CHAPTER FIVE CHAMPAGNE SUPERNOVAS 
Spring 1989–Spring 1992
Carolyn represents a time that no longer exists,” observed Michelle Kessler, Carolyn’s colleague at Calvin Klein. There was a sense of liberty and possibility in the worlds of fashion and art in New York in the early 1990s, and that joy encompassed nearly every facet of Carolyn’s life. These were, unbeknownst to the people living through it, the last years of analog, where certain kinds of improvisation and serendipity could be taken as a matter of course. Young people often journey west, or perhaps even to the Far East, to find themselves, but they come to New York to invent themselves. Who should I be? Who are my people? Where is my home? These were the questions animating Carolyn in the first months after her arrival in New York.
While Carolyn already had a clear idea of who she was on the inside, once in New York, she tried on a variety of exteriors. She dropped the sweatpants and sweatshirts of her college days. At times, when she was not at work, she dressed like a Bloomsbury bohemian in flowing dresses accessorized with Chuck Taylors. Other times it was jeans and a white button-down shirt. Carolyn’s hair, always long and thick, was highlighted but had undertones that matched her darker, thicker eyebrows, resembling, in those first years in New York, more the Romanesque Monica Vitti than her later incarnation as a Grace Kelly diamond-ice blonde.
The way Carolyn looked was obviously a boon for a job in fashion, but her charm was an equal part of her appeal. According to friends and colleagues, she was completely at ease speaking with anyone.
“The Personals department on [the] eleventh floor was for ‘personal orders,’ where VIPs like socialites and actors, such as Bianca Jagger, Sarah Jessica Parker, Susan Sarandon, and Fran Lebowitz, were invited to come in within the days after one of the shows to place orders, anything from the runway,” explained Kessler.
Another colleague explained, “Post-show, retail stores like Neiman Marcus and Saks were also placing orders at the same time, so everything would go into production at once. This was before the first Calvin retail store opened. When Carolyn did not have this parade of VIPs coming in, it was about following up with VIP clients and nurturing new relationships.”
To succeed in Personals you couldn’t be intimidated by celebrity. Carolyn was not, partly because unlike many others, she noticed which celebrities had substance and which did not. Anyone of substance was of interest to her.
She especially admired women whose lives and careers revolved around philanthropy and journalism. Clients like Blaine Trump, Annette Bening, Diane Sawyer, Patricia Buckley, and Sharon Stone needed to look sophisticated and modern, but they were not women whose lives revolved around fashion. “Carolyn was not ‘expensive,’ ” said Kessler, “but she had a talent for handling expensive people.”
Carolyn and her assistant, Rachel Bold, were both tall and blonde, so they jokingly called each other “Muffy,” a playful dig at their many coworkers who came from blue-chip stock. The joke, however, alluded to a conundrum of New York Carolyn had not completely figured out. She had been able to sidestep whatever tensions of class and exclusion she may have encountered with the Greenwich elite, but New York City presented an entirely new social ladder, one that was especially conspicuous in the world of fashion, where many young women attained entry-level jobs because their parents were important clients. In the 1990s, people still checked the Social Register, and inclusion in the “upper echelons” just wasn’t going to happen if your name wasn’t in that book. Happily, there were places in New York for the young women, like Carolyn and Rachel, who were hired because they were bright, beautiful, and willing to work hard.
At one point, they even dated brothers. Sometimes they would scream at each other about what a client should wear, but the tirades always ended with the affectionate wink of their co-opted sobriquet. It also spoke volumes about Carolyn that in a world where assistants were often expected to cower, she encouraged Bold to not only voice her opinions, but fight for them. Their bond helped the two manage the moments when the office drama approached a summit. (“Calvin just came in on her broom,” Carolyn would say during particularly chaotic days, raising her right eyebrow, a sure sign that mayhem was to follow.)
At the time, Calvin Klein gave his employees clothing allowances. The young, green girls didn’t make sizable salaries, so this “gift” meant a lot—they would want to make it count. That spring, Sue Sartor, a design assistant who now has her own line of dresses, was relocated during construction along with her boss, Monica Roberts, near Carolyn’s office. Sue remembers, “We were trying things on, all in these beautiful fabrics with earthy names like anthracite or nutria. I was self-conscious because I felt that I didn’t have the same shape as a lot of the girls, who were usually model-tall and thin. We were putting on form-fitting silk kimono blouses, or three-button jackets, and she could see I felt shy and unsure. Carolyn walked close up to me and softly said, ‘You have a beautiful body, and you should always be proud of it.’ ”
This is not something a lot of women in fashion were apt to say to one of their own who did not fit the tall, lean proportions of a model. Another employee remembered Carolyn once touching the hair of another colleague, remarking, “You look so beautiful today. I saw you getting out of the cab for work, and you just looked happy.”
