Fashioned: The Secret Life Of A Mom

By Joanne King

Written at the request of her children, Fashioned: The Secret Life of a Mom chronicles Joanne King's improbable journey from her childhood in the Bronx to the international world of fashion and music. A chance encounter at Studio 54 launched her on a modeling career in Paris, Milan, and New York, working with an iconic fashion editor, an Academy Award-winning actor, and a world renowned artist. With fortitude and grit, she managed harrowing experiences in her youth and, as a model living in Paris, survived the manipulative, unsavory, and dangerous denizens of that seemingly glamorous world. Serendipity led her to record with an international disco group, take an evening stroll with a music legend, and revisit a past life that foretold her present.
After overcoming personal losses and a near-death experience, Joanne emerged from self-exploration with a startling realization that would alter her life's trajectory.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: May 10, 2020
• ISBN: 9781098306922

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Copyright © 2020 by Joanne King

All rights reserved.

This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Printed in the United States of America

First Printing, 2020

Cover design by Joanne King and Max Harlynking

Cover photo by Marc Ledzian

Author photo by Kelly Taub

ISBN 978-1-09830-691-5 (print)

ISBN 978-1-09830-692-2 (eBook)

Dedicated to Max and Joy

Mama

Contents

Author’s Notes

Introduction

The Motherhood Question

My Fashion Education

Now What

A Life Changing Night

Mom and Dad

College

Modeling

Many Lives

Paris

Survival Training

Pimps

Salvador Dalí

Home

Anna Wintour

American Vogue

Success

New York Experience

Change

First Marriage

On Stage

CEO

Pain

New Perspectives

Love Arrives

Acknowledgements

About The Author

Author’s Notes

To write this book I relied on my personal diary, letters from family and friends, my collection of photographs and articles, consultations with some people who appear in the book, researched facts, and my memory of the events at the time. In an effort to protect the privacy of individuals mentioned, I have changed the names of most but not all included in this book.

It is only with the heart that one can see rightly;

what is essential is invisible to the eye.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Introduction

As I headed into the kitchen one Saturday morning in August 2013, I knew something was up. Typically, when I entered my family’s weekend morning tableau, my children, Max and Joy, would be at the dining table engaged in conversation, or Joy might be sitting at the table engrossed in a book while their dad and Max chatted. With Max leaving soon for college a thousand miles away and Joy about to start her junior year of high school, I felt increasingly invisible to them, a peripheral character in this warm, familiar domestic scene. THIS morning, however, Max and Joy greeted me sitting at the dining table, sharing a chair, giggling and eyeing me with ‘we’re up to something’ smiles. As soon as I sat down at the table Joy said, very directly, Mom, Max and I want to talk to you.

Based on their lighthearted demeanor, I figured they wanted me to buy them something or take them somewhere. I wasn’t far off base. They did want me to take them somewhere: to my past, before I was their mother. They wanted me to write a book about my life before they were born. As they presented it, it would give me something to do ‘next.’

What they really wanted were the details of the far-flung experiences I’d had before they were born, my pre-Mom careers as a photo stylist, model, pop singer, fashion designer, and co-owner of an evening wear company. My mention to my children of these anecdotes over the years elicited a WAIT, WHAT??? response: the random encounter that led to a modeling career in Europe and New York, working with Anna Wintour early in her career, an unexpected photo shoot with a celebrated actor, a stroll with Marvin Gaye in Manhattan, posing for Salvador Dalí, a near-death experience, our past lives together in France during World War II.

Flattered, touched, and grateful that my children wanted to know my stories, I told them I’d give it some thought but they shouldn’t count on it.

Others had asked me over the years if I’d ever thought of writing a memoir. Five years prior while on a family trip, I became friendly with another woman on the tour, Gail, with whom I’d casually chat when we were on the bus together. Her mother, who was also on the trip, had written a memoir about surviving the Holocaust. When I mentioned some of my experiences as a model, singer, an eveningwear company co-founder, Gail was stunned. She was adamant that I write a memoir. To my protestation that I’d never written a book, Gail insisted that if her mother could write a book, so could I. Her encouragement became a mantra for the duration of our travels. After the trip ended, we stayed in touch; each time we spoke, she asked me if I’d started my book yet. Each time, my answer was ‘no.’ My lifelong need to ‘create’ was abundantly satisfied at that time with raising my children, caring for my family, and running the interior design business I’d started five years earlier. Until, I found myself staring into a void.

