Wry Martinis Read online

  I’m constantly begging my wife to buy more miniskirts to show off her (lovely) legs. I was a very happy camper when, about the mid-seventies, the fashion industry glommed on to the fact that men were desperate for lacy underthings. The Victoria’s Secret catalog, which in the eighties replaced Playboy and Penthouse as the reading matter of choice, has long been a regular arrival in our home. And lest I start sounding high-and-mighty about butt floss, I’ll point out that a good linear foot of my bookshelf space is devoted to back issues of Sports Illustrated swimsuit issues showing off the Vargas girls of today: Cheryl, Paulina, Kim, Kathy … Alexis … Elle … Ashley.… No point, either, in pretending that I’m immune to the glories of Lycra and high heels. Not long ago, while I was walking down Fifth Avenue in New York, a young woman cling-wrapped in what looked like Azzedine Alaïa went clickety-clicking by on three-inch Manolo Blahnik heels. This apparition left me wailing at the moon, and it was only eleven in the morning. She was wearing dark sunglasses. On top of an outfit like that, sunglasses add a cool edge of mystery that makes it hurt even more.

  Best come clean on the boots, too. Why did that silly-but-irresistible Nancy Sinatra song “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’ ” twang such chords when it came out? What is it about women’s boots? The modern boot phenomenon, started in 1963 with Courregès’s quite innocent white kid boots, and before the end of the decade Grès was designing those wet-look, thigh-high, black-patent-shiny “wading boots.” From Pert Miss to Mistress Pert in six years flat, followed by all those Helmut Newton spreads in the seventies showing half-clad amazons strolling through Mad Ludwig’s gardens in jodhpurs with riding crops. Maybe the fascination with boots isn’t such a mystery after all. I’ve always suspected that the success of the movie Pretty Woman had more to do with that poster of Julia Roberts in thigh-high boots than with the movie itself. Just another theory I’ll be presenting in a paper before the Academy of Arts and Sciences next month.

  On balance, the only complaint I have against Pandora is that she’s enabled the whole unfortunate Madonna business, which, thankfully, now seems to be going away. Otherwise the post-sixties gave men rather a lot to get all het up about.

  Yet once the old endocrine glands calm down, more … shall we say … platonic images of feminine beauty do come to mind. One of the most arresting images of a woman that I have seen—aside from the first time I clapped eyes on my wife-to-be—was of a lady in a long evening gown. Only her shoulders and arms were on display, and her impossibly long neck, opulently chokered with pearls. It was at some opera premiere in Washington, D.C., in the eighties. I’ve forgotten almost everything about the night, even Placido Domingo’s singing, except for that epiphanous lady standing there in the lobby, exquisite and unapproachable, something between a Klimt and a John Singer Sargent.

  “Who is that?” I hissed to my wife, who herself was struck. The answer was Vicomtesse Jacqueline de Ribes.

  Later I came across the famous Richard Avedon photograph of her, taken some years before. It was the same pose. She hadn’t moved an inch in all those years, or gained a year of age. Here was a woman whose natural beauty and poise and clothes had bestowed something like immortality. Would that be possible in a miniskirt?

  Perhaps. Marilyn Monroe’s single most immortal pose had her in panties and an up-blown skirt, standing over a subway grate in 1955’s The Seven Year Itch. Tom Ewell, amiably ogling nearby, stood in for Everyman. This was fashion as peekaboo, a transitional moment between the demure fifties and the “Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?” sixties. She and Ewell never actually consummate their affair; and at the end he runs off to catch the train to join the wife and kiddies on vacation.

  Marilyn wore clothes the way the Vargas girls wore them—as things for the beholder to peel away, or see through. But with rather less of Vargas’s felicity. That image of her backstage with JFK and Bobby Kennedy at the president’s 1962 birthday party at Madison Square Garden, wearing a five-thousand-dollar flesh-colored, rhinestone-embroidered dress that she literally had to be sewn into, is both risible and haunting. Risible because Rubenesque blonds probably ought not to squeeze themselves into sausage casings, even for the president of the United States; haunting because she died soon afterward. Like so many beautiful women, she was at her sexiest in a simple, sleeveless summer dress. Or in whatever they happened to be wearing around the house. For my money, Elizabeth Taylor has never been as radiant as she was in Giant (1956), stepping through heifer pies in jeans and a plain shirt.