Carolyn valued her female friendships, and Calvin Klein was a workplace of many women; the feeling of sisterhood was predominant. Especially after growing up surrounded by Ann, Jennie, and two impressive sisters, Carolyn was perfectly suited for the office’s amalgamation of female wisdom, empowerment, and verve.
In keeping with Calvin’s habit of looking to his employees as sources of ideas and inspiration, Calvin asked that every employee take a Polaroid picture of what they had on every day and send them up to his office. For Carolyn, whose style had remained decidedly more bohemian in the very early nineties, this could vary wildly. Polaroids from the time show Carolyn in a black or white T-shirt, sometimes with a black pencil skirt and high-heeled black wedges, or with black leggings, no socks, and penny loafers. Another had her in a black shift dress over a white T-shirt, her eyes so intense and her hair so long and wild that she looked almost otherworldly. In a group shot, all the girls have on black, but Carolyn stands out with a black cap placed jauntily atop her head.
One former supervisor said, “Sometimes she would be wearing a fisherman’s sweater, track pants, and sneakers, her hair wild. No makeup. Carolyn had an incredible eye and instinct, which is why she moved so quickly from sales to PR and then to shows. She was very creative, not a prima donna and not overly groomed.”
Carolyn possessed an inimitably original, wildly engrossing brand of magnetism that held those around her spellbound. It’s an energy that affects every facet of one’s being. Mentally, emotionally, and intellectually, it’s as if she brought just a little more with her to the planet. The “just a little more” had certainly been evident to her peers as a child, teenager, and university student. Now it was apparent to everyone on Seventh Avenue.
Carolyn’s colleagues began imitating her clothes and manner. Assistant designer Jessica Wade remembered that “every woman who worked there was following [Carolyn’s] style in one way or another. I remember thinking a lot about wearing no mascara” because Carolyn didn’t. They had contests to see who could show up with the dirtiest head of hair. Once she wore a long midi Calvin skirt with Chucks on her feet and only a fitted black leather jacket as a shirt. Soon, Chucks, midi skirts, and jackets as shirts made appearances all over the office. If Carolyn ran out to the drugstore, she would bring back a lipstick or a vial of Abdul Kareem Egyptian Musk Oil, which she would buy from street vendors and share with the other girls.
“Here, try this. This shade will look beautiful on you.”
“Try this oil. Doesn’t it smell like clean, first love?”
This was Carolyn’s signature scent. One can’t help but wonder, in a fragrance version of Charles Foster Kane’s Rosebud, if her father had brought this musk oil back from his work in Egypt.
But her influence went far beyond 39th Street. It was in her second year that she grew close to Zack Carr, who had been Calvin’s right-hand man since 1970. “Whatever one thinks about what we stand for in terms of being nontraditional, modern, clean—that was Zack,” Calvin has said. Over the course of their friendship, Carolyn became a muse and inspiration for Carr, and his pencil-drawn sketches in countless Hermès notepads began to feature her silhouette. Looking at the images, one understands exactly what Carr saw in her. Her long and slender form, with just the right amount of stylish disinterest, is animated by movement and energy. His sketches always look like a breeze has just blown through.
“Carolyn’s first day, everyone at Calvin Klein was talking about her,” said Zack’s brother George Carr. “When Zack came home, his description to me was, ‘She’s different. She’s special. Her body temperature is just higher.’
“I remember the first time I met her, she was already seated with Gordon Henderson outside Tartine, wearing a sleeveless black cashmere turtleneck and a midi black-and-white tweed pencil skirt, all Calvin. The only way to describe it,” George recalled of approaching the corner of West 11th and West 4th Streets, “is that I suddenly saw this creature. And she was all in her hair. Laughing, with expansive arm gestures, and lush hair that seemed to have a life of its own.”
Carolyn’s influence on Zack (who died of a rare cancer in 2000) was profound. He often wondered, “How would Carolyn put this together?” Carr was the designer who convinced Calvin to “let Carolyn make him hip,” said Carr’s brother George.
