The only room that did not look staged was the living room. This contained a handsome black-and-white divan, scattered with sumptuous patterned velvet cushions reminiscent of Poiret, a well-thumbed shelf of books, and photographs. These, prominently displayed on the mantelpiece, were of Gogo, aged six or seven, wearing short hair, bangs, and a wistful look.
For the first time Schiaparelli had a suite to call her own, and her designs grew ever more outrageous or inspired, depending on the viewpoint. There was, for instance, a sweater boldly tattooed like a sailor’s biceps, complete with snakes and pierced hearts. There was another decorated with fine white lines, following the lines of the ribs so that, when she wore it, the hapless owner looked as if she were being seen through an X-ray. This was Schiaparelli’s first foray into surrealism, and she liked it so much that she developed the theme some years later on a dress. It is considered extraordinarily original and routinely included in catalogues about her oeuvre, if not in reminiscences by the wearers. She was looking past the sweater and did not like what she saw. The bust had to come up at once. Where were the shoulders? The waist was far too low. The skirt was too short. Schiaparelli was in her element, and the freedom would have been exhilarating, if not for the nights. She discovered that she had inherited legions of mice and rats. They crept out as darkness fell and danced around her bed “in a satanic saraband.” Unlike Marie, the little heroine of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s famous story, there was no Nutcracker with toy soldiers to vanquish the Mouse King, but only a small fox terrier who was as terrified as she was.
When she was growing up, Gogo would ask, “Where is Daddy?” and her mother would respond, “He’s dead.” But no one knew where he was.
After professing his absolute determination to live in New York, Willie de Kerlor was anywhere but there. He abandoned his ambition to be a newspaperman fairly soon, and probably also discovered that there was not much demand on the part of the average police department for a psychological detective with extrasensory powers. He was concentrating on his magnum opus, The Secrets of Your Hands, or Palmistry Explained, subtitled “a scientific explanation of ‘kirography,’ ” not explained. The book was published by Experimental Publishing in 1927 and it is now out of print, although his earlier translations of Boirac, Our Hidden Forces and The Psychology of the Future, have stood the test of time.
He was also translating into French a book by Edwin Franden Dakin on Mary Baker Eddy (Mrs. Eddy: The Biography of a Virginal Mind), published by Frederick A. Stokes in 1929. And he was still on the move.
Tampico in Mexico is just north of the Venezuelan border and, like Veracruz, a busy port on the Gulf of Mexico, so it is possible that De Kerlor had passed through the city on his journeys north. The name means “place of otters,” so-called because the city is surrounded by rivers and lagoons. But by 1926, when De Kerlor moved there, the otters had long since left. Oil had been discovered and the city went from a quiet little backwater on low ground with swamps, tropical heat, and stifling humidity to a vast, seething landscape of drilling rigs, steel gasoline-storage tanks, pipelines, barges and jetties, of railway lines snaking northwest to Monterey and south through the oil fields of Pánuco, of docks, cargo ships, and oil tankers transporting their black gold far and wide. Tampico was for a time the greatest oil port in the world.
Along with oil came the workers, Spanish, Lebanese, and Chinese, to join its drilling crews, man its boats, build its roads and railways, and labor on its assembly lines. It also brought every fast-talking, quick-thinking, gun-toting opportunist from every major city in the world and plenty of minor ones. In his novel Tampico, published in 1926, the popular author Joseph Hergesheimer provides a telling portrait of this “ugly city on water defiled by oil.” It was a crude, brawling place where bandits stripped and bound men and left them for the ants, where girls in cafés had knives in their garters, where bullets flew through the streets in broad daylight and where, somewhere on the hills, leaks from pipelines burned with a hideous roar “and the road [was] blotted out for hundreds of feet in impenetrable rolling black smoke.” Prospectors knew that the water table was rising in the oil districts, new fields had to be constantly developed, and leases were available, at a price, for men willing to pay for drilling, fight over the pipelines, and maybe end up dead. It was not generally known that the laws that had given unlimited access and ownership to foreigners had been curtailed, that money was drying up and the traffic shifting across the Venezuelan border to the more hospitable port of Veracruz. No one could know there would be massive layoffs and drastic reductions in domestic output in the years ahead. And the fact that he knew nothing about oil would not have stopped De Kerlor, with his ready charm, his salesman’s patter, and his enduring faith, for an audience of gamblers, in his powers of prediction. Plus having a little flutter himself on the side.
