10.3/The Interior Life/The Private Life

The Maintenance of a Life: Smoke, Mail, and the Domestic Interior, 1989–2001

The Ashtray by Rank

New York City had gone further than the federal government on its own: the 1988 Clean Indoor Air Act required restaurants seating fifty or more to set aside non-smoking sections, a rule enforced loosely enough that ash still drifted from the smoking side into the food on the other. Not until January 10, 1995, did Mayor Rudolph Giuliani sign the Smoke-Free Air Act, which barred smoking in restaurants seating thirty-five or more, in most workplaces, and in taxis — while leaving bars, smaller restaurants, and rooms with separate ventilation untouched, an exemption that held for the rest of the period.¹ Until that exemption itself closed, an evening out in a New York bar still meant an evening spent inside a haze visible in the room’s upper third on a crowded night, a last cigarette at closing time as reliable a ritual as the bill. Cigars, briefly, had their own vogue inside that same exemption: legal at any restaurant table through 1994, they migrated into dedicated cigar-and-cognac rooms as the mid-decade approached, a fashion that peaked in the private cigar clubs that began opening above street level in Midtown. Which brand a smoker carried read as its own kind of shorthand, parsed instantly by anyone paying attention and detailed on its own terms below.

The film on the ceiling above the chair where a household’s heaviest smoker sat did not arrive in a season; it built across years, a brownish stain radiating outward from a light fixture or a corner, visible in full only once the furniture beneath it was finally moved. A coat that had spent one evening at a bar carried the same fact on a much shorter clock: cold cigarette smoke worked into wool and stayed there for roughly two days, into cashmere longer and more thoroughly, into suede past the point any cleaning could undo it. Dry cleaners across the city knew the smell without being told what had produced it and had a name for the garment that arrived carrying it — the “bar coat,” dropped off on a Monday by someone who had been out on a Friday. Smoke detectors, standard in most buildings by then, were tuned to household fire risk rather than to cigarette-level haze and rarely interrupted anything. The smell settled into whatever the room was made of — drapes, upholstery, the spines of paperbacks that had passed through more than one owner’s hands, so that a used bookstore in 1991 carried the smell of every previous reader who had lit a cigarette over the pages. Burns turned up on nightstands and hotel dressers alike, the residue of cigarettes smoked in bed and set down a moment too long. The lighter carried a signal of its own: a gold Dunhill or a worn Zippo said one thing and a disposable Bic another, while a book of matches carried out of a restaurant or a bar doubled as a record of where its owner had lately been. In the apartment, the only ledger being kept was the ceiling’s, and it kept it in silence, one shade at a time, for as long as the resident stayed.

The Meter Running

A long-distance call in 1989 was priced by the clock in a way a local call never was, and the price varied by the hour it was placed. The Bell System’s 1984 breakup had created the competitive long-distance market that AT&T, MCI, and Sprint fought over for the next decade, the three carriers together holding roughly ninety percent of the residential market by the period’s start. Pricing ran in three bands — a daytime rate on weekdays that cost the most, an evening rate that dropped after five, and a night-and-weekend rate, covering all of Saturday and most of Sunday, that cost the least — with the first minute of any call typically billed at a steeper rate than every minute after it. A caller watched the clock as much as the conversation; keeping a call short was not merely polite, it was priced that way. Domestic long-distance ran at roughly twenty to twenty-five cents a minute by day and ten to fifteen cents at night — period estimates rather than a single quoted tariff — while a call abroad ran dramatically higher: to London or Berlin, on the order of a dollar a minute or more on AT&T’s standard rate; to Tokyo, closer to two.² The cheapest window for an overseas call — Sunday, or the overnight hours on a weekday — shaped when families placed the call at all, though what a Sunday call itself carried, once it was placed, belongs to an accounting kept elsewhere in the record.

The carrier itself became a subject of household argument. MCI introduced its Friends & Family plan in March 1991: subscribers built a “calling circle” of up to twelve people, later expanded to twenty, and calls placed within that circle received a twenty percent discount — provided both ends of the call were MCI customers, which turned every enrollment into a small campaign to get a parent or a sibling to switch carriers.³ AT&T, caught without an answer, did not respond in kind until its “i Plan” and later “True USA Savings” arrived the following year, by which point MCI’s telemarketers had already worked through a season of family dinners interrupted by a pitch for the rival network. The competition that Friends & Family opened continued through the decade, and by 1996 and 1997 the “One Rate” plans from all three major carriers had collapsed the old three-tier pricing into something close to a flat ten to fifteen cents a minute at any hour. Dial-around codes — 10-10-321, 10-10-220, and others, launched in May 1996 with a wave of television advertising — offered a way around a household’s regular carrier entirely, dialed digit by digit before the number itself, and are detailed on their own terms below.