  Born in the fifties, stuck in the fifties. Stop me before I start praising Doris Day. As a matter of fact … why not? There was something ineffably sexy about that chaste tomato (as long as she wasn’t singing “Que Será, Será”), and I think it must have been the clothes. She and Marilyn had sort of the same body—more or less—sort of the same hair. But Doris did not hang around on top of subway gratings. She dressed like Mom. Marilyn dressed like Aunt Marilyn, Mom’s sister, the one she wouldn’t let you go spend the weekend in New York with.

  The most romantic movie of that decade was also the one in which clothes played the largest part—Sabrina (1954). Pygmalion, set on the North Shore of Long Island, to the tune of “Isn’t It Romantic?” Audrey Hepburn as the chauffeur’s daughter who falls in love with the boss’s two sons, first William Holden, then Humphrey Bogart. First we see her as a pretty but dreary young girl in a ponytail and a jumper with a long-sleeved black T-shirt. She’s sent off to Paris to learn to cook and is taken under the wing of a seventy-four-year-old French baron who sends her back to America a woman—with gamine-short hair and, to judge from what follows, about ten steamer trunks full of Givenchy.

  When we see her next, she’s standing on the Long Island Railroad platform looking drop-dead in a jewel-necked double-breasted suit, a turban—a turban!—big earrings, and with a French poodle with a diamond collar. Before you could catch your breath, she was gliding across a moonlit tennis court—in a straight-skirt ball gown with an embroidered overskirt. Then it’s off for a day’s boating with Bogie, for which she wore the shortest of short pants and a man’s madras shirt with an upturned collar. Ahoy, my heart. Then to Bogie’s Manhattan skyscraper office (30 Broad Street) for their big date at the Persian Room, in a black boat-neck sleeveless cocktail dress with a V back, accessorized with a hilarious sort of Swan Lake ballerina hat and elbow-length black gloves. Givenchy transformed a skinny tomboy into the most beautiful woman in the world. By contrast, Cecil Beaton’s subsequent voluminous ward-robing for her My Fair Lady seems a matter of, as the emperor puts it to Mozart in Amadeus, “too many notes.” Givenchy, whose clothes enabled Edith Head to take the Oscar for Sabrina, went on to name his new Italian fabrics after the film. Hepburn said of her Sabrina wardrobe, “My dearest wish … was that Billy [Wilder] would allow me to keep them. I could not have afforded a whole Givenchy wardrobe at the time, although I did own a coat I had bought with the fee from Roman Holiday.” Givenchy was such an indivisible part of Audrey Hepburn that twelve years after Sabrina, when she was making How to Steal a Million with Peter O’Toole, the following lines (quoted here from memory since it doesn’t seem to exist on video) were added to the script as an inside joke:

  H: Why do I have to dress like a washerwoman?

  O’T: Well, for one thing it will give Givenchy the night off.

  But to look back on the first half of the century …

  I’ve always been a sucker for Dior’s New Look of 1947, with its belted suits, shirtwaist collars, pleats, and longer skirts. What a relief it must have been to women who’d been through those long, improvising years of the war. Finally there was some decent material available, and the time to be creative with it. Frivolity is not esteemed when soldiers are being killed on beaches.

  The New Look coincided with the beginning of the Cold War. Though there’s no direct connection between wearing fan pleats and containing communism, politics and fashion did play off each other during the following forty-two years, until the Berlin Wall wa
s sledgehammered down. Remember the pajama suits that briefly became the rage after Nixon opened China in 1972? A definite improvement over the short-lived Nehru jacket. After a thoroughly depressing decade of Vietnam and Watergate and Iranian hostage taking, America elected a good old-fashioned, unapologetic cold warrior to the presidency, which made everyone feel confident, or at least better, and after Nancy Reagan wore Adolfo to the inaugural, signaling a definite end to the Rosalynn Carter era, it wasn’t long before ladies were dressing to the nines in puffy taffeta evening dresses and coming to the office in very sharp “power” suits. The Chanel suit came back, too, making people wonder why it had ever gone away in the first place; and the Pretty Young Things filled the tables at Mortimer’s, mostly in black velvet minis and shifts, as the masters of the universe snapped their suspenders and tightened the knots of their yellow ties. The masters of the universe were ridiculous, especially now that we know the secret of their success—insider trading—but the ladies of the eighties, when we finally beat the Evil Empire, were a pleasure to behold. I’ll take them over the grunge-clad, nose-bolted ladies that followed any day. Maybe I’m just terminally Republican, but I’ve never understood the point of paying a lot of money for clothes with holes in them or why beautiful women would want to clump around in combat boots looking like heroin addicts who haven’t washed their hair in two weeks. So glad that’s over.

