Vogue's André Leon Talley - Part II

Vanessa Grigoriadis on the man who has gone clubbing with Karl Lagerfeld and seen Anna Wintour in the dressing room

This is part of Inside the Tent, a series going behind the scenes of Campside’s award-winning podcasts and business.

Today, part two of an article by Campside Co-founder Vanessa Grigoriadis, who spent time with the late, great André Leon Talley before his departure from this earth a few years ago. (Part one here.)

Part two explores Talley’s childhood, career trajectory and what Vanessa meant when she wrote that, “If Talley is not exactly a king, few would argue with characterizing him as an icon.”

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"It's about gloves. O.K., darling?"

From the September 2013 issue of Vanity Fair

Vogue’s André Leon Talley - Part II

Southern Comfort

As told in Talley's 2003 memoir, A.L.T., the world he now inhabits is lightyears from his childhood in Durham, North Carolina, in the 1950s and 60s. His father, born to sharecroppers, worked two jobs, including driving a taxi at night. Talley's mother divorced his father when André was young, leaving him to be raised by his grandmother, a maid for the men's dormitory rooms of Duke University.

At home, near the peach trees, his grandmother skinned rabbits and whacked the heads off chickens on a tree stump before cooking them for dinner, and boiled and blued their white sheets in a black iron cauldron, stoked by a fire for which she had chopped the wood herself. She ironed not only the linens but also towels, curtains, his boxer shorts, and even the doilies for the back of her chairs. She tucked her beloved grandson into these symbols of her love - "crispy, crispy, clean, clean, clean white sheets."

In his black neighborhood, Talley was bullied; when among whites, he was required to sit in the balcony of the movie theater. Once, while he was walking down the road with other college students after a Jimi Hendrix concert, a white highway patrolman jumped out of his squad car and kicked him for no discernible reason. As a boy Talley joined the Cub Scouts but didn't like it much. He cared only about the uniform and the pseudo-French-country décor in the den leader's living room, with its woven-cane-back chairs and settee.

In adolescence, he began reading Vogue, walking across town to Duke University to spend his pocket money on it and other magazines. He read John Fairchild's memoir of couture in the 1950s and 1960s, The Fashionable Savages, so many times he "practically memorized it." Did he think he was gay, even in high school? "No, no, no," he thunders, very sternly. "I was just into my magazines and the drawings. I had a very strict upbringing, almost puritanical. I lived there all the way through college." He adds, "I was in my grandmother's house, and I respected that!"

At North Carolina Central University, Talley majored in French and thought he might pursue a career teaching French literature a private school. When he received a scholarship to the master's program at Brown University, he moved away from home for the first time, to Providence, Rhode Island, but found that he fit in better socially with the students at the Rhode Island School of Design.

Sauntering around in his peacoat, Cuban-heeled dance shoes, and black rubber mackintosh cape for the rain, he befriended the dandies and rich girls who came to school in their Mercedes coupes, with Henri Bendel wardrobes, Chippendale dining-room furniture, and family china.

"Back home, I had never had so much peer approval, but among all these swank socialites, I was suddenly popular," he wrote in his memoir. "My fashion life suddenly sprouted wings."

When two of his male friends graduated, leasing studio apartments in the same 57th Street building in Manhattan, Talley moved in with them, and he took turns sleeping on one or the other's floor, under a horse blanket he had bought at the Salvation Army. To make money, he worked as a receptionist at the Upper East Side A.S.P.C.A. "I was answering the phone, just to have money to eat," recalled Talley. "I didn't euthanize dogs. But it was a horrible thing to hear them being killed."

Clearly, it was time to build a bridge to the continent of high style. The father of one of his wealthy friends wrote a letter of introduction to the Metropolitan Museum's Costume Institute. Diana Vreeland had by then left the top position at Vogue and landed at the Met, where she had recently mounted a Balenciaga exhibition, which was a box-office sensation. A "volunteer" position was arranged.

