Selling the Upscale Tinsel to Tinseltown

Tracey Ross finishes a minuscule lunch of bananas, melon and strawberries on the wraparound patio of Cafe Med and strolls half a block down Sunset Boulevard to the boutique that bears her name. She walks through the open door to find:

(1) A beautifully blond and pregnant movie star (Natasha Henstridge) standing in the middle of the shop with her equally blond and gorgeous husband at her side.

(2) The pregnant wife of another movie star (Linda Caan, as in James) sitting on an ottoman.

(3) A fledgling movie producer sitting on a couch.

(4) And a giant Rottweiler who’s made herself comfortable on the floor.

“Oh, my gahhhd! How are you?” Ross exclaims as if she has stumbled upon a reunion of old friends. She laughs. “All the pregnant women are here.”

It’s unclear that anyone is buying anything this afternoon. That’s OK. They’ve all bought plenty in the past--slip dresses, cashmere sweaters, silver gift ware, the $1,300 VIP StarTac cellular phone. The women sometimes have their nails done by the manicurist sitting in the back.

They’ve just dropped by to chat, to check in, the way you imagine people in very small towns do at the local general store.

There are just two differences: This is a West Hollywood boutique where people have Rolexes on their wrists and tiny rings on their pedicured toes. And the storekeeper is a 37-year-old, whippet-thin Farrah Fawcett look-alike.

Only here, in a land where shopping is the equivalent of promenading, and small clothing boutiques double as community centers, could someone like Tracey Ross have created such an odd and--for now, at least--popular hybrid of a store. For a certain beautiful, toned and moneyed set, this is not merely a place to buy, but a place to linger and schmooze--equal parts gift shop and kaffeeklatsch.

And only here, in a land where celebrities are royalty, could a quirky native daughter flourish as one of their courtiers. Sure, lots of people can figure out how to buy the kind of feminine but slightly edgy clothes favored by actresses, models and other women who share their impossibly lithe body type. But Ross had the crucial advantage of being born into the Hollywood-adjacent lifestyle: Where else but summer camp in Malibu could a girl start collecting and cultivating future clients? Where else but here can a woman cheerfully call herself a dumb blond and confess to being hopelessly bad with numbers (“I knew I would have to have a business manager”), yet still run a business successful enough to have been mentioned over the past decade in practically every magazine and newspaper chronicling style?

With her fashion smarts, loopy inflections and penchant for teariness, she is the ideal California boutique hostess. She has created the perfectly casual little oasis where celebrities feel pampered and safe and wannabe celebrities feel cool.

“I think everyone--and I’m guilty of this--is looking out for themselves first,” she philosophizes. “I think everyone is in pain, I think everyone is scared. I think I provide an environment here where, if people don’t want to go to a therapist, they feel comfortable. They can get something off their chest.”

Well, she does have a couch.

She’s the Entertainment at Her Own Birthday

On a recent summer day, customers are buying and friends are stopping by for what has turned into an impromptu party. It’s Ross’ 37th birthday. An actor friend, her trainer, a former employee who also happens to be the daughter of a studio executive, all come by. There are balloons, a flower arrangement from hip-hop music entrepreneur Russell Simmons, and a pizza sent over by the owner of Albano’s Brooklyn Pizza on Melrose. (He named a pizza after her.) She eats the toppings on her slice but leaves the crust.

Clad in pale blue capri pants and a beaded shell top, she is the entertainment at her own party. She spent the night before in Las Vegas and regales the group with stories of seeing David Copperfield’s performance as well as the Siegfried and Roy show.

“You saw two magic acts?” Neill Barry, the actor, asks.

“I didn’t know Siegfried and Roy was a magic act!” she exclaims. “I thought it was lions and tigers and animals.”

Later, when her friends have left, Karen Zambos, her 27-year-old store manager, gives her a gift from herself and other staffers. Ross opens the box to reveal a pearl and ruby bracelet.

“Oh, my God, you guys, it’s so beautiful,” she says as tears well up in her eyes.

An Intimate, Cozy Hangout

As stores with fashionable clothes go, Tracey Ross is not as glitzy as the department store, Barneys New York; it’s not as architecturally sleek as the expensive boutique, Maxfield; it’s not as breathlessly trendy as the landmark L.A. emporium, Fred Segal.

