Elsa Schiaparelli

by Meryle Secrest

  ALSO BY MERYLE SECREST

  Between Me and Life

  Being Bernard Berenson

  Kenneth Clark

  Salvador Dalí

  Frank Lloyd Wright

  Leonard Bernstein

  Stephen Sondheim

  Somewhere for Me

  Shoot the Widow

  Duveen

  Modigliani

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2014 by Meryle Secrest

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House companies.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Secrest, Meryle, author.

  Elsa Schiaparelli : a biography / Meryle Secrest. — First edition.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-0-307-70159-6 (hardcover) — ISBN 978-0-385-35327-4 (eBook)

  1. Schiaparelli, Elsa, 1890–1973. 2. Fashion designers—Italy—Biography.

  3. Women fashion designers—Italy—Biography. 4. Surrealism and design. I. Title.

  TT505.S3S43 2014

  746.9’2092—dc23 2014025820

  Front-of-jacket image: Schiaparelli Shocking Perfumes advertisement, Christmas 1946 (detail) by Marcel Vertès. Private collection.

  Jacket design by Kelly Blair

  v3.1

  For Vicky, as always

  Chi crede a’ sogni è matto; e chi non crede, che cos’è?

  He who believes in his dreams is mad;

  and he who does not believe in them—what is he?

  — LORENZO DA PONTE

  Birth is not the beginning

  Death is not the end.

  — CHUANG TZU, 400 B.C.

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

  PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  CHAPTER 1 THE ORPHAN

  CHAPTER 2 THE PICCADILLY FAKER

  CHAPTER 3 THEMES OF LOVE AND DEATH

  CHAPTER 4 MURDER AND MAYHEM

  CHAPTER 5 COQ FEATHERS

  CHAPTER 6 COMET

  CHAPTER 7 THE BOUTIQUE FANTASQUE

  CHAPTER 8 SHOCK IN PINK

  CHAPTER 9 SCANDALOUS SCHIAP

  CHAPTER 10 THE “COLLABO”

  CHAPTER 11 WEARING TWO HATS

  CHAPTER 12 PICKING UP THE ARROW

  CHAPTER 13 A BIRD IN THE CAGE

  NOTES

  Illustration Credits

  Illustrations

  ILLUSTRATIONS

  fm.1 [Frontispiece] Elsa and her dog

  1.1 Aunt Zia; Alberto de Dominitis; Elsa’s mother, Maria-Luisa; and Elsa’s uncle Vincenzo

  1.2 Elsa Schiaparelli, aged four

  2.1 William de Wendt de Kerlor in 1914

  2.2 Willie and Elsa

  2.3 Elsa being hypnotized by Willie

  2.4 Elsa gazing into the future

  3.1 Mario Laurenti, 1921

  4.1 Elsa, 1920s

  4.2 Elsa at work

  5.1 Elsa circa 1926

  5.2 A small chic hat

  5.3 Schiaparelli’s answer to the little black dress

  5.4 Schiaparelli’s designs, copied by the pattern makers

  5.5 Divided skirts, 1940

  5.6 Schiaparelli’s invention of a swimsuit with a built-in bra

  5.7 Cocktail dress of black jersey

  5.8 “Pixie Hat”

