Wallflower at the Orgy by Nora Ephron Page B

shirt;
enough
to have divined that what one really needed drooping from one’s hair at Truman Capote’s gala was a single white begonia.
    The Ladies subscribe to
Women’s Wear
to read about themselves, to find out what clothes they are buying and what they should buy, what designers they will patronize next, what restaurants are fashionable, where their friends are this month and whom they are in love with. But there is one more reason The Ladies read
Women’s Wear Daily:
it serves as their Surrogate Bitch. Delightful, delicious, delectable, and delirious the newspaper
is
, but it is also bitchy as can be.
    Why, remember the time
WW
printed that terrible picture of Lady Bird Johnson with the ironic caption: “Welcome to the Best-Dressed List”? The Ladies had a good giggle over that. And another giggle when
WW
cited Princess Margaret for being “The individualist of 1965 … the woman who proved fashion doesn’t count.” When Mrs. Hubert Humphrey arrived at the Capitol to hear President Johnson’s State of the Union message,
Women’s Wear
commented, “That little old dressmaker is at it again.” One of The Ladies, Jean vanden Heuvel, was found wanting at the opera: “Jean vanden Heuvel,” snipped
WW
, “needs a new hairdresser.” Even Caroline Kennedy was singled out for bitchery this past summer. “THERE IS NO QUESTION,” wrote
Women’s Wear
, “THAT CAROLINE DRESSES MUCH YOUNGER THAN HER AGE. Her smocked-to-the-waistdresses, her short white socks, her semifitted velvet-collared coats all point to another era. Today, ten-year-olds wear boldly striped knits, chain belts, bright tights. Said one executive of a New York store where Caroline’s clothes are bought, ‘The surprise is that Jackie dresses her like a little girl of six or seven. Perhaps Mrs. Kennedy wants to keep Caroline a little girl so that she herself will look younger.’ ”
    “Women’s Wear,”
said Marian Javits, wife of the New York Senator, “is like having a morning gossip with a pal who has taste, who’s a little bitchy, and who goes to all the parties, my dear. It never condescends, it judges all the time. It is a giggle, a bubble, fun, fun.” It is, in other words, a surrogate bitch.

    The evolution of
Women’s Wear Daily
into a fashion oracle and surrogate bitch began in 1960, but its history goes back a good deal further.
Women’s Wear Daily
was founded in 1910 by E. W. Fairchild, the son of a Dutch Reform minister who in 1890 started to print a trade paper containing the business news he picked up while selling homemade yeast cakes to grocery stores. The Fairchild Publishing Company, which now publishes nine newspapers including
Home Furnishings Daily, Drug Weekly News
, and
Metalworking News
, picked up considerably with the addition of
Women’s Wear:
it was a newspaper that supplied exactly what the garment business wanted—news of latex futures, new trends in sewing machines, and indiscriminate reports on every collection from shoes to hatpins. “It was encyclopedic,” said
New York Post
fashion editor Ruth Preston. It was also dull as denim. “It sat on every merchandiser’s desk,unread indefinitely,” said Leonard Hankin. “You got it because you were in the business but you never looked at it.”
    E. W. Fairchild was proud of his newspapers; he often said he would never allow editorial comment to appear in his pages. “Our job is to mirror the industry, not to lead it,” he declared. When his son, Louis, began to assume editorial responsibility in the late 1930s, the paper continued to have minimal impact; its reporters were seated ignominiously in the back rows of fashion shows and shunted around to the service entrance for outdated press releases.
    Louis Fairchild began training his son to take over the company when John was fourteen; a student at the Kent School, he spent summers as an errand boy in the company offices. After graduating from Princeton, marrying the former Jill Lipsky, and working at