Glamorama
Everyone thinks about clothes. Each morning, we choose to wear garments that do more than cover our nakedness. They broadcast an image--of authority, availability or prosperity. Once we’ve styled our persona for the day, we get on with the business of living.
What sort of person would choose to think about clothing all day? Someone who must be shallow and cold, a person disproportionately concerned with appearances. It is a credit to Lois Gould’s fine, lively memoir that the portrait sketched of her fashion designer mother, Jo Copeland, both fulfills a stereotype yet goes way beyond it.
Copeland began her career in the 1930s, when American fashion didn’t yet exist. Home-grown designers, few of whom were known by name, made their living by “interpreting” Parisian style. Copeland also followed the French, until World War II made business trips to Europe impossible. Faced with an inspiration blockade, Copeland concentrated on the sinuous, small-waisted gowns sophisticated New York women wore to the Stork Club and El Morocco (bombs weren’t dropping on their city). A fixture on the New York social scene, she knew better than any Frenchman how American women wanted to look. Under the label Jo Copeland of Pattullo Modes, she gradually developed her own look, gaining a national following that included movie stars Joan Crawford, Greer Garson and Dolores del Rio, style icons who became friends.
Gould offers a child’s-eye view of her mother’s glamorous life, a perspective that is less a panorama than a series of sharply focused snapshots. Together, they form a picture of a forgotten era, when women traveled by steamer to Europe, packed their entire wardrobes in trunks and, if they lived on Park Avenue, were careful to give the impression that they worked because it was great fun, not because they needed the income.
How difficult to have a mother so chic. Whether the Oedipal explanation is accepted as causal or not, the relationship between mothers and daughters is often fraught with envy and competition. That common childhood fear, of not measuring up to our parents’ expectations, must be so much more acute when mom has no visible faults. The adult Gould, who could have taken poison pen in hand, is aware of the flaws beneath her mother’s perfect exterior. But she chooses humor, understanding and pride over bitterness. Reminding the reader that in her day Copeland was called “the Chanel of America,” Gould displays an abiding admiration for her mother’s portrayal of the character she invented.
“Watching her, studying her clothes, you would never know there had been a war on, or that it had ended, or that women’s lives would be changed again for another generation. When they finally emerged again in the late 1960s, she would still be there for them, with a slinky dinner suit, a grand evening gown; with masterly detail, luxurious fabrics and trimming, and the wit that could line a tweed suit with brilliant yellow silk, so you could flash it, or fling it back over your chair and dazzle everyone sitting behind you. She could paint peacock feathers on organdy, or scatter ostrich fronds in red bugle beads over a red crepe gown, and make the high drama seem like a force of nature.”
But her appreciation does not preclude what in less skilled hands would have been fodder for a “Mommy Dearest” recollection of childhood. The casual cruelties inflicted by her German governess are described without self-pity. At least that salaried gargoyle is balanced by the presence of the sweet, maternal cook. The servants were trusted and appreciated, beloved as much for their competence as for their reliability. Husbands and suitors came and went. Sally, the cook, could be depended on.
The first backlash spurred by the memoir boom that hit the book industry a few years ago questioned how authors could remember minute details from their childhoods. Though Gould’s history isn’t comprehensive, what she does recall is vivid and significant. When well-known people appear in the story, it doesn’t feel as if their names have been gratuitously dropped. Little Lois did play checkers with Stevie Sondheim. Movie stars did drop their coats in her room when they came to Jo Copeland’s parties. I found my own often weak memory of childhood stimulated by her tales, and I could hear my mother’s stories again of the chauffeur who was the kindest person in the Philadelphia home of relatives she stayed with when she fled Switzerland in 1939. Was it true, as an older cousin once said, that my grandmother took long walks in Vienna’s parks with Sigmund Freud when she was troubled? Gould’s colorful past made me wonder.
As in the best melodramas, there is a dark family secret at the heart of Gould’s story. She understands it, then explains it without resorting to bathos. Clothes, she realizes, were her mother’s shield from unpleasant reality: “Clothes were her refuge from the facts of life--and therefore death.” As a novelist, essayist and now memoirist, Gould brilliantly reverse-patterned, to use the biologist’s term. As much as she acknowledges her mother’s uncommon ability to create a striking facade, she is equally adept at illuminating what lies beneath the surface.
