Every Frenchman Has One

by Olivia de Havilland

  The French male bladder is what you might call nervous. Not only are the metal screens placed for its convenience every few paces on every city street, but in the country, on the principal highways of France where no such contraptions exist, it is a frequent and quite ordinary thing to see a Frenchman stop his car, descend from it, and, not even bothering to seek a tree, get the matter over with. I have seen an entire family of males lined up on the roadside, all at the same time, getting the matter over with, while the ladies merely waited in the car. On the occasion of which I speak, there was a sort of protocol. Great-grandfather was closest to the road, so as not to have to walk too far; Grandfather was just beyond him and only just out of range; then came Father; then came Uncle Antoine, then Cousin Gaston; and little Paul was last of all. The most remarkable phenomenon of the entire practice is that the Frenchman manages this operation with such skill and finesse that never once have I seen the slightest indication of indecent exposure.

  Now the French female bladder is exactly the contrary. It may not even exist at all. Not once has a Frenchwoman at lunch or dinner at my house, or even at my table in a restaurant, asked me where the ladies’ room was. Having had a six-months course in a Notre Dame convent in Belmont, California (note that Notre Dame and Belmont are French words), I myself had had a certain training in this respect, and so I began to take the discreet rhythm of the female French bladder for granted as being just feminine. Then an ex-cover-girl friend of mine from California came to Paris and dined with my husband and me at the Berkeley. At the end of the meal, while we were drinking our coffee, my American friend stunned me by asking me the once-familiar but long-forgotten question as to the location of the Little Girls’. Well, frankly, I didn’t know. However, wanting to be hospitable to my compatriot in a foreign land, I rose and accompanied her into the foyer in search, and every eye in the restaurant followed us with astonishment. The clientele thought we had quarreled with our husbands. All we were doing was engaging in the old American custom, the Powder Room Parade.

  And I’m against it. I’m for an obligatory course in French feminine discretion and restraint. Let us teach it in the schools; let the Girl Scouts and Campfire Girls spread the word; let the women’s clubs go into training. And the system can be taught. The daughter of Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI was only half French, and she learned it. Her German half made so perfect an adaptation that when she was brought back from the border after her parents’ famous near-escape during the French Revolution, the deputy who accompanied her as a guard in her coach remarked with awe that during the twelve-hour nonstop ride, she did not manifest “aucun besoin.”

  I’m not surprised; but since he was a Frenchman, however did he manage???

  In Hollywood a woman has “chic” if she wears a black velvet dress and a platinum anklet out to lunch, and she has “good taste” if she’s always attired in a beige wool shirtmaker and a string of Saks Fifth Avenue pearls. But the most important look for her to have in dress is the “sexy look.”

  The sexy look starts with the toenails. They must be lacquered red, of course, and revealed, not concealed, by the shoe. The transparent plastic shoe was invented to meet this requirement of the sexy look. The really sexy plastic shoe has a four-inch heel of black suede or rhinestones, and with it must be worn sunset-colored nylons at five dollars a pair. Sheer. Expensively sheer.

  The sexy dress begins just below the knee and is of a striking color and a glossy fabric. Satin, taffeta, moiré—any cloth which catches the light and molds. Design, cut, pleats, buttons, belts—details of any kind are of no concern; it’s the outline that is underlined. The dress must cling to, sculpture, and emphasize the thighs, hips and waist, and stop at the sternum—in the front, I mean, not the back. And en route it must strain itself over an oversized bust. If the lady wearing the dress doesn’t have an oversized bust, she must buy one.

  Of course, when I arrived in France I found that the prevailing mode had nothing whatever to do with the look I left behind me. In fact, the sexy look had never been heard of. In France it’s assumed that if you’re a woman you are sexy, and you don’t have to put a dress on to prove it, too.

  The Paris principle seemed purest simplicity: if you must dress, then do it beautifully. No exaggerated protuberances, please. And if you’re going to put a dress on, then don’t create a deadly contest between it and whatever else you put on.

