The Jews in America Trilogy (174 page)

Meanwhile, a whole new Russian-Jewish generation was moving up to fill the shoes, and eventually eclipse the accomplishments, of the oldsters. Brash and young, ambitious and daring and willing to try for the long shot, not all these new entrepreneurs were heirs to great family fortunes like Edgar Bronfman. Some were starting, just as their predecessors had, from scratch, with nothing more than a bright idea and a gambler's nerve. Once again, assimilation was the goal, and, as the older generation had found, assimilation seemed to involve financial success first, and then, it was hoped, some degree of social acceptance by the American establishment. But, once again with this younger generation, assimilation would prove to be a double-edged sword, involving, as it did, the emotional choice of how much Jewishness to retain and how much to abandon on one's journey of upward mobility. Sometimes, in order to assimilate into a new culture or new economic stratum it is necessary to totally deny the old, and in the process, something precious may be lost—a sense of who one really is, or where one came from. To assimilate, after all, means to make oneself similar, to adapt, to blend in, to assume the tone and style and coloration of one's surroundings. But what are the limits of assimilation? At what point does the assimilationist
become the apostate? At what point does the assimilationist say good-bye, for instance, to his grandparents or even to his parents? These are questions that many young and successful American Jews of Russian descent would find it difficult to answer in the 1970s.

Ralph Lauren, for example, would much rather talk about his considerable success as a designer than whether he is, or is not, Jewish. “I'm so sick of being described as a poor little Jewish boy from the Bronx who's made good,” he says. “Yes, I was born in the Bronx—but in the nice part, the west Bronx, the Mosholu Parkway section, near Riverdale, and I had a wonderful childhood. My parents weren't rich, but they weren't poor either.” His father was a painter who specialized in
faux bois
and
faux marbre
work, and did an occasional industrial mural. “And I'm sick of hearing about how I changed my name. The name was Lifschitz. Do you know what it's like growing up as a kid in New York with a name like that? It has ‘shit' in it. And
I
didn't change the name. My older brother suggested the change when I was sixteen. We all changed. Still,” he adds, “I'm told that the name Lifschitz is a very distinguished name in Russia.”
*

After graduating from City College, where he majored in business, a major he hated—“My mother wanted me to be a doctor or a lawyer or at least an accountant”—he worked as a clerk in various New York stores, including Brooks Brothers, where he was able to buy classically styled clothes at a discount.

Meanwhile, as the youngest of three boys in the family, Ralph Lauren was often given hand-me-down clothes to wear. Though these outfits were sometimes out of style, Lauren learned to make the most of this fact. An old belted Norfolk jacket, for instance, could, with an upturned collar and the addition of a jaunty scarf, be made to look snappy and debonair. Pleated slacks might have become passé, but with the right belt, shoes, shirt, and other accessories, the young Ralph Lauren—with his close-cropped dark hair, his blue eyes, perfect teeth, and lithe build—could make them look both sporty and sexy. Girls, in particular, began to tell him they liked the way he dressed
because he looked “different.” All this was in the late 1950s. While his contemporaries were wearing leather jackets, driving motorcycles, and listening to rock music, Lauren was embracing an earlier tradition—that of the 1920s, and
The Great Gatsby
, and the Ivy League look. He was already, like Helena Rubinstein a generation earlier, proving himself a clever adapter—a master of juxtaposition and pastiche, taking old styles from the American past and from English country and hunting fashions, and giving them new flair.

His first job with a manufacturer was with Beau Brummel Ties, which made inexpensive snap-on bow ties. Lauren, whose fashion idols were such vintage movie stars as Fred Astaire, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., and Cary Grant, along with such public figures as John Lodge, John F. Kennedy, and the Duke of Windsor, asked Beau Brummel if they would let him experiment with marketing wide neckties, such as the Duke of Windsor had made famous. Beau Brummel agreed, and Lauren and his brother Jerry sat up late one night at the kitchen table tossing around ideas for names. “We wanted something that sounded tweedy, sporty, elegant, English, expensive,” Lauren says. The choice of names began to narrow down to those of upper-crust sports. Cricket, rugby, fox hunting, and quail shooting were considered and rejected. Finally, Jerry Lauren suggested polo, the most upper-crust, expensive, exclusive international sport in the world. At first, the sales of Ralph Lauren's Polo line of neckties were poor. Narrow neckties were the fashion then, and his were a full four inches wide. In his secondhand Morgan sports car—with a wide leather strap across its bonnet in the manner of the old MG—Lauren tooled about the North Shore of Long Island with his ties in a suitcase, trying to convince shop owners that these were the ties Jay Gatsby would have worn. Then Bloomingdale's hove into view with a small order. The Polo ties were no sooner displayed than they were snapped up.

