Betty Halbreich confirms she is collaborating with “Girls” creator and star Lena Dunham on another HBO project. Then she describes growing up during the Great Depression as an only, often lonely, but always exquisitely dressed child in an affluent Jewish community on the South Side of Chicago.
In the next breath she is reminiscing about friend Joan Rivers, one of her many clients at Bergdorf Goodman in New York, where Halbreich has spent the better part of 40 years as the legendary personal shopper who once scolded a U.S. president (Gerald Ford) for slinging his wife’s garment bag over his arm.
Living past 80 raises the probability of the improbable. But Halbreich has experienced the unexpected in spectacular fashion almost from birth. In elementary school she became dimly aware that the man she called daddy, the president of Chicago department store Mandel Bros., was not her biological father. She nonetheless adored her parents, though often at a distance — they once left her with their alcoholic cook while they spent Christmas in Florida.
“It was a different time,” Halbreich says after a packed luncheon, where she spoke about her new book, “I’ll Drink to That: A Life in Style, With a Twist.”
The memoir layers personal drama onto a storied career, covered in her first book (“Secrets of a Fashion Therapist” in 1997). Halbreich bares her suicide attempt and stint in a mental institution after the collapse of her two-decade marriage to the Manhattan magnate she married at age 20.
She credits a friend’s insistence that she come to work at Bergdorf Goodman for saving her life. Or, rather, giving her a new one.
“I’ve had a lot of crises, not just one,” Halbreich says. “But, you know, we’re born to endure a great deal.”
This trip came on the heels of Halbreich’s book party in New York on Sept. 4, the day Rivers died. Rivers and designer Michael Kors were to be the party’s hosts. The show went on amid the mourning.
“Most times I say death was meant to be, but this was not right,” Halbreich says. “She got better with age.”
But Halbreich, 86, has learned not to dwell on loss.
“If I did at my age, I’d be very maudlin,” she says, brightening:
“Do you know that there were two men here today, one who I was in 2nd grade with, the other who said he dated me, though I don’t remember, and a third who went to Sunday school with me? That’s pretty good.”
Halbreich’s memoir recalls the acidic wit of Rivers and drops the bombshells of a “Sex and the City” episode (whose cast Halbreich helped to clothe on the studio side of her Bergdorf services).
It also illuminates Halbreich’s sense of style. Hers has always turned heads, from the World War II era when she wore her cardigans backward to her first day of work at Bergdorf Goodman in 1976, where she roiled the black-clad vendeuses by turning up in a bottle green jersey Cacharel suit.
To escape the sales floor (specifically, the cash register), Halbreich proposed the personal shopping department to her boss. It quickly evolved into a salon where her clients made excuses to stop, shop and smoke.
Many of Halbreich’s closest friends are the children of her first clients.
“This one couple, her daughter was my first bride,” Halbreich says. “Thirty-odd years later, her mother is gone, she has three grown children, and she takes care of me — she thinks.”
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