The Adventurous Life of Agatha: Fashion Designer

By Agatha

Award winning internationally recognized U.S. fashion designer, Agatha Brown, was born in Texas and graduated Southern Methodist University Fashion School of Design. Known in the fashion world simply as "Agatha", she chronicles her very free spirited, adventurous, and glamorous life. From very humble beginnings and growing up during the Great Depression, she overcame all obstacles to reach the top in her career. Her adventurous travels alone took her to Italy and France to design and produce her collections, and a dangerous trip to Israel three weeks after the Six Day War will keep the reader entranced. In her travels, she meets many fascinating people and celebrities, both the famous and infamous.

Her adventures in the Far East and exotic Hong Kong are wildly exciting and her trip to Brazil almost cost her life. Finally, she meets her soul mate, and opens her own company at 550 Seventh Avenue in New York. At the pinnacle of her career, events bring it all crashing down and she starts all over again from the island paradise of Aruba. Her autobiography tells it all. The great successes, the downfalls, the hot passionate love affairs, the heartbreaks, and the adventures that challenge her indomitable free spirit are all here in this thrilling read.

Member New York Fashion Council; Named "Guest Designer" Dallas Fashion Mart 1986; Nominated "Best Designer" Mohair Council of America 1985; "Best of Fall" for fragrance "Mystery of Agatha" awarded by www.ashford.com 2000; "Best of 2002" award for fragrances "Imperial Jade Empress and Emperor" by www.lucire.com

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Nov 18, 2008
• ISBN: 9780595622719

Agatha

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Book preview

PROLOGUE 

To the best of my recollection, the events in my autobiography are true and they did happen as written. The names, and sometimes genders, of some people are changed to protect them, their progenies, and their ancestors from embarrassment. The true names or genders of some persons and companies written about in this book will remain a secret as long as they themselves do not come forward and identify themselves. Those who choose to do so will be solely responsible for their own embarrassment.

Most of the celebrities I met are deceased, but in any case, there is nothing derogatory here to tarnish the memories of them.

Some stories and events told to me by others about others fall into the category of gossip and although related in these pages, I do not guarantee their veracity but assume they are true. Nothing in these pages is written with the intention of offending anyone, but it surely will some.

CHAPTER 1 

A Foundling Infant

My life began inauspiciously. I was born June 17, 1929, in Borger, Texas, only four months before the stock market crash that ushered in the Great Depression. My birth mother took out a tiny ad in the Borger, Texas, newspaper:

Wanted a good home for an infant foundling.

From this humble beginning, it is hard to imagine that I would become internationally recognized as a fashion designer….known simply as Agatha….and travel the world, meet fascinating people….both famous and infamous….and lead a free spirited, glamorous, and, at times, dangerous life.

Borger, in the Panhandle of Texas, was exactly as it appeared in the movie Boom Town starring Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy. Oilrigs sprouted like ugly misshaped mushrooms in the middle of town and the noxious smell of gases and oil permeated the air. Black gold brought hopes and promise of money and jobs. If they found no other way, men and women from all over the country rode the rails or walked to Borger. The men were anxious to work the long twelve-hour shifts for the few dollars that it paid. Times were hard and it was dangerous work. You could lose a finger or two, your hand, or your life in an instant, but no one had money. Desperate men did desperate things.

Like everyone else, my birth mother, already a widow at the age of eighteen, arrived in Borger hoping to find work of any kind, but there was no work for a teenage girl eight months pregnant and she had no skills. Therefore, she did the only thing she knew to do. She wanted to find a good home for her child, and she asked the doctor to help her.

When I was born and put immediately into the arms of my adoptive mother, she offered my birth mother some money, but she refused saying, That would be selling my baby.

On my nineteenth birthday, my adoptive mother told me that my birth mother lightly touched my cheek, after signing the adoption papers. She walked down the street, hesitated, and turned only once to look back, and then she disappeared around a corner and was gone.

My adoptive mother was the only mother I ever knew, and I loved her. Her name was Inez, and she was a beautiful woman. She had raven black hair and hazel brown eyes. Her grandfather, W. W. Duncan was an adventurer, and it was in his honor that they named the town of Duncan, Oklahoma. He was a pioneer Scotsman and set up a trading post at the intersection of the north/south Chisholm Trail in the late 1890’s. My mother never knew him, for he died in the Samoan Islands when she was a very small child. Her grandmother was a Cherokee Indian, so my mother had the fiery temperament of Scottish, Irish, and one-quarter Cherokee. Her high cheekbones and elegant nose distinguished her good looks.

