Betsey And Me
Sheila Weller
Word Count 1689
When I was twelve and saw the play WEST SIDE STORY, I became enchanted with the possibility of moving to New York City from balmy, too-easy West L.A. Some years later, when I heard the Drifters sing the Carole King – Gerry Goffin song UP ON THE ROOF, I felt a further impetus. Who wanted the LA-accented Beach Boys, saluting – in a clean-cut way -- their school and their cars when one could be passionate about a romantic, complex, and difficult truly urban setting, full of soulful yearning? That was my sense of things – rational, not crazy, to me.
One day after the semester was out at the University of California, Berkeley, I sat, all alone, on a plane to New York filled with soldiers en route to Vietnam. While half of the young people on the East Coast were heading to the land of California Dreamin’, days before the glamorous Monterey Pop Festival, I was almost singularly compelled to make a reverse migration I barely understood myself. Not long after I touched down, I picked as a long-term boyfriend an older man who had swapped girlfriends with Norman Mailer and Timothy Leary and who had the vibe of someone darkly, resplendently world-weary. I had been a high school cheerleader in a sunny land – I longed to be cool, like a combination of Susan Sontag and Charlie Parker’s girlfriend, Chan Richardson.
This world, dripping with dissoluteness and a belief in the redemptive value of danger, coincided with the debut of a revolutionary new clothing store called Paraphernalia. Its star designer, Betsy Johnson, hiding her normalcy under a stark Vidal Sassoon haircut and layers of fake eyelashes, became its star designer. Like me, this new-to-the-city young woman had recently left a safe suburb – this one, in Connecticut -- to live out her dreams of a more interesting self in the city’s newly sultry, darkened bohemia. Her dresses were fairy-tale clothes for girls who skipped on the wild side. And as a soon-to-be regular wearer of those dresses, I would add that we all wanted to walk wild for some emotional good we expected to get out of it all — for some incandescence in our souls that would match the incandescent in those dresses.
It’s hard to describe just how Betsey Johnson’s clothes defined us, but let me try. For one, they amped up the youthquake gimmick of the time, but they also shifted gears and went romantic, with voluminous sleeves and ribboned, shirred necklines — apt, since coming to New York alone and female was all about romance. They toggled from skimpy silver minis (perfect for discothèques like the Electric Circus and the Scene) to ankle-length skirts that acknowledged the new counterculture’s fondness for medieval gowns. Edie Sedgwick was a fitting model; Julie Christie, an avid customer.
At Paraphernalia, Betsey’s first hit was a set of three nylon microskirts: Day-Glo pink, green and yellow, crunched up in a tennis-ball can. Then came her silver motorcycle jacket. In the mid-to-late 1960s, her clothes punched your membership ticket in a chick elite: not for us, the coming-to-New York of that older generation, with “straight” jobs, roommates in high-rises, and a thirst for engagement rings.
The clothes signaled a sea change. “When I wore my Betsey micro-mini crossing 39th Street at First Avenue, the truck drivers coming out of the Midtown Tunnel would go crazy,” the actress Ali MacGraw recalled. “We were so different from the depressing society ladies with their Diana Vreeland s-curved posture in their Courrègeses.” The folk-singing queen Judy Collins said: “I still have Betsey’s crushed velvet jacket, in black and bright fuchsia. In fact, I’m wearing the black one at the moment.”
Viva Hoffman, a writer, and painter in Palm Springs, Calif., who was then Andy Warhol’s superstar, said: “My entire wardrobe was Betsey. Her black velvet robe with its plunging neck? I lived in it.” Her low-backed turquoise knit? She says she kissed Rudolf Nureyev in a phone booth in it.
And when the actress Anjelica Huston moved from London to New York, she was given a black Johnson jumpsuit by her best friend, the writer Joan Juliet Buck, “and I don’t think I ever took that thing off.” To Huston, Ms. Johnson personified “that wonderful, magical, Peter Pan moment before girls become adults,” a period that was both elongated and darkened during that era.
Betsey designed dresses for the girl who had fled Mayberry for the edgiest quarter of Manhattan to try to erase her former self. (“I didn’t want anyone to know I didn’t do drugs,” she said.)
That was me, too. I got a job as a fashion assistant at Eye, a new glossy that Hearst was starting for the counterculture. t was a magical place, all the more so as few people remember it. Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, and Nora Ephron wrote for us. The art department girls were cocky and beatific as if cutting and pasting bits of swirling psychedelic typeface was a completely uninteresting part of their personal cosmic order.
A regular photographer was Linda Eastman: leggy, busty, impatient, midpoint between being the receptionist at Town & Country magazine and wedding Paul McCartney, she was dating some of the rock stars she photographed, and they sometimes swaggered into the office, tie-dyed scarves looped around their messy-long-hair-dusted necks. The Eye offices were also next door to the loft where Betsey then lived with the Velvet Underground’s John Cale. I visited and interviewed her there; we featured her clothes in our layouts almost every month.