  The forties: Aside from Dior, the decade seems to recede in a sepia haze of Andrews Sisters hair, gabardine, and painted-on stocking seams.

  The thirties: the Age of Slink. All those languid starlets, languishing liquidly in the back of their limousines. Alluring, in a vampish sort of way, but I always wondered if they had any energy left for the really fun stuff after so many cigarettes and martinis.

  The twenties: more energetic. Whole lot of whoopee going on back then, flappers flapping, drunk on bathtub gin, ladies holding on to their brimless cloche hats as they indulged in the new sport of motoring.

  No need to dwell on the suffragette teens. The higher hemlines must have come as a relief to a generation of men reduced to fantasizing about what their wives’ ankles looked like.

  Which brings us to the double-aughts, or whatever those zero-zero years are called, the Edwardian era of high collars, massive, corseted monobosoms, and below-the-ankle skirts. Yet there was something ineffably majestic to those haughty ladies of the boulevards with their S-curved silhouettes and tiny waists that still give rumor to stories of rib-removing operations.

  I love the shirts and neckties they wore. As I finish this, on a plane as we begin our “final descent” (why do they put it so alarmingly?), the flight attendants are walking up and down, wearing very smart single-breasted jackets, shirts, and ties. I can’t put my finger on it—or maybe I don’t want to—but there is something irresistible about this look. Marlene Dietrich, Julie Andrews, Diane Keaton, Maggie Smith, and Helena Bonham Carter in A Room with a View. A good friend of mine has just proposed to a woman who dresses in menswear to killer effect. I’m very happy for him.

  One night recently in Los Angeles, my friend Alison took me to a new place called House of Blues, where in order to get to the bar on the third floor you have to talk your way through more roped-off check-points than you ever did in Cold War Berlin, manned by muscle-boy bouncers wearing telephone-operator headsets (for heaven’s sake). Eventually we achieved the sanctum sanctorum, there to encounter such luminosities as Andrew Dice Clay and Jim Belushi. But it was not to them that my eyes were drawn, for everywhere you turned were beauties—and I mean beauties; hey, it’s L.A.—turned out in the latest Ter et Bantine and Isaac Mizrahi jackets, with microshort skirts. It took a great deal of concentrated effort to pretend to be more interested in Mr. Clay’s repartee than in the three-alarm pin-striped pulchritude sitting on the next couch over. Took imagination, too, to see the Edwardian palimpsest behind that cardiac-arresting modern version. But it was clear enough: The century had come full circle, and I was a long way from Philadelphia.

  —Vogue, 1994

  Explosions

  in My Skull

  The first one went off a month after I turned nineteen. I was on the FDR Drive at 106th Street in Manhattan, inching along in traffic when I became aware of a dull pain behind my left eye that within a few minutes turned into a burning sensation. Over the next eleven years, the pattern would repeat itself without variation hundreds of times: the ache, followed by the burning, followed by mounting pressure. Back on the FDR, I soon began to moan out loud and twist in my seat. I remember stomping on the floorboard, massaging my temples. Tears flowed from my left eye. On a scale of one to ten, I’d put the pain at nine. (By comparison, I once had a live cigarette shoved into my eyeball and had to wait fifteen hours to get to a doctor. I’d rank that pain—which was memorable—at six.)

  After three-quarters of an hour, the pain suddenly vanished. What the hell was that about? I wondered.

  It happened again the next day, and again, and again, totaling as many as ten one-hour headaches in a single day, every day for a period lasting anywhere from a couple of days to 6 months. I was diagnosed as having cluster headaches, a variety of vascular headache in which the blood vessels inside the head constrict and then dilate.

