. As it happened, she was moved to a table next to the Duchess of Windsor. Next day, in Women’s Wear’s column Eye, Miss Parnis was accused of moving in order to
sit next to the Duchess.

  If Women’s Wear’s tactics of revenge seem sophomoric and its methods of obtaining stories unethical, they seem delicious to the staff. “We’re a throwback to yellow journalism,” said Richard Atkins, Fairchild’s publicity man, smiling. And James Brady, who has replaced Fairchild as publisher of Women’s Wear while Fairchild has moved up to president of the company, practically boasts about a four-million-dollar libel suit Women’s Wear incurred from Genesco, settled out of court when Fairchild publicly apologized for several errors. “That was a good one,” says Brady. He is blasé about Women’s Wear’s penchant for stretching the truth of Women’s Wear,” he said. And he is right about that: the inaccuracies range from minor facts or dates wrong to major flubs (WW once printed an obituary of a man who had not died) to gross faux pas—such as Women’s Wear’s page-one explanation of the 1965 power blackout. Rumor had it, the paper reported, that a “test of a revolutionary weapon to destroy enemy missiles” had deliberately drained the Northeast of power. “We overplayed it,” said Fairchild later, in something of an understatement.

  What really propelled Women’s Wear into national prominence was a phenomenon that had nothing to do with its bickering with the Fashion Establishment. When Jacqueline Kennedy became First Lady in 1961, Women’s Wear scrutinized, recognized and publicized every thread she wore, and Mrs. Kennedy unwittingly provided the paper with scoop after fashion scoop. At one point, she grew so weary of Women’s Wear that, when asked if she read it, Mrs. Kennedy replied, “I try not to.”