Nine Women, One Dress (2 page)

As I rode the elevator to the sixteenth floor I briefly allowed myself to dream about the possibility of the cover of
Women's Wear Daily
. We had made the cover a few times over the years, but this was my very last chance, the last fashion week before my retirement. I had a good feeling about one of the dresses. From the moment our designer handed me the sketch I knew I had something special to work with. Through the heavy glass door I could see that the paper had been shoved through our mail slot as on any other morning. As I zeroed in on it I felt my heart skip a beat. There it was! This year's little black dress was mine. Worn perfectly by some doe-eyed model who looked like it was her very first trip down the runway. I made that dress with my own two hands. The dress of the season! It will arrive in stores around August, a few months from now, and by the time its last reorder sells out it will be December and I will be celebrating my retirement. It feels good to be going out on top.

I am the first one in to the Max Hammer showroom every morning, at six a.m. Even today, as the last snow of the year dusts the Manhattan streets, I am still on time. On my time, that is. No one else will arrive for hours. I unlock the heavy glass door and pull it open, feeling victorious as I do. Pretty good for a ninety-year-old man. The words
Max Hammer Ltd.
are written in gold script across it. They have been there for seventy-five years. That is how long I have been pulling this door open, at first with the strength of a single index finger, now with two hands and a triumphant “Oy!”

Max has been gone for eight years now. Before that he was the first one in. Sometimes I thought maybe he slept here. Not me: in at six, home at six. I never missed dinner with my wife, Mathilda, and our daughter, Sarah. She is in her sixties now, with two sons of her own. My younger grandson, Lucas, is an emergency room doctor; the older, Henry, plays cello for the New York Philharmonic. Max had two boys. The younger, Andrew, runs the business now, though in his fifties he's not exactly young, I guess. He is a smart boy, Andrew. Smart enough to know that unlike his parents, he has no eye for fashion. But he wanted into the family business anyway. So he went to Wharton and took over the day-to-day from his father when he and Dorothy finally retired around twenty years ago. Within a year of his arrival, Max Hammer went from the knockoff king of Seventh Avenue to just the king, all without changing the name on the door. And I've been here, making the patterns, all along.

I met Max Hammer on the boat to America that left the Polish port of Gdynia in the summer of 1939. It was my older cousin Morris's ticket, and my father brought me with him to see Morris off. It was a week before my bar mitzvah, and I was sad that my cousin would miss it. When we picked him up that morning he was ill. Very ill, burning up with a fever. His mother, though worried, insisted he get on the boat to America. We looked alike, Morris and I. Though he was sixteen, he was small, and though I was nearly thirteen, I was big. People often mistook us for twins. His father had died years before, and he'd grown up with me almost as a brother. My father was a dressmaker and taught us both everything he knew, from how to make a pattern from a sketch to how to make buttonholes without a machine.

When we arrived at the boat they would not let Morris on. By that point he had a rash covering half his body—you could almost see the heat coming off him. Now that I have seen nearly every childhood illness, I would guess it was roseola. The stewards turned him away, yelling that he would take down the whole ship.

My father took Morris's ticket, bag, and papers and led us around to the other gangplank. I assumed we were just trying a different entrance for Morris, but at the last minute my father gave me all the money in his pocket, all the money in Morris's pocket, and his gold wedding band. He kissed me on the head and told me to get on the ship. I cried, I begged, I pleaded. I tried warning him of the scene he would face at the house when he went home to my mother without her only son a week before his bar mitzvah. I looked down, embarrassed by my tears, and by the time I looked up he and my cousin were gone. I never saw my father or Morris again. Max Hammer, who was about six years older than I, witnessed the whole thing. He pulled me onto the boat by my sleeve and told me that my father had just saved my life.

It was three days before I could speak, and by then Max had told me his whole life story—even the part that had not happened yet. The first thing he said he would do when we landed in America was find his girl, Dorothy, who had arrived months before, and ask her to wait for him. They had already been waiting quite a while. He said he had known she was the one from the first time she smiled at him through the window of his father's dress shop in Kraków. They were barely twelve years old at the time. He said that he would make the start of his fortune, then marry her and make the rest. Even in steerage on a rat-infested boat with barely a loaf of bread between us, I believed every word he said. He was larger than life.

