A wicked wit’s wacky chicks
Simon Doonan is drowning in famous labels, but to look at him you’d never know it: Liberty print shirt, Miu Miu suede jacket, Gucci belt, Dolce & Gabbana pants, Prada shoes. All are so gently worn, so nonchalantly haphazard in combination, that he looks just the opposite of the fans in newly minted outfits who’ve come to his book signing at Barneys New York in Beverly Hills.
Doonan’s shabby chic is the code of the ultimate fashion aristocrat, detectable only to others in the club. And Doonan, who is the world’s high priest of high-fashion window design at Barneys, is a charter member. That said, he’s had more than enough of the intoxicating fizz that is fashion. At 50 he has settled into a more mature, if no less enthusiastic, approach to both clothing and life.
His new book, “Wacky Chicks,” for example, is a postfeminist romp describing unusual women who’ve hacked out unusual lives, often in daunting circumstances -- a subject new to Doonan’s repertoire.
The book is an outgrowth of his entertaining weekly fashion and lifestyle column in the New York Observer, where he often takes the imperious dictatorial tone of those 1950s fashion magazines that demanded women to “think pink” or “never go out this season without your mantilla.” (Doonan worked briefly, in his youth, for the legendary fashioneuse Diana Vreeland, who was archduchess of such incongruous edicts.)
Doonan’s updated version of the genre, however, is directed at both sexes. In a recent Observer column on men’s raincoats, for example, he exhorted gents to choose “the pervert’s impermeable ... the archetypal flasher raincoat -- a simple, single-breasted bone-colored garment that’s ... the preferred style of men about town and flashers the world over.”
Doonan’s column also takes occasional leaps into lunatic trends on both coasts. In fact, he says during a break from signing books, many of his most outlandish scoops emanate from Los Angeles. He says he was first to publish news of the shop in Hancock Park now doing blockbuster business in a skin cream made from the foreskin of newborn boys. And to discover that certain Angelenos have taken to bleaching unmentionable body parts in their ongoing attempts at total body aesthetics.
Doonan’s literary detour into the world of wacky women is as much a surprise to him as it is to those who’ve followed his career, which was hilariously detailed in his first book, “Confessions of a Window Dresser.” It’s a memoir that begins with growing up gay in Reading, England, where the men went off to work each day at the biscuit factory and where little Simon’s tendencies to flit around “trailing a length of diaphanous fabric in the manner of the Ballet Russe” were deemed odd.
Doonan never intended to write a book about women until he realized he was meeting a different kind of female than he’d ever met before -- women who are not only intelligent and accomplished but also “free birds, recklessly individual, uninhibited and possessed of great humor and the ability to have great fun.” Much more interesting than movie stars, he decided.
“Shouldn’t we expect a bit more from our cultural icons than good looks, the ability to keep their weight down and a talent for showing up on a movie set on time?” Doonan writes.
He uses the phrase “wacky chicks” as a compliment and as the kind of sociological subspecies that Gail Sheehy was so fond of inventing in her books -- with two indispensable differences: Doonan doesn’t take himself seriously, and he writes with wicked wit. Of course, he’s chosen subjects about whom it’s easy to be witty. Women such as Spider Fawke, who used to be a designer in Paris for Claude Montana and who is now a park ranger living in a Tarzana apartment with 44 pet reptiles. Many of Doonan’s other subjects are also from Los Angeles, among them:
Janet Charlton
Charlton, the Star tabloid’s Hollywood gossip queen, takes her mongering so seriously that she wears disguises to get in where she’s not wanted so she can overhear what she’s not meant to know. A strong proponent of checkbook journalism, Charlton says she’s “delighted to pay” those who dash up to her in malls or phone her home office with juicy tidbits, tales she says they’d never tell unless there was a cash incentive. “You get what you pay for,” she says.
Charlton, who won’t reveal her age, has good bones, distinctive chrome-color hair and a fashion model’s physique -- but when she’s “under cover” you’d never know it. She says she knew at age 10 that she wanted to stay single and become successful all on her own. She achieved a good part of her goal five years ago when she was able to buy an exquisitely proportioned 1961 Hancock Park house, originally built for a real estate agent who gave huge parties. “It’s very Austin Powers, isn’t it?” she asks as she glides through the glass-walled, high-ceilinged 4,300-square-foot house, which she maintains in meticulously authentic 1960s style, right down to the landscape design and dinner dishes.
