[00:15] Jessica: You are listening to Desperately Seeking the 80s: New York edition with Jessica and Meg. I'm Jessica, and I talk about pop culture.

[00:23] Meg: And I am Meg, and I do ‘ripped from the headlines.’

[00:26] Jessica: And this podcast is all about the weird, wonderful, disgusting and abhorrent stuff that happened in New York City in the 80s. Meg and I were there for all of it. We've been friends since 1982, and we still live here. So Meg, let’s go.

[00:44] Meg: Okay Jesscia, I have an engagement question for you.

[00:48] Jessica: Oh, I love these. Okay. And I think I've gotten all of them wrong so far. So this is fantastic.

[00:54] Meg: Well, this is more sort of an opinion question.

[00:57] Jessica: Oh, I'll still get it wrong.

[01:04] Meg: What is your favorite Robert Durst fun fact?

[01:10] Jessica: Well, there are many to choose from. You know what it is? I think my favorite weird fact about Robert Durst is that even though he made all of this effort to dress up like a woman and to move and live life as a woman, even though it was purely a disguise, he didn't really commit to the disguise. He was just sort of like, phoning it in with, like a shitty dime store wig and some weird dresses and maybe a touch of lipstick for going out.

[01:45] Meg: It was almost like he was trying to get in trouble most of his life.

[01:48] Jessica: He wanted to be caught. And his whole persona that he created, that female persona, I mean, he might as well have just been like, hi, I'm Roberta Durst. How are you? So bad. That's my favorite.

[02:08] Meg: Okay, well, that's awesome. And we will touch on that in this story because I'm going to tell you about the disappearance of Kathleen McCormick Durst.

[02:17] Jessica: OOH.

[02:18] Meg: And as much as we can go down the Robert Durst rabbit hole and as you know, we were just talking about, he's super fascinating. I kind of would rather focus on Kathie. I highly, highly recommend watching ‘The Jinx’ to anyone who wants to hear his side of the story and also just to see him in action because he's a weirdo.

[02:40] Jessica: Well, he was a weird. He's a was.

[02:42] Meg: I know he is a was. He's a was. But yeah, his whole sort of gruff affectless tone. I can still hear it because I've watched so many, I watched ‘The Jinx’ a couple of times and then I watched some interviews with him. But we are going to talk about Kathie today.

[02:58] Jessica: Excellent. She needs to have her say.

[03:00] Meg: Yeah, she doesn't even have her own Wikipedia page.

[03:03] Jessica: What?

[03:04] Meg: Yeah.

[03:04] Jessica: But I think it says a lot about the silencing of women, one of our favorite topics and definitely still in full force during our formative years in the 80s. Right?

[03:17] Meg: Indeed. And a lot of that is part of this story about poor Cathy's story.

[03:25] Jessica: All right, so let's give her a voice.

[03:27] Meg: All right. My sources are the HBO documentary The Jinx directed by Andrew Jurecki. Do you know that he's a movie phone voice.

[03:36] Jessica: Stop it. Yeah. “Welcome to Movie phone.”

[03:39] Meg: That's Andrew Jurecki. He's the director of ‘The Jinx.’

[03:41] Jessica: I am stunned.

[03:44] Meg: That is a fun fact.

[03:45] Jessica: That is a great fact.

[03:46] Meg: Okay. The Lifetime movie The Lost Wife of Robert Durst, starring Katharine McPhee of American Idol fame. Currently married to David Foster. The many New York Times articles by Charles Bagley, who started covering the Durst family in the real estate section 20 years ago, but for obvious reasons has transitioned to covering crime and Jury Duty, a fantastic podcast which covers the trial of Robert Durst very just the facts kind of podcast. All right, you ready?

[04:18] Jessica: I am so ready.