My adoptive daddy, Lawrence David Brown, if that was actually his name, was Irish. He was a handsome man with a wonderful sense of humor and bright sparkling blue eyes filled with merriment. At the age of thirty, he was already bald except for a fringe over his ears, and around the back of his head. His first words, upon introduction to my mother, as he took off his hat, and rubbed his hand over his baldhead were, Don’t you think I have pretty hair?

It was love at first sight. He was a good man and I never met anyone who did not like him. He was also a mysterious man who kept his own counsel. We knew he was born in Washington State and that he had run away from home at the age of fourteen for reasons unknown. He wanted nothing to do with his family. We did not know their names, or if he had brothers and sisters, or where they lived. Nothing! My mother was married to him for forty years, yet she knew nothing about him. He carried his secrets to his grave.

He worked at the only thing he knew how to do, and that was as a roughneck or driller on the oilrigs. In the dangerous work that he did, he lost parts of his fingers, and the ends of his thumbs on both hands. The end of his thumb caught in the chain that wraps at lightening speed around the drill pipe and it was mashed off. He calmly laid the end of his thumb aside on the rig, and continued his work. If he had stopped, he would have been fired, and jobs were too hard to get.

With my blonde hair and blue eyes, (they later turned dark green at the age of fourteen) I looked as though I could be his biological daughter. He agreed to my adoption with the understanding that he would name me. When he told my mother my name was Agatha, she was horrified. You can’t name my beautiful baby Agatha, she said, That is an awful name."

Nevertheless, my daddy insisted, and he would never reveal how or why he chose that rarely used name. For years, my mother was convinced he had named me after an old girlfriend, and she would accuse him of that when she got mad at him, which was often. He would laugh his wonderful booming laugh, his eyes would sparkle, and he would deny it, saying, Now Mother, you know you’re the only woman I’ve ever loved. However, he would never reveal where he got the name, or why he insisted I be named that.

Agatha is derived from the Greek name "Agathia" one of the seven muses on Mount Olympus in Greek mythology. The name is so rare that I am usually the only Agatha most people have met in their entire lifetimes. Before I met another person by that name, I was in my early twenties. Of course, I was teased unmercifully as a child, but I knew my name was special, and I trusted my daddy had a very good reason for naming me Agatha. The name has been both a blessing and a curse in my life.

Growing up during the Depression was a powerful influence in my life. It gave me the fire in the belly I needed to succeed. I have never expected anything free, and I recognized, from the beginning, that I would always have to work long and hard for anything I got in life. Most of all, it gave me the determination to surmount all obstacles, and against all odds. I wanted to be somebody.

Times were desperately hard, and my mother and daddy often had to be apart for weeks at a time while my daddy traveled to find work wherever he could. He sent money home, and my mother worked at whatever odd jobs she could find. It was a hardscrabble existence; however, I was well fed, clean, and they saw to it that I was dressed at least as well as any other kid in school. They protected me as best they could from the worst of it.

While my mother worked, she would give me the quarter I needed to go to the movies. The movie consisted of a double feature, a comedy, a Flash Gordon serial, and the news, and it lasted for four hours or more. I loved the movies. I had no idea of people with wealth because no one we knew had money. I virtually lived for the movies. I saw glamorous life-styles, and movie stars wearing elegant and magnificent clothes designed by Adrian and Edith Head. I was fascinated by travels to far-off lands. I yearned for that kind of life with all my heart. I absorbed everything like a sponge, and the lifestyles I saw in the movies served to develop my taste level far above anything I could conceive of ever having the opportunity to know or enjoy. Little did I know that my wish would be granted beyond my wildest dreams, and that I would lead an extraordinarily, exciting, and adventurous life; certainly far more exciting than a little adopted girl, from the oil fields of West Texas, had any right to expect.

My trips to the movies alone ended abruptly when I told my mother about the man who sat down next to me in the theater and said, Reach into my pocket and you’ll find a piece of candy there. I was six years old.

