POWER PLAY
LONG BEFORE MONICAGATE, WWD SOUGHT OUT D.C.’S DEEPEST SECRETS, FROM THE DISH ON DR. K TO JACKIE’S OPEN-TO-BUY TO THE TRUTH ABOUT INAUGURAL FROCKS.
Byline: Susan Watters / Bobbi Queen
The dress. For years in Washington, those two words have come to mean one of two things: either a First Lady’s inaugural look or a presidential daughter’s wedding gown. No hunt is juicier, more fun or even more political than the dress beat. And WWD pursues it
relentlessly.
Yet the paper has long chronicled all of Washington’s affairs — some of even greater import than fashion. From extensive coverage of the Depression economy to the surprise transitions from FDR to Harry Truman and JFK to Lyndon Johnson, from Ike’s visits to Seventh Avenue to the NAFTA debate, this newspaper covered it.
Sometimes, WWD, however unintentionally, even became part of the story itself. For example, one feature ultimately triggered Edmund Muskie’s withdrawal from the 1972 presidential race. Kandy Stroud was one of several reporters who accompanied Muskie’s wife, Jane, on a campaign bus trip before the New Hampshire primary. Although complimentary in tone, Stroud’s subsequent story depicted a feisty, regular-gal type who smoked, chewed gum and “jestingly suggested, ‘Let’s tell dirty jokes.”‘ Jane Muskie also admitted to enjoying two drinks before dinner and creme de menthe after, “because the next day everything seems to work just right.” Other publications picked up the quotes, and the virulently conservative Manchester Union Leader questioned whether such a woman was fit to call the White House home. At a press conference, the senator broke down while defending his wife’s honor. Although he won New Hampshire, Muskie’s campaign never recovered, and he eventually dropped out of the race.
Not surprisingly, the Nixon years provided the paper with plenty of material. One headline mused of the president-elect: “Nixon could be a Swinger.” Not that kind, but the kind who, “as a Communist-hunting, law-and-order, Chamber of Commerce Republican,” could afford to engage in a little liberalism, such as “recognition of Red China.” In subsequent years, administration officials merited harsher critiques. John Mitchell found that out in a story that posed the burning question, “Atty. Gen.’s Mouth: Bigger Than Martha’s?” At a cocktail party, an uncharacteristically jovial Mitchell told Stroud: “Henry’s [Kissinger] an egocentric maniac.” “This country is going so far right you are not even going to recognize it.” “I’ll tell you who’s not informed…those stupid kids…And the professors are just as bad, if not worse. They don’t know anything, nor do these stupid bastards who are ruining our educational institutions.” The story is believed to have merited Stroud a spot on Nixon’s enemies list. Still, in 1974, with the beleaguered President under fire, his daughter Julie sat for an interview. A front-page teaser photo ran with the caption: “What Bugs Julie? Watergate, of course.”
Sometimes, however, the relationship was simpatico. When a staffer turned up in HotPants for an interview with Henry Kissinger during the non p.c. Seventies, he teased her: “What are you trying to do? Seduce me?” Duly reported. Two days before that story was scheduled to run, TV gossip maven Rona Barrett reported that he had secretly married Jill St. John. When WWD called for confirmation or denial, Kissinger told Ms. HotPants, “How can I be married to Jill St. John when everybody knows I’m married to Candy Bergen?” After an hour or two, the good doctor regretted his own wit and called managing editor Mort Sheinman in New York to retract his statement in favor of a direct denial. WWD complied.
The paper was there when the Nixon girls played host to young royal siblings Charles and Anne during a two-day visit to Washington in 1970.
Charles, who “spent several minutes talking to a whooping crane at the Patuxent Wildlife Center,” was “indeed a prince charming.” Less could be — and was — said of New York senator Jacob Javits. The senator, “politically opportunistic” and “a notorious royal knee-slapper,” tore over to Charles with a “Hi there. I know the Duke of Windsor very well. We go to lots of parties together.”
The vice president’s wife chatted with WWD as well and when asked about a report published elsewhere that she appeared to “be on something,” Betty Ford replied: “Valium, three times a day, or sometimes Equagesic. That way I’m more comfortable.” Ford also talked to the paper on the evening she became First Lady, the day of Nixon’s resignation. “How do I feel? I’m paralyzed,” she admitted. “I have very mixed emotions. It’s been a very emotional thing.” But not utterly distracting, as earlier in the day the owner of a shop Ford frequented had brought by an assortment of 40 dresses for her to peruse, including some by Oscar de la Renta, Christian Dior, Geoffrey Beene and Gloria Sachs.
Other political scandals got equal time. In 1970, one story asked Bostonians, “Is Ted Kennedy’s political future still alive and thriving, or did Chappaquidick finish off the last of the Kennedys?” Another noted the island’s heightened tourist appeal under the tasteful headline “Ghouls and Tourism at Chappy.”