[04:19] Meg: On February 4, 1982, Bob Durst walked into the 20th Precinct, which serves the Upper West Side, Lincoln Center, Museum of Natural History, Tony neighborhood, with his Alaskan Malamute Igor to report that he hadn't seen or heard from his 29 year old wife Kathie, in four days. Detectives Struck took his statement. Bobby said that he and Kathie were staying at their South Salem, New York cottage, and on the night of January 31st, Kathie had returned to the cottage from her friend Gilberte's home in the early evening and that she was drunk. He said the two of them had dinner. Kathie drank a full bottle of wine and that he drove her to the Metro North train stop because she had to get back to the city. She had a morning class at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, where she was in medical school and due to graduate in five months. He then said he walked Igor and called Kathie from a payphone. She had arrived, this again according to Bobby Durst, she had arrived at their Upper West Side penthouse at 37 Riverside Drive, 76th street. He had then had a drink with his neighbors, the Myers, and that was the last he had heard from her. Before he left the precinct, he tossed on Detective Struck's desk a copy of a 1980 New York magazine with the headline The Men Who Own New York, and pointed out the picture of his father, Seymour Durst, on the cover. The Durst family owned many New York City skyscrapers and was worth billions. Detective Struck followed up on a couple of things. He spoke to the elevator man at 37 Riverside Drive, and the elevator man said that he saw Kathie the night of the 31st, so that placed her in the city. The dean of the medical school got a call the morning of the first from a woman identifying herself as Kathleen Durst, who said she was ill and wouldn't be at school that day. And some friends of the Dursts told the detective, Kathie was miserable in her marriage and was using a lot of cocaine. Incidentally, over the years, Bob has made a big deal about the fact that Kathie used cocaine and drank a lot, but hasn't suggested how that has anything to do with her disappearance. Struck also discovered some discrepancies in Bobby's story. Remember Kathie's friend Gilberte? Gilberte knew when Kathie left her house, and the train to the city was a half hour after that. So there was no way that Kathie could have returned home, had dinner, guzzled a bottle of wine and still made it to the train. Also, the Myers, the neighbors that he said he had a drink with, said Bobby didn't come by for a drink that night. I mean, just flat out lied. And two days after her disappearance, Durst made a series of collect calls from the New Jersey pine barrens, a notorious Mafia burial ground.

[07:22] Jessica: Anyone who's watched ‘The Sopranos’ know the minute you hear pine barrens, you know, it's not good.

[07:28] Meg: No. In the meantime, Kathie's friends and family are going ballistic. She's from a super close knit, working class Long Island family, and when she moved to the city to be a dental hygienist, she lived in a building owned by the Durst family on East 32nd street. She met Bobby in the building, and after two dates, Bob asked Kathie to move into his Vermont house, where he ran a health food store called All Good Things. They got married and eventually moved back to the city. Gradually, their marriage deteriorated, in front of everyone's eyes. Her brother Jim recounts this story, “We're all out at Hyde Park at Mom's house for Christmas dinner. It was evening, and we were all sitting around enjoying a few drinks. After the meal, Kathie was sitting at one end of the couch near the fireplace and I was at the other end. Bobby was restless. He kept saying to Kathie that they should get going, but Kathie didn't move. She was enjoying being with all her family and was in no hurry to leave. Bobby went outside to warm up the car, but knowing him, no doubt he smoked a joint, too. When he came back in, he was carrying her coat, which had been thrown on the stairs like the others, and barked at her. ‘Let's go.’ Kathie said, ‘oh, come on, Bobby. Can we stay a little longer?’ He just lost it. He lunged at her, pulled her up off the couch by her hair, dragged her across the room, and they were gone.” Now, this is my voice again, Meg. I don't do impression. Okay. Her friends tell all kinds of stories about physical abuse and control. She had to check in with Bobby, constantly. He wouldn't allow her to have access to any cash or credit cards, and made her have an abortion. When she asked for a divorce with a requested $250,000 settlement, he refused to give her the money, canceled her credit card, stopped paying her medical school tuition, and took her name off of their joint bank account. Also deeply disturbing. Remember Bob's Alaskan Malamute Igor?

[09:33] Jessica: I don't like it when bad things happen to dogs. This is not going to be good.

[09:38] Meg: No. Douglas Durst, Bob's estranged brother, told the Times, and this is Douglas Durst's voice. “Bob had a series of Alaskan malamutes, which is like a husky. He had seven of them, and they all died mysteriously of different things within six months of his owning them. All of them named Igor. We don't know how they died and what happened to their bodies. In retrospect, I now believe he was practicing killing and disposing his wife with these dogs.” Back to 1982, Kathie has been missing for a couple of weeks, and detective Struck appeared to be dragging his feet. So Kathie’s friends descended on the 20th precinct and regaled detective Struck with accounts of Bob's violence towards Kathie.

