Wallflower at the Orgy (10 page)

E. W. Fairchild was proud of his newspapers; he often said he would never allow editorial comment to appear in his pages. “Our job is to mirror the industry, not to lead it,” he declared. When his son, Louis, began to assume editorial responsibility in the late 1930s, the paper continued to have minimal impact; its reporters were seated ignominiously in the back rows of fashion shows and shunted around to the service entrance for outdated press releases.

Louis Fairchild began training his son to take over the company when John was fourteen; a student at the Kent School, he spent summers as an errand boy in the company offices. After graduating from Princeton, marrying the former Jill Lipsky, and working at a retailing job that consisted, John claims, of ordering paper panties for bathing suit tryons, he went to work for
Women’s Wear
as a reporter. In January 1955, at the age of twenty-nine, he was sent to head the Fairchild operation in Paris; before long, the leaders of Paris
couture
were referring to him as
le blouson noir
and wishing for the old days when
Women’s Wear
could be ignored.

During his indoctrination years in Paris, Fairchild went to parties at Pierre Balmain’s and learned to stand on one foot on a bottle of Dom Perignon 1947. He listened while Italian designer Simonetta told him her collection was inspired by the egg, and while Christian Dior told him, “Fashion is something of the marvelous, something to take us away from everyday life.” He ran a long series of interviews with the grande dame of
haute couture
, Gabrielle (Coco) Chanel, who said, among other things, “I hate breasts that show” and “Anyone past the age of twenty who looks
into the mirror to be pleased is a fool.” He feuded with Balenciaga and Givenchy, calling them the Dullsville Boys and dubbing their collections Flop Art.

When he returned to New York to become
Women’s Wear
’s publisher in 1960, Fairchild set about changing the publication from fashion’s pariah to fashion’s arbiter. He opened the paper up to jazzier layouts, surrounded the sketches—which are considered superb—with lots of white space, gave his staff the freedom to do what it wanted, and brought in bright new personnel. One of them, the late Carol Bjorkman (a beautiful young woman who died of leukemia in 1967) wrote a column that left its readers charmed and chuckling. “Le Grand Charles,” she wrote of a de Gaulle press conference she covered, “appeared—in a gray double-breasted suit with huge lapels (I am sure he is right—he is too large for the Ivy League cut), white button-down shirt … enormous gold cuff links, and a sweet touch—A GOLD WEDDING BAND.” Miss Bjorkman covered prize fights, political campaigns, and went to see David Rockefeller, whom she referred to as her friend at the Chase Manhattan.

Fairchild continued to print the hard news that kept the tradesmen reading, but he also began to run features about people who weren’t in the business at all. The most popular pages in the paper, the photo layout on pages 4 and 5, soon were filled with the marriages of Connecticut socialites, polo matches of Long Island horsemen, the lunches of The Ladies. “The Ladies … Are … BACK,” wrote
Women’s Wear
in a typical chronicle, “to the endless rounds … the forever decisions: Where to shop, what to buy, what to wear, where to wear what, when to go, how to go, why to be there … and—Who With? BACK: To the favored noontime spas … 
the Midtown Manhattan Muncheries.…” And printed next to The Ladies’ pictures were Fairchild’s comments on their clothes and ensembles: frequently, he would place large white Xs over their pictures to denote fashion sins.

The days of editorial nonparticipation were over. “Burn their asses,” shouted Fairchild, as he stormed through the Greenwich Village city room in his three-piece suit. His face, which bears an oft-noted resemblance to Alvin the Chipmunk, sparkled with glee when his staff members treated fashion with the irreverence he himself felt. “We want the staff to be themselves,” he said. “We don’t want them to become part of the Fashion Establishment, which is like an ingrown toenail. We want them to have a fresh eye on fashion and treat it with a sense of humor.” (Except for his daily lunches with designers at the Midtown Manhattan Muncheries, Fairchild leads a quiet life away from the Fashion Establishment, with his wife and four children in New Canaan, Connecticut.)

For its first exclusive,
Women’s Wear
took on
Vogue
magazine in a scathing attack that caused
Vogue’s
publisher Samuel Newhouse to cancel all his advertising in Fairchild publications. It began to expose the public to the designers behind Seventh Avenue clothes and give credit where credit was due—not to the man whose money paid for the production but to the man whose pencil determined the flow of fashion. It divided the designers into Greats, Realists, Classicists, Risers, and Giants and managed to infuriate all but the Greats. Eventually, it angered the Greats, too, and
Women’s Wear
achieved the sure sign of success in the fashion world when it was banned from James Galanos’s and Norman Norell’s collections for real or imagined causes. Designers’ collections were graded by
WW
like examination
papers; the marks often depended as much on designers’ deportment—toward
WW
—as on their excellence.

