I.M. Read online

  The subway was a total mess in those days. A chaotic, claustrophobic, lawless place. On good days it felt like a place where anything could happen. Occasionally the filth and noise of the subway wore thin. A lot of evenings, to avoid one more hour on the subway, I would meet my father at his office for his drive home, which happened daily at about 6:30 P.M. Although I was now farther from my father emotionally, we made small talk in the car, and his office became a place for me to hang out while I waited for him to leave. His business was making children’s clothes under the labels “Little Ruffy Togs,” which were infant and children’s sizes, and “Big Guy,” teen sizes. (I could never fit into any of those clothes. Not when I was an infant, not when I was a teen—I was always too fat.)

  My father had a secretary, Evelyn Glick, a middle-aged woman with a heart-shaped face, fluffy black hair, and crazy bright-red lipstick, which she was constantly adjusting in a compact mirror. She wore washable white knit gloves all day to protect her hands, a lot of white collars, bows at the neck, and half-glasses that hung from a chain. She had a sour streak and complained bitterly about my father and his temper. He’d slam the phone down in a rage, grunt, and violently crumple a piece of paper. She would lock eyes with me, gently float an uncrumpled piece of paper in her wastebasket, and say with a deadpan reading, “There’s more room in the basket if you don’t crumple.” Then she would wait a beat and add: “And so much quieter.”

  There was a younger woman in the office named Stephanie who assisted Evelyn. Stephanie was big-boned, lethargic, and sexy—a poor man’s Peggy Moffitt crossed with Kim Novak. She dressed in clingy printed knits and colorful scarves that she wore as headbands in her streaked brown lacquer bangs, which touched the tips of her fake top lashes. Stephanie was not such a perfectionist in her office work, and when she was in the ladies’ room, which was often, Evelyn would complain aloud about everything from her typing to her bagged lunches, and would pose the question: “Is Stephanie more of an asset or more of an ass?” Evelyn was full of phrases such as “Don’t talk, chum, chew Topps gum.” When my father criticized her work she’d say “Kiss my ass in Macy’s window … at high noon.” Some of those phrases imbedded themselves in my memory forever.

  If there was anything I picked up from my mother, it was how to listen to women. Evelyn and Stephanie were my first willing test subjects. It’s unclear who sought out whom; they took more of an interest in me than you might imagine full-grown women would take in their boss’s fourteen-year-old son. These women told me everything, and not just about clothes and shoes and hair and makeup. Evelyn talked about being single at her age and living with her kid brother in Brooklyn. Stephanie talked about her dating life and how “men are pigs!” That was one remark I heard again and again.

  When people talk about me and my clothes they say “Isaac loves women.” Which is a great piece of flattery. But I think what they mean to say is that I’m actually interested in women’s stories—which is true almost to the exclusion of any other kind. I never was into men’s stories: survival stories, war stories. Love stories, though, Cinderella stories—which tend to be categorized as women’s stories—I take to naturally. I’m interested in the social aspects of these stories, but I think it’s the shallow side I love more. I love the clothes. The gowns. The hair and makeup. And I just think women’s bodies, the architecture of them, are far more beautiful than men’s bodies, comparing them side by side. Which is a ridiculous thing to do. The funny thing is, I don’t really make an effort to have more women friends than men. It just works out that way.

  * * *

  When I wasn’t hanging out with my friends or listening to Evelyn’s and Stephanie’s snarking while waiting for my lift home, I wandered the department stores in the area. B. Altman, which had a rambling, understocked, lonely quality about it; and Lord & Taylor, which had a great luncheon counter on the seventh floor called the Bird Cage. I got to know these stores like the back of my hand, but none as well as Macy’s, which was right across the street from my father’s office. I went up and down the noisy wooden escalators, looking at all sorts of clothes, accessories, housewares. My parents gave me a Macy’s credit card (I think largely to avoid the always-stressful task of taking me clothing shopping), but I didn’t buy much, I mostly looked. Still I had a great feeling of power knowing that I could whip out my charge card at any moment and buy something if it seemed appropriate. This made the shopping more compelling. And the idea that I could fit into clothes anywhere in the store and not just the husky departments was also at first a little unreal.