[10:27] Jessica: So these are her girlfriends?

[10:28] Meg: Yes.

[10:29] Jessica: Love it.

[10:20] Meg: Kathie had even started saying, most notably to Gilberte on the night of her disappearance, that if anything ever happened to her, Bob did it. Gilberte feels just horrible about that now, by the way. She says she just didn't realize how much danger Kathie was in. And a quick note on domestic violence. The term was first used in 1973, and the Violence Against Women Act wasn't passed until 1994.

[10:58] Jessica: What?

[11:00] Meg: Yup. As a society, we are still learning how insidious and dangerous domestic violence is and how it escalates. Needless to say, many of Kathie and Bob's friends and family were on the early part of that learning curve in 1982. Incidentally, the Violence Against Women Act was allowed to expire in 2019 because, you know, it's not a problem anymore. So Detective Struck was mostly just irritated with Kathie's friends and their incessant calls and interference. My favorite part of the story is.

[11:35] Jessica: How interfering in his not solving the case.

[11:38] Meg: Exactly.

[11:38] Jessica: Okay, great. Good job.

[11:41] Meg: So these three women, Ellen Strauss, Gilberte Nagamy, and Eleanor Schwank, went on full Nancy Drew to find their missing friend. They broke into Durst's home trying to find evidence. They sifted through and photographed Bob's garage, where they found he was throwing out all of her possessions, including her makeup and school books and sewing machine. There was a handwritten note saying, “town dump, bridge, dig, boat, shovel.”

[12:20] Jessica: You've got to be kidding me. And did these women take that note to the moronic, Detective Struck?

[12:30] Meg: Yes! They did.

[12:31] Jessica: “This shows nothing.”

[12:32] Meg: Gilberte, this is good. Gilberte interviewed passengers on the 9:17 train to New York to see if anyone had seen Kathie on the train, because it's the same people who are committing. Their conclusion, Kathie never got on that train. And clearly Bobby knew she wasn't coming home. But Detective Struck said that without a body, without a crime scene, there was nothing he could do. In spite of all the circumstantial evidence against Bob. What on earth are you supposed to have? And the case went cold. Flash forward 17 years. New York State Police detective Joe Becerra got a tip through the Durst former housekeeper and decided to reopen the case. Joe Becerra is a little bit more on it than our friend Struck. And this basically, when he reopened the case, a cavalcade of events happened, which I will just summarize.

[13:32] Jessica: Do we know quickly what the tip was from the housekeeper?

[13:36] Meg: Yeah, she said that she had had to clean up and throw out things that were really suspicious. I can't remember exactly what it was, but at the time she was like, I think I'm destroying evidence of a murder, but she didn't do anything about it.

[13:53] Jessica: And what motivated her 17 years later?

[13:56] Meg: Oh, gosh. It's a very complicated story that I'm going to tell wrong, but something about, like, her husband's cousin was in jail and he told authorities that she had information because he was trying to get a lighter sentence or get a better cell or whatever, get moved. He was basically just trying to.

[14:18] Jessica: Oh so he threw her under the bus.

[14:18] Meg: Yeah, he threw her under the bus. But then when they called her in, she was like, it's true.

[14:24] Jessica: Damn.

[14:25] Meg: All right, so now I'm just going to summarize what happens as a result of this reopening of the investigation, because clearly Detective Becerra knows what he's doing. So this is again a summarization of what happened right after he reopened the case. Remember that New York City elevator man who said that he'd seen her?

[14:48] Jessica: Oh, yes.

[14:49] Meg: He recants. He said he didn't see her. Okay. It's just like everything sort of a house of cards. Right. Because that was the only thing that actually placed her in the city. Bob Durst freaks out that his best friend from 20 years ago, Susan Berman, will tell people that she, in fact, was the person who called the dean of the medical school and pretended she was Kathie. So he goes to L.A.

[15:21] Jessica: What could have motivated her to do such a thing?

[15:23] Meg: Well, that's another whole story. She was really good. She was devoted to him.

[15:28] Jessica: No, no, no, if she was so devoted to him, what could have made her blab about that?

[15:33] Meg: He’s paranoid. He's paranoid. He thinks she's going to.

