YOU HAVE TO SEEK OUT VAHRAM. IF you need to know about Wes Anderson, if you really must understand, then you have to find Vahram. Vahram knows. Oh, you can read the impossibly detailed scripts Anderson writes. You can watch his funny, melancholy movies. You can talk to his best friend and writing partner, Owen Wilson, or Owen's actor brother, Luke. If you don't mind waiting--and waiting--you can sit down with the filmmaker himself and discuss why he was obsessed by limousines as a child or why Linus is his favorite Peanuts character.
But to comprehend Wes Anderson, the 32-year-old writer-director who has been called the next Martin Scorsese by Martin Scorsese, you have to get into his head. And to get into his head, you have to get into his pants. That's where Vahram comes in.
Vahram is Anderson's tailor. His name rhymes with arm, but Anderson calls him "Varn," which rhymes with barn. Vahram doesn't care. Vahram knows Anderson's inseam, where he wants to be suppressed and where he wants to stick out. Vahram has touched Anderson where few other men would dare. As much as anyone, Vahram has taken Anderson's measure.
"I got a lot of customers with their own bugaboos," Vahram says. He is sitting in his Manhattan workshop, a narrow room stacked ceiling high with bolts of fabric. Most people, he says, want to be taller or thinner or broader in the shoulders. The six-foot-two-inch Anderson wants to be understood. "He wants to bring you into his world."
So far that world consists of three films: Bottle Rocket, Rush, more, and The Royal Tenenbaums, which comes to theaters December 14. Anderson's movies are comedies, but they are also sad, filled with messy emotions. Loss. Betrayal. Contrition. Regret. He finds laughs not in jokes but in juxtapositions. His movies aren't gross or mocking or savagely ironic. They are sincere, observant, nonjudgmental.
Anderson likes to wear traditional suits in wacky colors--a wardrobe whose meaning I've had time to ponder. For weeks I have hounded his assistant, his agent, his producer, and a phalanx of publicists connected with the movie studio releasing his new film. Everyone says Anderson is on board, excited to be interviewed. Finally he summons me to New York for a lunch meeting. Then he cancels lunch.
Vahram could be a character in one of Anderson's movies--wry, modest, very much his own man. His name, however you choose to say it, fits right in among the Dignans, the Royals, the Kumars, and the Pagodas who populate Anderson's films. His bearing, too, is Anderson-esque: He's a plain-talking guy who looks on the bright side and calls his father "Pop." When Vahram talks about clothes, it's as if he's run Anderson's psyche through his sewing machine.
Anderson has figured out that he can use wardrobe to alter reality. Wear a white turtleneck under your rust-colored suit jacket, and you are professorial. You are rakish. You are Carl Sagan. Wear a purple turtleneck with that same rust-colored jacket, and you are Sagan-ish, Sagan-like, but with a twist. People receive you with trepidation, perhaps, but also with curiosity and a willingness to be surprised. In Anderson's hands, weirdness is a tool to make you lean closer, to make you listen.
In Vahram's 5th Avenue shop, the tailor makes Anderson's seersucker and pin-striped suits. He cuts, tucks, and hems the cashmere herringbone suits and the fine-wale corduroy suits in royal blue, egg white, and burnt orange. "Not a lot of people are going to get this kind of color," Vahram says. That's why he has to order it special.
Vahram's suits fit Anderson like the tiny pinafore on the overgrown Alice in Wonderland. The shoulders are too narrow. The pant legs are abbreviated so, as Vahram puts it, "Wes's whole sock is showing." The jackets button over Anderson's sternum, and the pockets hit him high, just under his rib cage, so when he jams his hands in--which he often does--his long arms form two sideways Vs, like he's dancing the funky chicken.
"It's his own thing," Vahram says, pinching a swatch of corduroy between his thumb and forefinger. "He likes everything minimalist. I'm always screaming at him. He don't want to hear it. He knows what he wants in his head."
IN WES ANDERSON'S HEAD, THE COLORS ARE brighter, the bookshelves are meticulously ordered, the bunk beds aren't just made--they look like you could bounce a silver dollar off them. In Anderson's head, a grown man would wear a blue gingham bow tie and a yellow gingham pocket square at the same time. In Anderson's head, Formica would come in only one color--that yellow-beige-with-fake-wood-grain that elementary school desks are topped with--and ideally it would have someone's name scratched into it. In Anderson's head, the string hanging from the lightbulb in the hall closet would have a green Monopoly house knotted to the grabbing end, not because any moviegoer could possibly see it on the screen but because a child would have tied it there, years ago, before everyone grew up and moved away.
As much as any filmmaker working today, Anderson makes films that reflect a distinct sensibility. Some people think his love of detail is precious, but they're wrong. Anderson sees as a child sees--vividly, completely, as if for the first time. In Bottle Rocket and Rushmore, that focus helped him create a style that translates more as fable than as fiction. With a $25 million budget (more than twice that of Rushmore) and a large, big-name cast, The Royal Tenenbaums is his most ambitious and risky undertaking. It has a whimsical innocence that will be familiar to Anderson fans, but it also peers intently into life's dark corners.
Set in New York City, the film revolves around a family of troubled geniuses. Gene Hackman, the self-serving con man who is the Tenenbaum patriarch, yearns to reconnect with his oddball children. Hackman's estranged wife, an archaeologist played by Anjelica Huston, is falling for her clumsy, gingham-wearing accountant (Danny Glover). The three Tenenbaum siblings (Gwyneth Paltrow, Ben Stiller, and Luke Wilson) are over-the-hill prodigies whose relationships with friends (Owen Wilson) and lovers (Bill Murray) are overshadowed by past failures. They inhabit a world where bedroom doors have five deadbolts, the wallpaper sports galloping zebras, and the butler wears pink.
It's like a hyperreality he's creating," says Stiller, who was so eager to work with Anderson that he committed to The Royal Tenenbaums before reading the script.
"If all the colors and all the other atmosphere is more extreme," says Glover, "the connectedness between the characters seems to be heightened."
"Wes is so specific about these details, and they're very personal to him," says Paltrow, who as Margot Tenenbaum wears the same mink coat and heavy black eyeliner in nearly every scene. "On set he's very much the boss. Very much in control. He's created a situation where he literally controls everything."
Anderson grew up in Houston. His mom, a real estate agent, used to be an archaeologist. She and his dad, who runs an advertising agency, split up when he was in the fourth grade. About that time, a teacher discovered that the only way to get Anderson to behave in class was to let him produce his own plays. Later he wrote, directed, and shot his own Super 8 films, using cardboard boxes as sets and his two brothers as stars.
Anderson continues to surround himself with intimates. For each of his films he has hired director of photography Robert Yeoman, production designer David Wasco, costume designer Karen Patch, and composer Mark Mothersbaugh. Then there's his younger brother, Eric, an illustrator. For The Royal Tenenbaums Anderson imagined the zigzag-patterned carpets and the rotary telephones and described them to Eric. Sometimes Eric would misunderstand. His brother would gently correct his sketches. "He'd say, `No, that shower curtain was supposed to be clear, not pink,'" says Eric. "The details give the movie a credibility. But they also create a sort of fantasy. It's almost more information than life has, in a way. It's both credible and, in a pleasant way, knowingly incredible."
Vahram understands. "Almost all the jackets in the movie that were single-breasted, only the middle of the three buttons actually buttons," the tailor says of the costumes he made for the film. "But he wanted the buttonholes there for all three. You can't really see it on the screen. But he wanted it there. Because in his head, that's the jacket he wants."