Fairchild’s policy was to get it first by any means necessary. He broke official release dates on press releases. He sent reporters scaling the walls of private collections. Once he instructed one of his male reporters to dress in leather jacket and boots and ride his motorcycle to interview a member of European royalty known for his penchant for boys. Designers who refused to go along with
Women’s Wear
found their seamstresses receiving bribe offers for sketches and themselves the recipients of Fairchild retribution. Priscilla Kidder of Priscilla of Boston refused to give
Women’s Wear
an advance sketch of Luci’s wedding dress; her reward was contained in
Women’s Wear
’s once-removed coverage of the wedding.

“There was Priscilla in front of the President … in front of Lady Bird … in front of Pat—and at one point her backside completely blocked the camera’s view of Luci. All of this effort—just to carry the three-yard lace train … A keen-eyed Washington observer, very close to the White House, comments, ‘I was interested to see how Priscilla was fawning over Lynda all during the reception.’ ”

When Mollie Parnis, who often designs clothes for Lady Bird Johnson, released sketches of several of Mrs. Johnson’s clothes to a competitive publication, Fairchild struck back. One day Miss Parnis was lunching at Grenouille and asked that her table be moved to a quieter spot to accommodate her luncheon guests. As it happened, she was moved to a table next to the Duchess of Windsor. Next day, in
Women’s Wear
’s column Eye, Miss Parnis was accused of moving in order to sit next to the Duchess.

If
Women’s Wear
’s tactics of revenge seem sophomoric
and its methods of obtaining stories unethical, they seem delicious to the staff. “We’re a throwback to yellow journalism,” said Richard Atkins, Fairchild’s publicity man, smiling. And James Brady, who has replaced Fairchild as publisher of
Women’s Wear
while Fairchild has moved up to president of the company, practically boasts about a four-million-dollar libel suit
Women’s Wear
incurred from Genesco, settled out of court when Fairchild publicly apologized for several errors. “That was a good one,” says Brady. He is blasé about
Women’s Wear
’s penchant for stretching the truth of
Women’s Wear
,” he said. And he is right about that: the inaccuracies range from minor facts or dates wrong to major flubs (
WW
once printed an obituary of a man who had not died) to gross
faux pas
—such as
Women’s Wear’s
page-one explanation of the 1965 power blackout. Rumor had it, the paper reported, that a “test of a revolutionary weapon to destroy enemy missiles” had deliberately drained the Northeast of power. “We overplayed it,” said Fairchild later, in something of an understatement.

What really propelled
Women’s Wear
into national prominence was a phenomenon that had nothing to do with its bickering with the Fashion Establishment. When Jacqueline Kennedy became First Lady in 1961,
Women’s Wear
scrutinized, recognized and publicized every thread she wore, and Mrs. Kennedy unwittingly provided the paper with scoop after fashion scoop. At one point, she grew so weary of
Women’s Wear
that, when asked if she read it, Mrs. Kennedy replied, “I try not to.”

The First Lady’s return to civilian life has not daunted her friends at Fairchild. Almost every purchase she makes is reported and usually applauded. “It’s the casual Jackie,” went one recent article, “that calls Paraphernalia, orders the Bush
Blouse in blue. Will she wear it with her new gold chain belt? Her Gucci shoes? And maybe pull everything together with a suède skirt, knee socks … even pull her hair back with a signature scarf?” Tune in tomorrow for the solution to these pressing questions.

In December 1966 John Fairchild spotted Mrs. Kennedy at lunch at LaFayette in an above-the-knees skirt. He called his office, which in turn signaled a photographer who travels with an electronic bleeper device in his pocket for just such emergencies. The photographer rushed to the restaurant and snapped the picture that was reprinted in nearly every American publication. “Jacqueline Formidable,” said
Women’s Wear
commemorating the raised hemline.

Women’s Wear’s
relationship with the White House has withered considerably during the Johnson years. It called Mrs. Kennedy Her Elegance. It calls Mrs. Johnson Her Efficiency, and her clothes are seldom applauded and only reluctantly. “The First Lady of the United States can, within reason, wear whatever she chooses,”
Women’s Wear
wrote tartly of one of Mrs. Johnson’s recent appearances. “Thursday she did.”

