The Philadelphia Inquirer from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania • Page 124

THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER Sunday, March 9, 1997 H6 Designer creates a new ethnic side of Sears Mod guests preview the Rothschild family art J-' i f( 1 Fashionwise, Sears orchestrated an amazing apparel turn-around in the last two years by upgrading its fashion mix and displaying it better. It touted the revamp through its much-lauded "Softer Side of Sears" campaign. Bell was introduced to Sears officials by Lawrence H. Baum, co-owner of Lawrence Stevens Fashions, which produces the Mosaic collection and other clothes for Sears. "I've known Alvin for 12 years and worked with him, and we've always been friends," Baum said.

"When Sears came to me wanting to do an ethnic program, I told them that Bell was the one to do it." Bell, a friendly, gregarious sort, concedes that he had some misgivings about the so-called ethnic collections. "I found it offensive at first because so many of these lines treat black women like they are all church women with church hats, or they all want African prints. Black women are more than that, and they want more than that," said Bell. "What sold me was that Sears told me to think global." Bell's mother, Ka'therine Bell, inspired his interest in fashion. A refined, elegant woman, she worked as a seamstress in one of the many garment factories that once operated in Philadelphia.

She was a big fan of couture fashion of the day, Christian Dior and Norell, and passed that passion on to her son, enrolling him in art school at age 7 and taking him to exclusive city boutiques. "My mother took an enormous special interest in me," Bell re called, "She would give me photos from fashion magazines and tell me to sketch them." This did not sit well with his father, a postal worker. "My father," Bell said, "did not want me to have anything to do with fashion." The young Bell hid his growing enchantment with fashion from the stern eyes of his father, poring over fashion magazines at night while his father toiled on the graveyard shift. Dreaming of being a painter or illustrator, Bell studied commercial art at Bok Vocational School in Philadelphia. He landed his first fashion job at age 17 as an illustrator for the Alfred Angelo bridal company.

He was staring in the store window, sketches in hand, when he was invited inside to meet Mrs. Angelo, who, he said, took one look at his designs and hired him on the spot. He entered Philadelphia's College of Art, now known as the University of the Arts, where he met and developed a long friendship with Willi Smith, the internationally known designer who died in 1987. After Smith left for the Parsons School of Design in New York, he soon persuaded Bell to move to New York. "He told me was wasting my time in Philly," Bell said.

So in his early 20s, Bell landed on the doorstep of Jon Weston, then one of the most famous bridal designers in America. Weston took Bell in, put him to work as his assistant, and even allowed him to live in his three-bedroom apartment until he got on his feet. In New York, while under Weston's tutelage, Bell also studied at DESIGNER from my life," said Bell, 45. "Sears' is giving me the opportunity to do designer clothes for the masses." In plucking Bell, an African American, from the heights of fashion to oversee an ethnic-flavored collection priced from $34 to $64, Sears is following the lead of other mass retailers, namely J.C. Penney and Target.

Both stores found great success in recent years with so-called ethnic collections designed by Anthony Mark Hankins, dubbed the Calvin Klein of the coupon-clipping set. "This is a way for us to cement our relationship with women of color," Lana Cain-Krauter, Sears vice president of women's apparel, said after the show. Mosaic comes in regular and plus sizes. The line will be in about a quarter of the company's 820 U.S. department stores, mainly those in states with large black and Hispanic populations, such, as California, Florida, New York, Illinois, Texas, New Jersey and the Carolinas.

Locally, Mosaic will hang in Sears stores in Philadelphia, Upper Darby, Willow Grove, Woodbridge, Burlington and Wilmington. Like the introduction a few years ago of ethnic makeup lines by large cosmetics companies, mass retailers are targeting black, Hispanic and Asian populations just as studies show their numbers are becoming a larger percentage of the general population. There is also a bottom-line concern. With more competition and higher expectations on Wall Street for annual increases in sales and profits, retailers are turning to targeted marketing to attract shoppers. the Fashion Institute of Technology.