Situated next to a bustling coffee shop, it is an intimate little hangout with a cozy, neo-Moroccan feel. The walls are midnight blue. The black velvet day bed is strewn with leopard-print pillows and magazines. The ottomans are plump. A celestial frieze snakes around the walls. Chandeliers hang from the ceiling. Scented candles burn. Dogs, food and even kids are welcome.

Ross is MC as well as proprietor. She will coo over a baby in a stroller, gush over how pretty a pregnant friend is or let a movie star’s personal assistant take a bag of clothes home for the star’s personal perusal. She will delicately explain to a customer who thinks the monogramming was done wrong on her merchandise that the initial of the last name does belong in the middle.

Gift-buying men adore her. “She tells me what to do as far as being the romantic guy,” says 26-year-old producer Brad Buckley, who buys cashmere and jewelry for his girlfriend from Ross. “She’s my guiding light.”

Ross can be saccharinely sweet. Ask her how her pal Robert Downey Jr., the actor who finished a jail stint in April for violating the terms of his probation for drug possession, is doing: “Awesome. He’s awesome. You know what’s great? He’s going to be a great example for other people.”

She is disarmingly confessional about her own failings--a trait that puts both friends and strangers quickly at ease.

“I tried my first drug in my 20s, got totally addicted, and I had a problem. I’m in recovery,” she says during lunch, talking about cocaine abuse that landed her in the Betty Ford Center in 1987 and then in 1995. “The more people know about it, the harder it is for me to relapse,” she says quickly, her pale blond hair falling in shaggy chunks around her angular face, jet-black sunglasses obscuring her eyes.

She has other weaknesses--she’s a shopaholic, she gambles. She says it makes her more understanding of her friends. “Robert [Downey] can call me and say, ‘I’m freaking out, I’m obsessing, I just went someplace and I spent $17,000 shopping,’ and I start laughing. I say, ‘That’s it? I know what that’s like.’ ” She compensates by renting a townhouse in Beverly Hills instead of buying. Her down payment on a house, she notes ruefully, “is in my closet.”

Ross was born and raised in Long Beach. She hated its unhipness. Her father, a successful clothing manufacturer of a budget line of dresses sold at Sears and Kmart, among other stores, wanted to shield the family from the excesses of L.A. while his children were young, his daughter remembers ruefully.

So she straddled two worlds--Long Beach during the week for school, West L.A. on the weekends for shopping. Her mother wrote her fake illness notes to get her out of class so she could have her hair colored in Beverly Hills. “She’d drive me up here to get my hair done by Jose Eber. I was indulged.” Eventually, the family moved to Beverly Hills.

Retail was always her calling. At 16, she worked part time as a shopgirl at Bullocks in Lakewood. She loved it. “I could really unload the merchandise.”

While she was in college at UCLA, she did a part-time stint at the now-defunct Melon’s, a boutique on Melrose. Her friends, who liked what they saw her wearing, came into the store, hoping to replicate her look.

“She was a natural at the store,” recalls Judy Greitzer, who owned the store with her husband, Michael. “She knew the customer she could push the whole ensemble on, and she knew when to back off.”

After three years at UCLA, Ross dropped out to follow her boyfriend to London. When that relationship failed, she came home. To her shock, her father insisted she get a job.

“I said, ‘I always thought you’d take care of me until I got married,’ ” she says, retelling the encounter with a mocking, little-girl voice.

“And he goes, ‘No.’ I said, ‘But Dad, I’m used to living a certain way.’ He said, ‘Yes, darling, I taught you how to have nice things so you would go out and work hard to get them yourself.’ I said, ‘Oh, I never got that.’ ” She chuckles. “I just thought Daddy would always take care of me.”

She worked as a saleswoman at Fred Segal and then at Diane Merrick in West Hollywood. Through friends of friends of friends and customers, she gradually made the acquaintance of celebrities, and eventually started doing “personal stuff” for them in her free hours--the kinds of things a fashion stylist would do. She shepherded a friend on a search for clothes for the Academy Awards ceremony. She went shopping for Bob Dylan.

She became convinced she had the eye to run her own store. And unlike most girls from Long Beach, she had the money to do it: a trust fund from her grandfather that also allowed her to pay off $75,000 in credit card debts before she opened on Robertson in 1990 at age 29. (“This is what a dumb blond I am--seriously. They sent me credit cards with $10,000 limits and I just had to pay the minimum.”)

