“Well, as soon as I get enough information, I want to do that big story about how Dutchess County is changing.”
“Your ‘dying farmers’ story?” Kathryn Boughton asked.
“I changed the description of it on my list,” Heather said, glancing up at Kathryn. “I didn’t actually mean ‘dying farmers.’ I meant ‘dying farms.’ ”
Over the next few days, Heather and I drove from Lakeville to Millerton, to Amenia, and back to Millerton, to the elementary school, to the Gun Club, to Terni’s for the papers, to the sheriff’s substation in Amenia for the weekly crime report, back to Lakeville, back to Millerton, to the Burger King for lunch, to the town hall, to the village hall, around the fields and the farms, back and forth through the center of Millerton—around the bend in the road where the low, square buildings of the village huddle—and to the ends of town, where the buildings thin out and finally disappear. Covering a town keeps you busy. At the elementary school, Steve O’Connell was packing to leave. The school is perched on a bald gray hill, and in the summer stillness it felt a little forlorn. Steve was in a great mood because of his new job, in Westchester County. “I read the description of your new school,” Heather said to him. “It sounds like a country club.”
“Well, it’s gorgeous,” he said. “It’s gorgeous, Heather. I’ll tell you all about it, because I know you’re not from New York. I know I’m talking fast, but that’s the kind of guy I am.” At the end of the interview, Heather took half a dozen pictures, because she suspected that the story would end up as her lead.
The next stop was the village pool, to cover McGruff the Crime Dog’s presentation. Angela White, who is married to Glen White and is the Millerton recreation director, was waiting, with an unhappy look on her face. “I spoke to McGruff this morning, Heather,” she said. “He canceled. He said it was so hot yesterday that he almost passed out. I thought there was a fan in his costume, but I guess I was thinking of Smokey Bear.” She said he had promised to reschedule, but meanwhile there would be no
MCGRUFF COMES TO TELL HOW TO PREVENT CRIME
—at least, not until the following week.
“I think I’ll just take pictures of the kids swimming,” Heather said. “The only trouble is, I have a lot of pictures of cute little kids this week.”
The days had a jerky rhythm. After the canceled McGruff appearance was a stop at the town hall to get information on the Scoland Farm rezoning. It was a local tale without whimsy: an old farm, a fire that destroyed barns and silos, a son killed in a car accident, a family belt tightening, a petition to mine gravel from dairy land. We went to the pig races at the agricultural fair, in Goshen, where the master of ceremonies announced the contestants as Roseanne Boar, Tammy Swinette, and Magnum P.I.G. Back at the office, after Heather called the medical examiner about the outcome of the autopsy of the man killed by a train, she explained the small-town rule on obituaries: “Everyone is an avid
something.
An avid gardener, an avid walker. Charlotte told me we once had someone who was an avid coupon clipper.” Another rule: If you crop the Pet Parade photo so that the animal’s ears poke out of the frame of the picture, the pet will be adopted more quickly. Everyone at the paper got distracted for a while, listening to reports on the scanner about an ex-convict engaged in a gun battle with a local deputy sheriff. Heather called several appliance stores to catch up on her electrical storm story. And after that she drove to the Gun Club, where three chubby old men smoking Tiparillos were shouting a conversation—“His goddam blower went out!” and “I don’t know what the hell he paid for it!” and “Well, he’s tougher than whalebone!”—and firing shotguns at neon-orange clay disks. Heather chatted with them, mentioning the fact that she wouldn’t be able to come to the Gun Club clambake. The men looked sad for a moment, then resumed shooting. One of them cocked a thumb at the trap and said, “You girls shoot? Oh, no, you’re reporters.”
“Tell me about your gun,” Heather said.
He patted it and said, “Darling, it’s a 12-gauge Browning.”
“Nice,” Heather said. “How do you spell that? Like the food brownie?”
“Exactly,” the man said. “You’re learning.”
Near the end of my visit, Heather went to talk to a shiny-faced young man named Todd Clinton, who was on the organizing committee for Millerton Days. Todd is a local banker, a Lions Club member, the treasurer of the volunteer fire squad, a Chamber of Commerce vice president, and the husband of the woman who owns the new seamstress shop on Main Street. He was in his office, at the Salisbury Bank & Trust Company, and he had a lot of information for Heather about Millerton Days. “We’re doing Sno-Kones and cotton candy,” he said. “There will be clowns. And 50 percent of the proceeds are going to the Eddie Collins ball field restoration. We’ve hired a Mickey and Minnie—wait, don’t say that. Say, ‘There will be a cute mouse couple.’ We don’t want to get in trouble with copyright people at Disney.” Heather scribbled. Todd called his secretary to find out who was lending the freezers to store the ice for the Sno-Kones. She told him that it was Jimmy Campbell, of Campbell & Keeler. Todd said that one of the local restaurants would be donating tablecloths, but that there weren’t enough tables yet for the Millerton Days clambake. Heather said, “I could put in ‘Please call Todd if you have tables.’ ”
“Great,” Todd said. “Because it’s a little bit of an issue with the tables. Oh, and for the antique tractor show you can put in that anyone interested in showing their tractor can call me.”
