Shocked: My Mother, Schiaparelli, and Me

by Patricia Volk

  “ Didn’t you notice, Aunt Barbara? Mom always seemed to be angry at Nana. Why was that?”

  Aunt Barbara dips a toe in: “Your mother wanted everything to be perfect,” she says. “Hair. Clothes. Nana didn’t care about perfect. Nana was earthy.”

  “She was? Nana?”

  Nana, with her chic suits and lavish furs and big diamonds, was “earthy”?

  “Your mother could be very strict with Nana if her hair or clothes weren’t right.” Aunt Barbara picks up steam. “Perfection was a necessity. If Nana wore pink and green together, your mother let her have it.”

  Does Aunt Barbara believe this? Is this the best she can do?

  Audrey volunteers for Class Mother every year. She doesn’t miss a single play or trip. And even though she thinks washing her girls’ mouths out with soap is the progressive way of setting limits, even though she hits so often my nickname for her is THOON (The Hand Out of Nowhere), I love her and am proud of her. She’s on my side. She tests me for the spelling quiz. She protects me from my sister and punishes Jo for pummeling me. I’d rather be with Audrey than just about anyone. The precision of her language excites me. I can make her laugh. She loves my hair.

  And yet, and yet: When we’re shopping together and Audrey runs into an acquaintance, if she doesn’t like the way I look that day, she pretends she doesn’t know me. She turns her back. She doesn’t introduce me. I’m not there. I peel off and paw the racks. My mother pretends she is shopping alone.

  Once, lying in bed, looking at her ceiling, I ask her if she has any regrets.

  She thinks. Finally, she says, “One.”

  I’m hoping she regrets the way she spoke to her mother or that she apologizes for the time she THOONed me in the mouth for sassiness. The aftermath of that whack, the resulting root canal, led to an ongoing prosthodontic challenge.

  “What is it, Ma? What do you regret?”

  “That I talked my mother out of getting a face-lift.”

  When Gogo is six, she says, “Mummy, where is my father?”

  By then Count Wilhelm de Wendt de Kerlor is dead.

  Schiap tries to explain the notion of death to a six-year-old. When she is finished, Gogo looks up at her and says: “Well, after all, you are my father and my mother.”

  Gogo attends school in Switzerland. Occasionally Schiap will visit and treat Gogo and her friends to a good meal. Schiap creates the “Go-Go Doll” and dresses her in tiny versions of Schiaparelli couture. A predecessor of Barbie, Go-Go is an eight-inch vinyl walker with sleeper eyes and rooted hair. She comes with outfits and accessories for travel, ballet, all kinds of activities. Everything the Go-Go Doll wears has a tiny Schiaparelli label sewn inside, including her real-fur cape.

  When Gogo is ready to meet men, Schiap sends her beautiful gowns. A London newspaper, the Daily Express, asks Schiap to write an open letter to Gogo on the correct way for a young lady to dress:

  Dear Gogo,

  Soon you will be buying your own clothes, so, considering the time I spend worrying about clothes for women—some of whom I never even see—I suppose I ought to give you a little advice.

  To begin with, you won’t have a big dress allowance because I think it is a bad thing for young people (maybe for all women, I’m not sure). It takes them longer to acquire judgment if their mistakes cost them nothing. Up till now you have been wearing tailor-mades most of the time. Well, that is not a bad habit for anyone. Don’t allow yourself to react from it too violently. Your first inclination will surely be to buy as much as you can for your money. Don’t give in to it.…

  You can only get to know good clothes from bad by looking at good ones. So, when you see a smart woman, study her. Only the rich can afford cheap clothes. If something you see looks worth twice its price, you may be sure the illusion will not last. What you buy must be good. Cut is of the first importance, and cut of course implies fit. Suits, coats, dresses, cut by an expert, fitting you perfectly, will stay smart long after the fashion which they follow is forgotten.

  I will not give you a list of colors which “will go” and those which will not because I believe that any one color will look well with any other provided (and this is, I think, the secret) that both are good clear, clean colors.

  Five years old, at sleep-away camp with a head-full of Prell. You were safe from polio in the Adirondacks.

