Shocked: My Mother, Schiaparelli, and Me

by Patricia Volk

  In 1939, Schiap presents her Music Collection. As usual, everything relates to the theme. A handbag opens, and a music box inside plinks “Rose Marie, I Love You.” Another bag is shaped like an accordion. Belt buckles are hurdy-gurdies. Buttons, clips and hairpins are miniature violins, bagpipes and horns. The dresses themselves float with singing birds and buzzing bees. Music staves ripple with half-notes, grace notes and chords. This is the gown Schiap chooses for her daughter, Gogo, to wear to her first ball. It’s organza, full-skirted and cut on the bias, a gown made for dancing. I show Mr. McMoon a picture of Gogo’s dress and ask him to play the music on it. I’m certain Schiap left a secret message, that the notes will mean something. I’m hoping for “The Marseillaise” or “Dance, Ballerina, Dance.”

  Cosme McMoon plays the dress.

  “What song is that?” I ask.

  “This is fake music in A minor,” he says. “The rhythm doesn’t make any sense.”

  4. Men lead. Women follow.

  There are four kinds of social dancers: natural, schooled, bad and the ones who learn to trust one partner exclusively. They perform well but only with that particular person. That is the kind of dancer Audrey is. In college, her dance card was filled. So at one time, she had diverse partners. But now she likes to dance only with Cecil. To watch her dance with another man at a party, to watch her compromise her ideals of perfection, is agony. She tries to engage the partner in a heated discussion so the emphasis is less on dancing. If the conversation gets intense enough, they can stop dancing yet remain on the floor, loosely clasping each other, talking as if what they have to say is much more important than the act of dancing and requires complete concentration. Most of the time, Audrey resigns herself to the rigors of following. She tosses her head with confidence, as if it’s her partner’s fault they fail to mesh. Cecil doesn’t ask other women to dance unless Audrey chooses to sit one out. Then I get to watch him pull out all the stops. He glides across the floor. He swirls, dips and breaks away. Another woman “reads” his signals. Dancers give them room. He laughs. The woman laughs too. I check my mother’s reaction. Her face idles in neutral.

  Audrey sends me to Helen Rigby’s for tap, Madame Svoboda’s for ballet and, for social dancing, the Viola Wolff School of the Dance. Boys and girls wear party clothes and white gloves. I’m the tallest girl in the class and there aren’t enough boys so I have to lead. Young Roman girls of Elsa’s class study social dancing too. At the fashionable Scuola di Pichetti, they learn Le Quadrille des Lanciers, a figured dance from the 1820s, when lances were beginning to be used by the cavalry. Four pairs of dancers face each other. There are five “figures,” or movements: the Promenade, Moulinets, Chevaux de Bois, the Passe and the Corbelle. Partners are honored, corners are honored, there are deep dips, salutes, bows and curtsies. Advancements speed up as the figures progress. Quadrilles are highly choreographed and formal. They sound like more fun than the waltz. They sound like square dances, which I love. Schiap learns only the quadrille. The first time a man asks her to tango at a ball, she’s at a loss. It turns out she’s a natural. In the 1930s in Paris, women dance with women. At Le Bal de Forêt, Coco Chanel comes as Chanel, but Schiap rises to the occasion as a Surrealist oak tree. Chanel spots her amid a throng of admirers. She doesn’t like Schiap. Her favorite clients, Nancy Cunard and Daisy Fellowes, have jilted her for the House of Schiaparelli.

  Chanel taps Schiap on the shoulder. “Voulez-vous danser?”

  The oak tree and Chanel begin an energetic fox-trot.

  Leading, Chanel backs Schiap into a bank of lit candles. Her bark ignites. Guests grab soda siphons and extinguish Schiaparelli.

  5. A woman must sew.

  When Audrey is little, Polly designs and makes her clothes by hand. Dresses with georgette collars. Graduation gowns. A green velvet coat with Persian-lamb trim. Polly Morgen is what is called “good with a needle.” Audrey can sew too. It is a wife’s responsibility to maintain her husband’s socks. When one of Cecil’s develops a hole in the heel, Audrey repairs it. Her sewing box is a square duplex woven like a basket. Tidy spools of jewel-colored thread line up in the top story. From the basement she locates her darning egg. It looks like a rattle. She slips the round end down the neck of the sock until it stretches the hole in the heel. Her stitches are neat. She picks up one thread of still-woven sock (the third one in from the hole) and loops her needle under it, connecting it to a partner of still-intact sock on the other side of the hole. She draws sock and thread together, pulling them lightly, just so, to mimic the tension of extant sock, over and over, north to south, east to west, until the hole disappears beneath a scab of thread. Audrey excels at socks, name tapes and buttons. Anything more arduous—a hem, a seam—goes to the dressmaker.

