Shocked: My Mother, Schiaparelli, and Me

by Patricia Volk

  —Audrey Volk

  She was to continue to gamble all her life but never again on the gaming tables.

  —Elsa Schiaparelli

  Audrey does not gamble. Make that, she doesn’t take chances. In other words, given a choice, my mother is 110 percent risk-averse. She gambles only when she can completely without a doubt control both the circumstances and the outcome, specifically, any possible downside, so that definitionally speaking the risk isn’t risky and she’s not in fact gambling. Audrey does not like to lose. She does not lose unless losing spawns an advantage. On occasion, when she does lose, the extent of her loss is predetermined. This means she takes chances by creating a situation where she doesn’t mind losing if she does. She loses voluntarily. In such a case the risk is justified.

  Financially, Audrey has a reputation for being “good with money.” She fans it. She whispers to it and blows on it. Every weekday when The New York Times lands on our doormat she ignores the front page and heads straight for the microscopic stock-market columns. She has a system: When a stock doubles, she sells half and reinvests the profit in a new stock. Her system is conjoined to free tips from a wealthy friend who is a client of the most revered portfolio-manager in New York. Audrey keeps no more than 25 percent of her assets in the market. It’s burned into her brain: Herman Morgen was okay during the Great Depression because he was not in the stock market. Overnight her father was a rich man by virtue of not having lost a penny.

  This does not mean Audrey is averse to spending. She spends but she discriminates. She relishes “good value,” getting something for her money. So it’s puzzling what she does on vacations:

  Every winter, Audrey and Cecil take a ten-day holiday someplace hot. Along with Mattie Sylvia Lee Myles Weems Watts, our beloved housekeeper, our New York grandparents move into the apartment to watch us. This presents an annual revelation in what you can get away with:

  “Mom always lets me stay up for Lux Video Theatre.”

  “We always get seconds on dessert.”

  “I’m allowed to wear my party dress to school.”

  On the downside, daily bowel reports are mandatory:

  “Yes, Nana. After breakfast. Two.”

  “Were they hard or soft, zezakeppeleh?”

  Thumbprint cookies and Barton’s Chocolate Kisses are on tap. But if you ask for a glass of water, Polly worries you have diabetes. If you scrape your knee roller-skating, she’s on lockjaw alert. We teeter on the brink of catastrophe. Every stomachache could be appendicitis. On the other hand, all you have to do is say, “I forgot to study for the test,” and Polly lets you stay home from school. She’ll take you to the playground and you’ll have it to yourself.

  Then one day Audrey bursts through the front door, tan as caramel, more beautiful than ever, arms loaded with presents. She tosses her mink on the bed, the quicker to hug us. We unwrap our coconut-head piggy banks from San Juan, or sombreros from Acapulco, or turquoise clamper bracelets from Arizona. We model grass skirts from Maui or bambouches from Marrakech and from Las Vegas something we’ve never seen before, a one-piece dress with a pleated skirt that is actually shorts, a skort! Fringed leather jackets! Beaded belts! Marimbas and tomahawks! How happy she is to see us! So many presents you could almost forget how much you’d missed her, her touch, her smell. So many presents her bed is a nest of crunchy cellophane excelsior.

  Then I overhear a conversation:

  “How did you do, darling?” Polly asks.

  “The first night, I was up eighty. The second night, I was down fifty. The third night I lost everything. The next night, I broke even. All told, I came in about twenty ahead, Mother.”

  Later I screw up the courage to ask, “Are you a gambler, Ma?”

  She laughs at my concern. “Every night,” she explains, “when your father and I are on vacation, before we go to bed, I slip down to the casino. But I’m very, very careful, darling. I never bring more than a fixed amount with me. I never bring a penny more than I can afford to lose.”

  “How much?”

  “Fifteen dollars,” she says. “I consider that not too much to pay for an evening’s entertainment. If I lose it all, if I lose every single cent, all I’ve spent is what two theater tickets cost and I’ve had a marvelous time. And if I win, well then there’s extra money I wasn’t even counting on.”

  “But Ma! That’s gambling!”

  “Technically speaking, Patty, yes. But I always come out ahead, even if I lose my fifteen dollars, because I’ve been amused. I’ve had a good time. Only instead of seeing Where’s Charlie? or Oklahoma, I’ve had my evening’s entertainment in a casino.” Then she adds, “Did you know, darling, while you’re gambling, they bring you free food and anything you want to drink?”

