Elsa Schiaparelli

by Meryle Secrest

  Claiming to head a spiritualist school was one thing; sympathy with the Bolshevik Revolution was something else. When another BOI agent, Norman L. Gifford, visited them two months later, De Kerlor seemed embarrassingly eager to continue his damning admissions about them both. He claimed, for instance, that Scotland Yard was looking for him because of his involvement with “black anarchists” in England in 1910. He was anti-English (for good reason). He and Elsa, as fervent supporters of Bolshevism, had been overheard conspiring with an Italian anarchist named Joe Tomasino, judged violent by the BOI. They had taken part in a “Bolshevik” riot in Roxbury, a suburb of Boston. The agent wrote, “He claims he cannot get fair publicity for the Bolshevists and claims to desire to put forth their true case.”

  “Subject’s wife,” as she was called, hardly troubled to conceal her sympathies either. She said she spoke English, French, and Spanish, besides Italian, and was teaching Bolshevism to Italians in the North End. She had been shown how to make a bomb and thought it was ridiculously easy. In short, Agent Gifford concluded, “From his own conversation and that of his wife it is believed he will do his utmost to incite by every means in his power foreigners less intelligent than himself to revolution.”

  Such careless admissions could not have been more badly timed. A few months before, in late 1918, letter bombs were sent to prominent government officials, including the then U.S. attorney general, A. Mitchell Palmer. The “Red Scare” would remain a popular political menace throughout the 1920s and 1930s. As a result, Palmer ordered a series of roundups nationwide to ferret out and expel Communist sympathizers and anarchists from American soil. Willie and Elsa were spared. Perhaps the factor that prevented them from being deported again was the suspicion that despite his damaging assertions, De Kerlor was harmless.

  The pert little person with the heavy eyelids, turned-up nose and dainty feet, who dreamed of a rescuer on a white horse, was coming of age. No matter how desperately she wanted to believe in the handsome stranger, be his handmaiden and worship at his feet, their years together had shown her just how far Willie fell short of her ideal. If she sought daring, intellect, and emotional stability, what she found was mythomania, duplicity, and cheap tricks. Even the beliefs they passionately shared, spiritism, alchemy, and the occult, had been tested, as one by one his claims were demonstrated to be bogus, his behavior unpredictable, and his mood swings mercurial: he could even have been violent. She was living with a man whose lack of empathy and evasiveness in close relationships were equaled only by his clownish incompetence. He was a fraud.

  On the other hand, she was building a sturdy self-reliance and resourcefulness that would become her biggest assets. She was discovering something even more valuable: she had a gift. Beautiful girls lent their allure to almost any outfit; plain girls had to do the reverse. Even while completely under De Kerlor’s spell, one notes in Elsa’s early photographs, she is wearing unusual and distinctive jewelry. Her taste for the dramatic statement would soon extend to everything she wore. Now, after five years of marriage, they were growing apart, and perhaps they both knew it. It was her bad luck that, in the autumn of 1919, she became pregnant, just six months after the end of the Dean fiasco in New Hampshire. At that point De Kerlor was suing the selectmen of East Jaffrey for expenses claimed in a ridiculously padded bill of over a thousand dollars that they refused to pay. No doubt they were poorer than ever and waiting for money from Italy as usual. Elsa moved back to the Brevoort and living on oysters and ice cream, pretending they were the cheapest items on the menu.

  At about this time De Kerlor began accepting invitations for himself alone, whether because they were already leading separate lives or because Elsa was pregnant is not clear. In any event she was finding friends of her own. On the SS Chicago bound for New York in 1916, they met Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia, wife of Francis Picabia, the French painter, poet, Dadaist, and surrealist, whom she married in 1909. Adversity brought them together and common interests united them. Gabrielle was bound for New York, which she and her husband had often visited in the years following his triumphant debut in the great Armory Exhibition of 1913. They had three children: Laure, born in 1910, Pancho, in 1911, and Jeannine, in 1913. Presumably the children travelled with their mother although there is no evidence of this. What is known is that Gabrielle was related to Alphonse de Lamartine, poet, novelist, and dramatist, and was of minor French aristocracy, which would have been a point of contact with Elsa.

