Shocked: My Mother, Schiaparelli, and Me

by Patricia Volk

  Despite the wartime gloom and the anxiety about the well-being of her brother, Audrey has one secret smoldering joy: Cecil is safe. Six family stories circulate. Dad does not serve in World War II because:

  1. He has high blood pressure.

  2. He is an alcoholic.

  3. He isn’t an alcoholic but shows up at the draft board blotto and swears he is.

  4. Audrey goes to the draft board, throws herself on the floor, writhes and cries: “You can’t take him! He has two babies! I’ll kill myself!”

  5. Audrey goes to the draft board, throws herself on the floor, writhes and cries: “You can’t take him! He’s an alcoholic with high blood pressure! If you take him, he’ll be more trouble than he’s worth!”

  6. When he was ten, Dad had an orchiectomy after being kicked by a horse. The army doesn’t want a man missing a testicle.

  Cecil could drink. Appearing at his draft board slurring his words and tripping over his feet would have been a walk in the park. But even after Pearl Harbor and the wave of patriotism that followed, there must have been plenty of men who didn’t lust to sign up. Wouldn’t coming in drunk be the first thing a draft board would suspect? As for Audrey’s writhing on the floor, it’s not easy to imagine. A histrionic display would have been out of character. And yet were stakes ever higher? Audrey would go to any lengths to protect Cecil. She adored him. I suspect she could not have imagined life without him. What would she be, a young widow with two baby girls and no source of income? She would be the worst of the worst, the lowest of the low, the phrase she used for women worthy of abject pity. She would be damaged goods.

  Cecil never had high blood pressure. He maintained 100 over 70 till he died. Is it possible to give yourself, with the right medicine, a temporary case, high blood pressure for a day? Dr. Freddie King, who treated four generations of our family, who relished weekends with my grandparents at the Shelburne in Atlantic City and the Al-Bur-Norm on Schroon Lake, was an ethical man. But might he have been willing to help Cecil, especially since our family already had one son overseas? Amphetamines make your heart go crazy. Every dieter knows that. What is it like for Dad, a strapping twenty-three-year-old, to sit out the war in New York? How does he respond when people say, “Why aren’t you overseas?” Does he start with “I tried to enlist, but …”? And what does Audrey say when people ask, “Where is your husband stationed?” followed by “Why isn’t he serving?”

  Most often, she tells story number four. And like Schiap, she thrusts herself into good works. Being purposeful is the antidote for shame. Good works are Audrey’s Bogomoletz too. She knits socks. She becomes an officer in the Bread Donor Nursery and Junior League for Child Care. She runs the Bookmobile at Polyclinic Hospital and makes sure her girls have a job too. We are to collect all the thin metal strings smokers pull to open the cellophane on a pack of cigarettes, every single one we can find. We walk looking down. We scour our block. We pester the elevator men. The Riverside Drive playground at Eighty-third Street is a gold mine. Jo and I are human metal detectors prowling the benches where mothers sit and smoke. We find them, triumphant, silver or gold and sometimes red (Lucky Strikes). We are told these metal strings will be melted down into bullets. I want mine to make the bullet that kills Hitler.

  When I ask Dr. Michael Cohen, my internist, what pill a man could have taken in the 1940s that would have temporarily raised his blood pressure high enough so he would not be draft-worthy, he says: “You wouldn’t need a pill. If you don’t drink any water for a day and then run four miles, you dehydrate yourself and your blood pressure will rise.” The last time I overhear Audrey tell a Why Cecil Wasn’t Drafted story, she uses version number one. We thought it was a miracle that, after four and a half years in a trench, Uncle Bobby came home. He was never right again, but gladiolas reappeared in my grandmother’s living room and Herman Morgen opened a big new restaurant in the garment center where, since Schiap’s New York office was around the corner, most likely she had lunch.

  Postwar, my grandmother sticks with Bellodgia. Nothing German enters our homes until, eleven years after V-E Day, Cecil rolls into the driveway on a BMW motorcycle. No one mentions it is made in Germany. My father wants the safest bike. If he is going to engage in the dangerous act of motorcycling, it behooves a responsible family man to ride the sturdiest bike there is. My son drives a BMW station wagon. My daughter brews her coffee in a Braun. I’ve lost my taste for Pflaumenkuchen. But when my friend Benjamin Taylor’s mother dies, he disposes of her beautiful things in one generous afternoon, appointing them to his ladyfriends, and I come into possession of Annette Bockstein Taylor’s quilted Chanel shoulder bag.