I told him that I was to become a bar mitzvah on Saturday, and he arranged it that I did. I recited my Torah portion, and by the time we were halfway across the Atlantic the Germans had invaded Poland from nearly every direction. I endlessly worried about whether I would ever see my family or my homeland again. I went onto that boat a boy, but I landed in America a man. And not just because I was bar mitzvahed. I assumed my cousin's name, Morris Siegel, along with his age, nearly seventeen. I knew no one but Max Hammer, but I had a feeling that knowing him would be enough. Everything he had said would happen happened. Though not exactly in the order he predicted.

The very first thing we did was head to Brooklyn to find Dorothy. The photo she had sent was taken in front of a street sign at the crossroads of Coney Island Avenue and Avenue J. We waited all day in front of the sign. Max had shown me her photo so many times on the boat that I was the one who spotted her first. Their reunion was like nothing I had ever seen—I was too young to have had a girlfriend, and I couldn't imagine what it must be like to feel that way about a girl. The kissing and the tears. They both cried. I had never seen a man cry like that before. It wasn't just that tears filled his eyes, they ran down his cheeks relentlessly. Dorothy took us to a little dairy restaurant and we ate like we hadn't eaten in a month, which we barely had. I miss those dairy restaurants—they were once as prevalent as Starbucks in the old Jewish neighborhoods. Warm blintzes and cold waiters. Max told her of his plan to wait to get married until he'd gotten his business going. Then she told him of her plan—she didn't care that he hadn't any money, she wasn't letting him out of her sight again. They were married that week. She was really the boss, from the very beginning.

I was able to make contact with a distant cousin in Jersey City who owned a dress factory, and I began to work there. As a pattern-maker's apprentice I fit perfectly into Max's grand plan, and I was happy to be working toward a rightful place in it. More than that too: the little we heard from home was not good, and doing the same work as my father helped me feel connected to him. The pattern-maker took me under his wing and I learned his way of making patterns, though I liked my father's way better. By the next year Max had convinced my cousin to back him in a dress house on Seventh Avenue. Besides lending him the money, my cousin lent him me, and in the blink of an eye the label Max Hammer was off and running.

The early days were my favorite. At that point I could make a pattern for any style. While the dress houses around us had fancy designers making original creations, Max had a different idea. He would send me to the newsstand every day to buy copies of Hollywood magazines:
Film
,
Photoplay
, and
Motion Picture
. If Carole Lombard, Joan Crawford, or Bette Davis was wearing it, we would knock it off. He had an incredible eye and could pick out just which dresses would look good on the average American woman while making her feel like a movie star. While most other pattern-makers needed the dress to produce a copy, I could usually do it from just the photo.

We weren't trying to fool anyone or anything. During Market Week, when the buyers came, we would leave the movie stars' pictures right out on the showroom tables. Our first line was even named for the actresses. Dorothy was a perfect sample size, and when she came out wearing the Greta Garbo or the Loretta Young, the buyers would break out the heavy pencils, as Max called it when they placed large orders. We were a big success, and by the next season other dress houses were copying our MO. But we were the first, and quite honestly the best. Before long Max moved his now pregnant bride from Coney Island to Central Park West. By that time neither of them looked like they had ever set foot in a Polish shtetl, let alone grown up in one. Dorothy now shopped at the finest stores on Fifth Avenue and the Ladies' Mile, where she bought the latest fashions from Paris and Milan. This meant I had more than photos to work from. I would take apart her beautiful dresses, study the handiwork, make a pattern, and put them back together. We were a dream team before the term even existed.

