Neither Tommy nor Dinah had two beans to rub together, but they managed to see every play worth talking about. She and I lived in two different time zones. I was up at six and in bed by ten; Dinah slept half the day and had lunch before she dressed to go out in the evening. I loved having her there. I loved hearing about college life and the nightlife and I loved having company my own age. At work, the only people under forty were the models, who, unless we were showing a new collection, sat around all day in their underwear, waiting for Madame P to call them in to have fabric draped on them. (Philomena famously designed without drawings, cutting directly into the cloth.) The models didn’t talk much to the likes of me, except to say, “Tuna salad, no mayo, and Fresca, please.”
When there was a show I really wanted to see, Tommy and Dinah took me with them. They had lots of tricks, but one time I remember, it worked like this: we dressed in our glad rags. Dinah had a stretchy silver lamé sheath dress that accentuated her curves, and I had a knockoff Rudi Gernreich I had made myself. Our skirts were so short we couldn’t cross our legs when we sat down. Dinah wore eyelashes that looked like tarantulas, and her lipstick was almost white. When I couldn’t bring myself to adopt the maquillage à la mode, she said, “All right, you can pretend to be my nurse.”
At the theater, Dinah strolled to the door as if she were Katharine Hepburn and said, “Miss Kittredge, party of two. We’re on the list.”
The usher looked puzzled. “I need to see your tickets, miss.”
“No, no, we’re on Mr. Patten’s list,” said Dinah. “Brad is expecting us.” Mr. Patten was a producer she’d never met. Brad Taliaferro was the star of the play. Just then, Tommy appeared holding a clipboard.
“Can I help?” he asked the usher.
“Dinah Kittredge,” said Herself, looking relieved. “We’re on Mr. Patten’s list, friends of Brad Taliaferro.” She even knew to pronounce it Tolliver.
Tommy ran his finger down his clipboard, looked troubled, then said to the usher, “I’ll take care of it.” The usher was thoroughly relieved, and we were led off to the house seats, side aisle, third row. In gratitude a seat was found for Tommy in the back, he told us at intermission. After the curtain call, Tommy tapped another usher with his clipboard and murmured, “Brad is expecting Miss Kittredge in his dressing room. Could you?” We were all three led backstage, down a rackety flight of stairs, through a boiler room where the dressers ironed and mended costumes, then up two more flights of stairs. The usher knocked on a door, announced, “Mr. Taliaferro, your friends are here,” and left us. The famous voice called “Entrez,” and we did.
Here was the toast of Broadway in a grimy terry cloth robe with a jar of cold cream in one hand and a weird net on his scalp where moments before had been his glorious thatch of ash blond hair, which was now perched on a wig stand on the counter. He looked at us with happy expectation as we trooped in. After his smile faded only one degree, he said “And you are . . . ?”
“Absolutely nobody,” said Dinah, and Brad (we soon called him Brad) laughed.
“Marvelous! What would you like to drink?”
The friends he was really expecting arrived while he was in the shower. They were much entertained by the story of how we got there and insisted on taking us with them to dinner. I didn’t get to bed until three, and Tommy and Dinah went on with them afterward to some place like the Peppermint Lounge where, it was claimed, society girls in miniskirts and go-go boots did the Twist on top of the tables.
I’d almost forgotten how much fun those days were. Dinah would disappear for long stretches when she had exams or papers due. Then she’d reappear, full of appetite and news. She and Tommy broke up, but it hardly put a hitch in their friendship. We still see Brad, although his salad days are behind him and he is not always such good company now. Tommy finally grew into his slightly crumpled face around the time he turned forty and began getting lead roles. He’s been nominated twice for an Oscar, and Dinah thinks that this year will be his year.
Next she took up with a rising young editor at the Herald Tribune. When the Trib folded, he moved to the Times, and when she finished college Dinah went to work there too. She used to love to say that she slept her way to the middle and made it the rest of the way on talent.
