Ms. Brooks found references in the Library of Congress, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) in College Park, Maryland, and numerous online sources. When the time came to chart Schiaparelli’s movements during World War II, she was even more resourceful. She visited the Department of State—it is amazing what one can learn from the issuing of visas—the OSS, the War Department, and Secret Service records at the National Archives. She uncovered pertinent sources in the Public Records offices in the United Kingdom. Her most valuable find was a large and detailed file, first by the Bureau of Investigation, which was investigating the De Kerlors as early as 1917, and then by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which looked into Schiaparelli’s movements from 1940 through to the end of the war. Susannah Brooks’s help is beyond praise.
I also want to thank Sally Gordon Mark, the researcher who had been so important in the success of Hal Vaughan’s book Sleeping with the Enemy, an account of Coco Chanel’s wartime activities. Sally Gordon Mark was a very great help in tracking down the relevant sources on Gaston Bergery and his postwar trial. She also found a report on Schiaparelli made at the request of General de Gaulle in 1945 that labeled her as a collaborator with the Germans. Police documents during the German Occupation are only now being released, and it is conceivable that more will be discovered about Schiaparelli’s activities in the years to come.
I would like to convey my warmest thanks to friends and acquaintances here and abroad who answered my queries, provided information, and granted interviews. They include Ménéhould de Bazelaire, Fondation d’Enterprise Hermès, Paris; Rosemary Harden, fashion museum manager, Bath Costume Museum; Glenda Bailey, editor-in-chief, Harper’s Bazaar; Beatrice Behlen, senior curator, fashion and decorative arts, Museum of London; Timothy Young, curator, Beinecke Library, Yale University; Rosamond Bernier; Robert and Sylvia Blake; Mary Blume; Nuala Boylan; Louise Martin, Mona Bismarck Foundation, Paris; Beth Dincuff Charleston, Parsons The New School for Design, New York; Gemma Ebelis, British Fashion Council; Agnès Callu, conservateur du patrimoine, Les Arts Décoratifs, Paris; Pierre Cardin; Giles Deacon; Oriole Cullen, curator of fashion and textiles, Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Meredith Etherington-Smith; Annie Groer; James J. Holmburg, Filson Historical Society; Hubert de Givenchy; Robin Givhan; Marie Keslassy, Gripoix; Didier Grumbach, director, Chambre Syndicale de la Couture; Philippa Hardy, Pan Macmillan, London; Joan Sutcliffe, HPB Library, Toronto; Flash Gordon Helm; Richard E. Heanu; Cathy Horyn, New York Times; Sir Alistair Horne; Joan Kropf, deputy director, the Salvador Dalí Museum, St. Petersburg, Florida; Roy D. Kirvan; Erik Lahode; Catherine Lardeur; Rena Lustberg; Jan Reeder, Metropolitan Museum Costume Institute; Beatriz Tamayo, Mexican Embassy; Sophie Mirman, Trotters, London; Caroline Pinon, Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris; Olivier Saillard, director, and Dominique Revellino, chargée d’études documentaires, Musée Galliera, Paris; Patrick Collins, National Motor Museum Trust, Beaulieu, U.K.; Katherine Neville; Marshall “Mars” Newman; David Patrick Columbia, New York Social Diary; James Oglethorpe; Professor Linda Przybyszewski, Department of History, Notre Dame University; Fiona Petheram, PFD, London; John Pennino, Metropolitan Opera Archives; Madelaine Piel; Côme Rémy; Alan Riding; Ned Rorem; Laurence Marolleau, Schiaparelli France, Paris; Michelle Smith; Roberta Smith, New York Times; Valerie Steele, director, the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, New York; Mary Thacher; Janet Kerschner, archivist, Theosophical Society; Susan Train, bureau chief, Condé Nast Digital, Paris; Valerie Vasquez, Museum at FIT; Paule Verchère; Hugo Vickers.
This book had its start when I began to wonder why nobody dressed up anymore, even for evenings out, and when my editor, a longtime fan of Shocking, began to wonder why that perfume did not smell the same. She thought the formula must have changed, and she was right. So this account of what I discovered is for her. It is also dedicated to my husband, who has tolerantly endured years of monologues from me about artists, art historians, art dealers, an architect, and several musicians, much of which interested him, but could not follow me into haute couture. And to my daughter Gillian and my daughters-in-law, Moira and Jennifer, who thought Schiaparelli’s designs were fabulous and wanted to know where they could buy them. My heartfelt thanks to you all.
