Fur comes with baggage

Here are three things you need to know about me to understand the story of my fur coat: I’m a reporter, I’m always prepared, and I’m always cold.

To begin at the beginning:

From the time we were teenagers growing up in New England, my sisters and I were pressured to own fur coats. Our grandmother was born in Russia with the last name of Moscow and immigrated to Boston at the start of the last century. Rose Moscow Applebaum insisted there was nothing warmer than a fur and every woman, even if she couldn’t afford it, had to have one. It was less a matter of status than it was good sense.

A remarkably tough woman who taught herself English by reading the dictionary and went to medical school in the 1920s, my grandmother always had more than one fur coat, usually tailored to the knee and square shouldered. Although my grandmother looked trim in her furs, from the time she was a teenager, my sweet mother appeared in photos looking like a plump teddy bear wrapped in a sheared beaver coat. As she got taller in the photos, the coat would get shorter — and look more ridiculous.

My sisters and I wanted nothing to do with fur. In the early 1970s, we were finally allowed to wear dungarees, as we called blue jeans, to school — and there was no turning back. We layered silk underwear beneath our turtlenecks and thin pea jackets — and let the Russians be damned.

After enduring winds whipping off Lake Michigan throughout college, I headed for my first reporting assignment in South Florida, and for the next seven years I never bothered to turn on the air-conditioning. I secretly sympathized with those Miami Beach prima donnas who on a rare December night when the temperature dropped below 50 pulled out their furs. I knew their grandmothers.

But I still didn’t own a fur.

The first winter after I moved back North I couldn’t stop shivering. My older sister insisted the culprit was a combination of low blood pressure and a whacky thyroid, but I was convinced that living in Florida had forever ruined me.

And so I gave in. It was time for a fur.

My mother was giddy. She drove to Long Island, where I was working, and took me to lunch in a strip mall that had a huge fur warehouse. I tried on full-length minks and chinchilla jackets, and what looked back at me from the mirror was comical, like one those cave drawings of a huge man with a hairy back.

I kept asking the salesman if I could walk outside to test drive the coats in the cool air. He agreed but kept an eye on me. I didn’t care. I was deeply cozy and lost in the shopping experience and having my mother gush over me. I can pull this off, I thought.

I chose a long raccoon coat with silver fox arms and trim. It was a bit fluffier than my grandmother would have worn, but I immediately thought of it as my Moscow fur coat.

That first winter I wore it a couple of times when I was meeting my mother for dinner or around the house when my cheap landlord wouldn’t pump up the heat. I also stowed it in the trunk of my car at the last minute when I was chasing a story out of town, just in case.

Reporting is all about “just in case.” Always carry pencils, just in case it gets so cold that your pen won’t write. Always have tons of quarters, just in case you need to call in your story on a pay phone. (OK, that’s dating me.) Always have your cellphone, laptop, Blackberry and digital recorder chargers with you, just in case.

But most important: Always wear comfortable and warm clothes, just in case you have to spend five hours in some random town standing on the sidewalk in the freezing cold waiting for — fill in the blank — to emerge after having just — fill in the blank.

Which brings me back to the coat.

For nearly 25 years I hauled it with me in its blue zippered body bag from apartment to apartment, city to city. I never wore it out after my early outings, never had it cleaned. Occasionally I’d throw it on the floor and let my babies roll around on it naked.

Maybe I was intimidated by the fur police, who, by the late 1980s, were roaming Manhattan flinging paint at unsuspecting women wearing leopard. Frankly, while I understand that it’s better not to murder some animals for their skins, I never completely understood the crime in killing raccoons. Why are animals that are considered pests for opening trash cans with their crafty little hands more important than women with low blood pressure?

On the rare occasion I modeled the coat for my husband or wore it around the house, I felt more like Jack Lemmon in drag in “Some Like It Hot” than Vogue editor Anna Wintour.

It was the rigors of being a reporter that started me on the path back to my fur.

A few years ago I wrote a story for this newspaper about the formerly thriving fur district in Manhattan that was down to a few retailers and fewer manufacturers. I was appalled as I witnessed the process — and endured the stench — of pelts becoming coats.

Yet I also learned in my reporting that a rising middle class in places like Russia and China was suddenly increasing the demand for fur coats. Those women — like my Grandma Rose — wanted to protect against the misery of a winter night — and turn a few heads.

After perusing racks of new coats — nowadays they come in colors like blood red and inky blue — I kept thinking about the oversized body bag in the back of my closet and my mom’s fur collection that we had carefully stored in a plastic bag after she died. My two sisters and I had tried on her favorite white-tipped mink with the matching hat and laughed so hard we fell down and cried.

I kept thinking about those furs … and how cold I was. I thought about my grandmother and how I was determined to get warm again. So I dug everything out, even mom’s scary fox fur scarves with beady-eyed faces at the tips, and dragged it all to Larry the furrier on West 29th Street.

Most of it was too old and dried out to salvage, but Larry was able to use raccoon fur from the body of my old coat to make me a “new” fur-lined raincoat with a faux fur collar and cuffs.

I paid way more than I could afford and mostly I look like Anna Wintour’s housekeeper in my raincoat. But every time the temperature dips below 50, I drape that Moscow fur around me. Just in case.

geraldine.baum@latimes.com