by Donna Karan
Little did that three-year-old know she was going to design menswear herself one day, and even dress a president of the United States. I became a tailor, just like my father. He was an amazing one. I like to think he passed that baton, that talent, that gene on to me, because that’s where I feel the most connected to him. The photos of my parents and the clothes he made for the two of them—well, the sophistication just kills me. How to capture that, how to create that, how to become that? On some level, those challenges fuel my creative passions.
Photos of my parents tell their story better than words ever could. They’re dancing, laughing, and smiling, with hints of the city behind them. My mother looks like a young Ava Gardner; my father is utterly debonair. They lived the high life. My father’s tailoring business attracted all sorts of famous people, including celebrities and gangsters—he even dressed New York City mayor Vincent Impellitteri. Everyone told me how charming my father was.
In fact, his whole family was. The Faskes had social status and were always entertaining or out on the town. My father, Gabby, had six siblings: two sisters, Miriam and Leah, and four brothers, Sol, Heshy, Abe, and Frank. Frank was the brother to whom he was closest. Uncle Frank led a glamorous life back then; he owned a Pontiac dealership, and Pontiacs were very chic cars at the time. Montrose Motors was in Brooklyn, where he lived. Once Uncle Frank called my father, all excited. The comedian Red Buttons had just traded in his old car for a new one, and Uncle Frank knew Gabby would love the old one: a 1951 yellow Pontiac convertible. My father went over right away, and that became our family car.
Gabby and Uncle Frank loved going to clubs, whether in New York, in the Catskills, or on Long Island. They were friendly with the owners of the Concord Hotel in the Catskills and made all kinds of show biz connections through them. In addition to owning Montrose Motors, Uncle Frank managed a handful of celebrities, including the comedian Buddy Hackett. He and my aunt Dotty, who had four kids, threw parties at their home in Manhattan Beach with lots of singing and dancing. Stars like Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh would occasionally show up. In the summers, our families would drive to Atlantic Beach on Long Island—an area we eventually moved to—and go to the Capri resort, where we shared a cabana. I was a just a baby, but I remember the festivity, the buzz.
Then on May 1, 1952, the party ended. My father was on his way home from work; his friend Morris was giving him a lift in his green Cadillac convertible. They were on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, and the car must have swerved. The passenger side was hit. Morris survived, but my father died in the hospital the next day of brain injuries. He was fifty-two years old.
When death happens suddenly, like it did with my father, everything changes dramatically: How your mother behaves. How you are cared for. How your family functions. How you define your family. How you define yourself. And, in those days especially, you were changed financially, because the main breadwinner was gone. You go from being a normal child to one who knows about death, loss, and uncertainty. The impact of losing a parent at such a young age is impossible to grasp unless you’ve experienced it yourself.
Years later, when I was in my late teens, my then boyfriend, Mark Karan, was opening a men’s clothing store in Cedarhurst, Long Island. It was called Picadilly, named after the street it was on. Mark’s father was helping us out. He’d just returned from picking up an order of clothes in Brooklyn that hadn’t been delivered on time. As he was unpacking, he suddenly stopped.
“Donna, what was your father’s name again?”
“Gabby Faske.”
I turned, and he was holding a suit on an old wooden hanger embossed with the words Gabby Faske Clothier. Stunned, I reached for it, wanting to make sure it was real. What are the odds that after so many years, so many suits, so many stores, so many miles, a Gabby Faske hanger would end up in Mark’s store on Long Island?
I look at this hanger framed on my wall, and know my father has been by my side, holding me up, throughout my journey.
—
Fashion was my destiny. Which isn’t the same thing as my life’s dream. Fashion was actually the last thing I wanted to do. It was too obvious, too predictable, too easy. Like most kids, I wanted to be different from my parents. My fantasy was to dance like Martha Graham or Isadora Duncan and later as a teenager, I wanted to sing like Barbra Streisand. Growing up, I would dance in my room till all hours. Not in front of the mirror—I danced for how it felt, not how it looked. I loved every kind of musical and all the jukebox hits of the 1950s. I signed up for every show in camp and at school. My mother adored my voice and was always asking me to sing. Not that I had a huge talent or anything, but I projected as though I did.
