by Tom Wolfe
God, it’s painful to hear old Ross talk about all this. It’s taboo! Sex, well, all right, talk your head off. But this, these men’s clothes—a man must have to have beady eyes to even see these things. But these are Big men! But—all right!
It’s the secret vice! In Europe, all over England, in France, the mass ready-made suit industry is a new thing. All men, great and small, have had tailors make their suits for years, and they tend to talk a little more with each other about what they’re getting. But in America it’s the secret vice. At Yale and Harvard, boys think nothing of going over and picking up a copy of Leer, Poke, Feel, Prod, Tickle, Hot Whips, Modern Mammaries, and other such magazines, and reading them right out in the open. Sex is not taboo. But when the catalogue comes from Brooks Brothers or J. Press, that’s something they whip out only in private. And they can hardly wait. They’re in the old room there poring over all that tweedy, thatchy language about “Our Exclusive Shirtings,” the “Finest Lairdsmoor Heather Hopsacking,” “Clearspun Rocking Druid Worsteds,” and searching like detectives for the marginal differences, the shirt with a flap over the breast pocket (J. Press), the shirt with no breast pocket (Brooks), the pants with military pockets, the polo coat with welted seams—and so on and on, through study and disastrous miscalculations, until they learn, at last, the business of marginal differentiations almost as perfectly as those teen-agers who make their mothers buy them button-down shirts and then make the poor old weepies sit up all night punching a buttonhole and sewing on a button in the back of the collar because they bought the wrong damn shirt, one of those hinkty ones without the button in the back.
And after four years of Daddy bleeding to pay the tabs, Yale, Harvard, and the rest of these schools turn out young gentlemen who are confident that they have at last mastered the secret vice, marginal differentiations, and they go right down to Wall Street or wherever and—blam!—they get it like old Ross, right between the eyes. A whole new universe to learn! Buttonholes! A whole new set of clothing firms to know about—places like Bernard Weatherill, probably the New York custom tailor with the biggest reputation, very English, Frank Brothers and Dunhill’s, Dunhill’s the tailor, which are slightly more—how can one say it?—flamboyant?—places like that, or the even more esoteric world of London tailors, Poole, Hicks, Wells, and God knows how many more, and people knock themselves out to get to London to get to these places, or else they order straight from the men these firms send through New York on regular circuits and put up in hotels, like the Biltmore, with big books of swatches, samples of cloths, piled up on the desk-table.
The secret vice! A whole new universe! Buttonholes! The manufacturers can’t make ready-made suits with permanent buttonholes on the sleeves. The principle of ready-made clothes is that each suit on the rack can be made to fit about four different shapes of men. They make the sleeves long and then the store has a tailor, an unintelligible little man who does alterations, chop them off to fit men with shorter arms and move the buttons up.
And suddenly Ross found that as soon as you noticed this much, you started noticing the rest of it. Yes! The scyes, for example. The scyes! Imagine somebody like Ross knowing all this esoteric terminology. Ross is a good old boy, for godsake. The scyes! The scyes are the armholes in a coat. In ready-made clothes, they make the armholes about the size of the Holland Tunnel. Anybody can get in these coats. Jim Bradford, the former heavyweight weight-lifting champion, who has arms the size of a Chapman Valve fire hydrant, can put on the same coat as some poor bastard who is mooning away the afternoon at IBM shuffling memos and dreaming of going home and having a drink and playing with the baby. Naturally, for everybody but Jim Bradford, this coat is loose and looks sloppy, as you can imagine. That’s why custom-made suits have high armholes; because they fit them to a man’s own particular shoulder and arm. And then all these other little details. In Ross’s league, Wall Street, practically all of these details follow the lead of English tailoring. The waist: the suits go in at the waist, they’re fitted, instead of having a straight line, like the Ivy League look. This Ivy League look was great for the ready-made manufacturers. They just turned out simple bags and everybody was wearing them. The lapels: in the custom-made suits they’re wider and have more “belly,” meaning more of a curve or flared-out look along the outer edge. The collar: the collar of the coat fits close to the neck—half the time in ready-made suits it sits away from the neck, because it was made big to fit all kinds. The tailor-made suit fits closer and the collar itself will have a curve in it where it comes up to the notch. The sleeves: the sleeves are narrower and are slightly tapered down to the wrists. Usually, there are four buttons, sometimes three, and they really button and unbutton. The shoulders are padded to give the coat shape; “natural shoulders” are for turkeys and wet smacks. The vents: often the coat will have side vents or no vents, instead of center vents, and the vents will be deeper than in a ready-made suit. Well, hell, Ross could go on about all this—but there, you can already see what the whole thing is like.
