The Americans’ first organizational meeting took place at the de la Renta apartment. The designers arrived, each with a small entourage, except for Burrows, who came alone. Chip Rubenstein, Anne Klein’s husband, would serve as the treasurer of the group. The relationships were friendly but competitive.
Halston and Burrows were chums from Fire Island. De la Renta and Blass had known each other for years from Seventh Avenue. Blass’s right-hand man, Tom Fallon, had met Burrows while they were students at FIT. De la Renta had a working relationship with Halston. “When I first came to Seventh Avenue, he did hats for my shows,” de la Renta recalls. “When I first knew Halston, he was a really nice guy, good looking. Then he started his own business.… He really was it. No question about it.”1
Lambert was there, of course, as was the fashion illustrator Joe Eula, a slight man with thick-rimmed glasses and the ability to create characters and convey emotions with only a few deft strokes of his pen. Eula, who died in 2004, was a magnificent, in-demand talent whose sketches appeared alongside Eugenia Sheppard’s column in the New York Herald Tribune. He also provided illustrations for Saks Fifth Avenue, magazines, and album covers, and worked closely with Halston. And as a result, Eula knew virtually everyone. He’d agreed to create the Americans’ set.
“We talked about the project and what it would be,” Burrows remembers of the first meeting. “There was a lot of competition between the other guys. And Joe would spark little fights and incidents. I was amazed how he could get everyone going. There was bickering already about the order [of the show].
“I didn’t care,” Burrows shrugs. “It wasn’t like a big thing to me if I went last or first.”2
In that initial meeting, the designers made a few key decisions. Their tiny finance committee would consist of Lambert, de la Renta, and Chip Rubenstein. They would keep count of the expenses and make sure each designer paid his or her fair share. They envisioned each designer having about twenty minutes to present a collection. Today, that much time allotted to each designer would be obscene. A runway show now lasts little more than ten minutes—and that’s for a designer presenting an entire season’s collection all on his own, not a few well-chosen highlights. But back then a typical runway show lasted forty or forty-five minutes, so twenty didn’t seem so terribly long, especially for a special charity event where the audience was looking to be entertained, not to shop.
The Americans were ready-to-wear designers, and that was what they would show. But they also decided they would make a few special pieces for the occasion.
To be frugal, they created a pool of money to cover model fees. But that meant that at least three designers had to approve a model before she could be added to the master list. A designer could still bring a favorite mannequin or two, but he alone would have to bear the cost. Again, this would be unheard of today. Designers are barely willing to share models over the course of a day of shows during fashion week, let alone for one event. In the 1970s, each of the half-dozen or so models in a designer’s show would regularly navigate eight or nine quick changes. Today, a designer like Marc Jacobs will hire fifty models, one for each look, to eliminate quick changes and allow for more elaborate styling.
Each of the designers agreed to share models and their costs, except for Halston. In 1973, things were different for him. Up to his neck in Norton Simon money and with an address book of famous friends, he used only a few favorite professional models. Otherwise, he would invite demi-celebrities such as actress Baby Jane Holzer and model Marisa Berenson to walk his runway. And he proposed inviting Liza Minnelli.
Fresh from an Academy Award win for her performance in Cabaret, Minnelli agreed to perform at Versailles. For Halston. For his segment alone. This did not sit well with other designers, most notably de la Renta.
“There was going to be an opening number and closing number with all the designers and one number for each designer. But Halston was being very mysterious about his segment. Every time we talked about it, he’d say, ‘Oh, we can talk about that later.’ And then, uh, I heard that Liza Minnelli is going to be in Halston’s show. Liza Minnelli was a great, great friend of Halston.
“Well, when I heard Liza would walk for Halston, I knew Raquel Welch was in Spain doing Three Musketeers. So I called her up and I said to her, ‘Would you please do me a huge, big favor. We’re doing this show in Versailles; it’s very important for me. Will you come and do one dress of mine?’