Vreeland chose to make Talley her pet. The attraction was mutual. Talley loved everything about her: the way she would daub her temples and earlobes with rouge, smearing Vaseline on top to make it shiny, and ask him, "Is it Kabuki enough?"; her walk-in linen closet, full of sheets with handwritten labels like "Mme. Porthault Gift, 1965," or "Sheets Embroidered by Nuns in Portugal, 1939," each of them sleeping in its own zippered plastic case; that she had her attendant lay out a dress for an event at least two days beforehand, so that it could be aired on white tissue before it was worn; the dye she imported from Paris for her electrifying black hair because it wasn't approved by the F.D.A.

"When a woman of true style, like Mrs. Vreeland, has her hairstyle, she never changes it," declares Talley. "Ms. Wintour has had her bob since she was in her 20s... I have never seen her hair pulled back. Never. Not even at tennis."

Talley became Vreeland's assistant for her next Met show, "Romantic and Glamorous Hollywood Design," which included Vivien Leigh's green velvet dress from Gone with the Wind, Greta Garbo's clothes from Camille, and a Marlene Dietrich costume from Shanghai Express. Vreeland liked giving him an abstract notion, and he set about making it real.

For Claudette Colbert's gold lamé dress from the 1934 Cleopatra, she commanded him to think about the dress belonging to a "child of fourteen and a queen! And in her garden she walks in the sun, with her white peacocks flapping at her hem." Then she sat back in her chair and said, " 'Uh-hmmmmmm' - as if she had eaten a chocolate soufflé or Sevruga caviar." Talley spray-painted the mannequin all over with two cans of gold paint, to express how golden and bright the sun felt on her, and Vreeland approved: "Right-o, right-o, André! I say!" (Like the tales that Vreeland would tell to her friends, thought by many to be creatively embellished, Talley's doubtless involve some reimagining.)

With Vreeland's blessing, things happened quickly for Talley, Soon, there was a job at Interview magazine, then various positions at WWD, including Paris fashion editor and Paris bureau chief. Eventually he landed at Vogue, which he joined shortly after Anna Wintour was appointed creative director of the magazine, in 1983. When he interviewed there for the position, he says, he left the appointment in Midtown, and by the time he had reached his apartment, on Astor Place, the concierge at his building had received a flattering handwritten note from Wintour explaining how she was looking forward to working with him. (Talley has also worked as style editor for Vanity Fair.)

At Vogue, the Talley character and the real self became intertwined. Over the years, he visited the Parisian nightclub Favela Chic with Karl Lagerfeld, and danced until collapsing into peach linen pillows at the Ritz; took a ride in the Brant-family blue Ferrari to an audience with a bejeweled Miuccia Prada dressed in an ermine ascot; and watched Zac Posen transform a Charles James-ian blue organza ball dress from a sketch to reality, with Handel and Brahms on the stereo.

At fashion shows, Talley sits in the front row, but he never takes notes. "It's all mental pictures in the moment," he says. Afterward, he types letters to those designers with whom he feels close, sharing his thoughts. "Every season I receive a personal note about my show, whether he has liked it or not; his point of view is very honest, interesting, and articulate," says Miuccia Prada in an e-mail. "I am always so looking forward to receiving it."

A letter from Talley that Carolina Herrera shares calls her show "soignée," mentioning that this is the word that socialite C. Z. Guest would have also used for it, and declares that Herrera's "long evening skirt, with the cognac band of fur on the horizontal stripes is the new evening. And high evening, not just for sitting at home or dinner at home."

Talley likes to say he is "usually always right" about clothes and other topics, though at one point he adds, "Except about myself." He does wonder why he has never been the editor of a major magazine. "People stereotype you," he says. "What person of color do you know who's in a position like that, be it a man or a woman, unless it's Essence magazine?" But he expresses only love for Vreeland and Wintour. "I wouldn't have stayed at Vogue as long as I did without Anna being there," he says. "She was my biggest ally. There could not have been another way."

Says a colleague, "Anna and André are best buddies, and sometimes with your friends there are ups and downs. He advises her on what to wear. They go to fittings together. This is the only man who could see Anna in her underwear."

Another associate describes their relationship a little differently: the key, he says, is that Anna is a bit afraid of André, and André a bit afraid of Anna.

