It’s confusing when someone you love hits you so hard you need a root canal. It’s confusing when someone you love hits you so hard you need a root canal and doesn’t apologize. It’s confusing when someone you love hits you so hard you need a root canal, she doesn’t apologize and says, “If you’re ever rude to me again, I’ll knock the other thirty-one out.” Especially because you know that person loves you. The person who wouldn’t think twice about insisting you take her seat in a lifeboat can also kill your tooth. It would mean the world to me if she apologized. A dam would break. “She never will,” my sister says. “Give up.”
I hold the bottle. Usually I ask for nothing. Audrey knows this. She hasn’t used this bottle since 1955. I love this bottle. I suspect she’s aware of that. Sometimes she gives me things she knows only I will cherish: the wool cap my father bought her at Le Château Frontenac on their honeymoon, Granny Ethel’s surreal silver salver that looks like a celery leaf, her wedding dress with a waist so small it was too tight to button on my wiry eight-year-old one Halloween. I’m the one. My mother chose me for these things. Jo doesn’t care about them. Audrey knows that. Just because my sister is vulnerable doesn’t mean she’s sentimental.
I stand there holding the bottle. I don’t say a word.
Mom’s look says, You should know better. She is on her continent of a bed, a California king covered by a custom silk quilt. It resembles the quilts Mr. Oswald, her New York quilt man, used to make. Three generations of our family used him for their beds. Everyone agreed he was an excellent quilt man. Mr. Oswald made house calls. Now in Boca Raton Mom has found a quilt lady. Mrs. Gutierrez comes to the house with swatches and she sews silk quilts too.
Reading in bed is still sacrosanct. The shaded sconce makes Audrey’s cap of hair look gold. She stares at me over her readers. Propped by pillows, she is in one of her many pristine white Oscar de la Renta peignoir ensembles. All of them are the same, her beauty-sleep uniform. She is spending more and more time in bed. She sleeps with oxygen tubes in her nose, and now she keeps them on during the day too, but only in her bedroom, only in front of her daughters and her aides. She won’t go shopping with the tubes or play bridge in them. My brilliant sister invents cushions out of pink foam hair rollers to cover the tubes where they press into Mom’s face. That way, when company comes or she goes out, Mom won’t have red lines from the tubes denting her cheeks. The doctor has told her that using the oxygen round the clock will take some strain off her weary, compromised heart, but my mother has rules for how she will appear in public. And my mother has told me—as she has lost the ability to play tennis, to walk around her enclave, to shop at Blooming dale’s, as her illnesses have progressed and multiplied (she has lymphoma, hemolysis, pulmonary hypertension, neuropathy, osteoporosis, congestive heart failure, and arthritis in two fingers—making them curl), as she has begun to breathe like a fish on a dock, as she has qualified for a disabled parking spot, as filling the thirty-five compartments of her weekly pill organizer has become an activity and her new way to measure the passage of time—my mother has told me, “I’m quite happy to live as long as I can still do three things: play bridge, do The New York Times crossword puzzle and read.” These three things are enough. If she has nothing left but her trifecta, she can be content. She loves bridge. She is a member of the American Contract Bridge League and the World Bridge Federation. She goes to local tournaments with her girlfriends and wins enough Silver Masterpoints to become a Sectional Master. She’d like to be a Life Master, but that would mean earning three hundred or more Masterpoints, of which at least fifty must be Silver (she has those), at least twenty-five must be Gold, and at least another twenty-five must be Red or Gold. For Red and Gold points, she has to go to regionals. This entails traveling and staying overnight in a hotel. She’s willing but there’s a problem: Audrey simply will not share a hotel room with any of her bridge partners.
“They don’t want to pay full-price for a room,” she explains.
“So treat your partner to a room, Ma.”
“It would change the dynamic.”
“Tell them it would be your pleasure.”
“They would feel beholden.”
Audrey, as superb a bridge player as she is, will never scale the Life Master heights.