CHAPTER 1
* * *
THE ORPHAN
Somewhere inside an Italian palazzo a girl is running. Perhaps she has been running down these vast and deserted hallways for a long time, this small figure with dark hair streaming behind her, her footsteps bouncing off the stone floors and reverberating down the endless rooms enfilade. She skips past mounted busts and antique stone nudes, dados and caryatids, arcades and moldings and beneath arched and impossibly high ceilings. Surely there are nurses and governesses in attendance. Yet she seems quite alone. She is reminiscent of a recurring image one finds in Dalí’s prewar paintings, a faceless girl with billowing skirts and using a skipping rope, haunting the streets of his memory. Dalí’s symbolic language has been exhaustively studied, but the origins of the skipping girl remain obscure. The lives of the surrealist artist and the particular girl in question would become intertwined. So perhaps she is the girl his dream memory has conjured up, who keeps appearing as a brief and fleeting figure, running, always running.
As Roman palaces go, the Palazzo Corsini is on a grand scale. A late-baroque building in the Trastevere, on the bank of the Tiber, across from St. Peter’s, nowadays it houses a library and a national collection of Old Master paintings and sculpture. The library, the Accademia dei Lincei, has a distinguished past that begins in the seventeenth century. Galileo was one of its founders, who also included an artist, a mathematician, a physicist, and a philosopher. Its holdings reflected similarly broad interests: everything from botany and Orientalia to architecture, mathematics, astrological, alchemical, and hermetic texts. In 1847 the academy, which had lost much of its original stature, was revived by Pope Pius IX. After the unification of Italy in 1870, King Victor Emmanuel II made the restoration of the Accademia dei Lincei and the choice of librarian his personal project. He was a passionate collector of coins, and so was Celestino Schiaparelli, a thirty-five-year-old scholar from a prominent and well-to-do family of Piedmontese intellectuals. Along with the appointment came a handsome apartment. One assumes it was spacious, perhaps even grand. When Queen Christina of Sweden abdicated in 1659 and converted to Roman Catholicism, she chose to live in the adjoining Villa Farnesina in sumptuous quarters. The whole was surrounded by what Jane Austen would have called a small park, full of tangerine and lemon trees in geometric formation. Elsa would run underneath them, aware of the penetrating and haunting perfume of the magnolias.
Elsa’s father was an accomplished scholar who had taken professorial posts in Florence and Rome when he joined the Lincei. His specialty was the Islamic world in the Middle Ages. His daughter has left a fond portrait of him, written when she was in her sixties. He is solitary, the kind of man who goes for walks late at night or early in the morning, when he is less likely to meet anyone. In a new town his first idea is to climb the highest building or tallest tower, taking Elsa with him. He surveys the scene with satisfaction; Elsa, who is frightened of heights, curls into a ball and shuts her eyes. A cultivated and modest man, his life is spent between the university, his Oriental researches, and his massive collection of Persian, Sanskrit, and Arabian books. He is kind, immersed in his studies and hard to reach emotionally—Elsa cannot understand how he and her mother ever met, let alone got married.
They were all scholars on his side of the family, absorbed in the romantic pursuit of distant worlds. Ernesto, one of Celestino’s cousins, an Egyptologist, discovered the grave of Nefertari in the Valley of the Queens, then founded a museum to display his treasures in Turin. He was, she recalled, almost bald, used to plaster down the few strands of hair with glue, and was perhaps the ugliest man she ever met. Another celebrated scholar, her father’s older brother, Giovanni, who became head of the Brera Observatory in Milan, inves
tigated the heavens. There he found, or thought he did, canals on Mars, and what seemed clear evidence of former habitation. He was later proved wrong, but other, less spectacular finds have stood the test of time. He too was a kind and modest man, if even more absentminded than her father. A family story is told about this husband and future father of five, who, on his honeymoon in Vienna, left his bride in their hotel room because he had an appointment and forgot all about her. When he returned the following morning he was astonished to find himself married.