  Years later I teach a class in contemporary culture to aspiring actors at the Tisch School at NYU. We discuss superannuation. I bring in Audrey’s darning egg.

  “What do you think this is?” I ask, holding it up. They pass it around.

  “A maquette for a Brancusi?” one says.

  “You use it to make guacamole!”

  “A massager?”

  “Does anyone know what ‘darning’ means?” No one does. Their socks are disposable. They laugh when I tell them people used to repair socks.

  While Audrey darns, I unscrew her button jar. It’s a Hellmann’s mayonnaise jar, thirty-two-ounce size, heavy with the buttons of her life. I shake them out on her quilt. Buttons from clothes she wore and buttons that come as spares in tiny envelopes once attached to new clothes. There are white glass flower buttons the size of Oreos, mauve silk balls from her engagement dress, buttons that look like heraldic shields, lace-covered buttons, various sizes of tortoiseshell buttons with rolled rims, mother-of-pearl buttons, shirt buttons, rhinestone buttons, clear plastic buttons, buttons like knotted gold rope, a pink silk faille button from her Claire McCardell dress with the buttoned cummerbund, horn buttons, toggles, rainbow abalone, navy reefer buttons with anchors on them. Most buttons I know from her suits and dresses. Some are from before my time. Carved amber ones belonged to my great-grandmother. There are buttons that look like bows and domed gold ones with raised eagles. There are faceted black buttons, set in prongs, kept together on a string. My favorite looks like a tiny bunch of grapes. It has leaves.

  “What’s this one from, Ma?”

  She looks up from her work. “The grapes? That was from my going-away suit, darling. Part of my trousseau.”

  Not until I’m older do I learn the word for the pleasant longing I feel touching these buttons. It is “nostalgia.”

  Polly teaches me how to sew. She asks me to thread her needle for company.

  “Did you ever in your life see such a child? She got it on the first try!”

  My sister, who has also learned to sew from Nana, teaches me the chain stitch.

  I make Audrey macaroni necklaces, Popsicle-stick frames and ashtrays out of clay. But when I turn ten, I’m allowed to cross the street myself. I can walk to Woolworth’s. I walk from Eighty-third and Riverside Drive to Broadway and Seventy-ninth to buy my mother a hankie for Mother’s Day. I’m going to monogram it with red thread. “A” for “Audrey.” I will use the chain stitch. My allowance is fifty cents a week. Hankies at Woolworth’s are ten. I can buy my mother a present and still have enough for a thirty-five-cent hot-fudge sundae at Schrafft’s with a five-cent tip.

  I buy a white hankie. Sewing the “A,” I pull the thread too tight. The fabric bunches. I flush the hankie down the toilet.

  The next day after school, I walk back to Woolworth’s.

  The second hankie, when I finish it, you can see the ballpoint ink I drew the “A” in. I flush that one too.

  The third hankie I use a pencil. The lead rubs off on the thread, turning it black. The toilet overflows.

  I want the hankie to be perfect. My mother is perfect.

  “Another hankie?” the saleslady at Woolworth’s says.

  Back home I thread the nee
dle. I begin to chain-stitch. This one looks good. Then I try to iron it. The front is sewn to the back. I throw it out the window.

  I am down to my last dime. On the fifth hankie the stitches on the crossbar of the “A” don’t match the vertical ones even though I’ve used the chain stitch on both. That hankie sails out the window too.

  I borrow ten cents from my sister. I have to give her an IOU for fifteen cents. Hankie number six, when I bite the thread off, it pulls a hole.

  Now my sister wants a twenty-cent IOU for one last dime. I draw the “A” on a piece of paper first, then Scotch-tape the paper to the window. Next I Scotch-tape the hankie over the paper. Light comes through. I can see the penciled “A” through the cloth. I use the needle to wiggle tiny holes where the stitches should go. I prick my finger. Blood gets on the hankie. I fill the sink with hot water and let the hankie soak. Yellow gum from the Scotch tape melts into the hankie.