  On the other hand, even in New York, where the best-dressed women of the U.S.A. buy and wear their clothes, the American woman, it seems to me, tries to rivet your attention to some complementary element of her costume. Let’s face it, we’re accessory crazy. We’re conversation-piece mad. We must wear some item that will draw the eye—a bag, or a hat, or a brooch, or a bracelet. Something original. And we have a herd instinct about which item in any given year will be original. The result is very odd: an army of women all catching the eye with exactly the same eyecatcher.

  Several years ago it was the oversized handbag or portable portmanteau. Black leather. Brass lock. Brass key. Two American friends of mine, fresh from New York, came to my Paris home at that time for an apéritif. Frightfully stylish types they were, and they could prove it: each carried the original accessory of the moment; each had her large black satchel with the brass lock. Each valise caught my eye, all right, and held it there. Physically it was hard on me because the ladies were seated at different ends of the room. I’ve been a little walleyed ever since.

  As I say, the principle in France is definitely anti-eyecatcher. It’s the ensemble that counts, the harmonious look of the whole. And why wear a dress designed by a master if you’re going to carry a trunk in front of it?

  I must say, when you’re home in the U.S.A. and you pick up the home-town paper after the first Paris collections have been shown in autumn or in spring, the view you get of what is going on over there is unnerving, to say the least. Invariably the paper carries a scare headline and under it, on the first page, a photo of a hat no one would be caught wearing on Halloween, to show what the giddy French are trying to put over this time. Well, it’s a hat you won’t see on any Paris street on All Hallows’ Eve or on anybody else’s Eve either. It’s just something in or out of somebody’s collection created expressly to give you a jovial sort of journalistic jolt.

  Then there’s that other journalistic ploy, the hemline hullabaloo. With each new collection the hemline seems to zoom up and down like a drunken elevator, but have you noticed that a really radical change in the hemline comes about once every five years and just about the time you really don’t have a thing to wear?

  There now, don’t you feel better?

  Back home in Saratoga, California, and during the adolescent period of my life which might be designated B.C. or Before Cinema, I had been so thoroughly indoctrinated in the sober principles which governed the appearance of the young ladies of that admirable, attractive and conservative community, that even in the A.D. or After Damnation portion of my life, I still adhered to the belief that a girl should look as nearly as possible just the way the Lord made her.

  This meant, in my case, that I made only the most elementary concessions toward make-up, limiting this form of embellishment to a thin film of face powder and a light application of rouge upon the lips. It also meant that a basic tenet of my personal religion was that the color of hair most suited to me was that with which I was born: God’s color, or Deep Mouse.

  After I went to Hollywood, no amount of persuasion in the make-up and hairdressing dens of the City of Iniquity could cause me to yield so much as a single hair to so much as the most lightly tinted of rinses, or even, in fact, to anything other than five drops of lemon juice well mixed with rain water. Added to the influence of my basic training was, too, a horror of the kind of conjecture I had often overheard about other young female players, whose upbringing had very clearly not taken place in the Most Aristocratic Village in the Prune Belt.

  I quailed when I heard it whispered about another ingénue: “It�
��s a lovely color, but it isn’t hers, you know” or “If you look at the roots, you can see for yourself” or “Why, the last time, they overdid it and it all fell out.” There seemed to be a distinct implication in these suppositions that a girl who would dye her hair could not be other than false, through and through.

  Then I came to France.

  Now, not only was I still crowned with virgin tresses in their original, muted, dead-leaf tone, but, in addition, these locks were dressed in the purest style which the do-it-yourself-with-your-own-bobbypins method can achieve. For, although studio hairdressers had always done very well by me, I had never found a commercial hairdresser who would give me a coiffure inspiring anything in me but a headlong rush to my own bathroom and the salutary effect on the rigidity of my water-wave of my own comforting cold-water faucet.