  5.9 Schiaparelli at home in 1936

  5.10 Bettina Shaw Jones

  5.11 Gaston Bergery

  5.12 The fashionably slim Bettina

  5.13 Bettina in the early 1930s

  5.14 Portrait of Schiaparelli inscribed to Bettina

  5.15 1934 example of a military-style coat of black wool

  5.16 Evening dress of white textured crepe

  5.17 Evening gown in midnight-blue crepe

  6.1 Bettina in 1933

  6.2 Evening coat of full-length fur

  6.3 A model wearing a clown’s hat

  6.4 Black silk crepe evening dress

  6.5 Evening dress in rose satin

  6.6 Paul Poiret

  7.1 Dalí and Gala at an American country estate

  7.2 Opening-night party for the Museum of Modern Art in 1939

  7.3 Schiaparelli adjusting one of her hats in the 1930s

  7.4 Schiaparelli’s daring shoe hat

  7.5 Dalí and Schiaparelli in 1949

  7.6 Sir James Allan Horne

  7.7 The only known photograph of Henry S. Horne

  7.8 Schiaparelli’s 1934 Mayfair pied-à-terre

  7.9 Elsa in the 1930s

  7.10 Elsa, “Eddie” Marsh, and Syrie Maugham

  7.11 Elsa, 1938

  7.12 A sewing pattern translation of a blouse, flared skirt, and capelike top

  8.1 Schiaparelli on the Place Vendôme

  8.2 Interior of the Schiaparelli boutique, 1950s

  8.3 Schiaparelli’s monkey-fur-and-suede shoes

  8.4 A blue silk fabric of her own design, 1933

  8.5 Schiaparelli chastising Bettina, 1930s

  8.6 Kay Francis

  8.7 Vivien Leigh

  8.8 Bettina Bergery and the Countess Marie-Laure de Noailles, 1930s

  8.9 One of Schiaparelli’s super-sized buttons

  8.10 Boris Kochno, Marie-Laure de Noailles, and “Bébé” Bérard, 1930s

  8.11 Ensemble of upturned hat and black jacket

  8.12 Ivory organdy, waltz-length evening dress

  8.13 Schiaparelli in the kind of at-home finery she liked to wear

  8.14 An imaginary conversation between Stalin and Schiaparelli

  9.1 Schiaparelli, probably mid-1930s

  9.2 Metal mesh handbag

  9.3 Loelia, the Duchess of Westminster

  9.4 A decorous advertisement for playing cards, undated

  9.5 Schiaparelli and Gogo, 1938

  9.6 One of Schiaparelli’s many entry visas into the U.S.

  10.1 The French politician Gaston Bergery in 1934

  10.2 Gaston Bergery in 1940

  10.3 Elsa on a lecture tour in the U.S., summer 1940

  10.4 Elsa, arriving in the U.S. in 1939

  10.5 Schiaparelli arriving on the Pan Am Clipper in New York, 1941

  10.6 Gogo meets her mother in the customs shed, 1941

  11.1 Gogo does war work for the French Red Cross in World War II

  11.2 Paris under the barricades in World War II

  11.3 Schiaparelli back again in New York in 1945

  12.1 Schiaparelli in 1949

  12.2 Window display, 1949

  12.3 Schiaparelli and artist Drian, 1950s

  12.4 Hubert de Givenchy

  12.5 Johnny Galliher with Ilona Massey

  12.6 Elsa and Johnny Galliher in 1949

  13.1 Schiaparelli, 1969

  13.2 Schiaparelli in 1950

  13.3 A studio portrait, 1960

  13.4 Schiaparelli in later years with her two granddaughters

  13.5 The house in Hammamet

  13.6 The road from the house

  PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The most extraordinary fashion designer of the twentieth century is now just a name on a perfume bottle. She is Elsa Schiaparelli, like Gabrielle Chanel a successful woman in the hierarchy of male Paris couturiers. But she was much more than a dress designer. Schiaparelli was an integral part of the whole artistic movement of the times. Her groundbreaking collaborations with
such artists as Kees van Dongen, Salvador Dalí, Christian Bérard, Jean Cocteau, Alberto Giacometti, and Man Ray took the field of women’s wear from a business into an art form.

  In the years between World Wars I and II, Schiaparelli, like Chanel, created clothes that were attuned to new freedoms for women and the reality of the role they were playing in the workplace. Skirts left the ankle and stayed close to the knee. Crippling corsets disappeared. Silhouettes were practical and wearable; fabrics could be washed. She was as much inventor as designer of style. Realizing that putting on a dress over the head could be a nuisance, she came up with a dress that could be wrapped around the body, an idea that is still with us. Split skirts were practical; she would show them even though it took decades for the idea of wide-legged pants to be socially acceptable, and even longer for the pantsuit. She patented swimsuits with built-in bras and went on to design similar shortcuts for dresses. The zipper arrived and she used it with panache. The Depression arrived, and along with it the idea of clothes that had a multiplicity of uses, such as reversible coats, the all-purpose dress with sets of accessories, skirts that came apart to make capes or shrugs that could be zipped onto evening gowns, and, during World War II, pockets that looked like purses and vice versa. Some of the most obvious things, like matching jackets for dinner dresses, had eluded everyone until she thought of them, and the idea of adding feathers to an outfit was exploited by Hollywood for years.

