When the Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute opens “Charles James: Beyond Fashion”
on May 8, the exhibition will have 70 outfits, making it the largest
show devoted to the designer, who died in 1978 at age 72. Among them are
the Taxi dress, designed in 1929, which wrapped around the body and
fastened with Bakelite clasps, so that a woman could slip into it while
in the back of a taxi, and the Clover Leaf dress of 1952, which did not
touch the floor but undulated while the woman walked.
There
is also a black silk bias-cut dress designed 20 years before that, with
short kimono sleeves, a deep V-back and two black silk streamers that
fluttered in the back, at the waist, as the breeze blew.
That was the dress that I wore on the night of June 20, 1975, nearly 40 years ago. That night, I was Charles James’s walker.
I
went with the designer, as his date, to the Everson Museum of Art in
Syracuse for the opening of “Charles James,” an exhibit of 215 of
Charles’s drawings of his designs (and 50 by Antonio Lopez, the fashion
artist, and his collaborator, Juan Ramos), along with one of Charles’s
famous curvaceous Butterfly sofas that resembled a woman’s buttocks,
first designed in 1950 for Dominique de Menil. Other clients included
Lily Pons and Gypsy Rose Lee, Babe Paley and Millicent Rogers, Mrs.
William Randolph Hearst, Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney and Jeanne
Bultman, the wife of the artist Fritz Bultman.
Jerry
Hall was in the caravan that drove to Syracuse that night with Mr.
Lopez; Mr. Ramos; Homer Layne, Charles’s assistant and pattern maker;
Sputnik, the designer’s beagle; and me.
By
day, I was the editor of Art Direction magazine; by night, I was a
fashionista. I haunted vintage shops like Harriet Love, and dressed up
at midnight to go to Max’s Kansas City, with feathers woven in my hair. I
had wanted to publish Juan and Antonio’s work, and told them I wanted
to write about fashion. They introduced me to Charles, who wanted a
writer to help him do his autobiography.
I
first met him at the Hotel Chelsea in Manhattan, in his bedroom/studio,
Room 624. He was not an intimidating man. He stood 5 feet 6 inches,
just an inch taller than me. His hair was a gleaming black, and his dark
eyebrows were bushy, his eyes friendly and highly intelligent. He spoke
with an English accent. The room had a mysterious scent, unidentifiable
and slightly medicinal. Charles made his own perfumes, often using
civet and ambergris. He also burned fragrances from Floris, the English
company.
Sometimes
we would go to the workroom, down the hall in 618, which was filled
with dress forms, a sewing machine and a cutting table placed over a
bed. That was where Mr. Layne, then in his 30s, made patterns, from 1970
until Charles James’s death. “I did the cutting and sewing,” said Mr.
Layne (now retired after a long career working for the designers Tom and
Linda Platt), adding with a laugh, “When he sold something, he’d give
me $500, and then he’d borrow back about half of that.”
But
Charles was generous in other ways. “One time, we were shopping at Sy
Syms, and he saw this coat — a camel-color wool coat, a winter coat with
a tie belt — and he bought it for me,” said Mr. Layne, who also walked
Sputnik, drove Charles around the city and made their meager lunch of
boiled rice sealed in a plastic bag, then adding vegetables to it.
“He
didn’t care about food,” Mr. Layne said. Twice a week, they would go to
a nearby restaurant he remembered as the Wild Mushroom, where Charles
would eat a burger, and Mr. Layne the sautéed chicken livers and onions.
But on those days, when they had so little money that boiled rice would
be all that they could afford, I would excuse myself, and go home.
(In
2013, Mr. Layne sold a collection of more than 100 items of the
designer’s clothing, accessories and ephemera to the Met, for a sum
neither would disclose.)
It
was not always easy to be a friend of Charles, and Mr. Layne survived —
with a submissive grace — the designer’s mercurial personality.
One
such feud involved Halston: In 1975, Charles wrote an article for
Metropolis magazine, accusing the younger designer, whom he had known
since 1958 and who had hired him to help re-engineer some clothing, of
plagiarism after Halston didn’t include Charles’s name on the label.
When Charles wasn’t attacking Halston in print, he would attack him
verbally, to me. He would call Halston “that thief, that copycat.”
He
also accused Diana Vreeland, the longtime editor of Vogue and then a
special consultant to the Costume Institute, of purposefully ignoring
him. “If he thought you had crossed him, you were off his list,” Mr.
Layne said. “He felt that Diana Vreeland was in a conspiracy to keep his
work out of the magazine.” ( His clothes had not appeared in Vogue
since 1957.) He wanted me to write an article that would be critical of
Ms. Vreeland, but I wanted to concentrate on his talent, not these
furies.
I
was sometimes at the studio at night, when Antonio was drawing a model,
maybe Eija Vehka Aho or Nancy North. I would ask Charles how he made
the skirt flare, or shaped a bodice, and he would explain calmly and
meticulously. “He was vain,” said Paul Caranicas, an artist who was Mr.
Ramos’s partner from 1972 to 1995, when Mr. Ramos died. “And if you paid
him attention, he wouldn’t be cranky.”
To
keep Charles amiable at the Everson show, Mr. Ramos and Mr. Lopez
invited me to be his companion for the evening. I was to keep him
constant company, flatter him on the drawings and smile benevolently as
people came up to congratulate him. I was to prevent him from mentioning
either Halston or Ms. Vreeland.
I went to his workroom so he could choose a dress for me one June day, a week or two before the opening.
“Try this,” he said.
