She wrote, “In a way, Schiap was a small sensation. Nobody had ever seen … anybody dressed in such a queer way.” There was one problem she had not foreseen. During an especially lively tango the pins holding everything together began to loosen and scatter on the dance floor. The costume was flying apart in full public view. With great presence of mind, her partner steered her off the floor and out of the room before the costume disintegrated altogether.
After a while the hostel experiment came to an end, and Schiaparelli found herself in London, a city she barely knew. Interestingly, it never occurred to her to go home. She wrote, “I was not very close to my family …” Return would have meant doors closing: defeat, stultification, perhaps even marriage to the repellent suitor with the rounded beard and slanting eyes. Besides, she had decided to go back to Paris. As soon as she saw it, she told herself, “This is the place where I am going to live!” She also liked London, despite its pea-soup fogs and the sense of disorientation that accompanied an evening walk around Green Park, clinging to the railings, with strange shapes looming out of the darkness. She might have been contemplating a way to get back to Paris when, one evening, she decided to go to a lecture. It was on theosophy, that philosophical belief with ancient roots that Helena Blavatsky had newly popularized: an interest in esoteric teachings and the immutable reality behind outward appearances.
It was being given by “a quite unknown man,” who was “rather handsome in a queer way.” He was talking about “the powers of the soul over the body, of magic and eternal youth.” Who was he? She listened, spellbound. After the audience left, she was still sitting in her chair. Pretty soon she and the lecturer were talking. They spent a whole night discovering “what appeared to be a complete communion of ideas.”
Here was an incarnation of the mysterious stranger galloping into her life, talking about all the things that mattered, but so much more accessible. One does not know just what happened as darkness fell, and it is tactful to draw a veil. The fact is that they were engaged the next morning, just like that. Her alarmed parents raced to London to stop the marriage. But it was too late. Wilhelm de Wendt de Kerlor, age thirty, and Elsa Luisa Maria Schiaparelli, twenty-three, were married in the Register Office, St. Martin’s District, London, on July 21, 1914. The groom had already rented a tiny furnished mews house, and they went straight back there. The house contained seven mirrors. All of them, Schiaparelli writes, were cracked.
CHAPTER 2
* * *
THE PICCADILLY FAKER
Palmer White, Elsa Schiaparelli’s biographer, based his description of her marriage on the recollections of her only child, Gogo, the Marchesa Cacciapuoti, his friend of many years, when he published Elsa Schiaparelli: Empress of Paris Fashion in 1986. What little evidence there was about her father, William de Wendt de Kerlor, as White records the name, came from the daughter who never knew him, since the marriage broke up before she was a year old. Even to put a name of any kind to Schiaparelli’s husband was a coup, since in her autobiography it never appears. White claimed that De Kerlor was Breton French on his father’s side and French-Swiss on his mother’s. He was tall, slim, and elegant, with “magnetic” eyes, and had inherited his Slavic good looks from his maternal grandparents, Poles from Cracow. White published a photograph of the handsome spouse wearing a formal collar, satin tie, suit with a waistcoat, and the air of hauteur one would expect from a Polish count, as White records him. By marrying him, Schiaparelli had attained the title of countess, a belief that entered family lore.
Recent research into the United States Bureau of Investigation, State Department, and naturalization records shows that De Kerlor never claimed such a title, although he went by a variety of names, many of them variations on his own birth name. He sometimes said his name was Kent and frequently appended the title “Professor” or “Doctor,” although he was neither. He was actually born in Geneva on August 30, 1883, as Wilhelm Frederick Wendt, the son of Frederick Wendt, a native of Prussian Poland. In 1906 William Wendt legally changed his name in Britain to Wendt de Kerlor, or so he stated when he was twenty-three. He said Kerlor was his mother’s maiden name. He might be de Wendt de Kerlor, Wendt de Kerlor, Willie Wendt, or other such variations in the days when there was no convenient way to track a man’s movements, let alone his aliases. Far from being tall, De Kerlor was five foot six at most, had brown hair, blue eyes, and a scar on his left temple. He had a brother, Edouard, and his father ran a horticultural business outside Cannes. Depending on the inspiration of the moment he could be either Polish, Russian, Austrian, French, or English. His application for naturalization, made after he and Elsa arrived in the U.S. in 1916, under oath and in wartime, makes it conceivable that, for once, he was telling the truth when he declared he was Swiss. Exactly when, and why, he seems to have acquired a title is a mystery.