Heather said, “Sounds like I have it all. I just have one question. Will the clowns be free?”
Todd nodded and said, “Absolutely free.”
IT WAS ALL THERE
in the Millerton
News
the next week:
O’CONNELL LEAVES FOR POST AT ARDSLEY MIDDLE SCHOOL
and
STORM CLOUDS REQUIRE PRECAUTIONS TO PROTECT HEALTH AND PROPERTY
and
MAUREEN BONDS ENDS WORK AS VILLAGE CLERK
and
PREPARATIONS PICK UP FOR MILLERTON DAYS
, and a late-breaking story about a lawsuit filed against the town board of Amenia. A few stories had evaporated, and Heather had saved a few others for a later week. It turned out that the man who had squirreled away all the Eddie Collins memorabilia died over the weekend, and the paper had been able to get the pictures for the special Eddie Collins section from his widow. His avidity for local history was noted in his obituary, which also ran that week. By then, I had left Millerton and was back in Manhattan. Heather sent me the paper, and when I had read it I called her. I could hear the hum of the newspaper office in the background. We talked for a while, and then she said she had to go, because she was expecting another busy week.
KING OF THE ROAD
W
HAT AMAZES BILL BLASS IS AMAZING. LAST
year, he was in La Jolla, California, and someone took him to a supermarket, which was somewhere he had never been before in his life; he found the supermarket, and especially the do-it-yourself ice-cream-sundae bar, amazing. In Nashville, where I joined him recently for a trunk show—an in-store event, when a designer’s entire collection, and sometimes the designer himself, are on display—he caught me admiring a blazer, made by the designer Richard Tyler, that cost $1,859; even though some of the ensembles in the Blass couture collection cost more than $6,000, he found the price of the Tyler blazer amazing. He is someone who seems fascinated by something or other much of the time. He is a virtuoso of the high-pitched eyebrow and the fortissimo gasp. These give him a puckish air, without which he might seem irritatingly regal. Blass is classically good-looking in the manner of a country gentleman, with a wide forehead, a boxy jaw, a direct gaze, and a chest like a kettledrum. Almost any time you see him, there will be a cigarette in the corner of his mouth, bouncing like a little diving board. He usually stands with his hands poked into his pockets and his jacket hitched up around them. No matter where he is, he looks as if he might be standing on the deck of a big sailboat. He is now seventy-one years old, fond of candy, and settling into leonine stateliness; as a young man, he was long necked, blade thin, and so wolfishly handsome you could weep. I love to hear him talk. His voice is rich, gravelly, and carefully inflected, like a film narrator’s. He also has a wonderfully intimate and conspiratorial-sounding whisper. At times, he can sound like an American schooled in Britain, but in fact he is a Depression-era kid from Fort Wayne, Indiana, who came to New York at seventeen and has never left. Like all elegant people, he curses with charming abandon and to great effect. Like most successful, wealthy people, he knows how to deploy a sort of captivating brattiness, to which other people quickly yield. One of the funniest things in the world is to sit in his office at his showroom and listen to him bellow questions to his staff without moving a muscle, or even an eyeball, in their direction.
Universal adoration is one of the reasons Blass goes on trips to places like La Jolla and Nashville. Most stores don’t buy a designer’s entire collection but will hold trunk shows, during which customers can see samples and place orders. There are trunk shows going on all the time, all over the country. Sometimes the trunk show is brought to the store by a sales representative. Sometimes the designer sends along a model, who throughout the day will stroll around in outfits from the collection. Occasionally, the designer himself escorts the clothes, in which case the store often stages a fashion show and luncheon for good customers. After lunch, while the customers are trying things on, the designer may hang around and editorialize. This year, Bill Blass’s collection traveled with salespeople to Boston, Houston, Dallas, Fort Worth, St. Louis, Palo Alto, Midland (Texas), San Antonio, Beverly Hills, Pasadena, Tulsa, San Diego, New Orleans, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Baltimore, and Pittsburgh; he appeared with it in Atlanta, New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Washington, San Francisco, and Troy, Michigan. Couture clothes cost a fortune, but they have a tiny market and seldom make any money. What they do is endear a designer to those customers whose clothing choices are newsworthy, and this in turn makes the designer famous. Then, when he is famous enough, the designer can sell other companies the rights to manufacture profitable items like underpants and perfumes under the designer’s name. Bill Blass was one of the first designers to travel with their collections, and he’s one of those who have done it the most. He is generally regarded as the king of the trunk show. His clothes are rarely thought of as artistic or trendsetting or remarkable, but his customers have never abandoned him; they turn out at the trunk shows, and the trunk shows have kept him famous, by fashion standards, for a remarkable number of years.
