Herman Talmadge and Emilio Pucci: One night in Athens

The women had arranged it

The chapel was already full when the Europeans arrived. According to the Athens Banner-Herald, they appeared ten minutes after the audience had filled the house and begun waiting. One wore an evening suit. Another wore shorts and an Alpine hat. The occasion was a student symposium on "European and American Girls."¹

It was Tuesday, January 21, 1936. On the American side stood Herman Talmadge, the governor's son and president of the University of Georgia's Pan-Hellenic Council. On the European side stood Emilio Pucci, the Italian marquis, studying cotton agriculture a long way from Florence. Before the night was over, Pucci would accuse American women of copying movie stars, and Herman would wonder aloud whether he should have worn his father's trademark.¹²

The Pioneer Club, the women's debating society, had arranged the program. Its president, Nellie Rucker, introduced the speakers. Five Americans would defend the women of their country against four European exchange students. The advance notice promised the audience a chance to join the discussion and invited the public. It also put Herman's name first among the Americans, identifying him as the son of Georgia's governor.¹³

Pucci had come to Georgia through an exchange. R. Sam Crane of Athens went to the University of Milan; Georgia received Pucci from Florence. Contemporary reporting said Pucci was working toward a master's degree in agriculture, specializing in cotton, with the intention of taking Southern methods back to Italy. The famous clothes were still ahead of him.²

Both men belonged to the Demosthenian Literary Society, but this was not a Demosthenian debate. Herman was the fraternity-council president, not president of that literary society. Pucci had been admitted to Demosthenian membership by examination with twenty-five other students the previous November. For this evening the Pioneer Club supplied the stage and the question.⁴

The case for the American girl

Herman congratulated the visitors on their ability to draw a crowd. Then he added: "after the gentlemen appeared in their monkey-suits, I was almost sorry that I didn't wear my red suspenders."¹

He was twenty-two, and his father's red galluses were already a political trademark. Here he could use them without putting them on. The joke brought the governor's public image into the room while keeping the son in the role of a college man answering a well-dressed foreigner.¹⁵

Herman's defense of American women did not stop at their looks. He called the coeds "America's tomorrow" because they were "so successfully invading all fields of masculine endeavor." He also insisted that there were distinct personality types among them. Pucci was about to argue almost exactly the opposite.¹

The Italian, in his evening suit, declared: "all American girls act the same. They have no personality. They imitate movie stars from their earliest days." He went on to contrast European suffering with the American pursuit of a good time. The Banner-Herald followed him from the front page onto page three.¹

His side did not maintain a perfectly united front. Louis Deroche, the French student, conceded that the average American girl looked better, dressed better, and appeared happier than the average French girl. He nevertheless preferred French habits of courtship. A French girl might have one date a month with the same boy, he said, rather than two or three a day with different ones.⁶

The German student Scheibe allowed American women their cosmetics but suggested restraint in applying them. Europeans used makeup too, he said, but did not try to use all the colors at once. Herbert Sonthoff offered a different comparison: "the American woman is a portrait beautifully painted, but please don't touch her."⁶

On the home side, Tap Bennett praised women's endurance, especially at bridge. Ben Anderson invoked European movie stars and Italian girls leaping onto tables at parties. Walter Wise contributed an estimate of how many European women were working. Nine men had been given the subject of women, and the accounts suggest they found no shortage of opinions.⁶

Harry Baxter had done some advance interviewing. He told the audience he had consulted Pucci about European women but had managed only one word to the marquis's thousand. Even so, according to the student paper, Pucci had conceded that American girls were better dressed and possibly too alluring.⁷

Baxter also questioned the premise of the evening. "This program was arranged by women," he said, "for no man in his right senses would think of giving such a subject as this serious consideration." Having been invited to defend American women, he finished by blaming the women for inviting him.⁷

The Red and Black reported that the two sides "fought to a standstill." There was no formal winner. Its headline gave the encounter the billing the organizers had earned: "Foreign Noblemen, Southern Gentlemen Discuss Women at Pioneer Symposium."⁷

What came afterward

Herman would return to the same chapel that May for a debate with an actual resolution and judges. This time he defended the proposition that Governor Talmadge should be reelected. The newspaper reported cheers and boos as he spoke. The judges awarded the decision to the other side.⁸

Pucci had already made a less playful political appearance. In the fall of 1935, speaking before the Demosthenians, he defended Italy's campaign against Ethiopia. "Ethiopia is simply an economic question for Italy," the student paper quoted him as saying. At Reed College the following year, he continued his defense of fascism; his master's thesis was titled "Fascism: An Explanation and Justification."⁹

That history belongs beside the clothes. He later flew for the Italian air force. During the war, he helped Mussolini's daughter Edda Ciano escape with incriminating papers from her husband's diaries. Reed's account describes him sewing a pouch into her jacket, then being arrested and beaten by the Gestapo before escaping to Switzerland in January 1944.¹⁰

After the war, another set of clothes brought him a different kind of attention. In 1947, a photographer noticed his ski designs at Zermatt. His use of stretch fabrics offered an alternative to bulky ski outfits, and the fashion career followed. The prints, scarves, dresses, and famous customers eventually made Pucci a name recognizable far beyond the people who had known him as an exchange student in Athens.¹⁰

Herman's path led through his father's organization to the governorship and the United States Senate. He became one of the country's leading defenders of segregation. The college evening does not explain either man's later choices.¹¹

The surviving accounts put Herman and Pucci in the same room, on opposite sides, performing for the same audience. They do not establish a lasting friendship. They preserve one evening: before their names carried all that later history, the future fashion designer arrived in an evening suit, and the governor's son answered with a joke about the suspenders he had left off.¹⁷