Dinah could really write. I always thought we’d see her name in lights, one way or another, that she’d go to Hollywood and make movies, or write famous plays, or at least win a Pulitzer for journalism. Gloria Emerson was reporting from Vietnam for the Times, Gloria Steinem had founded Ms. magazine. Things were changing for women and we who had Known Her When thought we’d see Dinah on the barricades. Instead, at the Times she dutifully wrote about family, food, furniture, or fashion for the ghetto of the women’s pages, left the office at five, and was out virtually every night building her Rolodex. She went to art openings, book parties, discotheque openings, luxury product launches, and even celebrity funerals. Sometimes she was on assignment, but much more often she just found a way to be where the heat was being generated, for its own sake. Andy Warhol noticed her. So did Charlotte Curtis, who was writing about society for the Times in a way it had never been done before. By the time the serious women of the Times started making common cause to sue the paper for sex discrimination, Dinah had moved on. She’d been offered a job by Simon Snyder, who was writing a must-read society/celebrity gossip column called “New York Eye” for a new downtown tabloid which Dinah liked to call “The Fishwrap.”
She told me, “I kept running into Simon. He finally said ‘Honey, you’re out here every night at all the same places I am, you might as well be paid to be there.’ ” He said if she worked for him he could go home and get some sleep, but in fact his hiring Dinah was more like his being in two places at once. At the showroom, you could see their column selling papers. When our ladies came in to see a collection, they’d sit in their spindly gilt chairs waiting for the show to start, open their salmon-colored tabloids to page eight, read “New York Eye,” then throw the paper away.
During my first years with Mme. P, I was mainly a gofer. I’d carry fabric swatches to our button lady and our belt lady with Madame’s instructions. When the fabric salesmen came with their bolts of gorgeous cloths for Madame to choose among, I’d help haul them over to her and back again, carry them to the window to show the color in natural light, or unfold several yards of this weave and that so she could see how they draped. When important clients came in to order the numbers they’d liked at the collection, I’d help to dress the models who showed them the clothes. Once in a while the vendeuse would have me take a client’s measurements while they discussed variations to the dress we would make for her. Our vendeuse was a marvelous creature named Mme. Olitsky, rumored to be a White Russian princess, though in her off-hours she was known to lapse into one hell of a Wisconsin accent. Perhaps there had been a Prince Olitsky. She was tiny with huge red-framed glasses, always impeccably dressed, usually in Philomena, but now and again in skillful Paris knockoffs from Orbach’s. (Society ladies like Mrs. Wanamaker, who wore our clothes everywhere, got discounts, but the staff didn’t.) Mme. O spoke beautiful French, good Italian, and passable German, and took me under her wing after my fichu disaster.
A week in which we showed a collection was very high pressure. A runway was brought in and set up in the showroom. All week we were juggling the seating, so that the second Mrs. Rockefeller wasn’t at the same showing as the first, and that the buyer from Neiman Marcus wouldn’t run into the buyer from Dayton’s in the hall. We had our own models plus two or three others backstage. I’d be assigned a particular model and had to keep the lists of what dresses to put on her in what order, along with everything that went with each costume: shoes, hose, jewelry, scarves, and hats. It was hot and crowded behind the stage, and not all the models bathed as often as one would wish.
At the winter show the second year I worked there, Mme. Olitsky was out front greeting the invitees and showing them to their seats while Mme. P checked all the lists
and accessories one last time. As often happened, especially at moments of tension, she found something not exactly to her liking. This time, her eyes fell on me. “Vous, mademoiselle! Arrêtez ça! Take this back to the twelfth floor, maintenant, vite vite!” It sounded as if its imperfection was my fault in the first place. I was to race with this spangley velvet scarf to the rhinestone crimper, have him fix it, and bring it right back. Perhaps she was giving me a chance to shine, as normally only Marjorie, the brilliant Trinidadian who managed all the physical properties, would have been entrusted to leave the atelier at such a moment. But maybe I was just the first person she saw.
