Glitz doesn’t just happen.
A Broadway designer has to come up with the look, the gold glow of the dancers in “A Chorus Line,” say, or the gluttonous kitsch of the showgirls in “The Producers.” But even then, you can’t wear an idea. Somebody actually has to make it.
And quite often that somebody — on Broadway at least — lives and works in a small bedroom in a modest brick house on an unremarkable residential street here.
She is Bessie Nelson, and she is the go-to beader of Broadway. Meaning Nelson, 77, spends hours upon hours sticking a needle through fabric stretched taut across two pieces of wood, attaching one No. 4 bugle or No. 6 three-cut copper bead at a time to costumes that will eventually be wildly elaborate works made up of thousands and thousands of beads.
She has done the beadwork on Liberace’s capes, Neil Diamond’s jackets, Michael Jackson’s glove and Cher’s famously revealing, uh, thingies..)
She did beading for the Broadway productions of “Dreamgirls,” “Sunset Boulevard,” “Miss Saigon,” “Wicked” and “The Boy From Oz”; she did inaugural-ball gowns for Nancy Reagan (for the second inauguration) and Hillary Rodham Clinton (the first). She’s currently working on 31 costumes for the national tour of “A Chorus Line.”
“I mean I boggle my own mind when I think about it,” Nelson said in a recent interview.
Done by hand
In the 68 years she’s being doing this, what she actually does hasn’t changed all that much. “They haven’t found a way yet for a machine to do it,” Nelson said. Beading still has to be done by hand, bead by bead.
Many of the costume shops used to have staffs of “beading ladies” who would sit around their frames in large rooms, quilting-bee style, gossiping and arguing. Nelson — who has lived at her sister’s house since the late 1980s, soon after her second husband died — is something of an anomaly, preferring to work behind closed doors, in the company only of her beading frame and the television set.
“There were many more beaders when I first started in the ’70s,” said Suzy Benzinger, a costume designer for “Movin’ Out,” “Miss Saigon” and other Broadway shows. They’re almost all gone now, and they’re not being replaced. “Kids coming up don’t want to do that,” Benzinger said. “It takes too much concentration, and it’s too labor intensive.”
Nelson has four beaders scattered around the country who work for her; there is an excellent beading shop in California, and some top beaders in Paris. Otherwise a great deal of the beadwork is done these days in China or India. The beadwork in Asia is good for high-end fashion, said the costume designer William Ivey Long, who estimates he has worked with Nelson on at least 30 shows. But the demands of Broadway are different.
Costumes often have to be put together fast, at the last minute; Nelson had to do the work on Long’s wildly complicated Chrysler Building gown, the one Gary Beach wore in “The Producers,” in two weeks. You need someone who has the aesthetic sense to make artistic decisions without having to be told exactly what to do.
Broadway outfits also have to be able to take a licking. What may look beautiful on an haute couture gown might end up leaking beads all over the stage after a week on Broadway. Beadwork done in China and India tends to have this problem. Nelson’s work, which is not cheap but not out-of-line expensive either ($5,000 to $8,000 for the work on bead-intensive outfits), is famous for being durable.
Aunt a role model
Nelson grew up as Bessie Noto, the fourth of six children in an apartment building in Jersey City that was owned by her grandmother and occupied almost exclusively by family. Bessie’s father was a milkman, and her mom was a homemaker, but Aunt Jenny was a beader.
Bessie came down with rheumatic fever when she was 9 and had to spend most of that year at home, being tutored and being bored. She would go over to Aunt Jenny’s apartment and lie under the beading frame while Aunt Jenny worked, watching the patterns slowly emerge. After a few months of looking and learning, Bessie went to work for 25 cents an hour at a local beading shop called Roman Art. She was by far the youngest in the roomful of women doing beadwork for the clothing shops along Seventh Avenue in Manhattan.
Twenty-five years later she left Jersey City for California, but she had barely gotten started. After a few years of working at a bead shop attached to Nolan Miller’s design studio in Beverly Hills, Nelson and another beader broke off to open their own shop on Sunset Boulevard.
“All of a sudden we got into that little one-room shop, and Jean Louis came and Bill Whitten came, and Bob Mackie came,” Nelson said, rattling off the names of a few designers.
They brought their clients with them: Lionel Richie, Diana Ross, Cher, the Jackson Five, “The Carol Burnett Show,” everyone on “Dynasty.” (Nelson has done most of her Broadway work after moving back East in 1988.)
Recognition for craft
Nelson is scheduled to receive an award Friday at the Hudson Theater on Broadway. It’s an Irene Sharaff Award from the Theater Development Fund, the so-called artisan award. Artisans usually don’t get awards.
Nelson said the lack of recognition in her career didn’t bother her, but it clearly does, a little. No mention of her on the plaque next to Clinton’s inaugural ball gown in the Smithsonian. But now she’ll have this award.
And, of course she’s also got a bunch of “Chorus Line” costumes to finish. Her sister chimed in, It’s going to be a late night.