  Letter to Audrey from the Bureau of Child Guidance. (illustration credit 15.2)

  The Vase Bacchantes by Lalique. (illustration credit 15.3)

  Audrey in Claire McCardell. Her mother in fox-trimmed cashmere. Does she look earthy to you?

  My favorite photo of my mother and me … (illustration credit 15.5)

  …and a painting of it.

  Gogo Schiaparelli (illustration credit 15.7)

  Namesake doll, an eight-inch walker with rooted hair and sleeper eyes. Schiaparelli labels were sewn into all of Go-Go’s costumes, including her pink rabbit-fur stole.

  chapter sixteen

  Superstition

  Never put a hat on a bed.

  —Audrey Volk

  Truly mystic, she believes in IT, but has not yet found out what IT is.

  —Elsa Schiaparelli

  Audrey is agnostic. Sometimes she refers to herself as an agnostic. “I’m not sure there is a God,” she says. “Frankly, darling, I doubt His presence.” We celebrate Christmas. Our tree pulses with bubble lights and tinsel. What Audrey believes in, the closest she comes to organized religion, is superstition:

  “If you leave the apartment, then remember you’ve forgotten something, when you come back in to get it, you have to go into the bedroom and, just for a moment, sit on the bed.”

  “If you’re walking down the street holding hands and something comes between you—say, a lamppost or somebody walking a dog—when you reclasp hands, you have to say ‘bread and butter.’ ”

  “The open side of a pillowcase must always face away from the door.”

  “Step over the legs of a growing child? Why not just lie down in front of a speeding train?”

  “A red ribbon tied on a baby’s crib keeps the evil eye away.”

  “It is all right to brag about the baby, provided you spit through your fingers three times. You needn’t actually expectorate. You can symbolically spit by saying ‘Toy! Toy! Toy!’ through the ‘V’ of your first two fingers.”

  Schiap’s superstitious too. She designs a line called Lucky Dresses, printed with the Big Dipper. Four is her lucky number: “I saw it, loved it, and felt I belonged to it,” she said, buying her eighteen-room mansion at 22, rue de Berri. “The number in the street was my lucky number: 22, two plus two equals four.”

  Ready to announce a new perfume, Schiap is certain “the name had to begin with an ‘S,’ this being one of my superstitions.” A color for the packaging is needed too. Schiap imagines a pink that is “bright, impossible, impudent … like all the light and the birds and the fish in the world put together, a color of China and Peru but not of the West—a shocking color, pure and undiluted.” She gives artists work whenever she can and sets René Clément to the task of making the new color. He develops four interpretations—cameo pink, desert rose, ruby pink and mauve. Schiap turns all of them down. She says no to the next three too. She wants a color that’s never been seen. How do you make a new color? How do you describe it? Is there a vocabulary? Once you’ve seen an oil slick or a Madagascar panther chameleon, you suspect the color wheel is covered. Try to picture, say, a dark yellow. And yet Professor Mas Subramanian at Oregon State University recently made a new pigment. As reported in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, manganese oxide mixed with other chemicals and heated to two thousand degrees Fahrenheit produces a brilliant new blue.

  Schiap is convinced it can be done. She sees the new color in her head. It must electrify. Clément nails it on the eighth try, a mixture of a particular magenta with a particular pink. There are countless magentas and pinks. Clement mixes the magical ones in the magical p
roportions. And there it is, the color Schiap dreamed of. She knows it when she sees it, the brightest, clearest deep blue-pink in the world. It becomes her lucky color. Her next collection—every gown, every shoe, every handbag—is this color. Schiap owns it. Decades later, acknowledging its power, Yves Saint Laurent will say, “She alone could have given to a pink the nerve of a red.”

  Using her lucky “S,” Schiap calls the color “Shocking Pink.” Every Schiaparelli scent begins with her lucky letter: Si, Soleil, Sleeping, So Sweet, Succès Fou, Salut, Scamp, Sans Souci, Santé, Spanking, Snuff (the first perfume for men, presented in a glass pipe in a cigar box) and Sport After Shave. Zut! (which in English loosely translates to “Holy Toledo!”), starts with the “S” sound.

  For luck, Schiap never travels without an empty cold-cream jar. It protects a crumpled picture of Joan of Arc given to her by a man she met in Hollywood.

  Peacock feathers augur “disappointment and bad luck.”

