Angie Barrett Does Not Use Butt Cream
Or so she says— and from the looks of her, she doesn’t need it. Although she once stole hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of clothes from Neiman’s—and did hard time in the state penitentiary—she’s clawed her way to the top of the Dallas socialite heap and now hosts her own reality TV show. Who says there are no second acts?
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Angie was on the arm of Bill Barrett, the Coors distributor and philanthropist. Bill had briefly met Angie soon after her arrest, when she was volunteering part-time for a foundation that raised money to pay for craniofacial surgeries for disadvantaged children. (The job, Angie said, was her way of trying to pay penance for what she had done at Neiman’s.) Bill told me that he thought the young woman, who was 31 years his junior, was “wonderful” and that he wanted to help her in some way. Once she went off to prison, he came to visit her, and on the day she was released, in 1987, he sent a limousine to Gatesville to pick her up, with a bottle of champagne in the backseat. Alas, prison officials required her to ride a Greyhound bus back to Dallas, Angie said, and, from there, take a taxi to her halfway house.
Angie said that the courtly, white-haired Bill was her “knight in shining armor.” But she said they did not have their first date until 1990, a year after Bill’s wife died from a long battle with cancer. Angie was then working as a flight attendant for Southwest Airlines, based out of Phoenix and then Houston, flying back late at night to Dallas, on a prop plane that carried canceled checks, so she would be able to see her daughters during the day. In those post-prison years, Angie said, she was living in near poverty, staying in a tiny duplex, driving a $600 Ford Escort, and eating airline peanuts for lunch and dinner. But all that changed with her marriage to Bill, in April 1992. He gave her a blue Jaguar as a wedding present, and for their honeymoon, they flew on the Concorde to Europe, where they rode the Orient Express and sailed on the Queen Elizabeth II.
They had no plans to return to the social scene. After their wedding, they moved to the far-off suburb of Colleyville, close to where Angie’s children lived with their father. Angie said the idea of being at a society party terrified her. “I was seeing a psychiatrist then because of the anxiety I felt whenever I saw people just looking at me when I went to the grocery store,” Angie said.
But after she made an agreement with Allen to regain custody of her daughters, she and Bill decided to return to Dallas, buying a grand two-story home in Highland Park on Beverly Drive, one of the city’s most exclusive streets. Her psychiatrist had been telling her that the time had come to live her life without feeling shame about her past. What’s more, her daughters had wanted to move back to Highland Park to be at their old schools and among their old friends. “I knew I couldn’t hide forever,” Angie told me.
With Bill’s encouragement, Angie began using his money to buy the most expensive tables at a variety of events to support local charities and the arts. She also became an underwriter for some of the bigger luncheons and galas, paying the entire cost of everything from the food to the entertainment.
In Texas, buying your way back in by donating to charity had always been an acceptable way to rejoin society. But needless to say, Angie was not welcomed back with open arms. Some socialites said that under no circumstances would they lower themselves to speak to a thief, especially one who had stolen so much merchandise from the Store, as the downtown Neiman’s was reverentially called. Other socialites were no doubt horrified to see Angie for a different reason. These were women who six years earlier had stocked their wardrobes with the half-priced dresses that Heide Levy had sold them. They couldn’t help but wonder if Angie knew their names. (Angie said she knew no names of Levy’s customers.) Was it possible, they asked, that Angie might try to blackmail them for her silence? “God, you should have heard the talk,” recalled Gloria McCall Godat, a veteran socialite who befriended Angie. “People were simply in disbelief that she had returned to circulate among them.”
Yet for all the talk, no one tried too hard to keep Angie out of their parties. “Oh, no,” said Yvonne Crum, another Dallas socialite. “When it came time for these women who were gossiping about Angie to chair their own charity events, Angie was the first person they would call, because they knew she would support them. They wouldn’t pose for a picture with her or invite her to their homes for dinner. But they didn’t mind at all asking her for a two-hundred-thousand-dollar check.”
Angie insisted to me that she was not trying to buy her way back into the other socialites’ favor. “I believed these events were important,” she said. “They kept a lot of charities and nonprofits from closing their doors.” But she also admitted that she kept coming to the parties because she loved them. This was indeed her chance to step into that glamorous world that she had seen only from a distance, years before, at Diana Strauss’s dinner for Robert Redford. “I loved the atmosphere. I loved wearing the couture dresses. Going to parties was what I liked to do. Should I have to apologize for that?”
Dallasites who kept up with the social scene only by reading the society columns were never given a clue by the writers about who she once was. (“Why rub it in?” an editor of one Dallas society publication told me. “There are lots of socialites who have had rather interesting pasts that we don’t mention.”) Instead, they learned about Angie walking the runway with other socialites at a fashion show during a fund-raising lunch or getting some award with her husband for contributing generously to the United Way or some other organization. At one point in 1997, she and Bill were seen so often at so many events that one of the Morning News’ society writers suggested to her readers that the couple could very well have been cloned.
What no one expected, however, was for Angie to return to the downtown Neiman Marcus, the scene of her crime. According to one former vice president at Neiman’s, the company’s policy had remained absolute through the nineties: no Angie Barrett. Security guards at the store were even given her photo, he said, to make sure they didn’t let her slip past them.
But in July 1999, Angie’s friend Shelle Bagot, one of Dallas’s most respected fashion retailers, took the job as manager of the downtown store, and apparently some conversations went on in the executive offices about Angie’s social rehabilitation, as well as her love of expensive clothes. (Neither Bagot nor any other Neiman’s official would comment for this story.) One day Bagot called Angie and casually invited her to drop by and see the new collections.
“I took the elevator up to the second floor [where the top designers’ clothes are showcased], and I was queasy,” Angie said. But then she took several deep breaths, gazed at the elegant dresses adorning the mannequins, and finally picked out some Yves Saint Laurent and Michael Kors. And just like that, the most infamous thief in Neiman Marcus history became one of its most prized customers. “I thought, possibly, for the first time, people would start thinking of me as a person and not as a felon,” Angie told me. “I thought the scarlet letter would finally start to fade.”
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