So we look at each other. It’s what she calls “a Russian standoff.” I’m determined not to break the silence. I could seesaw the bottle like it was dancing and say, “Please, pretty please with sugar on top?,” and make her laugh, but I don’t want to. I use the absence of speech with my mother the way Native Americans used it, to make the other person hear what they’ve said, to maintain dignity.
She shakes her head as if I’m hopeless. “What do you want it for?”
“I love it.”
“What are you going to do with it?”
“Nothing.”
“Fine.” She waves me away with the back of her hand and returns to her book.
There’s less than an inch of perfume left, but the bottle of Elsa Schiaparelli’s “Shocking” cologne is mine.
I take it into the guest room. I unscrew the top.
I raise the bottle to my nose and take a whiff. Quickly I put the top back on. The smell of “Shocking” has not changed. It is still there in this bottle, a genie, heavy and rich, floral and spicy, the smell of my mother. That night I call my sister: “Mom gave me her bottle of ‘Shocking.’ ”
“What did you want that for?”
“I’ll be able to smell her whenever I want.”
“But she hasn’t worn ‘Shocking’ in years. She stopped wearing that when they came out with ‘Norell.’ She stopped wearing ‘Norell’ when they came out with ‘Paris.’ ”
“How do you remember that?”
“Please,” she says. “I’m a therapist. I have to remember the names of my patients’ dogs.”
“But ‘Shocking’ is the smell of our youth,” I explain.
My sister disagrees. She says when we were little our mother’s smell was Pall Malls. “And when she read in bed in the afternoon, the air from between her legs.”
I kiss my mother goodbye. At the airport, Security asks me to step aside. A man rifles my carry-on. His hand stops.
“What’s this?”
“My mother’s perfume. What’s left of it. She gave it to me.”
He unscrews the top and sniffs. “You’re not supposed to carry more than three ounces of liquid on the plane.”
“Oh, this is much less than that. It’s less than an ounce.”
He hesitates.
“See?” I say. “It’s almost empty. When it was full, then it had four ounces. But now, it’s less than a quarter filled.”
I could lose this bottle. It could get tossed on the mountain of gels, lotions and cuticle scissors, the Great Airport Confiscation Heap, the amnesty loot bag. What do they do with all that stuff? Airport Security must be the best-groomed service group in the world. My mother’s “Shocking” is slipping through my fingers.
“Look.” I dig out my travel shampoo. “This is a bottle I bought at Target especially made for flying. See?” I point to the airplane on the label. “ ‘Airline Security Approved.’ This one always goes through, and there’s more shampoo in this little bottle than perfume in this big one.”
I hold them side by side.
“I don’t know…,” he says.
“ ‘Three-ounce travel bottle,’ ” I read the Target label. “ ‘Bouteille de voyage de eighty-nine milliliters. Botella de viaje de three ounces.’ ”
I point to the contents in the “Shocking” bottle. “One ounce,” I say. “Maybe even half. Half an ounce, tops.”
“That’s a much bigger bottle.” He points to the “Shocking.”
“Yes! It is! You’re right! But it’s almost empty!”
“I’d call that a six-ounce bottle,” he says.
“Okay,” I say. “I can go to the ladies’ room and rinse out the shampoo from the three-ounce bottle and put the perfume
in it, and then the big bottle will be empty. Would that be okay? An empty bottle? Want me to do that? I can do that. I’m happy to do that. Will you let me back in line at the front?”
He puts the “Shocking” in my bag and zips it up. “Next time your mother gives you perfume,” he says, “put it in a smaller bottle.”
Dior’s New Look from 1947.
Waist = 18 inches.
Bust = 36 inches. (illustration credit 18.1)
Postwar women failed to see the charm of the Broken Egg Silhouette.
Schiap pioneered the celebrity endorsement.
My mother’s bottle of “Shocking” cologne. The Airport Security–approved travel bottle. (illustration credit 18.4)
chapter nineteen
Through the Looking Glass
I merely know Schiap by hearsay. I have only seen her in a mirror. She is, for me, some kind of fifth dimension.