After four years, he moved on to work with designer Bill Haire and his most important mentor, Klein. "Anne Klein taught me that I had to find my own style. She said that too many young designers move from job to job," Bell recalled, "and they never find out who they are and what their style is." Next came Halston, the most celebrated designer of the 70s, known for his simple sexy jersey dresses and pantsuits. He met Halston by standing outside his window late one night and calling the designer from a street phone booth, imploring him to look out the window. "He let me in, and we talked for four hours," Bell said.

He persuaded Halston to give him a job, in the designer's blouse division, where he would stay for five years. Then, Pab Limited, a suit and evening wear company, offered him a job designing the kind of imitation French and Italian suits that were the rage in the '80s. Five years passed. Yearning to travel and to visit the world's great design houses, he quit the designer biz and launched a trade journal. In his Designer Report, Bell published sketches, photographs and news from the designer seasonal collections.

"It was the final part of my education," he said. He then gained acclaim as designer of couture-like fitted suits for PSI, famous for its tailored clothes. The company added his name to the label after just one season of spectacular sales. Several times Women's Wear Daily, the influential trade newspaper, voted his She'a a queen in a man's domain designing computer games ML art may have been cubist but the celebrating was not for squares when the Philadelphia Museum of Art opened its exhibition of works from the Rothschild family collec-tion with a preview on Feb. 27.

More than 300 guests, many of them key museum, supporters, heeded the injunction to don festive attire and went lor an evening that included cocktails, dinner and after-dinner dancing. "We thought it was time for a party," said Sallie Korman, who chaired the preview and who was there with her David lams Party Time husband, Bert. In' some cases, festive attire meant wearing clothing that could have been in the exhibit itself, such as the cubist neckties worn by James P. O'Brien and Fred Schroeder, who was there with his wife, Sandra Cadwalader. 5 On the other hand, Harvey Shipley Miller settled for a traditional bow tie.

He'd already done his part for the opening. A trustee both of the Art Museum and the Judith Rothschild foundation, Mr. Miller was instrumental in organizing the exhibition, "Encounters With Modern Art," a joint venture of the Art Museum and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, where it was previously displayed. The evening began seriously enough, as guests toured the exhibition of paintings and drawings by such artists as Arp, Matisse, Pi-i casso and Mondrian. "These are all so early," said Maude de Sedations' see, making a tacit tribute to the perspicacity of Nanette and Herbert Rothschild in acquiring the works of artists before they be-s.

came famous. "This is a better I space for it than the National Gal-I lery," said Claire Fagin, the nursing educator, as she and Pam Riley, wife of the head of the Pennsylva-t nia Academy of the Fine Arts, admired a pencil-on-paper drawing by Leger. Then it was time for dinner. There, museum director Anne d'Harnoncourt introduced Innis Howe Shoemaker, the museum's senior curator of prints, drawings and photographs; Ann Temkin, curator of 20th-century art, and the Rothschilds' daughter, Barbara Rothschild Michaels. Mrs.

Michaels, who was there with her husband, Roger, told dinner guests how her parents had begun collecting. They were helped, eventually, by their other daughter, the painter Judith Rothschild, but at first they were on their own. After all, she noted, "the Medicis never took an art course." Then it was time to hit the dance floor, where the dinner guests were joined by 200 late-nighters. Soon you could see Miss d'Harnoncourt twirling with Victor Johnson and nearby, Mr. Johnson's wife, Joan, doing likewise with Miss d'Harnoncourt's husband, Joseph J.

Rishel all to the jitterbug and disco sounds of the Joe Sudler i Swing Machine in the museum's great hall. So it was a party for paintings, i prints and drawings. You were ex-: pecting line dancing? Gardening by Jane G. Pepper and the Gardening Calendar will resume next week. Sometimes, BATTLE from H1 Phantasmagoria, with its quasi-feminist story line about a young woman struggling to defeat the evil forces that have overtaken her became an important stress point in the Williamses' 24-year marriage and working relationship.