  Some of the memorable things I bought on my own:

  • An olive-green velvet YSL blazer (on sale).

  • A navy-blue cotton poplin YSL military shirt jacket (which I wore well into my early adulthood and if I had it now I’d still wear it).

  • An ankle-length, yellow, rubberized, Ralph Lauren rain slicker with a khaki corduroy collar.

  • A rust herringbone cotton shirt with a flanged button placket by a designer named Jeffrey Sayre. (A really important European designer in the late seventies and early eighties. I passed his shop on the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré in Paris on my first trip and felt so international that I already owned something of his.)

  • A teal-green tweed Jhane Barnes crewneck sweater (another really important American menswear designer in the day).

  • A rust-and-Naples-yellow herringbone-patterned thick cotton terry cloth Geoffrey Beene robe, which was chicer than your average licensed robe. Also more expensive. I think it was originally something like $300 marked down to $70, which was still hugely expensive for a robe at the time.

  • My favorite polo shirt ever, a thin-striped, long-sleeved Gant number in celadon green, taupe, oyster, and navy blue.

  • A cream, red, and blue broken-pinstripe Calvin Klein Viyella flannel shirt.

  • A Calvin Klein denim jacket that I still have and wear.

  • About three pounds of multicolored paper from Paper by the Pound in The Cellar at Macy’s. It was stationery meant for letters, but I didn’t write many letters so I used it for other purposes. I remember cutting it up like construction paper, using it to make holiday cards and various school presentations for years after. I swear I still have some of the blue paper somewhere, a gorgeous Wedgwood blue in that heavy, linen-finish stock.

  By this point I had taken full control of how I dressed myself, and neither of my parents involved themselves at all. As long as I looked presentable—meaning I wore a sport jacket to shul and had a good winter coat—I was taken off the list of sartorial priorities. I had known for a long time that my looks weren’t going to be my fortune, so I approached dressing myself as an act of expression rather than anything that approached elegance. A few years prior, when my family was in the car headed home from a visit to see relatives, my mother remarked proudly about what a good-looking family we were, especially her kids. My father caught my eye in the rearview mirror and said, “Well, Isaac knows looks aren’t his strongest point. He knows he has other qualities.” My mother shot a killing look across the front seat. She tried to backpedal for him, but the harder she tried, the more he dug in his heels. “I’m doing you a favor, Isaac. You know that looks aren’t everything. Especially for a man. They’re not nearly as important as other qualities.” It was almost as if he were talking to himself about himself. For me at the time, even more meaningful than his statement that I wasn’t good-looking was the fact that he was equating the two of us. He was not good-looking, and I was his son, so therefore I wasn’t good-looking either. He thought he was helping me by saying what he did. And no matter how hard my mother tried to bolster my confidence, she got nowhere. Though my lack of self-confidence on the issue of my looks was not formulated that day, it was confirmed.

  But my father’s statement, however poorly put, accomplished one really good thing: It deemphasized the importance of physical appearance. I was able to think of myself not as a subject but as an arbiter: someone who could stand on the
sidelines in basic black and give an honest opinion with absolutely no axe to grind. I backed into the role of family stylist without knowing I wanted the job, but I embraced all the power that came with it. It was one thing when I was a child innocently opining about which dress I liked better. Now the responsibility became almost professional. The pressure on my sisters to compete in the over-the-top arena of that social scene was increasingly intense, and almost every time they left the house, I would weigh in. A shoe would get changed, or hair would be put up in a pony tail—and I can’t count the number of times my mother stood before me in a cloud of cigarette smoke and Fracas challenging my opinion.