For his part, Talley says that both Vreeland and Wintour are among his top style icons, but each has "a different modus operandi for the world. Anna's a Romanticist in her personal life and she loves her children, but she is a businesswoman. Mrs. Vreeland's whole world was narrative escapism, and the beauty, the luxury of fashion, and the fantasy of it."

After shopping at Balducci's, Talley dropped some caftans at the local dry cleaner. (His couture clothes go to Madame Paulette, in Manhattan, the city's most revered dry cleaners and one of the most expensive, though he claims never to look at the bill.) Then he began to pack for his trip to Savannah, where the following morning he was to present his own lifetime-achievement award at the Savannah College of Art and Design to Francisco Costa, women's creative director at Calvin Klein.

Talley does not sleep long at night but goes through "little pockets of sleep," he says. It's easy to do that "when you live alone." In the afternoon, he likes to watch a lot of MSNBC. "Five o'clock is Chris Matthews; six o'clock is Reverend Al Sharpton," declares Talley. "Then I wait for Rachel and Lawrence... And I'll probably look at Judge Judy. I wish she were my friend."

The next morning, I accompanied him on a private plane to the picturesque art school specializing in graphic design and fashion, among other disciplines, with a high tuition and the promise that graduates will not become starving artists. At Teterboro Airport, in New Jersey, he was in his best warlord chic: a white-and-black patterned caftan made for him by Diane von Furstenberg, with a long necklace by Sidney Garber of black onyx with platinum links and a real tiger tooth. (Later, he dramatically tossed the chain of the necklace over his shoulder, just the way Diana Vreeland used to with her tooth necklace on a gold chain.)

In Savannah, guests from New York were put up in a fantastic guesthouse, up many steps and surrounded by trees dripping with Spanish moss, but Talley chose to stay in a small cottage, which didn't have stairs. There were servants dashing around steaming his clothes, and a late-night discussion of a visiting stylist's paisley socks, during which Talley told him to take them off immediately, shouting that "the socks are juvenile for those elegant tasseled shoes, and for someone with the taste level you have!"

And when someone questioned if a no-socks look is stylish, he boomed, "Jack Bouvier, the father of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis, wore his custom bespoke suits and his tuxedo shoes with no socks on the beach in East Hampton!" (Needless to say, the stylist's socks were dispensed with.)

Talley, a child of the South, seemed happy and at ease there, much more than he had appeared in White Plains, and his kinder side started to come out, with smiles so delightful that they felt like the sun breaking through.

The warlord thing, it turns out, is often leavened by equally dramatic compliments, on a patterned scarf or the high arch of the foot. Talley is godfather to six children, including the daughter of his former Vogue style director Alexandra Kotur, who calls him the "most compassionate person I know in this industry," and the three kids of former assistant Sara Arnell, who describes him wearing a Juicy Couture floor-length denim jacket to visit his godson at a Connecticut boarding school—the back of it bedazzled with the words "Great American Dream."

Talley has a warm rapport with Paula Wallace, the president of the college, who mentioned that Talley "removed himself from the South for years for racial reasons, and the failure of the South to embrace talent like his." In Savannah he gave impromptu monologues on the style of Marlene Dietrich ("She kept everything, darling—everything she ever wore in Paris or in films. Everything— down to her W.W. II hairpins") and bossed everyone around with panache, including the mild Costa and his boyfriend, a horse trainer, recommending that the two of them stay in separate bedrooms in their guesthouse. "If I was a couple," he says, "I wouldn't like to stay in the same bedroom. It is very un-chic in Europe to sleep in the same bedroom."

Larger Than Life

Even though there were multiple banquets of fried chicken, finger sandwiches, and sweet iced tea, the one thing I didn't see Talley do much in Savannah was eat. When there were group meals, he sometimes chose to remain in his cottage. At one point, he mentioned offhandedly that he will eat half the refrigerator in the middle of the night. We gingerly broached the topic of his weight gain in recent years.