I found love as well. I fell in love with my Mathilda the minute I saw her on the L train headed home for Brooklyn. She was carrying fabric remnants that her boss had let her take home, and after sixteen stops I finally convinced her to let me carry them for her. She was almost a first-generation American; she'd been born on the boat—her parents had fled from Austria—and liked to say she was from nowhere and everywhere. Her parents welcomed me, and being part of a family again somewhat helped to ease my heartache. It was the summer of 1945 and the war had finally ended. People had brought back news of my family in bits and pieces over the years, and any hope I had of seeing them again slipped away with each horrific report. I knew that to honor them I had to live a full life, a life big enough for all of us. Soon Mathilda and I were married and had a child of our own.

There have been a lot of changes in the garment center over the years, but I have basically remained the same. Fashions come and go, but a pattern is a pattern. The shoulder pads of the forties and fifties were tossed out for the strapless numbers of the sixties and seventies. Unlike me, Max did change with the times. In the seventies he invested in discos, and he and Dorothy would dance their nights away. At least that's what I imagined—I never set foot in a disco. In the eighties they got into harness racing. They bought trotters and had their picture taken in the winner's box. They had a big life. Bigger than the shoulder pads that came back again in the eighties. I had a smaller life but wouldn't trade it for anything.

Eventually Max retired and he and Dorothy moved to Palm Beach. That's when his son Andrew took over the business. Max had lived the life he had mapped out on the boat for me all those years ago—his American dream. The only wrinkle was, he hated Palm Beach. Said everyone walked around in the same damn dress, the Lilly Pulitzer. He made his son promise never to knock it off. It wasn't worthy of a Hammer knockoff, he joked. But Andrew did not intend to knock off Lilly Pulitzer, or anyone else for that matter. Like his father, he too had a plan. His was to take Max Hammer to a whole new level by putting the craftsmanship and quality that we were known for into original designs. He went to FIT and RISD and interviewed designers and assembled his own dream team. They would hand me a sketch and I would create their vision. We worked well together, and I think it was the excitement of creating true fashion that kept me from retiring years ago.

The pattern-maker who comes in after me will never make a pattern the way I do. I'm one of the last in the business to do things entirely by hand. I drape muslin on a mannequin and then draw the pattern onto cardboard. I take the designer's inspiration and make it come to life—my hands, my work. The patterns are all done on a computer these days. Some pattern-makers don't see an actual dress until a fitting. But whenever they do, one hopes they treat it with the respect it deserves. The right dress has a bit of magic in it. The right dressmaker is like the magician.

I imagine those shoulder pads from the eighties will come back again, but I will not be here to place them. This is my last fall line. I looked again at the photo of my dress on the cover of
WWD.
It has been a good ride.

I'm not really Tab Hunter, movie star. But today I may as well be. I'm really Jeremy Madison, movie star. Okay, I'm not really Jeremy Madison, movie star, either. I'm Stanley Trenton, nobody. My agent named me Jeremy Madison the day he signed me, six long years ago. But today, all day, he's been calling me Tab Hunter. As if being the subject of a false tabloid outing scandal weren't bad enough, he has to call me names. And I had to Google the name to even get the joke.

Tab Hunter was a closeted box-office star in the fifties whose agent created a phony relationship between him and Natalie Wood to cover up his homosexuality. I don't fully understand his reference, since the truth is I'm not gay and this publicity fiasco does not involve a bogus relationship. But according to the maniacal mind of my raving-lunatic agent, whom I'm secretly afraid I would be nothing without, the truth is irrelevant and I am the new Tab Hunter. I will give him this: like Tab Hunter's, my success is closely tied to my looks. I've made eight movies in the last six years, a track record that has brought me the overnight success and stardom that I always wished for. Careful what you wish for, I guess.

I wasn't a child actor, but close to it. I was cast in my first role just days after graduating from Los Angeles High School of the Arts. It turned out I'm quite castable. I'm the boy next door. I'm a high school rebel. I'm a geek. I can even put on a superhero costume and believably save the world from impending doom in the nick of time. I'm also turning thirty next year. So I am afraid. I worry that my days of playing twentysomethings are numbered and that there will be no place for me in the next Hollywood decade. It's partly because of this that I play the Hollywood publicity game as little as possible—it seems like the best approach to lasting fame. I avoid the paparazzi and a few years back even moved to Manhattan, where it's easier to keep a low profile. Being publicly outed, even falsely, was hardly keeping a low profile.