  Had Schiaparelli done only this, she would have secured a place in fashion history. But she did much more. It is fair to say that she took the underlying concepts of surrealism, its emphasis on the unconscious, the irrational and daring, and translated them into items of fashion. She made hats look like lamb cutlets, high-heeled shoes, or clown’s cones. Pockets were made to look like drawers, necklaces became collections of insect specimens, handbags were shaped like balloons, and buttons could be anything: lips, eyes, or carrots. The exquisite embroidery from Lesage adorned evening jackets that took their inspiration from musical instruments, vegetables, circus acrobats, or the solar system. Her clothes were smart, wearable, and sexy and marked the wearer as an individualist as well as someone with a sense of humor—the Duchess of Windsor, after all, chose a diaphanous evening gown for her honeymoon that featured a huge pink lobster on its skirt, surrounded by some tastefully sprinkled parsley.

  Schiaparelli had a kind of instinct, not just for what American buyers liked—and despite her impeccable Parisian credentials, her biggest audiences were Americans. The styles she launched: for padded shoulders, split skirts, mesh chenille snoods, shirttail jackets, bowler hats, fur shoes, and her own vivid shade of pink, called “shocking”—were reproduced in the thousands. Then there were all her Shocking perfumes, each named with a word beginning with S. An astute businesswoman, she launched herself into hats, hose, soaps, shoes, handbags, and cosmetics in the space of a few years. By 1930, her company was grossing millions of francs a year. She had twenty-six workrooms and employed more than two thousand people.

  Schiaparelli, like Dalí, wanted to shake people out of their torpor and make them look at themselves and the world afresh. She wanted to shock, and she did shock. Then World War II arrived, and she clung on. Her workrooms on the Place Vendôme continued to function, her perfume went on being sold, and her mansion on the Right Bank stayed intact, one of the facts that led, in the end, to deep suspicions from spy agencies from Berlin and London to New York. She had shaken off the baleful influence of a self-destructive husband and fought to give their only child, Gogo, a better life after she was stricken with infantile paralysis. She had battled everything and survived, but the one thing she could not conquer was changing tastes. Women no longer wanted to be self-assertive and different, as Dior discovered in 1947 when he launched his New Look. They wanted full skirts, tight waists, a bosom, a very large hat, and high heels. Schiaparelli had lost her most vital source of inspiration—surrealism—and the impulse went with it. Her postwar clothes lack the inner conviction that had inspired them, and her sales dwindled away. The triumphant return of Chanel—her clothes, for all their practicality, were always ladylike—coincided almost to the day with the moment when Schiaparelli closed her doors. She was finished.

  In the decades that followed, along with the arrival of T-shirts, blue jeans, sneakers, and baseball caps, the idea of a distinctive look has, for most women, disappeared. What most women want is not to look different, as a wry cartoon in The New Yorker recently made clear. That may be true, but the allure of a beautifully made, exquisitely imagined look has not completely disappeared either, if the popularity of several recent exhibitions of haute couture is any guide. Such examples transcend mere fashion, because they speak to a deep human need. They have become works of art in themselves.

  This, then, is the legacy of Schiaparelli.

  Once my longtime editor, Victoria Wilson, and I agreed that Schiaparelli was the next subject for us, almost the first person I contacted was Dilys Blum. She is curator of costume at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, an important collection of costumes and textiles that was, when it was founded in 1893, among the first of its kind, and includes a deed of gift from Schiaparelli herself of some seventy of her most important works. Dilys Blum then set about organizing a major exhibition of Schiaparelli’s oeuvre, a labor of love that took almost five years. The exhibition, Shocking!, was seen in Philadelphia in 2003–4 and subsequently went to the Musée de la Mode et du Textile in Paris. The exhibition included a handsomely illustrated catalogue spanning Schiaparelli’s first designs in 1927 up to the closing of her salon in 1954. As soon as I found the catalogue I realized I had to have a copy. But it is now a collector’s item, difficult to obtain and extremely expensive.

