Afterward, she ran out onto the street, dizzy with triumph. She would experience this kind of life-altering moment of success again, but there was nothing like that first time. She strode up Thirty-seventh Street to Fifth Avenue, not knowing where she was going, but only that she wanted to be in the middle of everything. She walked up Fifth Avenue, weaving joyfully between the passersby, and stopping at Rockefeller Center to watch the skaters. The city was like a silvery Oz, full of magic possibilities, and it was only when she reached the park and had exhausted some of her energy that she went to a phone booth and called her best friend from F.I.T., Kit Callendar.
“She said she wanted to start me off small, but she took eighteen pieces!” Victory exclaimed.
The order seemed enormous to both of them, and at that moment, she couldn’t have ever imagined that someday she’d get orders for ten thousand . . .
Three more weeks of sewing late into the night completed her first order, and she showed up at Myrna’s office with the pieces in three supermarket shopping bags. “What are you doing here?” Myrna demanded.
“I have your things,” Victory said proudly.
“Don’t you have a shipper?” Myrna asked, aghast. “What am I supposed to do with these bags?”
Victory smiled at the memory. She’d known nothing about the technical aspects of being a designer back then; had no idea that there were cutting and sewing rooms where real designers had their clothing made. But ambition and burning desire (the kind of desire, she imagined, most women had for men) carried her forward. And then she got a check in the mail for five hundred dollars. All the pieces had sold. She was eighteen years old, and she was in business.
All through her twenties, she just kept going. She and Kit moved into a tiny two-bedroom apartment on the Lower East Side, on a street that was filled with Indian restaurants and basement “candy stores” where drugs were sold. They would cut and sew until they couldn’t see anymore, and then they would make the rounds of art openings and dingy nightclubs where they danced until three in the morning. She was barely making enough money to cover her costs and her living expenses, but it didn’t matter. She knew big success was just around the corner; but in the meantime, living in the city and doing what she’d always dreamed of doing was enough.
And then she got her first big order from Bendel’s, a department store known for supporting struggling young designers. It was another turning point—the order was large enough to warrant her own special area on the third floor with her name and logo on the wall—but there was a catch. The cost of actually making the clothes would require a huge outlay of cash, more than $20,000, which she didn’t have. She went to three banks to try to borrow the money, but in each case the bank managers patiently explained that in order to secure a loan, you had to have collateral, something concrete like a house or a car that they could take from you and sell if you couldn’t pay back the money.
She couldn’t see her way out of this conundrum, but one day her phone rang and it was Myrna Jameson. She suggested Victory call a man named Howard Fripplemeyer. He was a scumbag, Myrna explained, a real garmento, but he’d been in the business for thirty years and he might be able to help her.
Howard Fripplemeyer was everything Myrna promised and worse. Their first meeting took place at a coffee shop, where Howard wolfed down a pastrami sandwich without bothering to wipe away the mustard residue that formed in the corners of his mouth. His clothes were brown, and his hair alarming—he wore a toupee that jutted from his forehead like a shingle. When he’d finished eating, he picked up his copy of the Daily News and disappeared into the men’s room for fifteen minutes. Victory’s instincts told her to pay her portion of the check and run, but she was desperate.
When he returned to the table, he said he’d decided she was a good investment—she had potential. He would put $80,000 into her company over the next year; in return, he wanted thirty percent of the profits. It seemed like a good deal to her. Howard was awful, and on top of his crude personality, he had a strange, sharp odor about him, but she told herself she didn’t have to sleep with the man. Plus, she needed him. “Let me worry about the money, kid,” he said, puffing on his tenth Newport cigarette. “You worry about the fashion. I’ve been in this business for thirty years, and I understand creative types. When you think about money, you get all mixed up.” And she’d nodded, thinking yes, that was exactly what happened.
She trusted Howard, but only because she didn’t have enough experience not to. Howard moved her “operation” into a large room in a building off Seventh Avenue, where sound echoed through the walls of the corridors painted an industrial gray, and the ladies’ room required a key to get in. It was a building that reeked of desperation, of promises and dreams that were never going to be fulfilled, but after working out of her tiny apartment, it felt like a huge step up.
And her clothes were selling. Howard told her that the company was going to make $200,000 that year, a sum that seemed mind-boggling. “ ’Course, that’s before you subtract my eighty thousand plus my thirty percent. That’s sixty thousand plus eighty thousand—one hundred and forty thousand.” This didn’t seem right to her, but she was too meek to argue.
“He’s ripping you off!” Kit said. There was a woman who lived next door to them who was a banker, and one evening Victory explained the situation to her. “No one does business like this,” the woman said, shaking her head. “Besides, you don’t need him. It’s all pretty simple—supply and demand. You can do this yourself.”
There was only one problem: Howard couldn’t be gotten rid of, at least not legally. In the excitement of being rescued from her money problem, she had signed a contract with Howard, entitling him to thirty percent of her profits for the rest of her life.
She was going to be stuck with Howard and his stench forever. She couldn’t believe her stupidity, and lying awake at night, she wondered if there was any way to get rid of Howard short of hiring someone to kill him. If she ever got out of this situation, she vowed, she would never take on a partner again . . .
And then Howard did something strange. He opened another fashion company in the building across the street.
It was odd, but Victory didn’t think that much about it because it meant Howard was out of her hair. Every morning he arrived in the office from his commute from the Five Towns on Long Island, wearing a cheap trench coat and carrying a cardboard box and the Daily News. The box always contained three coffees and a knish. The first thing he’d do was to get on the phone, which he would stay on
for the next three hours, until he went to the coffee shop for lunch. Howard seemed to have an endless network of garmento buddies whom he talked to hourly, and Victory wondered how any of them managed to get any work done. She didn’t mind on principle, but the office was only one large room, so there was no getting away from Howard and his conversations. And when he finally got off the phone, he’d review her designs.
“That’s no good,” he’d say. “Who’s gonna wear that in Minnesota?”
“Howard, I’m from Minnesota. I’m trying to get away from the Midwest . . .”
“What for? So you can have a couple of pretty pictures in Vogue? Pretty pictures don’t sell clothes, you know. Needing something to wear on a Saturday night with your sweetheart, now that sells clothes. And nothing too out there either. Guys want to see their gals in something pretty and demure . . .”
“I do want to see my clothes in Vogue,” she’d hiss fiercely. “And I will, I promise you . . .”
Then Howard would lean forward, engulfing them both in his signature odor, and smile. His teeth were gray with a whitish scum in the cracks, as if he could barely be bothered to brush his teeth. “You ever look closely at the designers in Vogue?” he’d ask. “Halston, Klein . . . even Scaasi, who used to be Isaacs but decided to spell his name backwards . . . they’re all Jewish fags. You ever see a woman designer in there? No way. That’s because when it comes to fashion, or anything else for that matter . . . movies, architecture, painting—all the best are men. And there’s a reason for that . . .”
Howard never told her what this reason was, exactly, and she never asked. She didn’t want to hear his answer.
Instead, she’d curse him inwardly and go back to drawing. Someday . . . she’d think. And she’d tell herself that if she made Howard enough money, maybe he’d go away and leave her alone.
And one day he did. He didn’t show up in the morning, and finally appeared at about four o’clock in the afternoon. This pattern continued for several weeks, and Victory was so grateful to be relieved of his daily presence, she didn’t ask why. But she noticed that no matter how late she worked, Howard always managed to be in the office when she left.
She ran into Myrna Jameson on the street a few weeks later. “So I see Howard’s got you in Dress Barn,” she said.
Victory looked at her in surprise, shaking her head and thinking that Myrna must have made a mistake.