  Gabrielle Picabia was alone. Her husband remained in Barcelona, where he was launching a Dadaist review, 391. She was not herself a painter but was in close touch with the founders of Dadaism and surrealism, those postwar movements that would have such an influence on Elsa. As a journalist she wrote informed articles on the theories and goals of her particular specialty. All this continued even though, a year after she arrived in New York, Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia’s own marriage was falling apart. Picabia had met another woman. In 1917 he and his mistress left Spain for Lausanne. It was all quite over … or was it? Somehow he and Gabrielle must have reconciled briefly, perhaps just after the end of World War I, in 1918. At any rate, there was one more baby, Vincent, born in 1919. By the end of that year, Gabrielle Picabia was back in New York.

  As for Elsa, she always said that Willie left her for Isadora Duncan. It might have happened but if so the affair was brief, because Duncan fell in love with a Russian poet, moved to Moscow, and married him in 1922. An affair with Nazimova looks more likely, since she had been willing to share the bill in vaudeville with an unknown. There is no proof. To say one’s husband has deserted one for another woman is sure to arouse sympathy if there is a baby in the picture. It is certainly easier than announcing to the world that one is married to a con artist, a trickster, and a fraud.

  Elsa also became friendly with Blanche Marks Hays, then married to Arthur Garfield Hays, a prominent lawyer and officer of the American Civil Liberties Union. That was another helpful friendship, since Blanche was a New York socialite and also dabbled in the arts as a costume designer for the Provincetown Theater. Arthur and Blanche were divorced in 1924, but when Elsa came to write Shocking Life, she had nothing but warm memories of those early days. “They had a congenial home full of intelligent and unconventional people, and to me they were kind in their sympathy, and very helpful.”

  The De Kerlors’ baby girl was born on June 15, 1920. Three days later, Willie was back in the news and on the pages of the New York World, that pioneer of yellow journalism with its circulation of one million. On June 17 a noted researcher in psychic phenomena had died. He was a former professor of ethics and logic at Columbia University, a Dr. James Hervey Hyslop, age sixty-five. Dr. Hyslop, who was also a psychologist, was the first to connect psychology with psychic phenomena and was head of the American Society for Psychical Research. Originally an agnostic, he had become convinced that the spirit survived bodily death and that this had been proved scientifically. Despite his energetic beliefs, these assertions had been mocked in his day, partly because of the unlikely evidence he offered. He claimed to have made contact with the late William James, psychologist and mystic, who often had been ill and had favored wearing pale pink pajamas. With a straight face Dr. Hyslop offered the evidence that William James, from beyond the grave, wanted him to have one of his black ties for Christmas and two pairs of his pale pink pajamas. This farcical bequest was not lost on the tongue-in-cheek account that appeared in the World.

  It was now De Kerlor’s turn to say that he had contacted the spirit of Dr. James Hyslop. Shortly before Hyslop’s death a friend of De Kerlor’s, who was a medium, brought him a painting. Above the kneeling figure of an angel was a hovering butterfly. What is this thing? De Kerlor wanted to know. The medium had no idea. So De Kerlor took the picture and propped it on top of his typewriter and against the wall of his rooms in the Brevoort Hotel. Then he sat down in his blue armchair and “concentrated his keen gray eyes on the pretty butterfly …” For someone who found faces imprinted on
bloodstains, it was the work of a moment to see that the butterfly was actually Dr. Hyslop’s face in disguise. Here was the nose, here were the eyes, mouth and beard. There was more: a communication after death.

  Dr. Hyslop was sorry he had not achieved wider recognition for the work of his society. He had hoped to raise a million dollars for important research, but the strain of writing his last book, Life After Death (1918), had been too great. One doubts these revelations contained any information not readily available from published sources. Dr. Hyslop had a further message for De Kerlor (although not a word about pajamas). He should stop hiding his light from under a bushel and come out from behind the scenes. Since De Kerlor had been trying to do nothing else since he arrived in New York four years before, it is hard to see the usefulness of this advice, unless what he claimed to have heard was an encouragement to end his marriage.

