A Classically Tailored Life

When an intimate group of friends gathered at Margot’s favorite restaurant to celebrate her 90th birthday, I raised a glass. “When I grow up,” I toasted, “I want to be Margot.”

“You can’t,” she wryly responded. Already in my sixties, I knew there was still room to grow. When I’m 90 years young, I want to be keenly intelligent, classically minimalist, and fiercely independent, a woman who has loved deeply, traveled widely, and deliberated profoundly. I want to be Margot.

Finely etched lifelines crinkled about her eyes and mouth. She sat up straight, tilted her silvered head ever so slightly, and squared her shoulders. “You can’t,” she repeated in a delightfully precise German inflection. “Because then you would have to have been me.”

Hmmmm. Would that be all that bad? After all, Margot wears her life like a Chanel—fine tweed, structured shoulders, soft pleats—embellished with a simple brooch. Hidden, however, is the warp and weft of whole cloth, the ripped out seams, and trimmed-away scraps. You sense, but don’t see the raw underpinnings.

Like being born in the idyllic German city-state of Bremen, in the lull between the horrific events that would later be called World Wars. Her father, who never recovered from the first, took his life before the second. And by the time she was 16, in 1943, when the Allied Forces launched Operation Gomorrah in Hamburg, the molten asphalt that swallowed 43,000 men, women, and children—including her friends— also swallowed what remained of her innocence.

At war’s end, the family returned to her birthplace. But unlike the Grimm Brothers tale in which bedraggled animals set out to find a new life in Bremen, Margot sought a new life by going from Bremen. She was chosen in 1950 to attend the University of Miami as an exchange student.

She had won a lottery, alright, but the true prize was Dick. Rumor has it that for him, it was love at first sight. But not so for Margot. It took her a week—or maybe it was a month—before she got up to speed. She’s not one to use the term “soul mate.” That’s a little too cheesy for this dame. But husband and friend, now, those are words she honors, words she still uses when she reflects on their 60-year marriage. Dick was the interfacing in her Chanel, its structure and strength.

They both wanted to practice law. So they moved to New Orleans, with their daughter Annette, the jewel in Margot’s brooch. The plan was for Margot to attend Loyola at night. But the school refused her admission. She believes (and probably correctly so) that it was because of her sex. Few law schools accepted women in those days.

So she and Dick tweaked the plan: Margot enrolled in Tulane Law School full-time and Dick started Loyola’s night school a year later. Not only did Margot graduated first in her class in 1958, she did so looking like Katharine Hepburn. She possessed the same self-assuredness, too. When the dean of Loyola congratulated her, she bluntly put him in his place, saying “You thought I wasn’t good enough for your school.”

Good looks and scholarliness notwithstanding, she couldn’t get a pumped toe in the legal door. So when the family moved to Washington, D.C., she tried the federal government. A colleague had advised, “They hire women lawyers.”

She did, they did, and she went on to become assistant general counsel of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency and deputy and acting head of U.S. delegations to international conferences in Geneva and Vienna. Fine threads, those days were. But beneath that fabric were nasty truths. As an arms negotiator, Margot learned that Operation Gomorrah was designed to demoralize the civilian population. It succeeded. And while I deeply admire that she rose from those ashes, I do not envy the flight of her phoenix.

After a rich life of travel and culture, Dick died, rendering Margot rudderless. Arming herself with a makeshift oar, however, she rowed on. It was strenuous. But that’s just the way she is., how I want to be.

Maybe I can’t be Margot.  But I do aspire to be like her. She tells me I already am that person.

So when I grow up to be 90, or a hundred, or whatever, I shall don my own tailored suit—heaven knows, Margot’s won’t fit me! And when a youngster of 50 or 60 tells me that when she grows up she wants to be me, I’ll just sit up straight, conjure Margot, and share my wisdom in a New Orleans–infused Yankee twang.

“Dahlin’,” I’ll wink, “you got yourself a good life. You just live it.”