Wallflower at the Orgy (15 page)

Designing dresses, raincoats, swimsuits, luggage, furs and children’s clothes might have been quite enough for most designers; not for Blass. “As busy as you can be with the women’s thing,” he said, “I felt it wasn’t enough. I like making clothes, but I can’t get emotionally carried away by them. Adolfo, who does the hats for my shows, told me that one designer was describing one of his dresses to him and burst into tears. And at the Coty Awards, I sat in front of one of the winners, and he wept right through the fashion show of his own clothes. I think that clothes are a very necessary part of our lives, but to get so carried away by them.… Anyway, I would work on Seventh Avenue and have hours empty.”

Two years ago David Pincus, a Philadelphia men’s-wear manufacturer who realized that women’s-wear designers like Cardin were about to strike it rich in men’s wear, decided
to hire an American designer for his firm, Pincus Brothers-Maxwell (PBM). He asked his wife, his sister Sylvia, and several of his female cousins for suggestions, and the name that kept coming back was Bill Blass. Pincus went to see Blass, who agreed to a deal on the spot. “I had anticipated going into men’s wear,” said Blass, “and I wasn’t nervous about it at all. It seemed like such a natural evolution for me. And after all, I knew something about men’s clothes, if only from forty years of dressing myself.”

The first Blass collection for PBM made its debut in June 1967, and except for one green plaid kilt, shown with a green velvet jacket, it was a smashing success. Blass called the show his getaway collection, and its strength lay in its English country suits, in windowpane plaids, that had a marvelous outdoors, masculine feeling. Bonwit Teller decided on the spot to build a
boutique
for Blass. “Without even seeing a Bill Blass collection, both Miss Custin and I knew he couldn’t do anything bad,” said Bonwit’s Danny Zarem. “The way he dresses, his marvelous eye for color, shape, and fit—we could visualize just who he was designing for and what he would design.”

Among the men who wear Bill Blass clothes are Senator Jacob Javits, William Paley, Mayor John Lindsay, William Buckley, and Kirk Douglas. But the typical man in the Bill Blass suit is an affluent suburbanite who once owned a Madras jacket, plays golf at his country club, drives a Thunderbird which he thinks is a sports car, and brings a bottle of liqueur back from the islands every February and makes all his friends drink it. “He’s over thirty,” said Blass. “He’s tall, a little thick in the middle and heavy in the legs. He’s apt to be a business type. Sounds awful square, doesn’t he?”

Yes, indeed. The man in the Bill Blass suit does not want
to look silly—or worse, effeminate (the polite word he uses for homosexual). He wants to look with-it—which he does in his fitted, striped-checked Blass suit. He wants to feel secure—which he does when the suit is lined with silk covered with the Bill Blass double B insignia (the first B is printed backward) and buttoned with brass BB buttons. And he wants to look as if he had taste—which he does, his wife assures him, because Bill Blass was in town only last month, and
he
looked as if he had taste.

“I really believe the American woman is one of the reasons it’s taken so long for anything to happen in men’s clothes,” said Blass. “Years ago you’d go out of town and see some dame who was voting for Nixon and she would tell you she didn’t want her husband to wear anything but a navy-blue suit. She didn’t want to lose control of him, and she was terrified that if he dressed in anything that might be construed as effeminate, people might see what the true nature of their relationship was.

“But now I find women have rallied to my side. It’s the woman who says, ‘Oh, Fred, go ahead and buy those red loafers. They’ll be just wonderful in Boca Raton.’ And when women go out at night in minidresses, they don’t want their husbands to fade away into the background. They want their men to be part of the whole picture.”

The Blass look for men is not without its critics. There has been widespread disapproval throughout the industry of Blass’s use of signature linings and buttons. “To me,” says one men’s-wear manufacturer, “it’s like sticking a $150 price tag on your lapel.”
Women’s Wear Daily
’s publisher James Brady conceded that Blass has a great color sense and good taste, but said, “He’s not the most creative designer. He’s never created a new shape.” And George Frazier, the immaculately
tailored
Esquire
fashion writer, thinks some of Blass’s resort clothes are very so slightly effeminate—a charge Blass finds more interesting than accurate.

“Isn’t this fear of looking homosexual a peculiarly American thing?” he said. “There’s no group of men as vain as the Latins. Spanish men are immaculately tailored and each hair is perfectly combed. Even the bullfighter is as vain as any person can possibly be, but there’s never any question of
his
masculinity. I suppose it’s partly because the women in Latin countries have very little status, unlike American women.”

The success of his men’s line has done much to fill up Blass’s empty hours. When he is in New York, he leaves for his Seventh Avenue office at nine a.m. in a rented limousine. His secretary, Sandy Price, is waiting with coffee, three packs of True cigarettes, and a stack of letters, a few from would-be designers seeking advice on how to break into fashion. At ten, the phones start ringing, and Blass begins the work day, choosing fabrics, fitting clothes for the next collection and seeing important buyers. Lunch, observed religiously from one to two-thirty p.m., is usually taken at one of the Three La’s—La Grenouille, La Caravelle, or La Côte Basque—either with friends outside the trade or designers, like close friends Jacques Tiffeau, Norman Norell, and Oscar de la Renta, to whom Blass is “Bilbo.”