I was in a limo heading down Lexington Avenue to the premiere of my latest movie at the Ziegfeld. Hank, my agent, was screaming at me on the phone, making it very hard for me to think. Since his normal talking voice starts at the level of a scream, when he actually screams it's like he's screaming through a megaphone.

The fiasco that had him screaming began twenty-four hours ago, when I walked in on my fiancée having sex with her personal trainer. Apparently the trainer-trainee cheating scenario has become commonplace. The lethal mix of innocent touching and tweaking and body-clinging spandex often leads to much less innocent touching, tweaking, and body clinging. After the shock wore off I did what any actor in my shoes would do in that situation: I called my agent. Hank labeled the whole thing boring, adding to my mounting insecurity with this gem of a comment: “The last thing I need is ten percent of boring.”

He claimed that as well as being boring, I would look bad if the truth came out. Can you believe that?
She's
unfaithful and
I'm
the one who'd look bad if the story were to break. He said it implies that I can't satisfy her. “Sex symbols do not have fiancées who cheat with trainers.” He instructed me to keep the whole unfortunate occurrence among the four of us and attend my premiere tonight alone. When people ask where she is, as they will, because she is a Victoria's Secret model with celebrity of her own, I should “just say she's under the weather instead of under the trainer.”

Truth? While it felt really crappy to walk in on that scene, part of me feels like I dodged a bullet. It was tough being with her. One star is hard enough to hide on the streets of New York—it's almost impossible for me to have dinner without interruption, or even see a movie. Try hiding a star plus a Victoria's Secret model. Especially one with no desire to be hidden. And two egos like ours would never have made for a happy family life. We both suck so much oxygen from a room that our children would've needed nebulizers just to breathe. Throw in my deep-seated trust issues, stemming from my parents' horrific marriage, and we were doomed from the start. I need a
nice
girl; a pretty girl, yes, but not one whose pretty is bankable. A girl I can trust with both my heart
and
my ego. And while my ego is bruised, I'm happy that it was bruised in private. So sure, it sucks to be cheated on, but now I'm free to find the right girl.

I felt like the worst was behind me. Until I woke up this morning and the worst was on the front page of the
New York Post.

Jeremy Madison, GAY.

Seriously, that was the headline. I was enraged for so many reasons. First, over my complete lack of privacy. Second, that GAY is still news—front-page all-caps news, no less. Third, that it wasn't bad enough that she cheated on me and lied to me. To cover it up, she chose to lie to the whole world about me! Apparently she had no problem appearing barely clad on the pages of a magazine but wanted to appear saintly in her “real” life.

Since no one told her I was going to remain silent—though Hank claims he told her agent, who promised to tell her manager, who was supposed to tell her publicist—she had obviously felt the need to get her story in the press first. The article went on to describe how she had been my supposed beard, covering for me to protect my multimillion-dollar career. (Enter Tab Hunter and Natalie Wood, once nicknamed Natalie Wood and Tab Wouldn't!) She cried about how difficult it was to be engaged to a closeted gay man. Night after night of rejection left her feeling ugly and empty, and she had to fill herself with…well, we all know what she filled herself with.

The reason my agent was just screaming at me is that I was refusing to take a shill to the premiere and refusing to make a statement. I don't think my sexual orientation or anyone's sexual orientation is news unless they want it to be.

I told my agent that I'm not interested in talking to the press.

His response: “I'm glad that talking doesn't interest you, because if you don't talk now, pretty soon no one will want you to talk at all. At least not onscreen opposite a leading lady for the ten mil you got for your last film!” He stopped screaming for a split second and said, relatively calmly, “Did you wear the pink tie I sent over?”

I laughed. “So we're embracing the gay angle now? You want me to wear a pink tie?”

“No!” he yelled. “I mean yes. Yes, it's October first, breast cancer awareness month—I told you this, the whole cast is wearing them.” I had totally forgotten. He continued, “Are you looking to give the press more evidence that you don't like breasts? You are to walk into that premiere with a woman on your arm and a pink tie around your neck or so help me god you will never work in this town or the other town again!” He hung up.