  We are a restaurant family. I know which end is up. “Don’t they lose money?”

  “No,” she says, then adds a favorite phrase: “ ‘It’s good business.’ ”

  “Why?”

  “They want you to stay at the table. They don’t want you to leave because you’re thirsty or hungry. They want you to stay there so you can keep losing money.”

  God, I think, my mother is brilliant.

  Schiap is brilliant too but she takes chances. She tries things without knowing in advance they’ll succeed. “Reckless,” Audrey would call her. Schiap plunges in and pays for it. She strikes me as fearless. Her life feels like a high-wire act but instead of scaring me, it exhilarates. She is six when she learns Jesus walked on water. Fully dressed, she leaps into a swimming pool. It’s filled with quicklime. At seven, she comes across a book in her father’s library with Leonardo’s engravings of his inventions. She’s dazzled by his flying machines, especially the ornithopters, wings laced to your arms. You leap off a cliff then flap them like a bat. She climbs to the second floor of the Palazzo Corsini, opens an umbrella and jumps, landing in a heap of manure. When she’s fourteen, a book of her poetry is published. She’s betting her father won’t see it. For a young woman of her station, exposing her erotic fantasies is scandalous. But Arethusa is widely reviewed and her parents ship her off to a convent. She goes on a hunger strike. Celestino brings her home. In Nice during the Great War, she puts on her best dress and heads for Monte Carlo. She walks past the Hôtel de Paris, enters the glittery casino and slips onto a seat at the roulette wheel. It doesn’t take long to grip how bad the odds are. She moves to trente-et-quarante, then finally tries her luck at baccarat. She loses everything. The casino freights her home. On a string around her neck so the conductor can’t miss it, a railway voucher reads: “With the compliments of the casino.”

  At twenty-three, to learn English, Schiap accepts a job at an orphanage on the outskirts of London. On her day off, on a whim, she buys a ticket for a lecture on theosophy. She takes a seat in the auditorium. The lights dim. A young man of Polish-Swiss-French descent, a slender man with deep-set eyes and blond hair, strides onto the stage in a cutaway. He grabs both sides of the podium and glares at the audience. Schiap falls in love with Count Wilhelm de Wendt de Kerlor on the spot.

  Thirteen years later, she is the daredevil darling of couture. One of her friends, Jeanne Lanvin, heads the Syndicat de la Couture. She invites Schiaparelli to participate in the 1937 Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne. Countries from all over the world set up pavilions along the Seine. Schiap bursts with ideas. Then she reads the rules. Lanvin’s parameters are pointilleux. You can’t do this, you can’t do that. One restriction states all couturiers must use the same mannequin, a faceless, fat-hipped terra-cotta giantess seven feet tall. To re-create the floaty sylph of Schiap’s new Butterfly Dress, it could never be right. Her latest collection will look terrible on what she refers to as “that dreary mannequin.”

  Schiap protests.

  “It’s up to you,” Lanvin tells her. “Le choix, c’est le vôtre. You can obey the rules like everyone else or you can not participate.”

  Yes, all right, she will use le monstre. She
will obey the rules. But she will do it the Schiaparelli way. What hasn’t been thought of can’t be prohibited. Schiap takes a chance. She lays turf on the floor of her exhibition space, making it look out of doors. Then she subverts the purpose of a mannequin. Instead of dressing it, she lays the mannequin flat on its back. The mannequin is naked, en plein air, her legs spread outward. Schiap tucks flowers around the behemoth and stretches a wash line above it from two stylized trees. Using clothespins, she hangs “all the clothes of a smart woman, even to panties, stockings and shoes.” She hasn’t broken a single rule.

  Her exhibit makes headlines. A gendarme is posted to keep order. The fashion magazines unite and refuse to print pictures of what they call the naked corpse. A gentleman leaves a condolence card by its derrière. Schiap rights the mannequin to a sitting position. Even so, it infuriates. Lanvin’s restrictions spark the one exhibit crowds line up to see.

  Does Marcel Duchamp visit his good friend’s tableau?

