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business all our own that the Families had not thought of and didn’t want.
    Giselle thought a fine name for the shops would be Presque Nu —almost naked. I liked her idea of using French words. In those years, “French” still connoted something naughty. I liked the idea but knew Americans wouldn’t understand its meaning. Finally, we came up with a name. It was simple, yet carried a suggestive double entendre. We would call our shops Cheeks. The fashion was chic, a woman might need cheek to wear it, and she might show something of her nether cheeks to anyone who saw her from behind.
    Buddy thought the idea was insane. “Oh, man! You want to open a buttons-and-ribbons store? What kind of man sells ladies’ undies? What kind of business is that?”
    It is a business that last year had almost eleven billion dollars in gross sales, through almost seven hundred stores, plus catalog sales.
    Not bad. But it didn’t come easy.
    Giselle and I talked about it. She would be my partner in Cheeks, in every sense of the word. I talked to Frank Costello. All he could do was shrug. “It’s an original idea, I gotta say.”
    “Nobody’s gonna object?”
    “Nobody’s gonna object. You could go into other lines and nobody would object. You got friends, Jerry.”
    Giselle heard him say that. She had no idea what he meant. In Paris, I had learned, there was an organization vaguely referred to as les Messieurs, and she’d had contact with it through Paul and still knew nothing of it.
    Anyway, we had to define what we would sell. We ordered a substantial shipment from Frederick’s of Hollywood and decided, essentially, that what Frederick’s offered was not what we would offer.
    Remember, it was still the era of nylon and rubber. By no means everything offered by Frederick’s was like that, but some of it was; and we were firm in our commitment to offer something different.
    Giselle and I made some of the signature items of our early line. When I say made, I mean we sewed together and dyed items that we could show to makers and suppliers. It seemed the best way to give them the idea.
    Giselle bought one of the leopard-print panty-and-bra sets that seemed so bold. At home we snipped holes in the bra so as to expose the nipples. Then we dyed the thing black. Then we photographed it, on Giselle. When we showed that to prospective suppliers, they understood what we wanted.
    We didn’t cut down the panties, just dyed them black and folded them to make a bikini style.
    Giselle put on the black bra with her nipples bared, the panties, a black garter belt, and dark sheer stockings, and she posed for my camera. That outfit became one of the pilot styles for Cheeks.
    Nighties were not so difficult. The only problem was that most of them included modesty panels. A woman in those days might wear a nightgown that displayed her legs, her hips, even her butt through sheer nylon but expected a modest covering over her pubes and her breasts. We could easily induce manufacturers to omit the modesty panels. Our sheer nightgowns were sheer all over.
    Those became another one of our pilot styles.
    We couldn’t know yet how the public would receive our merchandise, but we had a philosophy—if it can be dignified by that name—and meant to venture on the market with it.

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    Apart from merchandise, the first problem was real estate. No point in opening one shop. I opted for three, one on the Upper West Side, one on the Upper East Side, and one in Midtown.
    Merchandise. I knew we would have to design and manufacture our own. For the moment, I hoped to import from France, where women no longer walked around in hip-length panty-girdles and bras of … well, there was something called a “whirlpool bra,” a contraption so horrid it was almost beyond imagination.
    I called on Paul Renard. Lingerie was not one of his many interests, but he had contacts in every business in France. Shortly, crates of “unmentionables” were aboard cargo planes