But for all the roll calls, state dinners and scandals, reporting on the style of Washington, and especially its first ladies, has long been central to WWD’s coverage. While the paper’s interest dates back to Woodrow Wilson’s administration, the stakes skyrocketed in 1961 when the glamorous Kennedys came to town. John Kennedy had won by a narrow margin, and his political advisers worried about potential reaction against anything too sophisticated or elitist — including the image of the First Lady.
“The fact was that this relatively unknown trade paper of the fashion press was one of the first things Pierre Salinger in the press office looked at each day, wondering if Madame would be happy or furious that day,” recalls Kennedy White House social secretary Letitia Baldrige. “And since then, all these women have all relied on designers to make them look good. Yes, Jackie cared a lot about what it said about her. And so did all the first ladies thereafter. Nancy Reagan cared desperately; Barbara Bush wanted Bill Blass to be mentioned well. And if the designer wasn’t mentioned well, you felt crushed. You felt responsible.”
Aides to President Ford complained Women’s Wear was snubbing Betty by running too many pictures of a stylish young cabinet wife, Nancy Kissinger. Nancy Reagan groused so much about not being able to get her Women’s Wear Daily on time that Fairchild’s front office agreed to ship her paper to the White House special delivery. “She cared about Women’s Wear Daily,” recalls press secretary Sheila Tate. “She cared about fashion, and she cared about the fashion industry. In addition, a lot of the people WWD wrote about were her friends.”
Even the anti-fashion Carters cared. White House aides confided that Jimmy Carter had a copy delivered to him in the butler’s pantry adjoining the Oval Office, so he could check reports on himself and his wife, Rosalynn. The gist: “More Plains than fancy.” Yet when WWD reported on a true fashion moment — Rosalynn’s secret $4,000 buying expedition to Seventh Avenue — the White House called to ask that the story be dropped. When WWD refused, it was barred from the press plane on the First Lady’s first foreign trip, to Latin America.
But no one provided more material than Jackie. WWD had followed her as a young, stylish senator’s wife and naturally stepped up post-election coverage. From that time on, the paper covered her relentlessly, through the White House years, in a page-one photograph at the president’s funeral, and later, throughout the Seventies, as a chic editor about New York.
As first lady, Jackie’s press issues centered on depth, on looking like more than the ultimate clotheshorse without tempering her finely honed sense of chic. She came up with the idea of helping America’s textile industry by promoting American designers. Shortly after the inauguration, she made a public announcement that despite her long preference for French designs, she would now only wear American. Jackie chose Oleg Cassini as her man.
Everything went smoothly until a month or so later, when the paper learned that, despite her public pronouncement, Jackie still indulged in the Paris couture. A front-page report noted that Hubert de Givenchy would make clothes on Jackie’s dress form and her sister Lee Radziwill would sneak them into the country and deliver them to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Pierre Salinger denied the story, but newspapers and television and radio stations across the country picked it up. WWD followed with an estimate of how much Jackie and the rest of the Kennedy women spent on clothes. That spring, during the Kennedys’ state visit to Paris, Jackie made her grand entrance at Charles de Gaulle’s dinner decked in Givenchy.
“We came to an abrupt ending with Women’s Wear because Jackie didn’t want anyone asking about her clothes,” recalls Baldrige. “She thought Women’s Wear Daily pressed too hard. She didn’t want anyone knowing who designed her clothes. But Valentino wanted it known. And then she’d get criticized for not supporting American industry. So she told [press secretary] Pam Turnure and I that we were not to give out any information.”
While the Johnson administration was hardly notable for its high chic, the fashion battles raged on. As daughter Luci Baines Johnson prepared for the first of two White House weddings, Liz Carpenter, press secretary for Lady Bird, invited reporters to an off-the-record briefing. In it, she was to reveal sketches of the bridal dress by Pricilla of Boston, along with designs for the bridesmaids and Lady Bird, complete with instructions for a press embargo: The story could not run until the wedding day itself.
You’ve heard the expression red to a bull? WWD boycotted the briefing, dug up the story on its own and ran a sketch of the dress the Thursday before the wedding. Carpenter responded by banning the paper from the nuptials, saying that it had broken the release dates. WWD countered with a statement. “As the White House well knows,” it read, the paper had declined all invitations to embargoed briefings “in order that it be free to publish news of the wedding whenever such news became available.”
Fairchild reporter Richard Wightman later asked President Johnson, in one of his nationally televised press conferences, whether the ban jibed with his attitude on press freedom. Johnson smilingly replied he’d rather leave such matters to the ladies of the family. Yet the incident set off a flurry of support for WWD from news organizations around the country, which published editorials praising WWD’s firm stand in the name of the First Amendment.