  Last year, in Philadelphia to see the Duchamps, I realize Schiap’s spread-eagle plein-air nude may have been the inspiration for his spread-eagle plein-air nude in Étant donnés: 1˚ La Chute d’eau/2˚ Le Gaz d’éclairage (“Given: 1. The Waterfall 2. The Illuminating Gas). This is not noted in Calvin Tomkins’s encyclopedic Duchamp: A Biography. Duchamp began working on Étant donnés in 1946, nine years after the Exposition internationale. Étant donnés occupied him for the next twenty years. It became his final work of art. Jasper Johns calls Étant donnés “the strangest work of art any museum has ever had in it.” It resides now, permanently, in the exact spot Duchamp chose for it. You enter a small, unlit, windowless room. Set into the wall on your left is an ancient wooden door Duchamp found, after years of searching, in a small Spanish village not far from Cadaqués. The door is faded and splintered. It opens in the center. Only it never opens. If you want to know what is behind the door, you must look through two peepholes drilled into it. Then, surrounded by pitch black, floating in limbo, you will see a brick wall. In the center of the wall, there is an irregular hole. Bricks are missing as if an explosion blew them out. Through this hole, you see a woman lying on her back in the woods. She is naked, en plein air, her legs spread outward. Duchamp’s femme au naturel is holding a Bec Auer gas lamp, similar to the first one Duchamp drew when he was eleven. She has no hair on her body. (Duchamp detested female body hair. He asked his women to shave.) The cleft of her vagina is front and center but it doesn’t look like a vagina. It looks like skin that’s been slashed. No matter how you try, no matter how you shift your body or your eyes, you can’t see one twig more than Duchamp wanted you to see. “Why don’t artists require people to look at a painting from a specified distance?” he asked John Cage. There is no choice when viewing Étant donnés. You are physically forced to see it precisely the way Duchamp wanted you to. Is she dead? Was she raped? Étant donnés speaks to a universal anxiety: coming upon a naked body in nature. As a little girl I was mesmerized by pictures of Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe. It’s a beautiful day. Two men are enjoying a picnic in the woods. They don’t seem to notice they are in the company of a completely naked woman. In the distance, another naked woman bathes in a glen. (I used to think these two naked women were the same person, that because the woman in the background was softly focused, I was seeing the past as well as the present.)

  In Étant donnés, the woman’s skin is lovely and real-looking. First Duchamp tried tinting parchment. Then he tried leather. He found what he wanted in pigskin. Translucent, painted on the side making contact with the plaster, pigskin worked. His nicknames for the corps, which is cast from the torso of a lover, Maria Martins, and the left hand of his final wife, Alexina “Teeny” Matisse, were “ma femme au chat ouvert” (“my woman with the open pussy”) and his playful, irreverent “N.D. (Notre Dame) des désirs” (“Our Lady of Desires”). In his Manual of Instructions for reassembling Étant donnés when it was shipped to Philadelphia, Duchamp refers to her as “le nu.”

  Here’s the thing. It’s pure Duchamp. I laughed when it hit me: If you blacken the background of Étant donnés then turn that image on its side, the negative space between her arms and legs forms two letters. Reading left to right, they are “M” and “D.”

  Schiap’s naked spread-eagled mannequin caused a riot at the Paris Exhibition of 1937. (illustration credit 5.1)

  The door Duchamp found near Cadaqués. He drilled two peepholes into it. (illustration credit 5.2)

  Étant donnés: 1˚ La Chute d’eau/2˚ Le Gaz d’eclairage. Jasper Johns called it “the strangest work of art any museum has ever had in it.” (illustration credit 5.3)

  If you black out the background to Étant donnés, then turn it on its side, the negative space forms the letters “M” and “D.”

  Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe.

  chapter six

  Manner of Dress

  Just because it looks good on a model in a magazine, doesn’t mean it will look good on you. Know what works.

  —Audrey Volk

  Women dress alike all over the world: They dress to be annoying to other women.

  —Elsa Schiaparelli

  Her look can be summed up in a word: Crisp. She lives ruffle- and flounce-free. Nothing dangles or blows in the breeze. She wakes up with perfect hair. The click of her red fingernails against the piano keys, the whish-whoosh of her stockings, the stutter of her heels in the hallway—kuh-luh-KLICK, kuh-lah-KLACK—broadcast crisp. She is streamlined by the Art Deco definition—passing through water, she would cause the least disturbance. Her crispness is abetted by a God-given asset, stick-straight hair. Curlies can’t be crisp no matter what. When she tosses her head, her hair moves of a piece, a waterfall of hair, what the French call en cascade.