  At first the doctors I saw pretty much shrugged and prescribed various vasoconstrictive drugs, as well as painkillers. But the relief they provided was minimal. By the time the Percodan or Fiorinal did their work, the headache would have abated, only to return in a few hours, just as the painkiller was wearing off. I could not have been a very stimulating conversationalist during that time of my life.

  Frustrated, I turned to alternative medicine, which promised not only relief, but even a cure. I spent two months of mornings in the lab of one alternative guru while his assistants squirted extracts of corn, dust mites and chocolate under my tongue and logged my reactions. I ended up with my very own allergy serum and a supply of disposable hypodermics. Every Friday morning for weeks I shot myself in the bottom. The headaches got fiercer; the guru got richer.

  I had tests: regular X rays, tomographic X rays, electroencephalograms, a CT scan. Friends, relatives and coworkers all had suggestions: a clinic in Switzerland, biofeedback, psychoanalysis, homeopathy, more gurus.

  I read deeply on the subject. There was consolation in finding out that some of the great writers had had migraines (if not clusters). Lewis Carroll is said to have gotten the idea for Alice in Wonderland during the hallucinatory aura that preceded one of his migraines. Alexander Pope would call for steaming pots of coffee in the middle of the night so that he could inhale the vapors. (I’ll say this for my headaches: I’ve never since wished that I had been born in the romantic past. Give me the latter twentieth century with its abundant pharmacopoeia any day.)

  It was my father who, after witnessing a particularly bad spell of my attacks, finally found Dr. Frank Petito, a Manhattan neurologist. I think of him the way some people think of Elvis or Mother Teresa.

  Dr. Petito did two things. First he prescribed, in addition to the vasoconstrictors, Elavil (amitriptyline), an antidepressant with sedative effects. I chafed at the notion of being tranquilized until he explained that there was something in Elavil—they didn’t know what, exactly—that blocked headaches. Instead of getting ten a day, Dr. Petito said, I might get only two. Then he told me to stop smoking. “If you quit,” he said, “you probably won’t have these in five years. There’s a higher correspondence between smoking and cluster headaches than there is between smoking and lung cancer.” This was news. “There’s no data yet to support the idea that stopping smoking stops clusters,” he went on, “but I believe it, and several experts agree.” I was left to wonder why none of the half-dozen or so doctors I had been to before had told me this. I guess they were no Frank Petitos.

  So I gave up smoking. More or less.

  The Elavil worked wonders. Two headaches a day definitely beat ten. But they did remain a fact of life. By then I was working in the White House
as a speechwriter, a job that can have its stressful moments. I remember one day trying to bang out an arrival statement aboard Air Force Two—my drugs were in the cargo hold, an error never again to be repeated—and pleading with then Vice President Bush’s doctor to shoot me up with morphine, or something, so I could finish the speech. The most he would offer was Tylenol with codeine. It was a mark of what an analgesic snob I had become that I spurned his wimpy white tablets.

  A few days later, back in Washington, I found myself laid out on an acupuncturist’s table, my skull bristling with 20 needles. (“It won’t do you any harm,” Dr. Petito had said, “but I’ve seen no evidence to suggest that it will do you any good.”) I went through the mandatory ten treatments, each one increasingly painful since they insert needles into the exact same spot.

  The headaches never came back. I tease Dr. Petito about Western Med being aced by a Chinese lady with needles, but nice as it would be to think of myself as living proof of a medical breakthrough, the truth is that Dr. Petito was probably as responsible as Dr. Wong. The headaches disappeared almost exactly five years after I more or less stopped smoking. They had lasted eleven years, about a quarter of my life at the time. I don’t miss them much.

  —American Health, 1994

  The Passion of

  Saint Matt

  For Christians, Palm Sunday is an important day, marking the entry of Christ into Jerusalem for the Passover, and the start of the holiest week of the liturgical year. Priest and congregation read aloud the Passion of Saint Matthew, beginning with the betrayal of Judas Iscariot and ending in the laying of Christ in the sepulcher. It is the most dramatic stretch of prose in the English language.

  I consider myself a reasonably reconstructed, post-Vatican II Catholic, which is to say that while I suspect Latin is the language He prefers—an AT&T connection, if you will, to the scratchy MCI or Sprint of the new liturgy—my knees don’t jerk in the pews every Sunday when the priest tells me to shake hands with the person next to me.