Ross even knows what somebody is likely to say to this. You walk into a room and you can’t tell whether somebody has real buttonholes on his sleeves or not. All of these marginal differences are like that. They’re so small, they’re practically invisible. All right! That’s what’s so maniacal about it. In women’s clothes, whole styles change from year to year. They have new “silhouettes,” waists and hems go up and down, collars go in and out, breasts blossom out and disappear; you can follow it. But in men’s clothes there have been only two style changes in this century, and one of them was so esoteric, it’s hard for a tailor to explain it without a diagram. It had to do with eliminating a breast seam and substituting something called a “dart.” That happened about 1913. The other was the introduction of pleats in pants about 1922. Lapels and pants leg widths have been cut down some, but most of the flashy stuff in lapels and pants goes on in ready-made suits, because the manufacturers are naturally hustling to promote style changes and make a buck. In custom-made suits, at least among tailors in the English tradition, there have really been no changes for fifty years. The whole thing is in the marginal differences—things that show that you spent more money and had servitors in there cutting and sewing like madmen and working away just for you. Status! Yes!
Yes, and how can these so-called Big men really get obsessed with something like this? God only knows. Maybe these things happen the way they happened to Lyndon Johnson, Our President. Mr. Johnson was campaigning with John Kennedy in 1960, and he had to look at Kennedy’s clothes and then look at his own clothes, and then he must have said to himself, in his winning, pastoral way, Great Hairy Ned on the mountaintop, my clothes look like Iron Boy overalls. Yus, muh cluths look luk Irun Bouy uvverulls. Now, this Kennedy, he had most of his clothes made by tailors in England. Anyway, however it came about, one day in December, 1960, after the election, if one need edit, Lyndon Johnson, the salt of the good earth of Austin, Texas, turned up on Savile Row in London, England, and walked into the firm of Carr, Son & Woor. He said he wanted six suits, and the instructions he gave were: “I want to look like a British diplomat.” Lyndon Johnson! Like a British diplomat! You can look it up. Lyndon Johnson, President of the United States, Benefactor of the Po’, Lion of NATO, Defender of the Faith of Our Fathers, Steward of Peace in Our Times, Falconer of Our Sly Asiatic Enemies, Leader of the Free World—is soft on real buttonholes! And I had wondered about Ross.
Chapter 16
The Nanny Mafia
ALL RIGHT, CHARLOTTE, you gorgeous white Anglo-Saxon Protestant socialite, all you are doing is giving a birthday party for your little boy with the E. S. A. (Eastern Socially Attractive) little-boy bangs in his eyes and all his little friends. So why are you sitting there by the telephone and your old malachite-top coffee table gnashing on one thumbnail? Why are you staring out the Thermo-Plate glass toward the other towers on East 72nd Street with such vacant torture in your eyes?
“Damn. I knew I’d forget something
,” says Charlotte. “I forgot the champagne.”
So gorgeous Charlotte twists around in the chair with her alabaster legs and lamb-chop shanks still crossed and locked together in hard, slippery, glistening skins of nylon and silk and starts going through the note pad by the telephone, causing her Leslie II Prince Valiant coiffure to hang in her eyes so that she has to keep blowing the strands away, snorting and leafing through the note pad.
O.K., Charlotte. Champagne for your little boy’s birthday party?
“You’re damned right,” she says. “For all the nannies. I’m not kidding! If we ever tried to give a party for Bobby and his little friends without champagne for the nannies, we might as well, you know, forget about it.