But my main dream was to be a stay-at-home mother—the opposite of mine. She had to work, because we needed the money, but it was also where she came alive. She lived and breathed Seventh Avenue; it was in her soul. When I was a kid, most mothers didn’t have outside jobs. My friends’ moms got them ready for school in the morning, made hot chocolate when they came home, and cooked dinner every night. My childhood home was nothing like that. I grew up in Kew Gardens, Queens. We lived in a red-brick apartment building—a nice building for Queens. Our apartment wasn’t small; it had seven rooms: the living and dining rooms, the kitchen, a small den, my mother’s room, which had an attached dressing room, and a bedroom that I shared with my older sister, Gail, and the nanny of the moment. We even had a small terrace. (Young as I was, I remember sitting on that terrace as my father’s funeral procession went by.)
I could fill a book with stories of my mother. There are so many ways and words to describe her: beautiful, grand, polished, stylish. But also crazy, dramatic, temperamental, difficult, and—knowing what I know now—bipolar. As I said, they called her “Richie” at work, but her lifelong personal nickname was “Queenie,” which kind of says it all. It’s hard to know where to begin with her, so I’ll start when I was very young. She was distant, depressed, and not there in the ways that mattered—she wasn’t there to welcome me home from school and took little interest in my education. My favorite thing to do is climb into my bed with my grandchildren and read to them, but she never did anything like that. My mother worked long days, made even longer by her train commute. When she came home, she was exhausted.
Shortly after Gabby died, she packed me and Gail off to Camp Alpine in Parksville, New York, in the Catskills. That’s where New York Jewish kids went. I was only three and a half, even younger than the minimum age of four years. I stayed in Bunk Zero, where a woman we called Mother Sue watched over us like a hawk. (At one point, there were ten of us cousins there at the same time.) I remember feeling terrified, looking for any sign of my mother all day long, hoping she would appear and take me home. She didn’t.
Looking back, I understand that she had major issues, including constant migraine headaches and all sorts of ailments, real or imagined. There were bottles of pills everywhere. As much as she loved her job, she had the pressure of supporting her young family while working in a tough, competitive industry that was based on looking good. She didn’t have many friends to speak of, just her sisters, all of whom she argued with. She needed to be mothered herself, yet her parents weren’t around—like me, Gail has no memories of them, other than the fact that they lived on the Lower East Side and my grandfather had a pushcart. No wonder my mother could barely cope.
She remarried quickly—to Harold Flaxman, who owned a dress business in Brooklyn. Harold was matinee-idol handsome, a real man’s man, with a fabulous head of white hair. It seemed like he just appeared one day. They met at the Concord Hotel in the Catskills (I swear, everything in my early years leads back to that hotel). They married on May 17, 1953, a year and a week after my father died, in a hall at the Hampshire House, a fancy Manhattan apartment building on Central Park South. My sister said the wedding was lovely; I was too young to go. After they married, Gail made the mistake of telling her teacher that our last name would change. Queenie was incensed.
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sp; “Your last name is Faske and always will be,” she said. My mother loved that name and all it represented: status, glamour, a big social life. Being a Flaxman offered none of that.
Queenie was far nicer to me than to Gail because I appealed to her sense of aesthetics. I was a singing, dancing artist and performer. I was tall, slim, and had a flair for dressing, even as a kid, and as a former model, my mother liked that I had “the look,” as she called it. She was outright emotionally abusive to my sister, who didn’t take after her. Queenie would call her “piano legs” and tell her she needed makeup or to smoke a cigarette—anything to make her look more sophisticated. I couldn’t separate that mean mother from the one who was kinder to me. I still can’t.