  For daywear, Audrey prefers sculptural clothes that elucidate her form, pencil skirts with kick pleats or slits so she can taper mermaid-svelte yet walk with a long stride, walk crisp. When she wears a sweater with a skirt, she wears it the Audrey way, tucked in tight, emphasizing her toned tidiness. The sweater is disciplined by a leather belt that sports an unusual buckle—a lion’s head, say, or a crown—drawing attention to her waist. Above all, she is what she calls “buttoned up,” edited to the bone, neatest of the neat, cleanest of the clean, clean being a major component of crisp. She radiates high-polished meticulosity. Earrings are taboo (“Only gypsies pierce their ears”), and anything “frou-frou,” although she is not above wearing a Bill Blass scarlet felt carnation if it comes on a taupe Bill Blass suit. But as wondrous as her clothes are, as fine as she looks in them, they take a back seat to her face. Clothes can’t compete. Her face is the star. This is clear early on. By the time she’s sixteen, her look has gelled. She dresses differently from other coeds. Simply draped evening gowns are Railway Expressed from Russeks, silk shirts and bomber cardigans from Bonwit Teller. She stores her angora sweaters in the Sigma Delta Tau freezer so they won’t fluff off. “Park Avenue Audrey,” her sorority sisters call her. Her home is at 845 West End Avenue, but she’s Park Avenue crisp.

  As a married lady, working in the family restaurant, she shifts to designer clothes. Because Morgen’s is in the garment center, she’s on a first-name basis with the best “houses.” She can “get up” to showrooms. Shopping at Bergdorf’s, when she falls in love with a Geoffrey Beene, she checks the tag and jots the style number down. At home, she dials the manufacturer:

  “It’s Audrey from Morgen’s, darling,” she says. “You wouldn’t happen to have T6136J in navy in an eight, would you?”

  If they have it—“How marvelous, darling!”—they sell it to her wholesale. It’s good business dressing Audrey. All the top designers, manufacturers and buyers wait behind her red velvet rope. They have nothing else to look at till they’re seated. She’s a walking advertisement for Larry Aldrich, Gino Paoli, Claire McCardell, Pauline Trigère, Teal Traina, and her three “B”s: Brooks, Blass and Beene. She looks terrific in their clothes. She shops at Loehmann’s on Fordham Road too, where you can
find couture (once the miracle of a black Lurex Norell for eight dollars) at the deepest of the steepest deep discounts. What pleasure is there in spending fifteen hundred dollars for a Norell? That takes money, not brains. But to wear a Norman Norell you have essentially stolen, that is a coup. Her favorite saleslady, Miss Sylvia, hides an 8 she suspects Audrey will like in the 14 rack, then gives Mom a call.

  On occasion, a manufacturer asks to “borrow” one of Audrey’s Loehmann’s finds so he can copy it. Once, when a favorite Cardin is returned to her, it doesn’t fit right. It has been dissected by a pattern-maker, then resewn by someone careless. Audrey says nothing to the manufacturer. He is a customer. She doesn’t wear the dress again.

  She has the right clothes for specific events. A fitted black suit and veiled hat for funerals. In the summer, a white piqué halter top for picnics. Hacking jackets, knife-edge slacks and tailored shirts for the weekends. Cashmere polos. Structured dinner suits and sweeping ball gowns. Her jodhpurs have little cuffs to protect the horse from the buckles on her riding boots. Her tennis dresses are so white they glow. After a game on clay courts, Cecil cleans her sneakers with Clorox on a toothbrush.

  She believes in quality, not quantity. A woman should have twenty-four upholstered hangers in her closet and love each item hanging on them. When she gets a new blouse, an old blouse goes. Audrey believes in Laver’s Law. It is a fashion timetable developed by James Laver, playwright, bon vivant and a curator at the Victoria & Albert Museum. Mr. Laver explicates the life cycle of a dress:

  Indecent—10 years before its time

  Shameless—5 years before its time

  Daring—1 year before its time