I bought almost all my own clothes at Paraphernalia’s boutique on Greenwich Avenue. An elegant Englishwoman who managed it would watch me holding the hangered new Betseys against my body in the three-way mirror with a worried gaze: She could see through my game face into the fast-beating heart of a girl far less confident than she wanted to appear, a girl who feared she would never be as cool as these dresses, no matter how many she bought.
Betsey spent her days at Paraphernalia and her nights at Max’s Kansas City, the nucleus as she puts it, of “this sparkler of a world.” (Young women quit publishing and advertising jobs in droves to be waitresses at Max’s.) When I first went there, on an afternoon in the summer of 1967, the atmosphere of hip glamour took my breath away. The cool people – the blasé artists!; the darkness, the Abstract Expressionist paintings over the bar, the chickpeas in mini bowls on each table: you could never get this in L.A.
Jerry Schatzberg came with his girlfriend, Faye Dunaway, then unknown. John Ford, a handsome fashion designer, came in daily with his two Irish wolfhounds. Bob Dylan’s manager, Albert Grossman, brought Janis Joplin. Andy Warhol held court in the back room. Twiggy, Veruschka and Lauren Hutton were there alongside Paul Morrissey and Robert Rauschenberg and Brigitte Bardot. John Lennon and Yoko Ono slumped in a booth for privacy. The bar was the province of the brawling sculptor John Chamberlain; there were lots of amphetamine-fueled Social Register exiles vamping about, and the rumpled junkie every girl wanted to save was that bard of exquisite two-minute love songs, Tim Hardin. What melodrama!
Even in the workaday world, melodrama reigned. One weekend, our Eye art director, an ethereal beauty, and her photographer beau, got into their boat in a storm after taking too much LSD — and drowned. (The magazine never entirely recovered and eventually folded.)
In that muggy black summer of 1969, while Neil Armstrong walked on the moon and Ted Kennedy left a girl dead in the water off Chappaquiddick, I moved to Ibiza, where you could pretend that living with no electricity or indoor plumbing among beautiful people and savvy drug dealers was a healing experience. I sent my quixotic dispatches to Jann Wenner, who published them in his Eye-eclipsing Rolling Stone.
I came back to New York 10 months later. It was 1970. If you’ve ever lived an earlier portion of your life in a manner that can’t be explained without your sounding certifiable, you’ve probably collected examples of other women who exemplified the vaporous spirit of the age that governed the life you desired at the time.
In my collection are: Sue Graham leaving the bland, white Dakotas for New York City and Charles Mingus; Susanna Moore’s masochistic female writer in her downtown-based novel “In the Cut”; the novelist Rachel Kushner’s tough-California-“Alice”-tumbled-down-the-rabbit-hole-of-the-All-Irony-’70s-New-York-art-scene in“The Flamethrowers”; the sneering, guiltless older-musician-on-young-girl demi-molestation struggle by the wounded, rapier-witted West 10th Street teenage vixen in Dylan Landis’s novel “Rainey Royal.” All the songs in Laura Nyro’s, “Eli and the Thirteenth Confession.” When I first heard its haunting opening track, “Timer,” during my dazzling tumult, I almost fell on the floor in absolution. My nutty choice of boyfriend was sanctified into a spiritual journey.
One of the first things I did when I got back to town was rush over to Paraphernalia to buy some new dresses, one of them a forest green velvet, collared and cap-sleeved dance frock. The dress sent the message: You can make your own romance and thrive. I asked Betsey Johnson, all these decades later, when I was writing an article about her for the New York Times, “That was yours, right?” “Yes!” she said.
Betsey Johnson branded herself long before others: She’d made the ballet skirt over a leotard her signature dress, and she made her spiky white-blond hair and huge, red-lipped smile her signature look. She performed a cartwheel at the end of her runway shows. Betsey Johnson designed for good girls who wanted to seem wild but who could turn back at zero hour, girls who knew that no adventure was really dangerous as long as you kept your wits and your work ethic. We wanted to bury our ingénue selves, and she became one of the first New York women at a very convenient noir moment when the available means for such burial were copious — as were, if you were smart and lucky, the means for self-reclamation. She found them both. And then, like any good seamstress, she cut the pattern for the rest of us.
Sheila is the author of eight well-received books, several of them NYT bestsellers, the best known of which is Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon -- And The Journey Of A Generation. She has written for (what the hell, let's use the vernacular) a ton of magazines, including Vanity Fair, New York, Glamour, the New Times Book Review, Styles and Opinion pages. She lives in Greenwich Village.
