The most popular credible theories for Jewish social mobility boil down to four arguments: there is a Jewish tradition of valuing education; Judaism itself encourages Jews to work hard because it is a religion that emphasises achievements in the current life as opposed to waiting for rewards in the afterlife; Jews tend to work, and succeed, in areas that have long been heavily Jewish, such as fashion, banking and the arts; and there is something specific to the way Jews are marginalised that encourages them to succeed. The first two theories aren’t relevant in regards to Alex, because he barely went to school and was not observant.
The third one is more pertinent, given how many of Alex’s art friends were Jewish, although it also raises the question why certain industries were and still are so popular with Jews. In his book about how Hollywood was founded by eastern European Jews, An Empire of Their Own,[15] Neal Gabler suggests that the movie business appealed to Jews because it allowed them to create an idealised view of America, even while American society denied them admission. American golf clubs might not allow Jews as members, but Jewish producers could make movies set in fancy country clubs. Connected to this was the practical consideration that movie-making was a job Jews could actually do, because ‘there were none of the impediments imposed by loftier professions and more firmly entrenched businesses to keep Jews and other undesirables out’. Both of these points are equally relevant to Jewish immigrants in Europe who worked in the arts, like Alex: they were able to get into that industry, and, once in, they could celebrate the beauty of a country they loved even if it had, at best, ambivalent feelings towards them. Anyone who works in a business like fashion and fine art is someone who needs to be surrounded by beauty. It is not that surprising that eastern European Jewish immigrants, who had experienced so much ugliness in their lives, might crave a corrective.
The last theory, about the way Jews are marginalised, strikes me as being especially relevant to Alex. All minorities are, in different ways, marginalised, but Alex’s specific experiences, ones that were common to countless Jews of his generation, unquestionably shaped his ambition. He was from the generation that lost ties – by choice or force – with traditional shtetl life, only then to be rejected by the country in which he’d been born. He then emigrated to another country, France, where he was reluctantly accepted, and then very much not. These events, in which he was repeatedly punished by the worlds in which he lived, encouraged Alex’s strong individualism. It also, as Paul Burstein writes in his essay on Jewish success, created a marginality that made Jews like Alex ‘sceptical of conventional ideas and stimulated creativity that led to intellectual eminence and, often, economic success.’ I suspect this is partly why financial industries have also attracted so many Jews, as Donald Trump has eagerly pointed out. Jews over the centuries experienced enormous losses, over and over again, as their businesses and homes were taken from them simply because they were Jewish. Cash, something they could hold on to and hide, was a form of protection. Even Jews like myself who live in comparatively peaceful times grow up listening to stories of our parents’ and grandparents’ state-sanctioned bankruptcies, and so the idea of suddenly having nothing always feels very real. Money, like beauty, can feel like a protection against that, and certainly Henri and Alex felt like that. So did my father. He grew up seeing his parents often fretting and arguing over money, always feeling like they were on the verge of destitution. My father wanted a different life, and to provide a different kind of life for his family, so he went into banking, and he was then able to look after his parents and his children, which was the point. He hardly ever wears a yarmulke, and he definitely never counted Trump’s money, but by going into banking he adhered to a Jewish tradition as much as Alex did by going into the arts. He, like Henri and Alex, worked extremely hard, not because Jews are naturally hard workers, but because they are raised to believe they have to work twice as hard to get ahead, because they will never be entirely accepted. I doubt if my father ever consciously thought like that, but his parents did and they imbued that work ethic in him, and Alex and Henri definitely believed that. It was only by working all the time, Alex thought, that he would get anywhere.
Alex realised early on that there was no point in following rules, because the rules were made to work against him. He had learned definitively during the war that he always had to help himself, and if that meant defending suspected collaborators who would be beneficial to his career, or screaming at them in the middle of a cocktail party, he would do so without hesitation or fear. He didn’t care what anyone thought of him.
