Dressing Well Is the Best Revenge : Or, How a Former Reporter Went From Missouri to Milan--and a Job That Pays Her to Wear $2,000 Designer Suits
IT IS 1972. WIDE-EYED WANDA MCDANIEL,the 19-year-old recipient of the Honor McGrath fashion scholarship from the University of Missouri journalism school, is in Los Angeles for the first time in her small-town Midwestern life to cover California Fashion Press Week for the Columbia, Mo., daily paper. She checks into the Beverly Wilshire Hotel and then, chaperoned by a veteran local fashion writer, she steps out onto Rodeo Drive.
She cannot believe her eyes. Everything is so seductive: The top-knotted palm trees, as tall and slender as runway models; the brawny foreign sedans that growl up to the curb; the soignee civilians who alight for an afternoon of designer acquisitions. “Why are there so many Mercedeses?” the quizzical teen journalist asks her companion. “Are they cheaper out here?”
She ventures into Giorgio, that arbiter of Beverly Hills dazzle-chic, and is transported. There is a bar in the boutique. She can have an espresso while she shops. It is all too sophisticated.
By the time the week is up, Wanda McDaniel promises herself that, after she graduates, she’s going to leave her landlocked home and make a big-city career for herself, either on the West Coast or in New York.
IT IS 1988, AND WANDA MCDANIEL HASbecome one of the women she stared at 16 years ago. She has a Beverly Hills house with a tennis court, where she lives with her husband of seven years, film producer Al Ruddy, and a young son and daughter. When she drives around town, it is in a Mercedes station wagon with a car phone--and when she walks down Rodeo Drive, it is in Giorgio Armani.
Always, Armani. For Wanda McDaniel hangs out now at the other Giorgio’s--the 13,000-square-foot temple to sartorial minimalism that opened last August, the Milan designer’s largest outpost in the United States, where he hopes to do $17 million in business this year. McDaniel is Armani’s corporate liaison, his ambassador of good wool, part press attache, part presence in the community, a walking advertisement at every screening, party or luncheon she attends.
She is the executive in charge of image management. In the store, she juggles media inquiries and requests for hands-on assistance: If a Hollywood wife wants special attention or if Elton John decides to trade in his legendary flamboyance for Italian double-breasted suits, it is McDaniel who comes out onto the floor to make sure their shopping experiences are happy ones. When an unfamiliar face spends $15,000 in one hour in the men’s department, the pleasantly dazed salesman dutifully reports to McDaniel, who jots down the customer’s name and asks to be notified if he ever shows up again.
Outside the store, she is a siren beckoning to the lesser-dressed, reminding them of what awaits behind Armani’s glass doors. Her professional life is a fantasy that would make any fashion-conscious woman weep: She actually gets paid to wear what, at about $2,000 for the classic blazer-and-slacks outfit, mere mortals only dream of buying.
McDaniel is Armani’s investment in his retail future. When the designer decided to colonize Los Angeles--to bring religion, in the form of his ascetic, elegant clothing, to this heathen outpost of sequins and see-through--he knew he would need a field representative. Not a professional glamour puss, but a woman who traveled in the circles he wanted to infiltrate.
“What Giorgio tries to appeal to is not to the excess, the ultra-rich, the ultra-fancy, the jet-setters of the world. His clothes were never really aimed at that,” says Armani Vice President Gabriela Forte, a Milan-based tactician who, on a recent visit to the Beverly Hills store, wore her cream Armani suit with a down-to-earth white T-shirt and oxfords. Armani already has a fairly dependable male clientele. His primary target, now, is wealthy women who want to dress between boredom and outrage--some of the American classics might be a bit too tame for them, but they don’t want to wear what McDaniel calls “clothes that arrive before you do.” Customers have been able to find Armani clothes in L.A. stores before, but the profit advantage of the Rodeo Drive mega-boutique is that they can’t find anything but Armani. It’s the chance to establish an exclusive relationship.
Armani would also like to make his mark in Hollywood--and indulge his lifelong passion for movies--by outfitting the occasional character. It would make him happy to work with directors he likes--his favorites include Martin Scorsese, who will direct Armani’s first two television commercials, to be aired next year; Brian De Palma, with whom he worked on “The Untouchables,” and Francis Ford Coppola. And it would be better than a billboard for business. The right star in the right movie--from Richard Gere, who introduced American audiences to Armani in “American Gigolo,” to Michael Keaton, who will wear Armani in his capeless moments as Batman--can turn moviegoers into Armani fans. If they can’t afford couture, they can wait for one of the designer’s less-expensive Emporio Armani shops, which he plans to open across the country.
The markets Armani wants to reach are Hollywood and the generic working rich, so Forte was dispatched to find an appropriate foot soldier. There were job applicants with public relations and fashion credentials, but Armani is a devout believer in the power of the proper network. He had already made Lee Radziwill, ex-princess and sister of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, his “special-events coordinator,” to ease his way into high society. Radziwill mentioned the West Coast job to Kennedy clan member Maria Shriver, who in turn mentioned it to McDaniel, who was one of Shriver’s bridesmaids when she married movie muscle man Arnold Schwarzenegger. McDaniel applied for the job and, on Forte’s recommendation, was dispatched to Milan for Armani’s final approval. She was hired last May.
