Lady with Taste

Henrietta Kanengeiser never learned to cut a dress; her needlework was atrocious, and if she ventured to baste a hem it was likely to sag. Yet she wore clothes with a verve that trailed rapt feminine stares behind her like smoke from a gold-tipped cigarette. And she had an intuitive sense for that ill-defined and mysterious quality, taste. To two generations of American women Henrietta--or, as she was better known, Hattie Carnegie--was the quintessence of feminine fashion. Last week, at 69, Hattie Carnegie died of cancer, and left few peers in the bewildering business of adorning the body of American women.

Chop Suey in the Air. Like the millionaire Scot steelmaker whose surname she borrowed, Hattie started life in rags. Born in a Vienna ghetto, she came to the U.S. when she was six, and with her six brothers and sisters, grew up in the jungle of Manhattan's Lower East Side. When she was 13 her father died, and Hattie went to work as a messenger in Macy's basement. Even then, rotating a wardrobe of one skirt and three blouses, she had style and taste. Rose Roth, a neighborhood seamstress, noticed it, and persuaded Hattie to model Roth dresses at the theaters and restaurants where her beaux took her.

Hattie and Rose went into business together (Hattie made hats to go with Rose's dresses), moved to an uptown shop above a delicatessen and a Chinese restaurant. Their only advertising was Hattie herself, but it was enough. Soon Soprano Alma Gluck, Mrs. William Randolph Hearst Sr. and other fashionable ladies were standing patiently for fittings in the mingled aroma of chop suey and lox. In 1919, after a quarrel, Hattie bought out her partner, and later moved to the present, world-famed Carnegie salon on Manhattan's East 49th Street. The same year, she made her first trip to Paris (through the years she rolled up a total of nearly 100 trips abroad).

Inspection in the Bath. In Paris, tiny (4 ft. 10 in.), trim Hattie was a reigning queen. At the ateliers of the top designers, her slightest show of interest made heady columns of news in Vogue and Harper's Bazaar. (In later years she learned to gush at the models that bored her, and to look bored at those she intended to promote.) Her suite at the Ritz was invariably a bedlam, with delivery boys, salesmen and hatboxes filling up the living room; Hattie herself sometimes held forth in the bathtub, shrewdly appraising the hats and accessories that were brought to her.

In Manhattan, Hattie stirred up the natives with equal success. Wealthy women and celebrities flocked to her salon (among her clientele: Gertrude Lawrence, Clare Boothe Luce, Barbara Hutton, the Duchess of Windsor, Joan Crawford). Although several famed designers learned their craft in her workrooms, Hattie was never a designer in the strict sense. Her talent was for blue-penciling gowns, like an editor, and her critical decisions ("No, no, that sleeve is out I") were almost always right. The Carnegie foundation for a wardrobe--the "little Carnegie suit" became a basic garment for well-dressed women, and was later translated by Hattie into the WAC uniform. Another recent Carnegie creation: a modernized habit for a branch of the Carmelite nuns.

Mink on the Bed. As a businesswoman, Hattie was as shrewd as she was stylish. She knew intuitively when to extend credit and when to collect bills (she once successfully sued the late Jimmy Walker for his wife's unpaid $12,059 balance). She often quite literally sold the clothes off her back to eager customers, but would never allow a woman to buy a dress that seemed unsuitable. Her surplus energy spilled into other businesses, all of them successful: hats, jewelry, antiques, perfumes--even chocolate candy. By last year Hattie Carnegie Inc. was doing a gross business of $7,000,000 a year.

Hattie Carnegie was a temperamental whirlwind, who loved the glittering world she lived in, doted on poker, slot machines and canasta. Her Fifth Avenue duplex was serenely elegant, from the gold-plated fixtures in her bathroom to the crepe-dechine sheets and mink coverlet on her bed. Lunching at the Pavilion, sweeping into the opera or arriving in Paris, Hattie was always a conversation-stopper. Her domestic life was sometimes hectic: after two brief and capricious marriages, she finally settled down with Major John Zanft, a childhood sweetheart from the East Side. "I've had three husbands," she often said, "but my real romance is my work." There was never any doubt of that.

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