The fact that they were Italian, supposedly both born in 1890, and arrived in the U.S. at more or less the same time would have been enough of an introduction. By a further coincidence, both he and Elsa were extricating themselves from unhappy marriages. Here was another talented newcomer with a brilliant future, as De Kerlor had seemed seven years before, whose gifts she could nurture and protect. She fell in love with her usual impetuousness. She wrote, “Being compatriots [we] sympathized immediately and became great friends. [We] started long walks and long talks and found in each other much peace and happiness.”
Dora Loues Miller, a fashion designer who would come to know Schiaparelli in Paris some years later, recalled in 1941 that her husband, the writer Allan Updegraff, had met Schiaparelli years before. In the Woodstock days she was known simply as “Mario Laurenti’s girl friend” and the story was that both were waiting for their divorces so they could marry. Neither spent much time worrying about the partners they left behind. Elsa, in particular, seemed at pains not to meet De Kerlor again. Once, by chance, when Gogo was still lodged with a nurse in the country, they happened to be visiting her at almost the same time. As she was leaving, Elsa caught sight of De Kerlor coming along the road toward her. She begged a ride with a passing car and leapt inside. Years later a friend, Mrs. Ottavio Prochet, referring to the failed marriage, supplied a likely explanation. Elsa told her that Willie had begun legal steps to get custody of Gogo. The fact that she and Mario were known to be a couple while she was still married was reason enough to escape.
Schiaparelli was amazed to discover the Puritan attitudes toward adultery in America. Perhaps Laurenti’s wife, Angelina, had spread some inflammatory rumors. At any rate, she and Mario were dining on spaghetti one evening in his modest cabin in the woods when they heard voices. A crowd had gathered outside the door, demanding justice for the wronged wife. Showing her aplomb in the face of danger, Elsa cleared the table in a leisurely way and strolled out. She and Laurenti left unharmed. Perhaps after that the lovers made a tactical retreat to the relative anonymity of the big city.
The Met’s 1921–22 season was the most brilliant of Mario Laurenti’s career. He appeared briefly as Valentin in Gounod’s Faust. That season he also sang the role of the lover in Rimsky-Korsakov’s Snow Maiden. Being cast as Mizgir was a definite step up the ladder particularly since he appeared in its American premiere that January of 1922. By then he had appeared in another U.S. premiere, Die tote Stadt (The Dead City) by Erich Wolfgang Korngold, with Maria Jeritza, then making her triumphant debut, in the leading role. Laurenti was cast in two roles, that of Pierrot and also Fritz, a new part. The opera’s theme of love and death was very much in the mood of the times, much as Gian Carlo Menotti’s opera The Consul would be in the aftermath of World War II. It played to sold-out houses. Laurenti was ready for the challenge and acquitted himself as nobly as Elsa could have expected.
None of this appears in Elsa’s account, but it is safe enough to imagine her at the first performances, shouting and pelting him with flowers. She was travelling with him as well. As luck would have it, Laurenti went on a concert tour in upstate New York early in 1922. He was in Syracuse when he came down with a cold. That developed into an abscess in one of his ears. Alarmed, Elsa accompanied him back to New York where he was admitted into the Eye and Ear, a first-class hospital. He immediately underwent an operation, but it was too late. The abscess in his ear had become spinal meningitis, a bacterial inflammation of the lining of the brain and spinal cord, or meninges. Before the days of antibiotics it was almost always fatal.
Mario Laurenti died a day after he was admitted to the hospital, on March 7, 1922. It is hard to overestimate the effect of the sudden death of someone in whom Schiaparelli had placed so many hopes, justifiably as it turned out. Although he was legally still married, his wife refused to have anything more to do with him, and Schiaparelli had to make the funeral arrangements. These she did with her usual efficiency and dispatch. “Like Job, I reeled under the blow,” she wrote. “What had I done to deserve this?”
CHAPTER 4
* * *
MURDER AND MAYHEM
In 1922, Schiaparelli had no money, no career, no future, and a very sick daughter. Any other young woman in her situation, alone in a foreign country, would surely have gone home to mother. And Maria-Luisa genuinely wanted her. Schiaparelli had a sister in Rome, uncles, cousins, and a comfortable life. It was a measure of her determination that she refused. She could not, after all, expect much from a return except, perhaps, an unsatisfactory marriage to someone willing to accept a divorced woman of thirty with a sick baby girl, and pay the bills.
