Eighty-eight years ago at a high school mixer, while the gym floor was crowded with couples dancing, my 15-year-old father Marvin kept his eye on another 15-year-old, a shy female friend leaning alone against the gymnasium wall. They were neighborhood chums, classmates, and often rode together to William Cullen Bryant High School in Long Island City.
The wallflower was Iris Apfel, who would blossom into a riotous colorful garden the more she aged. The flamboyant fashionista icon who passed away recently at 102 had touched my father’s life many years ago.
Marvin knew Iris, the self-described “world’s oldest living teenager,” when- he liked to joke- “she actually was a teenager” living in Astoria, New York.
While my father and his family lived in a modern brick apartment house in Astoria, Iris Barrel and her family lived on a farm.
That’s right, a farm in Queens.
Several of her obituaries characterized that “she lived out in rural Astoria.” It may not have been Kansas, but in 1921 the year they were both born there was still plenty of open farmland in that part of Queens. So much so that my father always spoke wistfully about having an obstructed view of the skyline of Manhattan from his living room window as there were no other buildings around to block it.
A Shared History
Long Island City, Queens 1899
Iris’s grandparents like my fathers were early Eastern European immigrant settlers of Long Island City, who lived there long before a bridge over the East River was built to get into Manhattan. A boat was the only access to get to that borough.
Years later while my grandmother Rose shopped at Iris’s mom Sadye’s fashion boutique, they realized, that as young women they had both joined the hundreds of pedestrians who walked across the brand new Queensboro Bridge on opening day in March 1909 linking forever Manhattan to Long Island City.
Manhattan would always draw Iris even as a youngster. While girls her age were hanging out at the neighborhood candy store and soda shop after school, she traveled by subway into Manhattan scouring the junk stores of Greenwich Village, and Chinatown. As an 11-year-old she began taking Thursday afternoons off school to travel to The Big Apple poking around antique and second-hand shops picking up vintage bags, silk dresses, and costume jewelry for a song that would form her extraordinary collection.
Be Yourself
Iris Apfel
“Be yourself, don’t be part of the herd!” Iris exclaimed when she turned 100, and it was a philosophy she followed at a young age.
By 15 Iris marched to her own drummer. Like most creative types she neither fit in nor was she part of the popular set.
Though she was lightyears away from her trademark oversized black glasses, she once said she “took a fancy to oddball spectacles” as a child, scouring flea markets for the wildest frames she could find. At a time when the conventional wisdom was “Men don’t make passes at girls who wear glasses,”, my father remembered that she loved to sport these unusual glasses as a great fashion accessory despite not even needing to wear glasses.
Nor did her looks conform to the traditional sense of beauty. She was short, plain, and until her teen years, plump but she had style, and as my father recalled Iris proudly telling him, the owner of a Brooklyn department store picked her out of a crowd to tell her so.
So at this spring dance in 1936 at William Cullen Bryant High School my father spotted her standing on the sidelines with the other shy girls waiting to be picked. “She wasn’t a looker,” Dad remarked in the telling of the story, but she was a pal and felt “she shouldn’t be left out of the fun.” When the band burst into a rousing rendition of Sing, Sing, Sing, and everyone quickly partnered up, Marvin trotted over and asked Iris to dance, which they did for the rest of the night.
A Wallflower Flourishes
But this wallflower didn’t wilt or fade in the years that followed. She actually grew more vivacious and colorful as she aged and in her last chapter, she blossomed into full plumage. She not only grew into her looks but owned them and felt comfortable in her own skin. And she never stopped listening to her inner soul.
For nearly 70 years my father lost touch with her. Like so many childhood friends who drift away, drift apart, her name was never referenced when he talked about the past. He knew nothing of Old World Weavers the luxury fabric company she founded with her husband Carl that furnished textiles to the White House, nor any idea of her designer clients.
Rara Avis: Selections from the Iris Apfel Collection.”
It wasn’t until 2005 when both were in their eighties that he saw Iris’s name for the first time in decades in an article in the N.Y. Times. To his surprise his old pal from the neighborhood was the subject of a fashion exhibition at the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art “Rara Avis: Selections from the Iris Apfel Collection.”.
Suddenly as an octogenarian, she became a full-fledged global celebrity what she called an “accidental icon.” Flamboyant, her outspoken personality was outsized as her oversized glasses.
In contrast, my father’s life was winding down around that time, preoccupied with my mother who was slowly diminishing. But from time to time he would casually mention to us that he grew up with the famous senior fashionista.
He wanted to reach out to her. He began and yet never finished a letter to her, a legal pad filled with pages of stories written in long-hand a testament to his desire. My brother Andy and I encouraged him.
Constantly.
Andy who is the entertainment editor of the Long Island newspaper Newsday had even gotten her contact information including her phone number to get in touch. He never did.
Suddenly, he was the shy one.
“Iris” A film by Albert Maysles
In 2014, the style icon became the subject of legendary documentarian Albert Maysles and his film Iris was shown internationally, including a tiny theatre on Long Island where I grew up.
For over six decades my father had never considered going to the movies alone. Yet now at 93 he drove a short distance to the small local theatre where Iris was playing and purchased a single ticket to sit in the darkened theatre and see his former friend on the screen who was now larger than life.
Geriatric Starlet
That same year Newsday did an interview with Iris at her Park Avenue home. As she was being interviewed, the reporter mentioned that his editor’s father Marvin Edelstein had grown up with her in Astoria. Behind her oversized black glasses, Iris’s eyes lit up in recognition, “Marvin! Oh of course I remember Marvin. We were friends.”
It pays to be nice.