If You Pass the Hat, She Just May Help You Mend It
The fake rabbit ears on the straw hat in Sandra Leko’s shop window are there just to fool you. She is no fly-by-Easter hat maker.
Step into two cozy rooms tucked away in a Dickensian courtyard in Sherman Oaks and you enter another world, one made of feathers, flowers, fruits and froufrou.
On a whim, Leko signed up five years ago for a millinery class. “I became obsessed. I wanted to make every kind of hat there was.”
Schooled as a serious artist and sculptor, she tried to battle this obsession. She lost.
So, she stuck a few feathers in her caps and called them Hats by Leko. Then she set out to empower women to feel comfortable en chapeau “because you get noticed in a hat.”
Leko makes very few hats these days. “I like making one, an original. Making 50 of one thing is not fun for me.”
This recent evening, Leko, with 6-month-old daughter Anael (hatted) on one hip, is maneuvering her way among the antique wood hat blocks, ribbon spools, buckram frames and bolts of veiling. Perched on her upswept hair is a flower-festooned straw pancake, her “countess” number. It suits her. With her gauzy dress and a certain not-of-this-century aura, she could have been created by a French Impressionist.
Soon, students will arrive and Anael, who’s been coming to the shop since infancy, will go home with Daddy.
The women will bring their creations, and their problems. One has a lovely straw cloche that keeps slipping down on her nose. Another can’t get ribbon ends to line up. Vital, says Leko--”It could be the difference between an $80 hat and a $350 hat.”
Sloppy won’t do here. “Someday,” Leko tells the women, “somebody’s going to be taking your hats apart, redecorating them, reshaping them.” The implication is that being found shoddy is right up there with being in an auto accident while wearing dirty underwear.
Another tip from the milliner: When creating, “You’ve got to think about what the person in back of you is going to be seeing too.”
Between stitches, the talk turns to diets, hatpins as weapons and how a hat can save one on a bad hair day.
Liz Wohl is reworking a straw number that she describes as a travel hat that “traveled in a different direction.” Hats, she has found, “have a mind of their own.”
That’s OK, says Leko, recalling a memorable millinery disaster, a lavender felt that ripped. “We stuffed red veiling through it” and it was a wow.
Carolyn Ernst, a waitress who hopes to be a full-time hat maker, is wearing a poufy green velvet beret, her own creation.
Susan Carlston coaxes a mauve straw cloche into shape over a jet of steam, joking, “When you get tired of hats, you give yourself a facial.” Class is fun, but she’s keeping her job as sales manager for a janitorial supply firm.
Darlene Frost is here because she sells hats at her shoe store in Culver City. Hit by recession, she’d like to cut out the middleman and make them herself.
A hat may start as a “hood,” a raw shape that looks something like a small upside-down wastebasket. It is then steamed, blocked and stitched into a creation.
Creating her own competition is just fine with Leko, who urges her students, “Take your designs and run.”
As she bids another class goodby, she says reassuringly, “You’re old hats now.”
Memories of the Fab Four
So, Paul McCartney will be at the Hollywood Bowl next week.
It was 28 years ago--can it be?--September, 1965. The Beatles’ early classic, “Help!” was topping the charts and--riding the crest--the Fab Four were making their second American concert tour.
I caught up with them at San Diego’s Balboa Stadium, where the 18,000 fans included hysterical young women who scaled the infield fence to pull up clumps of the very grass the Beatles had trod upon.
In their foppish tan coats and black pants, with their bowl haircuts, Paul, George, John and Ringo had all looked so impossibly young. It seemed, then, that for them life would always be a lark.
As a reporter for the San Diego Union, I was seated front row center at the news conference preceding the concert.
McCartney surveyed the scene and then, with an insouciant wag of his forefinger, beckoned me. A bit flustered, but convinced that I had been singled out for some scoop, I approached.
“It’d be better if you pulled down your skirt,” he whispered. “I notice those things, you know.”
The Beatles were irreverent, just a bit pompous--and fun.
Lennon, asked what advice he’d offer teens, deadpanned, “Don’t get pimples.”
Harrison answered a silly question with a silly reply. What do the Beatles see while touring America? “Stadiums and airports.”
Were the Beatles a Communist plot to undermine American youth? “We’re not Communists,” they said. “We’re just filthy capitalists.”
Party’s Not Over for Some
The irony was inescapable at a gathering Sunday afternoon at a mid-Wilshire church.
The Communist Party, USA was holding a rally even as, up in Vancouver, President Clinton was holding hands with Russian president Boris Yeltsin.
About 300 people--among them a number of warhorses who have been at the barricades for 40 or more years--had come to the Unitarian Universalist Church to hear Gus Hall, the party chairman, take a few jabs at the Clinton administration.
But Hall, now 82 (and the party’s head for 34 years) was ailing in New York--the flu, it was explained. So the task fell to Sam Webb, the national secretary, who called on the faithful to “hit the streets” to demand social and economic justice here at home.
“Tax the rich” seemed to be the afternoon’s prevailing theme. Speakers called for further slashes in the military budget, a 30-hour work week (with 40 hours’ pay) and doubling the minimum wage.
And they railed against “capitalist leeches.”
Meanwhile, up in Canada, Clinton and Yeltsin were forging “a new Democratic partnership”--and Clinton was promising Russia $1.6 billion to help things along.