  She does not allow lilacs at 22, rue de Berri. If someone sends her lilacs, the servants are instructed to donate them to a hospital and bring Schiap the card. But one afternoon she comes home and discovers a vase of lilacs in her living room. The next day, two poplar trees in her courtyard mysteriously crash down and the Germans march into Paris.

  My mother doesn’t own any Schiaparelli hats, dresses or jewelry. She’s no fan of Schiaparelli lipsticks, perfume nips (small glass pipettes for single applications) or beauty creams either. She doesn’t go for the perfumed charms, or rings you slip Shocking-scented cotton into so the scent wafts when you move your hand.

  What Audrey does have is what Schiap envisions for the woman who can’t or won’t pay five thousand dollars for a House of Schiaparelli gown: Something lovely and amusing from Elsa Schiaparelli. And what Audrey does have, I think of as lucky: In addition to her “Shocking” perfume and cologne, she has Shocking sachets, lingerie envelopes and compressed bath sponges (drop one in the tub and it blooms like a flower, scenting the whole bathroom, expanding until suddenly you’ve got yourself a full-size pink washcloth!). She has Shocking Pink heart-shaped guest soaps packed in pleated white paper cups like bon-bons, and Shocking dusting powder. The motif on the powder box is four hearts almost kissing at their pointed ends, repeated over and over, like wallpaper, four hearts, a family of four, like Audrey, Cecil, Jo and me, our family, the four of us. Piercing each heart where you’d expect to see an arrow is a gold sewing needle. A fine blue thread pokes through the eye. It loops around each heart spelling out “les parfums Schiaparelli paris france” in thread. The letters fall the way a thin thread would if you actually looped letters out of it. Fifty-two hearts (I know. I count them) about to kiss. There are fifty-two weeks in a year. You have to look closely. Everything Elsa Schiaparelli designs has more meaning than first meets the eye. Everything Audrey has from Schiap is worth studying. The more you look, the more you see.

  Before she leaves our apartment, Audrey scents her handkerchief with a drop of “Shocking” cologne. She unscrews the top, places her hankie over the hole. With a flick of her wrist she inverts the bottle. Her hankie, for good luck, is perfumed for the day.

  The Madagascar panther chameleon (Furcifer pardalis). (illustration credit 16.1)

  chapter seventeen

  The Bogomoletz

  One never knows what the effect of a Bogomoletz will be. Sometimes it makes the hair grow black, sometimes it turns hair white, sometimes it makes one feel younger, but at other times it makes one swell like a whale.

  —Elsa Schiaparelli

  Are you making yourself useful?

  —Audrey Volk

  On January 17, 1944, Time magazine reports a discovery: The director of Kiev’s Institute for Experimental Biology and Pathology has invented a miracle drug. He is decorated with the Order of Lenin and the Hammer and Sickle Gold Medal. Anti-reticular cytotoxic serum (ACS) is made from the bone marrow of human corpses. It speeds healing, increases all the body’s defenses and may enable man to live to 125.

  Schiap reads about Professor Alexander Alexandrovitch Bogomoletz in New York during the war. The United States Embassy has persuaded her she is at high risk in Paris. In 1941, Elsa Schiaparelli, Italian by birth, French by choice, outspoken critic of fascism, flees. She keeps the doors at 21, place Vendôme open. She wants to save as many jobs as she can. Undercover, Schiap wends her way to Lisbon, then flies into Idlewild Airport aboard the Dixie Clipper.

  But what will Schiap do in New York? She reads about Bogomoletz: “One must not lose desires,” he says. “They are mighty stimulants to creativeness, to love, and to long life.” Schiap needs desires. She needs something to be passionate about. Her Bogomoletz takes the form of submerging herself in charitable works. In New York she designs uniforms for the Salvation Army. She gives blood. She judges a sewing contest at the Waldorf-Astoria. On the CBS radio show Report to the Nation, she begs Americans, in a teary voice, to send needles and thread to France. She embarks on a cross-country lecture tour, to raise money for French children. She joins a relief organization called American Aid to France. In the Whitlaw Reid Mansion at 451 Madison Avenue, she stages art shows and concerts that demonstrate links between French and American culture. She asks Marcel Duchamp to install a Surrealist art exhibit. Her budget is small. Duchamp gets a good price on sixteen miles of cord. With the help of his friends André Breton, Max Ernst and Alexander Calder, they string it back and forth, up and down, weaving a web from chandeliers and columns and easels and back. The viewer is ensnared in front of the pictures like a fly in a web, a surreal experience looking at Surrealism.

