Shocked: My Mother, Schiaparelli, and Me

by Patricia Volk

  Aunt Honey tells me something I can’t get over: “I was five when I met Albert and knew I would marry him.” She’s in show business, a Broadway star. Aunt Honey sings “Bali H’ai” in South Pacific and costars as Mother Burnside and Madame Branislowski opposite Angela Lansbury in Mame. At Audrey’s parties, Uncle Albert plays the piano and they lean into each other on the bench, harmonizing to “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.” The house fills with music. A Broadway star at our piano. Of the four “aunts,” I laugh most with Aunt Honey.

  Audrey discovers Aunt Horty in Sidney Hook’s philosophy class at NYU: “I looked around the room for someone who looked like me, and there she was, looking back.”

  Both are beautiful. Both are five feet five, slender and love to “dress.” They whoosh into parties in starched crinolines and attend luncheons in sheaths and hats. They take cruises together with their husbands, who are best friends too. They are reverse images of each other: Aunt Horty has black hair and white skin. Audrey is blonde and tan. They speak on the phone every day before getting out of bed. Mattie carries in a tray—fresh orange juice, toast and coffee. Then Audrey and Aunt Horty smoke, talk and have breakfast together. At the end of the day, before dinner, they catch up again. This time the tray ferries tea. We envy Aunt Horty. Audrey loves her so much. Audrey uses her beguiling voice when she talks to Horty. Aunt Horty is the only friend Audrey quotes:

  “Aunt Horty says you should never cut your cuticles. Push them down with an orange stick.”

  “Aunt Horty says if you turn off the TV you have to wait a minute before turning it back on.”

  “Aunt Horty says the pizza at Ray’s is better than the pizza at Joe’s.”

  When air conditioning becomes available in cars, “Aunt Horty says you should turn it on and leave the door open and the car will get cooler much faster.”

  “Cooler faster than if the door is closed, Ma?”

  “That’s what Aunt Horty says.”

  Over the course of a sixty-four-year friendship, they take cha-cha lessons together, play bridge together, move from New York to Kings Point, Long Island, together then thirty-three years later, sell those homes and retire to Boca Raton together. One winter, they rent a motel room in East Hampton for a week and give up smoking together. They have three major falling-outs, extended periods when something goes haywire and they’re not “on speaking terms.” During these nadirs, Audrey is valiant but subdued. No laughter ripples from her bedroom. No Pall Malls are lit when the telephone rings. “Your Aunt Horty says …” and all Aunt Horty references are banished from conversation. We are not told Audrey and Horty are on the outs. We don’t have to be. Loss permeates the air. Our mother is inconsolable and there’s nothing we can do about it. The worst silent treatment lasted a year. But usually, after a few months of mourning, one of them picks up the phone and, without discussing the injury, they start talking as if nothing has happened. Once again my mother’s step is light. She calls us “darling” again and we know it’s okay to say, “What’s new with Aunt Horty?” As they age though, a peculiar thing happens: Audrey spurns Horty. When Horty comes to visit in the hospital, Audrey screams through the canvas curtain: “Did I invite you, Hortense? Did anybody ask you to come? Go home!” Then she turns on Horty’s husband. She’s tired of him talking about his father “as if he were Abraham Lincoln.” She’s angry he’s not more grateful to Cecil for including him in all-guy sorties. She ridicules him for buying dental instruments to scale his own teeth and mocks them both when they split the pork-chop entrée at Houston’s. She complains that when she plays devil’s advocate Horty doesn’t bite. Audrey can’t get a rise. This goads my mother, makes her a little nuts. She delights in verbal sparring. She has a gift for it. She hurls herself against the barbed wire of dissonance and volunteers for either side. I begin thinking of her as “The Arbiter of Everything” after she excommunicates Cecil’s buddy Irv. Irv helps himself to a banana from Audrey’s fruit bowl, breaks off half, bandages the remains with flappy peel, then drops it back in the bowl. There is a right way and a wrong way to eat a banana when you’re a guest in someone’s house. Audrey refuses to go out with Irv and his wife, Shelly, again.