William de Wendt de Kerlor in 1914, the year he married Elsa (illustration credit 2.1)
Before marrying a French girl, De Kerlor’s father, Frederick Wendt, lived for a time in England. Perhaps that was the reason why his son Wilhelm or William or Willie went there to study at the Municipal Technical College of Brighton and the Royal Polytechnic University in Regent Street in London (now the University of Westminster), where he perfected his already excellent English. He also studied in France at the College of Cannes. At some point he developed an interest in theosophy and the occult that was to become lifelong. He boasted of having mediumistic powers. One of the incidents told about him is his warning to W. T. Stead, founder of several English periodicals, including the Pall Mall Gazette. Stead was curious about the paranormal and had several friends who were “sensitives” or “psychics,” including De Kerlor. In 1911 De Kerlor reportedly told Stead he would make a trip to America, although the newspaperman had no plans to do so at the time. He would travel on a great ship that was still being built. Early in 1912, De Kerlor had a nightmare vision of a disaster at sea. In his dream he saw Stead in the ocean, struggling to survive along with more than a thousand others. Stead’s reply was, “Oh yes; well, well, you are a very gloomy prophet.” He died in the Titanic disaster of April 1912.
The major influence on De Kerlor’s thinking appears to have been Émile Boirac, a French philosopher and parapsychologist whom he met when he attended the Second International Congress of Experimental Psychology in Paris in 1913. Boirac, who became president of the University of Grenoble in 1898 and president of Dijon University four years later, was an advocate of scientific investigation of the paranormal, which included clairvoyance, déjà vu, extrasensory perception, and much else. He conducted experiments on an Italian medium, Eusapia Palladino, explored the uses of hypnotism, and wrestled with the study of spiritism. De Kerlor, who would become a loyal disciple, translated and wrote the foreword for two of Boirac’s books, Our Hidden Forces, published in 1917, and The Psychology of the Future, in 1918. The books are still in print. De Kerlor’s other interest—he lectured at the 1913 conference—had to do with alchemical experiments in transmutation by François Jollivet-Castelot, who founded the short-lived Société Alchimique in France.
While at the conference in 1913 De Kerlor began to demonstrate a flair for self-promotion that would become marked in years to come. Although the tone of the meeting was scholarly, if not pedantic, De Kerlor instinctively realized the vast potential for popularizing its subject matter and settled, for gullible readers, on what would prove to be his downfall in Britain: reading palms. He claimed to have analyzed the palm prints of four people—a domestic servant, a “violent lunatic,” a woman flier who almost died in a plane accident, and Gordon Selfridge, the American founder of the London department store—and proceeded to discourse on all that had been foreseen in their hands by an expert like himself. He provided photographs. The article was reprinted in newspapers as far away as Duluth, Iowa.
He certainly was an apt student and his study of the paranormal was in keeping with an international surge of interest in the subject. The British Societ
y for Psychical Research was founded in 1882 by Henry Sidgwick, a professor of moral philosophy at Cambridge. Three years later a companion organization, the American Society for Psychical Research, was founded by William James, professor of philosophy at Harvard. Freud and Jung were honorary members. Others were pioneers in psychology, psychiatry, physics and astronomy, a cross-fertilization of interests that would have appealed to the daughter of the librarian at the Lincei Academy.