  In 1971, Chanel dies in her suite at the Ritz. She is seventy-seven. She dies with a caved-in face, features squashed together like the puppet Señor Wences made out of his hand. She dies with the face she deserves, a mean little greedy face made absurd by plucky straw boaters and giant earrings emblazoned with two gold “C”s, which, to my mother, grandmother and me, stood for “Coco Collaborateur.”

  The “First Papers of Surrealism” show, in 1942, at the Whitlaw Reid Mansion in New York. Schiap put Duchamp on a tight budget. He bought sixteen miles of string and used one. Then he hired twelve children in sports gear to play ball, jump rope and chase each other. If asked what they were doing there, Duchamp told the children to say, “Mr. Duchamp told us we could play here.” (illustration credit 17.2)

  Dad’s draft notice. (illustration credit 17.3)

  Description of registrant and classification.

  In his novelty act, the ventriloquist Señor Wences made a dummy out of his hand. It bore a startling resemblance to Coco Chanel. (illustration credit 17.5)

  chapter eighteen

  Reckoning

  Had I not by pure chance become a maker of dresses, what could I have become?

  —Elsa Schiaparelli

  I never expected my hands to look like this. Whose hands are these?

  —Audrey Volk

  As soon as she can get a flight, Schiap books passage back to France. The war is over. She heads straight for 22, rue de Berri to see what’s left. She has no idea what she’ll find. Have her trompe-l’oeil tapestry walls been painted white? Did the Germans smash her mirrors for spite? For three years, they commandeered her home.

  Alone, she walks through every room. Miraculously, everything is intact. Downstairs, in the front hall, she pauses. The drawer of her console is filled with calling cards left by French friends who visited during the Occupation. Schiap cuts every card-leaver dead.

  At the place Vendôme, she doubles all salaries and launches her Talleyrand Silhouette. Jean-Paul Sartre asks her to design costumes for his new play, Le Diable et le bon Dieu. Vogue calls Schiap “the only true artist in fashion.” To celebrate the liberation of Paris, she collaborates with Dalí on her most dramatic perfume presentation: Press the catch. A gold scallop shell yawns to reveal a Baccarat bottle. The dauber is the sun. Its bursting rays are hand-gilded. The features of the sun’s face are composed of Schiap’s symbol of freedom, birds in flight. The base of the bottle is the rippling ocean. Waves crest in blue enamel. “Though too expensive and too sophisticated for the general public,” she wrote, “it was a lovely object destined not to die.”

  Schiap calls this presentation “Le Roy Soleil.” Two thousand Sun Kings are produced and sell out immediately.

  She sends a bottle to one of her best customers. A thank-you note is hand-delivered:

  Dear Madame Schiaparelli,

  It is really the most beautiful bottle ever made, and the Roy Soleil is a very lasting and sweet gentleman. I cannot tell you how much I appreciate your giving me such a handsome present which has displaced the Duke’s photograph on the coiffeuse! I shall be back again either tomorrow or Friday morning.

  With every good wish for great success with your collection which deserves all the applause.

  I am,

  Believe me,

  Yours sincerely,

  Wa
llis Windsor

  At Paramount Studios, there’s talk about making a movie of Schiap’s life. It will star Joan Crawford, who continues to wear Schiap’s tray shoulders long after Schiap tells her, “You must give them up, Joan. They are vraiment passé.” Later, another Schiap client, Lauren Bacall, is proposed for the lead but the movie is not made. A young cutter named Pierre Cardin, said to be excellent with scissors, joins the House of Schiaparelli. A promising twenty-year-old named Hubert de Givenchy is hired as a junior designer. “Surrealism was finished by then,” said Givenchy. “When I arrived at the house and saw her wearing two different color shoes, I said to myself, ‘How can a woman with so much talent not understand that that is all over?’ ” Schiap, creator of the themed collection, brings out six a year: the Broken Egg Silhouette, the Gibson Girl Look, the Mummy Silhouette, the Riding-Habit Line, the Hurricane Line, the Arrow Silhouette. Twenty years after she’s on the cover of Time, she’s on the cover of Newsweek. A survey in front of the New York Public Library confirms that “Schiaparelli” is the best-known name in fashion. But something is wrong. Something has changed. The clothes aren’t selling. Schiap misjudges the postwar woman. Theatricality and what Schiap christens “hard chic” are no longer calling cards in a freshly chastened world. Impudence and conspicuous luxury have lost their glow. Insouciant clothes misfire. Schiap is out of touch with the prevailing mood. “I tried to make women both slim and elegant, so that they could face the new way of life. I did not immediately realize that the sort of elegance we had known before the war was now dead.”