After lunch, Blass returns to his office until four p.m., when he goes up to the men’s showroom on West Fifty-eighth Street. At six, he walks ten blocks crosstown to his apartment, where the valet, a Scotch and soda, and a crackling fireplace are waiting. He may spend the evening out—at a small dinner party at Mrs. Gilbert Miller’s, for example, or
at the Horse Show—or he may order sandwiches from Reuben’s for himself and a friend.

Such New York days are dwindling down to a precious few: in a recent three-week period, Blass went from New York to Minneapolis (to do a men’s-wear show), to Chicago (for an Evening with Bill Blass to benefit a local hospital), to New York (to open his spring collection), to Maine (to spend a quiet weekend at his fishing shack), to Lancaster, Pennsylvania (to discuss watch design with the Hamilton people), to New York (to speak before the Advertising Women of New York), to Scotland (to pick the plaids for next year’s collection), and to Italy (to consult with his shoe people). Not surprisingly, his friends think he is working too hard. “He has an image as a party boy,” says fashion publicist Eleanor Lambert, “but three or four times a week he’s simply home in bed, collapsed.”

“If I didn’t have the house in Maine, I’d probably blow my top,” Blass said one night as he sat at home, collapsed, in front of his fireplace. “Your private life and your public life have to be separated. You cannot be all things to all people. You spread yourself too thin. I had lunch today with a client from San Francisco and she asked me if I minded traveling and talking to so many people. Actually, I find it interesting. But you do get tired of smiling.”

But Bill Blass goes right on smiling that genial smile. The customers come into the store and dumpy men from Detroit slip into corduroy knickers, and Bill Blass smiles and tells them they look wonderful. Dumpy ladies in Atlanta come to meet him at Rich’s and he smiles and they walk out with five dresses. Last year, he was even asked to design a tire. He turned it down, smiling. And jewelry. He turned that down, too. “I don’t believe in jewelry for men,” he said.

And there have been offers to design carpeting, wallpaper, fountain pens, sunglasses, and kitchen equipment—all of them rejected. “You have to evaluate those products very carefully,” says Blass. “Do they fit in? Do they have validity for you? Kitchen equipment doesn’t have any validity for me. But I’ll tell you what I would like to redesign. American automobiles. Why shouldn’t your convertible have a bold brown-and-white plaid upholstery instead of green brocade plastic? Why shouldn’t sports cars have white linen slip covers in the summer time?” He paused and grinned. “I’ll tell you this,” he said. “I wish all those gray-flannel-suited men had their cars upholstered in gray flannel. It would look much better on cars than on them.”

Robin Stone
is
the love machine. My goodness yes. Robin Stone, who drinks his vodka straight, who is positively insatiable in the kip, who runs the largest television network in
the country, and who is not only a magnificent sadist but a weak and vulnerable one at that, is the love machine. “I think Robin Stone is divine,” says Jacqueline Susann. “Don’t you?”

Yes.

Robin Stone is, of course, the hero of Miss Susann’s new novel,
The Love Machine
, and if he has brought happiness to almost none of Miss Susann’s fictional heroines—who are, incidentally, the most willing group of masochists assembled outside the pages of de Sade—he is nevertheless on the verge of transporting the book sellers of America to unparalleled heights of ecstasy. Hot on the heels of Alexander Portnoy and his Complaint (Philip Roth’s novel now has a staggering four hundred fifty thousand copies in print) come Robin Stone and
The Love Machine
(with a first printing of two hundred fifty thousand copies). And along with the book, as an added dividend, come Miss Susann and her husband, producer Irving Mansfield, who have already begun the first of a series of nation-wide tours dedicated to knocking Roth off the top of the best-seller list.

“It’s wild,” said Michael Korda, editor-in-chief at Simon and Schuster, which is publishing Miss Susann’s novel. “You have these two giant books out at the same time, and their merits aside, one of them is about masturbation and the other is about successful heterosexual love. If there’s any justice in the world,
The Love Machine
ought to knock
Portnoy
off the top simply because it’s a step in the right direction.”

The publication of
The Love Machine
should not be confused with a literary event. Not at all. There is nothing literary about Miss Susann—a former actress who became somewhat successful in the fifties doing Schiffli embroidery
commercials with her poodle Josephine—or her writing. She is a natural storyteller, but her characters’ motivations leave much to be desired and their mental processes are often just plain silly. I give you, herewith, a couple of typical sentences from
The Love Machine
, on what Miss Susann’s heroines think while crying, an emotional act in which they indulge thirty-five times in the course of the novel (a figure that does not include the number of times they refrain from bursting into tears in order to prevent their mascara from running):

“She was sobbing for all the rejections, all the men she had loved for just one night, all the love she had never had.”

And “She walked down to the river and knew the tears were running down her face. Oh God, it wasn’t fair! It wasn’t fair to put the heart and emotions of a beautiful woman into the heart of a peasant.”

As for her dialogue (“My forte,” says Miss Susann), I have never met anyone who talks quite the way the characters do in Miss Susann’s books. On the other hand, I have never met any of Jacqueline Susann’s friends, who apparently
do
talk that way. For example, James Aubrey, former president of CBS, who was convinced that he was the prototype for Robin Stone, called Miss Susann one day, and according to her, said, “Jackie, make me mean. Make me a son of a bitch.” Like that.