Her journey from rags to riches to rags--from what she calls a “Norman Rockwell upbringing” in Macon, Mo., through a career as a scrappy society journalist, to her current high-profile, high-ticket existence--has been fueled by her appreciation of the productive personal relationship.
McDaniel travels in just the right social and cinema circles. She sits with the rich and famous on the boards of the Children’s Museum and Cedars-Sinai Women’s Guild and is a member of the Amazing Blue Ribbon, the Music Center’s primary support group. She does the Hollywood circuit. She drops names with aplomb. “I’ve cut a wide swath,” she says, “and it’s a real Armani swath. The kind of people who get it .”
And, having gotten it, can afford to pay for it.
CONSIDERING the geographic distance covered, and the number of tax brackets hurdled, McDaniel got it rather quickly--zero-to-here in nine years, thanks to what she calls “a real curiosity,” a restless ambition and the not insignificant ability to stay up all night, whether to party or to prepare copy for the next edition. She seems not to notice the obstacles that might deter a more cautious soul; she sees something in the far distance and sets out for it.
McDaniel graduated from Missouri and moved to Dallas--where she didn’t have a job--because friends at the Dallas Times-Herald told her that she probably could get hired if she was pushy enough. After two weeks of being a pest, she won a slot on the 5 a.m. copy-desk shift and a muttered promise about a writing job in six months. In six months, she politely inquired as to which beat was hers.
To her surprise, she was given Dallas society--all of it. She became the paper’s society editor in 1974 with nothing to recommend her but her energy and desire, which seemed more important, given the somnambulant state of society coverage in Dallas, than a background in reporting on afternoon charity teas. Three years later, her efforts paid off: Ted Warmbold, who had just become managing editor of the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, had known McDaniel in Dallas and fondly recalled her “great, funny, witty, nasty” writing. He offered her a chance to tackle yet another sagging society page.
Now she was where she wanted to be, even though the circumstances were less than perfect: a harried blur of parties that often were tough to get into, elusive contacts and sprawling all-nighters at the paper, testament to McDaniel’s sometimes infuriating perfectionism. Former Style editor Mary Ann Dolan, now a columnist and political commentator on ABC, says: “Wanda was famous for the constant, up-to-the-last-minute and far-beyond, polishing of her copy. She was a real pain in the butt--but then she’d work hard, way beyond deadline.” McDaniel spent some of her evenings sleeping on the cot in the women’s restroom between rewrite sessions.
But it wasn’t long before she had better things to do at night. McDaniel became what is known in movie jargon as a crossover success, edging into the society crowd she was writing about. There was a “series of Hollywood dates,” recalls Warmbold, now executive editor of the San Antonio Light, including a friendship with Cary Grant. “We had a pool party one weekend, and Wanda ended up staying the night,” Warmbold says. “The next morning my wife, Carolyn, got up to clean the house, and Carolyn’s in one room scrubbing the toilet and Wanda’s in the next room breaking a date with Cary Grant. And my wife’s thinking, ‘Something’s wrong here. We’re both from Missouri--why am I cleaning toilets while she’s breaking dates with Cary Grant?’ ”
In November, 1979, McDaniel met Al Ruddy, 56, a producer whose credits include “The Godfather” and “The Cannonball Run.” They married in June, 1981, and threw a reception at the Beverly Hills Hotel that emphatically marked the end of McDaniel’s struggling-journalist phase. “It was,” Warmbold says, “a glitter-glitter event, limousines pulling up, paparazzi . For us newspaper types it was quite a bash.”
McDaniel, who was hardly prepared to retire to the life of a Hollywood wife, was back at work at the Herald within weeks of her wedding. But there were subtle changes: After years of “shopping haphazardly, on a journalist’s salary, at department store sales and boutiques on Melrose Avenue before it became Melrose Avenue,” McDaniel could afford to abandon fashions “as funky as Los Angeles society would allow” for a sleeker image. She started buying clothing by Italian designers--Krizia, Gianfranco Ferre and Armani--and assumed a new look, which she calls “dressed-down dressed up.”
And if she now wore enough good jewelry to make her co-workers worry that she’d be mugged on a downtown street, most of her old, overworked, underpaid friends managed to be more amused than envious. “Wanda is just a
real person,” Warmbold says. “She’s just this real person who happened to fall into something where now there’s a lot of money. But I’m willing to bet you that underneath all of that she’s still a little girl from Macon, Missouri.”
