Last week Roehm, you might say, fell in a day. Citing personal reasons, she announced she would close the doors on Carolyne Roehm, Inc., a Kravis-backed design firm specializing in elegant dresses for the ladies-who-lunch crowd. Times are tough for other Wall Street wives, too. As the nation tires of the lifestyles of the rich and famous, and scandal sullies the financial landscape, nouvelle-society spouses are confronting a new and sometimes harsh reality–especially for people unaccustomed to disappointment. “These are women who really want to have it all,” says gossip columnist Liz Smith. “A career. A marriage with a big and demanding tycoon who wants them to look and be perfect. That’s too much hard work in 48 hours a day, let alone 24.”
Having risen on the fortunes of their spouses, some of the trophy wives are finding that what once went up is taking them down with it. Scandal has touched the life of Gutfreund, wife of Salomon Brothers head John Gutfreund, who recently resigned; it’s also hit Lynda Carter, actress and denizen of the society pages whose husband, Robert Altman, has been caught up in the BCCI inquiry. Others have found that their money can’t buy them love: Gayfryd Steinberg owed much of her glittering reputation to her involvement with PEN, the literary organization. But last year, after author Ken Auletta criticized the practice of “wealthy people gaining respectability on the backs of writers,” she resigned her post. In the changed climate, many are living more quietly-though perhaps no less well. As Robin Leach, their most adoring TV chronicler, puts it: “Instead of 50 cans of caviar a year, they’ll simply cut back to 10.”
How have they coped with their relative adversity? Some, like the now single Ivana Trump, have decided to jump headlong into careers of their own. By all accounts, she has put all the executive ability she used to devote to The Donald’s companies into laying the groundwork for a perfume and, possibly, a fashion business. She recently finished her first novel, to be published by Pocket Books; a second title is due at the publisher’s in December. Other wives have made a public showing of standing by their men. Lynda Carter appeared arm in arm with hubby Altman, former First American Bankshares president, during hearings last week into the bank’s role in the BCCI scandal. (The couple obligingly posed for photographers on the way out.)
The fall of the house of Roehm may be the true coda to the era. She once adorned the cover of Fortune magazine, and New York society matrons are still buzzing about a lavish party she and Henry threw at the Metropolitan Museum in 1988. Born Carolyne Jane Smith, (Janey to her family) in Kirksville, Mo., the designer sold more than expensive dresses. What the Roehm customer bought, along with a stylish gown, was a piece of the lifestyle she had built. Though not as original a designer as Bill Blass, or as big a name as Oscar de la Renta, with whom she apprenticed, she produced elegant, flattering clothing with an unmistakable style. And in case anyone missed the message–“These are clothes for women like me”–she sometimes modeled her own designs in her ads.
But nowadays the high-end dress business isn’t what it used to be; with the heyday of junk bonds and leveraged buyouts past, the market for frou-frou frocks has gone south. Even so, the demise of her business surprised the fashion community: only two months before, Roehm had hired former Chanel executive Kitty D’Alessio to help turn around the enterprise. (The company, which was heavily bankrolled by Kravis, had yet to show a profit.) The business didn’t have the licensing agreements or secondary lines from which many design companies make big profits. But Roehm says it was the tragic death of her stepson-not finances–that caused her to reassess her priorities and close the company (box). At some level, she seems to have braced for the fall. “I felt the era ended the day that Malcolm Forbes died,” she says. “I knew then that the ’80s were over.”
With their money diminished, their forum disappearing and their cachet evaporating, how will the other Wall Street couples cope in the ’90s? They’ll be “taking a low profile,” says Patrick McCarthy, editor of W magazine. “It’s not the time to be running around spending a lot of money and having a ’let-them-eat-cake’ attitude.” But any show of temperance may simply be relative. In the end, it could boil down to the way the wealthy view their commitments. And that, says one wealthy society matron, is different from the rest of us. “Their relationships were never supposed to be for better or worse,” she says. “They were supposed to be for better and better.”
In her Seventh Avenue office last week, Carolyne Roehm met with NEWSWEEK’S Nina Darnton for one of the few interviews she’s given since she announced that she would close her six-year-old fashion business:
Dressed in an ecru-and black wool suit, Roehm looked shaken and vulnerable. Her dark blue eyes were swollen from weeping, and she was even thinner than usual. She responded sharply to rumors that her husband, Henry Kravis, forced her to close the business. “I resent the implication that Henry is tired of pumping money into my company,” she said. “People can believe what they want, but it’s a bunch of b.s.” At one point she even offered to call him for a direct denial. “Maybe I should get him on the phone to tell you that himself,” she said–but then added, “Unfortunately, he’s in Biarritz.”
Roehm said that her recent hiring of former Chanel president Kitty D’Alessio and much-publicized expansion plans proved that Kravis supported her until the end. She insisted it was a family tragedy–the death in July of Kravis’s 19-year-old son–that made her question her way of life. “After Harrison’s death,” she said in a near whisper, “something just snapped in me. I looked at my husband and I saw the pain and sadness in him and I thought, ‘What is life all about?’ I want to spend more time with him and my two stepchildren.”
Is Roehm finished with business? Hardly, she says. “My astrologer says the ’90s are going to be my most creative period.” Though her firm will be shuttered, “I’ll keep a small office and staff to fulfill my obligations to my private customers, and who knows what that will evolve into … We may fool you all.”