[15:38] Jessica: Oh, so she had not actually said anything, so he's worried.

[15:43] Meg: He just gets paranoid because the case has been reopened. And he's like, well, she's really the only person who's going to who can, like, has evidence that I was lying then. So he gets nervous and he goes out to L.A. And he shoots her in the back of the head. Then he goes on the Lamb. He disguises himself, as you were talking about earlier, this is your favorite Bobby Durst. It is, in fact, disguising himself as a, quote, “ugly woman.” That's how people, like, ‘there's this ugly woman who lives next door to me’ and moves into a ramshackle apartment in Galveston, Texas, when the dismembered body parts of his neighbor Morris Black wash up on shore. Durst is easily identified and arrested. I mean, he left tons of evidence in the garbage bag that he had wrapped the body parts in. I mean, not a mastermind. He is later acquitted by a Texas jury after his fancy, expensive lawyers argue self defense. He agrees to be interviewed for the HBO documentary ‘The Jinx’, during which he confesses killed them all, of course, in a hot mic moment, which leads to his trial in the murder of Susan Berman, which was postponed due to COVID and resumed earlier in 2020. And he was finally found guilty September 17th and sentenced to life without parole.

[17:20] Jessica: And that was only for Susan, not for Kathie.

[17:22] Meg: Not for Kathie. Then on October 22nd, as a result of the evidence revealed in the Susan Berman trial, 39 years after Kathie's disappearance, Robert Durst is finally charged in Kathie's death. But on January 10th of this year, Robert Durst died. So not only was he never put on trial for Kathie's murder, but listen to this, his conviction in Susan Berman's death may be vacated because he died before his appeal could be heard.

[18:03] Jessica: Speechless.

[18:04] Meg: Yeah. Didn't that nuts. Like why?

[18:11] Jessica: Money.

[18:11] Meg: Money doesn't hurt. And just to close out a little bit about Kathie, this is again from her brother Jim, “I want to honor all that she stood for and aspired to. She wanted to be a doctor after, you know, achieving what she did in nursing school. She was only three months away and she would have been caring for mothers to be and babies born. She was gifted and a caring spirit. Very gifted.” Met the wrong guy.

[18:45] Jessica: It's so chilling and my brain is going in like 19 different directions. So part of my thought process is don't ever date anybody because you never know what's going to come at you. But I've heard this story several times, right. Just watching some of the things that you have and so on and so forth, I think, and what strikes me as chilling changes each time, you know, I get some new, some different detail just sticks in my head and I get really agitated about it. And I think this time around, the completely ineffective engagement by the New York City police and dismissive, the dismissal of the friends is so fucked up.

[19:55] Meg: That hit me hard too.

[19:59] Jessica: Because like I know if I suddenly disappeared, you would be on the steps of whatever precinct covers 96th street having a meltdown and would not leave until you had started a riot and a rally. I can't imagine what those women were feeling and thinking as they made these efforts that were just dismissed, falling on deaf here, just so dehumanizing. Okay, we've all seen Double Indemnity. We know you need a body, okay? But with all of that circumstantial evidence, shouldn't there have been some effort on the part of the police department to go out and find a body or find whatever it is? It's not like, well, you know, so you say, ladies, you go find the body. That's not their job. Strange.

[21:13] Meg: And now he's gone.

[21:17] Jessica: Well, good riddance to bad rubbish.

[21:19] Meg: Yeah, it's awful that there was no justice, but very little justice, but at least, I don't know.

[21:29] Jessica: The Ugly Woman. The Case of the Ugly Woman and the Bad Wig. All right, thank you, Meg, for yet another really disturbing piece. And thank you for making sure that my sleep will be disturbed with very vivid and very bad dreams.

[21:49] Meg: Okay, Jessica, what do you have for me today?

[21:51] Jessica: I'm going to start with a question for you.

[21:54] Meg: Oh, gosh.

[21:55] Jessica: Okay, so when you think of the 70s, what do you think of as fashion, like trendy? What were people really into like fashion?

[22:07] Meg: Like suede, fringe, turtlenecks? I think of Brady Bunch.

[22:15] Jessica: Okay.

[22:15] Meg: Is that fair?

