I read "Wear and Tear: The Threads of My Life" by Tracy Tynan. She is a retired costume designer who worked on some big Hollywood movies like "Blind Date" and "The Chamber," as well as low budget ones like Alan Rudolph's "Choose Me." Her husband is the director Jim McBride, and she did the costumes for some his movies too, including "Breathless" and "The Big Easy." Her parents were both writers: Elaine Dundy, the novelist and biographer from New York, and Kenneth Tynan, the theater critic and celebrity profiler from England. They both led very active (and drunken) social-climbing lives and had busy careers; she was an only child, more or less raised by a series of au pairs in London and New York until she was sent away to boarding school, which she loved as an escape from her empty home life.
After her parents divorced, her mother spent 5 years at Austen Riggs, where Tracy would visit her on school vacations, and her father eventually remarried and moved to Los Angeles. She always had to find her own way in life, and she has many interesting stories to tell and is a decent writer. Her honesty about her relationships and struggles is sometimes funny and sometimes sad. Her father threw a big party for her 21st birthday, which inevitably turned into a party for himself and his celebrity friends; he actually proposed postponing the party for a couple of weeks so Princess Margaret (whom Tracy had never met) could attend, but it ended up going ahead as scheduled on her actual birthday without Margaret (a few years later, Margaret did attend Kenneth's memorial service at St. Paul's in London). When her father was dying of emphysema (and still smoking in the hospital) and she told him for the first time that she loved him, he poured himself a glass of champagne and quipped, "This is beginning to sound like a bad hospital movie." In the 80s, Dundy moved to L.A. to be closer to her daughter and family, but because of her mother's bipolar disorder and narcissism, Tracy was unable to spend more than 20 minutes at a time with her and rarely saw her. When Dundy died at 86, she left a list of celebrity friends (including Gore Vidal and Gloria Vanderbilt) she wanted Tracy to notify; when she called them she found that, "I was comforting them instead of vice versa."
She uses her lifelong passion for clothes as a framework for the book: this can feel a bit forced, as many of the chapters don't have much to do with fashion, but the chapters about her own career are very interesting. When she was hired for "Choose Me," she met with Genevieve Bujold to discuss the costumes for her character, and they agreed to go with a lot of pink outfits; the budget was small, but Tynan spent a lot of time scouring costume shops and bringing pink clothes to Bujold's house for fittings, which went well. When the shooting started, Bujold told Tynan out of the blue that she no longer liked the pink plan, which left her scrambling to find replacement costumes for Bujold to approve (they mostly came from Tynan's own closet); part way through the shoot, Bujold apologized to Tynan, saying her nerves had been shot, and she agreed to wear some of the pink outfits. They became friends, and Bujold asked her to work as her stylist on her next movie, "Tightrope," and choose her dress when she presented an Oscar in 1985. Tynan said that in her 25 year career, Bujold was the only actor who ever apologized to her for difficult behavior. The nicest thing about her book is that her gift for sustaining long lasting friendships (including with many ex boyfriends) shines through, without any bragging. She comes across as a genuinely kind and lovely person who built a rich life without much guidance from mom and dad.