He
held up a brilliant orange silk satin dress, with slender straps, a
snug bodice with a décolleté neckline and a tight form-fitting skirt to
just above the knees, where a white stiffened satin band, reaching to
the floor, flared out. I squeezed myself in and couldn’t breathe or
walk.
“The dress is fantastic,” I said. “But I can’t wear it. It’s structured. It’s formal. It’s too small. It isn’t me.”
He
designed the dress in 1974 as a gift for Elizabeth Strong-Cuevas, a
sculptor in Manhattan and occasional patron, finishing it a few years
later. (Ms. Strong-Cuevas said that the dress was so tight on her, she
broke the zipper once.)
He asked me what I liked.
“The 1920s and ’30s,” I said. “Black, preferably, bias-cut, no structure and easy to move in.”
Days
later, I went to the workroom, and there was the 1932 number. It was
the most beautiful and erotic dress. The fabric slithered over the body,
just barely touching the skin. Air circulated between the body and the
dress, so when the silk did brush against the skin, it felt like a
caress. I was ecstatic. “That’s me,” I said. Charles looked pleased.
On the night of the opening, Charles went in early to inspect the show. He was not happy.
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Mr.
Caranicas said, “Antonio’s drawings were framed, and Charles had a
vision of how he wanted them hung, on black lacquered panels,
triptychs.” One of the triptychs was in the wrong place. “Charles took
it off the wall,” Mr. Caranicas said, “and started going to our hotel
with it. We saw him leaving with it, and we got into the car, and Juan
jumped out of the car, and persuaded him to return it, so it was hung
where he wanted it.”
Charles
wore a navy wool blazer and tan pants that night, Mr. Layne recalled,
store-bought. “He never made anything for himself,” Mr. Layne said,
except once, a swimsuit when he went to Capri, in the 1920s.
Floating
in the black dress and Manolo Blahnik black silk shoes, I circulated
next to Charles, and at dinner, nudged him (gently) to eat a bite or two
of food. Ms. Hall, tall, lithe and bubbling with that outsize Texan
charm, swanned about the museum, wearing another Charles James dress,
under a glamorous white eiderdown jacket from 1938. I gaped at the
jacket, and said to Charles how wildly beautiful it was. Halfway through
dinner, as plates were being cleared from the table, Charles said, “I
think you should wear that jacket now.” He went over to Ms. Hall, asked
her for the jacket, and then held it out for me to slip on.
It
was my first and last time wearing haute couture. It was a singular
moment, to be clothed in pure silk, inside and out, head to toe, a white
puff of a jacket over a slink of a black dress. I was in a state of
bliss.
The next day, I was back to my own clothes: jeans, Indian cotton gauze top, sandals.
That summer, I met with Charles maybe once or twice at the Chelsea. In October, my phone rang.
“This is Charles James,” the English-accented voice said.
He had called to invite me to a black-tie dinner, somewhere in New York, with Juan and Antonio, the next night.
“Oh,
Charles, thank you so much,” I said. “I would love to go with you, but
in the last month, I have fallen in love with a wonderful man, and
tomorrow night, we’re going to a Knicks game.”
There was silence at the other end.
Finally, Charles, who was once married and was the father of two children, said, in a warm voice, “I wish you happiness.”
But this was not the end of my relationship with him.
My
boyfriend, Gerry Sussman, an editor at The National Lampoon, wanted to
meet Charles James. Gerry loved the Knicks, but he also loved clothes.
He sometimes had his sports jackets custom-made, and certainly his
tuxedo.
Gerry
understood Charles’s genius. But he also wondered about his hair, still
jet black despite the advancing years. What kind of dye did the
designer use? Was it shoe polish? No, it was a black commercial hair
gel, Mr. Layne said.
Gerry
was such a fan of Charles’s that I had the bright idea of commissioning
my wedding dress from Charles. It was January 1977, and we were going
to get married that June.
By
then, the book project with Charles James was dormant. But Antonio and
Juan often invited Gerry and me to go to a cocktail party for Charles.
One day, I was visiting Charles in his studio at the hotel, where he was
sewing pieces of Chinese jade, beautifully carved small pieces in
clear, deep green, onto the waistband of a pale pink silk satin
full-length skirt. The jade pieces were going to be buttons, to close
the waistband.
Who’s that for? I asked.
“A young Chinese lady who has a lot of jade,” he said.
“Wait,” I said to myself. “I’m a young Chinese lady who has a lot of jade” (in the form of pendants, bracelets and rings given to me by my mother).
I raced home to Gerry.
“What if Charles were to design me a wedding dress,” I said, “using some of the family jade?”
“Sure,” Gerry said. “What do you think it would cost?”
“Twenty-five hundred?” I said. “He’s kind of penniless these days.”
“O.K.,” Gerry said. “But first ask Juan and Antonio what they think of the idea.”
I
called Juan, left a message, and later that night he called back. I
told him the idea, to commission a wedding dress from Charles, to be
ready in six months, by June.
“Forget about it,” Juan said in his high-pitched but street-raspy voice. “We like Gerry.”
“What does that have to do with commissioning the dress?” I asked.
“Charles will never finish the dress,” Juan said.
That
Charles James was such a perfectionist that he often did not finish
dresses was not a myth. “He wanted to get it right,” Mr. Layne said.
“Most clothing, you feel it pulling on your shoulder, and it’s not
balanced properly. He put the weight on the trapezius muscle that runs
across the ridge of your shoulders. That’s what carries the weight, and
that’s why they felt so light.”
“If you want to marry Gerry, marry Gerry,” Juan said. “Wear anything. Just forget about the dress.”
And so I did.
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