He is carrying more than the 355 pounds he had in 2004—"Of course," he says, "yes, yes" - when Wintour organized an intervention with Oscar de la Renta, which failed. But eventually he enrolled in a fitness program at Duke University, bringing his weight down to 295 and appearing as a success story on Oprah.

Today, he does not know how much he weighs. "I do not weigh myself," he says. "I do not want to get on that scale... I only know what I weigh from the way my clothes fit." He reveals that he had a lap band that has not worked. He keeps eating even with it in. "The people who are really close to me and know me have stopped bringing my weight up," he says. "They probably discuss it behind my back, some of them, in the fashion world."

He is hard on himself on this topic. "Every time I go eat something, I think, Have I eaten too much? Every single meal of the day. When I wake up in the morning it's: Is milk wrong? Am I eating enough fruit? Am I eating enough meat and vegetables?" Still, "I have never felt less of a person because of my dramatic weight gain," he says. "Up or down, my confidence and sense of self never wavered." (His friend George Malkemus adds, "André has that Gone with the Wind thing, looking at every day as a new day. I've never known him to be seriously depressed.")

By e-mail weeks later, Talley redirects a discussion of weight, talking about loneliness. Though one would assume Talley is gay, he rejects the "label" and says that, while he has "had very gay experiences, yes, I swear on my grandmother's grave that I never slept with a single designer in my life. Never, ever desired, never was asked, never was approached, never, ever bought, in my entire career... Never. Not one. Skinny or fat. Never."

In fact, he says he has never been in love with a man - only a woman. This has happened twice: once with a fellow student in Providence and then with a society woman with whom he fell in love after a night of dancing in Manhattan, and whose name he declines to share because she married and had children.

Now, though, he laments, no one approaches him for love: "I just said to a friend, 'I can create this magic, so why don't I have a lover?'“

Ritual and tradition keep Talley feeling safe. In late June, he left White Plains (where he lives, says Malkemus, to preserve some semblance of a personal life far from fashion) for the couture in Paris, where he truly gets to be the 18th-century Trench aesthete he is inside. He had received eight new caftans from Ralph Rucci in rich-colored couture fabrics—dark brown, deep pale gray, and "deep, deep, deep sapphire blue," he says.

In Paris, he would see Christian Lacroix's Schiaparelli dresses, shows from Chanel, Valentino, and Dior, and the collection of Ulyana Sergeenko, his friend from Russia. (She is his favorite person in Moscow, outside of Naomi Campbell.) Talley may visit couture houses with close friends who have already had the privilege to dress at those houses, but "I am not a consultant," he says brusquely, mentioning that he has never made a large salary in his life, though, as is traditional in the fashion world, most of his clothes and some jewelry are gifts. "I would not go to a house and say, "I am a friend of Madame So-and-so, and she would like to buy a dress.'“

He enjoys Europe, particularly at the side of Gloria von Thurn und Taxis. He went to the Schloss St. Emmeram in Regensburg a couple of years ago for the holidays, dressing for dinner each night in Chanel coats, a sable muff from Fendi that Lagerfeld had made for him in the style of the Due d'Orleans, Louis XV's regent, and cashmere Ralph Rucci kimonos inspired by samurai-warrior clothes. "The cathedral was so cold, I passed the sable muff to Gloria's mother, who had little gauzy crocheted mitts, with the fingers out," he says.

At certain events he has wondered, "Why am I the only black guy here? Where are the others?" Gloria remembers, calling from Europe. "In the world where he likes to hang out, black people are not around. In the theater and opera world of Europe, you hardly see African people. He doesn't care. He is at ease... I like that so much about him."

Gloria talks about Talley as a "king." "He has the attitude of a king," she says. "André is always guiding, never asleep, always the one to call the shots. When he comes into a room, everybody in the room looks towards him."

If Talley is not exactly a king, few would argue with characterizing him as an icon, a figure entering the stream of history by way of his many fashion moments. And if the life of an icon is an imperfect one, that is fine with him. One morning, while discussing Coco Chanel with Talley, I mentioned that it was a shame that she had been an unhappy woman. "She was unhappy?'' thundered Talley, glaring at me. "Who cares? She was an icon. She created herself and had an amazing life!"

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