“When Liza Minnelli heard about it, she said, ‘If Raquel is in the show, I’m not going to do it. I’m going to be singing my heart out and Raquel is going to walk out and get all the accolades.’ So at that moment, it was decided Liza would be the needle that would thread all the way through for everyone. She’d be the only star in the show.”3
Minnelli agreed to work for free, but the designers paid $1,000 for two male dancers to accompany her and another $1,000 for a sound and lighting technician. Minnelli’s contract also stipulated that she could not do television gratis, so there could be no TV coverage of her performance.
Eula designed the set for free, too, with only his expenses covered. The designers received other financial breaks as well, the first from a very unlikely source. The chemical company Monsanto, which manufactured artificial hair for its Elura wigs, agreed to kick in $15,000, along with the expertise of the hairstylist Kenneth Battelle. Better known simply as Kenneth, he was the hairstylist to social swans, most famously creating Jacqueline Kennedy’s famous bouffant. Of course, Monsanto wanted more than a little in return. The company wanted the rights to a three-to-six-minute promotional film that would be put together from the dress rehearsal. And it demanded that at least one-third of the American designers incorporated Elura wigs in their part of the production.
At the time, Monsanto was in need of positive publicity. The company was one of the leading producers of Agent Orange, a defoliant that was used extensively in Vietnam, as well as the pesticide DDT. The latter was banned in the United States in 1972, and by 1973, Vietnam veterans were pointing to a link between Agent Orange exposure and certain cancers and birth defects.
Lambert balked at Monsanto’s wig request. She didn’t want the Versailles show to become a spectacle of corporate sponsorship that risked overshadowing the designers themselves. She responded with shock and bewilderment and a not-so-gentle rebuke.
“This totally violates the spontaneous, cooperative spirit of the show, which is to help American fashion in general,” she wrote in a memo. “It’s not a publicity stunt or a hard-sell promotion of Monsanto and its various departments in my opinion—unless there has been a serious miscommunication.” 4 Monsanto backed down. The designers used Elura wigs at will and Monsanto received a credit in the program.
Max Factor chipped in $25,000 to be the beauty company of record. Most of its money went to pay for the production costs and the models’ expenses, including their flight on Olympic Airways.
The biggest value, however, came in the form of the models. There were thirty-six of them: blondes, brunettes; black girls and white. They were at various stages in their careers—some who had been working regularly for years and others who were just beginners. They were from a generation for whom modeling was a glamorous job, but not a road to immense wealth.
For their services, each received a flat fee of $300 plus a $25 per diem. That covered their rehearsals in New York, as well as four days in Paris. It was a ridiculously low payday. One of them, a black woman named Charlene Dash, who was represented by Ford Models, already had credits in Vogue and had been photographed by Richard Avedon. She was regularly earning $50 for only a couple of hours of modeling at the Plaza Hotel.
Yet when Lambert asked her to do the Versailles show, Dash agreed. Eileen Ford, who ran her agency, was aghast. “Are you crazy?”
“I’d been to Paris before,” Dash explains, “but I hadn’t flown over just for the weekend!”5
A lot of the models felt that way. “I was excited about going to Paris and being part of another culture,” says Billie Blair, who had never been to the fashion capital before. “I respected the French and the name they’d made and the path they’d made for designers. But to be there with them actually? The Eiffel Tower! The Champs-Élysées! In my naive mind, there were going to be artists wearing berets and painting, and poodles with pink ribbons! This is the mind of a twenty-three-year-old.” 6
As the plans started coming together, the designers held occasional meetings at Eula’s studio on West Fifty-sixth Street. Every gathering was a blend of creative kibitzing, growing anxiety, and barely contained self-doubt. Each designer contributed between $5,000 and $10,000 for the show—although Burrows doesn’t remember putting in much of anything. In all likelihood, a significant portion of his assigned contribution came from Halston, a personal friend, enthusiastic supporter, and newly minted millionaire.