[22:16] Jessica: Why not? I think of velour. I think of disco outfit kind of scenario.

[22:26] Meg: Lame.

[22:27] Jessica: Lame. Yes. I think of those, like, Pierre Cardin silky dresses with pumps and nude stockings.

[22:37] Meg: Okay, yea!

[22:38] Jessica: For women, like my French teachers had that in grammar school.

[22:40] Meg: JC Penney catalog stuff.

[22:45] Jessica: Yes. Yes. Yes. Okay. My next question is: true or false the beginning of any decade is really still the decade that came before it.

[22:59] Meg: Yes, I think that is fair to say.

[23:00] Jessica: Okay, so the style, the look, what's cool, what's hot, what's not it's reasonable to say that in the early 80s, it was what was happening in the 70s.

[23:17] Meg: Yes, absolutely. It took the 80s a while to get what it's now known for.

[23:22] Jessica: Or did it? You walked right into that. Love it. So what I'm talking about today is the phenomenon, a publishing phenomenon that started out and was intended to be a joke. It was a joke for a very limited audience, understandably. And it was a joke that was supposed to be like a stocking stuffer book for the Christmas of 1980.

[23:59] Meg: Okay.

[24:01] Jessica: Okay? However, this book changed the look of the 80s and it happened very rapidly on the East coast and West Coast, as these things do, and then worked its way towards the middle. And that is The Preppy Handbook.

[24:19] Meg: All right.

[24:20] Jessica: Okay. So would you say that you are preppy?

[24:24] Meg: I definitely went through a preppy phase, for sure.

[24:29] Jessica: But you see, now you're walking right into another question. Okay. Are you aware of the fact that in the original Preppy Handbook, Lisa Bernbach, the author/editor, she had a few contributors working with her, but she is making the point that preppy is a way of life. It's not a look. We now think of preppy as a look. She was saying it's a way of life. It's the world that you're born into, where you go to school, the people you know, where you live in the country, all that kind of stuff. And the stuff that became the outward expression of it that people were obsessed with, with the clothing and the jewelry or not jewelry, as the case may be, and haircuts and all of that stuff became that was actually just a byproduct of being, as she called, it true prep. So you, my friend, you are true prep. You are a genuine preppy.

[25:36] Meg: Well on paper yes, I am.

[25:37] Jessica: Well, that’s where it exists, and that's the point. So where did you go to high school?

[25:43] Meg: I went to the Nightingale-Bamford School for Girls in New York City.

[25:49] Jessica: And you wore a?

[25:52] Meg: I wore uniform. I wore a navy kilt.

[25:57] Jessica: Okay.

[25:59] Meg: We called them kilts, right?

[26:00] Jessica: Yeah we wore kilts

[26:00] Meg: And Izod shirt.

[26:06] Jessica: Yes and starts with the T.

[26:10] Meg: What?

[26:11] Jessica: Turtlenecks.

[26:12] Meg: Oh, yeah. Oh, my God. I love Turtlenecks.

[26:14] Jessica: And where did you go to college?

[26:16] Meg: I went to Brown University.

[26:17] Jessica: Yes. An ivy. And I know on one side of your family, your ancestors came to the United States in what year?

[26:31] Meg: 16 something.

[26:32] Jessica: Okay. True prep. Now, what's so fascinating to me about The Preppy Handbook, having been, although also a dyed in the wool preppy, but not exactly the same as you. I think I would be considered nouveau preppy as a Jew, a little gentleman's agreement.

[26:57] Meg: Waspy.

[26:57] Meg: Yes, wasp is very, very important. However, the look was very specific. And that is what to me is one of the most perplexing things about the 80s. That we went from sexy out there, glitter, glamor, metallic leather, fringe, you name it. Feathered hair, the whole nine yards. The glam of the most boring buttoned up, absolutely plain as can be look possible. And why it was that a humor book that was meant to skewer wasps wound up becoming the guidebook for cool in the 80s.

[27:47] Meg: That is so interesting.

[27:48] Jessica: Indeed. So what do you think? Before I go on, having been a part of it in such a fundamental way, what do you think was going on in the 80s that made in 1980 because, and that's my point about the 70s. Like, the book came out in 1980, and it was on the New York Times bestseller list for, like, 38 weeks. It was something insane, so it dominated. Why do you think that would be?