I started school, and my teachers discovered that I had a great deal of artistic ability far advanced for my age. My teachers told my mother that I had a big talent. I designed my first dress at the age of seven. Designing is a God-given talent, not simply one that is acquired.

We moved constantly because of daddy’s work, and this made school difficult, but I was bright enough that I made good grades in everything but math. We moved around so much, and I attended so many different schools, thirteen in just one year, that I never had the proper foundation for math. I hated math, and this would prove to be my undoing and downfall several times in my life.

Being an only child and moving around almost constantly was a rather lonely life. I had few opportunities to make friends, so I became deeply absorbed in books. The library was a favorite spot, and I was perfectly content to have my nose in a book or go to the movies. My favorite books were those written by a young adventurer and author named Richard Halliburton, who traveled the world over and had many exciting and dangerous experiences. I day dreamed of that kind of life.

Tucked away in a library by myself also served to make me painfully shy, and I had little opportunity to develop the social skills that could have been so helpful to me in launching my chosen career in fashion later in life.

When I was about eight, my daddy managed to accumulate a small amount of savings, and he and another of his oil-drilling buddies rented a rig and drilled a wildcat well a few miles outside of the tiny town of Kermit, Texas. We rented an old farmhouse out near the well. It had been a rabbit farm, and it was there that I gained a lifelong terror of rattle-snakes, scorpions, centipedes, tarantulas, black widow spiders and other assorted poisonous desert creatures.

My daddy was absolutely convinced there was oil there, and we sunk every penny we had into the venture. During those times, in the mid 1930s, if a wildcatter had not struck oil by three thousand feet in the Permian Basin, where the rig was located, then the hole was dry. They drilled to three thousand feet and struck water. My daddy was not convinced because he could taste the oil in the mud and water. They drilled a little farther, and when they lost the tools in the hole, they had to give up.

Several years later, it was ironic that at the very spot my daddy was drilling, a huge new field of oil was discovered, but drillers had to drill six thousand feet to reach the Ellenberger Formation to find it. When daddy heard this news, he took his hat off, slammed it down on the ground, let out a stream of obscenities, and cried, God dam it, I knew it was there. Big tears streamed down his face. This is the closest we ever came to striking it rich.

My first commercial success as a fashion designer came at the age of twelve. There was a nationally syndicated cartoon character in the Sunday newspapers called, "Tillie the Toiler." It featured a paper doll drawing of Tillie, and readers could submit sketches for her fashionable clothes. I mailed in my designs, they were published nationally, and I received a check for one dollar which was a lot of money to a twelve-year-old. I prudently stuffed it away in my piggy bank in hopes of a grand future like the ones I saw in the movies.

I signed my sketches in a distinctive way. I printed my name agatha in all small letters with an elongated g and h, and with a dramatic slash across the t. I have signed my name on every design I have made in my entire lifetime in this way, and still do to this day. Even at that tender age, I recognized the power and uniqueness of using just my first name to identify my designs and from that moment on, I became known simply as Agatha.

Therefore, when I finally finished high school, I was determined to get an education, and be a fashion designer. By this time, my designing skills were looking extremely professional. I designed a few sketches and mailed them to Nardis of Dallas, Texas, the only fashion company I had heard of. I received a nice letter from the president advising me that I had talent, and should go to Southern Methodist University School of Fashion Design to receive my formal training. It was as though this advice was written in big bold letters across the heavens, and I immediately begin to plan on how I could make it happen.

After graduating high school, I worked as a stenographer for one year at Shell Oil Company in Odessa, Texas. I saved every penny. When I finally accumulated one thousand dollars, which was a lot of money in 1950, I announced to my mother and daddy that I was going to Dallas to attend the SMU Fashion School of Design.

My mother was horrified that her baby daughter was going to fly the coop, and she was desperate to prevent me from going. She made a comment to daddy that maybe it was time for her to tell me some things. They had never told me that I was an adopted child, and during those years, everyone believed it to be for the best. But somehow, I just knew that I was adopted. My daddy was driving me to work, and I asked him,

Is my mother my real mother? He looked around at me and sadly said,

No, she’s not,

And then I asked, Are you my real daddy? Tears welled in his eyes and he said, Baby I cannot lie to you. No, I’m not your real daddy.