  Schiap experiences her major Bogomoletz by enrolling in a program at the American Red Cross. “I learned how to take a temperature, how to treat a burn, how to bandage a broken leg, how to stop a wound flowing, how to revive a drowned body.…” She tests blood and bathes the dying. One of her biggest challenges is something I do without thinking at camp, making the perfect hospital corner. Hospital corners baffle Schiap: “a geometrical problem not easily solved.” Mornings at six, Elsa Schiaparelli walks to Bellevue Hospital in white sneakers and a nurse’s uniform for a full day of “endless stories, swamped in organic smells—all this made her feel part of humanity again, and no longer a dead branch hurled by the hurricane, and it saved her soul.” You can’t be miserable when you’re doing good. Schiap is rejuvenated. She feels useful. She writes: “This particular Bogomoletz gave Schiap courage and to a certain extent made the difficult years tolerable.”

  Audrey could use a wartime Bogomoletz too. Her twenty-four-year-old brother, Bobby, is shipped to Saipan. Herman Morgen closes his restaurants, all three of them, refusing to deal in black-market meat while his boy is overseas. Polly bans flowers in her home. Cecil opens the Robert Cecil Bakery with the understanding that half the profits are to be put into a savings account for Bobby when he comes home. No one in the family will buy anything made in Germany. Herman Morgen switches from Heineken to Miller High Life—“The Champagne of Bottled Beer.” Yorkville and its Konditorei are off-limits. Going crosstown for Schwarz wälder piflinger is out of the question. The ban includes Chanel N° 5. Although Chanel N° 5 is made in France and she is French, our family despises Coco Chanel. She is a traitor. Firing her staff, closing her maison, it is common knowledge that she is riding out the Occupation in the arms of the Nazi spy Baron Hans Günther von Dincklage, aka Spatz. From their love nest at the Ritz, using von Dincklage’s influence, she does her best to steal the House of Chanel from her backers, our landsmen, the Wertheimers, who own 70 percent of everything Chanel. While the rest of Paris starves, Chanel nibbles fraises des bois.

  “Can you imagine?” Polly says, pouring her Chanel N° 5 down the drain. “That momzer.”

  Nana switches to Bellodgia, a floral yet spicy scent made by the House of Caron.

  When the war is over, Chanel is accused of being a traitor, une tondue, une collaborateur horizontale. She is arrested by the Comité d’Épuration. After questioning, they release he
r. If the Comité decides she is guilty, she will be arrested again, her head will be shaved and she will be paraded through the streets of Paris in her underwear. While the Comité is deciding how to proceed, Chanel receives a phone call warning her to leave Paris immediately. She and von Dincklage speed by car to Switzerland. It’s an ongoing mystery—to this day no one knows for sure—who made that call and how Chanel and von Dincklage were allowed to cross the border. According to Hal Vaughan in his book Sleeping with the Enemy: Coco Chanel’s Secret War, it was Chanel’s good friend Winston Churchill who saved her: “One theory has it that Chanel knew Churchill had violated his own Trading with the Enemy Act (enacted in 1939, which made it a criminal offense to conduct business with an enemy during wartime) by secretly paying the Germans to protect the Duke of Windsor’s property in Paris.”

  In 1954, after nine years in exile, Chanel returns to Paris. She is greeted with less than love. French reviews of her first collection say she has “lost her touch.” The British call her line “mumsy.” Courrèges likens her to “an old Rolls, still in working order, but inert.” Lillian Ross interviews Chanel for The New Yorker and asks her why she stayed in retirement so long: “Her brown eyes flashed. ‘Never was I really in retirement in my heart. Always I observed the new clothes.… Always I was smiling inside my head, and I thought, I will show them.’ ” It’s the Americans who embrace Chanel’s immaculately tailored, modernistic suits. Americans save the House of Chanel. They don’t seem to care about Chanel’s politics. When I ask Rosamond Bernier about this, she says: “At the end of World War II, no Americans knew what was going on.”