The disappearance of interior design clients when the housing market collapsed, coupled with my children being back in school for the year, presented me with too much time on my hands and too little purpose with which to fill it. I needed to do something, create something. One day while sitting at my computer, staring at the oak trees swaying in the breeze outside of my window, I began to wonder…

What if the interest others had expressed in my life was presented to me for a reason? To me my life was normal, just a constant navigation of emotional and physical survival tactics. Yet, mindful of the times people I encountered through the years like Gail had expressed curiosity about my life experiences, I decided to give ‘writing it down’ a shot, and began my first attempt. After a few months of struggling to ‘write it down’, I realized I wasn’t ready for the difficult and emotional work—and, without a strong purpose I didn’t have the commitment it demanded. I abandoned the effort. Five years later when the request came from the two people I love more than anyone I have ever loved in my entire life, and for whom I would do ANYTHING, I seriously reconsidered writing my story.

My children may have asked me to write my stories to merely satisfy their curiosity about what sounded like a glamorous and exciting life before I became their mother. Knowing my story, however, I knew that if I honored their request, the finished work would be a far more complex story about their mother than their young minds could have ever contemplated. I wondered if knowing all of the challenges I had in my life could help inform them in some way as they went forward in their own lives. Perhaps, too, reading about my childhood would help Max and Joy appreciate theirs, or understand why I behaved as I did as their mother. While I couldn’t foresee what, if any, affect this book would have on them, I knew that if I wrote my memoir it would be a true labor of love, and tangible evidence of my love for them. I decided to give it another try. I’d write when I had time and if I lost interest I would quit.

I began writing whenever I had spare time. Several times when I thought I’d abandon the effort, the pull of finding the exact words to honestly express myself, the desire to do this for my children, and the satisfying connection I felt between writing my story and my desire for self expression kept drawing me back to writing. I took a few months or weeks off when I needed to step away from the painful memories that brought me back to places I had no desire to revisit.

In these pages, it’s my intent to fulfill my promise to my children to candidly share with them the facts of my life before I became their mother. I would trade all of those days for their birth days: They were the two best days of my life.

Life is a complex series of events that lead to your truth.

The Motherhood Question

Lying oh-so-comfortably in bed, my full-term belly carefully positioned atop my New Best Friend--a body pillow--I gazed out the bedroom window of my Bronx apartment. Based on my due date, I had just two days to go until my son and I would meet face to face. Always a proud and committed feminist who’d vowed to never stay home, to never marry or have children, I’d begrudgingly stopped working due to pregnancy-induced arthritis and my enormously protruding belly. I could no longer safely drive to my Garment District office. Arriving at this moment, and this condition, all began with an out-of-the-blue question posed by a college friend.

Unexpectedly Evelyn invited me to lunch one day. No sooner had I placed my order for a turkey on rye and a bowl of matzo ball soup than she asked, apropos of nothing, if I thought I might want biological children. We hadn’t been in touch for a while, and my disposition toward having children was nothing we had ever discussed before.

My feminist side said ‘no way’, that I needed to stay on my trajectory to be a successful businesswoman; I hadn’t the time or the desire to have children. My entire life had been devoted solely to my own wants and needs and I was satisfied with it. As a practical consideration, what ability or qualifications did I have to care for another person who’d depend upon me for EVERYTHING? Babysitting twice for my next-door neighbors toddler and infant when I was 12 years old hardly suggested to me that I was prepared to be a mother. And yet……………

Wanting to experience all of life’s wonders, I’d seized every opportunity that excited me and about which I felt passionate. The quote I’d chosen for my high school yearbook, You only live once, were the words by which I’d lived. I had traveled to five continents, appeared on the covers and in the pages of fashion magazines, spent time with world renowned musicians and artists, co-founded a company in New York City, signed a recording contract with a major record label, performed on stage, and had a life-altering near-death experience. What I hadn’t done was be a mom. As Evelyn pointed out, my fourth decade was approaching and the window on my childbearing years was closing. Did I want to be a mother? If I was considering motherhood, I had no time to waste.

As I walked back to my office after lunch, my mind became consumed by the question. Did I want to add motherhood to my already long list of life experiences? Not knowing precisely what that would entail made it a difficult question for me to answer. I did know that unlike all of the other experiences, being a mother would dramatically, and in a heartbeat, alter my focus from MY wants, MY needs and MY desires, to that of someone else’s. And not just someone else, but an infant! One who would be dependent on me and to whom I would be a role model, teacher, and advisor. Unlike my travels, careers and relationships that lasted weeks, months or years, if all went well, this commitment would be for life. My choices and behaviors would have a direct impact on someone else beside myself. This decision came with no do-overs, options to reselect, change my mind, or give it another try if I screwed up. This was a one shot deal I would have to nail as best as I could every moment. Motherhood was the mother of all life decisions.