The fighting started all over again when it was Lynda Bird’s turn to marry. She chose Geoffrey Beene to design her dress. And when Beene refused to give Fairchild a sketch, the famous feud between Beene and John Fairchild began.
Sheila Weidenfeld, press secretary to Betty Ford, remembers her own shock when she arrived in the White House and had her first contact with WWD. “I got a call that Mrs. Ford was spotted on Seventh Avenue shopping for clothes. I said, no, she was upstairs in the family quarters. That’s when I found out she’d sneaked off to buy clothes. After that, we had an understanding that I’d always be told where she was.” It was Weidenfeld who took the hits when Betty Ford insisted on giving a major interview to WWD. “When wire services like UPI and AP heard her first real interview was with Women’s Wear Daily,” she says, “they were furious.”
In the roaring Eighties, Nancy Reagan frequented WWD’s pages with her impeccable style and grooming, a look dubbed “the American Thoroughbred image.” The paper noted that Nancy’s distinctive chic helped fuel retail sales across the country, but also reported on the brouhaha over her acceptance of gifts and loaned merch worth thousands, and her damage-control “wear-now, donate-later” policy.
Nancy was the first first lady since Jackie to be celebrated — and scorned — for her overt love of fashion, including her affinity for the Europeans. But if the position requires a jingoistic embrace of Americana when it comes to her closet, it is also the first lady’s role to project the American moment with style and sophistication. Reagan may have paved the way for her successors. While Hillary Clinton started out on the folksy side with an inaugural gown designed by Arkansan Sarah Phillips, no one criticized her when she turned to Oscar de la Renta and Donna Karan for help. And while she’s hardly taking chances, Laura Bush decided recently to supplement her Michael Faircloth wardrobe with pieces from Bush family favorite Arnold Scaasi. WWD will be watching.
“No matter what they say, all first ladies care what WWD says about them,” Baldrige explains. “Frankly, if Women’s Wear Daily had been around during the days of Dolly Madison, she’d have been feeding them all the time.”
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GIRL TALK
Since Pat Nixon, first ladies have chatted with WWD before, during and after their stints at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
Pat Nixon, on campaigning, 1968: “I’m buoyed by the crowds, particularly the young people….You have to live with faith rather than fear. Most people are good; only a few souls are demented.”
Lady Bird Johnson, on the Head Start program, 1967: “I think such exciting things are happening at the Glenwood School [in Appalachia]. I think it shows that teachers cannot teach alone and students cannot learn alone. It really is a family affair. A mother’s enthusiasm adds to a child’s. The best way to look at the future is to look at a school.”
Betty Ford, on Nixon’s resignation, 1974: “Jerry and I were sitting in a chair together in the family room and we were mutually sad and touched. What did I say to him? What is there to say? We just put our arms around each other.” On her husband’s presidency: “It’s like jumping into a river without being able to swim. If you’re elected, you’re elected in November and have until January before you’re sworn in. This is like instant, 24-hour presidency. But I have confidence.”
Rosalynn Carter, 1976: “When people ask me about Jimmy being a Baptist and indicate they feel no Baptist can run the country, I just remind them that Harry Truman was a Baptist, and I think he did a great job.”
“I have very mixed feelings about abortion. There’s never been any question in my mind that for me it’s not right. I wish nobody had to have them, but I really don’t know if I should impose my will on other people.”
Nancy Reagan, on whether her marriage was faithful, 1976: “Oh, heavens, yes. Yes. You know, I think I’ve found that it’s difficult for many people to accept the fact that there are no problems, that it is a close marriage and we’ve nothing to hide.” On whether she could vote for a homosexual: “No, I don’t think I could. In order to hold office, you have to be a terribly strong man emotionally.”
On her hopes for scaled-back inaugural festivities, 1980: “I wanted to make it more comfortable and warmer. I also wanted to shorten the parade. I’ve been to a couple of parades that went on for hours. What if it’s raining or snowing? The poor people watching….”
Barbara Bush, on her fashion influence, 1989: “My mail tells me that a lot of fat, white-haired wrinkled ladies are tickled pink.” On why she wished people wouldn’t compare her with Eleanor Roosevelt: “Because I grew up in a household that really detested her. My mother really didn’t like her. She just irritated my mother, she was just one of those people.” Bush added that, years later, when her mother met Eleanor, her opinion changed. “But it was too late. We’d grown up.”
Hillary Clinton, on whether fidelity had ever been a problem in her marriage, January 1992: “I don’t talk about it. I think my marriage is my marriage and my relationship with my husband is solely between us….We demand much too much of our political people in terms of the way we expect them to live. We have really collapsed the space in which public people can live, to the detriment of our overall politics. You lose not just privacy, you lose the opportunity to be a real person.”