At a good show, he does a lot of business; two weeks ago, at a trunk show at Saks Fifth Avenue, he sold over half a million dollars’ worth of dresses, and that is the most any American designer showing at Saks has ever sold. He does bigger business, though, just selling his name and his designer’s eye. Blass licenses fifty-six products, including Bill Blass belts, ties, handkerchiefs, jeans, sheets, shoes, pajamas, outerwear, evening wear, watches, and window shades. For sixteen years, Ford manufactured a Bill Blass Lincoln Continental Mark IV; Blass chose the interiors, paint colors, and trim. Blass’s trunk show philosophy: “You don’t want to be on the road so much that the novelty wears off, but you want to get to know your customer and help move the clothes. If you are buying a Bill Blass dress for a couple of thousand dollars, I’d say it’s an added attraction to have Bill Blass there saying, ‘Babe, that looks great on you,’ or ‘Babe, that’s just awful.’ ”
BECAUSE BILL BLASS
is popular and fashionable, I expected him to have a drifty attention span, but he is actually quite dogged. In Nashville, for instance, after declaring the price of the Tyler blazer amazing, he pulled it off its hanger, inspected its seams, and pinched the fabric, and said he thought the cut and workmanship were amazing; then he asked me to try it on and told me I should buy it. This was at Jamie Inc., the Nashville store where the trunk show and a luncheon were being held. The show had just ended, and dozens of women were milling around the racks, placing orders. When he was able to tear his attention from the blazer, he remarked that he found the women’s ardor and stamina amazing. Then he turned back to being amazed by the blazer. He got everyone walking by to stop and take a look at it, because it had him so amazed. When I saw him several weeks later, in Manhattan, he asked me how I’d been and then immediately asked me if I had bought the Richard Tyler blazer. His enthusiasm made me feel that I should have done whatever it took to find a spare eighteen hundred dollars. He looked utterly crestfallen when I told him no.
In Nashville, what he found amazing, to start with, was walking through the airport, looking at people’s clothes. We had just gotten off the plane and were heading down an endless concourse, and I was following his gaze. He gestured with his chin at a man and a woman walking toward us. He said, “My God, have you ever noticed how Americans dress? They dress like it’s summer all the time.” The man and the woman were both wearing pale T-shirts and acid-washed jeans sutured with lots of useless-looking zippers. Blass stopped and watched them walk by. He was dressed in his usual bespoke double-breasted English suit and a loosely knotted tie, and he had a topcoat tossed over his arm. The acid-washed couple passed. Behind them was a fat woman wearing a short red dress, red satin pumps, and a red fez. Blass lifted his eyebrows, shifted his coat to his other arm, and said, “That’s an outfit.” As she ambled by, he said, “I was the first designer to really go out on the road with my clothes, and I’ve done it for years and years and years, while the other designers were rushing back the minute they could, to go to New York parties. I didn’t do that. I’d stay out on the road for days at a time and meet people and keep my name out there. It allowed me to see what’s out here. And I can tell you that, no matter what anyone thinks, there’s a huge part of this country that still loves print dresses.”
MRS. JACK MASSEY
, a friend of Blass’s with whom he would be staying in Nashville, called me one afternoon before the trip. “Sunday night, when you arrive, we’ll be going to dinner at the Johnsons’. It will be just a little informal gathering of friends, so you can wear—oh, little velvet pants, something like that. Monday night is dinner here at my house, Brook House, and that’s not formal, either—it’s not black-tie or anything, so you can just wear dressy pants or a little silk dress. At the luncheon and fashion show, you could wear a nice suit. During the day, you can just knock around in a sweater set and pants.” Pause. “You know, of course, that Bill Blass is just the most entertaining man to ever walk down the pike. Everybody adores him. He is absolutely the best company in the world.”
Bill Blass had never before gone to Nashville with his collection; in fact, he had been in Nashville only twice: in 1985, when he spoke at O’More College of Design, in nearby Franklin, Tennessee, and eighteen years before that, when he was the honored guest at Nashville’s fanciest annual social event, the Swan Ball, to which many women in Nashville wear his dresses. There is a picture of him on page 51 of a book called
Reflections: Twenty-five Nights at the Swan Ball.
The text says, “And then Bill Blass, the talented, sociable, and just-too-darn debonair designer, brought the clothes and paraded them around for everyone to die over while dining on shrimp and filet de boeuf.”
Blass’s own recollection of the visit: “The Swan Ball is a good event, but, my God, it’s always on the hottest goddam night of the year.”