I thought of my own family of origin’s dynamics—emotional and physical volatility that existed side-by-side with love. I couldn’t imagine life without my family; they were my tribe, what kept me grounded. While I had friends whom I considered to be my true family in many ways; they inspired me and treated me with respect, and gave me the unconditional love for which I yearned. The support of friends was no substitute for the eternity of being a member of my genetic family.

And then there was The Club: that secret society of women, infinite and timeless, upon whom membership was conferred solely because they were mothers. In magazines and newspapers I’d read stories of how they could miraculously lift a car or willingly jump in front of one to save their child. Mothers were the keepers and providers of the deepest and most impenetrable love that life had to offer. How could I go through life without experiencing that? By the time I pushed the elevator button in the lobby of the skyscraper that housed my business, I had my answer.

My Fashion Education

In June of 1977, on the day of my college graduation, while my classmates were in the school auditorium receiving their diplomas, I was across the street in my dorm room, packing up to move back into my parents’ Bronx apartment, back to my childhood room. Skipping the graduation ceremony was my choice. Traditional forms of recognition meant nothing to me. At 16, when graduating from John F. Kennedy High School in the Bronx a semester early to start college, I didn’t want to attend the graduation, but as a practical matter, I had no choice.

JFK, a new high school, offered an experimental program allowing juniors and seniors to declare a ‘major’. My major was art. One day, with graduation approaching, the art department head summoned me to her office to inform me that, out of my class of 800 students, I was the salutatorian. How, I wondered, was this possible?

I’d always stayed under the radar in school, quietly doing what was required academically. Hardly the stuff of which salutatorians are made, I saw myself as an intellectual imposter who never cracked open a textbook. I faked it really well by listening in class so I could ace my tests and then drop the information from my brain. I had zero emotional connection to the school, only enjoyed my art classes and looked forward to the day I could get out of there. My attitude, however, belied my actual academic performance.

After being presented with a written record of my grades—having never gotten a math problem wrong, I had 100+ in every math class I’d taken in high school— I was, indeed, salutatorian of the 1975 graduating class of JFKHS in the Bronx. It meant I’d have to write and deliver a speech at the commencement ceremony. My shocked disbelief gave way to annoyance.

To make matters worse, the sense of pride my parents would have in seeing me honored as salutatorian and giving a speech was a gift I didn’t think they deserved. While I’m not proud of wanting to deny my parents pleasure, this decision made me feel powerful in a world and at a time when I felt completely powerless.

Education was believed to be the golden ticket in my family especially for my father who enforced his belief by demanding that I read every day for an hour. These forced sessions always began with my resistance, which then lead to loud and aggressive arguments about how I needed to be more like my sister who loved to read, and instructions that I not leave my room until I was finished. Other than the Nancy Drew mysteries I devoured to help me escape to a world where a young girl always won the day because she was strong, capable, and clever, these reading sessions under duress had now transformed whatever enjoyment I felt previously from reading into loathing.

When my bedroom door closed (or slammed) I’d go to my secret, imaginary fashion business located in the bottom drawer of my dresser. My heart pounding, I’d excitedly pull on the painted wood knobs to open the drawer, push aside my sweaters, and retrieve the hidden Spiegel catalog and a stack of discarded index cards with the names of my mom’s clients from her side business selling life insurance who are now—voila—my clients. In my virtual store of the catalog, I helped my clients shop and recorded their purchases on their index cards.

In my make-believe world, all my clients purchased outfits worn by one particular model that had beautiful long black, straight, silky hair. It was the polar opposite of my wild, out-of-control frizz that used to be blonde but, sadly, was now turning auburn. (Squeezing lemons into my darkening hair and standing out in the sun didn’t return it to blonde.) This model had the perfect, all-American, ‘look’ the opposite of mine, especially her button nose, which was in stark contrast to my large Jewish hooked nose that I attempted to hide by covering it with giant eyeglasses I began needing in third grade. This model’s physical beauty made everything she wore a bestseller.

Those secret hours spent in quiet rebellion were empowering even though they had no bearing on my plight, which was for me to be able to choose what I wanted rather than what my parents demanded. The never-ending reading sessions, and my father’s domineering behavior, made me detest him. Being at my graduation would make him feel good and proud, which was the last thing I wanted him to experience.