Alex’s acceptance and then fierce rejection of collaborationists reflects how his war experiences shaped him. Like Henri, he believed that the world would turn against the Jews again, and this led to what Howard Sachar describes as the Jewish immigrant’s ‘drive for entrepreneurial success’.[16] But Alex’s reaction to this sense of threat was the opposite to that of his older brother. Whereas Henri wanted to blend in and be unnoticed, Alex believed that the way to face this threat was not to hide but to stand out and fight, showing the world that the Jews, or at least this Jew, could not be pushed around.
This made Alex unusual, in terms of Jewish social mobility. Contrary to some ugly generalisations about Jewish success, there isn’t something inherent in Jews that leads to success. If there were, then the most Jewish Jews would be the most successful, and clearly that is not the case: studies have repeatedly shown that Reform Jews earn more than Orthodox ones, and there aren’t many high-profile ultra-Orthodox Jews in mainstream public life. Henri had been right from the start: assimilation leads to greater success for Jews. It contributed to Jews passing as Caucasians in a way they didn’t before the twentieth century, and this in turn has helped their social mobility.
Alex was definitely not Orthodox, neither was he entirely assimilated. Unlike Henri, he never tried to be seen as French, because he learned from the war that true assimilation was a delusion – ultimately, he would always be seen as a Jew, and so he defined himself first and foremost as that instead of letting other people do it for him. His experiences – rather than any genetic tendencies – shaped his approach to the outside world and his ambition in it, and it just so happened that his unusual approach worked for him. He consciously hugged his Yiddish accent close and he loathed Germany, refusing to visit the country ever – that Sonia could speak fluent German, and continued to do so after the war, was yet another count against her in Alex’s eyes.
As angry as he was at Germany, he was more furious at France for having betrayed him. Yet he never considered living somewhere else. Maybe he thought it would be too hard to start another business elsewhere, maybe he didn’t want to leave Henri. I suspect there was a part of him that simply needed to triumph over France as a form of revenge on it. They couldn’t throw him out during the war, and he would not be chased out afterwards. But this meant that for the rest of his life, he stayed in a country that he loved dearly but had hurt him worse than any single person. He loved France, and he never forgave it.
Wounded by the French, and long ago abandoned by Poland, Alex became a very vocal supporter of Israel (another common reaction among Jews of his generation, also borne from experience). He and Henri bought Chaya an apartment in Haifa, and they visited her there often. Photos show them grinning happily in a Jewish homeland none of them could have imagined when they all lived in Chrzanow. ‘Israel is the realization of all my dreams, a dream come true after the worst atrocities which humanity has ever known. No one can doubt that Israel will become a leading country in developmental potential and the light of the Middle East,’ he wrote. This prediction was a rare instance of Alex being overly optimistic, but such uncharacteristic sunny hopefulness is a testament to how shocked he was by what had happened to him and his family in France, and how much he hoped – had to hope – that the new Jewish state would protect them all forever. When, as a Jewish designer, he was invited to Israel shortly after the country was admitted to the United Nations in 1949, to s
how his collection in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, he was so overcome that when writing about the trip thirty years later he lapsed into near hysteria, describing how much the invite meant to him as a Jewish couturier, and how much Israel meant to all Jews. Because of Israel, he wrote, all Jewish children will now have a ‘beautiful, happy, rich’ childhood, the opposite of the one endured by him.
While nowhere near as successful as his former illustrator Dior, Alex had a genuine talent for making beautiful clothes that lasted. As a child I loved to play with the coats he had made for my grandmother, which she still had in her closet thirty, forty, even fifty years after he made them. And given that he was an independent designer with no financial backers, he did impressively well. The sleek and sporty look for which he became known before the war turned out to be a canny choice, because even if all of France had fallen in love with Dior’s feminine New Look, Alex’s smart coats, sharply tailored dresses and streamlined suits were a popular look in America. Ava Gardner bought dresses from him; Marlene Dietrich bought a jacket. His friends from the Foreign Legion, including General Koenig and Lieutenant-Colonel Magrin-Vernerey, occasionally came to his presentations, and some of the most carefully preserved photos I found of Alex’s salon show him proudly posing with his fellow legionnaires – all of whom look a little bemused by their couture surroundings. Sala tried to come to Paris as often as possible for his shows, and she kept several photos that show him accompanying his beautiful sister, wearing an elegant Alex Maguy dress and coat, to her seat in his salon. His friends from the art world came too. Kisling was by now living in the south of France, but when he was in Paris he would come to Alex’s salon every day and certainly to the shows if he was in town. Alex always thought of ‘Kiki’ as a foster brother, the one who taught him how to be both Jewish and Parisian, Bohemian and serious. Most of all, Alex writes in his memoir, Kisling taught him to look at paintings, to seek out the life of happiness in art that had eluded him in childhood.
