The Times Magazine 51hit by a car, a piano would fall off a balcony...
I called my kids and said, ‘Goodbye. I love
you.’ Like, I wouldn’t say I was 99.9 per cent
sure; I was around 98.5 per cent sure that
I wasn’t going home. But if I was going to be
killed, I was going to f***ing do it in a pair
of leather Saint Laurent leggings!”
Just as fashion has had, and continues to
have, a defining influence over Julia Haart’s
extraordinary life, so has sex.
“I love sex, let’s be honest,” she tells me.
“I think it’s so beautiful.”
Sex, like fashion, was one of those innate
desires she felt God hated in her while still in
Monsey. It caused problems on her wedding
night. Haart wanted to “be kissed and
explored, and I wanted to do my own
exploring... I wanted to touch every part
of [Hendler’s] unfamiliar body. But he was
horrified... He assumed I would be shy and
quiet, and that I would lie still and let him do
his thing... Instead of praising his lucky stars
that he had such an uninhibited wife, he
chastised me and looked so uncomfortable
and disgusted with my blatantly un-tznius
behaviour that I stopped what I was doing and
lay still so he could enter me,” she writes.
And sex, like fashion, compelled her
forward, toward escape. A decade and a half
into their marriage, Hendler took Haart to
a trade show in Las Vegas – the company he
was employed by had an exhibit there. Alone
in their hotel room, Haart stumbles upon a
show called Sex and the City. She recoils from
the title, then finds herself unable to resist
it, purely because the main character, Carrie,
is so wonderfully dressed. Following a little
leisurely bingeing, Haart watches the episode
when Charlotte gets a Rabbit vibrator (The
Turtle and the Hare; episode nine, season one).
“I’d never heard of [a vibrator],” she writes in
Brazen. “I’d never once had an orgasm.” She
promptly takes herself out onto the streets of
Vegas to track down a sex shop and buy a
Rabbit – which she does, while wearing “my
usual uniform of buttoned-up blouse, a long
skirt and sheital”. She gets the Rabbit back to
the hotel and has her first orgasm.
Sexual exploration and liberation ease
Haart through the early years of her life
outside Monsey. She has one-night stands and
flings with inappropriate men (through which,
she writes, she keeps her wig on). You were at
a place where you could happily have sex with
non-Jews you barely knew who weren’t your
husband, the only man you’d ever slept with
until you were 42, but you couldn’t do it with
uncovered hair? “Belief systems aren’t logical,”
she says. She gets date-raped, though it takes
her a while to understand what’s happened to
her; there wasn’t much chat about Rohypnol
in Monsey. She gives her daughters vibrators
and talks to them about sexual pleasure in
front of rolling TV cameras.So how was sex outside fundamentalist
religion? “When you don’t have to recite songs
when you are entered, you mean?” she replies.
I wonder if Haart is nervous about the
publication of Brazen. It’s incredibly candid,
even for a book called “brazen”. She received
death threats over My Unorthodox Life. “[I]
had someone arrested for stalking. It was pretty
scary.” She’s been accused of antisemitism
repeatedly, which hurts her: “I love being a
Jew.” Do the usual feelings of being vulnerable
and exposed apply when you’ve already
broken all the taboos Haart’s broken and
plastered her new life all over TV, I wonder.
Is Haart pretty much over feeling shame?
“Am I over shame? Oh, I love this question!
I don’t feel shame [any more], no. I feel pain
sometimes, when people say that I shouldn’t
have left the life I lived, or that the life back
there is normal, or that our education is good.
It feels like being raped all over again.”
In which case, why do it? Why do the show
(season two of which is in the works)? Why
write the book?“There’s so many times where I say, ‘Why
do I do this to myself? I could have such a
comfortable life! I could lunch all day and
travel and party.’ But what’s the point of
everything I’ve been through if that doesn’t
help other people? I know that sounds corny,
but it’s what I want. And I don’t know how to
shut up. I couldn’t shut up there [in Monsey]
and I can’t shut up here. And yes, it makes
my life a lot more complicated, it opens me up
to attacks and a lot of pain... When you fight
fundamentalism, fundamentalism fights back.
But if I don’t do it, then nobody does it.”
Is she dating again?
“Not yet. No.” But, “I love love. I love
giving love. I love being in a relationship. I love
sex.” So she will, at some juncture.
And how is that as a prospect?
“To be honest with you, I am scared
shitless. I don’t know how to date. I’ve never
dated. I’ve never been on a dating app.” She
says that, because her marriage to Scaglia
followed hard on the heels of her divorce
from Hendler, she’s only technically not been
married for “like, one or two weeks”. Also,
“I have terrible taste in men. Disastrous.”
I wonder if her children might advise her
on future boyfriends. “I think that’s what
they’re going to have to do.” Did they have
questions about your relationship with Scaglia?
“Yes! So next time, I listen. They’re going
to help me with an app when I’m ready. Don’t
laugh, but my daughters’ suggestion is to get a
matchmaker. I run from matchmakers.” It was
a matchmaker who set her up with Hendler.
Haart is much more certain of her
professional future. She has plans for a sizeless
clothing range, one which will help women
detach themselves from the stigma of size. If
fashion liberated Haart, she’s aware fashion
can also limit, shame and exclude. “Ageism.
Weight. Size. That drives me crazy.”
I ask if there’s an ultimate end goal, and
she says, “I want an army of financially
independent women. I will do everything in
my power to get this. I want to be able to go
to my grave knowing that there are thousands,
or tens of thousands, of women whose lives
I’ve made better. And that, to me, makes all
the rest worth it. I’ve had two women say
they were planning to take their own lives and
chose not to after watching the show. I have
women coming over to me in restaurants and
at Fashion Week saying, ‘I left my husband
because of your show,’ or ‘I started my
business because of your show.’ Forget
everything else, the show was really worth
it, to save two human beings’ lives.”
And when Haart dies, I say, presumably
she’ll be buried in her Saint Laurent leggings?
“I’d better be buried in those leather
leggings! Although, honestly, I’m thinking
more of a Viking kind of funeral. Burn me to
Getty imaGes. HaiR aND maKe-UP: miCHael asHtON UsiNG FyeO BeaUty the sky. I kinda like that.” n
‘I had two women say they
were planning to take their
own lives and chose not to
after watching the show’
With second husband Silvio Scaglia. They’re now divorcingHaart with her first husband, Yosef Hendler, and his new
partner, event planner Aliza ‘Lisa’ SchulhofJulia Haart Continued from page 39