“I was always on the prowl for fashion news, looking for inspiration while walking around Paris, watching the branchée girls shopping in Les Halles and pasting polaroids and previews from fashion shoots into my week-at-a-glance calendar.” An editor for Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar and Time, Kate Betts has been just about everywhere anyone could have wished to go. But it all started when, in 1986, as a recent college grad, she moved to Paris.

With a few French lessons under her belt, naïve, youthful hopes mixed with genuine trepidation (there had been bombings in Paris that year), she stayed with a French family, immersed herself in the life of the city, and looked for a job. For a time she worked for the International Herald Tribune as an aide-documentaliste (“glorified paper-pusher”), but later landed a tough yet significant assignment as a journalist for the dictatorial John Fairchild, who groomed her by giving her sometimes apparently impossible tasks. Chasing a party of wild boar hunters was one highlight. Her zeal had been for serious news, hoping to wind up in Southeast Asia or the Middle East, but in the Fairchild empire she found herself writing about food and fashion. Meanwhile, falling thoroughly in love with a suave French businessman provided the perfect piquancy for her private life. 

"[F]ew who read about [Betts'] gutsy, glittering glissade through the City of Light will feel anything other than a frisson of envy."

Betts rings all the changes, having seen Paris with the anticipated golden glow of youth and romance, but also confronting its rather disappointing flaws. Listening for legends of the left wing, she heard instead, during the trial of Klaus Barbie, the stories of French collaboration with the Nazis. And as a naïve, can-do American, she came to grips with the fact that the most common answer to almost every question among Parisians was “non.”

Not long after a sad parting with her lover, Betts also had a parting of the ways with Fairchild, when she decided to write her real impression of a lackluster fashion show by the then-ailing Yves Saint Laurent. Fairchild coldly informed her that she had no authority to express her own ideas, and instead printed a rave. Fortuitously she got a phone call from Anna Wintour of Vogue, and the job she was offered there soon became a reality.  

Even though Betts had long recognized that “Even if I spoke slang and danced Le Rock, I would always be une étrangère,” she felt pangs of regret at “breaking up with France.” But few who read about her gutsy, glittering glissade through the City of Light will feel anything other than a frisson of envy. As told in MY PARIS DREAM, her coming of age was not a novel, but the true story of a young woman destined to rise to the height of her profession.