A grand, formal, larger-than-life-size portrait of Mrs. Massey hanging in one of her parlors at Brook House depicts her in a draped gown of ecru pleated silk with a petal-pink cummerbund, her blond bob swept back, her face set in an idle smile, her fingertips dandling a string of pecan-size pearls. The portrait was commissioned by her late husband, Jack, who was the venture capitalist behind Kentucky Fried Chicken, Hospital Corporation of America, and Volunteer Capital Corp. It was painted by Aaron Shikler, who has also painted Ronald and Nancy Reagan and Gloria Vanderbilt. The dress in the portrait is by Bill Blass. I know this because while he and I were walking around Brook House on the evening of the dinner in his honor, he stopped in front of the portrait to remark on how pretty Mrs. Massey looked. Then he interrupted himself with a gasp. “My God, I think that’s one of my dresses!” he said. “I honestly think it is. It’s one of my dresses.”
There were twenty-eight guests in the house at the time. They had been having cocktails in a vast horseshoe-shaped room with French doors that looked out over a brook and a stone fountain (a boy with a frog) and a big guesthouse and some clipped lawns and hedges, and now the guests were done with cocktails and were brushing past us toward a wing of the house which was too far away to see, but I could hear the scrape and chatter of chairs being pulled out, and I was starting to smell dinner. Several butlers were shooing people toward the dining room, and one of them hesitated behind us, gesturing with a silver tray and murmuring, “Dinner is ready in the east room, sir.” Blass went on eyeing the portrait. After a moment, he shook his head and said, “Well, I’ll be damned. It is one of mine. I
remember
that dress.” He popped me in the ribs with his elbow and said, “Say, that was a good dress, wasn’t it?”
JAMIE STREAM,
the woman who owns Jamie Inc., had met us at the airport with her limousine and a driver. Jamie is snappy and blond and forty-eight. She opened her store twenty years ago, when Nashville was on the outer edges of the fashion frontier. “We pioneered Oscar and Bill and all those people in Nashville,” she once told me. “When I moved to town, I really didn’t know what I’d find here. I come from the ranch country in Texas, where everything is pigskin, Hermès, and tweed.” I asked her why she thought that Bill Blass had managed to remain fashionable for so many years, and she said, “Well, this isn’t a glamorous thing to say, but Bill Blass is just . . . so . . .
appropriate.
Don’t you think? Isn’t that a compliment in this day and age, to say someone is always appropriate? And no one can take a little satin skirt and a little cashmere sweater and make it as glamorous as Bill Blass can. You know what I say? I say Bill Blass clothes have good bones.”
In the limousine, Jamie was telling us about picking up Yvonne Lopez, the Blass fitting model, and Craig Natiello, of the design staff, who had arrived in Nashville a day earlier. Yvonne and Craig had brought the collection with them on the plane. It filled thirteen trunks. Jamie said, “I had the two of them over to the house for drinks. I said, ‘Come over, but I’m warning you, I’m just wearing a sweatsuit.’ ”
“In which she looks adorable,” Blass added.
“Well, that’s what they were seeing me in, anyway,” Jamie went on. She turned to the driver and called out, “Basil, can you turn up the air-conditioning back here? It’s beastly.” She squinted out a window. We were driving down a four-lane road in Nashville rimmed with fast-food joints and muffler shops. It looked as if it was about to rain. Jamie said, “Oh, I think we’re going to have a loblolly. If it lasts for days, it means I’m going to have to hire some parkers for the luncheon. We’ve invited seventy-five people, and I’m being very tough—all of them have to already own Blass. That’s what I’m telling people who are calling me, because I can’t just be throwing invitations around. It’s a legacy luncheon for the real Blass devotee.”
Blass said, “It’ll be intimate. Ten tables of heavy hitters.”
Jamie nodded and then said, “I’m telling you, this limousine is a wreck. It’s our work car. It’s just like a truck. We just use it like a truck when we go up to our Adirondack camp in the summer. When we come home, we just load this thing up to the rafters with everything under the sun.”
We passed an enormous pillared building sitting back from the road. Blass sat forward and said, “What’s that? What’s that building? My God, that’s something.”
“That’s the Parthenon,” Jamie said. “It’s the world’s only full-size replica of the Parthenon.”
“My God, I’d want to see that. If there’s a full-size replica of the Parthenon in Nashville, I think that’s something to see, don’t you?”
Jamie pursed her lips, and said, “You’ve got dinner at the Johnsons’ tonight, and the fittings for the models are on Monday, and you’ve got an appearance on a local television show, and you’ve got dinner at Mrs. Massey’s on Monday night, and the lunch is on Tuesday, so I don’t really know when you’re going to go.”
Blass pushed his hand against the ceiling and said, “My God, I haven’t been in Nashville in years, and already I’m so busy that I don’t have a goddam minute to breathe.”