  In my career as a biographer I have, like Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire, frequently leaned heavily on the kindness of strangers. Dilys not only took my call and provided me with a precious copy of Shocking! by return post, but opened her considerable archive to me. I spent a wonderful week in Philadelphia going through newspaper clippings, magazines, letters, and photographs and received much sage advice. Despite her painstaking work in correcting facts and dates of earlier accounts, as well as compiling a detailed chronology and record of Schiaparelli’s achievements, Dilys had not wanted to write a biography as well. She pointed me in various directions: London, Paris, and New York.

  I knew that, nevertheless, Dilys had uncovered more about Schiaparelli’s peripatetic life than she was willing to reveal. We talked often, and her role became like that of an observer in the old game of hide-and-seek who tells you when you are getting warmer. Or not.

  What is surprising about the huge volume of fashion coverage in newspapers and magazines before World War II is just how little there was on the personality of the couturier. The profile interview, a form I knew about since I wrote many of them as a reporter for the Washington Post, scarcely existed. You might learn there had been a jammed opening of new spring fashions in Paris, but the description of the scene invariably left out the creator herself, with, presumably, her little black dress, her turban, ropes of pearls, and gimlet eyes. There were, of course, a few exceptions. Genêt, otherwise Janet Flanner, wrote a fascinating article for The New Yorker early in the 1930s describing the life of the new “comet” on the French scene. And Bettina Ballard’s book, In My Fashion, is so full of observations about the life and times in the prewar years that it is quoted everywhere. I slowly became aware of the importance in Schiaparelli’s life of Salvador Dalí, about whom I had written. In fact I had interviewed one of Schiaparelli’s closest friends, Bettina Bergery, who introduced them. But oh, horrors, I had scarcely bothered to ask her about Schiaparelli, because I was too interested in Dalí. Since then, Bettina Bergery had died.

  Bettina Shaw Jones was an American, a Long Island socialite who moved to Paris in the late 1920s, applied for a job with Schiaparelli, and shortly became her sometime model, trusted confidante, and public-relations expert; she also dressed her windows.
In due course she married a French politician, a socialist deputy named Gaston Bergery. Bettina, as I already knew, was a talented writer and had left her estate—letters, photographs, books, and voluminous diaries—to the Beinecke Library at Yale University. That library very generously gave me a grant to study the archive for a month. Off I went.

  My hopes were high, and to some degree I was disappointed. Bettina and I had kept up a correspondence for several years, and I was used to her sometimes exotic flourishes and rather prided myself in my ability to decipher them. But her diaries, written late at night in a rush to include every detail, were more like scribbled peaks and valleys rising and falling across the page, with only the most tenuous relationship to actual words. The other issue was that I was sure they must have gone back to her earliest days in Paris, but the Beinecke had nothing on deposit before 1940. These precious testimonials—Bettina was, to a considerable extent, Schiaparelli’s Boswell—are somewhere, but just where I never discovered.

  What the archive did illustrate, however, was the course of Gaston Bergery’s strange political career, from convinced and vocal socialist to fervent Pétainist, supporter of fascism, and principal architect of Vichy following the fall of France. The implications for Schiaparelli in this important piece of information, I was to discover.

  Among the attributes Dilys and I have in common is a passion for exact dates. This led me to my first hesitant forays into the world most genealogists take for granted: ships’ manifests. Just when did Schiaparelli, who grew up in Rome, then moved to London and Paris, arrive in the U.S.? What about an application for U.S. citizenship? Where did one find that? This and other questions led me to another happy encounter: I met Susannah Brooks, an immensely knowledgeable and meticulous researcher. She went to work on the strange life and curious end of Wilhelm de Wendt de Kerlor, the man Schiaparelli met and married in London in 1914. Very little was known about De Kerlor, and what had been printed was inaccurate and/or misleading. My own efforts to uncover his personal history were ineffective. Thanks to Ms. Brooks, who knew just where to look, a completely new portrait emerged. Suddenly we knew not only his nationality and early life, but his forced exit from Britain, his movements upon arrival in the U.S., his subsequent career and lurid demise. She even found his death certificate.