  Still she can’t quit. Incapable of compromising on quality, ignoring her advisers, she pushes Schiaparelli, Inc., deep into debt. Schiaparelli perfumes begin supporting the House of Schiaparelli. In 1947, a young designer named Christian Dior announces his “New Look.” Youthful, straightforward yet feminine, it hits the right note. Schiap hears “the tolling of the bell.” The House of Schiaparelli becomes moribund. For the first time, suppliers refuse to extend credit. Bankruptcy looms. In 1954, with much prodding from her trusted business manager Monsieur Cavaillé-Coll, the House of Schiaparelli closes its doors at 21, place Vendôme.

  It’s devastating to see her fail. Even when I am little, I know that if life is going to be any good you’ve got to love your work. And here Schiap is, doing what she loves, answering to herself and failing.

  Why couldn’t she change with the times? I don’t get it. I look at my grandmothers and wonder why people get locked into ideas. Granny Ethel still wears her hair the way she did when she was seventeen. Nana Polly still loads her handbag every morning as if war is about to be declared on Manhattan.

  There will be no more House of Schiaparelli couture.

  There will, however, be more Schiaparelli than ever. Schiap reinvents herself. She becomes a licensing pioneer. Elsa Schiaparelli leases her name to Playtex girdles, Cutex nail polish, Glentex scarves, Kimberly-Clark, Formfit, Wyler’s Foods, Nomotta Yarns, Congress playing cards, Arrco playing cards, Sealy mattresses, Longines watches, paper dolls and real dolls, Catalina swimsuits, Doeskin gloves, fabrics, furs, stationery, shower curtains, cars, eyeglasses, table linens, lingerie, Vat 69 Scotch, Good Luck margarine, Kraft Italian dressing, Westcott Hosiery Mills, menswear, ties, cuff links, handbags, hats, jewelry, shoes and chewing gum.

  Cecil agonizes over it but eventually decides the time is right. He’s going to sell the restaurant. He’s spent two killing years negotiating a twenty-year lease, and now he can retire with an income. He sublets Morgen’s West. Overnight it becomes an Italian restaurant that sends him a big fat check every month. No more getting up at 5 a.m. to haggle with his suppliers then print the day’s menu. “PPP,” Cecil likes to say: “Prior Planning Pays.”

  Audrey has done her preparation too. Armed with her M.S.W. and the prospect of a new career, she puts their house on the market. Two professionals come in and stage a marathon three-day tag sale.

  “Mom, you’re selling the Morganti Brighton Banjo Barometer?”

  “It hasn’t worked in thirty years.”

  “The Syrie Maugham sofa?”

  “What do I want with a Syrie Maugham sofa in Florida?”

  “Not Granny Ethel’s bronze pheasant!”

  “When you need a bronze pheasant, you can buy your own.”

  They fall in love with a McMansion in Boca Raton. It has soaring ceilings and white marble floors. The tiles measure two feet by two feet. They’re set on the diagonal like diamonds. The lines make me dizzy—there are no right angles in this house. It’s crazy-making where the tiles meet the walls, which are designed not to be plumb. The house feels off-kilter, but not to them, and God!, how they love it, all forty-eight hundred square white feet of it. Moby Home. Four bedrooms and five bathrooms, a restaurant-size kitchen, breakfast room, TV room, two offices, a huge dining room and living room—all surfaced in a color born to show dirt. Even though she has a housekeeper, Audrey bends a thousand times a day, picking up a crumb or a hair or a bug on its back no one else can see. She’s like one of those perpetual-motion bird toys that peck water out of a glass. Up-down, up-down, she folds at the waist. “It’s good exercise,” she says, marching a sesame seed to the sink.

  They have twelve of their happiest years before Cecil gets paged at his club. He is to report to his doctor’s office immediately. It’s not good. A routine blood test has come back with seriously elevated numbers. Cecil has acute myelogenous leukemia. Overnight he goes from playing three sets of tennis a day to chemo “cocktails.” He loses his hair and his strength and parts of his skin. Each time something doesn’t work, Dad tries something else. Jo and I are typed for bone-marrow transplants. He’s accepted into an experimental protocol.

