William Ivey Long Keeps His Clothes On - NYT article on the costume designer

[DosViolines]

source: nytimes.com

Part 1

January 29, 2006
William Ivey Long Keeps His Clothes On

By ALEX WITCHEL
On the night that the movie "The Producers" had its premiere at the Ziegfeld in New York, William Ivey Long, costume designer for both it and the hit Broadway show, sidestepped the red carpet and went quickly inside. Not that he could hide. A showgirl in a sleeveless gold lamé dress immediately embraced him.

"The smallest waist in three counties!" he cried, turning her side to side from her hips. "You're not wearing any underwear."

"You're telling me," she said, laughing, arms covered with goose pimples. It must have been 20 degrees outside. Turning to greet someone else, Long accidentally knocked the cap off the actor Ernie Sabella's head. "It's only apparel," Sabella said graciously, picking it up.

Only? Apparel has been at the center of Long's universe since he made his first costume at age 6 - an Elizabethan ruff that he sewed around his dog's neck. That was followed by a bonnet he whipped up from a pattern he traced around his hand. You would expect no less from a designer whose wit and inventiveness have consistently bolstered the standards of musical-theater glitz. In the recent Lincoln Center production of Stephen Sondheim's "Frogs," for instance, Long gave the chorus girls in Hell headdresses that flamed up like cigarette lighters.

Long has been nominated for 10 Tony Awards and won 4 ("The Producers," "Hairspray," "Crazy for You," "Nine"), and this week he will be inducted into the Theater Hall of Fame. To be eligible for that honor, a theater artist must have at least five significant Broadway credits in 25 years of work. At 58, Long has done 50 Broadway shows, a milestone he celebrated last spring with a party for 400 at the Boathouse in Central Park, given by Susan Stroman, the director of "The Producers," Wendy Wasserstein, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright ("The Heidi Chronicles") and a friend from Long's days at the Yale School of Drama, and Paul Rudnick, the playwright and screenwriter ("In and Out"), who once worked as Long's assistant. The invitation bore a quote from the critic John Simon's review of "The Lady and the Clarinet," an Off Broadway play from 1983. "William Ivey Long's costumes hover between taste and travesty," he wrote. So of course, Long invited him. And he came.

At the Ziegfeld, Long was stopped continually on the way to his seat, and he spent a good 20 minutes kissing everyone - gay women, straight men - smack on the lips. When people saw Long, it was if they were seeing dessert - eyes widened, mouths opened, then they grabbed. He reciprocated in kind. "Oh, goddess!" was a frequent greeting, and not only to the women.

But when he finally sat down, his tension was palpable. He hadn't yet seen the movie, which required 7,000 costumes (the show has 497 by comparison), and he didn't know what to expect. Though "The Producers" is only his fourth film, he has often ventured beyond Broadway. Until the tiger intervened, he costumed Siegfried and Roy at the Mirage in Las Vegas, where "Hairspray" will open at the Luxor next month; he has designed operas for Leonard Bernstein and ballets for Peter Martins, Paul Taylor and Twyla Tharp at New York City Ballet. He dressed Mick Jagger for the Rolling Stones' Steel Wheels U.S. tour in 1989 and made the paper dresses in Bruce Weber's video of the Pet Shop Boys' "I Get Along." Although the fashion line he tried to establish in 2003 failed, he continues to design for private clients, including Halle Berry, who wore one of his gowns to the 2002 Screen Actors Guild awards.

Throughout the movie, Long sat at ramrod attention with his hands on his knees, and as soon as the lights came up, he bounded over three rows of seats to get to Stroman. They hugged as he congratulated her before leaving separately for the party at the Metropolitan Club. So? What did he think? He looked worried. "I always want to redo something," he said. "I saw every bra strap in captivity, or not in captivity, more to the point."

