by Nora Ephron
It is not entirely easy to interview McKuen, you see. Not that he isn’t open and garrulous—but for one thing, most of his thoughts seem to end up in statements he supposes are clichés; and for another he tends to ramble. Ask him about his childhood and within seconds he will be off on a ramble about prejudice and the Army. Ask him whether his poetry paints too sanguine a picture of the world and before you know it he will be telling you about capital punishment. Ask him about his new book:
“My new book has its roots in my childhood and in how I feel now, about getting back to basics. You notice in this house, I like lumber. I like wood. Frank Lloyd Wright was my favorite architect because everything he did sprang out of the ground. And even though you see a lot of gadgets and stuff like that I like them because they are gadgets. They don’t try to be anything else. I don’t like artificial flowers, for instance.…” Like that.
In any case, it really doesn’t matter to Rod McKuen how the interview goes, because he is sick and tired of being written about and criticized for what he is doing. Rod McKuen, who in the old days would talk to Stamp World Magazine if they wanted to profile him, has now become what he calls “gun-shy.” Writers describe him as a guru and he hates it. Critics confuse his songs with his poetry and criticize him unfairly and he hates it. Everyone is out to get him. “You know, it’s pretty fashionable to knock me down,” he says. “There’s something criminal, apparently, about being a successful poet. Too many writers take umbrage at that. It’s not fair. I don’t think poets should starve. I don’t think anyone should starve. That’s another problem we have in this country that should be changed.…” And off he goes on a ramble about poverty in America, leaving the reporter to wonder about it all.
What does it mean?
What does it signify?
What is McKuen trying to say?
And the answer is probably best put in a poem McKuen himself wrote: “If you had listened hard enough/you might have heard/what I meant to say/Nothing.”
The Man in the Bill Blass Suit
Only one interesting thing happened to me as a result of this piece. A day after it appeared, a florist arrived bringing me a basket of flowers from Bill Blass. It was the hugest basket of flowers I have ever seen—and it was full of what I have always thought of as rich people’s flowers: tulips, peonies, irises, roses, all of them out of season. They were beautiful. They took one look at my apartment and dropped dead on the spot.
December 1968
One day not long ago, Bill Blass, who is tall, slender, and tawny and speaks with a cigarette dangling from his lower lip, was standing in his brown plaid Bill Blass suit ($175), his brown Bill Blass shirt ($22.50), his brown Bill Blass silk tie ($15) and brown Bill Blass buckled shoes ($50) in the center of the Bill Blass men’s boutique at Bonwit Teller’s. A sign just outside the chrome-and-mirrored alcove announced that it was A DAY TO MEET BILL BLASS, and a few people came and did just that. Including:
A pharmacist from Cincinnati, who wandered in to say that he had found happiness in his maxi overcoat by Blass—“I was sick of getting my pants wet in the rain,” he said—and that no one, not even the folks back in Ohio, thought he looked like a nut in it.
The dean of a Colorado business school, who said he was “tired of being in tired-looking clothes” and thereupon bought his fourteenth Bill Blass suit—a red plaid number with a snappy red checked tie to match.
A Sacramento real-estate man, who managed to drop twelve hundred dollars in less than an hour in the shop, some of it for two perfectly color-coordinated outfits recommended by the salesman, to be delivered with each item tagged with instructions as to what to wear it with.
The men’s clothing business is currently undergoing its first substantial change in twenty years—since the World War Two veterans emerged from military uniform into the civilian uniform of the Ivy League suit. It is a change that has meant incredible revenues for manufacturers: in the last year alone, the number of suits cut is up seventeen per cent. It is a change that can count, among its virtues, the demise of the man in the gray flannel suit, white button-down shirt, and rep tie, and among its excesses, the Nehru jacket, the formal white turtleneck, the overuse of the word “peacock,” and—yes, folks, it really happened—the manufacture of a pair of dotted Swiss see-through pants.
Two years ago, when the Hollywood hipsters and New York creative types zipped themselves up snug into Pierre Cardin’s cosmonaut look, it might have been premature to call what was happening a revolution. But today, when the behavior of Cincinnati pharmacists, Sacramento realtors, and Denver educators is being affected, it is clear that the revolution has not only come—it is here for good, and settled firmly into a mellow period of consolidation.
