Weitz could easily have easily taken an early retirement and lived quite comfortably. Weitz however was more fully informed. Weitz’s interests extended beyond 7th Avenue, extended beyond the runways, and extended beyond the confines of fashion’s limited view of the world. While his contemporaries began to rest, selling their business’s selling their names, like Halston, it is now that Weitz who is in the prime of his life begins to hit his stride.
It was an altogether prosaic life. The Weitz' divided their time between the home in Manhattan and Westhampton Beach, on Long Island, where he boated, and she gardened. Weitz only began to start writing after (namedropper) John Steinbeck, who was living in nearby Sag Harbor, told him, "You had a decent education, you've no right not to write." Weitz was receptive. "I asked him how to do it, and he said he'd tell me the next morning," said the designer. "He arrived that day with a big yellow lined pad, and said, 'This is how you write.'" On little more than a dare, Weitz soon began his first novel, The Value of Nothing, about a New Yorker from an unlikely background who becomes a fashion designer, which hit the 1970 best-seller lists.
His novel, The Value of Nothing was published in 1970, with the familiar Weitz signature embossed on its cover, and sure enough became a national best-seller. It remain a realistic indictment, a cruel portrait of the rag trade it deals unashamedly, if not obsessively, with both homosexuality, and anti-Semitism, especially as it existed in America in the 1950’s, and the garment business itself… “Kikes we need because they're quick money. But too many of them can ruin the atmosphere, so keep it down. And once they're inside be sure they don't cluster!”
The richly autobiographical The Value of Nothing deserves a reissue for it attack on anti-Semitism, polite society, (today’s political correctness) and its cleverly drawn deceptions that pulls no punches… “Fuck them all! Fuck their beards, the yarmulkes, their prayer shawls, their bagels and kishkas, their Talmudic smart alecks, their waving hands; fuck their contempt! The yid from Whitechapel was Mayfair now”.
Weitz’s was more than eye-candy, his good looks and fashion sensibility was a conundrum for many people in the industry who stereotypically suspected homosexuality, or at least hoped for it. Indeed, Weitz did not fit the mold of the flaming queen that many expected in the fashion industry, nor may he have been a gay advocate (by today’s standards), but he despised intolerance, gave many a closeted man work, and a safe harbor. Weitz was a straight man, a well-adjusted heterosexual to who homosexuality was seldom an issue. In fact, he was nun-plussed concerning it. Weitz was also a man with many connections, as when he confirmed that a former OSS boss had shown him gangster blackmail photos of the longtime FBI Director and homo-phobe, J. Edgar Hoover inflagrante with his boyfriend, Clyde Tolson.
While not revolutionary or high art (although it wasn’t written to be revolutionary or high art) his second book, the aptly named, Man in Charge: The Executive's Guide to Grooming, Manners and Travel, also made the best-seller lists in 1974. It was for the US market one of the first “how to” books for men on the art of dressing, grooming and travel. Alas, there was once a time when fathers passed down this information to their sons, a time when people knew their local tailor, a time before mass-marketed clothing came in from China, and ready to wear, and one size fits all were de rigueur. In retrospect, it reflects a time of innocence, when the beautiful people jet-setted between the coasts, dressed up to get on a plane, and air travel was glamorous. Today we throw or stuff in a knapsack, buy a bottle of Poland Spring and hope that we’ll just make it through security. Rest assured, Weitz did not wear a soiled pair of Kikes in first class.
By 1974, with annual earnings of $18 million dollars his company was already one of the most stable in the market and Weitz walked into his Madison Avenue offices a bona fide bestseller. The worst that might be said of Weitz is that he was a work-aholic. If he was chasing something it was elusive. His work ethic is legendary. "He doesn't smoke or drink. He has to have some vice," explained his wife.
In the 1970's, Weitz's friend Albert "Cubby" Broccoli, producer of the James Bond movies, teased him about his resemblance to the character, adding that Weitz was better looking and proposed the role to him, Ian Fleming had reported that Weitz was used as the prototype for his character, in typical Hollywood style producers cast Roger Moore instead.
Weitz returned to autobiographical fiction. His novel Friends in High Places is about an honest German citizen who ends up in the Brownshirts, and later became a cult best-seller in 1982 amongst German youth. Indeed Weitz was decorated with the First Class Order of Merit by the Federal Republic of Germany, and became well acquainted with Richard von Weizsäcker, the President, who even offered him the chance to become a German citizen again.
Two other books, however, marked out Weitz as a historian of the Nazi period. He wrote Hitler's Diplomat, a biography of the third Reich foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, and its sequalesque, Hitler's Banker, about the president of the Reichsbank, Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht.
Weitz was repeatedly taunted about reconciling the vacuous occupation of sale of navy blazers, and researching the bon vivant, von Ribbentrop, but he saw no class, "Who else but a fashion designer would understand such a worldly man?" Weitz certainly comprehended the Nazis genius for the projection of personal image though the use of propaganda and clothing, and how clothing communicates, and, though never a major historian established a sufficiently solid reputation, such that, as a researcher, the president of Germany consulted him on the subject.