[28:20] Meg: I mean, I don't know if this is helpful. I think it's the way that the book is laid out is incredibly satisfying. It is, in fact, a how to. And my vague memory of it was like, oh, you recognize things about yourself and about other people you knew in it, but they spelled it out for the first time. It hadn't been articulated before, and it certainly didn't tell you, like, you must wear the pearls. So it put it all together. So, yeah, it was a guidebook. It was like a Bible. It's like, oh, okay, yeah, I recognize it. And now you're telling me exactly how to do it properly. And it was funny as hell.

[29:10] Jessica: It was hilarious but it was hilarious to a certain group of people because they understood what was being satirized. Right. So you first saw it, you were eleven years old, but as you grew to enjoy the book, you saw it as a reflection, and that's always entertaining. And because you were a kid, you could be a little removed from it. Well, and kids don't really have a lot of self awareness to begin with, so that's kind of, to feel so exposed and also so seen in a really weird way. My experience, which makes me laugh to this day, and this is to me, the ultimate in kids have no self awareness; My friend Nina and I got all dressed up in our preppy finery and convinced my father to take us to a bar and grill in our neighborhood for an early dinner so we could be preppies. The joke being we wore our own clothes. There was nothing. We were going out as ourselves. But with this heightened sense of recognition and self awareness. But yeah, there was no costume going on. But what I think is amazing is that right on the heels of all of this sex and fun and all of that, came preppy. And from preppy came the 1980s ‘Gordon Gekko, Wall Street, Greed is good’ “look”, it's all a continuum right there. Anyway, so back to this book. Why did this happen? So I started to do a little bit of research, and what occurred to me was the economy was in the toilet.

[31:11] Meg: Okay? True.

[31:13] Jessica: And people were looking for something that had a sense of stability and security. And what did the Preppy Handbook do? It did the same thing that electing Ronald Reagan did in 1980, which was brought us back to the 50s.

[31:33] Meg: That is a really good point, Jessica.

[31:36] Jessica: Thank you. It's my analysis for the day. So people liked it because and to your point, it was a guidebook. There wasn't much thought or self expression involved. In fact, there was none. The idea.

[31:52] Meg: There’s a uniform.

[31:53] Jessica: Right? And in fact, when I saw Paris's Burning, which I think came out in 1990, are you aware of the fact that one of the drags, one of the competitions in one of the drag balls, was preppy Wall Street?

[32:11] Meg: I do kind of remember that.

[32:13] Jessica: And it was guys with, like, pinstripe suits and Oxford cloth shirts with the button down collar with briefcases walking like they were very straight guys down on Wall Street. And I thought, oh, my God, The Preppy Handbook was the United States going into a full collaborative drag act because it brought a sense of safety and security. And even if you had nothing to do with this culture, as evidenced by the Black and Hispanic drag balls in Harlem at this time, it was centering. And by not having to think about it and being told the rules, and if you could mimic the rules perfectly enough, you would be acceptable and accepted. And of course, that's really an extreme example that ‘Paris is Burning’ thing. But I think that for everyone else who got excited about it, it was that 1950s redux, if you do this, which is pretty low impact, you can blend in. And that was, of course, before there were a million different knockoffs, knockoff brands, like instead of Lacoste, IZOD. It was Le Tigre, you know, or whatever.

[33:46] Meg: Oh gosh, Le Tigre. And then when do we meet, Mr. Lauren?

[33:50] Jessica: Oh, well, so prep, which started out as, okay, just buy the clothing as described in Lisa Bernbach's book. And in fact, I'll give you a little description of the fashion fundamentals. So the fashion fundamentals were conservatism, neatness, attention to detail, practicality, quality, natural fibers, anglophilia, specific color blindness, which I'll describe in a minute, the sporting look and androgyne, but not the fun David Bowie kind. Androgyne for preps, as she writes it was, men and women dress as much alike as possible, and clothes for either sex should deny specifics of gender. The success of the Lambs Nightgown is based on its ability to disguise secondary sexual characteristics. While the traditional fit for men's, Khakis, is one size too big, the specific colorblindness concept is primary colors, and brilliant pastels are worn indiscriminately by men and women alike in preposterous combinations. In some subcultures, hot pink on men might be considered a little peculiar. Preppies take it for granted. So everything that you're talking about, everything that she was talking about is old school. It's what happened before the 70s, before nylon, before rayon, cotton, wool and silk. And that was it, right? So Ralph and others like him, decided to commodify what was already becoming a trend and by using the exact principles laid out in this book: quality, practicality, Anglophilia, natural fibers. Ralph Nay Lipschitz Lauren. Typical member of the shmata trade. For those who don't know, shmata is Yiddish for rag. So the clothing business is called the shmata trade. He out preppied the preppies and repackaged it and sold it to people who were aspirational preppies. And that's what the rest of the 80s became aspirational prep. Real prep was actually very dowdy, very, very unsexual.