The immediate goal of the British society was to see whether such phenomena could be studied and analyzed using scientific methods. With the appalling slaughter on the battlefields of World War I, interest, if anything, only grew stronger and more urgent. Sir Oliver Lodge, a physicist and a president of the British society, lost his son Raymond on a French battlefield in 1915. Lodge began a careful investigation to see if he could make contact with his son. His book Raymond, or Life and Death, published in 1916, became a best seller. Any kind of supporting evidence, no matter how fragmentary, was grist for the Sunday papers in those days. At the turn of the century, the World on Sunday of New York published a lengthy article about “Spirit Pictures that have Startled all Paris,” along with some highly suspect drawings.
By the time Schiaparelli met him, De Kerlor had acquired a certain expertise as a lecturer and author on the paranormal and had established an Occult Library at no. 1 Piccadilly Place. His address was certainly Piccadilly, but not that great and celebrated thoroughfare of illustrious hotels, department stores, fashionable churches and museums that runs beside Green Park. Piccadilly Place is an alley off the main street near the Piccadilly Circus, or definitely down-market, end. Never mind; the name of his telephone exchange was Mayfair, which was what counted. The lesson was not lost on Schiaparelli. No one could understand why, years later, when she was establishing herself in business in Paris, she did not mind what kind of rat-infested hole she was living in. The address had to be, and indeed became, the Rue de la Paix.
De Kerlor must have seemed like the professorial, scholarly minded father and uncles she grew up with, and his title of “consulting psychologist” has a ring to it. Did her new husband tell her what the phrase was concealing? A report made to the U.S. Bureau of Investigation in 1919 by someone named “N.L.G.” is instructive. The author, who interviewed De Kerlor, said that the latter had boasted about a British general in charge of the northern provinces of India who did not make a move without consulting him. Then there was a couple, both prominent newspaper people, who were similarly under his spell. He claimed to have a library of thirty thousand volumes and a club with sixteen thousand clients. In fact, he read palms there for half a guinea, a steep price in those days, and would exercise his powers of clairvoyance for a further amount. Once war broke out, he published monthly astrological forecasts of the war in his magazine, the Occult Review, predicting German advances so successfully that, he boasted, the results had to be censored. He was, he continued, much talked about in the British press. They called him “the Piccadilly Fakir.”
By then De Kerlor was living in Boston with Elsa and looking back fondly on his London triumphs. This was curious, in light of what actually happened. As far back as 1903, when, under the name of Wendt, he was teaching languages, he read palms and made predictions on the side. This was against the law, and he received a caution from the police. The Vagrancy Act of 1824, section 4, made it illegal for “every person pretending or professing to tell fortunes, or using any subtle craft, means or device, by palmistry or otherwise, to deceive and impose on any of His Majesty’s subjects.” Now there was a war. Schiaparelli wrote, “I did not know where I belonged for my husband acted like a drifting cloud in the sky …” She makes no reference to his activities as a “consulting psychologist,” but a British report does.
In the spring of 1915, De Kerlor was sentenced to six weeks in prison and then deportation under the Vagrancy Act for fortune telling, as well as an alien act. This was half the usual prison term but nevertheless severe. Since by then the former law was seldom applied, and usually following a complaint, the likelihood is that it was a pretext to punish a suspicious character who might cause trouble, and put him out of business. De Kerlor appealed and his case was heard at the London Sessions House on Friday, July 9, 1915. Willie Frederick Wendt, “alias De Kerlor,” the court stated, was appealing his conviction at Marlborough Street Police Court of “being a rogue and a vagabond by pretending to tell fortunes.” The government continued to press its case. The Derby Daily Telegraph reported that “in April two ladies called upon [the] appellant. One, a private enquiry agent, said she would take a 10s 6d reading by palmistry and afterwards half-a-guinea’s worth of clairvoyance. Appellant’s information in the course of the interview was singularly inaccurate. He informed the lady that she had three children, and upon being told that he was wrong, said she had two. The lady replied that she had only one. He stated that the one child was a boy, and was again wrong. He next informed her that her age was 47, and received the reply that she was only 39. He was again wrong when he told her she was a widow. Endeavouring to tell her where her husband was, he said that he could see snow on the mountains, and told her that her husband was in Switzerland. On being told that he was wrong he said he could see him riding on sand, and conjectured that he was in Egypt. He was again wrong. The other lady removed her wedding ring prior to the interview. Appellant addressed her as ‘Mademoiselle’ and told her she would be married shortly.”
