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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WELL, NOT QUITE. While more of the fete-setters did embrace Angie, others maintained their resentment at her attempts to reinvent herself as a socialite. Despite her world-class wardrobe—her bedroom closet is the size of a one-bedroom apartment—the members of the Crystal Charity Ball adamantly refused to vote her onto their annual list naming the ten best-dressed socialites in Dallas. (According to one well-placed source, the chairman of the luncheon was even given a special vote to eliminate one person from the ten-best-dressed list who he believed did not deserve to be there, which became known as the “Angie Barrett blackball vote.” A spokesman for Crystal Charity called the story “ridiculous.”) Reid Slaughter, the publisher of Park Cities People, a popular weekly newspaper that circulates through Highland Park and University Park, also ordered his staff to stop running “party pictures” of Angie in the newspaper’s society pages. Every time she appeared in the newspaper, he said, he would get calls and letters, mostly from older residents. “They’d all say the same thing: ‘Stop giving Angie Barrett so much attention!’ ‘The woman is an ex-con!’ ‘She’s not one of us!’ And you know, I had to agree with them. I didn’t dislike Angie Barrett. I disliked the concept of Angie Barrett, the idea that someone with no discernible talents could hype herself into a celebrity by throwing parties or by showing up at a bunch of parties or by writing checks to charities from her older husband’s vat of wealth that she had no hand in creating.”
When the announcement was made in 2000 that Angie’s eldest daughter, Alana, would be making her debut with Dallas’s prominent Idlewild Club, several Highland Park residents, who remembered the days when Idlewild catered only to old-money, conservative Dallas families, were disgusted. A few other parents presenting their daughters let it be known that they were not happy either. “These were people who refused to accept that Alana was very popular around Highland Park and that the young men who ran the club genuinely adored her,” Angie said. “What mattered to them, I guess, was that they were going to have to see me at all the debutante parties. There was so much bad-mouthing that I thought, as a joke, I should turn a get-acquainted luncheon that I was throwing for the other mothers into a white trash party, with broken-down cars in front of our house and wine served out of boxes.”
Instead, she not only threw an elegant lunch for the mothers (many of whom were also using their husbands’ money to achieve social status) but also created one of the most memorable balls in Dallas debutante history, chartering three jets and flying Alana, the other debutantes (except for a couple whose parents didn’t want them to go), and more than 160 other guests to Los Angeles, where Alana’s ball was held at the Skybar, on the top floor of the chic Mondrian Hotel. Painted across the bottom of the pool was the phrase “aLAana Confidential.” The Pointer Sisters performed a ninety-minute concert, and everyone then walked over to the hotel’s Asia de Cuba restaurant for a seated dinner. Then it was back to the Skybar until the wee hours. The next day, everyone got on the jets and flew home.
“And even then people were saying, ‘Oh, there goes Angie, putting on a big show just to get attention.’ And I thought, ‘Wait a minute. Am I not allowed to celebrate my daughter’s debut too? Haven’t I yet paid my dues?’”
When she told me that particular story, she was sitting on a couch in the great room of her home. Just off that room was her bedroom, with an unusual piece of art on the wall that had been created by the noted British artists Tim Noble and Sue Webster. The art was essentially a neon pink sculpture that spelled out the word “vicious.” Angie told me that she had purchased that piece so she’d remember the way some people in Dallas felt about her. “I think they would just love to see me disappear. But every day that I walk out of that bedroom, I look at that sign and think, ‘I am not going to let them beat me.’”
THEY HAVE NOT beaten her. In recent stories describing Angie’s new television show, Dallas’s monthly magazine, D, heralded Angie as the city’s “undefeated heavyweight socialite” and the Morning News’ Alan Peppard went so far as to call her Dallas’ “social diva.” And even Reid Slaughter, at Park Cities People, agreed to let his society columnist run one more article and photograph of Angie this spring regarding her television venture. (The headline read “Almost Famous.”)
Angie is far from a polished television hostess—“I’m still learning how to do this,” she said cheerfully—and in its weekend afternoon time slot, the show is hardly producing blockbuster ratings. Still, such posh local establishments as Il Mulino restaurant, William Noble Jewelers, and some of the better clothing boutiques like Stanley Korshak and Tootsies have begun to run commercials on the show, no doubt because they realize that many members of Dallas society, their target audience, are periodically tuning in just to see what Angie is doing. In May she flew to Cannes to interview movie stars at the film festival, and before returning to Dallas, she flew to Paris to interview fashion designers and to film herself playing chef at the Cordon Bleu cooking school. The highlights of the show, however, are her non-socialite segments, such as the morning she worked at a Krispy Kreme doughnut shop, slipping across the floor in her Manolo Blahniks and destroying all the doughnuts. “I want the show to be like a video version of Town & Country magazine, with some Access Hollywood and Punk’d thrown in as well,” she said.
Grin & Barrett is certainly costing Angie a lot of money. (Insiders estimate that she is paying $10,000 a week for the airtime and at least that much each week in production costs.) And in one of our last interviews, Angie did confirm that she is getting a divorce from Bill, which raises the question of whether she can afford to remain the kind of socialite she has become. But Bill, who turns 82 this month, told me that he has arranged for Angie to continue living the life she loves. “I always knew the day would come that I would be a millstone to Angie’s success and her age,” he said about his decision to file for divorce. And then he chuckled. “She doesn’t need a decrepit old bastard like me.”
Who knows if that’s the real reason. At least on one occasion their marriage had been rather volatile: After a party in 2000, a Highland Park police officer came to the Barretts’ home to investigate Bill’s claim that Angie had scratched and kicked him during an argument. But no charges were ever filed. And when I was around both of them in the spring—at the very time their lawyers were working out the settlement—they continued to live under the same roof and they went to many parties together, acting so cordial with each other that it was hard to imagine anything between them being wrong. “This is the all-time friendliest of divorces,” Angie said. “Bill is ready to move on, and he’s told me he wants me to stay in the house and keep moving on with my life, just as it is.”
Which is exactly what she is doing. In the last week of April, it was time for Angie to make her appearance at the biggest social event of the spring season, the Beaux Arts Ball, a benefit for the Dallas Museum of Art. In the previous week, twelve couture gowns had been sent from as far away as New York and Beverly Hills for her to wear to the ball. The owner of one of Dallas’s hottest boutiques, 4510, had personally brought over six gowns, and Shelle Bagot at the downtown Neiman’s had sent over a stunning beaded Michael Kors dress.
But on the day of the ball, Angie still hadn’t made a decision. That afternoon, with only a few hours to go, Angie raced to see the Twanster to get her hair done, and then she was home by six. At the last minute, she picked out a rare yellow James Galanos gown sent to her from Lily et Cie, in Beverly Hills, that had been featured recently in an exhibition of famous vintage fashion at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. She threw it on and was out the door with Bill at her side.
They were more than an hour late—the last people to arrive at the ball. The other partygoers were already headed up a hallway toward the main banquet room. But the photographers were still waiting for Angie. They whisked her away to an empty gallery and for ten minutes took shot after shot. When she finally got to the banquet room, women began stopping her: Was that a real Galanos she was wearing?
She told me later that the evening was a huge success. She couldn’t have been happier.
“But what are you going to do with all the other gowns that were sent to you?” I asked.
“Oh, I’ll keep some of them,” she said with a smile. “There are still a lot of parties to go.”
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