Mester, meanwhile, had other headaches. Once the Los Angeles ad people came in, he claims, "We started splitting off into armed camps. Jane cleared everything through Friedman and them, even department store ads. I got a call from her late one night -- she sounded very upset -- saying that Saks was going to run some terrible ad in the papers. Sexist, I presume. I remember thinking to myself, Something's wrong here -- Saks simply does not do things in bad taste. But they were calling the shots. The point is, this [kind of thing] caused weeks of chaos at a point when we hardly needed another distraction. And it happened time and time again."
With the winds of war blowing all around him, Mester clung to the anchor of his personal relationship with Fonda. When she came east, she had dinner at his home with his wife and children, and even spent a day with his father talking about his life. When the went west, he was welcomed to the Hayden/Fonda house in Santa Monica. At L'Hermitage, a fashionable Los Angeles hotel Mester had frequented many times in the course of his travels for Capri, he reveled in his newfound stature as leotard maker to the star. "Let me tell you," he explains, "it's a whole different experience there when Jane Fonda calls your room four times a day and leaves messages. Was I dazzled by it all? Sure."
Summer was down time for the company anyway, so there was no great public concern about the seasonal layoffs that sent most of Capri's work force packing in May 1984. Mester even booked an additional $3 million worth of orders in June -- a final spasm of hope, as it turned out, before the company went into its death throes. Behind the scenes, things looked bleak. Friedman and Fonda were putting as much distance between themselves and Mester as they could without disavowing the campaign entirely, and the prickly Aldredge had come to feel like a pariah in her own showroom. At Capri, those left behind were working double and triple shifts. From vice-presidents to shipping clerks, they rallied around Mester, some because they felt for him personally, others out of longtime loyalty to his father and Capri.
Mester kept trying. He trimmed his sales force, announced price rollbacks for an abbreviated spring '85 line, and discussed options ranging from new bank loans to selling the company outright. He made overtures to such mass merchandisers as Sears, Roebuck & Co. and J.C. Penney Co., which he felt would stand by his product more faithfully than the department stores. To his consternation, Fonda's people nixed that strategy, fearing it would dilute the value of her name on any future clothing line. In July, his moment of reckoning came. Capri was $8 million in the hole to Century Factors and another $2 million or so in unsecured debt to its suppliers. By then, he says, "The trust was gone."
"In fairness to [Century]," Mester notes, "they were not the Chase Manhattan Bank. The debt was there in black and white, and it was my debt. We must have come up with a hundred plans [for rescuing the company], but they weren't interested in any plans that came from me. They pulled the plug, then the creditors filed against us."
It would be another three months or so before the patient breathed its last. As late as last November, a core group of seven or eight executives remained on hand, trying to find the means to salvage Capri. Finally, Ron Mester walked into the office one morning and called them all together. His heart was no longer in this, he said; it was time for him -- for all of them -- to move on to something else. With that, Capri's books, and its doors, were closed for good.
Jane Fonda is reticent about the demise of her exercisewear line and the company that fell with it, except to say that Capri "got swept away by the Fonda name and tried to move too far, too fast. There were a lot of objective factors [in the line's failure] that combined with the inherent weakness within the company itself." Her spokesman, Steven Rivers, says flatly that "Capri couldn't fulfill its obligations" and insists that "the problems weren't with [Fonda's selection] principles, they were with the company." Rivers also points out that Fonda had a limited amount of leverage to begin with: "She didn't control the books or the management," he avers," and that was a frustrating lesson for her to learn."
Lee Friedman, who is looking around for a new Fonda workout-wear licensing deal, bumps into ironies every day. "All the women at my health club love Capri Beachwear," he smiles, "because [Capri] put out great clothes you can get for half price now. They bounce over in their Workout outfits and ask me, 'When's Capri gonna make some more?' I tell 'em we're working on something a little simpler. Maybe just leotards."
Ron Mester also labors at simpler tasks. One may be a book about the Fonda campaign and the lesson that "getting mesmerized by the glamour doesn't make good business sense." For the moment, however, he's pursuing a second career in real estate development. "Right now," he says, "I feel as good about [real estate] as the day I met Jane Fonda."
"This whole thing was never about Jane Fonda in the first place," throws in Judi Roaman, who now runs an East Hampton, Long Island, clothing boutique. "She was a part of it, but it was a line of bodywear, pure and simple."
Well, yes and no. The "whole thing" surely was about Jane Fonda, at least to the extent that it was her name that lit up the stage on which so many other players came to dream. Nobody dreamed bigger -- or lost bigger -- than Ron Mester. Not Friedman, who walked away with $250,000. Not Fonda, who pocketed an amount Mester estimates at several hundred thousand dollars.
Roaman, an old colleague of Friedman's, thinks Mester makes an awfully convenient fall guy for a lot of second-guessers. "If Lee's so smart and Ronnie's so dumb," she asks, "how come Lee picked him? And where was Jane's support when [Capri] was going under? I've been around this business, and Ronnie's not your typical 'garmento.' He's a nice man and a straight shooter. Even when he could have, he never burned me. If Ronnie wanted to go to the beach tomorrow and sell knishes, I'd go with him."
Workout!!!, the shop Roaman owns, was specifically designed for the Jane Fonda clothes. Not much bigger than a broom closet, it is a small specialty store where customers can pick through dozens of coordinates and seek personal advice from a ready sales staff. On a back corner shelf, piled up in no particular order, lie bits and pieces of the bodywear line that once starred at the Shubert. It is, of course, heavily marked down. The rest of the inventory, manufactured abroad, seems to be moving OK.