This was on my nineteenth birthday. Even though for many years I secretly suspected I was adopted, the confirmation still came as a big shock. My mother could tell me little about my birth mother, nor why she gave me up. About all she could say was, Times were very hard, and she couldn’t take care of you.

As with most adoptees, I experienced deep feelings of rejection. These were hard to overcome, giving me much trouble and grief in my life.

After several days and many arguments, my parents saw that I was determined to go. I had saved my money, and they could not stop me. My daddy pointed out to my mother that if I remained in Odessa, Texas, I would likely marry some roughneck oil field worker and he wanted something better in life for me than what they had. This argument brought my mother around and she finally agreed to let me have my chance and she gave me her blessing.

CHAPTER 2 

Southern Methodist University On A

Dollar A Day For Food

I took a train to Dallas, Texas, and entered Southern Methodist University to learn to be a professional fashion designer. My first impressions of S.M.U. were overwhelming to me. I was an unsophisticated small-town girl, and there were thousands of students. I knew no one in Dallas.

The dormitories were full, so SMU assigned me to off-campus housing. I shared the entire second-floor of bedrooms with seven other girls in a beautiful old Federal-style house a few blocks from campus. This gave me a chance to develop some friendships, and I begin to feel more confident.

My roommate was a beautiful young girl from East Texas, with the announced ambition of finding a rich young man to marry. She wasted no time accomplishing this. She found someone the very first semester, and over the strong objections of his parents, she talked him into eloping. For the rest of the semester, I had my room all to myself.

Classes began almost immediately, so I had to adjust quickly to my new surroundings. Right from the beginning, I did not expect it to be easy to earn my way through the university. I usually had two or three part-time jobs at the same time. When I was not in a classroom, I was at work. During the afternoon, I worked as a secretary for the dean’s secretary. At night, I typed up five-by-eight-inch index cards for a professor who was writing a book about the oil industry of California. In the California newspapers, I found every article about this subject I could find and entered it on the cards. I did my homework all hours of the morning, averaging only four hours of sleep a night.

On Saturdays, I had a designing job. Yes, neophyte that I was, I designed for a woman who had a shop in Highland Park Village. She made custom clothes for socialites. Muriel was an elegant, beautiful woman who was a model at Neiman Marcus until she met a wealthy man who set her up in business. I made beautiful sketches in color, and since she had no designing ability at all but very good taste, she needed someone like me. Of course, she put her name on the sketches.

She also had a wonderful crew of tailors headed by a woman from Belgium; she could magically transform beautiful imported woolen fabrics into perfectly fitting masterpieces. In the early 1950s, women had tiny waistlines, and tailoring suits with padded hips and tiny waists required a great deal of skill. Muriel had no hesitation in charging her wealthy patrons a fortune for these suits. The price of each suit could have paid my tuition through four years at SMU.

Two of Muriel’s wealthy customers were sisters whose sibling rivalry had developed into a vicious hatred for one another. Neither one knew that the other was a customer of Muriel’s shop. I said to Muriel, Are you sure you want to sell both these ladies the same suit?

She responded, Don’t worry about it Agatha, they hate each other so much they don’t even belong to the same country club, and they each have different sets of friends, so there is no chance they will run into one another. That just will not happen.

Muriel made one huge miscalculation. They both bought clothes from her shop. A few months later, Muriel was in the fitting room with Claire, one of the sisters. They were fitting her with a magnificent light gray wool sharkskin suit that I had designed. It was a high fashion and distinctive design.

The receptionist came rushing into the fitting room in a total panic, pulled Muriel aside and informed her that the other sister, Alice, had just walked into the shop wearing the same suit. Muriel’s face turned the same shade of pale gray as the suit she was fitting on Claire; she looked as though she would faint.

Like in a Charley Chaplin movie, a comically manic effort of pushing one sister through one door and closing it before the other came out ensued for the next several minutes, but inevitably the two came face to face. Rage quickly replaced the shock on their faces.

Alice screamed, "What are you doing wearing my suit? Take it off at once!!" She then reached up, tore off the sleeve that was basted onto the suit by hand, and threw it in Muriel’s face.