At the party, Long ignored the sumptuous buffet tables. "I'm not here to eat; I'm here to say hello to people," he said. "Let's go look in that fancy room." He first greeted Stroman's extended family, then Neil Simon, whose last four plays Long has designed costumes for, then producers of the show and of the movie "The Producers." His campy exuberance was muted here. When it came to the grown-ups - the people who could hire him - Long dispensed a more burnished version of his Southern charm. That was, until he ran into Nathan Lane, holding court in a circle of admirers.

"Run!" Lane shouted to Long when he saw me standing beside him, notebook in hand. "When she wrote about me, I was the clown who cried, and you'll be the costumer who cried. 'Oh, poor William! Fourteen houses and no boyfriend!"'+

No one laughed louder than Long, though the joke had its sting. When I asked him about it later, he shrugged. "Nathan's talking about what he wants, not me," he said. It is indeed true that Long has never had a partner. The 14 houses are 12 houses; Long restores houses the way other people knit. There are two houses in the Berkshires, a brownstone in Chelsea, a farm in Pennsylvania and the rest in North Carolina: five houses in Seaboard, the tiny town where the Long family settled in 1676 and where Long is undertaking an elaborate program of what Rudnick calls "rural renewal"; a historic house in coastal Rose Bay and another two in Manteo, on the Outer Banks, where Long is the production designer for "The Lost Colony," an annual summer pageant about the first American settlers.

So, if not a boyfriend, what does he want? For starters, his appetite for work is insatiable. He converted an abandoned school in the Berkshires into a research archive for his own costumes as well as the historical clothing he collects (he lends these clothes to Off Broadway shows that could never afford to make them); he founded the nonprofit Eastern Seaboard Trust to encourage economic development there and has just completed a feasibility study with a grant from the state of North Carolina on how to create jobs. And most of his shows either preview out of town, sprout touring companies or both. "Chicago" alone has kept Long busy on Broadway and on the road for the last 10 years.

Highly caffeinated and in constant motion, he is rarely by himself. To enter the floating treehouse of Long's life, the tight camaraderie of his five-person staff, one of whom always travels with him, is a curious exercise. His flow of ideas is continuous - when he speaks, someone always takes notes - and his attention to detail is both meticulous and obsessive, whether it is finding the right trim for a dress or insisting that Seaboard fund-raising thank-you notes be postmarked only in Seaboard. Despite a certain amount of eye-rolling, the staff clearly adores him; most of them have been with him for years.

Long is also actively enamored of his family's exquisite 18th- and 19th-century furniture, much of which he has spent years restoring, and it fills his houses. (That's family the Southern way; every June, Long gives a Long family party, and 600 people attend.) Whenever a cousin doesn't want something, Long drives a truck down to rescue it. So no matter what city they are in, his houses feel vaguely the same.

That's all on the inside. To see Long race through a day on the outside, with his very big brain and even bigger personality, is to see someone for whom the world has clearly not been an easy place. No matter the activity - whether professional or one of his endless good deeds - he is there, then he's gone, like a comet, barely establishing a welcome he could possibly overstay. He seems mindful, always, to administer himself like a very strong spice, in dashes and sprinkles, only. The race ends back home, any home, surrounded by his books, his projects, his things, safe!

He has a line that gets him laughs, though it is also apparently a lesson he learned early. "Beauty is skin-deep," he likes to say. "But ugly is to the bone."

 

[DosViolines]

Part 2

It was Long's first day of work on the Las Vegas production of "Hairspray," and his New York studio was packed with people. They filled the ground floor of his 1864 brownstone, and at the very back, he sat in the room he calls his sanctum. It is anchored by a drafting table of 18th-century American pine that he will only say was "given by a dear friend." Long has friendships with scores of celebrities and prides himself on never mentioning their names in print. (I will instead: he was an usher at Caroline Kennedy's wedding to Edwin Schlossberg, and the table was a gift from the bride's mother.)

Long showed me his "bible" for "Hairspray," an enormous notebook packed with photos of the show's 350 costumes, including shoes, bags, hats and earrings, and measurements of the cast. The undergarments that Harvey Fierstein wore on Broadway and will wear again in Vegas have the breasts and buttocks built into them.