Faced with such an unconvincing display of psychic powers, the presiding magistrate was unmoved. The appellant could avoid prison by paying a five-pound fine, but he still had to be deported. He and Elsa had the weekend to pack and left England on Monday, July 12, 1915. A year after marrying the man of her dreams, almost to the day, she was now sharing in his humiliating fate. What she felt can only be imagined. First there was the omen of the seven cracked mirrors. Now, as she crossed the channel to France in the summer of 1915, the sky, she wrote, was as red as blood.
Paris would seem to be the obvious destination, but they were not going there. From the day war was declared, July 28, 1914, Paris was in immediate danger, since it was closer to the front than any other capital city in Europe. By September of that year, the Germans had raced through Belgium and were within fifty miles of the capital. This was the moment when the nation mobilized and, in order to get them to the front fast enough, Parisian taxis ferried four thousand soldiers to the battlefields. The Battle of the Marne—“the Miracle of the Marne,” it was called—pushed the Germans back twenty-five miles, and Paris was out of immediate danger. The French government, which had fled to the relative safety of Bordeaux, returned to Paris in December 1914. But many shops and businesses had closed. Cafés served coffee without milk, croissants had disappeared for the duration, meat and fish were scarce and coal was in short supply. No one knew when the next German advance might come.
The best solution, De Kerlor reasoned, was to go to his parents’ on the Boulevard du Moulin in Cannes, about as far away from the fighting as they could get. But that meant travelling the length of France in wartime, and the country’s efficient train network had been requisitioned by the military. It was dedicated to the effort of moving great armies, their machines and matériel, their guns and horses and trucks and petrol, their clothing and food, even their laundry, to the Western Front. Going in the other direction meant transporting the wounded and also ferrying sixty-five thousand refugees out of Belgium. In one massive effort, trains bound for the front left on a ten-minute schedule around the clock.
This more or less ensured that a trip from London to Nice that nowadays can be made in nine or ten hours on fast trains might take a week. Even following World War II, the regular service from London as far as Paris, which connected up with a Channel ferry on the British side and with a train to Paris on the French coast, took eight hours. Fighting one’s way onto overcrowded trains, with their unpredictable arrivals, battling for a seat or claiming standing room in corridors piled high with lugga
ge, with nothing to eat and no sleep, must have been hellish.
The diary of a British intelligence officer who eagerly volunteered with the British Expeditionary Force as soon as war was declared suggests the likely turmoils of such a journey. He left London at eleven in the morning, arriving at his embarkation point, Newhaven, by one p.m. Then he waited for a ferry, and waited, and waited. He spent the night sleeping in a railway carriage. The next day the first available ferry left at 3:30 p.m. It arrived in Boulogne well after dark. By then, the tide was too low. To get ashore, he had to climb up a slippery ladder fastened to the harbor wall. Even his patience was tried when he spent that night sleeping on a station platform.
Then there were the experiences of Richard Harding Davis, a gifted and daring American journalist who was the first American to cover the Spanish-American War and the Second Boer War, and died of a heart attack in 1916, at age fifty-one. Davis, in Paris, records the interminable formalities needed just to have a passport issued by the Prefect of Police. “I found a line of people: French, Italians, Americans, English, in columns of four and winding through gloomy halls, down dark stairways and out into the street …” The process took two days, and then there were the Italian, Serbian, and Greek consulates to contend with, a total of four days just for the paperwork.
“War,” he continued, “followed us south. The windows of the wagons-lit were plastered with warnings to be careful, to talk to no strangers, that the enemy was listening … [The traveller] learns, as he cannot learn from a map, how far-reaching are the ramifications of the war, in how many different ways it affects everyone …” Davis’s trip to Salonika from Paris, which normally took six days, took fifteen.
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