Aunt Zia, seated lower right, was the great beauty of the family, against whom the other girls were measured, and usually found wanting. Others in the picture are Elsa’s grandfather Alberto de Dominitis; Elsa’s mother, Maria-Luisa, at left; and Elsa’s uncle Vicenzo. (illustration credit 1.1)
On one side of Elsa’s family were men whose intellectual adventures made them detached and solitary. On the other side were men and women who lived life on a grand, not to say reckless, scale. Elsa’s maternal grandmother was born a Scot, daughter of the British governor in Malta. She could also trace her ancestry back to southern aristocrats from Naples, descended from the dukes of Tuscany, and spent her early years growing up in the Far East. Fast-forward to her at age twelve, when she is married off. Her husband, Alberto de Dominitis, is a marquis, and becomes the Italian consul in Malta. They have five children rather soon, because she dies at the age of twenty, presumably from exhaustion. Maria-Luisa is the last born, so it is safe to say she never knew her mother. Or much of her father, either: he died when she was ten. In the fashion of the day Maria-Luisa is probably married off to the right man as soon as she is old enough. No description of her personality appears in Elsa’s account, but the odds are that she shared the adventurous tendencies of her siblings. One of her brothers joined the secret society of the Carbonari. He “fought to unify Italy with Garibaldi,” Elsa’s biographer Palmer White wrote, “was imprisoned by the Bourbons, escaped and went into exile in Egypt, where he took up law and became an adviser to the Khedive.” All of this was played out in the context of rarefied social circles and in the drawing rooms of beautiful houses and plenty of servants, where the role of women was carefully controlled and circumscribed.
Then there was a sister, a raving beauty named Lillian, whom Elsa always called Zia (Aunt), whose calm acceptance of her astonishing gift is evident in an early photograph in which she sits, like Queen Victoria, her head resting poetically against an arm. Those dark looks, that pouting mouth and perfect chin, that calm self-assurance, are the rock against which one husband after another will dash himself in vain. Zia was walking down the street in Naples one day just as a young monk was approaching. He instantly understood the danger he was in, covered his face with his sleeve, and ran away in terror, crying, “Vade retro, Satana!” (“Get thee behind me, Satan!”). Zia finally settled on a lawyer and went to live in Egypt, periodically sending back the most marvelous bolts of fabric, which Elsa greeted with rapture. The moral was clear. Girls had only one card to play, but if they were clever like Zia, they could live happily ever after.
Elsa had a sister, Beatrice, eight or nine years her senior, who, in the fashion of her mother’s family, had already been designated as the next reigning beauty. How justly, is difficult to tell. The single photograph of her that has been published is out of focus, so one sees only an enormous hat perched on the head of a rather small person, somewhat plump, who might, or might not, be pretty. Never mind. She is obviously destined for great things, but of course she does not want that at all, which is another story. The sisters share a bedroom, but the difference in ages is too great for them to be close. Nevertheless, the mere existence of Beatrice also marks Elsa’s future. She writes that she is constantly compared unfavorably with Beatrice. She is too thin; she is difficult. She is ugly. As an adult she looks dispassionately at a photograph of herself as if it were someone else and writes, “Schiap was an ugly child as standards go. Just then she had enormous eyes and looked half starved.” The truth is quite otherwise. A photograph taken when she was four or five shows a little girl with short black hair and a fringe, her head tilted to one side, with lustrous eyes and delicate, even features. The idea that she was ugly became so engrained that she ignored the evidence of her own eyes. What cross-currents of indignation, resentment, hurt, and rebellion this verdict aroused can only be guessed at. Early in her memoir she records that when she was born, on September 10, 1890, her parents planned for a boy and did not know what to do with a girl. They had no names for her. At her christening, driven to make a choice, and finding that the name of their baby’s nurse was Elsa, they used that. They added Luisa Maria, after her mother. Obviously this became a big family joke. What did Elsa mean when she wrote, “The struggle had begun”?