  Post-banana, she turns on all her friends except Fran and Muriel. No one could turn on Muriel, beautiful, generous, a natural at keeping it light. If Audrey were to say, “Hitler had a good side,” Muriel would respond, “You don’t say, darling. Is that so?” Audrey doesn’t turn on Fran either. Fran has a world-class brain. Audrey respects that. Of all Audrey’s friends, these last two need her the least. Audrey can smell need a mile away.

  “Don’t mix your friends,” she warns.

  Audrey is orthodox about her best friends not being friends with each other. What if they make dates that exclude her? What if they leave her out? Meeting without Audrey, they could talk behind her back. When she introduces friends to each other, if they subsequently meet without inviting her, Audrey drops them both. She claps her hands, wiping one off against the other, and says: “Well, I’ve crossed her off my list!”

  Procedure for dropping a friend:

  “Don’t return calls. If she corners you at a party or on the street, say, ‘Darling, forgive me. I’ve been meaning to call you. I’ll call you tonight.’ Then don’t. Never discuss why the friendship has failed. Character is immutable—what’s the point? After a while,” Audrey says, “she’ll get the message.”

  Once Audrey cuts a friend, that friend is dead to her. If one of my friends hurts me, that friend’s dead to her too. Decades after I’ve forgotten a slight, Audrey will say, “What? You’re having lunch with Judy Fram? She didn’t invite you to her Sweet Sixteen!” Or “Alice Immerman? How could you? That girl never returned your comics!”

  Audrey does not confide anything to a friend she minds being repeated. But lest friends think your life is perfect, “once in a while you have to throw them a bone.” She digs into her bone box and flings:

  “Oh, that Cecil. He spent all day Saturday at Ghost Motorcycles!”

  “Patty came home an hour after curfew! I paced a hole in the rug!”

  “I’ve forbidden Jo Ann to see Eddie Oliphant again!”

  She offers these tidbits as gifts, tiny personal problems to suggest that, contrary to what you might think, her life isn’t flawless.

  It surprises me when she says: “There is no such thing as a friendship between a man and a woman. It isn’t possible.” She’s adamant: “It’s never neutral for a man, darling, never. It can’t be. A platonic friendship between a man and a woman? Please.”

  I don’t believe her. There are boys I love. But there are many more I like, boys I ride my bike and play handball with, boys I don’t think about before falling asleep.

  Schiap has plenty of men friends too—Marcel Duchamp, Alfred Stieglitz, the Giacomettis, Edward Steichen, Christian “Bébé” Bérard, Jean-Michel Frank, Marcel Vertès, Raoul Dufy, Cecil Beaton. Paul Poiret dresses her for free when she has no money. Salvador Dalí is a close friend and collaborator. New to Paris, it’s Man Ray who escorts her to the hottest club in town. At Le Boeuf sur le Toit, he introduces Schiap to other men who become friends: Picasso, Maurice Chevalier, André Gide, Jean Cocteau, the Prince of Wales, Erik Satie.

  Man Ray, Bébé, Duchamp, Dalí—her closest friends are men. Women find her to be “an enigma.” From ten o’clock in the morning till closing, her workdays at 21, place Vendôme pass in a whirl of women. She develops Elsa Schiaparelli’s Twelve Commandments for them:

  I. Since most women do not know themselves they should try to do so.

  II. A woman who buys an expensive dress and changes it, often with disastrous result, is extravagant and foolish.

  III. Most women (and men) are color-blind. They should ask for suggestions.

  IV. Remember—twenty percent of women have inferiority complexes. Seventy percent have illusions.

  V. Ninety percent are afraid of being conspicuous, and of what people will say. So they buy a gray suit. They should dare
to be different.

  VI. Women should listen and ask for competent criticism and advice.

  VII. They should choose their clothes alone or in the company of a man.

  VIII. They should never shop with another woman, who sometimes consciously, and often unconsciously, is apt to be jealous.

  IX. She should buy little and only of the best or the cheapest.

  X. Never fit a dress to the body, but train the body to fit the dress.

  XI. A woman should buy mostly in one place where she is known and respected, and not rush around trying every new fad.

  XII. And she should pay her bills.

  Schiap is as generous to young women as Poiret was to her. “June in Paris was Ball Month,” Rosamond Bernier, art lecturer, Vogue editor and creator of L’Oeil magazine tells me over dinner. “There was a ball every night. Schiap lent me anything I wanted and I would return each gown, wrapped in tissue, at dawn the next morning, before the streets were swept.”