SPECIFICALLY,today, the little girl is hiding underneath the following: a delicately lightened mane of honey- blond hair; a modulated touch of various pastel shadows on eyes, cheeks and lips; and, of course, The Suit. Today’s outfit is a whispered serenade in silvery gray--the short, single-breasted jacket made of wool crepe that’s about as heavy as a whipped egg white, the matching slacks and the matching silk blouse. The dark gray suede shoes even have little pleated bows in the lighter shade.
It is one of about 20 outfits McDaniel got as her “work wardrobe.” Mr. Armani--and it is always the deferential Mr., or Signor --wants McDaniel in his clothes all the time. She gets time off only when she’s at home, or for any endeavor with a high stain potential, such as chauffeuring her children to school. Otherwise, her job is to tantalize by example.
Which isn’t difficult. Armani groupies can be rather aggressive about their enthusiasm. McDaniel wore this gray suit to a luncheon recently and two women followed her back to the store to buy the same ensemble. Another devotee, a successful lawyer, approached McDaniel with a novel suggestion: “She said, ‘I’m going to quit my job to become your assistant,’ ” McDaniel recalls. “I was a little taken aback by the worshipful response I got to my new job at Armani. But now I understand it. There’s a real cult out here.”
The cult members, Gabriela Forte says, are the growing number of powerful women behind the scenes in Los Angeles--not on-camera celebrities, but Hollywood executives and producers, and their counterparts in other fields. Gently, she says that Los Angeles used to be a bit too casual to merit an Armani store of its own. Things have changed, though: As Forte sees it, the more Angelenos travel, the more their tastes improve. “Women who can afford Armani are not fixed in L.A. night and day,” Forte says. “They travel around the world. They are one day in Chicago, one day in New York, one day in Milan, one day in Rome; they are all over. Half of them have traveled during the year, two or three times outside L.A. I am positive of that without taking a marketing research, you know? They don’t necessarily have to dress like this for L.A., but they do have to dress like this outside.”
Once hooked, though, they do tend to dress like this in Los Angeles. “For those of us behind the camera, it’s the perfect uniform,” says Columbia Pictures President Dawn Steel, who still remembers the first Armani purchase she made nine years ago, having saved for months for a shirt she had to have but couldn’t really afford. Now she wears Armani all the time, down to the pocket square in her taupe jacket. “We’re called ‘suits,’ ” she says, referring to faintly derogatory industry slang for a movie executive, “and I figure as long as I’m called that, I want to wear the best.”
In fact, Steel tends to judge her status today as much by her relationship to Armani as by the title on her door. “This is how I knew I’d made it: On the night Armani opened, they kept the store open until 9 p.m. for me. It was quite fabulous--my fantasy. I had arrived,” she says. “I wasn’t the little girl with her nose pressed against the window. I was on the inside looking out.”
Despite their showy public images, some of the actresses who wear yards of buttons and bows around a sound stage every week share Steel’s obsession when they’re off-camera. Nolan Miller, whose designs drape Joan Collins and Linda Evans in “Dynasty,” uses Armani when he needs an understated look and knows that the actresses go Italian when they aren’t working. “You think of Joan Collins as being so spectacular in her style, but she loves Armani clothes,” Miller says. “So does Linda Evans. They’re always thought of as being jeweled and everything, but they’re really not.”
Forte--who, like her boss Armani, grew up watching American movies and proudly announces that she can recite the dialogue from “Duel in the Sun” by heart--says the notion of the glamour queen is obsolete. Today’s actress is a working woman who doesn’t have time for costumes. “Before, they had to be pinup bimbos because the studios wanted them like that,” she says. “But there is no room for divas today. She doesn’t live the life of a diva, so she can’t dress like a diva. So she comes into this store.”
It is power dressing--both for customers who can afford it and for optimists, as Steel once was, who invest as a bet on their own success. For the clotheshorse, the outfits are a clever way to show off: Armani implies that a woman no longer needs to prove herself to anyone. And Armani offers one essential extra for his high prices--the assurance that he won’t radically alter the look of the clothes from one season to another. “There is always continuity from season to season,” Forte says. “Anybody who decides to totally traumatize you--you spend $2,000 and then throw it away because next season the designer has something else for you--that is a bandit.”
For McDaniel, who admits that she is now “spoiled forever,” the clothes have an almost magical power. She puts on the perfect suit and, like the shoulders and the pleats, the rest of her life effortlessly falls into place. “I think they inject a workaholic dye into this fabric,” she says, laughing. Aside from finding time for tennis, anything seems possible. Since she started working she has finished a screenplay and begun the text for a Japanese art book with a co-writer; kept up her three-mornings-a-week attendance at her daughter’s preschool, and managed to preserve the institution of the family’s evening meal, even if it means arriving at a dinner party in time for dessert.
If her responsibilities collide, she manages to make do. On a recent afternoon she could be found, dressed in Armani, taking a break from the store to spend an available half an hour with her son at the fishpond of the Beverly Hills Hotel. “I jump into the nearest phone booth,” she says, “and emerge as Superwoman.” And then, ever the journalist, she rewrites herself. “Armani-Woman. That’s better.”