On the other hand, New York had given her a glimpse of the kind of life, rich with possibility, that she craved. As one of the major figures behind Dada, that anti-art cry of despair, “Gaby” Buffet-Picabia must have mentioned travelling through the Jura Mountains in 1912 with her husband and Guillaume Apollinaire; one of their “forays of demoralization, which were also forays of witticism and clownery,” as she expressed it. Signs and portents, dreams of other worlds, unconscious imperatives, inexplicable connections: the whole world of spiritism that Schiaparelli had discovered with Willie now presented itself in a new guise through art.
It did not hurt that Dada, which blended so seamlessly with that equally fantastic and sinister movement surrealism, was from the start involved with what people wore: hats, gloves, shoes, cloaks, and so on, as if to mirror a seismic shift in attitudes that lurked just beneath the conscious surface of how people felt about themselves. Man Ray, one of Gaby’s closest friends, was keenly aware of this subterranean psychic rumbling. By coincidence he grew up in a household where both parents worked in the New York rag trade. One of his first constructions used the common flatiron and transformed it into an instrument of menace by a row of wicked metal prongs. This unexpected combination of the sinister and the commonplace also appears in surrealism, with similar overtones. André Breton, one of its founders, was transfixed by an image first described by Isidore Ducasse, an obscure French poet, as the “chance meeting, on a dissecting table, of a sewing machine and an umbrella.” The phrase is from Les Chants de Maldoror, a rambling, scarcely coherent rant in free verse by the young poet (writing as the self-styled Comte de Lautréamont), who knew he was dying of tuberculosis.
Les Chants de Maldoror’s eccentric imagery inspired a number of artists, among them Man Ray. The latter’s enigmatic response, which had overtones of René Magritte, was to pay homage to Ducasse by wrapping a sewing machine in hemp and tying it securely with twine. Óscar Domínguez turned the sewing machine into an erotic kind of drill, piercing the body of a recumbent nude. Joseph Cornell took the figure of a fully dressed model, apparently a paper doll, about to be stitched up by the machine. In a further refinement of the theme, Salvador Dalí conjured up a figure somewhere between an embryo and a slug and proposed to use the needle on his figure’s head. Art was either sliding into sadism or perhaps, as Max Ernst thought in 1919, ceding its dominance to fashion. He produced a series of lithographs, Fiat modes, pereatars (Let there be fashion, down with art), that, Richard Martin wrote, “denounced the pretension of the fine arts in favor of the creative energy of fashion.” Magritte’s response was, as usual, merely elliptical and, in this case, practical, since he introduced the notion of serious artists working in fashion advertising on the side. In 1928 he designed surely one of the season’s most unexpected fur catalogues.
At the very least, fashion was being taken seriously by the art world. Women were already working in the field, and surrealism encouraged, even demanded, freewheeling interpretations that challenged the status quo, the madder and freer the better. Life was pointing toward new possibilities. It is curiously interesting that, in about 1919, Schiaparelli started referring to herself as “artist.”
Thanks to Gaby she had been introduced in New York to that small but pivotal circle of artists headed by Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray and also including Alfred Stieg
litz and Edward Steichen. In those days Man Ray was floating a new magazine devoted to Dada (it only had one issue) and was forming an organization, the Société Anonyme, to promote the arts. Thanks to her Picabia connection, Elsa was invited to help draw up the new group’s mailing lists. It would have been quickly evident that she was tireless and organized, a natural promoter. She was soon put in charge of directing an exhibition. With nothing to do, Schiaparelli might well have succumbed to apathy and depression. As it was, she was needed everywhere.
Then there was Gaby’s own project. Gaby, who seemed able to shuttle between Paris and New York at will, had come up with the idea of bringing Paris couture to America and taking a commission on the sales. She had a connection with Nicole Groult, the lesser-known sister of the famous Paul Poiret. Elsa could help with the sales. The idea, which had promise, never quite succeeded. In the meantime Schiaparelli had convinced herself that her future lay in Paris. Again, her luck held.