Lynda Bird Johnson is referred to as Lovely Lynda—LL for short—and the term has a distinct edge of sarcasm.
Women’s Wear
could be pleasant enough to Miss Johnson, particularly during what it considers her Golden Age—the months she was escorted by Gorgeous George (GG). But when Miss Johnson announced her engagement to Marine Captain Charles Robb
Women’s Wear
began to fret about her future as clotheshorse. Shortly thereafter, it published a devastating series of photographs entitled “The Metamorphosis of Lynda Bird,” which prominently displayed several pictures taken before the ugly duckling
became a swan. “George Hamilton may never go to Vietnam,” wrote
Women’s Wear
in crediting him with the transformation, “but he has done his bit for his country.” But the future looked grim to
Women’s Wear
, which asked: “NOW WILL LYNDA CONTINUE TO FLUTTER THOSE LOVELY WINGS? OR WILL SHE SLIDE BACK INTO PROVINCIAL ATTITUDES? She’s certainly come an amazing way in just two years. With George’s help, of course. And now it’s up to the Marines. Will Chuck get the message across to her about those cheap accessories? Will he find her a good shoemaker?”

LL, GG, Her Efficiency, and Her Elegance made regular appearances in
Women’s Wear
, along with an extensive supporting cast that includes Gloria Guinness (The Ultimate), Happy Rockefeller (Her Happiness), Princess Margaret (Her Drear), Ohrbach’s head buyer Sydney Gittler (The King), Balenciaga (The Monk), and, of course, The Ladies—Babe (Paley), Amanda (Burden), Chessy (Rayner), Didi (Auchincloss), Pamela (Zauderer), Linda (Hackett), Isabel (Eberstadt), and Judy (Peabody)—all of whom John Fairchild has favored at one time or another for one reason or another. “I sometimes wonder,” mused designer Bill Blass, “if we’d ever have heard of Isabel and Chessy and Didi if it weren’t for John.”

The Ladies themselves are rather fed up with the whole business. “At first it was flattering,” said Judy Peabody. “After all, what woman doesn’t like to think she’s pretty?” But after a while, it got to be rather a responsibility knowing that whenever one went out a photographer might be lying in ambush. “There are times,” said Mrs. Peabody, “when I would like to go out and not feel that I’m making an appearance.”
(It must be noted, however, that whenever Mrs. Peabody is photographed by
WW
she smiles.)

And it must be further noted that, for its part,
Women’s Wear
seems to be wearying of The Ladies. For one thing, The Ladies have begun to commit new and practically unforgivable fashion sins. “They’d rather be Socially Secure than Individual,” lamented one recent article criticizing The Ladies for not wearing dark stockings and buckled shoes. “AREN’T THEY TOO YOUNG TO BE SET IN THEIR FASHION WAYS?”
Women’s Wear
’s ambivalence toward The Ladies has been heightened recently: it ran a series of fictional adventures, written by one of their brightest young writers, Chauncey Howel, about two frigid postdebutantes named Didi Aubusson and Mimi de Nebbisch who take their decorators to lunch, shoplift at Lamston’s for kicks, and behave in several other ways that may or may not be Ladylike.

In the last year,
Women’s Wear Daily
has added fashion columnist Eugenia Sheppard. And its coverage of nonfashion events has broadened considerably. It prints articles on poverty, nuns’ orders, the Vietnam black market, and dragqueen beauty contests; its art, movie, and drama critics have always been first rate—drama critic Martin Gottfried is nationally recognized. And when reading
Women’s Wear
for its criticism is a little like reading
Playboy
for its fiction, there nevertheless are indications that
WW
is making a real attempt to place fashion in a slightly larger context. Despite the improvements, however, serious members of the fashion business wish that
Women’s Wear
would concentrate more of its efforts on being at least accurate, at least ethical, at least mature, at least responsible—traits that
WW
displays only on rare occasion.

If
Women’s Wear Daily
were writing about politics, its failings would be reprehensible. As it is, they are at worst, a
scandale
. For
Women’s Wear
is, after all, only writing about fashion. AND FASHION, NO MATTER WHAT
WOMEN’S WEAR DAILY
SAYS, IS AFTER ALL, ONLY SPINACH.