Ralph Lauren is the first to admit that, at the time, the four-inch-wide ties did not look quite right with the then-prevailing fashions in men's wear. “I saw that you needed shirts and suits to go with the ties,” he says. But he was also not really a designer. His drawing ability was amateurish at best. He knew nothing about the sizing of garments. He could not sew, and could not even pin up a hem. He needed someone to execute
his ideas. But Beau Brummel, a conservative, old-fashioned firm, was reluctant to branch out into anything beyond neckwear. And so, in 1969, still working out of a drawer—“not an office, a drawer”—in New York's garment district, Lauren approached Norman Hilton, an established men's-wear manufacturer, with the idea of producing a full line of men's clothing under the Polo label. Hilton responded by offering Lauren fifty thousand dollars' worth of credit and a partnership in the business.

The parting with Beau Brummel was friendly, and Ned Brower, the company's president, cheerfully let Lauren take the Polo name with him, along with a small inventory of neckties. Today, of course, Ned Brower looks back on his 1969 generosity with a certain amount of rue. “Given hindsight, considering what's happened since,” he says, “I wish I'd asked for five percent of the action. Still, if I'd kept the name and lost the man behind it, it might not have been the same.”

What happened, according to Ralph Lauren, “is that I got the chance to do my own look. No one had ever done a whole line of men's wear before me, there were no men's designers in the United States before me.” And when, in 1973, Ralph Lauren launched his line of clothes for women, he became the first designer to go from men's wear into women's wear, and not the other way around. Other popular men's-wear designers—Pierre Cardin, Bill Blass, Oleg Cassini, Calvin Klein, Yves St. Laurent, and Hardy Amies—started out designing clothes for the opposite sex.

The rapid rise from itinerant tie peddler to his current preeminent position on the fashion scene was not without its bumpy passages for Lauren. Theoni V. Aldredge, for example, is a well-known costume designer for the Broadway stage and films. When it was announced that she would be designing the clothes for the 1973 remake of the film
The Great Gatsby
, starring Robert Redford, Lauren's star was just beginning to rise, but the movie seemed a natural for him. He telephoned Miss Aldredge and asked for an appointment. They met, she admired his clothes, and he was given the assignment of turning out the men's clothes for the movie, including Jay Gatsby's famous pink suit. Miss Aldredge says, “I did
all
the designs, selected
all
the colors and fabrics. I got a full-frame credit as costume designer, and an Academy Award to prove it. Ralph Lauren
got a much smaller credit—‘Men's clothes executed by.…' There's a big difference between designing and executing someone else's designs.” The trouble was that the film was one of those in which the clothes got more critical praise than the actors' performances. According to Miss Aldredge, Ralph Lauren tried to capitalize on this by claiming that he had “created the Gatsby look.” So much publicity to this effect began appearing in the press that Miss Aldredge had to complain bitterly to Paramount and Lauren to get them to stop it.

Nor has Ralph Lauren's climb to huge success been without emotional rough spots. Both he and his wife, Ricky—whom he met when she was working as a receptionist for his eye doctor—insist that they are total perfectionists. When they acquired their vast Fifth Avenue duplex with its commanding view of Central Park and the reservoir, Ralph Lauren confessed to a friend that he “practically wound up in a hospital with a nervous breakdown,” because of his inability to come up with a design solution for so much space. At length, the interior designer Angelo Donghia was brought in, and the result is starkly minimalist, all white, mirrored, with glass and chrome furniture, many banana trees, and empty spaces. “The apartment seems all wrong for them,” says another friend. “Perhaps because they're both quite small, they seem lost in it, like aliens from another planet. They argue over which oversize white sofa they ought to sit in. But they try very hard. When
Architectural Digest
was photographing the apartment, Ralph made Ricky change her clothes—as though what she was wearing was all wrong. I've never seen two people trying to lead such
relentlessly
perfect lives.”