Ken, eager to stay within company budgets, was determined to produce lower-cost, combat-oriented, animated games. Roberta, according to some at Sierra, wasn't sure such mandates were necessary. The personal and professional con-! flicts have mounted during Rober-. ta's work on a new game, Mask of Eternity. Said Sierra designer Jane Jensen: ''Sic's getting pressure from Ken.

What I hear coming out of the meetings is that he's really hardballing Designer Alvin Bell has model Roshumba dressed in his designs. fitted designs the best in New York. When he was invited to join the prestigious Council of Fashion Designers of America, he accepted. About two years ago, he struck out on his own, but after his financial backer passed away, success eluded him. Last fall, Sears came calling.

Bell accepted. But it hasn't been easy for him to adjust. For example, he decided to line up major models to show off the spring line to fashion editors, pushing him way over budget. He had thought the expense important since few serious fashion followers ever consider seeing a show with designs from Sears. And then there was the matter of compromising on fabrics.

Still, he says, the project was worth it because minority women deserve designer clothes. "Why," he asked, "shouldn't they have the best that their money can buy?" ing for InterAction," Sierra's magazine. Outside, evening was coming to Mercer Island in cool grayness. Behind the house, beyond the patio deck and the tennis court, the Jacuzzi covered and buttoned down for winter, at the end of a private pier, the Williamses' 40-foot cabin cruiser, Sol de Sol, bobbed gently on the waters of Lake Washington. Inside, Roberta Williams motioned toward an original sculpture by the artist Erte.

Cost: $12,000. "We could retire now, forever, if we wanted to," said Williams. But she won't. There's still too much to achieve, too many people who don't know the Sierra name. And there's her family, the central and unifying force in Williams' life, still in need of her care the reason she does her own cooking, shopping and laundry (a housekeeper comes just once a week).

But there are times when none of it seems enough. "Sometimes you feel lonely," she said, "set apart from other people." It's been a recurring problem for the Williamses, who initially felt they could build a company in which their friends would play a prominent role. That policy proved disastrous when the young couple moved their corporate headquarters from California's Simi Valley to Oakhurst, a tiny town on the edge of Yosemite National Park. "It was probably the biggest mistake we ever made," said Roberta Williams. After forging close relationships with many of the townspeople, the Williamses discovered they were often forced to make corporate 'decisions that had a negative impact on all of Oakhurst.

Three years ago, they left, moving their headquarters to Bellevue. Sierra continues to maintain offices in Oakhurst, as well as Cambridge, Eugene, Champaign, Boulder, tond Austin, Texas. Even though it would seem that the Williamses have much in common with their most famous neighbor on Mercer Island, Bill Gates, Roberta said she has never spoken with Microsoft chairman. The queen of computer gaming says she wouldn't mind meeting with the king of almost everything else: "We would have certainly welcomed his call." of Fantasy selves. Photos of her appeared on almost every Sierra package sweet-faced, smiling, her fingers caressing a computer keyboard, her hair done-up in barrettes.

"It was 1982, and we were all a lot younger then," said Ken Williams. "But she has always wanted to succeed based on her products. To succeed in a male-dominated business I guess you have to play down your sexuality. But there are people who like it." If there is a Cult of Roberta, it has a willing icon. "There has always been some marketing of Roberta Williams that is separate from the marketing of Sierra," said Roberta experienced success doing that.

So we continued." ROBERTA WILLIAMS from H1 ure in computing games," said Johnnie Wilson, editor in chief of Computer Gaming World magazine. "She was the one who came up with the idea of having pictures with games, of making them graphic. And since then, she has been consistently innovative." Not to mention consistently profitable. Among computer gamers, Williams' name recognition is so high that Sierra routinely stacks her name above the title. What might be termed The Cult of Roberta reached adoration in extremis, when Sierra recently released The Roberta Williams Anthology, a glam compilation of 17 of her games.

