Authors Have Novel Wardrobes for Work and Promotional Tours : Write Items in Novel Wardrobes Spell Success for Some Authors

When Judith Krantz finished writing “I’ll Take Manhattan” last spring, she went shopping. She needed clothes to wear on her book-promotion tour, so she caught an L.A. flight and flew through a blizzard to New York, met designer Adolfo at his studio and custom-ordered five of his Chanel-like suits in pastel colors, which even she considered impractical. Each suit was attached to a four-digit price tag.

Krantz says she staged this jet-setter’s spree to maintain her public image.

“If you write glamorous novels about the publishing world or the fashion world, nobody wants to see you looking drab,” she says. “I didn’t know it when I toured for my first book. People would meet me and say: ‘ You wrote “Scruples”?’ ”

But for all the polish and pricey-ness of her current public image, Krantz has another wardrobe that most of her readers don’t know exists. When she sits down to work on her latest novel--which will require more than a year of seven-day work weeks--she wears frayed, gray sweat pants, an old T-shirt, sweater and a pair of sheepskin-lined slippers.

“If the doorbell rings, I’m afraid to answer it,” she admits.

Other Los Angeles-based novelists are every bit as extreme in their dress. Publicly, they use fashion to reflect their written words the way Hollywood stars use fashion to reflect their screen images. But in the solitary confinement of a writer’s workroom, the tendency is to wear what one writer, T. C. Boyle, refers to as “rags.”

In his own way, Boyle is as flamboyant a dresser as Krantz. If her calling card is a pastel Adolfo suit, his is a dollar strand of beads he knots like a choker around his throat.

All of his outfits, he says, consist of gifts. “My friends give me clothes, my wife buys me clothes and nothing costs more than a dollar,” he says.

To discuss his comical novels (“Water Music” and “Budding Prospects” among them), Boyle appears in red high-tops, a black leather jacket and a bohemian’s brass ear clip.

To write, he claims he dresses down, explaining: “I wear dirty jeans that I’d wear to got out and kill gophers.”

Women writers tend to believe that men have an easier time of dressing for public appearances because of men don’t have as many fashion choices to make. Of all men, Krantz says, she most envies author Andrew Greeley, a Catholic priest. “He has his uniform,” she points out.

But novelist Jackie Collins, who signs her name to such steamy stuff as “Hollywood Wives” and “Lucky,” says she has a uniform too.

“I always wear pants. There’s more of a power image wearing pants.”

For her book-jacket portraits, Collins has a “costume” wardrobe of black leather and leopard prints. “The person on the book jacket is not me at all,” she says.

The real Collins is the one she presents when promoting her densely packed romances. She wears silk shirts, neckties and blazers.

“I have a passion for men’s clothes,” she says.

Jacqueline Briskin is one of few writers who dresses well while working. But it’s a new approach.

“I worked in my bathrobe for 10 years,” she says. “While my young children were away at school I didn’t want to waste a minute, so I never took time to get dressed.”

Now, Briskin says, she’s wearing knitted pants and tops by a hip, Paris-based designer named Joseph Tricot and writing the tomes to follow such Briskin best bets as “Too Much Too Soon.”

“I do it for myself,” she says of her reformed fashion attitude. “I got tired of looking schlocky.”

Louis L’Amour, who sets his stories in the Old West, aptly outfits himself in bolo ties and cowboy boots for autographing his latest books--most recently, “Last of the Breed.”

It seems a subconscious decision, as if L’Amour somehow exists in the modern world while living in the past.

Literary monolith Irving Stone’s new biographical novel, “Depths of Glory,” springs from the life of the Impressionist painter Camille Pissarro. To promote it, Stone prefers “new, fashionable, immaculate clothes. But inconspicuous.”

With a pale-gray suit and sweater vest, he wears a crisp white shirt that was custom-made in Hong Kong, because he likes the workmanship of the three-letter monogram discreetly stitched above the cuff.

In contrast, Stone says, he wears “the oldest, shabbiest clothes” for writing. “That seems humble,” he explains.

“Stones for Ibarra” is a first novel that won the American Book Award for author Harriet Doerr three years ago. She was then 73. Doerr says her new-found fame presented her with a fashion problem.

“I didn’t know how to dress like a writer,” she says. “I still don’t. I wish I knew more of the language of fashion. I can hardly speak it.”

After some deliberation, she settled on “old faithful” outfits for public appearances, such as a gray linen coatdress she owned and wore before she published fiction.

Doerr says her old clothes express her literary intentions. “Serious writers are trying most of all to be honest,” Doerr says. “They’re looking for what is true in everything. I suppose the same lack of artifice carries over into their clothing.”

Ask her why she thinks poet Steve Mason owns 44 hats and wears one even while writing.

“He must consider that honest for him,” she suggests.

“I started wearing hats right after the Vietnam War,” says the military veteran, whose anthology of poems, “Johnny’s Song: Poetry of a Vietnam Veteran,” is based on his wartime experiences. “I started writing poetry with my hat on.”

He gives all of his hats a name. “Ramone, a Panama, is for whimsical love poems. Cellini, a borsalino style, lets me know I’m really humming--when worn at a certain angle.”

If his hats help provide an “emotional bunker” to protect him while he works, Mason says, his carefully chosen public insignia is a white silk scarf, draped over his shoulders like a mantle.

“There is something mystical about poetry,” he says. “As a poet you have to distance and elevate the image in order to bring truth.”

Unlike the poet he describes himself to be, Mason appears on a writer’s panel at the Music Center wearing a beige jacket, brown trousers and beige canvas shoes. That outfit, he says, was also carefully chosen.

“My hat and scarf were absent in deference to the other writers on the panel,” he explains. “I could not dominate the group.”

Mason believes that most writers dress for themselves more than for their public image.

“They make statements with words,” he says. “They don’t need to be remembered for anything else.”

But Judith Krantz begs to differ. She says: “Writers have personal agendas in their clothes. We’re all playing dress-up.” She considers her favorite “serious” woman author to be Susan Sontag.

“In public she wears a black sweater and no makeup, and it reflects her position as one who writes fine literature,” Krantz notes. “But I’ll bet she goes home and puts on slinky lingerie.”