Towards the end of the century, Weitz still now fully mature continued to glance back. He traded in his sketchpad for a writing tablet. He exchanged his Singer for an Olivetti electric.
Instead Weitz embarked on his searing and insightful study of Hitler's diplomat, von Ribbentrop, who rather than being a real aristocrat ,was a cosmopolitan, a champagne merchant, and dexterous social animal, well suited to Weitz's own psychology. The parallels between von Ribbentrop and Weitz are apparent, but further transparency suggest that many people in the fashion industry could easily become fascists, if not already. This realization cut too close for the mercenary press and designer hoi-poli who fancied themselves above it all. As Weitz declared upon being challenged, “Who but a fashion designer would understand a social climber? I wanted to write about the Nazis through the eyes of somebody I might have met at a cocktail party. I have sat in rooms for the last 40 years talking to people who sat at dinner tables with Hitler. The Ribbentrops went to the same resorts, played on the same tennis courts, wore the same clothes as my parents.” Other connections were more unsettling for Weitz, while looking through Ribbentrop's family albums at the National Archives in Washington, "I felt slightly embarrassed because the albums look exactly like my families," he is quoted, perhaps having a there but for the grace of God go I moment. Ribbentrop was the ultimate go-getter, an aristocrat who became enamored of Hitler. Having no ideology or scruples, Ribbentrop used everything and everyone to ingratiate himself with the Führer, says Weitz, simply because "he wanted to be terribly important in the world. Eventually, that's what he got."
As Weitz himself put it himself on the 1992 publication of Hitler's Diplomat, his biography of Joachim von Ribbentrop, “Find me another fashion designer who was born in Germany, served in the OSS (Office of Strategic Services) and knows the Nazi Party to the point where many people including the President of Germany consult him about it, and I'll show you a lousy fashion designer!"
Hitler’s Diplomat isn't merely the portrait of an opportunist. Weitz was pursuing a longtime fascination with his fatherland, and how it came to be seduced by a madman. Weitz managed to evoke Ribbentrop's world thanks to his own privileged background and several years of intense and studious research. Weitz interviewed scores of actual eyewitnesses, including Ribbentrop's 80-year-old former secretary, who he knew in Germany before and during Nazism. This made his book, a living document, not just a historical analysis.
The book was largely well received, The New York Times Book Review proclaimed “His new book, Hitler's Diplomat, a dispassionate, detailed biography of Joachim von Ribbentrop, the onetime champagne salesman who became Adolf Hitler's foreign minister may bring even more cachet to the Weitz name”…”its a thorough, engaging work of designer craftsmanship that guides readers through Ribbentrop's life, up to his execution by hanging in 1946 for complicity in the Third Reich's reign of terror.” In a 1992 interview with The New York Times, Mr. Weitz said he could not count the number of times he was asked how he reconciled the dichotomy between designing and writing about such serious topics. ''As Shakespeare said, 'One man in his time plays many roles,' and who else but a fashion designer would understand such a worldly man?''
The Times of London praised Weitz's "keen, discerning understanding of most of the cast of clowns, rogues and psychopaths who inhabit his elegantly written pages.”
It certainly sold well. Some however were less kind, practically insouciant, the prestigious review Foreign Affairs going so far as to call it a trivial, chatty bio of Hitler's instrument for foreign policy, drawn essentially from a scant number of published sources, and marked by factual errors and an a historical perspective. Well, I’d like to see them sew a dress.
One wonders what those hard-nosed book reviewers were doing during the war. By 1943, Weitz’s fluency in German landed him a job with the Voice of America. Weitz joined the Army, and then became a U.S. citizen, at age 21, after which he was assigned to the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA. Working as an undercover espionage agent, he infiltrated enemy lines in France, and worked with the German Resistance, including the officers who plotted the unsuccessful assassination attempt on Hitler in 1944. He frequently crossed through Europe, and ended the Second World War billeted with military intelligence in a villa outside Munich. After leaving the OSS, Weitz was among the first troops who liberated the concentration camp at Dachau. "To me, the Holocaust means that grim, horrible day I can never forget." If it sounds like the synopsis of a Hollywood film, like The Eiger Sanction, Where Eagles Dare or Inglorious bastards, they pale in comparison.
In 1991, his company, based in grand offices at 600 Madison Avenue, had an estimated turnover of $250 million, and that was long after the glory years.
Mixed reviews did not deter Weitz from embarking on yet another long odyssey of research in the archives of America and Europe, research he admitted he found personally painful, to write his last book, a portrait of Hjalmar Schacht, Hitler's Banker, which was published in 1998.
Weitz skillfully let his name generate money by itself, using witty advertisements to maintain a high public profile. A skilled entrepreneur with a fine honed ability to self promote, a poster on the back of New York buses announced, for example, "She ditched him, John Weitz ties and all". For a while, the striking designer posed for his own ads, but it was the quirky, quotes-only ones, which he created with the ad agency C.J. Herrick Associates, that really created a buzz. "The idea is to amuse without annoying and make for a little adult entertainment." The rarely self-effacing Weitz Said, "My favorite is the one that reads, 'Cute.' 'What? The one wearing the John Weitz tie?' 'No, the one standing next to him.'