There is no disputing that Williams is unique. She worked with her programmer husband, Ken, 42, to build Sierra from a few designs etched on notebook paper at their kitchen table to a corporation that last year sold 5.4 million games worth $192 million, retail, according to PC Data, a Virginia firm that tracks software sales. Think they didn't get rich? Sierra, which maintains its corporate offices on a few modest floors in an innocuous office building just outside Seattle, was acquired last year by CUC International for around $1 billion. The Williamses' cut? Some estimates place the figure as high as $100 million. The acquisition boosted Ken, Sierra's CEO, into a vice-chairmanship at CUC.

Roberta, who has eschewed executive positions saying she has no taste for nuts-and-bolts management, hopes eventually to wrangle a slot on CUC's board of directors. Still, the crown does not rest easy. For much of her career, Roberta Williams, who worked at home so she could spend more time with the couple's two sons, C.J. and Christopher, has bucked the industry's increasing tendency to produce violent, testosterone-infused action games, choosing, instead, to weave fairy tales. Her seven-part King's Quest series centered on the adventures of gentle King Graham, his wife, Queen Valanice, and their children.

It rewarded smarts, celebrated compassion, and downplayed violence. It has sold millions. Williams, who has little programming experience and sees her work as similar to that of a movie writer 4 One of the entries in The Roberta Williams Anthology, a compilation of 17 games. "I love her," said Marcia Bales, a designer who scored a hit with her own game Shivers after being assigned to one of Williams' teams. "This is a male-dominated business, and, even though I don't think Roberta goes out of her way Ito promote the careers of women her example has forced people to take the blinders off." Williams' down-to-earth, unaffected personal style and her willingness to "pass the glory around," said Bales, are atypical among designers, who know that the size of their paychecks is often directly proportional to their name recognition.

Despite that, Williams is the first to admit that she is highly competitive, uncomfortable in any position except number one. "But what's more important to me than my game is the name Sierra," she said. These days, that name covers around 1,000 employees, including scores of ambitious designers working under exclusive contract. So far, none of them can attract the high, six-figure research-and-development budgets that have backed most of Williams' recent work. That level of backing has raised concern among some designers who suspect that their own work may be underwriting the costs of Williams' projects.

On the Internet there have even been rumors of a feud between Williams and the woman said to be her director, said that among young male programmers "there's a lot of arrogance." "It's still an elitist thing," she said. "They like to think, 'We know something you I remind them that I'm the designer. I know what I'm doing." When Williams first conceived her self-declared masterpiece, an uncharacteristically adult thriller called Phantasmagoria, she met with resistance at virtually every level, including her CEO husband, Ken. "My butt was way out over the wire," said Roberta Williams. She also insisted on building a studio for filming live-action game sequenceseven though her husband protested that it would be a budget-buster.

"You'd think I could just say, 'Bam, this is how it's going to but I can't. When you work in a company, there are always people who will try to stop you. They sandbag, delay, drag their feet. Nobody believed in the project. I was on my own." She'd been there before.

In the beginning, Williams drew diagrams of what she calls "the universe," the imaginary places where her games take place, with Ken programming the computer codes that produced the text and pictures. As the games became more complex, Roberta Williams worked with larger and larger teams of programmers, artists and musicians, almost all of them men. And they almost always questioned her vision. "The technical people always know the limitations, or at least they think they do," Williams said. "They'll say, 'We can't do that, we can't do Well, I want to know why.

And even when they tell me, I will still say, 'Go back and figure it Her firmness has won her a reputation for being a determined taskmaster who doesn't like to be told what she can't do. Her soft, V-neck sweaters and flouncy blond hair conceal a leather-tough attitude and a quick mind. "I'm not a bitch in disguise," Williams said. "But I am very cognizant of the fact that these games have my. name on them." Among Sierra's growing corps of women designers, Williams is the standard bearer.

sion so heated that "people saw us the next day and said, 'What's happening? Are you guys going to split The fighting rarely makes it beyond the front door of their home in the posh Seattle suburb of Mercer Island. The Williamses describe their marriage as happy and secure, and boih use the same word to define their working relationship: synergistic. As childhood sweethearts, they learned early on to work together. They were Southern California high school students when they met on a double date. He was dating someone else, and so was she.