Though the contracts had not yet been signed, Long had already started researching "The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial," which will open on Broadway in May. Jerry Zaks, for whom Long has designed 24 productions, will direct, and David Schwimmer will star. Long often represents himself in business negotiations and drives a notoriously hard bargain for his services, with reason. Traditionally, men have been the set designers in the theater - think architecture - while women designed the clothes and were, unsurprisingly, paid less. The standard minimum fee for a show, Long says, is determined by the number of characters and costumes, whether it is a musical or a play and whether it requires contemporary or period dress. Most costume designers get the fee plus a flat payment for each week of a run. Long often gets the fee and a percentage of the weekly gross, both on Broadway and on the road.

One producer who has worked with Long calls him "brilliant and fastidious" though said he is still smarting from the cost. But André Bishop, the artistic director of Lincoln Center Theater, which produced "The Frogs" and a number of other Long-designed shows, said: "Most great designers I know are expensive. And William really gets in the trenches with the hems and the pins. It's not like all the assistants do it and he's standing off to the side wearing a beret."

Certainly in the last decade or so, Long's singular flair for color and good-natured glamour has jibed with the increased amount of spectacle on Broadway. But Zaks, whose work with Long includes both the 1992 Tony-Award-winning revival of "Guys and Dolls" and the 1991 Tony-Award-winning play "Six Degrees of Separation," said: "William always makes the play the most important thing. He never allows his style to upstage the material. And whether he's got a dollar to work with or unlimited funds, he's tirelessly inventive."

Leaving the bustle of the studio, Long led the way to the top floor of the house; the walls of his bedroom are covered in brocade, and he sleeps in his great-great-great grandparents' canopied mahogany bed, circa 1835. Across the hall is another sanctum with his great-grandmother's Chippendale chairs and walls of books organized by topic: fashion, men and uniforms, oversize folios, interiors, decorative arts and his favorite, architecture. When he can't sleep, he comes here, though when he's designing he gets inspiration from all over. One costume in "Hairspray" began its life as a pink plastic shower curtain in a discount store on 14th Street; another as a bedspread in the Garnet Hill catalog.

Long, who saves his flights of fancy for his actors and their characters, has worn the same outfit for some 30 years now: navy blazer, white shirt, striped tie, khakis, black lace-up shoes. "I have to wear a uniform," he said. "If I were wearing something people commented on, it would be distracting. Everyone knows I am focused only on them."

He took a seat facing his four Tony Awards, displayed on the mantel of the fireplace. "Let other people keep them in the bathroom," he said. "I'm proud as hell." He will be inducted into the Hall of Fame by Stroman, and from the breathless way Long talks about her, you would think he was a starstruck fan; they've done nine Broadway shows together, including the musical "Contact." But he takes nothing for granted, especially his friendships. And in the theater, where egos blaze at the most inopportune moments, he usually manages to remain above the fray. In 2003, when Mary Tyler Moore quit the Neil Simon play "Rose's Dilemma" late in previews after Simon criticized her performance, she stormed out of her dressing room as Long stood outside. What ever did he do?

"I made sure the understudy had clothes," he said evenly. "The trick about the theater is at the end of the day you cannot take any of it personally. At the level at which I work with people, their great talent is paired with great insecurity. Self-doubt is literally the twin of self-confidence. And I have to be there for both."

Well, who's there for him when his twin takes over? "With friends like mine, who needs a significant other?" he said. "I'm a bachelor in the old sense of the word, meaning I flirt, I have very many close relationships, but then I come home and like to read my book. In fact, I have escaped many complete breakdowns by calling up Paul Rudnick and making him listen. We both laugh because neither of us believes in shrinks. That's what friends are for. I guess I've lost some along the way, but since they're not here, I don't notice."