She perfected her service skills--opening on Christmas for a last-minute buyer, choosing and wrapping gifts for clients, ordering in grilled vegetable salads and lattes for customers from the tony Ivy restaurant a few doors down. Her life became a window on everything people loved and hated about celebrity culture: She styled it. She partied with it. She looked like it. People came to her store not simply to shop for clothes that flaunted a nubile body, but also to catch a glimpse of those nubile bodies at shopping--and to ask Tracey how to put funky, feminine outfits together.

“When people go to her store, they don’t just look for clothes, they look for her,” says Libbie Lane, the designer who sells out of her own shop as well as Ross’.

But a rent hike sent Ross packing, and on the advice of a real estate agent, she moved to Sunset Plaza two years ago. She hesitated at first; the west end of Sunset Boulevard was attracting more Euro-hipsters than screen stars and their agents. But she moved anyway, just as the area was broadening in popularity. Now it’s one of the hottest retail strips in the area.

‘The Sunset Plaza, Coffee Bean Thing’

A tour of the store takes you from bias-cut slip dresses, camisoles, hip-hugging trousers and little cashmere sweaters to tie-dyed baby clothes, jewelry, an array of silver and glass gift ware. Over the years, she’s ferreted out rising local designers as well as New York designers. A few things--T-shirts, a few scarves--are priced under $100, but most of her pieces sell from $200 to $500. She just started carrying the Chloe line by designer Stella McCartney (daughter of Paul and the new darling of the fashion world), which ranges from $700 to $2,500.

The most popular sizes are 4 (wraithlike), 6 (skinny), and 8 (just plain slender).

“It’s painful working here,” says 32-year-old saleswoman Jane Lopaty with a laugh, her own size-4 frame swathed in a low-slung black skirt that reveals a sleek midriff. “The people who come here are beautiful. I mean, the whole Sunset Plaza, Coffee Bean thing--it’s just not reality compared to the rest of the world.”

Ross insists that she carries clothes in sizes 10 and 12 (strapping by Hollywood standards), but not many.

While Ross is good at offering personal service and sending “care packages” to Bel-Air, New York, and even a devout client in Arkansas, there are some concessions she won’t make. She disdains sales. She refuses to haggle over prices. She resents well-connected actresses who try on a dress and then have their publicists call the designer to get the dress at a lower price or for free.

“I’m not going to be a showroom,” she says.

But mostly she accommodates her customers, observing their habits--a pointer she picked up as a hostess at the Hard Rock Cafe soon after entrepreneur Peter Morton opened it.

“He’s so meticulous about every detail,” she says. “I would just watch him. He was walking around the restaurant saying to people, ‘How’s your hamburger?’ That’s what I try to do in my business. I’m a buyer for my store, but I’m on my floor. I want to hear what the customers say. . . . I love working Sundays.”

And so one Sunday finds her sitting in a chair, legs curled under her, in an alcove outside her velvet-curtained dressing rooms, chatting with two friends, a man and a woman, who have dropped by.

When a reporter shows up and asks Ross’ friends what they do, they slowly rise from their perches and slink toward the door. Ross seems agitated. “You can’t just whip out your notebook and start talking to people,” she snaps at the reporter. “These are my friends, you have to ask them if they want to talk.”

So protective is Ross of her customers that she would sooner tell you about all her addictions than reveal the most innocuous peccadillo of a celebrity client.

“They’re my bread and butter,” she says. “And I want them to feel comfortable. That’s why they come here still.”

A week later, the reporter presses her on the issue of what she means to her bread and butter: Are they really her friends?

“I don’t know. They are what they are,” she says, the verbal equivalent of a shrug.

There is a cost of doing business in this world of the high-strung, the high-profile, the preening. Once, when a client--and friend--in the entertainment business got angry and screamed obscenities at her over the phone, Ross told him she was sorry he felt that way and hung up. He called back, screaming about how he was going to ruin her reputation. (“I was like, ‘Yeah, OK, whatever.’ ”) Later that night, he called and apologized profusely.

“I said, ‘It’s over, don’t worry about it, forget it,’ ” she recalls. “Of course, the next day, out of guilt, he came in and spent like $3,500 in my store. Literally, people have bad moments. But if you acknowledge it and recognize it, that’s all it is. Over. Next.”