  Ms. Bernier’s Metropolitan Museum of Art lectures are riveting, sold-out phenomena delivered in gowns by Schiaparelli, Balenciaga and Zandra Rhodes. When I can’t get tickets for the one about Picasso and Matisse, I make an appointment with the Costume Institute and donate a pair of my great-great-aunt Bertha’s Schiaparelli gloves. They are opera-length black suede, open-worked with diamante-studded silk mesh. Gants Jouvin, Schiap’s favorite glove-maker, made them and they look like something Lady Macbeth would wear. Great-Great-Aunt Bertha was four feet ten, officially a midget. There’s no way I can wedge my hands into her gloves. It seems like a good idea, a pair of unwearable Schiaparelli gloves for a pair of tickets to Rosamond Bernier.

  “I’m so sorry,” the Costume Institute assistant tells me, folding conservation paper around them. “We can’t possibly get you tickets for Ms. Bernier. Thank you so much for the gloves.”

  I write to Ms. Bernier cold and tell her the story. She sends me two tickets.

  During her final lecture at the Met, Rosamond Bernier describes sharing a compartment with Schiap on a train en route to Saint-Moritz: “It was an arduous trip. From a suitcase Schiap retrieved a smaller suitcase. It was her traveling martini bar, complete with olives, gin and vermouth. It had a silver shaker, martini glasses and a stirrer as well. The rest of the trip was more enjoyable.”

  At a later date, I ask Ms. Bernier if she and Schiap were good friends. She takes her time answering. “Schiap was very good company. She was funny. But she was not one to let women get close to her. She did not reveal herself in any way.”

  Audrey and “Aunt” Horty on a cruise with their husbands.

  Picasso and Dalí were good friends of Schiap’s. Their work hung at 22, rue de Berri. (illustration credit 8.2)

  (illustration credit 8.3)

  Schiaparelli gloves donated to the Metropolitan Museum in hope of getting tickets to hear Rosamond Bernier. It didn’t work. The story had a happy ending anyway.

  chapter nine

  Lingerie

  Don’t neglect your sachets. At least twice a year, refresh them with perfume.

  —Audrey Volk

  The most modern falsies are called “Very Secret” and they are blown up with a straw, as if you are sipping crème de menthe.

  —Elsa Schiaparelli

  First you pull up triple-thick training pants. “Accidents” behind you, it’s white cotton undies, elastic at the waist. Because you are learning to take care of your things yourself and because you are learning to read, each pair is embroidered with a day of the week: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. Days-of-the-week undies are followed by white cotton Lollipops purchased at Rappaport’s on Broadway. Lollipops (currently $21.95 for a three-pack at Marchvermontcountrystore.com) come up to the waist, like Marilyn Monroe’s in The Seven Year Itch. There is a dramatic shift from cotton to nylon when you “fall off the roof” or “your aunt Tillie comes to visit” or you’re “unwell.” You stop calling them “undies.” Overnight they become “panties.” Nylon is easier to rinse than cotton. You are postpubescent and for the first time given money to purchase your own. You buy your first pair in a color other than white. Probably you get pink. It will be years before you catch on to black. You begin to understand the meaning of “Menopause ends thirty-five straight years of staring into your underpants.”

  Women did not start wearing true underpants until the early nineteenth century. Before then, knee-length leggings tied at the waist like chaps. Private parts were exposed. Half a century later, my grandmothers swore by woolies in winter, pink knit Bermuda shorts that thwarted life-threatening drafts. Under suits and sleek dresses, suppressive all-in-ones reigned. They were particular about their underwear, Polly and Ethel. They had corsetieres and believed that even if something is not seen by anyone besides the wearer, it behooves the wearer to have it pristine. Scrupulous underwear sets the tone from the bottom up. Polly drives this home with a true story. Life lessons are deployed as true-life stories. It is important to Nana that the victim of the story is someone she knows personally or a famous person. This removes the story from the realm of “hearsay.”

  Our family instructs via cautionary tale. The first time Audrey feeds me cherries she says, “Never stick a cherry pit up your nose. Your great-grandmother did, and a year later she sneezed and a vine came out of her nostril.”

