Liz Claiborne Liz Claiborne THE L EGEND, THE WOMA N BY ART ORTENBERG TAYLOR TRADE PUBLISHING Lanham • New York • Boulder • Toronto • Plymouth, UK Published by Taylor Trade Publishing An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefi eld Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 http://www.rlpgtrade.com Estover Road, Plymouth PL6 7PY, United Kingdom Distributed by National Book Network Copyright © 2010 by Art Ortenberg First Taylor Trade edition published in 2010 Reprinted by permission of the Missouri Botanical Garden All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ortenberg, Art. Liz Claiborne : the legend, the woman / Art Ortenberg. p. cm. Originally published: St. Louis, Mo : Missouri Botanical Garden, 2009. ISBN 978-1-58979-494-8 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Claiborne, Liz, 1929-2007. 2. Fashion designers—United States—Biography. I. Title. TT505.C52O78 2009 746.9’2092—dc22 [B] 2009043275 Designed by Tracey Cameron and Michelle Leong (cid:2)™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America With gratitude, this work is dedicated to the trustees of our foundation: Bill Conway, Bob Dewar, Alison Richard and Jonah Western. PROLOGUE LIZ CLAIBORNE ORTENBERG died at the end of June 2007. When it became known that Liz Claiborne, the design visionary and corporate leader, had died, the acclaim she received was thunderous and came from every part of the globe. A great woman had died, a woman of extraordinary accomplishment and infl uence. The accolades related to the central role she had played in building a remarkably successful, happy and ethical company, a company whose sales were well over a billion dollars the year she retired, whose products had achieved a national ubiquity that left an enduring im- print. She had anticipated and responded to a lasting economic and cultural change in the America of the 1980s, when signifi cant numbers of women entered the workplace and reached professional heights heretofore denied to them. She created clothes that were appropriate for working women. The clothes were professional looking and comfortable, not intended to beguile or to dress a woman up in man’s clothing. Liz strove for perfection. She shaped an apprenticeship that equipped her with the technical and vi- sual skills necessary to implement her vision. As she often said, she had been educated “to see,” and to bring to life what she saw. During the fruitful, learning years at the company, she never failed to devote her professional 7 self to communicating with the women she sought to dress. And I, who admired her without reserve, who trusted her love of beauty, her talent and her vast technical skill, was privileged to be her partner, her lover, and per- haps most importantly, a person dedicated to doing what I could to assure that her vision would be realized. Liz loved the beautiful and “seeing” for her meant just that, responding to the “beautiful.” This fragment from a speech she gave in 1991 reads like a poem: “As a small child I was taught,” she said, “to respond to the graceful utility in my surroundings—the arrangement of fl owers, table settings, na- pery and fl atware, the lines of furniture, the rugs underfoot, wall hangings, the house one lives in, the way one wears one’s hair, carries one’s body— my entire life seemed to be immersed in things visual.” For Liz, this came to mean that “seeing” was the beginning of the process; making what you had seen come to life was the art. During those early years in Brussels, her development, supervised by her banker father who ran the American branch of the Morgan Guaranty bank, formed a private person who had to learn how to project herself to her broad public. She was taught as a small child to speak softly, to speak when asked to speak and to be the receiver of opinions, not the dispenser of private thoughts. She and her brothers were taught that table manners and disciplined, polite behavior were required of people of privilege. Privi- lege and civility were the two faces of the same coin. The broad public knew very little, in many cases, or perhaps nothing, of who this Liz Claiborne person had been and why she merited the newspa- per coverage that followed her death. I, her husband of almost fi fty years, have determined to write a narrative of Liz’s broader life. My hope is that you will get to know Liz, the Liz of our early life together, the Liz of the company, the Liz of the wonderfully adventuresome years after we left the company, the Liz who loved wild creatures and wild places, and the Liz who had been found to have cancer and fought it heroically. Her battle with peritoneal carcinoma, a nine-year struggle, began in May 1998. This is an extremely rare disease, affl icting less than 10 percent of women diagnosed with ovarian cancer. It attacks the lining of the stomach— the