Calling cards filled the gap the household phone could not: a fourteen-digit PIN dialed after an 800 number let a traveler bill a call back to a home account from any pay phone, of which the country still had something like two-and-a-half million in the mid-1990s, and let a guest in someone else’s house avoid running up a host’s bill, the calling card offered and accepted as its own small courtesy.⁴ A credit card that doubled as a calling card became a fixture of the same category, sold at the same kiosks and drugstore counters. When a call itself failed, the fax picked up the slack: a cover sheet listing sender, recipient, page count, and subject, then the slow mechanical grind of the transmission itself, printed on thermal paper that began yellowing within six months and was often illegible within eighteen. “Did you get my fax?” functioned as its own daily greeting in an office that relied on the machine. Cellular telephones remained, through most of the period, a point of comparison rather than a substitute: Motorola’s DynaTAC, the brick-sized handset of 1990, cost several thousand dollars with airtime running around fifty cents a minute and coverage confined mostly to Wall Street and a handful of early adopters, giving way by 1996 to Motorola’s flip-phone StarTAC, and by the decade’s end to handsets cheap and common enough that a junior employee might plausibly carry one.⁵ Until the late 1990s, the person receiving a cellular call paid airtime for it too, which kept most people from handing the number out freely — one more reason the pay phone, the calling card, and the fax machine held on as long as they did.

The Catalog on the Table

By 1988, catalog and mail-order sales in the United States were estimated at a hundred and sixty-four billion dollars, carried by something on the order of twelve and a half billion catalogs mailed that year alone — roughly fifty for every man, woman, and child in the country — and the category kept growing through the years that followed, at nearly ten percent annually between 1990 and 1996, close to double the growth rate of in-store retail over the same stretch.⁷ The catalog’s arrival in the mailbox functioned as a small, dependable event: it went onto the coffee table, got read on a Sunday morning, accumulated dog-eared corners around whatever had been flagged for ordering, and in at least one recognizable household ritual, got hidden in a drawer by whichever teenager had gotten to the Victoria’s Secret edition before a parent did.

J. Crew supplied the decade’s clearest case of a catalog manufacturing a brand from nothing. The company began as the Popular Club Plan, a New Jersey home-demonstration clothing business founded in 1947, and was renamed J. Crew in 1983 by Arthur and Emily Cinader; sales went from three million dollars that year to more than a hundred million by 1988, growth driven almost entirely by the catalog rather than by any store, since the first physical J. Crew location did not open until March 1989, at South Street Seaport in Lower Manhattan. By the middle of the 1990s the company was mailing something like seventeen distinct catalog editions a year. The aesthetic behind them belonged to Emily Cinader Woods, who built the brand around a deliberately weathered, unisex-leaning look — house parties rather than country clubs, a barn jacket and a rollneck sweater as the totem items of a college campus that had effectively uniformed itself out of the catalog’s pages — and who avoided the word “preppy” inside the company even as everyone outside it reached for it.⁸ The ordering ritual ran the same way at every catalog house: a household dialed an 800 number, read the item’s SKU code off the page, specified size and color, and waited a promised four to six weeks — often longer — for a box to arrive; a return meant repacking the item, a trip to the post office or a shipping counter, and five to seven dollars in return postage, friction enough that a garment which did not quite fit often got kept anyway.

Victoria’s Secret ran the opposite kind of catalog: less a shopping tool than a small, semi-illicit cultural object, its arrival at a friend’s house — because an older sister or a mother was on the mailing list — treated by teenage boys the way an earlier generation had treated a found copy of a magazine kept out of sight. Leslie Wexner’s company, The Limited, had bought the brand in 1982 and built the catalog into a major marketing vehicle through that decade; the Miracle Bra, a molded-cup design engineered to visibly enhance rather than merely support, launched in 1993, and the company staged its first televised Fashion Show in 1995.⁹ The scholar Jane Juffer, writing on the genre, argued that the Victoria’s Secret catalog succeeded by domesticating what a plain brown wrapper had once had to hide — mapping lingerie onto the ordinary rooms of a house rather than presenting it as contraband, which let a customer order without the stigma an openly adult catalog still carried.¹⁰ Sharper Image and Hammacher Schlemmer ran a third, unrelated register entirely, selling gadgetry and novelty rather than clothing, and the differences between all four houses are catalogued on their own terms below. Sears closed out its own tradition in the middle of this decade, publishing the last edition of its general “Big Book” catalog in 1993 after more than a century in print, though its separate Christmas Wish Book survived the closure.¹¹

The Private Reckoning

Beneath the clothes a catalog sold, a body’s own maintenance ran on a far older set of defaults, largely unadvertised. Shaving underarms and legs had been the convention for American women since Gillette’s 1915 razor campaign, with countercultural exceptions in later decades that had mostly receded by 1989; full pubic hair was the ordinary condition for almost every woman in the country, trimmed along the bikini line for swimsuit season and left otherwise alone.¹³ Men’s body hair, chest and back alike, went unremoved and largely unremarked; no word existed yet for its deliberate removal, and none was in use anywhere in the period. Daily showers were standard, hair washed every one to three days rather than every day, and a full bath remained a weekly rather than daily habit for most households.