Queenie was very private. Like I said, she didn’t have many friends that I can remember. She had family, as did my father, but they never visited. At work, she was a totally different woman: the elegant, stylish Richie who went into the city with sleek black hair, a perfectly made-up face, red lips, heels, and the impeccably tailored suits my father had made for her, worn over a foundation girdle. (Years later, I got rid of her suits—talk about regrets!) She worked for many Seventh Avenue houses, including for the designer Chuck Howard, who designed sportswear under his own label in the 1960s and later introduced me to Anne Klein. As much as she loved it, turning it on at work must have been exhausting. She’d come home and become, well, nobody. She changed into a robe, tied a babushka around her head, and washed off her makeup. If she had a migraine, which was often, she’d lie on her bed in the pitch dark, and we knew to be quiet.
It sounds dreary because it was. In a way, my mother died when my father died. Gabby Faske was the love of her life. She tried to keep his business open, but couldn’t. So not only was he gone, but so was their financial security and all the perks that went with it. I was always aware that our life would have been different if my father had lived. Poor Harold. He was forty-nine when he married Queenie, who was then thirty-three, and it was his first marriage. The youngest of ten children, he had taken care of his parents in their old age—that’s how loving he was. Gail and I quickly grew to love Harold, and his family was great to us. But it didn’t matter because he wasn’t our father. Even worse, Harold never made much money. He worked in the fashion world, but, as I said, he was in the schmatta business. Queenie was the sophisticated one.
Gail was eight years older than I, so she went to school and had friends outside the home. I was alone much of the time, and I didn’t feel safe. Yes, there was always a nanny of some sort, but each came with her own problems. One girl asked if she could have her brother over for dinner, and when my parents got home, she and her “brother” were in their bed—naked—with me asleep next to them. Then there was the one who watched me while Gail was at school. When my sister came home, the door was locked. She rang the neighbor’s bell, and they called the police. The cops knocked down the door, and there was the nanny, drunk and passed out, and me screaming from my crib. She actually came back to collect her week’s pay.
Queenie was constantly telling me to put furniture in front of the door to keep out strangers. I was raised to be scared and worried, just waiting for someone bad to come and get me. To this day, being alone is my greatest fear. I only sleep well when other people are in the house with me. Otherwise, I’m on edge, listening—for what, I don’t know.
I was always trying to attach myself to another family. An Eastern European girl, Georgette Beicher, a few years older than I, lived in a one-bedroom apartment down the hall. Her mother, a seamstress who worked at home, used to make clothes for my mother. Georgette’s mother was the quintessential nurturer, always offering us food and making a fuss over things we did at school that day. I spent a lot of time at that apartment. Years later, I ran into Georgette at the Clinton Global Initiative and learned that she had become an active philanthropist, as had I.
—
When I was six, our family moved to Woodmere, one of Long Island’s ritzy “Five Towns.” It was a big move from our terraced apartment in Kew Gardens. We moved into a three-bedroom split-level house in a new middle-class development called Saddle Ridge Estates. The house was small for the neighborhood, but to me it was a castle. It sat on a canal, and we had a beautiful weeping willow right outside our kitchen window.
Right before moving in, I fell while roller-skating and hurt my arm. I complained to my mother, who didn’t believe me. Maybe three days passed. She finally took me to a doctor, and sure enough, it was broken. So there I was, starting my new first-grade class at Ogden Elementary School, midyear, and worse than just being the new girl, I was the new girl with a cast on my arm. I was also tall for my age. I stood out in every way.
When I got sick and couldn’t go to school, my mother would pawn me off on neighbors or relatives. Once Gail stayed home with me. She was in high school and I was in grade school. Gail went to cook us some lunch, and her pajamas caught fire (this was the 1950s, before nonflammable fabrics were the norm). She screamed, and I came running. I poured bowls of water over the flames, then wrapped her in a blanket and rolled her on the floor. We called Queenie at work to tell her what happened, but she didn’t come home. Despite Gail’s severe burns, our mother never took her to a doctor. To this day, Gail has scars on her chest from the accident, and I never use front burners when I cook.
We spent Saturdays at the beauty parlor—I’d get so bored waiting for my mother to get her hair done—and then I’d wait with her some more on Sundays at the laundromat. Beauty parlors and laundromats, those were my childhood weekends. When I was old enough, if I was off from school, I’d take the Long Island Rail Road to meet my mother in the city and wait in a back room while she worked. More waiting—hours and hours of waiting.
