Nine Women, One Dress(4)
We weren’t trying to fool anyone or anything. During Market Week, when the buyers came, we would leave the movie stars’ pictures right out on the showroom tables. Our first line was even named for the actresses. Dorothy was a perfect sample size, and when she came out wearing the Greta Garbo or the Loretta Young, the buyers would break out the heavy pencils, as Max called it when they placed large orders. We were a big success, and by the next season other dress houses were copying our MO. But we were the first, and quite honestly the best. Before long Max moved his now pregnant bride from Coney Island to Central Park West. By that time neither of them looked like they had ever set foot in a Polish shtetl, let alone grown up in one. Dorothy now shopped at the finest stores on Fifth Avenue and the Ladies’ Mile, where she bought the latest fashions from Paris and Milan. This meant I had more than photos to work from. I would take apart her beautiful dresses, study the handiwork, make a pattern, and put them back together. We were a dream team before the term even existed.
I found love as well. I fell in love with my Mathilda the minute I saw her on the L train headed home for Brooklyn. She was carrying fabric remnants that her boss had let her take home, and after sixteen stops I finally convinced her to let me carry them for her. She was almost a first-generation American; she’d been born on the boat—her parents had fled from Austria—and liked to say she was from nowhere and everywhere. Her parents welcomed me, and being part of a family again somewhat helped to ease my heartache. It was the summer of 1945 and the war had finally ended. People had brought back news of my family in bits and pieces over the years, and any hope I had of seeing them again slipped away with each horrific report. I knew that to honor them I had to live a full life, a life big enough for all of us. Soon Mathilda and I were married and had a child of our own.
There have been a lot of changes in the garment center over the years, but I have basically remained the same. Fashions come and go, but a pattern is a pattern. The shoulder pads of the forties and fifties were tossed out for the strapless numbers of the sixties and seventies. Unlike me, Max did change with the times. In the seventies he invested in discos, and he and Dorothy would dance their nights away. At least that’s what I imagined—I never set foot in a disco. In the eighties they got into harness racing. They bought trotters and had their picture taken in the winner’s box. They had a big life. Bigger than the shoulder pads that came back again in the eighties. I had a smaller life but wouldn’t trade it for anything.
Eventually Max retired and he and Dorothy moved to Palm Beach. That’s when his son Andrew took over the business. Max had lived the life he had mapped out on the boat for me all those years ago—his American dream. The only wrinkle was, he hated Palm Beach. Said everyone walked around in the same damn dress, the Lilly Pulitzer. He made his son promise never to knock it off. It wasn’t worthy of a Hammer knockoff, he joked. But Andrew did not intend to knock off Lilly Pulitzer, or anyone else for that matter. Like his father, he too had a plan. His was to take Max Hammer to a whole new level by putting the craftsmanship and quality that we were known for into original designs. He went to FIT and RISD and interviewed designers and assembled his own dream team. They would hand me a sketch and I would create their vision. We worked well together, and I think it was the excitement of creating true fashion that kept me from retiring years ago.
The pattern-maker who comes in after me will never make a pattern the way I do. I’m one of the last in the business to do things entirely by hand. I drape muslin on a mannequin and then draw the pattern onto cardboard. I take the designer’s inspiration and make it come to life—my hands, my work. The patterns are all done on a computer these days. Some pattern-makers don’t see an actual dress until a fitting. But whenever they do, one hopes they treat it with the respect it deserves. The right dress has a bit of magic in it. The right dressmaker is like the magician.
I imagine those shoulder pads from the eighties will come back again, but I will not be here to place them. This is my last fall line. I looked again at the photo of my dress on the cover of WWD. It has been a good ride.
CHAPTER 2
The Movie Star
By Tab Hunter, Movie Star
Age: 29
I’m not really Tab Hunter, movie star. But today I may as well be. I’m really Jeremy Madison, movie star. Okay, I’m not really Jeremy Madison, movie star, either. I’m Stanley Trenton, nobody. My agent named me Jeremy Madison the day he signed me, six long years ago. But today, all day, he’s been calling me Tab Hunter. As if being the subject of a false tabloid outing scandal weren’t bad enough, he has to call me names. And I had to Google the name to even get the joke.
Tab Hunter was a closeted box-office star in the fifties whose agent created a phony relationship between him and Natalie Wood to cover up his homosexuality. I don’t fully understand his reference, since the truth is I’m not gay and this publicity fiasco does not involve a bogus relationship. But according to the maniacal mind of my raving-lunatic agent, whom I’m secretly afraid I would be nothing without, the truth is irrelevant and I am the new Tab Hunter. I will give him this: like Tab Hunter’s, my success is closely tied to my looks. I’ve made eight movies in the last six years, a track record that has brought me the overnight success and stardom that I always wished for. Careful what you wish for, I guess.
I wasn’t a child actor, but close to it. I was cast in my first role just days after graduating from Los Angeles High School of the Arts. It turned out I’m quite castable. I’m the boy next door. I’m a high school rebel. I’m a geek. I can even put on a superhero costume and believably save the world from impending doom in the nick of time. I’m also turning thirty next year. So I am afraid. I worry that my days of playing twentysomethings are numbered and that there will be no place for me in the next Hollywood decade. It’s partly because of this that I play the Hollywood publicity game as little as possible—it seems like the best approach to lasting fame. I avoid the paparazzi and a few years back even moved to Manhattan, where it’s easier to keep a low profile. Being publicly outed, even falsely, was hardly keeping a low profile.