Thus was the stage set for one of the great melodramas in recent retailing history. Filling out the cast were Susan Schneider, late of Capezio Ballet Makers Inc., as design and production coordinator; Judi Roaman, ex-Bloomingdale's buyer and an old crony of Friedman's, first as consultant, then as executive vice-president of merchandising; the Santa Monica, Calif.-based political consulting and advertising agency of Zimmerman, Galanty & Fiman, marketing ally of Fonda's husband, Tom Hayden, in several political campaigns; public relations consultants Roz Rubenstein and Carol Lupo; and sales executives Mel Nathanson and Phil Samuels.
All they needed was money. To bankroll the manufacturing, Mester turned to Century Factors, a longtime associate of Capri's. As collateral, Mester pledged Capri's assets, and some real estate. "We were always on the line for everything," says Mester, "but it really didn't seem like much of a risk at the time."
At the outset, according to Judi Roaman, "There was no negativity at all. We were a nice group of talented, motivated people all pulling in the same direction." Jane was flying to New York at least once a month and impressing the troops with her no-nonsense manner and her ideas on how the clothes should function. Theoni was whipping out fabulous designs, eventually expanding the line to nearly 200 items, from leg warmers and tunic tops to baseball jerseys and wrap-around skirts. "Work out in it, walk out in it" was the theme they gave this coordinated, layered look. When the department stores showed up for the first round of purchasing, the momentum looked down-right unstoppable.
"They were lined up outside our office and banging down the doors," says Mester. "Bloomingdale's locked me in a room and made me promise they could have the line. I mean, it was nuts."
Mester thought he would do around $4 million in sales the first year. He booked $7 million worth of business the first week after the Shubert Theatre premiere. Suddenly, he had visions of a $30-million, $40-million, even $50-million-a-year business. Everybody, it seemed, wanted Jane: Jane's clothes, Jane's look, Jane's charisma, whatever they could get. At a cocktail reception for the top brass of Federated Department Stores, Fonda walked into the room and stopped conversation so completely she might have been shooting an E. F. Hutton commercial. She told the executives, with a touch of irony, that they were "smart" to book the summer collection, even though the spring line hadn't been shipped yet.
"These guys were personally signing million-dollar orders," remembers Susan Schneider. "It was as if they were all in some bizarre contest to see who could spend the most -- with the winner getting Jane herself as the door prize."
By the end of February, with the stores panting for delivery, Mester had $14 million worth of orders on hand and a publicity blitz that wouldn't quit. Two separate road shows were mobilized to make the rounds of participating retailers, one starring Jane, the other her stepmother, Shirlee Fonda. Zimmerman, Galanty & Fiman had filmed three 30-second spots to launch the line's $1-million television campaign. To be sure, there was a leveling off in the bodywear market. No matter: All of them fervently believed that Jane Fonda Workouts was primed to take the industry by storm.
The storm they got was not quite what they were looking for. From that moment on it might as well have been typhoon season.
The first signs of trouble appeared early, when retailers received only bits and pieces of what they had seen at the Shubert. The times they did get came late, when competing stores were already heavily discounting their spring fashions. Behind the delay, the problems stretched from supplier to showroom. Lieda Mills, another old associate of Capri's, was under contract to furnish most of the fabric, but, according to Mester, it was overwhelmed by the size of the order and couldn't deliver on time. At the manufacturing end, Capri had put five of its own plants to work producing about half the line items. But many of the pieces were far trickier to sew than bathing suits, a reality of production life that eluded the inexperienced Mester. The old this-thing-can't-miss mentality was quickly proving infectious -- and lethal. Mester, who was as caught up in it as anybody, found that his contractors were depressingly blase about the delays. "They had their own schedules," he says ruefully, "and they thought this Jane Fonda thing was a bottomless pit. Unfortunately, the whole [collection] had to be coordinated to hit the stores together, and it did not."
Friedman has a rather different take on what was going on.
"Ronnie Mester lied to us," he says flatly. "He couldn't give us a straight answer on anything. It was like a movie without a director. Jane liked Ronnie, she really did, but he had no idea what he was doing. By the time we realized that, it was already too late. You do not promise delivery dates and expect to keep the stores [in line] when they can't be met."
The clothes' steep sticker prices only compounded the line's problems. The union labor Fonda had insisted on was expensive, as were the materials, and even though Mester had set his gross margins low, he ran into consumer resistance. At $40 a sweatshirt -- far more for a complete ensemble -- the garmenets may have been union made, but they strained the wallets of most working women. On the marketing end, department stores were confused about where to put the line. Some designed special Workout boutiques, others stuck individual items in Hosiery, Bodywear, or Sportswear. There, for the most part, they sat.
As inventory backed up, stores began to demand markdown money and allowances on returns, and Capri began to feel the pinch. "There was never any cushion of money," observes Roaman. "We didn't build up our prices so we could discount them later. We got the best available materials and manufactured them under the terms of the agreement, trying to make a decent profit. But one squeeze led to another, and pretty soon we were squeezing all the way down the line."
Nor did it help the stores' moods -- let alone their sales -- when a wave of controversy broke over Jane's promotional tour. Led by a cadre of Vietnam vets still embittered by Fonda's antiwar activities and her much-publicized trip to Hanoi, protesters in several cities picketed stores with signs like "Fonda, 55,000 GIs Martyred in Viet Nam Can't Be Here" and "What A Travesty -- To Buy Clothes From A Turncoat." One man wrote to an Indiana newspaper likening the Workout retailers to "money changers in the Temple." The worst, however, was in South Florida, where a local radio station whipped up anti-Fonda sentiment in a series of broadcasts to the ultra-conservative Cuban community. The Miami department store Burdines promptly called off Fonda's appearances after getting telephoned bomb threats. Determined to exercise her rights to "free speech and free enterprise," Fonda showed up anyway, but by then the columnists were more wrapped up in her politics than they were in her leotards.