Total hair removal, where it existed at all before the middle of the 1990s, belonged to one address: a nail salon at 35 West 57th Street, opened in 1987 by seven sisters from Vitória, Brazil — Jonice, Jocely, Janea, Joyce, Juracy, Jussara, and Judseia Padilha, known collectively as the J Sisters because clients could not keep the names straight. One sister, Janea, raised the idea of a full-removal wax around 1990, and the salon began offering it in the early part of the decade to a narrow circle of fashion-industry and entertainment clients, the singer Roberta Flack among the first; the salon’s own account dates the wider New York spread to 1994. For most of the period the service remained exactly that narrow — a single Midtown address serving a small, well-connected clientele rather than a citywide or national practice. Its migration toward the mainstream began late in the period: a signed photograph from the actress Gwyneth Paltrow in 1999, thanking the salon for changing her life, carried the service into wider fashion-press coverage before the decade closed.¹⁴ For most women through most of the period, then, the ordinary condition was the one the century had inherited rather than the one a single Midtown salon was quietly redefining — a fact of the body kept, like the coat’s smell and the phone bill’s total, almost entirely off any page a magazine would print. What lay past the beauty counter and the fashion pages themselves — the makeup, the hair color, the industry that manufactured and sold the look — belongs to its own separate account.

The Moratorium

Breast implants entered American medicine in March 1962, when the plastic surgeons Thomas Cronin and Frank Gerow, working with Dow Corning, performed the first augmentation using the silicone gel device that came to carry their names. The Food and Drug Administration gained authority over medical devices in 1976 and initially classified implants in a lower risk tier; in 1988 the agency reclassified them as Class III, the category requiring manufacturers to submit safety and efficacy data the industry had never been asked to produce.¹⁵ Public alarm arrived from television rather than from the agency: a December 1990 episode of Face to Face with Connie Chung on the risks of silicone implants is generally credited with triggering the crisis that followed.¹⁶ The following year, a Superior Court jury in Hopkins v. Dow Corning awarded Mariann Hopkins $7.3 million after finding that her ruptured silicone implants had caused a connective-tissue disease, a verdict accompanied by internal Dow Corning memoranda suggesting the company had known about the risk of silicone leakage for decades — the case that opened the litigation floodgates.¹⁷

FDA Commissioner David Kessler announced a voluntary moratorium on silicone gel implants on January 6, 1992, asking manufacturers to stop supplying them and surgeons to stop implanting them; Dow Corning released its internal files the following month and withdrew from the implant business entirely on March 19.¹⁸ On April 16, 1992, the FDA lifted the absolute moratorium but restricted silicone implants to women enrolled in clinical studies — largely those undergoing reconstruction after mastectomy or living with severe deformity — which took cosmetic silicone augmentation off the American market entirely and left saline, inserted empty and filled in place through a smaller incision but prone to visible rippling and a firmer feel under thin skin, as the only option available to a woman seeking augmentation in the United States for the rest of the period.¹⁹ An industry-wide settlement of $4.25 billion with claimants followed in 1994; Dow Corning itself filed for bankruptcy the following year under the weight of the remaining litigation.²⁰ Outside American borders, silicone was never withdrawn: European, Brazilian, and Mexican surgeons continued to offer it throughout the moratorium, and a wealthy American patient who wanted what the domestic market no longer sold could, and sometimes did, travel to get it.

None of this touched the surgery’s geography, which had been fixed for a decade already along a corridor of Park Avenue and Fifth Avenue offices running roughly from the 60s to the 80s, augmentation running an estimated five to eight thousand dollars a procedure in cash or check, a facelift running twelve to twenty-five thousand — figures drawn from national fee surveys of the era and best read as a rough range rather than a quoted price list. What the surgery bought was, almost without exception, kept quiet: implants functioned through the 1980s and into the 1990s as an open secret exchanged through hairdressers, trainers, and close friends rather than discussed outright, with total denial the default public posture even for the women whose results a trained eye could read on sight — “she’s had work done,” or simply, “she looks rested,” carrying the whole conversation without ever naming the thing itself. A husband often paid, sometimes framed as an anniversary gift; a six-week recovery got covered by a story about a Hamptons rest or a bad back. The moratorium disturbed that arrangement more than anything before it had: women who had kept a decade-old silicone implant private now found their own situation described, in general terms, on the evening news and the cover of a magazine at the newsstand, an exposure that pushed some toward a lawsuit and left most simply reading the coverage and waiting.