  Certainly the birth of Maria Luisa Yvonne Radha de Kerlor was traumatic for them both. Even if De Kerlor contributed “Radha” to his daughter’s name—a reference to the Hindu goddess who was the consort of Krishna—the idea of bringing up a baby certainly did not fit in with his plans. The odds are that he moved out a matter of weeks after her birth and set himself up at a smart address—a year later he was living at 51 East Sixtieth—and probably starting a new book, The Secrets of Your Hands, which would be published in 1927. No doubt he was courting the papers assiduously. He had taken his overcoat to a seamstress to add to it a mink lining that had once been their bedspread. For Elsa that was the last straw. He had applied for naturalization papers even before he emigrated to the U.S., in 1914. In 1921 he would apply again, signalling his determination to stay, although, as events will show, he never followed through. He always had ambitious plans.

  Elsa also had plans though, for the moment, they were not as clearly defined. Curiously, she appears to have made no effort to track down her husband for financial help. She was a mother now, responsible for a baby, and desperate straits brought out the side that rose to any challenge. The baby lacked a bed, and she could not pay for one: fine, she would put her in an orange crate. Hotels were turning her away because they did not want a single woman with an infant: no problem, she would leave the baby in the taxi and get the room first. The baby screamed all night and she was about to be evicted: that, too, called for creative solutions. When the manager arrived at her door, “Never have I tried harder to seduce a man and never for such a good cause. At last I succeeded …” She had to look for a job. Fine, she would put her “endearing, laughing child,” who “never minded being alone,” on the fire escape to sleep in the sunshine while she went job hunting. Did Schiaparelli know that breast-fed babies should be fed every two hours? How long was the baby left crying in hunger, in the heat of the day, on a fire escape?

  Fast-forward to a new phase in the fight to survive. There was her dear friend Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia, who had such “great intelligence and a great heart,” who offered to let the newborn stay with her. Schiaparelli does not mention that Gabrielle was also caring for Vincent, her own baby, plus her three other youngsters. Perhaps Gabrielle, as an experienced mother, gave the clueless Elsa some basic tips on child care. She did more. Gabrielle had some French underwear, bought in Paris, that they might be able to sell. Elsa would take them around to the stores and presumably they would split the proceeds. That idea was not a success. The next few months are a jumble of efforts at partial solutions for the baby. There was a country house that took in children, so Schiaparelli left her there. She visited in December and found her daughter, now six months old, parked on a terrace and freezing cold. Schiaparelli found a job with a Wall Street broker, watching the ticker tape, getting all the numbers wrong, and was fired. She discovered a “nice old nurse” in the Connecticut countryside and left the baby with her. Now there was some money from Italy, and she moved to a room in Patchin Place that was so small she had to sit on the bed to dress. But then the money was gone and she was always hungry.

  One day she went for a walk and picked up a twenty-dollar bill, a small fortune, and had a steak dinner. What remained must be invested, but how? One or two inexpensive trinkets in a pawnbroker’s window gave her an idea. She does not describe them; perhaps they were an unusual fan, an inlaid cigarette case, or a hand-blown piece of Venetian glass. She took her finds uptown and sold them for twice what she had paid, “the best deal I ever made.” In those years she was constantly on the move. Schiaparelli explains her daughter’s nickname of Gogo by saying that she made constant gurgling sounds to that effect, but her daughter’s explanation sounds more likely. Gogo said, “A mad socializer, Mummy got all dressed up every night for her umpteen dinner parties, leaving me with a nanny. Dashing out of the door she would always call to me, ‘Well, I must go now,’ and I would look up and say, ‘Go, go, going, go, go.’ So I was called Gogo and it stuck. Ironically, it describes Mother’s maternal pattern perfectly.”

  Taking care of Gogo was Schiaparelli’s constant preoccupation. At fifteen months she seemed healthy but she was not walking properly. Instead of trotting along on two feet, she was crawling like a crab. The nurse was reassuring. It was nothing, just that the baby had a slight cold. Fortunately, her mother was not satisfied. She consulted a specialist and learned the frightening news: Gogo had infantile paralysis.