  The doorbell rings. Tom the doorman wants to know if someone from our apartment is throwing hankies out the window.

  On Mother’s Day, I serve Audrey breakfast in bed.

  Invited to her first Parisian ball, Schiap buys four yards of dark blue crêpe de chine at Galeries Lafayette and two yards of orange silk. She’s twenty-three. She doesn’t know how to sew. She drapes the blue over, under, around and through, turning herself into a Zouave. She keeps everything together with hidden pins and a bright-orange sash. What’s left of the orange fabric is wound into a turban. This is Elsa Schiaparelli’s first creation. It causes a sensation. And then she is asked to dance. Something is wrong. She feels herself unraveling. Her escort tangos her out the door. Schiap never does learn to sew. The woman profiled three times in The New Yorker, who will one day be the subject of retrospectives at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Met, the woman who calls herself “a maker of dresses,” can’t make a dress? This violates a basic Audrey tenet: If you want to be good at something, you must learn it from the bottom up. You play “From a Rose” before you play “Für Elise.” You sketch before you paint. You master the Five Positions before you execute an arabesque. In a house of couture, according to Audrey, Schiap would start as an arpette, whose job is to pick pins off the floor. But Schiap sketches her designs or points to pictures in art books to describe what she wants and her staff does the rest. She critiques each phase. Adjustments are made. The most famous couturier in the world doesn’t know the basics. What’s more, she believes not knowing them makes her better at what she does. “Schiap decidedly did not know anything about dressmaking,” Schiap writes. “Her ignorance in this matter was supreme. Therefore her courage was without limit and blind.”

  Like Audrey, Schiap takes a great interest in buttons. She uses them to comment on the dress. She’s driven to pump the most out of an idea, to take it beyond expectation. At the House of Schiaparelli, “King Button” reigns: “The most incredible things were used, animals and feathers, caricatures and paperweights, chains, locks, paper clips, and lollipops.” Buttons like hand mirrors let you freshen your lipstick by looking down. Owls! Swans! Bugs! Nuts! Suns! Moons! Stars! Cinnamon sticks and licorice! Buttons are not ordered from suppliers. Schiap would rather give artists work—Alberto Giacometti, René Clément, Jean Schlumberger, Leonor Fini, Meret Oppenheim. A button can be art. Commercial buttons? A missed opportunity. Why settle for functional when a button could be life-enhancing. No detail is trivial. A Schia parelli button has to amuse and surprise. Everything—all of it, her home, her designs, her perfume presentations, her boutiques—is infused with one reigning principle: Everything has the potential to delight. Even, say, a button.

  6. A woman is responsible for the look of her home.

  Lee Epstein is the family decorator. Audrey and Polly are besotted by her taste. Mrs. Epstein is the height of an eight-year-old. She wears only black and keeps her gray bangs immobilized by a pillbox hat. People say, “She’s a dynamo!,” something I notice is said only about short women. Lee Epstein is known for her “shot of color” look. She creates a monotone room, then visually startles you. Polly’s living room is all yellow—yellow couch, yellow wall-to-wall, yellow chairs, yellow walls—then suddenly, just when your eyes are relaxing into yellowness, they light on a tiny ballroom chair covered in peacock-blue shantung. It’s a jolt in the happiest sense of the word. In Audrey’s all-cocoa living room—cocoa couch, cocoa walls, cocoa carpet—two club chairs are chartreuse. Her bedroom is emerald green except for a puffy rose satin quilt with trapunto so deep you could lose a finger tracing it. Everybody raves. Later my mother will shift to a decorator who is known for upholstered walls and trompe-l’oeil finishes. His specialty is making new furniture look old. He strips a bureau to bare wood, has it repainted, has the new paint partially rubbed off, then hits it with a hammer and drills it full of wormholes.

  Audrey redecorates, stem to stern, once per decade. She keeps her wedding furniture—the Syrie Maugham sofa, her fauteuil and Louis XIV chairs—but has them reupholstered and refinished. Carpets are pulled up and replaced by rugs. Rugs are rolled up and replaced by wall-to-wall. Drapes are donated to Aunt Gertie. There is a new color scheme, all blue in the sixties, then lots of polished floral chintz with fluffy tassels in the seventies. The eighties brought muted pastels. In a move that surprises, before she relocates to her last home, Audrey jettisons every memory-soaked piece. In Florida she buys the developer’s spec house. Whenever she buys a house, she buys a spec house: “I like to know what I’m getting,” she says. “I like fresh.” A decorator from the Boca Raton Bloomingdale’s is engaged, and in one day they furnish the biggest house of Audrey’s life, from teaspoons to sheets to zebra-skin rugs, couches, patio furniture and a Ming dynasty horse. French polished mahogany and ormolu are replaced by Lucite, chrome and leather. Two weeks later, a semi pulls into the driveway. Everything is delivered the same day. Every room in the new house feels like a model room in a department store. It is a home without anything personal, pared down, no history, and it thrills my parents. It renews them. They don’t miss a thing.