  I never stick a cherry pit up my nose.

  “Never swallow chewing gum. I went to school with a girl whose insides stuck together and she had to have surgery.”

  “Never push down garbage with your hand. Mrs. Blaine’s aunt severed the artery in her wrist on a tin can and nearly bled to death.”

  “Always wear socks with your sneakers. Calvin Coolidge’s son died from a blister.”

  There was The Man Who Swam Out Beyond the Buoy and Got Diced by a Propeller, and The Little Girl Who Gave a Squirrel a Peanut and Died from Rabies.

  “Always wear clean underwear, because you never know when you’ll get hit by a truck” is the horror story about Mrs. Wald in Apartment 12F. When she got divorced, her settlement was barely adequate. She went from wearing lingerie hand-made by nuns in France to buying her panties at Woolworth’s for less a pair than she’d paid a laundress to hand-wash her old ones. Pretty soon, she couldn’t afford those. But, like some people, Mrs. Wald thought if she could present to the world an outer look of elegance it didn’t matter about her underthings.

  Then one day while crossing the street, Mrs. Wald was hit by a truck. Unconscious, she was taken by ambulance to the nearest hospital. The director of the emergency room took one look at Mrs. Wald’s outer finery and realized he was in the presence of someone important. Reluctantly, he cut through her clothes to facilitate the examination. When he saw the shabby state of her underwear, he assigned her to a first-year resident. She still limps.

  Today underpants come in hipsters, thongs, bikinis, string bikinis, tangas, high-rise, low-rise, extra-low-rise, butt-enhancing, butt-suppressing, butt-dividing, boy shorts, girdle-like, disposable, edible, full-figure and, thanks to Frederick’s of Hollywood, once again crotchless. The most disgruntled underwear people on the Internet can be found at Marchmormoncurtain.com. Mormons are expected to wear “holy garments” during sex and giving birth. A woman can wear a bra, but she has to wear the garments underneath it. The holy garments are a “spiritual shield against the powers of Satan” and provide maximum coverage. Mormoncurtain.com is the site for people who no longer believe in “the magic power of the temple drawers.” These people are angry. They refer to Brigham Young as Breedem Young.

  “Mom told me, ‘Never go in my dresser. Never open my closet,’ ” my sister says. But Audrey didn’t say that to me. So when she leaves for work, I investigate the contents of her underwear drawer for what’s coming down the pike. Clues to the future: tube girdles with garters and padded bras nested like matryoshka dolls. Slippery underpants. New stockings in flat pink boxes, used ones folded in lace envelopes. Neatly tucked among her underthing
s are scented heart-shaped sachets. They’re satin and the same pink as the top on her cologne bottle. Each sachet has a sash across the front, like a beauty contestant. Instead of “Miss Wyoming” it reads “Schiaparelli.”

  In real life, I do not see Audrey in anything scantier than a full slip. She is pathologically modest. After she dies, sorting her things in the Florida house, I come across a sheaf of waist-high blindingly white spandex panties, folded once at the equator, stacked like pancakes. They are dense, reinforced, orthopedic undies. When she got terminally sick, she became rail-thin no matter what she ate. She was “cachexic,” the medical term for people who can’t absorb what they eat. Every part of her was emaciated except her belly. My mother’s spleen had exploded, a vicious by-product of lymphoma. I closed the drawer and sold the house.

  In 1929, 186 million pairs of undies were manufactured in America, mostly in New York. By 2002, almost all underwear was imported. My UN of Underwear hails from Colombia, Turkey, Macau, China, the Czech Republic, Hong Kong, the Philippines, El Salvador, Myanmar, Bangladesh, Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam and Taiwan. Hanro of Switzerland’s are made in Hungary. The loveliest lace ones come from Haiti. Only one vintage Maidenform bikini I keep for sentimental reasons bears the moving label: “Made in USA, ILGWU, AFL-CIO.”

  All these affordable little luxuries, so full of promise. They’re all that stand between us and nudity. They touch there. That’s why stores call them intimates. No one tells you how to buy them. Once I thought a man I loved wanted me to look virginal. I went to the old B. Altman’s, the only department store where you saw nuns shop. In the lingerie department, I asked a salesperson if I could see “the kind of underwear nuns wear.”