I ran like the wind to the crimper. I presented the fichu and relayed Madame’s instructions, in French. I sped back to my post, kneeling among the forest of naked model legs as skirts came off and evening gowns were wriggled on. Size nine feet were put into size ten pumps with lumps of tissue crammed into the toes, missing bracelets were found and fastened, queries, complaints, and swear words made a sotto voce hum drowned out in front by the music now emanating from the record player. It was the “Anvil Chorus,” I think.
Out on the stage, Mme. P gave her own commentary on each design as the models marched out, turned, posed, and marched back, passing each other as they went. It was unusual for a designer to perform this role, but Mme. P was famous for it. For the finale, all six of the models would be onstage in evening gowns, each with a fichu of a different style and color. Except that when the moment came, there were six girls and only five fichus. Red satin, green peau de soie, ivory chiffon, blue watered silk with seed pearls, burgundy cashmere, but no black velvet with rhinestones. I had forgotten to wait to bring it back. Madame’s eyes alone, when she came backstage after taking her bows, could have singed hair. Marjorie tried to hide me the rest of the afternoon, and for days afterward I crept around the studio, pretending not to cast a shadow, not sure if I even had a job anymore, though the very unpleasant things Madame had yelled at me had not included the word “terminée.”
Dinah roared with laughter when I told her the fichu story, which wasn’t quite the reaction I had hoped for. She, after all, was comfortably ensconced in an ivy-covered dormitory with three meals a day paid for, even if she did have to maintain a B average to keep her scholarships. But later, when she went to work for “New York Eye,” she was a huge help to me with Mme. Philomena. She’d come to our collections and plant items in the column about them. “What chanteuse in a hit Broadway musical was seen ordering Philomena’s new Grecian Column cocktail dress in three different colors of silk charmeuse? Maybe the rumors about her very well-heeled new inamorato are true.” The actress and Mme. P both loved it, as long as the inamorato’s wife in Rome, also a sometime client of Mme. P, didn’t catch on. Mme. P began asking why I didn’t bring that charming Mlle. Dinah around more often, especially after Dinah persuaded the very young, very photogenic wife of a major New York philanthropist to model the bridal gown in our spring collection that year. (Which was 1971. I just looked it up.) It was an innovation at the time to send a nonprofessional out on the runway, but it turned into a PR coup—it proved that our clothes could be worn by a younger customer and caused demand for seats at our shows to skyrocket. And got Dinah a very nice scoop for her column. “Would you take to the fashion runway in Mme. Philomena’s bridal offering, as pretty Bettina Cosgrove did last week, if you could wear a size six? Can’t say for sure, kids, but Dinah Might.” The column ran with a photograph of Bettina in our dress.
Bettina, who later became a particular friend of mine, had married a man whose terrifying former wife vowed that Bettina and her husband would eat dinner at home alone every night of their married life. But Bettina had nerve and a surprising cunning on her side, plus a press agent. We lost the former Mrs. Cosgrove as a customer, along with a few of her friends, but more than replaced them with a new, younger group who wanted their pictures in the paper too, and not just when they chaired a junior benefit. Bettina was well pleased because it induced several fashionable hosts to invite the Cosgroves to dinner, even over their wives’ objections. And Dinah was given her own column to run in place of “New York Eye” every Friday, entitled “Dinah Might.”
Meg Colbert was married on a summer weekend that year in her father’s cow pasture. She wore a white Mexican peasant dress trimmed with white eyelet. Her sister, the matron of honor, wore cornflower blue, and her bridesmaids, including me, wore soft, vaguely Empire dresses like nightgowns in different pastel shades, wreathes of daisies on our heads, and bare feet. I learned I was the only one among these girls who varnished her nails or owned a girdle. I learned that it was very wrong to refer to us as “girls,” and that in some circles, shaving your armpits was a political act. Once again, I’d been reading all the wrong magazines.
The minister wore sandals and little round wire-rimmed glasses, and the wedding march, played by a local jug band, was the Beatles song “When I’m Sixty-Four.” Toasts were drunk in fizzy cider that packed quite a wallop, brewed by the bearded philosopher from the next farm over. We square-danced in the dairy barn, and when the full moon was high, the bride and groom, still in their wedding clothes, departed on horseback. It was incredibly romantic, and the first wedding I’d ever been to where the newlyweds turned up in jeans the next morning to join all their friends for breakfast.