According to later reports, De Kerlor had been travelling in Mexico for several years but spent more time in Tampico than elsewhere to “look after his business interests” in prospecting for oil. Presumably he had not struck it rich, or the papers would have noticed. He was often to be found at social events reading palms, a talent that was much appreciated and which he apparently did for free, and wrote horoscopes for newspapers in the U.S. and Mexico. He was well liked. But apparently the weakness for alcohol that Elsa had seen developing had become an addiction.
The weekly Tampico Tribune, the city’s only English-language newspaper in Tampico, subsequently wrote about Dr. Kerlor’s pub-crawling activities on Sunday, April 29, 1928. It seems he and a group of friends appeared at the Yaqui Club in Altamira on the banks of the Tamesi River one evening after dark. One of the club owners, a certain J. Suarez, told the newspaper that the bartender was alone, all the patrons having left for the night. He was counting his money when Dr. Kerlor arrived and ordered beers. The account continues, “The bartender, (Perfecto) Perez asked Dr. Kerlor to wait a moment. The doctor became enraged and attacked him with a chair. Perez, who is said to be 54 years of age, then drew a revolver and fired in self defense.” He shot De Kerlor in the stomach.
This version is somewhat disputed by that of the Heraldo de Mexico in Los Angeles of the same date, May 5. According to the Heraldo, De Kerlor arrived much earlier at the Yaqui Club, around four in the afternoon that Sunday. By eleven at night he was thoroughly drunk and began to argue with Perez (here named Gutierrez) about the kings of Spain. De Kerlor made some contemptuous remarks. The bartender, who was Spanish, felt insulted and refused to serve him any more drinks, and a quarrel started. No mention here of chairs about to be thrown. The newspaper report continues, “Gutierrez, who was over fifty, fearing being beaten by De Kerlor, pulled out a gun and shot him in the stomach.”
Other accounts add conflicting details. According to La Prensa of San Antonio, Texas, of May 7, De Kerlor was shot in the skull, but nevertheless managed to testify before a notary public that the bartender had refused to sell beer to a Mexican in his party because he was not wearing shoes.
The idea of a man with a bullet in his head testifying before a notary can be confidently discounted. There are other discrepancies in what was reported, not to mention names misspelled and competing references to the gunman’s name. Exactly what happened after that is not known. Did De Kerlor fall to the floor? What did he say? Who else was in the room? Was there more than one shot? Was the argument actually about history or something else? All of this would make a fascinating study, but efforts to learn whether there was a trial and to uncover court documents have failed. According to the Tampico Tribune, the gunman walked to the nearest police station in Altamira and gave himself up, pleading self-defense. As for De Kerlor, bleeding, in pain, perhaps in shock, his wound went untreated that evening and all the next day. He did not arrive at the Civil Hospital in Tampico until Tuesday morning. The fact that he refused, or was denied, medical help for almost two days argues for something more sinister than a drunken brawl. Was there some shady business deal in the background? Was the murderer
ever charged? We may never know.
De Kerlor was operated on in the afternoon of Tuesday, May 1, and died later that day. He was thirty-nine years old.
The death certificate a day later reads as follows:
In Tampico, Tamaulipas at seventeen hours ten minutes of the day 2 May 1928, the funeral home of Pablo A. Garcia brought to this judge of this government agency, a certificate that says:
“The surgeon who prepared this document is legally authorized by his profession, and states: that W. de Kerlor died as a result of a firearm projectile wound at twenty-one hours on the 1st day of May, 1928, after arriving in the men’s ward of the Civil Hospital, to which he had been taken. Sex: male; age: 39; single; profession: journalist; nationality: Swiss; race: white. His parents: W. and Sofia W. de Kerlor.
“By Civil Judge M. Friubula Calderón.”
Elsa had been right after all.
CHAPTER 5
* * *
COQ FEATHERS
In 1925, when Janet Flanner began her column for The New Yorker under the pseudonym Genêt, Paris was “still a beautiful, alluring, satisfying city. It was a city of charm and enticement, to foreigners and even to the French themselves. Its charm lay in its being in no way international—not yet. There were no skyscrapers. The charm still came from the démodé (old-fashioned) eighteenth- and nineteenth-century architecture.” Children in black aprons still clattered home from school wearing boots with wooden soles for their afternoon snacks of bread and chocolate. Passengers still glided along the Seine in Bateaux-Mouches of such ancient vintage that, seated on their hard wooden benches, they might imagine themselves on a nineteenth-century picnic.