  When my great-grandparents die, one right after the other, I’m little and can’t figure it out. Where did people go?

  “How can they just disappear?” I asked my mother.

  “They don’t,” she said. “They’re in you. Every generation that precedes you. Sometimes in ways you don’t even know. It could be anything, darling. A turn of phrase. Not liking nutmeg. People don’t disappear. Look how you hold your pinky.”

  I looked down. “It’s just like Poppy!”

  “Exactly.”

  Cecil weathers treatment after treatment until his doctor comes up empty-handed. The day Dad dies, Audrey dictates a message for my sister to record on the answering machine. Audrey regards Jo’s speaking voice as the best. “A finely tuned instrument,” she calls it.

  “Cecil succumbed to leukemia at five-thirty this morning,” my sister says into the phone. “We are unable to return your call.”

  I fly down to Boca once a month now. More when my mother breaks a bone. She is valiant going it alone. But she no longer has the strength to walk around her enclave with me. A year ago, she was leaving me in the dust. She begins to laugh when she mishears something, turning it into a little comedy or drama:

  “You said ‘sticker’? I thought you said ‘liquor.’ Ha-ha!”

  “You said ‘tennis courts’? Oh my God! I thought you said ‘cold sores.’ ”

  Either she’s getting shorter or I’m getting taller.

  There is one thing I want. Something I want her to give me.

  “May I have this?” I ask.

  Cue number one: Her lips tighten.

  It is impossible to pick up the check when we go out for a meal. Shopping with her, if she approves of your selection, Audrey whips out her AmEx card. A driver picks me up at the airport in West Palm and he’s prepaid. My mother is wildly generous in unpredictable ways but doesn’t appreciate being asked for something. Not one bit. No, she most certainly does not, uh-uh.

  I wag the bottle at her.

  She raises an eyebrow—cue number two.

  Now I’m supposed to put the bottle down and say, “Oh, it’s not important.” Or “I don’t really want it, Ma. N’importe, chérie.”

  I’m good at reading her. Better than my sister. It’s possible reading my mother is what I do b
est. I know what might displease her and sense it the way trained dogs can predict an epileptic seizure. I know what makes her laugh. I am tuned like a Stradivarius to her flickery moods, innuendos, all shifts therein. I bat a thousand predicting her responses. She can’t surprise me, not anymore. I am the curator of her cues, the cue connoisseur. I know them all.

  Whatever I just said about Audrey and me is counterbalanced by my sister. Two accidents born eighteen months apart, sharing a bedroom, going to school, tap class, and camp together, we might have been born to different people. My sister thinks strict obedience is the shortcut to love. For me, that price is too steep. Pleasing our mother is like trying to eat Jell-O with chopsticks. My sister courts Audrey. She lays her slim, beautiful neck on the block. Mom’s ax catches the sun. Doesn’t Jo know? In an autobiographical sketch for one of her writing classes, Mom wrote: “My anger is easily ignited. In fact, I enjoy the preliminary sensations—the prickling scalp, the blood rushing to my head, and the tremors in my limbs that foretell the beginnings of a fine rage.”

  Aha, I tell Jo, reading this. Rage is Audrey’s sex.

  Aha, Jo tells me, reading it. Audrey is a sadist.

  Doesn’t she get that anger thrills our mother? My generous sister offers herself, a human sacrifice. She is enraged by our mother yet covets her approval. She wants to be what Audrey wants her to be, regardless of price. My sister is guaranteed to come back for more. But Audrey knows she can alienate me. I am capable of being more remote than Cassiopeia. “You left town early on,” Jo Ann recently told me. “You went into outer space. You saw what was happening to me and you didn’t like it. You were a pearl spinning nacre.”

  So I smile at my mother and raise my eyebrows back at her. Whenever I smile, I wonder if she notices the tooth. It’s the lower-right central incisor. My mother never says anything about that tooth, even though she criticizes the other ones. “Boy,” she laughs when I smile, “you’ve sure got a lot of gold. Get me my sunglasses.” But the tooth that is beginning to look strange, the root canal from fifty years ago, is an eyesore. Mom’s mum. This tooth Audrey never says a word about.