Long said he was "a manic child" who would fight with anyone, the "toughest sissy on the block" in Rock Hill, S.C. "My mind still runs too fast," he said. "If we get the wrong fabric or something is stitched the wrong way, I get so angry and so flummoxed that I start spelling my words, just to slow myself down. The kids downstairs know that's code for 'William's really nervous, nothing is personal.' My parents' favorite comment was: 'Billy, calm down and be yourself.' Which insulted me to the core because I was being myself. I have never stopped being myself. 'Billy, calm down and be someone else' is what they were trying to say."

At the very least, it would seem, he was theatrical from the start, living the first three years of his life in the stage-left dressing room of the amphitheater at the Raleigh Little Theater, where his father, William Ivey Long Sr., was the technical director (he later wrote plays) and his mother, Mary, acted and designed costumes. "It was like a circus family," he said. "I often say my parents left the farm to join the circus."

The Longs moved to a house after their second son, Robert, was born. (He is a theater architect based in Chapel Hill.) Their daughter, Laura, who still lives in Rock Hill, works with the Merry Pranksters, a theater company for the mentally challenged, which her mother helped found.

Long assumed he would become a professor like his father and graduated from the College of William and Mary before taking a teaching fellowship at his parents' alma mater, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He spent three years there pursuing a Ph.D. in Renaissance art history. During that time he befriended Betty Smith, the author of "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn," who had come South to teach playwriting. "She saw me struggling with art history, and she could see that my heart wasn't in it," he said. Smith had studied playwriting at the Yale School of Drama and encouraged Long to apply as a designer. But when he was accepted, he was the only one who celebrated; his parents regarded his career change as quitting.

"It was so traumatic," he recalled. "My father was a full professor at Winthrop University in South Carolina, where he founded the drama department, and my mother taught high-school drama for 21 years. They were very disappointed in me."

By the time Long graduated from Yale in 1975, he had been in college and graduate school for 10 years and had no idea how to look for a job. He moved into the Chelsea Hotel to be near one of his idols, the couturier Charles James, who lived there and for whom Long worked, unpaid, until James died in 1978. But he couldn't find work in the theater and had what he calls "breakdowns" for two years. "When I came to New York, I was so scared that I would eat one banana and one yogurt a day, and I weighed 135 pounds," he said. "So I arrived with the least amount of energy you could possibly have. I can only imagine now that here was this scarecrow person, lacking the kick and drive and the clawing that I have shown is the center of my work ethic ever since."

Long supported himself by designing dolls that Wasserstein and Rudnick sold for him. Finally, in 1978, the set designer Karen Schulz, his good friend from Yale, was hired to do "The Inspector General" on Broadway and recommended him to design costumes. He hasn't stopped since. In fact, one rap against him in the business - especially among costume designers in search of work - is that Long takes on too much.

"That is totally true," he said. "When I'm excited about a project, I'll take it even if I shouldn't. It's an addiction. Because when you turn jobs down, it's the worst. A great percentage of the time, the person who offered it to you will never offer you another job again. I'll sign that in blood. I have a real spiritual spook about it. You know how you relive things? I relive all those, and I'm still designing several shows I already designed because I don't think I got them right. Everyone liked 'Guys and Dolls,' but was it really right?" (He won a Drama Desk Award for it.) "I'm not saying I thought it was bad. But because it had so many possibilities, I'm constantly redesigning it."

Wow. Those must have been some parents.

"They died in 1998, six weeks apart after being married for 52 years," Long said. "It wasn't a great marriage, but they stayed together because, at the end of the day, they were best friends."

Was his being gay difficult for them? His expression was blank. "It was never mentioned," he said. "Though on her deathbed, we were in the hospice with the morphine pump, and my mother was answering questions to 'Jeopardy,' getting them right. And in between guessing the correct answer and the morphine pump, she would say, 'Oh, I still hope you find some nice girl and settle down and have children, because children are the greatest happiness in anyone's life.' Pump, pump. Not that this seared itself into my soul or anything. But there you have it."