The entry of women’s-wear designers like Blass into the men’s field is part of the industry’s attempt to cope with demands of an affluent country for more clothes and fashion in clothes, a demand the men’s-wear industry, a notoriously sluggish one, had nothing whatsoever to do with and seems somewhat puzzled by. Fashion, the expression goes, begins on the street (in this case, on Carnaby Street and St. Mark’s Place), and most of the big men’s-wear manufacturers seem to wish the new look had stayed there.
“They’re hoping it will all go away,” said Bill Blass, “and they can go back to making blue serge suits.”
Blass first tried to get into men’s wear ten years ago, and he was assured at that time that it was hopeless to change the way men dressed. “I spoke to a group of manufacturers,” he recalled, “and they told me there were two minority groups that doomed every fashion development—the homosexuals and the Negroes. Acceptance by these groups supposedly made fashion unacceptable to the rest of the population. But things have changed. Another minority group—the young—changed everything. The young could wear the most effeminate clothes without being suspect in the least. And the other minority groups have suddenly become acceptable.”
Cardin was the first women’s designer to plunge into men’s wear; he was soon followed by John Weitz, Hardy Amies, Oleg Cassini, and, eighteen months ago, Blass. In that short time, Blass clothes have become available in forty department stores; this year Blass labels will probably double the 2.5 million dollars they grossed last year. “By now,” said Blass, “everyone’s trying to get in and make a killing.” Designers are rushing in—among them Donald Brooks, Jacques Tiffeau, Oscar de la Renta and Geoffrey Beene—and manufacturers are frantically signing them up. A few weeks ago Mike Daroff, president of the 140-million-dollar men’s wear conglomerate, Botany Industries, told a reporter he thought the whole women’s-designer-in-men’s-wear movement was just “a big fad and a lot of noise.” Days later he announced that he was hiring Dior’s Marc Bohan to design a collection.
Bill Blass is no radical hero of the men’s-wear revolution. Unlike Cardin, who, in addition to creating his space suits, changed the shape of clothes to the fitted, updated Edwardian look that now dominates the market, or the Beatles, who managed to prove once and for all that dandyism and homosexuality did not necessarily occur simultaneously in nature, Blass has done nothing dazzling or extraordinary. The most explosive comment he makes about men’s wear is that ties will have to go—not this year, not next year, but someday.
“The only important thing about the Nehru jacket is that it opened up the possibility for the tie’s disappearance,” he says. “The wider tie has given the look a different dimension, but ultimately the tie will go. Men will use scarves or something—a man needs something up around there to set his face off since he doesn’t use cosmetics. At least, not yet.”
His major policy statements are even less earthshaking: they concern subjects like brown (“Most men have brown hair and brown eyes and brown looks marvelous on them”), red (“Red is the most masculine color in the world”), and blue (“The blue shirt has been a boon to men with sallow complexions”). Although he has designed them, he does not think men will go all the way for maxi-length coats. On turtlenecks during the day, his view
is: “Fine, in the country.” On turtlenecks at night: “Out! Never in. The only time I was interested in the look was in Cleveland, where I saw an elderly gentleman wearing one. He must have been very unsure of it because he wore it with a bow tie. He had my sympathy.” On he-and-she fashions: “Only for the young.” On the possibility of an androgynous society: “Not in the near future.” The nastiest remarks he makes are on the topic of the gray flannel suit. “I feel downcast in a gray flannel suit,” he said, “and I see no reason for anyone to wear one unless he’s a stockbroker or an undertaker.”
What is significant about Blass, however, is that his clothes appeal to a group of men who have hitherto been resistant to fashion change—a group which, in fact, includes the stockbrokers and undertakers, who can well afford to pay the extra premium for colorful, well-tailored, tasteful clothes but want nothing to do with ruffled blouses and love beads.
“I think all that exaggeration of costume dressing and kinky fashion was tasteless but it was a phase we had to go through,” said Blass. “Exaggeration isn’t what I’m after. The crushed velvet pants, the coats from Tibet, the jewelry, which I find particularly vulgar, had to come out so that the poor drab gray-flanneled man would become aware that something had to change.”
