Always in Style
By INGRID SISCHY
Published: December 26, 2004
"And that, my friends, is my farewell to the newspaper game. . . . So long, you wage slaves. Well, when you're crawling up fire escapes and getting kicked out of front doors and eating Christmas dinners in one-armed joints, don't forget your pal Amy Spindler." In quoting a scene from Howard Hawks's screwball comedy "His Girl Friday," I've taken the liberty, of course, of replacing the name of his journalist protagonist (Hildy Johnson, played deliciously by Rosalind Russell) with the name of my own heroine, Amy Spindler, a contemporary woman of the press, whose short life was so full of adventure that when a brain tumor ended her blue-ribbon run earlier this year, she was already a legend. Like Johnson, Spindler would sometimes threaten to quit the news racket, but she could no more resist the call than could the 30's ace reporter she seemed to embody. For Spindler, The New York Times — where she was first a reporter, then fashion critic and then style editor of the magazine — was, even with its warts, the only paper in the world. She believed its readers deserved to know fashion the way she did: as an endlessly interesting, reverberating subject that is about way more than the hiccups of hemlines, the Ping-Ponging between frocks and pants and the follies of the entitled few. As a writer, she did the paper proud, producing groundbreaking stories — including some that landed on the front page — that hooked people who had never before given fashion the time of day.
In 1997, breast cancer interrupted Spindler in midsentence. After treatment, she felt new again, and with that she wanted new challenges, so she moved to the magazine, where her nonstop inventiveness, her playfulness and her generosity blasted through the pages. Spindler never tiptoed around her subjects, or her life; she grabbed it, loved it and lived it large.
Take the time she stole the spotlight from half the movie industry. It was a big dipper of a night. At Vanity Fair's Oscar dinner in 2002, the stars were out as if there were no tomorrow. When Halle Berry's name was called as Best Actress, Oprah Winfrey, who was sitting beside me, became so weepy she peeled off her optimistically upward-pointing false eyelashes and stored them on her napkin. I looked across the room to find Spindler, the best reporter in the house. At her table people weren't really watching the TV screens. All eyes were on her, all ears tuned to her quick-draw commentary. When you've got someone with that much magic, who needs Hollywood?
Six hours later she made an exit that not even Faulkner or Fitzgerald could top. Before she'd gone out that night, because of a wicked cold she'd tried every over-the-counter remedy in the cabinet. But once she arrived at the shindig, she started firing off the one-liners — and lining up the martinis. One minute Ethan Hawke was hanging on to every word, the next he was hanging on to her. The NyQuil and the vodka proved to be bad bedmates.
When Roberto Benabib — her husband and the person who made her laugh the most — told her the next day that she'd had to be carried out on a stretcher, she shot back, "Considering the movies that were nominated, I had to give everyone something to talk about." They're still talking.
Ingrid Sischy is the editor in chief of Interview magazine.