The stakes were especially high for Halston. “Some people are calling it American week in Paris and others the Versailles Follies, or according to columnist Hebe Dorsey, ‘A giant promotion for Halston, the golden boy of American fashion,’” wrote Sheppard, whose work appeared in dozens of newspapers, most notably the New York Herald Tribune.7 David Mahoney, Norton Simon’s president, was planning an extravagant dinner party in the days before the show at a famous Paris restaurant, the art nouveau masterpiece Maxim’s. “Halston had more invested in the show,” says Karen Bjornson, who started her career as Halston’s house model when she was fresh from her high school graduation. She remained one of his favorites throughout her career. “He had more responsibility.” 8
Halston knew he had to pull off something remarkable in order to live up to the hype he was doggedly generating. He decided the group needed a choreographer. Kay Thompson, best remembered as the author of the Eloise children’s books and for her role in the 1957 Stanley Donen film Funny Face, was an experienced choreographer and also happened to be Minnelli’s godmother. Her retainer, plus the cost of an assistant, was $10,000. It was the American’s single largest expense, but it would turn out to be money exceptionally well spent. The designers agreed that when it came to the production, Eula and Thompson would have the last word, which was a quaint idea that dissipated on the wind almost as soon as it was uttered.
The gist of the American plan was to re-create scenes from Funny Face, opening with Minnelli, her two dancers, and all the models performing a version of “Bonjour, Paris,” the number Audrey Hepburn sang in the film about an ingénue introduced to fashion in the big city. Having settled on a theme, and agreeing on how the expenses would be covered, the designers were left to anxiously and thoughtfully determine what styles they would present to the world’s elite.
* * *
Since Eula was in charge of the set, the designers came to a consensus that he should be dispatched to Versailles to do advance work. Eula took Françoise de la Renta along because of her familiarity with Paris and the French fashion establishment.
The Palace of Versailles is about an hour’s train ride west of Paris. The town of Versailles that exists beyond the palace walls is little more than a well-preserved little suburb with modest businesses, unmemorable restaurants, and a grand city hall that will forever lie in the shadow of the palace’s gold-encrusted splendor. Eula and Françoise were the first among the American contingent to walk across the expansive gray-stoned Courtyard of Honor, and there inscribed high above their heads on the south wing of the palace—just before the ornate gates leading to the Royal Courtyard—was an inscription they worried would set the tone of the show: A TOUTES LES GLOIRES DE LA FRANCE—To all the glories of France.
They had arrived in the belly of the beast.
The Royal Opera House at Versailles, known as the Théâtre Gabriel, was designed by Ange-Jacques Gabriel—France’s most prominent architect of the eighteenth century—and was completed in 1770. It is an expression of noble wealth and extravagance that can only exist under a monarchy. It is a place of pomp and circumstance and intimidation by lavishness.
Four carved golden pillars flanked the theater’s proscenium stage. A heavy pale blue curtain decorated with fleurs-de-lis served as the backdrop. The walls were adorned with lush renderings of celestial creatures, reclining semi-nudes, and other flashes of bacchanalian indulgence. Seven chandeliers glittered from the ceiling and a large central chandelier served as an overhead focal point and hung above the king’s loge.
The theater walls looked as though they were hewn from marble but instead were the result of a trompe l’oeil effect on wood. This aesthetic trickery made the walls light enough to be shifted to suit any production. The gold and the crystals that dangled from the chandeliers, however, were real. Originally lit with two thousand candles, the chandeliers made the theater an enormous fire hazard, which helps explain why in its first twenty years it was used fewer than forty times. The theater was inaugurated in 1770 with a lavish production of Persée, an opera based on the Greek myth of Perseus, to celebrate the marriage of Marie Antoinette to Louis XVI.
Rows of blue velvet benches lined the wooden floor and three tiers of balconies rose up toward the ceiling. While the theater itself was far and away more extravagant than anything that might be constructed today, it was also an uncomfortable place to watch a show. The main floor seats were glorified bleachers, nothing like the deep-cushioned stadium seating complete with cupholders in today’s film theaters.