A lot of fates were sealed that night. Certainly Meg’s. One of the groomsmen introduced a game in which you whirl around and around holding a broomstick while everyone claps and then at a signal, drop the stick and try to jump over it. The second fellow who tried it missed the jump by a mile, fell over, and cracked his head on a stall door and nearly put his eye out, but later he married the bridesmaid who drove him to the hospital. And I met a man who changed my life. He was Meg’s godfather. We were the only two people there from New York, and he gave me a ride back into the city Sunday evening.
Chapter 4
Probably the man who most changed Avis’s life was Victor Greenwood. We went together to his funeral three years ago and afterward she told me the story of what turned out to be her job interview.
She’d been one of the bright young things from the Social Register working at Sotheby Parke Bernet when Victor noticed something special in her and asked her to come see him. This was in 1970. When she went to her boss to ask for an hour off one afternoon, he said, “Victor Greenwood asked you to come to his house?”
“Yes.”
“Why you? He doesn’t collect Old Masters.”
“I have no idea,” said Avis. “He was mooching around some Dutch still lifes while we were preparing the catalogue, and he started asking me questions.”
“What kind of questions?”
“Which one was better. More important. If I could buy one painting in the gallery, money no object, which one would I buy.”
Her boss had laughed. “That’s Victor. Well, go, of course. Give me a call when you’re done, I’d love to know what he wants.”
Although she was twenty-eight and probably as toothsome as she would ever be in her life, Avis didn’t imagine Mr. Greenwood wanted her body. His taste in women was well known, and she wasn’t it. Naturally I asked what she wore. She said she had chosen her usual uniform of very simply cut grays and blacks that caused her roommate to call her the Art Nun. Apparently this had been the right call.
She’d arrived on time at his house, a five-story limestone edifice in a French château style on a quiet side street in the east seventies, and been shown into a vast room on the second floor hung with nineteenth-century paintings. The butler offered her coffee, tea, or a cocktail but she had declined, not thinking she would wait as long as she eventually did. When her host failed to appear, she got up and began to examine the paintings. One small Caillebotte she recognized at once as having been sold by Sotheby’s two seasons before for a record sum for the artist. To a dealer named Gordon Hall, she thought. And he’d sold it to Greenwood for even more? Or he’d been bidding for Greenwood all along? Greenwood was s
quirrelly, everyone in the auction business knew. Sometimes he came to the auctions himself and bid, sometimes he came but sat like a stone Buddha while someone in the annex room was bidding for him, sometimes he bid by phone, and sometimes he was bidding by secret agreement with the auctioneer when he pulled his ear or took off his glasses. He enjoyed the sport of it.
Avis was lost in a painting of a young girl sitting in a wood with a boy lying on the grass beside her when she realized Greenwood was in the room watching her.
“What do you think?” He was looking pleased with himself.
“This is Edward Arthur Walton, isn’t it?”
His eyebrows went up. “Very good.”
“But isn’t this The Daydream? I thought it was a lost work.”
“Someone found it.”
Someone who obviously knew well what Greenwood was looking for. She turned back to the painting.
“Do you like it?” He was observing her like a cat studying a cricket.
“I do like the Naturalists. But I’m surprised you do.”
“Why?”
“Most people like either the Impressionists or the realists, but not both.”
“Is that so.” He seemed amused. “And which do you like?”
“I like both.”
“What don’t you like?”
“In paintings?”
“Yes.”
She considered. “I don’t think I like surrealism very much.”
She was beginning to wonder if he would apologize for keeping her waiting so long. But instead he crossed the room and stood before an Eakins, one of his absurdly beautiful shirtless young men, rowing on a river.
“What’s the best picture in this room?”
“I can’t answer that.”
“Why not?”
“You know why not,” she said, and then realized she’d been rude. He didn’t seem to mind.