—Elsa Schiaparelli
I’m not afraid to die. Not at all. I don’t expect you to understand that now, but you will.
—Audrey Volk
Here she is at the rest of her life. Schiap travels. She boards a DC-7 toting the Elsa Schiaparelli “Jet Wardrobe”: six dresses, one pair of shoes, three hats and a reversible coat for day and night, weighing in at less than seven pounds. She visits friends all over the world and comes to a stop at her seaside retreat in Tunisia, Hammamet, where her father had taken her half a century ago. She examines her life and wonders something impossible to know: What would have happened if she’d been a painter or a sculptor? She thinks she is excellent at both. In the end, she decides she is, after all, an artist: “Dress designing … is to me not a profession but an art.”
Returning to Paris, Schiap flings open the doors of 22, rue de Berri and welcomes her friends. She settles in to write her memoir. When she is sixty-four, Shocking Life is published in England and the United States. The reviews come in. They are what Audrey would call “less than wonderful”:
For those readers who enjoy reading about newsworthy personalities, there are glimpses of many such figures.… For the most part, it is the author’s own personality which emerges and the reader will enjoy the book if this unpredictable, restless, talented and essentially unhappy woman strikes a sympathetic chord.
—Agnes Rogers, New York Herald Tribune
Accept Madame Schiaparelli’s irritating ego and exaggerations. Chalk them up to the Latin flair for drama, and “Shocking Life” provides a turbulent entertainment, a serious glimpse of the workroom side of a French high fashion atelier.
—Leo Lerman, The New York Times
It is clear from the places and names mentioned in Mme. Schiaparelli’s autobiography, and from her reputation in the world of fashion, that she has had a fascinating career, but she tells her story so disjointedly that one cannot help wishing she had employed somebody to translate her experiences and her personality onto the printed page.
—The New Yorker
It will not be surprising if Schiap turns out another book—in which case perhaps she’ll see to it that the seriousness of its content is matched by its title and appearance.
—Elizabeth Hawes, The London Times Literary Supplement
Schiap does not turn out another book.
What designer does a former designer wear? Schiap admires the work of two: Cristóbal Balenciaga and a Moroccan newcomer, Yves Saint Laurent. Both consider it a privilege to dress her. Early on in his career, once he was certain he wanted to be a couturier, Balenciaga bought Schiaparelli dresses to study how they were made. And Yves Saint Laurent credits Schiap with his favorite design, “Le Smoking,” a man’s smoking jacket cut for women to wear in the evening. Schiap introduced hers in 1936. Thirty years later, Saint Laurent re-created it for Catherine Deneuve.
“Schiaparelli never stopped hitting Paris in the face with the most ideal form of provocation,” Saint Laurent wrote in his foreword to Palmer White’s biography of Schiap. “She slapped Paris. She smacked it. She tortured it. She bewitched it. And it fell madly in love with her.”
Schiap reads. She is content to watch almost anything on television. She visits Gogo and her son-in-law, Robert Berenson, whom she calls “Berri,” like her street. And she gets to know her granddaughters. They’re growing up. Berinthia (nicknamed Berry but with a “Y”) will marry the actor Tony Perkins and become a photographer. Her older sister, Marisa Berenson, becomes a high-fashion model, New York’s “It” Girl of the 1970s, and then a movie actress. For a while Marisa shares quarters with Schiap on the rue de Berri. It isn’t easy:
“You’re going out in that?” the woman who designed and wore the see-through dress says to her granddaughter.
In 1972, when she is eighty-two, Schiap has a stroke. She throws herself into rehabilitation and makes a vibrant recovery. But the following year, she’s felled by a second stroke. And this time she is unable to do what Audrey would call “martial her resources.” Schiap is bed-bound. Friends stream in to visit. She receives them from beneath her covers, meticulously coiffed, in a satin bed jacket. Always there are vases of fresh flowers. “Shocking” fills the air.