“One of the reasons Bill’s clothes are so successful in towns like Dayton,” said Bill Flink, who heads the Blass men’s wear operation, “is that he’s very careful about how far to go.” Danny Zarem, head of Bonwit’s men’s department, adds, “Bill’s done for the American-English look what Paul Stuart’s men’s show did fifteen years ago. Paul Stuart took an accepted traditional look and updated it. They took the natural shoulder jacket and did it in interesting fabrics. They took the rep tie, which had always been done in dull navies and burgundies, and kicked it up. In the same way, Bill’s taken things men have always related to, like the English cut in suits and big bold Shetland plaids used in hunting jackets, and kicked them up without being silly. Everything he does smacks of country, breeding, and good taste.”
Taste is the word you hear most often about Bill Blass. Bill Blass has taste. No question about it. Taste, of course, is an intangible thing, but some of the tangibles that make his taste so impeccable include twenty-five perfectly tailored suits, three dinner jackets (one of them lightweight for dancing, the others heavyweight for just plain eating), several dozen pairs of shoes cut for his very own feet by Lobb of London, and twelve overcoats, two of them fur-lined. He has a valet named Hugh who serves tea complete with watercress sandwiches. When he goes to London, he packs only his underwear; when he lands, he goes straight to his tailor—Kilgour, French and Stanbury—and picks up the five suits he ordered on his last trip abroad. Bill Blass has taste. Wonderful taste. Everyone knows it.
The women of America first began to hear of Bill Blass and his wonderful taste about nine years ago, when he became head designer at Maurice Rentner, Ltd., a prosperous Seventh Avenue house with a reputation for dressing the amply-proportioned woman. “Our 1959 collection was quite a shock to the buyers,” Eugene Lewin, Rentner’s chairman, recalled. “They came in looking for matronly stuff and we gave them Bill’s young look. It was like walking into a steak house and getting a Chinese meal. They ate it up.”
The Blass look for women was a luscious, soft, feminine look for evening, with loads of ruffles and lacy dresses, and an easy-to-wear, brilliantly colorful look for daytime clothes. Blass was a sketcher, not a tailor; his strength lay in his color sense—he became famous for combining checks with plaids and stripes with tweeds—not in his notions on shape. “I don’t pretend to be a Balenciaga or a Courrèges,” he said. “I simply want to make clothes for now.”
What gave Blass an extra boost in the fashion world was the fact that before long he became a Beautiful Person. A perennially suntanned bachelor who was good-looking and utterly charming, he was the first of the fashion designers to enter into what Marylin Bender has called “the marriage of fashion and society.” Blass, Miss Bender wrote in her book, The Beautiful People, “has the relaxed posture of a man whose major activity is clipping coupons.” It is a posture he manages to maintain while all those around him are buckling under stress.
At the dress rehearsal this fall for the Coty Awards fashion show, where Blass received a citation for his men’s wear, he stood backstage during what was clearly a crisis and listened blandly as an assistant told him there was no black shirt, no presser for the wrinkled suits, no tan sweater, no wooden hangers, and the wrong size raccoon coat. “And someone spilled mouthwash on the rain hat,” Blass added calmly. “Don’t forget that.” A few weeks later, just before the press opening for his women’s spring collection, Blass, cigarette drooping, leaned against the dressing-room wall at Rentner while eleven models scrambled frantically for shoes. “Can you imagine?” he said, smiling. “One hundred pairs of shoes are not here.” He chuckled. “Can you imagine?”
Blass broke Seventh Avenue tradition by inviting his private clients to press showings, and as the models appeared, all the socially registered women Women’s Wear Daily includes among the Ladies—Missy (Bancroft), Chessy (Rayner), Mica (Ertegun), and Louise (Savitt)—would sit and gasp and whisper and applaud and mark down the clothes they wanted to order on long slips of paper. Then, at night, Blass, the debonair extra man who always knew which fork to use, would go to Missy’s or Chessy’s or Mica’s or Louise’s, or they would come to his East 57th Street penthouse and dine on the terrace among fifteen thousand dollars’ worth of trees.
