The Press: Out on a Limb with the Midi

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than a club and a puffy paragraph is worth its weight in gold brocade, Fairchild thrived. In 1957, weeks before it was shown to the buyers, he managed to get hold of a sketch of Givenchy's precedent-shattering shift, later to be called "the sack," and ran it on WWD's front page. In 1960, he got advance word of Yves St. Laurent's distinctive new silhouette for the House of Dior, which he maliciously described as looking like "a toothpaste tube on top of a brioche." Soon Fairchild was not only sitting in the front row for new collections, but mixing socially with top designers and buyers as well.

BP at Play

Anyone who thought that this treatment might flatter him into flattery got a rude shock. He enlarged the Paris bureau staff and expanded his domain to include the Italian and Spanish collections. He sent his reporters to nightclubs, theaters, chic restaurants and chichi resorts to note not only what jet-setters were wearing but what they were doing while wearing it. A letter to his father explained his aims: "WWD must be alive in this alive business, WWD must be controversial in this controversial business, WWD must be smart and snobby in this smart and snobbish business." In late 1960, John returned to New York to become publisher of WWD.

Fairchild arrived in New York with an audacious plan: to attempt a madcap, Tom Jones-style conquest of the fashion industry by wrapping Seventh Avenue, high fashion and the Beautiful People into one publication. Run-of-the-mill reporters for WWD continued to trudge up and down Seventh Avenue, feeding needle-and-thread stories to rewrite men and women back on Twelfth Street. But, with his pack in full cry, Fairchild rode off in hot pursuit of scoops, gossip and scandal.

For openers, just after he got back to New York, he won worldwide attention when his report that Jackie and Rose Kennedy had spent $30,000 on a Paris shopping spree became an issue in the 1960 presidential campaign. (Jackie pouted: "I'm sure I spend less than Mrs. Nixon.") He mixed fashion scoops with big names: Princess Margaret's wedding dress, Lady Bird Johnson's Inaugural wardrobe, Happy Rockefeller's trousseau, Jackie's leopard coat (when she first emerged from mourning), Lynda Bird's wedding dress. Under Fairchild's prodding, WWD began building up jet-setters like Gloria Guinness, Isabel Eberstadt, Amanda Burden and Baby Jane Holzer (what ever became of Baby Jane?) into the equivalent of 1930s Hollywood stars.

With a report on twist fashions at the Peppermint Lounge and another on Small's Paradise in Harlem, the paper launched a series of features on Beautiful People at play. The late Carol Bjorkman, a onetime Saks buyer and jet-setter, began a knowing gossip column called "Carol Says," then moved on to interviews with the likes of Vice President Johnson and a new quarterback named Joe Namath. Reviews, always glib and sometimes perceptive, criticized books, plays, movies, TV shows, restaurants and (lately) Sunday church services. "Eye" and "Eye Too," gossip columns on the snide side, became must reading on the East Side and elsewhere. Pages were regularly filled with features and with candid-camera shots of BPs going in and out of smart restaurants.

As the paper's content got livelier, it also got meaner and more