As Long spoke, his eyes turned red and filled with tears while the rest of his face pretended not to notice. So the moment passed quickly. "I'm guilty because I haven't made everyone happy and everything perfect," he said wearily. "It's the same old story."

Maybe that's why he likes being with his family's furniture more than he liked being with his family. He smiled. "No, actually I liked being with them. I'm just telling you there was some torture along the way. I think it's encouraging to have their things around. I have a great sense of history, which I learned from them. I think that's why in the South, you hold onto things. Because they remind you."

 

[DosViolines]

Part 3

Seaboard, located in the northeastern corner of North Carolina, was originally called Concord, a farming community founded in the 17th century. The town was incorporated in 1877 and renamed Seaboard after the Seaboard Air Line Railroad. Its current population is 674.

"What it really is, is ordinary," Long said during the 90-minute drive to Seaboard from Raleigh. "For me the magic is it's where I'm from, therefore it's extraordinary." He moved here in 1997 (growing up he and his family spent holidays here), and in addition to restoring houses, he bought a building through the Seaboard Trust, where a health clinic opened last summer. On this trip, the trust was buying another building to house a pharmacy.

But show business is never far away. In nearby Roanoke Rapids, Randy Parton, brother of Dolly, is among the partners planning to open Carolina Crossroads, an entertainment district, in April 2007. An aspiring Branson, Mo., it is to have live-performance theaters, movie theaters, restaurants, hotels and shops. Long arranged for the trust to buy the Seaboard School (formerly Grades 1-12, it closed for lack of students) and he is turning it into the Seaboard School of Fashion and Costume, with the help of the North Carolina State College of Textiles and College of Design. The school will make costumes for the new theaters and the Carolina Ballet in Raleigh. Long also plans to start a laundry and dry-cleaning facility in Seaboard to service the costumes and uniforms at Carolina Crossroads. These projects, he says, will bring 50 jobs to Seaboard to start.

As he talked about his plan, he was so excited he could barely stay in his seat. "North Carolina State has one of the most advanced textile programs in the country," he said. "By having this market here, we will be unique as a training facility."

When we arrived at the Long family house, we got our sleeping assignments: I would stay there, Long would stay in his own house next door, the yellow house (pronounced "YELL-uh"), and Brian Mear, who handles his finances, would stay in the staff house across the street.

Not so fast. Long may be creating his own personal sequel to "The Last Picture Show," but to me, this setup was "In Cold Blood." Alone in a five-bedroom house in the middle of nowhere?

O.K. Mear would stay with me. The notion of inviting me to stay at his house never seemed to occur to Long, nor did he volunteer to stay with me. And by the way, with his love of history and tradition, why doesn't he live in the family house?

Long, who was racing through the yellow house showing me his tiger maple furniture when I asked that question, stopped still. "I've never slept there," he said, as if he hadn't realized it before. "Maybe I don't want to give in and have a family."

Forget about avoiding intimacy - he won't even share plumbing. Later, Paul Rudnick tried to give some context. "I think to a certain extent that the world is William's significant other," he said. "That's why the projects keep expanding. You wonder if there's a sadness or a lack there, but it's hard to imagine him being satisfied with one person, one Tony Award, one town. But he's not that old, so you never know. I would love to see who that match might be - but they're probably buried at Westminster Abbey."

I ran around with Long for the rest of the afternoon, to the farm and all the houses. At the yellow house, he made coffee and stood still long enough to listen to the 17 messages on his answering machine. One was from a 98-year-old aunt, who said she wasn't up to seeing him during Christmas.

Long shook his head. "She's just feeling, that's all," he said, as if it were akin to the flu. "That happens."

He cut camellias from the yard, arranged them in crystal vases, presided over a glorious buffet dinner at which the guests talked about the neighbors and actually said things like "I'm not sure who his people were." After they left, a train whistled mournfully in the deadly silent night, and Mear or no Mear, I hardly slept a wink. I kept recalling a moment that afternoon when we returned from a spin through the local cemetery and Long mentioned that his mother was not buried there with his father.