Kisling felt just as fond of Alex and wrote Sala reports of their times together.
Alex and Sala at a ball in Paris.
Chaya, Alex, a female friend and Kisling at one of Alex’s fashion shows in Paris.
‘I have made an unexpected visit to our dear brother, and you should see our Alex, how happy he is. His wit, his humor, and his life are marvelous!’ he wrote to Sala on 29 March 1947.
Alex’s life was glamorous, but it was not exactly marvellous. My father remembers sitting backstage at Alex’s shows and watching him carefully style and dress his models, pinning this sleeve, lowering that hem. And then after the show, he would watch his uncle obsequiously thank every fashion editor and store buyer who had come to his show, bow his head humbly as American and French customers told him they liked the dress but it was in the wrong colour, they liked the coat but it was too long.
‘For you, madame, I will fix it,’ Alex would murmur.
Afterwards, my father would see Alex almost prostrate with despair in his workroom, worrying that he hadn’t sold enough clothes, infuriated that the designs he’d sweated over were casually dismissed by ignorant customers, terrified that he wouldn’t be able to pay his seamstresses, that he wouldn’t be able to eat.
Today, the big labels like Dior are awash with money (mostly from make-up and accessories rather than clothes), but in the main it is very, very hard to be a fashion designer. When I was a young journalist occasionally posted to New York and Paris, I would often interview well-known designers who quietly spent their days shivering in underheated studios, barely keeping creditors from the door. In several cases, I’d interview a designer one day and find out he or she went out of business the next. For all the lipstick-shiny confidence fashion projects from the pages of magazines, the truth is not that many people have more than $3,000 to spend on a dress, and so designers are forced to give clothes to celebrities for free, in the hope of some publicity. They then have to write off the loss, hoping against all likelihood that their little gamble will pay off. As Alex’s memoir makes clear, it has always been thus:
‘The fame of a couturier is linked to the fame of the women he dresses. They were often more celebrities than normal clients and needed to be treated as such. They often “forgot” to pay. It’s part of the business. So a couturier has a dual responsibility: First, make women more beautiful in the great tradition of Parisian fashion. Second, support a business. To reconcile these two responsibilities is unimaginably difficult,’ he wrote.
Alex’s clothes were regularly featured in fashion magazines, French and American, and he himself was photographed in the society pages of French papers with beautiful women, such as the French singer Lucienne Dhotelle (known as ‘la môme Moineau’) and the American singer-songwriter Betty Comden at the races at Longchamp or the Parisian nightclubs. But despite the surface fabulousness of his life, his business was crippled by debts, and he would go for days without eating in order to pay his staff of 150.
In 1951, after 108 collections, Alex was invited by the French ambassador to Denmark to take part in a charity show for ‘the most famous haute couturiers’. By this point, his business was nearly bankrupt, so Alex hesitated to accept. But he hadn’t got this far by being shy, and he thought to himself: ‘Remember when as a child you dreamed of French couture in your little, lost Galician village. Now, after a twenty-five-year career, they’re inviting you. Prove by your presence that you’re not finished.’
So Alex went, but initially felt humiliated when he saw how the other designers had been able to bring dozens of models with them, dressed in the most expensive brocades. He couldn’t afford even a single model or outfit. But if the Nazis couldn’t destroy Alex then certainly fashion wouldn’t, so he decided to make a virtue out of his poverty. When it was his turn, he borrowed a model from a designer friend, got up on stage ‘taking my courage into both hands’, and with only a case of pins and about two metres of cotton, constructed an evening gown in front of the astonished audience in seven minutes. He got a standing ovation, and one Danish newspaper that covered the event described it as ‘a sensation’.[17] A one-off dress he made with his own hands in front of the audience: it was a characteristically defiant gesture from Alex in defence of the art of couture, and an illustration of Alex’s refusal to give up, ever, even when the odds seemed utterly hopeless.