Like most solitary children, Elsa discovered the consolation of books. As soon as she could read she explored the Lincei’s vast and enticing library, with its globe of the heavens showing the stars in their courses, perhaps an armillary sphere of Renaissance origins. She wrote, “Even at this early age it enveloped me with a delicious sense of peace and aloofness, quite different from the rest of what I knew.” It was her great joy, her haven. Between the pages of exquisitely illustrated books, she found “a dream world of ancient religions and the worship of the arts.” There was a different kind of treasure trove in the attic, an enormous trunk full of her mother’s clothes. Elsa spent hours removing them one by one and trying them on: lingerie trimmed with yards of handmade lace, sheer blouses minutely embroidered, with whalebone collars; rainbow-hued skirts with tiny waists; and, of course, her mother’s wedding dress. She took on a certain expression, prematurely watchful and reserved, as if skirting around the edge of family life. Perhaps she was not so much rejected as considered a nuisance by parents too busy, too self-absorbed, or too emotionally distant to give her the affection and attention she needed. One day she decided to reinvent herself. She was not their child at all. She told Rosa, their cook, that she had a special secret. She was really adopted. She made Rosa cry with the sadness of it all. Elsa cried, too. They held hands. One day Rosa, overcome by the nobility of the gesture, told Elsa’s mother how much she admired her. The truth came out. “My father, normally so very gentle, pulled up my skirt and gave me the first and only spanking I ever had.”
Elsa Schiaparelli, aged four (illustration credit 1.2)
Curious parallels would seem to exist between the childhoods of Schiaparelli and Dalí. Both, by their own account, developed early the skills required for successful self-promotion that would become such assets later in life. Dalí was quick to realize how vulnerable his parents were to temper tantrums and the lengths to which they would go to placate him, no matter how stubborn and outrageous his demands. As he got older, he graduated to what Elsa Schiaparelli would call “stunts,” acts that would terrify them while giving him an illusory sense of dangers triumphantly vanquished and an adoring public. Throwing himself downstairs was one of his favorite stunts. He was just as scared of heights as Schiaparelli was, and has described the “almost invincible attraction I felt sucking me towards the void.” He also described the moment when he decided to hurl himself down a flight of stairs in full view of his classmates. He somehow ended up unharmed. So he did it again, this time adding a scream for extra effect. The response was so rapturous that he hardly noticed he had turned black and blue. “With a single marvellous display he had riveted everyone’s attention on him, and now he could manipulate their curiosity with all the arts at his command. He liked, as he said, to ‘cretinize’ people at will.” Bruises were a small price to pay.
Did it really happen? With Dalí, the artful showman, one never knew. When Schiaparelli came to write her memoir in 1954, she called it Shocking Life—by then she was well-known for her promotional skills, so it is impossible to know how much actually happened and what was invented. However, in the first incident, which turns up much later in Dalí’s imagery as well, internal evidence suggests that it happened to her first
and he borrowed it later. She relates that as a little girl, convinced of her ugliness, she had a moment of inspiration. Flowers were beautiful. So she would plant them in her ears, down her throat, and into her nose. They would grow and cover her face and then she would be beautiful. Pretty soon she could not breathe. She writes that it took two doctors and seven attempts to remove the seeds and, in particular, a hardened plug of cotton wool that she had jammed up her nose. This kind of detail would suggest that such an event really happened. Years later, in 1936, some inventive publicity was needed for the first International Surrealist Exhibition in London. Dalí, who had met Schiaparelli by then, had the inspired idea of sending a pretty girl into Trafalgar Square to feed the pigeons, her whole head covered in roses. It was a sensation and she was in all the morning papers. Girls with their heads covered with flowers would figure from time to time in the master’s art.
The flower-growing stunt did not work out as Schiaparelli planned, so she tried others (or so she writes). The Bible said that Jesus could walk on water. Perhaps she could too. If you excluded the river, there were not many bodies of water around. One day Elsa thought she had found one, about the size of a swimming pool. True, the surface did gleam rather strangely in the sun, but no matter. She jumped in. Too late she discovered she had landed in a pond of quicklime, calcium oxide, a caustic alkaline substance that causes severe burns. Schiaparelli passes over the panic she might have felt, to say nothing of the burns suffered before someone pulled her out. If, indeed, the incident actually happened. Then there was the time she took up flying. Parachutes were all the rage, so she improvised with a large umbrella, climbed up to the third floor and jumped out of a window. Again, luck was on her side; she landed in a pile of manure.
Elsa Schiaparelli Page 2