“Bobby’s nanny is mad enough as it is. All she can do is drop what are supposed to be very subtle hints about the V———’s party for little Sarah. Do you know what Van gave each kid as a party favor? An electric truck. I’m talking about a real electric truck. Of course, they’re nothing much really. They’re smaller than a Jaguar. By a little bit. The kid can get inside of it and drive it! They cost five hundred dollars, five hundred dollars! Can you imagine that? We had to carry the damn thing home. You should have seen us trying to get it in the cab. Of course, Van is absolutely petrified of the nannies.
“Well, I was damned if we were going to do anything like that. Robert had to take the whole afternoon off Tuesday to go to Schwarz. This was precisely the afternoon the Swedes came in with some bond thing, of course. The Swedes wear the worst clothes. They all look like striped cardboard. They think they’re very European. Anyway, Robert got some kind of bird with a tape recorder in it, I don’t know. The kids can talk into it and it records it and says it back. Something like that. You know. Well, I don’t care, I think it’s a perfectly cute party favor, but our Mrs. G——— is not going to be happy with it, I’m sure of that.
“She wanted us to have the party in Robert’s father’s house on 70th Street in the first place. I’m serious! She doesn’t like this apartment! It embarrasses her! Do you know what it is? Do you know who runs the East Side of New York? The nanny mafia. There’s a nanny mafia!”
The nanny mafia! At this moment, the nannies, the leading nannies, are all gathered down in Central Park, in the playground just over the stone wall next to Fifth Avenue, at the foot of East 77th Street. Down there, through the pin oak, birch, beech and sweetgum leaves, in the sun and dappled shadows, on this green-and-gold, bluebottle-fly afternoon, you can see the nannies sitting on the benches around the oval that the playground fence forms. In the middle of the oval are their charges. All these little boys and girls are either in English Brabingham baby carriages or else they are playing about the swings and the seesaws in Cerutti shorts and jumpers with only the most delightful verandah-in-Newport, Sundays-in-North Egremont sort of gaiety. The oval fence has high and rather graceful spikes and stands as a kind of genteel stockade against the customary terrors of New York life. In fact, the playground at the foot of 77th Street is the kind of place all the New Yorkers who feel like hopeless DPs from the genteel style of life can walk by and look at and recharge their gentility cells and walk on. Down there in the sun and dappled shadows, after all, are the nannies, fillers of these little vessels of the Protestant ethic, angels in starched white, gleaming in God’s daylight.
Nannies are generally middle-aged women, or old women, whom upper-class families in Europe have hired over the last 125 years to look after the children up through age six or seven. Nannies have a higher standing than a nursemaid, since they have the power to impose discipline and manners on the child. But they have a lower standing than a governess, in that they undertake no real education. But, mainly, in Europe and in the United States, they have become a symbol of the parents’ status. First of all, parents who have nannies to look after the children have to have money. That is one thing. And parents who have nannies lead their own lives. This gives them more status even in front of their own children. They don’t have to appear in the ridiculous role of martyred, harried creatures, forever ill-kempt and ill-humored, waiting on the children like servants. They don’t have to clean up after their tantrums, go fetch them crayons, mollify their stupid fears or otherwise cast themselves in some demeaning role. They can come on, say, a couple of times a day, as figures of authority, charm, largesse, awe, smelling languorously of grape and tonic.
Upper-class New York and Boston families, still living within a European tradition, have adopted the nanny system as their own. They hire English nannies, if possible, always nice middling women with sensible hairdos, sensible clothes and sensible shoes. Or, if not English nannies, French nannies, which is just about as good, especially as it enables a woman to report in an amused and tolerant way how many French words her daughter has picked up.
The only funny thing is, the nannies are the most complete and unabashed snobs in America. The rich themselves have abandoned many of the symbols of status. They really botch dinner now. They don’t dress. They don’t use the finger bowls and all that great business at the end. The nannies note and deplore it all. They are the products, the creations, of an older, sterner status system and style of life and they bring all of its conventions into the modern age.
