S l e e p e r

A Review of Porthault Sheets

How close can you come to the rich? Can you come close enough to touch their sleeping faces?

Holly Golightly might have dreamed of D. Porthault. Poor Holly: You'll recall Truman Capote never even let her get to Tiffany's for breakfast. She was born on a dirt floor in Arkansas, moved to an army cot off Fifth Avenue, and, as far as we know, vanished into a bedroll in a tent someplace in Africa. But if there had been a happy ending, it might have involved a private chambre with Porthault sheets. Capote supposedly said the real difference between rich people and everyone else is their champagne and their D. Porthault linens. Audrey Hepburn herself surely napped on them.

Jackie Onassis loved them; Catherine Deneuve has them; also Gwyneth Paltrow. And, guess who.

"That's so much merde."

No, Holly, it's true.

(Miss Golightly would have loved the tech geeks!)

To see these sheets for yourself, take the 6 train uptown and ring the buzzer of the small, silent shop on 69th, just off Madison. Through the glass door, down the few white-carpeted steps, you'll find the linens and coverlets coveted by — well, not many people yet, owing to their price ($2,400 for a queen set, to start), the fact that you only hear about them via whispered confidences, and, surely, their... ugliness?

"Très fou!"

Listen, Holly, I am just not feeling it.

I squinted hard at the scatterings of pink hearts, the lurid, but not quite lurid enough, flowers. I love Billy Baldwin. I get Dorothy Draper. But I can't make sense of this. Maybe a Lilly Pulitzer dimmed by decades of four gimlets every afternoon of middle age?

It's impossible to imagine sleeping, napping, or even passing out on these sheets. They are as stiff as new thousand-dollar bills. They feel like they would crack if you lay down on them.

The heart softens at the idea of the orders for custom sets of linens ($4,000 and up) for palaces, chateaux, the White House, Balmoral, all handwritten in smudged pencil on yellowing tablets and sticking out of ancient file cabinets. Porthault is one of France's Entreprises du Patrimoine Vivant, or companies of living heritage. Its looms, in a tiny northern town, in humid toil, somehow manage to produce these sheets of unsurpassable smoothness and amazing hideousness!

And yet: K-mart, is what they bring to mind.

"Darling, you need a more expensive imagination!"

No, I don't. But anyway this tiny artisanal company has been bought by Brazos*, a private equity group headed by a coupla Americans. "Porthault," principal Bernard Carl says, "is one of the most massively underexploited brands out there." (Quel cowboy.) The seamstresses who embroider those yawny scalloped edges will soon be filing into a shiny new factory in Rieux.

Brazos wants to take sales from $7 million to $75 million in seven years. So get ready for sheetsploitation, Frette-style: "hospitality" quality linens at boutique hotels, sample sales with made-in-China Porthault baby bibs, which by the way already exist. "You have no idea how much people are willing to pay for the `Made In France' label," says Bernard Carl.

What do you think about that, Holly?

"Be anything but a coward, a pretender, an emotional crook, a whore: I'd rather have cancer than a dishonest heart. Which isn't being pious, just practical. Cancer may cool you, but the other's sure to. Oh, screw it, cookie — hand me my guitar."

I knew, in the end, that she wasn't the private equity type.

The irony of it all is that maybe Porthault will wind up with some better designs. Until that day, the verdict here must be: Fluff.

*In an odd twist, Brazos Group also now owns this writer's student loan.

Memorable Sleeps: Our Parents' Bedrooms

Before there were high-thread-count sheets, before there were mattresses thick as hay bales, back when people got their percale at Kresge's, swapped car keys at parties, and would have thought Duvets sang covers on K-Tel, there were our parents' bedrooms. The beds, indifferently covered with bedspreads the color of dried parsley or Etch-a-Sketch screens, were only of interest for jumping on. Otherwise they lay empty as Mayberry on any old afternoon.

You got married, you got a trousseau with white, glass-covered casseroles, some crocheted potholders, some functional towels — monogrammed, maybe — and sheets, and pillows. What kind of pillows? Rectangular pillows. Bed pillows, daughter. White, rectangular pillows that slowly yellowed and turned to sacks of cement and were never replaced. (They became fearsome weapons in pillow fights with the occasional visiting cousin.)

What went on in that bedroom was not connected with the bed. What went on in that bedroom? The energies and activities that created us existed and didn't exist, like the light in the refrigerator after you closed the door.