  * * *

  I was so young and so confident as a style arbiter. Three things combined to give me that confidence so young: The first was my increasingly sophisticated understanding of what motivated women, what inspired them (and not just on the subject of clothes). For as long as I could remember, I’d absorbed thoughts and ideas from my mother, and increasingly I had the voices of my sisters and other women, like Evelyn and Stephanie, in my head, too. These were real women with real goals and concerns—something I got on a deep level. The second thing was my ability to erase myself from the equation—for which I can partly thank my father. Unconcerned about how I looked or by my own aesthetics, I didn’t try to impose them on a woman. So I dressed the woman and not who I thought she should be. The third was my love of costumes and glamour. This would seem to contradict my strong sense of who women really are, undistracted by some idealized view of them. But it never felt contradictory to me at all. It seemed the most natural thing in the world, that a person—like a character onstage—would decide what message she wanted to communicate and would dress herself accordingly. Whether consciously or unconsciously. I naturally took to the task of translating those messages into clothing.

  My first professional fashion commission came to me courtesy of a classmate of mine, Ted Lambert, who had been cast in Andrei Serban’s production of The Trojan Women, which toured Europe the summer before. He appeared in it with another child actor, Diane Lane, who had just completed a movie with Laurence Olivier called A Little Romance and needed something to wear for either the New York City opening or some other related event. Ted got her measurements from the wardrobe department at La MaMa, which produced The Trojan Women, and we agreed on a fee of sixty dollars for the whole job, start to finish. I bought a beautiful, bright-peach silk broadcloth and matched it to silk rattail cord that I used to make a crisscross torso-tie belt that looked like something out of one of the Grecian sculptures I had seen at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. We had nowhere to fit the dress, so we snuck into a fitting room at Alexander’s, a discount department store on Third Avenue and Fifty-eighth Street, across from Bloomingdale’s, which closed, taking its place in history some time in the early 1990s. The fitting room was big and bright, and I smoked incessantly through the fittings and held pins in my teeth, emulating photos and movies I’d seen of fashion designers. I wore my favorite scarf, a striped ochre-and-navy knitted thing that I’d bought at Macy’s. It was about a foot wide and six feet long, very fashionable at the time. I kept it on for most of the fitting just for effect, and finally I was just too hot, so I took it off and flung it on the bench. Midway through the fitting an attendant knocked on the door and threatened to call security. We finished the fitting and sped out of there. I was so nervous that I left behind that scarf, the loss of which I never quite got over.

  Diane Lane was about twelve years old, and I was fifteen. I remember thinking of her as the luckiest girl in the world to be so beautiful. Her skin was luminous, and she had a long, beautiful body, not at all gawky like other girls her age. Her hair was already colored, which at first struck me as something perverse, that someone at her tender age should be held to that level of perfection. I could sense that her star was on the ascent. It seemed right that a girl who looked like that, who had been groomed—literally—for stardom, had a bright future ahead of her. I was still weighing careers and still nursed some hope that maybe I could be the one wearing the costumes and not just the one making them. But increasingly, between my exposure at PA and what my dad had pointed out about my chances of making it in show business, I knew I wasn’t good-looking enough. I thought: Who would ever believe me as a movie star?

  About twenty-five years later I hired Diane to be the image of my secondary line. On the first day of the shoot with Diane, I was in her trailer as she was being made up by Pat McGrath. It was with great trepidation that I brought up the story of the peach dress. I was so afraid she wouldn’t remember. But she did! She said she remembered the dress and remembered that day in Alexander’s. I would love to come face-to-face with that dress now, not only to see the crazy way it was assembled; this was before I understood anything about dressmaking or construction. The dress, for all its idiosyncrasies, was rather beautiful when it was finished, and it fit Diane well. But more than anything, that dress was a symbol of a big corner being turned. As I made that dress, with a mixture of despair and relief, I relinquished my dreams of a career in show business. I had the idea that only beautiful people could dream of things like starring in movies, and I could only imagine a lifetime of rejection ahead. I told myself I’d be happy with any nearness to show business at all, even if it meant making costumes or dresses, like this one, for movie stars like Diane Lane. I went into the dressing room at Alexander’s that day and left behind not only my scarf, but also my dearest dreams.