My mother was an enigma to me. She told me repeatedly I would never be happy. She showed me no affection, even swatting my hand away if I ran up and tried to hold hers. She frequently told me that she did not want a second child, (which I was), that she felt pressure to have a second child because that’s what married women were supposed to do, and that she only had me for my father. Watching me graduate as salutatorian would make her feel proud— a gift I didn’t want her to have. But I was 16: What could I really do back then? I wrote and gave the speech, and was thrilled to just get out.

This time I was not going to cave. Graduating from college was getting me closer to the family exit door. I felt stronger about making my own choices. And so I was not going to graduation. I was also convinced that my degree in fashion design from The Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City was all I needed to launch my career and make my dreams of becoming a fashion designer a reality.

So on the day my fellow classmates were in the auditorium receiving their diplomas, I was across the street in my dorm room, packing up to move back into my parents’ apartment in the Bronx. The cartons from Pathmark supermarket were filled with my clothes, sketchbooks, patterns, rulers, markers and paints and, most importantly, the ticket to my future, my portfolio.

Gazing around the dorm room that was now transformed back into the lifeless space I moved into less than a year prior filled me with melancholy. In the fall of 1976 when I arrived on campus, I met people for the first time who may not have laid their outfit out on their bed daily to study its nuances and make sure it was pleasing to the eye the way I did. It was, however, evident by the way they presented themselves that we shared a common love of fashion as an art form. From the boys wearing skirts over pants to long suede fringes hanging off the sleeves of girls’ jackets, the individualism and originality on campus welcomed me into a world I understood. FIT was the first place I ever felt as if I fit in: This was where I’d belonged, this was my tribe. They would be missed.

I also thought about the teachers I despised but would miss, (a little bit, anyway), who’d forced me out of my comfort zone, and ended up cradling me in the lap of their knowledge. Mrs. Green who, with her high-waisted belly and dresses that covered it, taught me to sew and made me abandon an eyelet lace pantsuit design in order to raise my grade. Her rejection left me feeling incapable - until I changed the fabric to crepe de chine and left her class with the knowledge that taste was subjective and not universal. Then there was Mr. Kamakatcha, a small, impatient Japanese master pattern maker whom I spent a lot of time cursing to my friends. He taught me to let go of attachment after refusing to allow me to make a leg-of-mutton jacket sleeve in velvet.

As I continued filling the boxes with leftover spools of thread, bobbins, art history and pattern-making books, I reminisced about the camaraderie of my classmates and all I learned from them. Their generous spirits and diverse perspectives exposed me to a world of design outside of my New York City fishbowl. Carlos’ brightly colored, feminine, lightweight dresses that accentuated women’s curves showed me the style preferences and climate requirements of women from his home of Puerto Rico. French Canadian Margot’s quirky, primary color-blocked, boxy garments introduced me to the concept of dressing purely for fun. Karen’s understated, easy-to-wear, elegant yet comfortable, neutral and pastel-colored soft separates opened my eyes to the fashion sensibilities of women in her native Midwestern U.S. The time I spent with my classmates included fun but was also hard work. Most importantly, it increased my design repertoire: When I arrived at FIT that previous fall I was exclusively sewing mohair ankle length coats for myself, my mom, and my sister. Now, I designed a multitude of clothing, from knitwear for colder climates to dresses as well as sportswear in lightweight fabrics for women in southern climates.

And then there was Fabian, the most talented designer in my class. His illustrations of sinewy girls wearing magnificent dresses and gowns were way beyond the ability and imagination of myself or anyone else in our class. His ability to turn stiff muslin into a beautiful form fitting, curvaceous dress was masterful. Sitting at a cumbersome wood cutting table across the room from mine in homeroom class, I frequently kept a curious eye on him while in the midst of working on a pattern making or draping assignment. His talent intrigued me and, although I imagined he was gay due to the fact that most of the men at FIT were, I thought his jet-black tousled hair, deep brown eyes, high cheekbones and dancer’s body were beautiful to look at.

One day when I was leaving class, to my delight he stopped me and asked if I would model for his fashion photographs. Excited to get to know him I happily agreed. In time our friendship grew out of his adoration for taking photos of me, and my adoration for being his muse. I would put on my favorite Diane Von Furstenberg (DVF) wrap dress or other clothes that I bought at Loehmann’s, a