“Do you know what she says about this apartment? Well, you know, they get on the phone to each other, it’s like a network. The phone rings all the time around here, and it’s always the nannies. They call up and say that little Sarah wants to say hello to little Bobby, and so the kids whine at each other in those little cretin voices they have for about 15 seconds and after that the nannies go on and on.”
Anyway, one day after little Sarah V—— had been over here for something, Charlotte forgets what it was, Miss S——, the V——’s nanny, she’s an absolute tyrant, Miss S—— was telling Mrs. G——, and the thing is, poor Mrs. G—— believes absolutely 100 per cent of every pronouncement that woman makes, Miss S—— was telling her, of course Charlotte could only hear Mrs. G——’s end of the conversation, but you could tell what she was saying, she was saying that Charlotte and Robert have the kind of apartment where everything looks cheap except what they got as wedding presents. She thought she would die! “Don’t they have the most fantastic frame of mind you ever heard of?” Charlotte says. “We call Mrs. G———the Black Widow, very much behind her back, I might add. But don’t you just know the kind of apartment the nannies are talking about?”
You know, you’re invited to dinner, says Charlotte, and this poor couple, as soon as you walk in, you can see they’ve gone to a lot of trouble, flowers and indirect lighting, yellow glows, city lights, and they’ve hired a butler. The girl always has on some kind of Ravish-Me hostess outfit and looks like Little Heidi of Switzerland conscripted into a seraglio. So pathetic. And the furniture is always sort of Department Store Louis, if you know the kind Charlotte means. Then you sit down to dinner at this awful table and then suddenly here is this fabulous silver and china, Winslow table settings, apparently the real thing—fabulous! The comparison is just too crushing. It’s always obvious where it came from. Their parents and their parents’ friends shelled out and gave it to them when they got married. Haven’t you ever been in that kind of apartment? It’s too—Charlotte doesn’t know—it’s not even pathetic. Well, Charlotte didn’t mean to go on about that. But that’s exactly how the nannies think!
“I know that’s what the Black Widow thinks about this apartment,” says Charlotte, and her eyes start drifting over her own mountainscape of chaises, commodes, pier tables, settees and the wall-to-wall. “But what she’s really against is that this is a new building. She thinks it’s awful. That’s why she wants to have the party over at Robert’s father’s. She says Robert’s father will love it. He’ll hate it. The Taylors actually did that. They actually gave the children a party at her parents’, on Ninety-something Street, a lovely old place. Just so their nannies wouldn’t be embarrassed in front of the other nannies!”
The nanny mafia! Nannies ar
e rarely brilliant, shrewd or conniving people. They come out of the British low-heel, twist-weave suit, Kind Lady tradition. But they are very firm on all social matters. The nannies’ hold on the East Side comes first from the fact that they keep holding up status values to their masters. If left alone, people can ignore status symbols to some extent. But if somebody keeps thrusting them in their face, and the claims seem to be at all valid, people wilt. They start getting nervous. They do what the nannies, the little old status pharisees, say about children’s clothes, children’s parties and the size and decor of a fit parents’ apartment in New York. Second, there is the nannies’ network. They all seem to know each other. They all seem to live in the same section of the Bronx, around Mosholu Parkway up near the Zoo. They all seem to have supper together on Wednesday, their day off. They all seem to send each other cards, supposedly from one child to another but all written by the nannies and really just part of the nannies’ network. They all spend half their working day with one another by telephone or else out in the stockade in Central Park. All this time they are trading information. Such information! Never mind politics, industry and culture. The nannies deal in intelligence that lies close to the soul. Who was seen insinuating his trembly knee between whose silky shanks in the crush at whose party. The nannies are most explicit, for Kind Ladies in hob heels. There are people who count on hearing what went on at their own parties from their nanny, who heard it from other nannies, who overheard it from the mouths of the principals themselves. And finances! They can smell the stalking of poverty in high places so thoroughly they must have been bred to sniff it out. So naturally everyone puts on the best possible face, the best possible performance, for the nannies, because everything is going to be broadcast all over the East Side via the nanny network.