The marriage of Blanche and Arthur Hays was coming to an end. As it happened, Blanche happened to be moving to Paris to get a divorce, taking the couple’s daughter, Lora, with her and offering to take Elsa and Gogo along, too. Gaby Buffet-Picabia, in one of her lightning shifts of residence, was already back in Paris, and a circle of immediate friends beckoned. The opportunity seemed heaven sent. But before she left New York, Schiaparelli took the trouble of confirming Gogo’s U.S. citizenship and changed her daughter’s name to Schiaparelli. The year before they left, Elsa had filed a court proceeding, Elsa de Kerlor v. William Wendt de Kerlor, at the New York County Courthouse for a legal separation. Elsa reverted to her maiden name. Then there was the issue of De Kerlor’s attempt to gain custody of Gogo. It was time to leave.
Elsa, Gogo, Blanche, and Lora sailed for France in June 1922. Schiaparelli was travelling on a Polish passport, one she believed had been arranged for De Kerlor by Jan Paderewski earlier that year and had replaced a French passport. But she and De Kerlor had filed for a French divorce, and she would soon be in the uncomfortable position of being neither French nor Polish, and not Italian, either, since she had lost her nationality when she married. This was explained to her by the Italian ambassador to France himself, Count Carlo Sforza, who happened to be an old friend of her cousin Attilio’s. But when she examined her Italian passport more closely, she discovered it still had two days left before it expired. She jumped on the next train to Rome, presumably travelling overnight and, as soon as she arrived, went straight to the passport office. She got one on the spot: as Elsa Schiaparelli. “What did she care if it were not legal?” she wrote, typically referring to herself in the third person whenever she was feeling evasive. Common sense, as Voltaire wrote, is not so common.
Everyone was going to Paris. It did not seem to matter that France was almost bankrupt after four years of war, that a generation of young men had died, or that the mutilated survivors, occupying reserved seats in the Métro, were living reminders of the price that had been paid. War and the Treaty of Versailles led, not to prosperity and relief, but to daily strikes and continuing deprivations. On the other hand, although Paris had lost a portion of its population, it was still the undisputed center of art and fashion, it was miraculously intact, and because everyone was so poor it was cheap. Picasso, Modigliani, Soutine, Brancusi, Foujita, and many other foreign artists had already discovered the affordable pleasures of Montmartre and Montparnasse; now a group of expatriate American writers was about to do the same. Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, Kay Boyle, Henry Miller, and Gertrude Stein were among those who settled into the smart, seductive life of the boulevards offered by the Dôme, the Select, and the Rotonde.
Despite the arrival of the motorcar, Paris was still a walker’s paradise, and the sidewalks were bursting with attractions and temptations: sandwich sellers, one-man bands, sword swallowers, fire breathers, chain breakers, jugglers, conjurors, street singers, bouquinistes and mattress stuffers, vegetable stalls and flower kiosks, all of them confronting the tourist as he came up out of the Métro or sat drinking un petit café on the sidewalk.
When she arrived, Anaïs Nin wrote, “I feel as if I were biting into a utopian fruit, something velvety and lustrous and rich and vivid.” A new era of années folles was about to envelop the social scene, as Colin Jones observed in his biography of the city, a haunt of jazz and black GIs who had discovered it during the war, and the Latin Quarter “reeked of ‘petrol, coffee, alcohol, sweat, perfume, ambition, tobacco, horsepowder, urine, frivolity, gunpowder and sex.’ ”
The silhouette was flattening fast. Bosoms and bottoms disappeared almost overnight, along with the corset. Hemlines had risen past the ankle with no end in sight. As if in obedience to some vast, fathomless command, women cut off their hair in great chunks and appeared in public with neat little heads and tiny kiss curls, over which they fastened hats like helmets that came down over their eyebrows. Eugène Atget, that master of pathos, still travelled the street with his tripods, taking his exquisitely evocative portraits of a disappearing world. What was replacing it, no one quite knew. But for Elsa, with her avid longing for adventure and new beginnings, to be there was enough.