On any given day, my mother might be in there, in dimness, riding out a migraine, the strong small pill dissolving underneath her tongue. "I have a bad head," she would have said at breakfast, her tone a mix of resignation and apology. The day's activities were canceled. If it was Saturday, that meant not going to the synagogue, and I could (oh glee! sitting so still, because if I was noisy I would ruin it) watch cartoons softly downstairs.

You could tell the nadir had passed when you heard Canadian Public Radio coming through the bedroom door. The perky theme from As It Happens meant the world was returning. There would be pot lids coming down, and drawers shutting, and doors opening. Dinner was going to be french toast, or maybe pizza and sodas in the tall, pale-blue, gold-flecked booths of the restaurant so far away (a ten-minute drive, I realized, returning to that suburb as a grown woman).

I interrupted her migrainous confinement only once, to tell her what I saw on television: President Nixon had resigned. The bed was a plain square shape in the light-dark of a curtained summer afternoon. There was a washcloth on my mother's forehead. She didn't say anything. Part of me was disappointed, but mostly I was filled with purpose and importance, as if I were an Information Minister with intelligence so vital I could walk into any bedroom in the neighborhood, without even knocking, to announce it.

A Night Out With: Eider Duck

If you want to glimpse an eider, the duck whose rare down fills the loftiest, most etheral (and most expensive) comforters and pillows on earth, you have to go to Iceland, or at least Northumberland, Britain, where they're lured into nests by kindly and enterprising eiderdown farmers. Unless you happen to frequent a secret corner at a certain zoo in the Midwest.

Sleeper caught up with a female King Eider spinning placidly in the Puffin Coast. Was the reclusive dam hiding from luxury pillow makers? "We keep a couple of eiders here to mix it up a little with the puffins," a source close to the bird explained. (The eider declined to comment for this blog.) "When you have a habitat like this one [the Coast is a new, climate-controlled exhibit, worthy of a celebrity], if there's another species that thrives in it, well, we like to let it."

The eider kept floating away into the shadows, but I managed to get a look at the feathers. From even a few steps away, she looked to be a solid, unobtrusive pale brown, but up close her coloring was exquisite: fine striations of black among many shades of fawn, darker mocha, and chestnut. The pattern was clear and regular, and the feathers soft; the effect was like the finest tweed at Cesare Attolini in Naples.

And was the eider fluffy? Oh, yes, she was fluffy. You can tell from even my paparazzi shot how incredibly round this duck is. In person she looked to be the springiest, yet also most satiny, bird in creation.

There's no danger of a cashmere-goat-type fate awaiting her.* Eiderdown farming is humane. The ducks pluck their own inner down to line their nests, and it is harvested after the chicks hatch. There simply isn't enough eiderdown to ever meet any increased demand for the stuff. No wonder this King Eider's air of... privileged startlement?

After my Frette nightmare, it was a true spiritual correction to spend the evening in the company of this bird. Eider ducks make possible a sleep that surely cannot be enhanced by brand. That make you forget the too-shiny (like a badly dry-cleaned wool suit) word "brand." In The Awakening, Kate Chopin writes: "...as she snuggled comfortably beneath the eiderdown, a sense of restfulness invaded her such as she had not known before."

You may never have an eiderdown pillow, but you may, if you're fortunate, and you're passing through St. Louis, and the puffin keepers are interested and agreeable, be able to pet this bird.

* You haven't taken a moment to consider the bald goats shivering all over the planet in this, the Era of Cheap Cashmere?

Freud and the Two Beds!

Now listen. It's not really breaking news that Sigmund Freud was having an affair with his sister-in-law, Minna Bernays, who lived with Sigmund and Martha for 42 years, is it? Does this surprise you at all?

Let's move on to the important thing: The room at the Schweizerhaus, the Alpine inn the two shared. Room 11, to be exact.*

Sleeper isn't saying two beds are necessarily sexy, but isn't there something about the double feather puffs that makes you want to tumble all over them? Sigmund and Minna, side by side on their sofalets, he smoking, she teasing him with a stockinged leg? Splashing up in their twinnie sinks and, afterward, he snoring away in the clarifying Alpine air, she peacefully dormant across the two-inch divide?

It's not that they couldn't get a room with a king bed. It's that there were no king beds.

Lie back, my darlings, and think about it.

*Yes, this is it. The television is new. Sleeper wagers that, if it were available in 1898, Sigmund and Minna might have watched Animal Planet in the morning.