My mother was mean to Harold, which really tore at me. She would belittle him the way she did my sister, and he would try, futilely, to defend himself. They fought like crazy because my mother was crazy. If she wasn’t literally putting her head in the oven, something she did regularly for attention, she was kicking him out of the house, taking him back, and kicking him out again. She was morose one minute, a screaming, hysterical drama queen the next. So even having a loving man around didn’t make me feel safe, because I feared I could lose him just as suddenly as I’d lost my father.
Queenie was a perfectionist, and, like so many mothers of her generation, she enforced strict rules to keep our home in order. The fact that she worked full-time made her even stricter. She gave Gail and me cleaning assignments every day. We had white sofas and white rugs, and there was probably a plastic cover over the sofa. Before she got home from work, I had to make sure the carpet was raked in the right direction and put the baked potatoes in the oven at just the right time, depending on whether she was making the 5:35 train or the 6:04. Once my mother discovered wire hangers in my closet, threw all my clothes on the floor, and made me rehang every piece on a wooden hanger. Then she grounded me. This was years before Mommie Dearest.
—
The most difficult thing to live with, more than her mood swings and rages, were my mother’s secrets. Façades came naturally to her. There was her artful nine-to-five persona, Richie, the perfectly coiffed, stunning woman who still looked and dressed like the model she once was. Then there were other sides, entire lives she didn’t share with us. When I was around eleven, I went up to the attic and started rummaging through old clothes and trunks filled with photographs. I was mesmerized, especially by the photos. There were stacks of paper folders holding single pictures, the kind photographers take of you at a dinner club or studio. One was of my mother in an antique-looking lace dress. In one after another, she was smiling, dancing, glowing. Posing in front of a nightclub with my father, he in a suit, she in a satin dress. By a pool in a two-piece swimsuit, one long leg draped over the other. Wearing a fur coat on a city street. My parents standing in front of a stone lodge, as if they had been skiing. The contrast between this angel and the mother I lived with was startling. Who was th
is beautiful, laughing woman? Why couldn’t she come back to us? Why had she become so sad and withdrawn?
There was also a picture of Queenie with another man. Their clothes looked antique to me. I was riveted by every photo I opened, every dusty item I unfolded. I couldn’t comprehend what I was seeing.
“Donna Faske, what are you doing up there?” It was my mother, screaming as she frantically climbed the attic stairs. When she reached me, she pulled the photos out of my hands, threw them in the open trunk, and slammed it shut. “Get out of here!” she shouted. “This is none of your business, young lady. How dare you!” I’d never heard or seen her this angry. She grabbed me by the hair, practically throwing me down the stairs, and grounded me every weekend for a month. I had no idea what I had done wrong, but I knew not to go in the attic again. I also grew to hate secret-keeping of any kind. I’m convinced that I’m completely uncensored and open because my mother was so closed.
I think my mother learned her secretive ways from her family, the Rabinowitzes. My mother had four siblings: three sisters, Sally, Fay, and June, and one brother, Eddie, whom I didn’t even know about until recently. No one ever mentioned him because he married a German girl during World War II—unforgivable to a Jewish family. Of my mother’s sisters, I especially loved Aunt Sally. When I was very young and living in Queens, she lived near us, in Jamaica Estates. Later she and her husband, Lou, moved to York Avenue in Manhattan. Lou was a noted collector of rare books and manuscripts; he had a bookshop on 61st Street and was one of the world’s foremost authorities on Sherlock Holmes. I spent a lot of time in their Jamaica Estates home, sitting in their basement with Uncle Lou while he read his books. Aunt Sally was funky and quirky and she traveled the world, but she was also down-to-earth, with a natural, effortless style. Uncle Lou wore fur-lined coats and had long gray hair and a walking stick. Queenie was terribly jealous of Sally—not on account of her sister’s looks or style, because they were opposites that way, but because my mother thought Aunt Sally had it all: the comfortable lifestyle, the adoring, successful husband. I’m sure it didn’t help to hear me constantly say I wanted to be just like Aunt Sally when I grew up. No mother wants to hear that about another woman.