  When I first took up residence in Paris, I followed, of course, my long-established custom of the pure-soap-in-the-shower shampoo, the wind-it-around-your-own-finger-and-clamp-it-with-a-Sure-Grip set, and my walk-around-until-it-drips-dry mode of dehydration. The whole system gave me, I liked to believe, an enviable, trustworthy, limpid, natural look. And I was not mistaken. Which is why Pierre felt that a change was urgently required. If there is anything that appalls a Parisian, it is that crassly straightforward and sincere appearance which only a baby’s bottom should have.

  To the hairdresser’s Pierre ordered me to go. To the best. And to go to the best was not a simple matter of calling up and making an appointment, but one of being correctly, formally, and personally introduced—sponsored, as it were, as used to be the case when it was still the custom to present young ladies at the Court of St. James’s.

  My sponsor once selected, the day came for her to take me in hand, make an appointment for me for the same time she made one for herself, and come to fetch me. Together we entered the sacred halls, mounted in the elevator to the floor where the Master himself presided, and then paused on the threshold of the Inner Sanctum, where only the elect might enter to receive the personal ministrations of the great Alexandre himself. His sanctum at that time was the smallest sanctum ever seen, and it was crowded to the sills and stuffed to the corners with the favored, among whom, that day, were two ambassadresses, seven countesses, one vicomtesse, four marquises, and no less than three royal princesses. I was the only commoner in the lot, and I should have cut and run had it not been for the fact that Pierre, with marvelous foresight, had picked as my sponsor a great Turkish beauty who, more than conveniently, happened to be Son Altesse Royale, the granddaughter of the last of the Sultans of All sultans. Cowering in her opulent shadow, I stood my ground.

  Seven hours later I left the premises chastened, changed, but not at all disposed to head for the cold-water tap. I was moved, rather, to seek out one of those small wooden blocks the Japanese put under their necks at night in place of pillows. As I directed my course homeward I was careful to walk under the illuminating arc of the street lights, for not the least of the virtues of my new coiffure was its subtly altered hue. Alexandre had said God’s color wouldn’t do. It was now mink instead of muskrat.

  Although the tone of my pelt is presently medium wild Labrador, it has undergone more than one mutation, all of which have been successful, with the exception of that which resulted on the dramatic day when it became my turn, as an established member of the royal court, to present my own eager candidate.

  An American couple, with whom Pierre and I enjoyed a warm and devoted friendship, lunched with us one afternoon in the City of Light when they were en route from Italy to Le Havre on their way back to the United States. During the meal the female partner of the pair confided to me that she would like to go back home looking as if she had been to Paris. Would I, she wanted to know, act as her sponsor for an appointment with Alexandre? I would, and I did, and the next day, after she had had a shampoo in the monarchial wash-basin, I led her personally into the Presence. Once she was established on the dais, I thought that a happy and exhilarating experience lay before her, but, alas, unaccustomed to royal usage as I myself once was, my friend committed the gravest possible breach of protocol. She told Alexandre how she wanted her hair to be done.

  As is his way on such occasions, Alexandre instantaneously went into a trance, a trance which no human voice can penetrate, and taking up his scissors, he began to snip with smoldering precision at the lady’s streaming locks. She protested desperately but vainly that she had not meant to have her hair cut, that she did not want to have her hair cut, that she absolutely must not have her hair cut. All she wanted was for it to be set and combed. Alexandre’s smoky eye showed not the faintest flicker of understanding, and when he finally put his scissors down and had murmured instructions to a lackey, my friend was led, shorn and bleating piteously, to the nether regions where, because it was the fashion of the hour, the hair was treated to flecks of gold or silver.

  I was there before her, and was horrified to see my friend’s pathetic little form, clad only in her slip and hairdressing peignoir, swaying in the doorway as the drops from her still streaming hair mingled with her tears. Because there was one at hand, and in answer to her supplications, I helped her to get the Hotel Bristol, and subsequently her husband, on the telephone.

  “Oh!” she cried when the marital voice came comfortingly on the line. “Something terrible’s happened!”