Carolyn enjoyed an independence and sense of purpose in the early Calvin days that would stand in stark juxtaposition to the constrained orbit she would later occupy. She relished her East Village life, telling Women’s Wear Daily in 1992 that she had “to step over drunks and crack dealers to get to my apartment. Everybody at Calvin thought I was crazy, but I couldn’t imagine coming to New York and living anywhere else. Even with all the weirdness, I felt comfortable and had fun.”
“In her apartment on Second Avenue, she had one chair, three champagne glasses, and mountains of clothes,” Michelle Kessler said. It was a place to shower and change before the next round of excitement, and maybe sleep, of which she tried to do very little. Carolyn served as a tour guide to many of the coolest places downtown, corralling her colleagues to join the excitement at Buddha-Bar and MK.
Eric Goode, who owned MK, said, “She’d come in a lot, but she wasn’t wild and crazy or anything. I really liked her.” There was also Tunnel, Cognac, Nell’s, Limelight, Palladium, Stereo… endless possibilities; Carolyn knew the particulars of each. Picture a taxi careening downtown, night air whooshing through the open window as the radio blares Black Box’s “Everybody Everybody.”
Some of the clubs were havens for heavy drug culture, but that wasn’t Carolyn’s scene. She smoked Marlboro cigarettes, but no friends recall her being incapacitated. Not even from too many glasses of wine or dirty-vodka martinis, one of her standbys. What buoyed Carolyn was conversation, dancing, shrieks of laughter, and, above all, company. For all her confidence, “she did not like to be alone,” one colleague pointed out.
“I was at dinner with a friend,” remembered MJ Bettenhausen, “and we thought, let’s call Carolyn. This was in the ancient pre–cell phone days when one would use a pay phone, which every restaurant had. She was there before we got back to the table, her hair wet from the shower, flying everywhere. She was so animated and lively in conversation that she was unfazed when a chunk of her hair grazed the candle and singed. Even though it sizzled and smoked, she shook it out and kept talking.”
Carolyn became a New Yorker in a way particular to those for whom it was a dream they worked to make real. Stormy Stokes, who worked with Carolyn early in her tenure at Calvin Klein, said, “Carolyn would be up for anything NYC offered, in our early twenties—late nights at Rex, Bowery Bar, anywhere. The next day, we’d go for long brunches at Jerry’s or Fanelli’s in SoHo and then spend an entire afternoon wandering through downtown antique stores searching for the perfect gift for a friend. She found one—a five-pound Old English Bible—and hauled it home to the East Village. In the few years we worked and spent time together, we were young and had so much energy… four hours later, we would meet up at Noho Star and start all over again.”
While she was decidedly a downtown girl, Carolyn did head up to the Upper East Side from time to time, to see love interest Scott Winters. They met in 1990 when he worked as a bartender at the Surf Club. Scott, an aspiring actor, was bartending to support himself. One of his first big breaks would be the role of the pompous Harvard student who loses the girl to Matt Damon in Good Will Hunting, but that was still years away. Eventually, he would lose Carolyn, too. She was out and about in the city and didn’t seem interested in getting serious with a bartender, whom she uncharacteristically dismissed to a friend as “not enough to marry.”
She then dated Scott’s lookalike Stephen Dorff, who had been a child actor and was at the time playing Bobby Dean in a TV version of The Outsiders. Carolyn also dated banker Liam Dalton, who had, coincidentally, been hired a few years earlier by Jackie Onassis’s friend Mike Nichols to consult on his film Working Girl. Like the others, he was seen by Carolyn as fun but without long-term potential.
More intense was a frustrating affair with Will Regan, owner of Rex nightclub. Regan and Carolyn had seen each other outside the club, and the fascination had been immediate. “It was a crazy chemical attraction, so powerful,” Regan said.
“Carolyn adored Will,” said MJ Bettenhausen. “He used to pull up to her building on his motorcycle and call out her name to her to come down. No phone call ahead of time. She was enthralled.”
“She was crazy about this guy,” a mutual friend confirmed. “One evening, I was heading over to Rex with some other friends, and Carolyn couldn’t make it. She quietly said she needed to speak to me. Almost bashfully, she asked, ‘Would you please not go?’ She was concerned that Will would be interested in one of the friends with whom I was going. She was not being catty or mean; she just felt threatened. So while she presented very confidently to the world, she could be insecure. I saw a girl who had her heart broken at a very early age and wanted to protect it.”
Carolyn’s “not enough to marry” verdict begs the question: Not enough what? Whether from lack of interest in marriage or lack of interest in the men themselves, she kept most of her alliances casual. She was a vibrant young woman in her mid-twenties building her career in New York City. Mr. Right could come later. Call it sowing her oats, call it playing the field, but one shouldn’t assume just because of her gender that she’d already be on the hunt for long-term love.