"Mother was buried at Manteo, where she was the queen," Long said. It turns out that for 10 years, Mary Long played Queen Elizabeth there in "The Lost Colony," and that is where she preferred to spend eternity.

"Her opening line was 'Unto my people, greetings,"' her son said. "That's what's on the tombstone."

Well, that explains a lot.

 

[DosViolines]

Last part

The following week, back in New York, Robin Givens came to Long's house for her fitting. She was preparing to join the Broadway cast of "Chicago" this month, and six costumes needed to be made.

Seeing Long again after our trip to Seaboard was unexpectedly reassuring. His clothes were the same, the furniture felt like North Carolina and Mear and company were present and accounted for. The Long family treehouse at work.

Givens is the first African-American to play Roxie, and since the clothes are variations on black negligees, Long had to make adjustments. "It's all a game of playing peekaboo with the sheer and the lace, and the black is so dense," he said. "The Roxies we've had never even had a suntan."

The original Roxie was Ann Reinking, on whom the clothes were built, a process Long says is all about defining the character. "I try to come to the first meeting knowing just the written word," he said. "Hopefully there's not a previous production or a movie, a previously owned vehicle, as I say, because I don't need to know that someone was wearing the red dress. Until the director shows me what way we're going, I don't need to start thinking, which is one of the hardest things, because how can you not start seeing the production as you're reading it? At the second meeting I can bring ideas, start my thumbnails and collages. By the third meeting the designs are almost ready, and I have a give-and-take with the actors."

Givens appeared first in a tiny dress with a plunging neckline, looking like a million bucks. Long, on his knees, reached up and pushed her breasts closer together before starting to pin. He touched her like a collector handling a vintage doll, with a sense of both worship and play.

The next costume was a dress that cut straight across her neck. "You wear this dress in the opening scene when we don't know Roxie yet, so it makes sense to be covered up," Long told her. "Later, in your solo, it should be totally revealing." That's where the plunging neckline comes in.

When the fitting was over, Long and I returned to his upstairs sanctum. Even with the door closed, the sound of people on the stairs was loud and clear. With the boss out of commission all morning, the staff was growing frantic. But ever the gentleman, Long made a final go at trying to identify what makes him run.

"I tried being a New Yorker," he said, "but in New York it's not a challenge to be accepted. I wanted to go someplace where they could be critical and I could say: 'Too bad, I belong here. I don't have to apologize for being strange because I'm from a long line of strange people who were here from the beginning of time and that's it.' And that's very comforting to me."

It also meant a great deal, he said, that his father lived long enough to see the family's roots re-established in Seaboard.

"I felt my dad did not achieve his potential," Long said. "He was a sensitive soul stuck in his time and place. He made this incredible leap from farm boy to playwright, though he was never able to make the leap to professional theater. That's one of the reasons I use his name. I learned my work ethic from both my parents. My God, did they work! That's why I think 'dilettante' is the word I fear most. It's why I try to be so thorough, why I work so hard. Whatever I do, I want it to be serious."

The footsteps were on the stairs again, and Long knew he had to go. He closed an oversize architecture book that lay on the table - he had picked it out in the dark the night before when he couldn't sleep, an insomniac's game. "I look at the pictures," he said, "and of course, I read it too, and at the end, I start again. You learn by going over it." He seemed to hesitate as he brought it back to the shelf, as if he might stay. But he slid it into place, returned the Chippendale chairs to their usual station, side by side against the wall, and once he showed me out, closed the door softly, even tenderly, behind him.

Alex Witchel is a staff writer for the magazine.

 

[DosViolines]

source: nytimes.com

Alessandra Petlin for The New York Times
William Ivey Long, in his Chelsea brownstone, fitting his latest Roxie, Robin Givens.

Alessandra Petlin for The New York Times
Long's "collage board" for "Hairspray." He has boards for every scene and calls them "Rauschenberg-esque."