The Weitz’ had two sons of their own, Christopher and Paul, who if the apples do not fall from the tree are renaissance talents themselves and would later go onto write, the screenplays, produce and direct films like “American Pie” “About A Boy” and “The Vampire Diaries”. His sons remembered Ingmar Bergman taking them to the circus, and film directors John Huston and Billy Wilder dropping in for coffee as "just nice old men around the house every once in a while". The boys' chief complaint about their father was that he made them wear blue blazers with insignias. Like Weitz, they too were educated in England and seem capable of everything, whether acting in Chuck & Buck writing the script for Pixar’s Antz or demonstrating their skill as gourmet chefs. They're also these scholarly, erudite guys. Like their father they have been described as directors who read Trollope between set-ups. Men that balance retrained Anglophile high culture and American commercial success. “Our father kept saying, you know Merchant Ivory is looking for some decent writers. He thought it was a disaster. Well, doesn't Merchant Ivory need someone to write their films? We did American Pie instead of Howard’s End II. But our dad is proud of us anyway” In fact, anyone who fancies a foretaste of the frank vulgarity, shock tactics and brutally embarrassing honesty of the Weitz brothers' American Pie only needs to read their fathers novels to see where that brilliant vulgarity was bred, it was their fraternal inheritance.
On October 4th of 2002, at age 79, Weitz passed way. The cause was cancer. Surviving Weitz was his wife Susan Kushner, his daughter Karen, and Robert, from his first marriage to Sally Blauner and his sons Paul and Christopher.
At the time of his death, Weitz was already planning another historical book, about the Gestapo. As usual, the subject wasn’t nearly as important to the testimonial Weitz as the setting. Writing about Hitler's Germany, Weitz said, is less an obsession than a duty. "If you are a witness to anything that needs to be set straight,” then you must tell about it." Unfinished, the novel based was based on the life of the World Heavyweight Champion boxer Max Schmeling, who heroically saved Jewish lives during the Second World War.
Awards
Sports Illustrated award, 1959
NBC Today Show award, 1960
Caswell-Massey awards, 1965-1966
Harper's Bazaar Medallion, 1966
Moscow Diploma, 1967
International Best Dressed List Hall of Fame 1971 until death
Coty American Fashion Critics award, 1974
Cartier Design award, 1981
Mayor's Liberty medal, New York, 1986
First Class Order of Merit, Germany, 1988
Dallas Menswear Mart award, 1990
Fashion Institute of Technology President's award, 1990.
Books By John Weitz
· Sports Clothes for Your Sports Car, New York, 1959.
· The Value of Nothing, New York & London, 1970.
· Man in Charge, New York, 1974.
· Friends in High Places, New York, 1982.
· Hitler's Diplomat, London, 1992.
· Hitler's Banker: Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht, New York, 1997.
Articles by John Weitz
· "Auto Motives," in the New York Times Magazine, 27 March 1988.
· "Jocks and Nerds: Men's Style in the Twentieth Century" (book review), in the New York Times Book Review, 3 December 1989.
· "Home Away from Home," in New York Magazine, 19 February 1990.
· "Fashion Statements," in Town & Country (New York), July 1994.
Books about John Weitz
· Bender, Marilyn, The Beautiful People, New York, 1968.
Articles about John Weitz
· Talley, André Leon, "John Weitz," in Interview (New York), March 1983.
· Gross, Michael, "Design for Living," in GQ, September 1985.
· Ferrari, Lynn, "John Weitz: Image of Distinction," in Millionaire, December 1987.
· Brady, James, "In Step with John Weitz," in Parade Magazine, 31 July 1988.
· Christy, Marian, "A Stylist with the Power of Politeness," in the Boston Globe, 9 April 1989.
· Harris, Joyce Saenz, "The Novel Life of John Weitz," in the Dallas Morning News (Texas), 8 April 1990.
· Simon, Cecelia Capuzzi, "Can You Explain John Weitz?" in the New York Observer, 10 September 1990.
· Parola, Robert, "The Way It Was: John Weitz," in DNR, 22 May 1992.
· Van Lenten, Barry, "Menswear Designer Pioneers: John Weitz," in DNR, 18 January 1995.
· Taffin, William E., "In the Beginning…Menswear Designer John Weitz Helps Start the Men's Sportswear Revolution," in DNR, 18 January 1995.
· Flanagan, William G., and Diana Merelman, "Tribalwear," in Forbes, 5 May 1997.
· Murray, David, "Hitler's Banker: Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht," in the New York Times Book Review, 25 January 1998.
· Horyn, Cathy, "Growing up Weitz," in New York Times Magazine, 20 February 2000.
"Dress is a form of tribalism; people wear what their tribe wears…executives, blue-collar workers, undertakers, accountants. They want to feel tribally appropriate. Distinguishing yourself within your tribe is a matter of style, not fashion." John Weitz