  “What?” exclaimed the husband with alarm.

  “That dreadful man has cut me!”

  “Who cut you?”

  “Alexandre!”

  “He cut you?”

  “Yes, he cut me!”

  “Where did he cut you?”

  “He cut my hair! My hair! He’s cut my hair!”

  The distracted husband gave my friend immediate and brisk instructions to pay the bill, call a cab, and come back to the hotel exactly as she was. Down went the receiver and off she started when my hand shot out and grabbed her wrist.

  With a tone I had never noted in my voice before nor have I since, I heard myself saying, “Do you want to go home looking as if you had never been to Paris?”

  “No,” gasped my friend.

  “Do you want to go home looking as if you had been to Paris?”

  “Yes,” she quavered.

  “Then sit down,” I thundered, “and do what I say. You are going to eat a sandwich, you are going to drink some tea, and you are going to see this thing through!”

  Stunned by the voice of authority, soothed by the sandwich, and calmed by the tea, my friend docilely allowed the color specialist to do what he wished with her, and meekly she returned once more to the August One for the final operation. When it was all over, I took her to the Bristol in a cab, but the second she descended from it, I told the driver to gun the motor, and off I sped to sanctuary. My strength was gone. I could not face the husband.

  That evening we were all expected at the same dinner party. It was at the Orangerie, now no longer in existence, and our host was another visiting American, Jack Warner. Pierre and I were at his table, I remember, together with, among others, Maurice Chevalier and Madame Arpels. Our friends were scheduled to sit at the immediately adjacent table and it was with considerable suspense that I awaited their arrival. However, when all the other guests were already seated, our couple still had not appeared. I was calling for more champagne when suddenly the door opened and in came our duo, radiant and serene. They smiled benignly at us, took their places, and aside from a murmur of interest over the newcomers, the party was as before.

  I learned later that what had delayed our friends was the minute examination before the mirror of every angle and every facet of the hairdress, and the coming of the decision “not to touch a single hair of it.”

  I was happy, of course, but with a pleasure not entirely unalloyed. In the confusion of the dramatic moments which had passed earlier in the coloring room, my tension had communicated itself to my own specialist, and, under his unsteadied and overlavish hand, my delicate shade of medium wild Labrador, l
ightly streaked with burnished gold, was not produced. I sat through that entire dinner party the perfect image of a ranch-bred chinchilla.

  Since that perilous and suspenseful day, Alexandre has moved from his narrow sanctum to more palatial quarters further up the Rue du Faubourg St. Honoré, and the domain over which he now reigns is a series of ballrooms of which the first, the Blue Ballroom, is the throne room. Minor princes hold sway over the adjoining Rose Ballroom. The Green Ballroom is the ornamental torture chamber where, ranged around the walls, are those diabolic instruments, the séchoirs. The Yellow Assembly Room is devoted to the more amiable practices of shampooing and color work, and the Terre Cuite Lounge is given over to the art of the permanent.

  The throne room is always crowded with court favorites, but a convenience has been provided them so as to keep the sills and corners disengaged and to avoid the risk of suffocation to sovereign and subject alike. It is a mammoth leopard-skin pouf, placed in the very center of the room so that the members of the court may rest and yet be ready to respond instantly to the royal summons. There, clustered upon it and grouped as if for a Winterhalter court painting, albeit in their socks and smocks instead of crinoline and capeline, are the ever-constant ambassadresses, baronesses, vicomtesses, countesses, marquises and royal princesses. Come to think of it, I’m surprised that pouf is clothed in leopard skin. It really should be ermine.

  I suppose that after Paris traffic the biggest hazard which awaits the visiting American is the French social life.

  To begin with, the bitter rumor which has reached your ears to the effect that the French can’t stand foreigners and therefore will never receive you in their homes but merely in a restaurant, is a complete canard, as we say in American novels. In the first place, it’s the French that the French can’t stand, and in the second place, if they receive you in a French restaurant, who’s complaining?