Pearl Harbour
Pearl Harbour’s parents (surnamed Gates) married on Pearl Harbor day in 1947, which is how she got her name. The former front gal for the 1970s new wave band Pearl Harbour and the Explosions left home at 17 for San Francisco, where she worked at odd jobs and lived in a Mill Valley storage locker for three years. “I had access to a cold-water sink and a kitty litter box and survived nicely,” she told Doonan.
Pearl finally landed a spot as a dancer and backup vocalist with the Tubes, then traveled the world making music until she met and married Paul Simonon, bass guitarist for the punk rock group the Clash. That was in the ‘80s, and for about a decade afterward, her Europe-based life was bliss. But Simonon was “exceptionally handsome, and all those groupies were bad for the marriage.” He wanted out in 1989. “I didn’t know what to do. I am so old-fashioned. I thought it would be forever.”
She started a rock band in San Francisco, which broke up in the late ‘90s, at which point she realized she’d like to stay in one place for a change. So she bought a small two-bedroom house that’s Hancock Park adjacent and turned it into an homage to the 1950s. One bedroom wall is decorated with handbags from the era. The other bedroom is transformed into a closet, filled with 1950s clothes and shoes. Her living room is aglow with posters, pottery and tchotchkes, including a pink plastic sofa, a pink vintage hair dryer and a lamp that’s a large bust of Elvis.
She’s put together a new band, called Pearl Harbour, which plays clubs up and down the West Coast. Harbour, 44, says she has a few close friends but rarely goes out these days except for gigs. “I’m afraid of people,” she says, “but not of life.”
Spider Fawke
And then there’s the redoubtable Spider Fawke, Our Lady of 44 Lizards and perhaps Doonan’s archetypal Wacky Chick.
Her pets aren’t the only unusual thing about Fawke, who is 6-feet-2, for starters. It is perhaps best to let Doonan describe her: “If Egon Schiele had painted Jamie Lee Curtis, the result would resemble Spider. If Virginia Woolf had posed for Munch’s ‘Scream,’ the result might have recalled our Miss Fawke.”
Fawke leans toward shapeless clothes and wears no makeup. But for Doonan, she exudes the kind of glam that no gussied-up Hollywood starlet could ever muster. “You cannot judge a wacky chick by her cover,” he says. The appeal of a woman like Fawke is that she is unlike all others. She is smart, funny, rebellious, resilient, uninhibited and outrageous. She has succeeded, surmounted, transcended. She has been to the top of the mountain, so to speak -- and realized that her destiny somehow lay down below.
Fawke, 49, began life as an outsize teen named Jane living in England with a poverty-stricken unwed mother, who died when Fawke was 15. Things got worse after that as she struggled to find a home, an education, a career -- not to mention a boyfriend who was taller than she was.
In due time, Fawke discovered that she possessed a talent for design. She traveled to Paris and worked for several designers before settling in at the house of Claude Montana. She left Paris in ’86 to design for Esprit in San Francisco, by which time she’d amassed a large number of friends worldwide and a lifetime’s worth of upscale living experiences. It was time to downshift.
A yearning to live with nature, and to nurture reptiles, led her to her current life in a one-bedroom apartment with concrete floors and a menagerie headed by a 6-foot iguana named Queen Isabella. One living room wall is covered with books, many on herpetology. The other is covered with stacked-up glass cages in which her other, mostly gecko “kiddies” live.
After five years serving as a volunteer park ranger, she’s just been hired for a paying job as a ranger at 1,600-acre Wildwood Park in Thousand Oaks. “I can’t believe it. It’s a dream come true,” she says.
Why does she think Doonan finds her so intriguing? “Because most women are caught up doing things that, in their hearts, they really don’t want to do. Then, at the end of their lives, they walk around saying, ‘I coulda, woulda, shoulda.’ Why don’t they just get up and do whatever it is they want to do? Why are they so tied up with material things and money?”