Alex returned to Paris and carried on as a designer for a few more years, but it was clear that couture was becoming part of the past. In 1955, Le Monde’s fashion critic compared Alex’s classical style with the more modernist looks that would define the 1960s when the journalist reviewed his show alongside that of Pierre Cardin: ‘We are seeing two trends clash: some still want to reflect the female silhouette, others want to reshape it. We will soon learn who played it best,’ wrote the critic of the two designers.[18]
There was no competition: although the journalist praised Alex’s ‘sylphan silhouettes’ and ‘the astonishing and much-applauded striped pieces’, Pierre Cardin’s ‘shocking spectacle inspired by interplanetary journeys’ was clearly the future.
At the same time Alex’s fashion business was struggling, someone else’s was taking off. His cousin Maurice’s son, Armand Ornstein, was no longer the little boy hiding in the woods but an extremely handsome young man-about-town. Around this time, he teamed up with a young designer called Daniel Hechter, and Hechter’s name would become as much of a byword for French 1960s fashion as Mary Quant and Biba were for British 1960s style, thanks to the extremely successful business he and Armand built together. Today, Hechter is widely credited with popularising prêt-à-porter and helping to kill off exactly the kind of fashion that Alex made. Prêt-à-porter literally means ‘ready to wear’, as in buying clothes directly off the rack, and this is how nearly everyone buys clothes today, whether they shop at Zara or Prada. Alex, however, was firmly in the older tradition of haute couture, which means each outfit is specially created for each customer, making it extremely beautiful, but expensive and ultimately impractical.
By the 1950s haute couture was already on its way out, and today, even in the big fashion houses like Dior, it accounts for an infinitesimal percentage of the company’s overall sales. Alex, as a small Parisian couturier, was one of the last of an already dying breed, and while his stubbornness about retaining his independence undoubtedly hastened his end, it would have come eventually. The fashion world was changing and would soon be unrecognisably different from the one in which he trained. Alex could be pragmatic about some things, but not his art, and in this area alone he would not compromise for the sake of survival.
Alex never explicitly blamed Armand for the death of his fashion business, or even talked with Armand about fashion. In fact, he would have been furious to hear anyone suggest they were even in the same business: Armand and Daniel Hechter’s clothes were intended to last just a fashion season, whereas Alex’s, as he would be the first to say, endured forever. But he certainly raged against the fashion revolution Armand and Hechter inspired:
‘Once there were forty great couture houses in Paris. How many exist today? Four or five at most. Ready-to-wear finally killed personal elegance and individual charm. It made Paris ugly. Today, it’s the brand a woman wears that is noticed, not the woman herself. One wears Sonia Rykiel or Chanel and circulates like an automobile and its nameplate. What an absence of taste. How sad,’ he writes in his memoir.
Even though his business was, in part, killed by one member of the next generation of his family, Alex later managed to pass his legacy on to another younger relative: Alexandre de Betak, his great-nephew and Henri and Sonia’s grandson. Almost every week through the 1970s and early 1980s, Henri brought Alexandre over to Alex’s for lunch – Sonia, of course, was not invited, and nor were Alexandre’s mother and sister, Danièle and Natasha – and Alex would lecture his great-nephew about art and elegance. (When I later heard about these lunches I thought of Gigi in the 1958 MGM film, adapted from Colette’s novel, enduring regular lunches with her Aunt Alicia, who would teach her niece about all the important things in life, like how to admire jewellery and the right way to eat an ortolan.) Alexandre resented having to get dressed up in a suit for these lunches – why did he have to spend his day all hot and uncomfortable when his sister could wear what she liked and stay home and play? While Alex would talk to the bemused little boy about fashion and all the beautiful people he knew, Alexandre would quietly wonder why, if his great-uncle knew so much about style, did he have lifts on all of his shoes? But something about these lunches stuck in Alexandre’s mind, because this introduction to fashion would prove to be a formative one.
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