You’ll hear from my lawyer about this. I am going to sue you. As for you dear sister, you look like a fat pig in that suit. Take if off.

Judy responded, How dare you call me a fat pig. You’re much fatter than I, and you have an ugly face and temperament to go with it.

Muriel then joined in the fray trying to calm things down.

Ladies please!

Both Claire and Alice turned their full fury on Muriel and calling her names that made me blush. Word about the altercation and betrayal spread around Dallas like wild fire among all her wealthy clients. This disaster forced her to close her shop and it put me out of my first designing job.

In the mornings, I went to class, and three days a week, I had an afternoon job with John R. Black Oil Company where I worked as an assistant to the geologist. He taught me how to find the different oil formations on the Schlumberger well logs, post them on a map showing where the wells were located, and the depth they had to drill to find each formation. This enabled the geologist to draw contour lines connecting the wells in a manner that could help in predicting where the formations were located, and where oil might be found.

I worked extremely hard, and I had little money left over. After paying my tuition of two hundred and fifty dollars a semester, I had to save enough money to pay my next semester’s tuition from my meager salaries. In my tight budget, I had only a dollar a day to spend for food. I bought two marshmallow filled chocolate muffins and a cup of coffee for breakfast, and a seventy-five-cent plate lunch at a little Greek diner near the school. The blue plate special consisted of a small piece of chicken, roast beef, or pork, with meatloaf every Thursday. It was served all on the same plate, with either mashed or a small baked potato and with a vegetable of some sort, a roll or biscuit, and a pat of butter. Dinner I did without unless I was lucky enough to have a date, but this was rarely. I became extremely thin bordering on anorexia, but I looked great in clothes, and moonlighted every chance I got to model in fashion shows for Neiman Marcus.

It soon became obvious that I would not be able to survive long enough to graduate Southern Methodist even with the few scholarships I managed to get. This was at a time when there was no such thing as student loans. I made the hard decision to give up the goal of graduating Southern Methodist University, and become a special student, concentrating only on training at the SMU Fashion School of Design for two more years.

This turned out to be a wise decision, because I got the technical knowledge I needed to become a designer. After I fainted in class one day, the school doctor informed me, that I was starving myself to death.

He told me, Unless you want to die, you’ll have to eat more food. You’re becoming dangerously anemic.

CHAPTER 3 

Mrs. Julie Boger

Mrs. Julie Boger, our professor in the Fashion School of Design, was a tiny French woman who was a designer on New York’s Seventh Avenue in the early 1930s during the infancy of the fashion industry. She was the smartest woman I ever knew. Everything I have ever achieved as a designer, I owe to her. She taught us to be excellent technicians and pattern makers, as well as how to make a living as a fashion designer. She was training us to design for Dallas fashion manufacturers, who found it impossible to lure New York designers to Dallas, so they decided to develop their own. They financially supported the SMU Fashion School of Design, and brought Mrs. Boger, an elderly but seasoned designer, to Dallas to teach the course.

She was a terror and a slave driver, and she whipped us into shape in two short years. I worked like a demon, and I absolutely both feared and worshiped this woman. In the junior year, there were thirty-five students, but in her graduating classes, there were never more than eight. She ruthlessly weeded out all the weak ones and those she knew would never be able to make it in the rough, tough garment industry. She concentrated all her efforts on us eight, to turn us into designers who could make a living for ourselves.

One day, I showed her three elegant cocktail dresses I had designed. As she looked up at me through her thick glasses and puffed on her cigarette, she said, Well, darling, very nice. What do you want to do when you graduate from my class? Do you want to open your own shop and design high fashion couture clothes?

Oh yes, Mrs. Boger that’s really what I want to do.

"Okay, I’ll help you. Do you have a wealthy boy friend that will set you up in business?

No, I said.

Do you have a rich grandmother that you expect to die any minute and leave you a vast fortune?

No.

She gave a greatly exaggerated sad sigh and said, That is really too bad, but look, these are quite nice. Save them, you never know, someday you may work for a high fashion manufacturer and be able to use them, but in the meantime, go back to your table and design me some good $6.75 dresses.

She taught us to adjust our talent to design whatever we had to, and in whatever price-range that we could get a job. She would constantly remind us,

"What do you want to do spend your life pounding the pavement looking for a job? When you are