This fact was later used against her, as it was against many women who enjoyed the increased liberty that came with earning their own income, the legalization of birth control, and the loosening of conservative religious strictures. And Carolyn’s dating existed within a haunted context: Her father leaving her beloved mother was reason enough to be extremely careful about commitment beyond the casual.
“You could kind of tell what had happened between her mother and father really bothered her. Carolyn would boast about how she had never been dumped,” said one friend. “A little odder, too: She wore her mother’s wedding band from her father on a chain around her neck. She told me, ‘I felt like I could wear it only after I dipped it in holy water.’ ”
In her twenties, Carolyn was perhaps more invested in the crucial lifework of finding her community rather than her life partner. If you are lucky, you work with—or adjacent to—people who share similar interests, for whom friendship overrides competition. In the world of fashion, everything is extra—extra drama with dramatic personalities. You need a lot of luck in friendship. And, as with all luck, some of it is bestowed by fate, and some of it is self-made.
BY THE END OF 1991, Calvin had decided to promote Carolyn. “Calvin loved her,” Paul Wilmot said. “After a while, he moved her into public relations.” Carolyn was thrilled with the eventual change. “She had been lobbying to move to PR for some time,” said a colleague. “It was where all the fun was.”
At the start of 1992, Jules Watson became Carolyn’s best friend and roommate. Eight months older than Carolyn, Jules was an agent at Click Models whom Carolyn had met when casting runway shows for Calvin. Like Carolyn, she was funny and larger-than-life, with an open personality and outsized sense of fun. They even looked alike, with long blonde hair and bright blue eyes. From the start, they were joined at the hip. But while Carolyn matched Jules’s adventurous spirit, many of their friends would later note that Carolyn had more self-control. Jules was, according to one mutual acquaintance, “a louder, wilder version of Carolyn.”
One friend spoke of an evening when they were out for drinks: “Jules loved to be loud and enjoyed the attention she got from it. There was a table of men sitting near us, and Jules was shouting at the top of her lungs and cursing like a sailor—every word in there was cunt, shit, fuck, motherfucker, and then she began to describe a hookup in graphic details—the guys moved tables.” Carolyn found Jules great fun and loved that she could match or surpass her energy level. Yet while Jules didn’t tone things down even when given a cue such as a group moving tables, Carolyn reined it in when required—she knew how to read a room.
In early 1992, after turning down several modeling offers, Carolyn agreed to a couple of photo shoots. Ann Mashburn of Glamour magazine convinced Carolyn to pose in a small feature with three other women, including Sarah Laird, who also worked at Glamour. The shoot was built around the theme of “Me and My White Shirt.” Mashburn explained, “I spoke with Carolyn almost every day, as did my assistant, Molly McMahon. And we saw her every couple of weeks, either when we went to the showroom and she showed us the line for a shoot, or when she brought samples over. To us, she was Carolyn at Calvin Klein like Tory Burch was Tory at Ralph Lauren.”
McMahon recalled Carolyn being particularly kind when Glamour needed Calvin Klein samples for a shoot: “Glamour was not that high on the totem pole, and sometimes it was hard to get samples from other designers. Clothes would be reserved for Vogue or Harper’s Bazaar, and the people working for other designers weren’t always that nice about saying so. Carolyn was nicer than a lot of people in the industry. She’d say, ‘Listen, Vogue has it reserved this afternoon, so just get it back in three hours.’ She was supportive and knew we were all working hard.”
Glamour readers loved the stories about “real women,” such as the White Shirt feature, which highlighted more accessible styles than the high fashion found in Vogue. It meant the stories Mashburn created required more inventiveness, and she often called the designers’ offices to get items for a shoot.
“I also needed the everyday girl, but a very pretty everyday girl, someone who worked in the industry or someone your cousin knew,” said Mashburn. “I needed someone right away. ‘Will you come to [the] studio for two hours?’ I asked Carolyn and she said, ‘Sure.’ She was so at ease in her skin. She didn’t wear a lot of makeup and was not self-conscious about the way she held herself. She was someone who made you feel great about yourself and was even super inquisitive about my son I’d just had, cooing over the pictures.”