  Schiap hires Jean-Michel Frank to decorate her first apartment. He commissions Dalí to make a footstool out of the hip bones of a horse. Alberto Giacometti casts plaster sconces and lamps. Diego Giacometti forges tables. In the living room, an enormous orange leather couch faces “two low armchairs in green. The walls are white and the curtains and chair covers are made of a white rubber substance that was stiff and gleaming.” When she moves to her mansion on the rue de Berri, Schiap does a one-eighty. Audrey went from traditional to modern. Schiap abandons modern for what she grew up with: pattern on pattern, paintings over paintings, artifacts, bibelots, taxidermy, divans and bergères. Jean-Michel Frank insists she get rid of her François Boucher chinoiserie tapestry. Schiap refuses. They lock horns. Finally Frank gives in. Then he makes the tapestry disappear by painting the other walls in the room with trompe-l’oeil copies of it so the real one doesn’t stand out. Boucher paints a painting. Gobelins weaves a tapestry of the Boucher painting. Frank has murals painted from the Gobelins tapestry of the Boucher painting. The rooms on the rue de Berri are layered. They have no negative space. The eye is kept in motion. These rooms are added to but they are not redone. Everything has meaning.

  Clara Petacci’s stemware.

  The world-famous French balloonist Monsieur Auguste Piccard. (illustration credit 7.2)

  My sister’s piano teacher, Cosme McMoon, former bodybuilder and accompanist to Florence Foster Jenkins. Part of his job was retrieving roses Mrs. Jenkins had strewn during matinees so she could re-strew them that evening. (illustration credit 7.3)

  Polly made Audrey a green velvet coat with Persian-lamb trim and a matching hat. (illustration credit 7.4)

  Not a maquette for a Brancusi. Not for making guacamole. Not a massager. (illustration credit 7.5)

  For easy reference, Mom tied her dance cards around her wrist. (illustration credit 7.6)

  chapter eight

  Friendship

  If a frie
nd hurts you on purpose, it’s because she’s jealous. Feel sorry for her. If she hurts you unintentionally, feel sorry for her. She is crass.

  —Audrey Volk

  Believing tremendously in friendship, she expects too much of her friends: sheer disappointment in their capacity to respond has often made her enemies. Flattery and small talk bore her … and though she was helped mostly by other women she got along better with men.

  —Elsa Schiaparelli

  Friends are essential but Audrey is firm:

  “Never have a best friend, darling. Never put all your eggs in one basket.”

  She heeds her advice but hedges her bet. She doesn’t have one best friend, she has four. We call them “Aunt.” To call an adult by a first name is impertinent and “Mrs.” too formal for people we kiss.

  Aunt Dorothy, Aunt Horty, Aunt Ruth and Aunt Honey form the best-friend galaxy. Aunt Ruth is Audrey’s best friend from high school. During Christmas break, Ruth marries her uncle. She returns to class in a mink coat she takes off only for gym. Ruth and Audrey remain best friends through Ruth’s five husbands. By husband three, she’s gotten a new nose, contact lenses, has lost weight and gone blonde and suddenly Aunt Ruth is gorgeous in a peppy Jane Powell way. By husband five, she owns a stable. Aunt Ruth has primate dental spacing—little spaces between her teeth like chimps. Primate spacing keeps Aunt Ruth looking young even when she has to use oxygen at the track.

  Aunt Dorothy is genteel, a Cornell graduate who speaks flawless French. She invites us to her island in the Adirondacks every summer. The couples vacation together and attend the New York Valedictory Ball every year, triple-dating with Dorothy’s in-laws. We go to Madame Svoboda’s Ecole de Ballet and Camp Red Wing with Susie and Nancy, Dorothy’s daughters, our oldest friends, friends since Dorothy and Audrey were pregnant together, friends since utero.