Six months later, Keu called and asked Roberta out. She remembered that he could down a beer in a sin key rival, Jane Jensen, 34. Jensen's live-action adventure game, Gabriel Knight: The Beast Within, was a fixture on many top 10 lists last year, but both women deny any in-fighting. "Roberta is cofounder of the company and she deserves whatever bonus she gets from that," said Jensen, who believes any talk of a feud is kept alive by "9-year-olds on the I Internet bulletin boards." But Jensen admits that staying out of Williams' shadow isn't easy. "When I do a project, I wonder if there are any Roberta Williams games shipping at the same time," said Jensen, who just published a novelization of her first Gabriel Knight program, Sins of the Fathers.

"Because, if there are, I know I am going to get the short end of the marketing budget." Ken Williams justified the expense for his wife's projects, saying Sierra follows "a corporate philosophy that says you banklroll things according to how well their last project sold." And that means hit-making Williams often gets the lioness' share of money. Roberta Williams said it's true that she and Jensen are not friends. But are they enemies, rivals? A sexist fantasy, Williams said. "There isn't a Jane Jensen iss'ue," she said. "I don't worry about Jane Jensen." Williams gets a 7 percent royalty on each of her games sold.

So you don't have to be Stephen Hawking to figure out that a heavy-selling game with a retail price of $45 to $65 a copy can mean a fortune in royalties. Phantasmagoria, which sold more than 800,000 copies, was, by any computer-game standard, a whopper. Roberta Williams wheeled her sil-ver-and-blue Porsche convertible into the driveway of her family's rambling split-level, dashed inside, and called out for her son Christopher. The tall, thin teenager was going out on a date, and his mother had shortened her rounds at Sierra to make sure he got his date-night instructions and had a little folding money. "He's a writer," she said proudly, touching Christopher's shoulder, causing him to roll his eyes in embarrassment.

"He's doing some writ minal linked to an early adventure game called Colossal Cave. "1 got hooked," said Roberta. "It was the turning point." The would-be archaeologist, wanna-be writer and might-be entrepreneur inside Roberta Williams converged. She designed her' own game, hired a baby sitter, and took Ken to dinner, dying to show off her handiwork. "I started telling him about my game, and his eyes glazed over," she said.

"But by the time I got done, his expression had completely changed. He was ready to get into computer games." Their first game, Mystery House, was an instant hit. So was Roberta. Almost from the start, she was as big an attraction as the games them even her husband must do battle with the Queen it." Mask producer Mark Seibert said that the level of violence in the new game has "been a topic almost every day." And how is this playing in the Williams household? Seen it, done it, been there before, said Roberta Williams, noting that her disagreements with her husband over game content are nothing new and have little impact on their marriage. Ken Williams, who said he wanted to emphasize action, not violence, said that while his wife "usually gets things her way," he isn't afraid to face her down.

He recalled the early development of Mask, when a year passed without (Significant progress. A meeting with Roberta and her team resulted in a discus gle gulp. Impressed, she accepted. They married within days of Ken's 18th birthday. Roberta was 19.

Ken went off to study computer science while clerk typist Roberta "got pregnant almost immediately." The couple eventually had two sons, C.J. now 23 and a chef, and Christopher, 17. At Ken's bidding, the reluctant Roberta took computer courses, and even went to work as a programmer, although she didn't share her husband's passion for the machines. "I think he was a little disappointed," she said. "He was into women's liberation and I think he was frustrated that I wasn't out there burning my bra.

But I had ideas. Real ideas." Those ideas exploded the night Ken brought home a computer ter.