Jane Fonda starred in the marketing campaign for her ill-fated line of exercisewear. But Ron Mester's company landed the leading role in the ensuing tragedy.
Even the people who lost heavily on the Jane Fonda Workouts clothing line -- loss of money, loss of face, loss of composure, loss of job, loss of company -- agree that the evening of November 7, 1983, was one of the magic moments of their lives. On that night, in New York's fabled Sam S. Shubert Theatre, where Michael Bennett's A Chorus Line had just celebrated its tenth anniversary, an elite audience of retail buyers and executives, garment industry nabobs, and assorted media moguls sat through a fashion premiere the likes of which Seventh Avenue had seldom seen.
The show cost $250,000 to produce and had all the trappings of a mini-Broadway musical. Bennett himself directed it; his choreographers choreographed it; his dancers danced in it. Jane Fonda, the Academy Award-winning actress and political activist, was honorary mistress of ceremonies. Theoni V. Aldredge, the Tony Award-winning costume designer, was creative director. But the evening's real headliners, up from wardrobe to take center stage, were the clothes themselves, prancing through the klieg lights in explosions of lilac nylon and pink spandex. It was, said one participant, "the highest of highs, a night to remember."
Probably no one enjoyed himself more that evening than Ron Mester, the 40-year-old president of Capri Beachwear Inc. It was Capri, after all, that was to manufacture the new line under a license from Fonda herself -- and it was the new line, Mester figured, that would rescue his company from its financial doldrums. Not that Capri was in anything like desperate straits; on the contrary, it was one of the largest bathing-suit manufacturers in the country, with $20 million in sales, 500 employees, and a stellar reputation in its industry. But its sales curve had begun to flatten out, and recently a number of buyout offers from would-be suitors had come across the transom. Mester, who had taken over managerial reins from his father, the company founder, saw the Fonda deal as a golden opportunity to put his own mark on Capri and to help the company regain the luster it had once known.
"Like my father, I'm pretty conservative," Mester says today in a voice that still vibrates with the emotion of the moment. "But I love the theater, all the performing arts. What a thrill it was to be standing on that stage!" That night, Jane Fonda introduced him to the cheering crowd as "my new friend and partner who is bringing me into the rag business." She also had his father take a bow from the audience. There was applause. There were standing ovations.
House lights, please.
Eighteen months later, a somber Ron Mester sits in a hotel coffee shop off Exit 46 of the Long Island Expressway and fiddles with the dregs of a Coke. Gone are the dancers, the cameras, and the hoopla. Gone, too, is all the aggravation that went with them -- the bomb threats, the shipping nightmares. Gone -- no, erased -- is Capri Beachwear, the family jewel. Mester pats his briefcase, which holds liquidation papers on a company that was $10 million in debt when it staggered into bankruptcy court on August 3, 1984, the day the music died.
"I remember sitting in a New York coffee shop just like this one with Jane," Mester says quietly, his eyes half closed. "People walked up and told her she'd changed their lives. As a celebrity, Jane has an order of magnitude way beyond anything I've ever been around. People were in awe of Jane Fonda. I was in awe of Jane Fonda. But she's human. She makes mistakes, too."
So did he. "I'm my own best critic," he says several times, kicking himself for "reacting, not acting," then adding, "My worst mistake was running my own company as if I worked for someone else." Yet he bristles at the notion that he was the sole architect of the clothing line's collapse. Asked to comment on his critics' view that Ron Mester had been done in by his own greed, promising too much to too many too fast, he picks up his glass and drains it.
"I used to attribute it to greed," he says. "I don't anymore. When you see something on the horizon that looks that good, is it greed to chase it? I don't think so." He looks out the window at a hard rain that is beginning to convert the hotel parking lot into a swimming pool. "You know," he sighs, "as I think about it, this has been one hell of a year."
Sipping a Perrier in a mid-Manhattan restaurant, Lee Friedman recalls the sequence of events that first led him to connect Fonda with Mester and Capri -- "my Watergate," he calls it now.
"After the success of her books and tapes," says the New York City-based licensing agent, whose other licensees include Alvin & the Chipmunks and the late martial-arts hero Bruce Lee, "I went to Jane's lawyer and begged them to do a clothing line. I mean, it was so logical. I even brought them a package that included Theoni and Bennett. Jane liked the idea, but she wanted to shop around for the right agent. In six months or so, she came back and gave us the go-ahead."
In peddling the license to a succession of major sportswear manufacturers, though, Friedman encountered heavy resistance. Fonda had laid down two ironclad conditions: The manufacturer had to be fully unionized, and every piece of clothing had to be made in the United States. Each time they were on the verge of signing with a Russ Togs Inc. or a Cluett, Peabody & Co., explains Friedman, one issue or the other defeated them. So when a friend mentioned Capri to him, and when he had checked out Capri's offices and plants and had gotten Jane's approval . . . well, why not Capri?
"The weird thing about [the first] meeting," adds Friedman, "is we signed the contract literally without changing a word. Ron said three words: 'I'll take it.' The other contracts [we negotiated] had so many lines and clauses changed you could hardly read 'em."
Mester, in fact, considered the contract to be "perfectly straightforward." It obliged Capri to pay Fonda 7% of the sales for the rights to the line. Fonda also got her choice of designers to work with Theoni Aldredge, who was already on board; approval rights on the number of individual pieces; and veto power over the appointment of a president to head up the Workouts company, which would be a wholly owned subsidiary of Capri.
The appointment issue proved problematic. Both parties realized that Capri lacked experience in the sportswear/fashion world, and that it had no track record in dealing with the big department stores. Of the candidates interviewed for the Workouts job, however, Fonda couldn't find one she felt comfortable with ("Jane was really turned off by the garment-center heavies," says one insider), and Mester couldn't find one he thought he could afford. Finally, he offered himself for the job. After some debate, it was agreed to give him a short at it, a decision many later publicly regretted. Counters Mester, "Once things got rolling, we didn't need someone [who had] clout with the department stores. The mere mention of Jane's name was enough to open any door we wanted to walk through. All we needed was a great sales force, and we had that."