peritoneum—and subtly “seeds” its surface with tiny, malignant cells. Statistically, it is the equivalent of a death sentence: three to fi ve years of life if treated. Total remission is extremely rare, as rare as 20 percent of those 8 treated. The discovery of the disease does not necessarily indicate that the cancer has just appeared; it may well have established residence a few years earlier. But much of the grimness described above was either described less clearly to us at the time, or we, as a great number of new patients are prone to do, heard only optimistic words. Liz was victim to a primary peritoneal carcinoma. That meant that there were no tumorous growths. The critical fact that we came away with was that, indeed, the cancer was treatable. On July 6, 1998, the treatment began. Liz’s coming to terms with her disease, a disease she was determined to outlive, inspired her and those who knew her well to live fuller, more pro- ductive lives. She had inspired me since the day I met her, but never more than when she determined that she would not be beaten down. “She loved life,” Dr. Tom Weiner, her oncologist in Helena, Montana, told me recently, “and she loved living.” She died on a Tuesday morning, June 26, 2007. We interred her ashes the following Saturday on a lonely knoll about a mile and a half from the main cabin at Triple 8 Ranch, our favorite ranch in Montana, a place Liz adored. As I stood there and watched the lacquered Liz Red urn with Liz’s ashes disappear into the earth, I knew that I must write about Liz, the inspira- tional Liz whom I loved. I hope with all my heart that readers of my narrative will also come to be inspired by Liz and the life she lived. • • • After her death, I was deluged with letters from a vast variety of people: friends, of course, many people whom Liz and I had met through the work done at our foundation, many of her colleagues at the company, so many, indeed, that I was unable to respond to them all. Some, however, were so moving and so to the point that I decided to share them more broadly. The letters are enduring evidence of how Liz affected the lives of others. That gift of adding value to the lives of such a broad diversity of people was as natural for Liz as breathing. I include a few now, some excerpted. The fi rst appeared in a biannual newsletter written by Ken Wolff, Viet- nam War Marine veteran and director of the Grounded Eagle Foundation, Kraft Creek Road, Condon, Montana. Ken is one of the most effective 9 birds-of-prey rehabilitators in our country. He is a man of bone and muscle and outdoor-living skills. Jody, his wife, is soft-spoken and tenderhearted, expert in growing garlic and monitoring wounded birds, and a person who enjoyed Liz and whom Liz similarly enjoyed, despite the vastly different lives they had led. We met Ken and Jody in 1986, our fi rst summer as part-time residents of Montana. He had spoken at a Veterans of Foreign Wars meeting in Seeley Lake, a town about thirty miles south of Condon, and disabused his audi- ence of the necessity to go to war in Vietnam. We thought that this was a singular thing to do, so we called him and encouraged him to form the Grounded Eagle Foundation. The following is excerpted from the Spring 2007 issue of The Raptor Room News, a publica- tion that is part diary, part advocacy and mainly about birds of prey. “One special and courageous woman, Liz Claiborne. I watched Liz suffer from cancer for a decade. She never stopped smiling. Liz was one of the toughest people I have ever met, generous, gracious, unbelievably strong and determined, with a smile that melted icebergs. It was both an honor and a great pleasure to have shared some time and space with Liz.” This letter is from Katy Allgeyer to The New York Times. It appeared in the January 13, 2008, issue of the Times Magazine. Katy’s letter was her way of commenting on an essay that Rebecca Johnson, a contributing reporter, had written for the magazine’s “Lives Worth Living” issue. Liz Claiborne had been a part of its annual compendium of notable deaths for 2007. Ms. Johnson had ended her piece by highlighting the inspirational quality of Liz’s life. Katy, a former Liz Claiborne knitwear designer, and now a feng shui expert, wrote: “I had the privilege of designing for Liz Claiborne from 1983 to 1989. When Vogue published a knit ensemble (skirt, shell top and long cardigan) in the mid-1980s, it was the fi rst time Claiborne’s line had ever made the pages of fashion’s bible, de- spite—or perhaps because of—being the average American woman’s favorite designer label. Most designers would have savored the moment alone, but Liz wrote me a personal note congratulating me for getting ‘us’ into Vogue with my knitwear designs. “I was proud to be part of her team, and I learned as much from her as to how to treat others as I did about design.” 10