I looked out the window at the street sign—63rd and Lexington, just a few blocks away from hundreds of ties. I alerted the driver. “Sir, I need to stop at Bloomingdale's to pick up a pink tie.”

I entered the store at around six-thirty, with only half an hour to go until the premiere. My plan was, I would walk down the red carpet at the last minute, alone, and avoid an inquisition from reporters. As I reached the tie counter my phone rang again. This time it was my publicist, Albert. He comes across much tougher on the phone than in person. Face-to-face he's a bit of a mush.

Our conversation unfolded like the setup for a meet-cute in an eighties romantic comedy script.

He always calls me Stanley when he is very serious about something. He thinks it grounds me. It doesn't.

I put the phone on the counter and asked the saleswoman, whose name tag read
Lillian
, for a pink tie. She was an older black woman with beautiful silver hair who looked eerily like my third-grade teacher, Mrs. Glass. It was clear that she had already recognized me and had been listening to every word of my conversation. She was slightly giddy, the way some people are when they see a famous person.

I had no idea what kind of fan she was: the kind who would keep her mouth shut, completely containing her excitement; the kind who would say, “I hope you don't mind me saying, but I loved you in
Bridge and Tunnel
” (my last movie, in which I played a one-eyed serial killer, so it's odd for people to say they loved me in it). Maybe she was the kind who would ask for a selfie with me, which I doubted; there must be some kind of rule in the Bloomingdale's employee handbook against that. Or maybe she was the kind who mistakes her familiarity with me as one that goes both ways. This is more common than you might think. It's amazing how many fans will chat you up as if you know them as well as they think they know you.

Albert had not adhered to my request to hold on and was now shouting, a very non-Albert thing to do. He was so loud he might as well have been on speakerphone. The eighties rom-com continued.

I laughed for the first time in two days. I picked up the phone for a second.

Bingo. Lillian was the familiar kind. The kind who thinks my public and private personas are one. She thinks from watching me on
The Tonight Show
and reading about me in
People
magazine that she knows me well enough to fix me up. Albert heard her as well. He shouted.

I looked at her name tag again.

This couldn't get any more ridiculous, so I gave her the phone.

It had been a long twenty-four hours and somehow, after the betrayal and all the screaming, turning my life over to the Bloomingdale's mafiosi seemed like a reasonable course of action. Besides, I trusted them; unlike my publicist and agent, they were only making commission on the tie. Lillian, still talking to Albert on my phone, motioned for me to follow her up two escalator flights to the third floor. There she approached three other salespeople: a woman around her age who seemed to be the fixer, name tag
Ruthie
; a Latin-looking guy around my age, name tag
Tomás
; and a younger woman whose back was to me. At least she looked younger; I couldn't totally tell from behind.

They listened to Lillian intently, the consigliere eyeing me rather obviously, the younger one taking a quick peek over her shoulder, the guy staring openly. Her quick peek in my direction revealed that the younger woman was in fact younger. And she was pretty—unconventionally pretty and kind of sexy. I watched as she turned back to the group and emphatically shook her head:
No way
. She was refusing a date with a movie star. This just made her seem even sexier. But then Lillian whispered something in her ear. Whatever it was sealed the deal. She turned, walked over to me, and smiled. “I'm Natalie.” (I tried not to dwell on the coincidence.) “Give me ten minutes. I assume a little black dress is appropriate?” I smiled and nodded. She smiled back and was off.

Up close she was quite beautiful. Not model beautiful, thankfully. The kind of beautiful that radiates from her smile. The kind of beautiful I remembered from high school. Back then, before I was famous, I could trust that a smile was a smile with no further agenda. Now when a girl is nice to me, I have to question her motives. I hate being so distrusting, but fame has its downsides. Lillian handed me back the phone and I told Albert I had the date and the tie and that he should tell Hank I would be there soon. I promised to hold her hand, and when the press shouted questions at me I would just sweep by with my pretty date, saying that I was late.