The theater presented clear challenges for a fashion show. First, it was enormous; it would easily dwarf the models. The wings soared forty-five feet high. And it featured a classic proscenium stage. There was no runway and there were no plans to extend a catwalk into the audience. So the presentation would essentially be a theatrical production, with side-to-side movement rather than the back and forth promenade of a typical fashion show. The clothes would have to hold their own in a theater built and embellished for a king.
During the trip, Eula met with the unionized technicians at Versailles to go over lighting requests and measurements for the set design. The Americans wanted to use colored lights and chiaroscuro effect to create a sense of drama and mystery on stage. The lights would shift in a geometric sequence in shades of blue, primrose, and magenta to bring the production to life.
The sets for the American designers were fairly plain. Eula’s freehand sketches of Paris landmarks painted on a scrim would serve as the backdrop. The unadorned aesthetic of the Americans stood in stark contrast to what the French were planning. They had hired the director Jean-Louis Barrault, who proposed a modern version of the sort of spectacle that would have been presented during the time of the monarchy. If they were going to celebrate couture, they would do so in its regal, stupefying tradition. Barrault assigned each designer a particular float that was inspired by history or the designer himself.
The French planned to use a live orchestra. The Americans were using recorded, contemporary music. The French were sparing no expense. The Americans, due to their need for frugality, the complications of organizing an event from across the Atlantic, and a desire to reflect their modern sensibility, kept things simple.
* * *
After a few days in Paris, Françoise de la Renta and Eula returned to New York for a final meeting with the group at Eula’s studio. It was time to settle the fine details, which meant that Halston and Oscar de la Renta had yet another opportunity to butt heads.
“I needed to call Paris to give them the order of the program,” de la Renta explains. “Who will be first, second, you know. I’m the one who is supposed to call Marie-Hélène to give her the order.”9
God forbid that this decision be simple and free of subterfuge.
De la Renta and Blass left their respective showrooms at 550 Seventh Avenue and shared a cab for the short ride to Eula’s studio. As they made their way through midtown traffic, they discussed the running order. De la Renta suspected that Halston would be gunning for the grand finale slot, and he did not want him to have it. He was tired of Halston’s shadowy shenanigans, his attempt to hog Liza Minnelli’s talents, and his haughty attitude. Everyone was.
Yet de la Renta knew he couldn’t suggest that the designers show in alphabetical order, because that would mean he would go last. The other designers would see it as a transparent attempt to gain an advantage. It would certainly rile Halston and a fight would ensue.
So de la Renta told Blass that he planned to suggest they all draw straws from a bag to determine the order; that way, no one could complain. It would be a matter of luck—and if luck were on de la Renta’s side, Halston would not get to show last. Blass nodded his approval.10
For that final meeting, all the designers turned up except Klein. Chip Rubenstein was there, though, representing her interests and dutifully keeping track of the group’s expenses. Kay Thompson was on hand, too, as was Eula. The debate over the order of the show began with an unconvincing display of magnanimity: the designers all respected Thompson’s résumé and her skill, so they asked for her opinion. She suggested opening with Klein, because she was the only female designer and her clothes were the least formal. Thompson wanted Burrows to show next because he was the young rebel, and while his clothes evoked seventies nightlife, they had an ease and lightness that was more appetizer than main course.
Blass was an established ready-to-wear brand. He designed for an American ideal—a sporty, sophisticated dame. He should go third.
Thompson suggested de la Renta show fourth because his work was more formal than Blass’s but was still mostly daywear. Halston, she said, should be the finale. Uh-oh.
“How did you come to this conclusion?” demanded de la Renta.
“Because Halston makes evening clothes,” Thompson explained.
In exasperation, de la Renta exclaimed: “So do I!”
Before Thompson could respond and de la Renta could embark on a full-throated argument, Blass spoke up. “Sounds great!” he chirped.
“I could have shot him,” de la Renta recalls.
After the meeting wrapped up, Blass, de la Renta, and Rubenstein commiserated on the street. “You really disappointed me today,” Rubenstein told de la Renta. “You let Halston get away with what we were worried about.”
