Wry Martinis (39 page)

As I sat down to write this, on a train, a young woman walked past wearing an above-the-knee pleated skirt, ivory stockings, bone-colored pumps, a blue double-breasted jacket, a strand of pearls, gold earrings, and blond hair pulled back with a barrette. I think she got on in Philadelphia.

She looked like she got on in Philadelphia. Grace Kelly, who must figure prominently in any discussion of what twentieth-century man finds sexy in twentieth-century woman, was from Philadelphia. There’s that scene in
Rear Window
where she sweeps into Jimmy Stewart’s Greenwich Village apartment wearing that long Edith Head skirt—I don’t even remember seeing her legs in that scene, only the dress, and that face. Fast-forward to Sharon Stone uncrossing and crossing her gams in Basic
Instinct
. Two hot blonds in the latest fashions. What’s to compare? In sex, as in architecture, less is more. I remember something else about that scene: Jimmy Stewart being annoyed at her. What acting that must have taken.

Before that lovely woman walked by on the train, I’d planned to write a heavy-breathing encomium to the miniskirt, which I’ve always thought of as the twentieth century’s most brilliant achievement, grateful as I am for antibiotics, automatic teller machines, and passenger-side air bags.

But things have changed since Mary Quant first raised hemlines and male heart rates back in the mid-sixties. In those happy Beatle days, the miniskirt had an innocence and a larkiness to it that seem lost in our Age of Less Innocence, with its crotch-grabbing singers and in-your-face
jeans and well-oiled glutei maximi. I have a theory—I am nothing if not a deep thinker—that once all those gorgeous, mile-long legs were revealed, the next logical step was to adorn them with sexy black stockings and garters! Panty hose (for my money, one of the century’s worst inventions) made the mini possible, but in doing that paved the way for seventies kink, which in turn led to some rather harder-core stuff. Remember Liza Minnelli in
Cabaret
in 1972, all got up in black stockings and garters and the Berlin S & M bit? Charlotte Rampling two years later in the positively wicked
Night Porter
?

Once that hemline went north, Pandora started opening boutiques with names like the Pleasure Chest, serving all your latex needs. It’s been a while now since Cole Porter sang, “In olden days a glimpse of stocking/Was looked on as something shocking.” What lyric would be left to him in an era of butt floss bathing suits?

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:

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 was 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.