  * * *

  My fascination with ballet began in my second year at PA. I became close friends with a beautiful, statuesque ballerina named Suzie Goldman who came from a ballet-obsessed family. Suzie was trained at home till the age of seven, when she entered the School of American Ballet. She was accepted into the corps at American Ballet Theatre when she was a junior at PA, and I went to see her dance a lot. Her sisters were both dancers, and her mother, Phyllis, was a ballet teacher who gave classes in their apartment on Park Avenue and Ninety-fifth Street. (I’m going to pause here for a moment while you imagine an apartment with a ballet studio where the living room ought to be. There was almost no furniture, only wooden floors, mirrors, and a barre that had originally belonged to Natalia Makarova.)

  There was a kind of body dysmorphia that was nurtured in us at that time, one that was already lodged in our brains. All we thought about was how to get thinner or how to stay thin. Suzie’s mother didn’t help; before we went out Phyllis would pull me aside and say good-naturedly, “If she eats anything out of line, you call me.” Suzie and I went out dancing together constantly. No dinner. Just mineral water and dancing and sweating, a punishing, yet fun, aerobic workout. We’d start at one club and go to the next and the next and just dance for hours. We might wake up the following morning slightly sick, but three pounds thinner. Though I may have ruined my intestines for life, I was never happier than when I was at my goal weight. Even today, no matter what goes wrong—the world could come to an end—if I’m thin, everything is hunky-dory.

  The Goldman family had a friend named Elaine who had a fabulous apartment at the El Dorado and who adored ABT. She had a box in the grand tier at the Met every ballet season, and she often invited me to join her. Other nights I would tag along with Suzie and watch performances from backstage—where I witnessed some pretty glamourous goings-on: Gelsey Kirkland, wasted on cocaine, making her entrance flawlessly, as though nothing were amiss; Jessica Lange holding their baby as Baryshnikov kissed her good night then turned on a dime for the grand pas de deux; visions of ballerinas in footlights stepping in resin boxes then lining up as swans or Wilis, it was something out of Degas. Also the beautiful male dancers backstage—it was with a mixture of inferiority and desire that I regarded them. Anyone would have felt like a different, less-important species being in such close proximity to those beauties.

  I became a member of an exclusive bunch of people, a society I’ve never left, whose priority is seeing all kinds of dance; ballet companies from all over th
e world. (Another reason to live in New York City, one of the few cities that hosts such a large number of yearly dance shows and events.) The Royal Ballet, the Bolshoi, the Grand Canadian Ballet (where I got my first glimpse of the great Rudolf Nureyev), the Danish Ballet, San Francisco Ballet, The Joffrey. I learned the differences between these companies, their specialties, their styles, their strengths and weaknesses. I went to modern dance performances, too. To see Martha Graham whenever I could at City Center. And Twyla Tharp. And Trisha Brown. And my absolute favorite, Merce Cunningham, whose shows influenced me well into my middle age. (Once my friend Mark Morris and I went to see Merce Cunningham and half the audience walked out. We wondered aloud what we were doing wrong that people were not walking out of our shows in droves.) One of the great nights of my life was when I saw Tango Argentino in 1985. I sat there in tears of joy most of the night and I was led into another dance obsession that included lessons and a whole trove of tango clubs in New York City which I fear have since closed. Looking at dance became a lifelong occupation. It’s with a certain comfort and pleasure that I go to shows now, to theatres, so familiar they feel like my living room, where I see so many of the same faces in the audience, balletomanes, like myself, who have been returning again and again all these years, some friends, others I know only to exchange a nod of recognition.