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At 98, Still Fashion's Miss Ballyhoo
Fashion's newest odd couple were huddled over tea, engaged in the kind of decorous banter meant to bridge two almost comically disparate backgrounds. He reminisced about James Galanos, the Los Angeles couturier, whom he once, unsuccessfully, hit up for a job. She bemoaned the decline of fashion craftsmanship, the attention to detail that had made Mr. Galanos a legend in his time. She was Eleanor Lambert, the 98-year-old grande dame of American fashion publicists, a woman widely credited with having put the likes of Halston, Calvin Klein and Bill Blass on the international fashion map. He was Rick Owens, the much ballyhooed California designer, whose kohl-lined eyes, brawny frame and raven-colored hair gave him the aspect of a brooding Goth. The encounter, which took place months ago in Miss Lambert's chintz and red-wool library on Fifth Avenue, was being filmed by her grandson, Moses Berkson, for a documentary about Miss Lambert's life. Mr. Owens, his friend, had come to kiss the ring. Or maybe just to gape. "Actually, I can't take my eyes off your ring," Mr. Owens said, admiring the nickel-size David Webb enamel bauble that Miss Lambert wears like a talisman. Apart from that, Mr. Owens's eyes never left those of his hostess, whom he seemed to regard as a lens on the past and a venerable fragment of fashion history. In the same library the other day, Miss Lambert recalled the meeting with a dry little laugh. "I think he wanted to have publicity," she said, "but I felt he wasn't ready for it." For Miss Lambert, Mr. Owens was merely the latest in a succession of visitors who stream to her apartment every week to chat, seek advice and pay her homage, simply because, like Everest, she is there. "She is the memory of the American fashion business," said Michael Gross, who is preparing an unauthorized biography of Ralph Lauren. For the book, he telephoned Miss Lambert. "How can you write about an American fashion designer in the last 50 years without placing that call?" Mr. Gross said. "She is a station of the cross." Hearing that, Miss Lambert would have howled. Being a Living Legend is simply not in her line. She still works, traveling to her Midtown office several times a week, pitching clients with a soft-spoken charm that covers a steely tenacity. Not long ago she deployed her persuasive powers to badger this reporter into visiting Lexington Avenue above 60th Street. Her latest protégée, Irene Kojen, a jeweler, has a store, Peipers & Kojen, on the somewhat sleepy thoroughfare. Lexington, Miss Lambert assured, was going to be fashion's next big thing. "I am not an expert on fashion," she demurred. But she ladles advice like hot chicken soup. "Have you made any connections?" she demanded of Mr. Owens. Do you have contractors in New York? I think I could find one for you." "Quick," she instructed her housekeeper, "find me a number for Geraldine Stutz. She used to run Henri Bendel, you know." Miss Lambert, the daughter of an advance man for Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus, has a penchant for promotion enmeshed in her DNA. She grew up in Crawfordsville, Ind., but by the 1920's she was in New York on 57th Street, promoting young artists and earning $10 a client. By the 1930's she had become America's foremost cheerleader for the fashion industry. The widow of Seymour Berkson, publisher of The New York Journal-American, who died in 1959, she has few illusions about what makes her newsworthy now. "People interview me because I'm old," she said, a touch of acid in her otherwise creamy delivery. "I hope," she added flatly, "you are not going to make this my obituary." She suffers from macular degeneration, which has rendered her partially blind. She has arthritis and walks with a black-lacquered cane. "Just getting around can sometimes be a bore," conceded Miss Lambert, who does not travel more than a city block without a limousine. "Still, as long as you can function, you might as well be useful. I don't want to retire while I like what I'm doing. Just being a cipher is not a good thing." Nor, just yet, does she intend to be consigned to history. Nevertheless, it is hard to describe her without spooling off a dutiful list of her credits. Her bio sheet says that she introduced Pierre Cardin and Yves Saint Laurent to the press. In 1940, she founded the International Best-Dressed List. In 1943, she founded the Coty Awards, considered for the next 30 years to be the Oscars of the fashion world. In the 1960's, she helped organize the Council of Fashion Designers of America, which has largely taken over the Cotys' function today. On June 3, at the council's annual awards ceremony, an anniversary celebration of the organization's past four decades, Miss Lambert will be honored with a prime table. Seated with her will be Mr. Owens. For a woman accustomed to being fussed over, she displays little vanity. True, she arrived for her interview looking decorative in a turban, enamel shell earrings and a string of pearls from which a gleaming blackamoor pendant hung. But at times she has permitted Mr. Berkson, her grandson, to film her without makeup, in un-self-conscious dishabille. "Did I have a choice?" She throws her head back and laughs. "Sometimes I think of the look of myself, and, oh, I wish it were 10 years ago. Then I stop. What's the use? I can't change my face or my age." Miss Lambert's candor has earned her her share of wrath. John Fairchild, the former publisher of Women's Wear Daily, once called her the scourge of the press. One editor, who declined to be named, recalled Miss Lambert in her heyday as "relentless, a terror," adding: "She would say anything to get you to do what she wanted." More recently, though, she won the grudging admiration of certain former detractors. Mr. Gross, the writer, who feuded with her in the 1990's over who should be included on the best-dressed list, says he prefers her cajoling manner to the bald hectoring style of publicists today. "Maybe because she was married to a journalist," he said, "she understands what it is that journalists do for a living, as opposed to those who think that journalists are supposed to be shock troops for the fashion general staff, who consider saying anything other than the party line to be treason." Miss Lambert has no use for the party line. "There are few fashion geniuses today." She maintains it was Giorgio Armani who precipitated fashion's decline. "He made unconstructed suits," she lamented. "After that there were no designers who bothered to learn how to cut." Nor has she a kind word for fashion's premier cheerleaders, those magazine editors whom she deems to be more interested in promoting themselves than the clothes. She is happy to tell tales on herself, so long as they hint at her colorful past. At a party last week at her apartment, one of the weekly meat-loaf-and-mashed-potatoes gatherings she holds in her kitchen, a friend goaded her into showing off her tattoo. She offered her leg obligingly, and there it was, a tiny star just visible through her sheer black stockings, the memento of an outing with Dorothy Parker. Parker had been in her cups, Miss Lambert recalled. As for herself, she had had nothing to drink. Still, she didn't want to be a spoiler. "So I picked the most discreet place I could find," she said pointing to her ankle, "and I got on with it." Mr. Owens, who returned for tea not long ago, says Miss Lambert is "fun and not that fragile; I could totally hang out with her." Mr. Owens, a council of designers nominee for new designer of the year, updated Miss Lambert on his blossoming career. "It was satisfying just being able to come back and kind of give her the progress report," he said. "In your personal life there are always people you want to show your report card to. She is that for me." FAIR USE NOTICE: This page contains copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. Global Action on Aging distributes this material without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. We believe this constitutes a fair use of any such copyrighted material as provided for in 17 U.S.C § 107. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond fair use, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
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