  In the best of outcomes infantile paralysis, or poliomyelitis, left only mild symptoms and no permanent aftereffects. In the worst, the virus attacked and destroyed motor neurons, including swallowing and breathing, leading to paralysis and death. The same year Gogo was infected, 1921, the future president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, was permanently paralyzed from the waist down. Until the Salk and Sabin vaccines of 1955 and 1962, epidemics, particularly in the summer months, were routine. One in Brooklyn in 1916 affected twenty-seven thousand children and adults, resulting in six thousand deaths. In 1950 there were more than thirty-three thousand cases. For severe infections like Gogo’s, there was the iron lung to take over breathing and continuous physical therapies to straighten deformed legs forcibly, no matter how painfully: braces, splints, casts, crutches, and the like. It was a long, slow process, requiring extended stays in hospitals and clinics. For Gogo the process involved numerous operations and took ten years. She said, “I … spent my early years in plaster casts, on and off crutches. I could ski before I could walk.” As for her mother, “I barely saw her. A lot of my childhood was spent alone and parentless.”

  Behind this succinct description, the only one Gogo gave of her childhood, is the harsh fate of a child who never knows what torment will be inflicted on her next. At one stage, Schiaparelli wrote, Gogo was in a small Paris clinic. “It was a long and very painful business and she would fight and cry bitterly at the sight of the méchante boîte,” a reference, one assumes, to the iron lung. By an accident of fate, mother and child were again at a physical and psychic distance, in eerie repetition of the pattern Elsa had endured. Go, going, gone.

  Mario Laurenti in costume as Pierrot/Fritz in Die tote Stadt at the Metropolitan Opera, 1921 (illustration credit 3.1)

  Since the spread of polio is linked to poor hygiene, there was something seriously lacking in the care of this supposedly reliable nurse. As soon as treatment had been arranged for Gogo that summer of 1921, kind friends offered Elsa a summer cottage for a brief holiday. Although unnamed, the friends were certainly Arthur and Blanche Hays, since they had a summer home in Woodstock, Vermont, and the house in which Elsa stayed was next door. Woodstock, with its eighteenth- and nineteenth-century late-Georgian, Federal-style, and Greek Revival architecture, was a gem. It was an unspoiled retreat for well-to-do Boston and New York families, and much sought after by artists, poets, sculptors, and writers. The surrounding countryside was bucolic and every aspect was pleasing.

  Then Elsa met Mario Laurenti. Laurenti, like his namesake Mario Lanza, the singer and film star, flared with spectacular ease across the vocal firmament before dying at a moment when his fame seemed assured. When Elsa met him, Laur
enti had arrived from Verona, Italy, in 1916, was singing small roles at the Metropolitan Opera and being groomed for stardom as the latest young baritone with the voice, the looks, and the natural dramatic flair to hit the headlines. Photographs show that Laurenti had a square-shaped face, wide forehead, high cheekbones, determined mouth and close-set ears. He was short, with broad shoulders and chest tapering to neatly turned calves and ankles.

  It is curiously interesting that he, too, like De Kerlor, was a performer, with the same chameleon-like ability to shift personalities from one role to the next, even the way he looked. There is a photograph of Laurenti in a minor role in Cavalleria rusticana, wearing a pageboy bob and puffed sleeves, that trembles on the verge of farce. On the other hand, in the role of Mizgir in Rimsky-Korsakov’s Snow Maiden, with a beard and daggerlike mustache, he is every inch the Russian heroic ideal. As an ardent young lover he must have been entirely convincing and physically resembled, closely enough, the dashing stage performer who swept Elsa off her feet with words, if not arias.

  Laurenti was similarly self-invented, which perhaps appealed to the gambler in her as well. Several records show he had been born in Verona as Luigi Cavadini (or Cavadani) in 1890. His birth date is also given as 1886, and this is possible, even likely. When he arrived in the U.S. he was calling himself Mario Laurenti Cavadini.

  What little can be ascertained about his private life is equally sketchy. We know that in September 1918 he was living with his wife, Angelina Bertha Laurenti, and their son. His address then was 73 Riverside Drive. Two years later, as recorded in the New York census of January 1920, Laurenti had moved in as a lodger in the home of Otto Lowe at 262 West Seventy-seventh Street. He was still married, but separated. Just a month after that, according to the supplemental census of February 1920, Laurenti had moved again, to 53 West Seventy-second, was stating his age as twenty-nine (although he was probably thirty-three), and declaring he was divorced (also unlikely).