And then, in September, Elsa Schiaparelli has a third and final stroke. She falls into a coma. Seven weeks later, on November 13, 1973, she dies in her bed. Gogo is holding her hand. It’s said that on their deathbed people cry out for their mothers. Schiap calls for someone else, her friend from long ago, the povero di Napoli her father forbade her to see: “Pino!…Pino!” she cries. “Is that you?”
The November 13, 1973, front page of The New York Times has the following headline:
KISSINGER SAYS U.S. WEIGHS PACT TO DEFEND ISRAEL
Two days later, Schiap’s obituary makes the front page too:
SCHIAPARELLI DIES IN PARIS; BROUGHT COLOR TO FASHION
Elsa Schiaparelli is laid to rest in a graveyard in France, behind a small stone church in the village of Frucourt, in the region of Picardie. As always, no detail is left to chance. Schiap visited the site beforehand to check its suitability: type of trees, their age and location, the proximity to a dear friend’s home, the look of the headstones, the care of the grounds. The quiet, the ambience. All aspects met with her approval. But there is something else, something meaningful enough for her to choose to be buried in a tiny town two hours north of Paris: The cimetière is named after Saint Eloi, the patron saint of collectors of gold coins.
Schiap’s final creation is her tombstone. Her bold signature is chiseled then gilded across a gray limestone slab piebald with white fossils from the sea.
Audrey doesn’t sound right on the phone. I head for the airport. Jo drives up from Coral Gables. We rendezvous for lunch. I pick up sandwiches from the deli Audrey prefers, the one with the mayonnaisey coleslaw, and we picnic on her bed. She talks to us with her eyes closed. She wants her daughters to be “fiscally responsible” like she is. She tries, one last time, to teach us about money:
“GOs are the best munis because they’re fully backed by the state,” she says. “The best notes are project notes backed by the government, six months to a year. If you buy on the secondary market, you get paid immediately. Now listen, girls: There is a table of commissions. A broker will give you a discount if you generate a lot of business.”
Her eyes flitter open. She takes us in.
“Do you understand, girls?”
“Got it, Ma.”
“I don’t believe in mutual funds, girls. You’re giving people money to keep your money. Am I making myself clear?”
“Uh-huh.”
“And remember this, girls. Never give all your money to one money manager. Jo Ann? Patty? Are you listening?”
We exchange glances. Her money lessons are intense and from the heart. We do our best to focus. We nod in what we hope are the right places and thank her profusely. We know we’re pathetic. Two women who have more than once been the sole supporters of their own families, we know how to make money. That said, we have no idea what she’s talking about.
“T
hings will be easier for you when I’m dead,” she says.
Easier for you when I’m dead? Is she dying? Does she mean after she dies we won’t have to worry about her? That not worrying about her is preferable to having her? Does she mean life will be easier with no more frenzied trips to the emergency room? No more flying down for every broken bone and Mohs procedure? No more seeing her in pain? Or wait, is she talking about money? We’ve just been talking about money. Is it money? Financial security? We don’t ask. Anything she wants us to know, she tells us. We have no idea what her assets are. What she calls “moneytalk,” specific numbers, is crude. Moneytalk is verboten, always has been. Specific financial information is private. Now that our father is dead, no one knows what Audrey has except Audrey and her trusty accountant, Bonnie. We think she puts her money into AAA-rated tax-free municipal bonds and lives on their safe, predictable income. But that’s a guess. We’ve observed her slitting open her brokerage envelopes and smiling. What are “GOs”? What are “project notes”?
Easier for you when I’m dead? What does that mean?
“All right, girls.” It sounds like she’s giving up. “I’ve done everything I can for you. I’ve told you everything I know. I have nothing left to tell you. Are you sure you understand?”
“Yes,” we lie. “Absolutely, Ma. We get it.”
Then we go into a guest bedroom and close the door. We bend over, holding our guts, and silently laugh our heads off. We gasp for air.
“What the hell was she talking about?” my sister says.
Shocked: My Mother, Schiaparelli, and Me Page 14