Glamour explained the shirt as “wrapped and tied for a feminine stamp that doesn’t cater to frilly stereotypes,” which echoed Carolyn’s later style. In the accompanying text, Carolyn is quoted as saying, “I’m not comfortable in anything ornate. I like clean and understated looks [with] very classic colors—black, navy, gray, and white. If I want to add some impact, I’ll do it with texture.”
For the shoot, Carolyn wore a pair of jeans and a short-sleeved Calvin Klein Sport for Men white shirt tied at the waist as she sat on her knees with her feet tucked under her bum for support.
Xanthipi Joannides, a stylist on the shoot, said, “Although she did not like the cowboy boots I asked her to wear—in her quiet manner she told me that the boots were not something she would ever wear—she wore them anyway without much of a fuss. Most other women would make a fuss and say absolutely not but Carolyn was gracious and wore them. I do remember also how beautiful and stylish she was—there was a simple chicness about her. Carolyn’s style did not scream for attention.”
Soon thereafter, Jade Hobson, the creative director at Mirabella magazine—launched by Grace Mirabella in 1989 after her seventeen years as editor in chief of Vogue—asked Carolyn if she’d appear in the magazine. Jade was taken by Carolyn’s energy and spirit. And even though Carolyn was neither a professional model nor a debutante who hung out with models, the fashion world was buzzing with her name.
It took some convincing before Carolyn agreed to do the shoot. As a young professional in the fashion business, she already understood the trade-offs between fame and freedom. “It’s so much better to be able to model, but not model,” she always said to her friends. If anything, given her experience of ducking down into cars to avoid the “Girls of BU” calendar photographer and having an early curfew because of the attention her beauty garnered, she felt the excessive focus on her looks to be a liability. Anyway, her looks were the luck of heredity, not something she labored over. Carolyn wanted to do something more with her life, and she could feel that she had that potential. She wanted, as a friend put it, “to be important.” And to Carolyn’s credit, she perceived that the smothering vanity of those caught in the swirl of the public’s imagination was at odds with what she wanted to achieve in life. Carolyn wanted to keep herself free.
But Grace and Jade had an idea for their shoot that fit well with Carolyn’s style and aesthetic. The feature was to be called “Friday Dressing,” and the conceit was that six “regular” girls, all employed by designers, were found in their casual Friday clothes, between leaving the office and rushing off to a glorious weekend holiday. On the page opposite Carolyn was Sara Sereno, the young fashion agent who represented Carolyn’s good friend, former Calvin Klein designer Gordon Henderson. Other design houses included were J.Crew, Isaac Mizrahi, Comme des Garçons, Crisca, Zang Toi, DKNY, Ralph Lauren, and Chanel, whose public relations manager Anne Fahey wore… a white cotton blouse tied at the waist.
“[Mirabella] wanted to often use real people instead of models, and when we did use models, we should choose one that didn’t scream ‘model,’ ” Jade later told the New York Times. And while Carolyn may have been against modeling per se, there was also that side of her that loved having fun. She wouldn’t be dressed outrageously or undressed. She saw the part she was playing not as a catwalk but an impish cameo. (The next spread in the magazine featured supermodel Christy Turlington, where she is shown in a Kenar white silk charmeuse blouse… tied at the waist.)
The plan was to have Carolyn pose in Grand Central Station, wearing Calvin’s poet shirt in washed-silk georgette and capri leggings. On the day of the shoot, Michelle Kessler, an assistant on the Mirabella shoot, met Carolyn in a location van outside the station. “Carolyn shows up and I thought—what kind of ‘regular’ girl is that? She was more than beautiful,” Michelle said. “In fashion, we are surrounded by striking girls but Carolyn stood out as not just a beauty for the ages, but also smart, elegant, and self-possessed, especially for someone so young. Otherworldly.”
As soon as she stepped onto the van, Michelle said, Carolyn was all questions: “We were in the van and Carolyn raises that one eyebrow and begins the inquisition.” The questions were peppered with compliments, starting with asking Michelle in her best breathy Lauren Bacall voice, “Baby, what are you doing in this job? You’re too good to be steaming clothes. You need to come work at Calvin, he will love you. Come bring your résumé tomorrow, and you’ll meet with our head of our PR, Paul Wilmot.”
Michelle showed up the next day, and within a week, after a meeting with Paul and then with Calvin himself, was hired. “My career trajectory was redirected by her uncanny intuition and insight. It was magic.”
Michelle was far from alone in benefitting from Carolyn’s support. Carolyn was a mentor to other women at a time when empowerment among women was less widespread. Some women, who had taken on more duties and responsibility than the men around them just to get a seat at the table, were not inclined to find more chairs.