“It was quite a phenomenon when it first happened,” said Vogue editor Carrie Donovan. “I remember saying to Louise Savitt about five years ago, ‘Louise, has he really made it?’ ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘and I’ll tell you something else. The husbands love him, too.’ ”
Said Mrs. Savitt, a young divorcée Blass frequently escorts, “Bill’s great thing about clothes was that he was the first designer to go out and lead the social life.” Another friend, Missy Bancroft, who was a Blass model before her marriage, agrees. “I used to work for some of the other designers,” she said. “They’d never been to Morocco. They never went to ‘21.’ Their clothes fit nowhere into your life. Bill knows exactly what you need to wear. He’s been everywhere.”
Bill has not been everywhere, but it does seem that way. He went to Acapulco and Marrakech before one went to Acapulco and Marrakech. He has followed the bulls through Spain and he weekends on an island in Maine. Once, a few years ago, he and a friend named Jerry Zipkin (whom Women’s Wear describes as Social Moth Jerry Zipkin) wanted to spend Christmas at a place they’d never been to and the only spot they could come up with was Miami Beach. Partly because of his extensive travels and partly because of a long-standing, somewhat uncontrollable Anglophilia, Blass occasionally speaks in a slight English accent. “He had an English phase,” explains Mrs. Savitt, “and years ago, when I was working at Vogue, I was told Diana Vreeland had once asked someone, ‘Tell me, what part of England is Bill Blass from?’ ”
As it happens, William Ralph Blass is from Fort Wayne, Indiana, where he was born under the sign of Cancer forty-six years ago, the son of hardware store owner Ralph Aldrich Blass and his wife, the former Ethyl Keyser. At the beginning of the Depression his father committed suicide; he and his older sister were raised by their mother. Following his graduation from Fort Wayne High School, where he played football and sketched for the newspaper, Blass left the Midwest for good—and fairly shudders when he thinks about it.
“Indiana?” he said. “It never happened. I never went back. It was for me almost as if the whole process of growing up was based on waiting until I could get out. Do you know, down the street from me had lived a girl named Jane Peters who ended up in Hollywood as Carole Lombard. As a kid, I thought of her as a straw in the wind. I thought, ‘She got out. She made it. I can, too.’ Look, Fort Wayne is probably as attractive a place for a youngster to grow up in as any other small American city, but what can I say? I didn’t like it. I’ve known what I wanted to d
o since I was five years old. And you don’t, if you have aspirations to design clothes, talk about it in a town of that size. I felt like a prisoner released when I came to New York.”
Blass dropped in and out of Parsons School of Design shortly after arriving in Manhattan and went to work as a sketcher for David Crystal. Then he served for three years in the Army in a camouflage unit which included a number of artists who had volunteered, thinking they were in for a cushy enlistment. Instead, the unit was sent to Europe as a dummy decoy division. “It was a suicide mission,” said photographer Art Kane, who was part of the unit. “Our job was to come in, with rubber tanks and recordings of battle noises, inviting enemy fire after a unit pulled out.”
Blass still carries with him a cast-iron saltcellar owl he found while digging himself a foxhole during the Battle of the Bulge. Years later friends heard about it and—“Oh, my God, the owls I got for presents,” he said. “I can tell you after a while they became anything but amusing.” (In addition to his owl collection, Blass also has coffee tables full of netsuke tigers and horn cups and walls full of antlers and paintings, a few of them abstracts by Blass himself.)
If Bill Blass was ever a hick, no one can remember it. Even in his Army days, he had taste. “He wasn’t a typical Hoosier,” said graphic designer Ned Harris. “His uniform did not look like anyone else’s uniform.” There was a reason: a week after enlisting, Blass had taken his dress uniform to Brooks Brothers and had it altered to fit.
Following his discharge as a corporal, Blass worked as a sketcher for Anna Miller; then, when Mrs. Miller merged with her brother, Maurice Rentner, Blass went over as second designer. He is now vice-president of Rentner, which grossed 4.1 million dollars last year, and president of Bill Blass, Inc., a licensing firm that handles his business dealings with manufacturers who hire him to design luggage, swimsuits, men’s wear, and other products. This year Blass’s business manager estimates he will earn a quarter of a million dollars from his combined efforts.