Meanwhile, what started as a suitcase enterprise has expanded, in barely a decade's time, to include complete lines of men's and women's clothes and shoes, boys' wear and girls' wear, lines called Western Wear and Rough Wear, luggage and small leather goods, men's and women's fragrances and cosmetics, and home furnishings—sheets, towels, pillowcases, and even glassware. Franchised are some twenty-two Polo by Ralph Lauren retail stores across the country, concentrated in such wealthy watering places as Carmel, Beverly Hills, and Palm Beach, and more are on the drawing boards. This sudden Lauren empire has provided Ralph and Ricky Lauren and their three children with, in addition to the extraordinary apartment,
a getaway house in the Hamptons—“East Hampton, the best Hampton,” Lauren points out; a winter retreat in Round Hill, Jamaica, that formerly belonged to Treasury Secretary Douglas Dillon; a sprawling horse and cattle ranch in southwestern Colorado, which Lauren admits he has no idea what to do with; and a private jet to carry the Laurens between these places.

One wonders what Lauren's Russian-born parents, who emigrated to the United States after the revolution, think of what has become of little Ralphie Lifschitz who used to play stoop-ball and stickball in the Bronx. But despite repeated efforts on the part of journalists to find an answer to this question, Ralph Lauren's parents remain an area of his life that he is reluctant to discuss.

Of course one could argue that Ralph Lauren, at forty-four, has not yet had time to grow into, and adjust to, the role of business tycoon. And though there was perhaps not that much difference between Lauren peddling neckties in a secondhand car in the 1960s and David Sarnoff peddling newspapers in a converted packing crate in 1900, David Sarnoff had become by the 1960s a suave and self-assured paterfamilias of the radio and telecommunications industry, had ripened to his position. His personal trademarks had become the heavy gold watch chain draped across his ample front, the large cigar in the ivory holder that was invariably clenched between two plump fingers, and in his lapel, one or another of the ribbons and decorations he had been awarded by American and foreign governments, including those he had received as a brigadier general in World War II, when he had served as General Eisenhower's chief of communications. In the process, he had also developed an enormous ego.

As he moved toward the end of his life, he had begun to think of it as a kind of parable, or Aesopian fable, in which every event had a neat moral attached at the end. There was the strange story, for example, of the mysterious woman who had handed him two hundred dollars to buy his first newsstand. The tale had its payoff, many years later, when Sarnoff himself had become a philanthropist, when dozens of colleges and universities had bestowed honorary degrees in the arts and sciences on him, and New York's Stuyvesant High School had presented him with an honorary diploma to make up for the
one he had never earned. One evening Sarnoff was attending a Jewish philanthropic gathering, and suddenly “found himself staring at a sweet-faced, gray-haired woman, evidently a social worker.” He recognized her as his benefactress from Monroe Street.

She explained how it had all come about. At the time, she had been a secretary “to a wealthy, big-hearted man who wanted to help people anonymously.” She had been dispatched to the Lower East Side to seek out worthy recipients. Sarnoff's name had been supplied to her by none other than school superintendent Julia Richman, who had been impressed by young Sarnoff's spunky stand against the English teacher who had inveighed against the “Jewish traits” of Shylock. Typically, when he told this tale, Sarnoff never supplied a name for either the “social worker/secretary” or her “big-hearted” employer, but the moral was clear: he who stands firm against bigotry will reap spiritual and material rewards.

Nor, in his role of moralist—or perhaps fabulist—did he forsake his role as prophet. In 1958, he told
Wisdom
magazine what he foresaw for the year 1978, which he himself would not live to reach. Among other things, he predicted the effective harnessing of solar energy; global, full-color television; automation (including men working only two hours a day and robots taking over nine million clerical tasks); the “farming of oceans for nutritive products”; a life span “within hailing distance of the century mark”; the end of the Soviet republic and the Communist hierarchy; universal communications and speedy transportation shrinking the whole world into a neighborhood; the outlawing of war as an instrument of international policy; and, above all, “as a reaction against current cynicism and materialism, there will be an upsurge of spiritual vitality.”