Once in Paris, Elsa was again under the benevolent wing of Gaby Buffet-Picabia, whose heroic role, as she coped with one more needy soul and sick baby, can hardly be overstated. Not only did she give them temporary shelter but she found a doctor who was using some kind of electric treatment for Gogo’s useless little legs. Who knows whether they did any good? At least they seemed to do no harm. Gogo was taken in as a member of the doctor’s family and lived there for several years, happily, if we are to judge from Palmer White’s account, which is based on her reminiscences. As for Schiaparelli, White quotes a remark she made after World War II to the effect that she owed her success to Paris, and poverty. The latter is harder to believe. According to White, she and Blanche took a large, old-fashioned furnished apartment on the Boulevard La Tour Maubourg in the 7th arrondissement, a fashionable part of Paris near the Hôtel des Invalides. Then Elsa hired a cook and maid and ran the household.
There are further reasons to think life passed agreeably in Paris for Elsa, who had the contacts and social cachet, thanks to her Roman relatives, to be accepted everywhere. Mother went on sending an allowance. She also sent a valuable coin collection of her father’s which Gaby, ever resourceful, managed to sell to a French businessman for a good price. Gaby also found a sympathetic antiques dealer willing to take Elsa on his rounds to the auction houses and antique shops. It was reminiscent of the days in Greenwich Village and hidden treasures in pawnshops. Elsa had a sharp eye and was soon exploring on her own.
In the evenings she was welcomed into the Dada group headed by Tristan Tzara and Francis Picabia, who, although divorced from Gaby, could never quite bring himself to leave her. As Janet Flanner found when she moved to Paris at about the same time (1925), surrealism had become “the latest Paris intellectual revolutionary movement such as Paris always foments when the cerebral sap of the Gallic mind runs in two opposite directions at once, one aiming at the destruction of a present society and the other at setting up a utopia on which nobody can agree.” Man Ray took her to Le Boeuf sur le Toit (The Bull on the Roof), a brand-new cabaret-bar. Its name derived from a surrealist ballet with a score by Darius Milhaud and scenario by Jean Cocteau. Palmer White wrote that it “had little black columns, a ceiling of iridescent glass and Raoul Dufy’s lithographs on the walls; behind the bar was Picabia’s L’Oeil cacodylate, named after a patent medicine, an eye-like montage of unrelated inscriptions signed by the artist’s friends.” For the cultural avant-garde it was the place to see and be seen. Under ideal conditions, Elsa met many artists with whom she would later collaborate, including Cocteau. She also met future clients, such as Nancy Cunard, an eccentric and wealthy Englishwoman, and Daisy Fellowes, the Singer Sewing Machine heiress, both of whom would abandon Chanel for her. There were Stravinsky, Satie, Gide, René Clair, Rubinstein, Chevalier, and Chanel hersel
f, not to mention the Prince of Wales and future Edward VIII, whom Schiaparelli would come to know after he married Mrs. Simpson. White believed they met in London a decade before and that Elsa rather fell for him. So much for penury and privation.
In a curious way Gaby Buffet-Picabia became the deus ex machina to launch Schiaparelli’s meteoric career. It happened in the summer of 1922, shortly after Elsa and Gogo arrived. The great Paul Poiret, who famously liberated women from their corsets, was the most celebrated designer in Paris, couturier to most of the crowned heads of Europe in the years leading up to World War I. When Poiret took the stage, the construction of a piece of clothing had been as intricate as a Swiss watch, requiring superb pattern-making skills, not to mention the reconstruction of the female form. As has been noted, Poiret dismissed such an approach in favor of draping fabrics directly on the body. Inspired by Eastern art and the Ballets Russes, Poiret fashioned flamboyant theatrical designs: vivid colors, gorgeous fabrics, and elaborate trims took the place of pastels, tailored shoulders, stiffenings, padding, and corseted waistlines. But once World War I started, Poiret left his fashion house to design uniforms for the military. When he returned five years later, his maison de couture was on the brink of bankruptcy, and something had to be done. So he opened a private theatre on the elegant grounds of his eighteenth-century hôtel particulier. “Here in the open air, but under an artificial, inflatable rubber sky,” Janet Flanner wrote, “romantic pieces were played. Here Yvette Guilbert, enchanting relict from the old Butte nights, wore her 1890 black gloves and sang. Big Berthas and Gothas had just ceased splitting the twentieth-century air. But with the intermittent thoroughness characteristic of him, Poiret piped his theatre with prebellum gaslights to heighten his momentary delusion …”
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