But in the offices at Calvin, as one of the women who worked alongside Carolyn put it, “equality ruled,” and many of the women at Calvin Klein either became fast friends, were amiable, or at the very least were not out to cut one another’s throat.
That is not to say Carolyn never felt competition. Once, when she was still in Personals, a position she had been angling to rise above for some time, she was benched when a certain socialite came to shop. This client was friendly with the parents of one of her colleagues, someone who had already made her way past sales and was now in a coveted PR position. Despite Carolyn’s poise, intelligence, and utter calm in the face of every type of luminary, this VIP requested the colleague—a new friend Carolyn had made amid the great leveler of hectic workdays—to help style her purchases. It was a harsh lesson: We only climb so far unless hands from upon high reach down to pull us up. All Carolyn could muster at the time was, “How do you know her?”
Carolyn became friends with Calvin’s daughter, Marci, and his wife, Kelly. Some corporate environments would discourage developing friendships with the boss’s family, but CK Enterprises implicitly encouraged closeness among colleagues, if just by virtue of long hours and the fashion world’s inevitable blending of the professional and personal. MJ Bettenhausen, Rachel Bold, Michelle Kessler, and her assistant Jen Dermer were others in Carolyn’s core circle, as was Monicka HanssenTéele, who had taken over in VIP sales. Monicka and Carolyn were often seen huddling in the elevator, rushing out to the theater or a foreign film, Carolyn’s beret-clad head accentuating her constant motion. Often Carolyn, Rachel, Michelle, and Jen would grab dinner after work at Lucky Strike, in SoHo.
Carolyn was a touchy-feely kind of friend. If you rode in a cab with her, she would make sure her feet touched yours. If you were in close conversation, she was not content to simply listen to you: She would touch you, maybe cup your face, stare into your eyes, and say things she knew would make you feel good. “I saw you and Dan walking down the street this morning,” she once said to a coworker, apropos of nothing, “and I could just tell by the way he looked at you that he is so very in love with you.”
Some of their twelve-hour days were punctuated with incessant laughter, the tears-running-down-your-eyes kind. “We once found a mouse, nearly dead from poison,” recalls MJ Bettenhausen, who would soon move over to Ralph Lauren. “Carolyn was always an animal lover; she had already had her beloved Ruby, a black cat known to scratch, but didn’t take sides between species. We got a Tupperware container and gave it water and cheese, of course.” Carolyn named the mouse Ralph, not just in honor of her departing friend but because, like her friend’s new employer, he was little.
“She took people in and elevated them,” said Heather Ashton, who worked at Calvin Klein as a receptionist in wholesale. “And hysterically took the piss out of them at the same time.”
“It was simple things,” recalled Michelle. “She’d call me Mesheee. She’d raise that eyebrow and ask, ‘Is Calvin still here?’ Meaning, Shall we bolt for the day?”
Sometimes the eyebrow was half humor and half threat. Noonan, in his book Forever Young: My Friendship with John F. Kennedy, Jr., recalled that once, while she was about to dig into a slice of pizza, Carolyn heard a colleague berating Narciso Rodriguez, a new young designer for the women’s collection, from behind one of the screens during a fitting. Carolyn stepped into the area of the scuffle. She looked at the pizza in her hand. She looked at the face of Narciso’s attacker. She looked back at the pizza. Then, raising that right eyebrow, looked back at the attacker. Did this person want to stop berating her dear friend, or did she want this piece of piping-hot, dripping cheese pizza on her face? The colleague fled the scene and thereafter treated Narciso with due respect.
The photographer Bruce Weber recalls meeting Carolyn during her early years in New York. “She was so natural, such a beauty, but wild, like a jumping horse,” he said. “She was also a fantastic mimic and could have us all hunched in stitches. She would imitate Zack [Carr], lovingly, perfectly capturing his excitement. ‘Oh, we’ve got a design meeting, it’s going to be excellent!’ And then she’d do Calvin, re-creating his, ‘Well, hold on, I don’t know. Try it on. Try it on.’ ”
Even though Carolyn seemed to beguile everyone who crossed her path, she did not want fame but rather to be behind the scenes—successful, to be sure, and in a profession of importance, but simple. For all her sophistication, Carolyn once told MJ Bettenhausen that her ideal man was “a rugged guy with a pickup truck, preferably vintage, with a dog in the back.” Carolyn was building a work family who knew and loved their colleague, a girl who wanted to have fun, and who figured love would find her soon enough.