The next morning, de la Renta called Rothschild in Paris to give her the order of the American segment of the Versailles show. He said it would be as follows: Anne Klein, Stephen Burrows, Bill Blass … Halston, and, finally, Oscar de la Renta.
When Thompson’s assistant checked in with de la Renta to make sure the show’s order had been transmitted to Paris, de la Renta told him what he’d done. He also said that if Halston had any questions about the order, he could call him. De la Renta was ready for a fight.
Halston never called.11
With the order of the show established, the sets settled, Thompson scheduled to choreograph each segment, and the cost of the show underwritten by corporate donors, all that was left was to build anticipation and sell tickets. The proceeds from ticket sales would go directly into Versailles’s coffers. Women’s Wear Daily, which in the 1960s had done so much to turn American designers into personalities, worked overtime to transform the charity event into an international “battle” between French and American fashion. Indeed, it was WWD that promised a showdown. The trade publication planted the seed that the winner—as determined by WWD, of course—would claim some sort of moral victory.
But while Women’s Wear Daily fanned the flames, the French press remained characteristically blasé. The fashion editor Eugenia Sheppard—tiny, blond, and feisty—captured the exaggerated French malaise, reporting: “‘One thing I can tell you for sure,’ says a certain French prince who doesn’t want to be mentioned by name. ‘No Frenchman would ever pay around $500 to go to this kind of evening. Everyone I know has had a free ticket given to him, usually by an American.’”12 He exaggerated the $235 ticket price for effect.
The general-interest media wavered between dismissal—it was just another charity event for the usual cluster of social butterflies—and complaints that the show was a frivolous endeavor by the American fashion industry in the middle of an energy crisis caused by the OPEC oil embargo. “Not only should any charity money have gone to Israel, some tongues wagged, but such conspicuous consumption hardly fitted into the trials and tribulations of a Western world shivering through the Arab oil squeeze (though for the time being it has not affected France),” wrote Jonathan Randal in the Washington Post.13
But most everyone gave it high approbation in advance, as it promised to be a splendid source of fizzy gossip.
“I went from New York, from the women’s department, to cover it,” recalls Enid Nemy, who spent forty years as a writer for the New York Times. “They wanted a feature story, not fashion. They wanted the party atmosphere, not just a show review.”
The Paris and New York social worlds overlapped, and the wealthy regularly crossed the Atlantic for the promise of a good time. No one was about to miss out on a good party. But one had to be invited to spend $235 per ticket. In France, getting on the list could be accomplished with the right family name. In New York, family name was important, but money could make up for having had the misfortune of being born a Jane or John Doe.14
It was useful to know someone, to be someone of modest fame, or to fabricate some convincing story about precisely why one simply had to be included. The whole experience was a bit like the annual Costume Institute gala at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a similarly curated extravaganza that takes on outlandish importance among those who traffic in social currency. In 1973, the breathlessness was palpable in the telegrams and letters sent to Eleanor Lambert’s office. Lambert was put in the exasperating position of navigating conflicting international schedules and whiny demands.
The John Barry Ryans made a last-minute decision to go, according to a rushed cable communication: “Could the tickets be sent to the Plaza Athénée and paid for upon their arrival?” Stuart Kline of Philadelphia added incorrectly and only sent $900 for four tickets. He had to be contacted to make good on the missing forty dollars. “Please pardon me for writing rather than having the letter typed, but my secretary has been out.…” For her part, Lambert barely concealed her impatience in her own memos: “I have simply forwarded your check to Paris. If your cancelled check isn’t receipt enough, I suggest you request one in Paris.” 15
Guests made out checks to the Versailles Foundation and Lambert forwarded them to Rothschild at her Paris office in the eighth arrondissement. For her part, Rothschild had assembled an all-star list of attendees. She invited Princess Grace of Monaco to be her special guest. The celebration was now under the patronage of French prime minister Pierre Messmer and the U.S. ambassador to France, John N. Irwin II—whose name was misspelled as “Irwing” on the official invitation. It was a hectic few weeks. But with the wealthy placated and designer egos tamed—for the time being, at least—everything had come together.