Lookin’ Mighty Fine
“Chestuh, Chestuh, Chestuh Drescher! Awright, awrady!”
Fran Drescher is racing home to Malibu, her itsy-bitsy Pomeranian dog next to her, exercising his canine cords. Drescher is tense enough awrady!
In six days the Everygal she plays on “The Nanny” gets hitched to Everygal’s dreamboat: the suave, sexy, sophisticated Brit with Big Bucks who, obviously, isn’t Everyman.
But, hey, this is TV and “The Nanny” is pure farcical fantasy. And here’s another F-word for ya: fashion. After all, even Drescher admits that fashion on the show is “just as big a star” as she is.
As Fran Fine--a CBS character F.D. created for huhself about huhself--Drescher, 40, will make her inimitable “She’s So (Fran) Fine” walk down the aisle in a fantasy gown that promises to rival Princess Diana’s for The Big Event.
Just think lots of fabric, lots of lace, lots of veil and another F-word: flash.
“You know what I wear on the show can’t be something that everyone else is wearing,” she says, adding that nothing is ever repeated, it just goes off into wardrobe heaven. “The audience would know if I repeated an outfit. Oh, definitely.”
As TV land’s wedding of the year counts down, the pressure mounts.
“We have Web site pages, and you know those chat-chat talk-talk rooms where they just talk back and forth to each other about stuff like that--what I wore or did I ever wear it before. They’re really into it. They’re very enthusiastic, our fans--from little children to married couples to gay men.”
Drescher--a trend-setting perfect size 4--is watching everything she eats, training with a coach three days a week and trying not to nosh beyond 5 p.m., “because I love it when I wake up with a flat stomach. You know my dad always said, ‘Breakfast you eat like a king, lunch like a prince and dinner like a pauper.’ ”
You’d think she was tying the knot.
“Everybody in the show feels like there really is a wedding,” says the New York-born actress, one hand on her steering wheel, the other on a cell phone as we motor chat. Drescher is headed home through the canyons, past mudslides and detours, after a day of rehearsals and wedding gown fittings. Chestuh, of course, is along for the ride.
“Ultimately we came up with the concept that we wanted the gown to look like every viewer’s most romantic fantasy, something that would put, you know, Diana’s wedding dress to shame and every other great wedding gown since,” Drescher says.
“But, you know, it’s not me that’s getting married, it’s Fran Fine and so I felt the gown needed to be more traditional in its silhouette but also very, very special. And it is magnificent, I must say.”
It must be. Publicity photos of the gown are kept under lock and key. Bootleg tapes of the episode are nowhere to be found. This gown is so top-secret, you’d think Miss Fine was marrying Seinfeld, not Sheffield.
But, at a remote Mexican village, amid the peaceful jungle at the tippy tip of the Yucatan Peninsula, we found Drescher’s costumer, Shawn-Holly Cookson, on vacation.
From a pay phone outside a small gift shop / grocery store / post office with slowpoke donkeys straggling past her, Cookson--in a bathing suit and flats--spilled the frijoles about the nuptial apparel.
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Here’s the scoop (which took three phone calls to get):
The dress, from Celeste in Beverly Hills, is a cream-colored satin number with sheer netting for the sleeves, which are embellished--or Fran-ized--with sparkling aurora borealis rhinestone studs on florets. The gown is poufy (our word; Cookson prefers “full bottom”) and looks “like a true princess-like dress,” she says.
More--lots more--aurora borealis rhinestones adorn the gown and bodice. Gold lace--some more Fran-izing--covers the dress so it doesn’t appear too white and allows the spangles to sparkle. The dress’ train is 4 feet long; a 15-foot train is attached to the back of the headpiece, also done in gold-cut lace.
“When you first see Fran in this gown, she looks like an angel. She really does. It’s a fairy-tale dress,” says Cookson. She and Drescher reshaped the gown with a new neckline, extra florets and longer veil.
Says Drescher: “We were looking for something that was gonna be drop-dead, fantasy gorgeous without being too garish or over-the-top glitz.”
Already there is buzz about the dress--which cost a reported $12,000--being knocked off, just in time for the June bride rush.
“I’m very, very pleased with the gown,” says Drescher, who, along with Cookson, selects her TV wardrobe, several pieces that work with togs in her real-life closet. Drescher, whose TV fashion ideals are Lucille Ball, Marlo Thomas and Cher, personally wears Moschino, Isaac Mizrahi, Versace, Dolce and Gabana and Todd Oldham (who has appeared as cousin Toddy, a budding fashion designer who sends Miss Fine samples).
For the wedding, Drescher is not worried about pleasing huhself or “cousin Toddy.” Her fans are totally abuzz about the wedding.
“I just want to make our show worthwhile for them,” Drescher says. “I mean, you know, it’s a fun romp, the wedding episode. And the dress is to die fer. Rally, it is.”