[36:27] Meg: I can picture that nightgown. My grandmother got all of us in the family the same nightgown every year, and it was basically a version of that night gown.

[36:38] Jessica: Yeah, it's a flannel sack that has some kind of smocking on a high neck and at the cuffs with your long sleeves. So you were completely enshrouded in flannel in a tent like kind of arrangement.

[36:56] Meg: Very cozy.

[36:57] Jessica: Very cozy. Not sexy. No, but anyway. And to your point about Ralph Lauren, amusingly, Lisa Burnback, like me, went to prep school in New York City and a college of the high prep variety and is Jewish. So her observations were also slightly from the outside, a little outside looking in, but completely immersed in the world of, this exclusionary world of prep. So that's my feeling and my thought about The Preppy Handbook. And we will revisit The Preppy Handbook because it was, as you say, the guidebook to style and fashion in the 80s, which we have not even really gotten into. But I just want to address the fact that it's so bananas, that a joke book ruled and completely dictated how everyone wanted to look. And without irony, it just was taken on face value. Completely insane. Yes. And as for the clothing, you and I went through our formative years fully in prep. And then at school, if we weren't wearing loafers, they were bluchers LL Bean bluchers. Right. Which you could keep sending back to LL Bean for replacements when they got worn out. But in true prep style, if you were really in it, you would just repair it yourself with duct tape.

[38:43] Meg: I loved penny loafers. And I would put, my parents put dimes instead of pennies. So if I got lost, I could use the pay phone.

[38:52] Jessica: See?

[38:53] Meg: Yeah.

[38:54] Jessica: So sweet.

[38:55] Meg: And then it went up to 25 cents.

[38:57] Jessica: It doesn't fit anymore in your loafers and what were adults wearing? You know what a great movie is to see with that look? The Last Days of Disco. Whit Stillman's movie. He's the guy who did Metropolitan and Bar.. Was it? Was it Barcelona? But the Last Days of Disco shows exactly what this was and what this looked like. And Chloe Stevigny and Kate Beckinsale, who are both seen as extremely sexy women, are made to look positively unappetizing in these outfits, and they were considered absolutely de rigueur. So I recommend that as a little bit of homework before we dive further into the world of prep. So that's it.

[39:52] Meg: Cool. Thank you very much.

[39:54] Jessica: You're very welcome.

[39:56] Meg: I'm going to order it because I haven't seen or I'll dig it out from my mother's bookshelf.

[40:00] Jessica: Oh, you mean the books? Yeah. Oh, I thought you meant the movies. Well, the books, I have to admit, when Lisa Burnback's second book came out about all of this, called True Prep, in 2010, she had her book signing at Brooks Brothers. Quite rightly. And she signed to me. She had, like, a fill in the blanks bookplate. So it was, this book belongs to Jessica Jones, who prepped at Nightingale-Bamford after being kicked out of Hodgkiss because of naked checkers. I leave it to the audience to wonder if that's correct or not. And her inscription, she's very funny: ‘Jessica, congrats. You survived Nightingale-Bamford. Best, Lisa. Ahoy. Jessica’ and from the preppy handbook, because I brought that, I was like, look, I still have it. And I'm sure she was throwing up like, go away. Get away, freak. “Dear Jessica, don't sell this. It's valuable. Cheers, Lisa Burnback. So that's the beginning of our foray, as I said, into all things prep, which you and I are really woefully well suited to talk about. So thank you, Meg. This was fun.

[41:33] Meg: Thank you, Jessica.

[41:335] Okay, until next time. Thank you for joining us.