One danced to le fox trot, recently imported from America, in the working-class bals musettes near the Panthéon, and strolled down the Champs-Elysées to observe the fancy new signs with their gaudy invitations to watch the latest Hollywood movies. Or one might linger on one of the city’s ancient bridges to admire “the vast chiaroscuro of the palatial Louvre, lightened by the luminous lemon color of the Paris sunset off toward the west; with the great square, pale stone silhouettes of Notre Dame to the east.” Paris remained, as Goethe wrote, “a universal city, where every step taken on a bridge or square brings to mind a great past, and where history has been played out on every street corner.”
Elsa Schiaparelli, with her lithe physique and her dragonfly mind, went everywhere, observing the paperboys in boots and black berets selling copies of L’Intransigéant, the trudging peddler with balloons pulling and bumping against his shoulders, the accordionists in shirtsleeves, cigarettes dangling, performing impromptu concerts on the sidewalks, the cyclists and the costume parades and the ladies in black swimsuits splashing and floundering among the boats and reeds along the Seine. New possibilities, bizarre juxtapositions, undreamedof harmonies—these confronted Elsa at every turn, even on the terraces of sidewalk cafés where two young women in cloche hats, furs casually askew, might be seen penciling in dates on exquisitely tiny diaries. As Flanner observed, Schiaparelli had a gift for discovering possibilities in the most unlikely places, as when she noticed some plaster and netting among the rubble at the Colonial Exposition and her agile mind transformed that into one of her most successful textile designs. Many of what were dismissed as “Schiaparelli’s little jokes,” Flanner wrote, turned out to be major successes, although not the dollar sign that she used as a coat fastener. As luck would have it, the date was 1930, and the dollar itself had “lost much of its power to make both ends meet.”
Schiaparelli was in her element. Luck was also on her side, since her New York experience happened to coincide more or less exactly with the mood of the moment. Parisians might briefly toy with, then discard, the idea of transforming their city into another Chicago. But that bricks and mortar symbolized ambition rampant was clear. The emergence of this new industrial civilization partly repelled, partly charmed the French. They adored Josephine Baker, who, clad in not much more than clumps of bananas, brought with her not only le jazz hot but the exuberance, sassy strut, and brio of someone released, it would seem, from inhibitions and convention into a freer, more natural self. But it was the skyscraper that most stood for what was unique about New York for those who only dreamed about it or went to musicals about it. (Skyscrapers, with appropriate scenic backgrounds, played to enthusiastic Parisian audiences in 1926.) E. B. White, who adored New York but spent most of his time in Maine, wrote that the skyscraper, “more than any other thing, is responsible for [New York’s] physical majesty. It is to the nation what the white church spire is to the village—the visible symbol of aspiration and faith, the white plume saying the way is up.” Even the huge French contribution to modern style, the Exposition des Arts Décoratifs of 1925, came back to Paris from New York in a new guise, transformed into something uniquely American, an art deco of abstract and lavish decoration that changed conventional forms almost out of recognition.
Elsa in about 1926, wearing a cap of her own invention and commanding her dog to look in the right direction (illustration credit 5.1)
Schiaparelli had a further advantage. Parisian ideas, as interpreted by American manufacturers, were big business—in 1926, French dress exports, chiefly to the U.S., totaled $80 million. Her sleek and jazzy silhouette, as demonstrated by the first successful sweaters, appealed to the American buyer as much as, if not more than, to the French. Added to these advantages was the free education of the streets she received following De Kerlor around and discovering at first hand just what it took to claw one’s way up the career ladder. A photograph of her exists, taken in about 1926, just after her first success. She wears a black cap that completely covers her hair and one of her own sweaters, the very essence of nonchalant chic. She is holding her dog, a cowed fox terrier, firmly around the neck. That viselike grip says it all.
Yet another factor was working in Schiaparelli’s favor as she set out into haute couture. The impulses that had turned young women toward the androgyne, i.e., looking as much like boys as possible, gave the girl with a lack of curves a handsome advantage. Schiaparelli’s own figure was not only petite but trim and free of that embonpoint now so much out of favor. Frenchwomen, with their curvier shapes, did not look so well in the new styles. It is a fact that a waistline is essential if such a woman is to avoid looking perfectly round, and the waistline had disappeared. American girls, naturally slimmer and taller, looked divinely nonchalant in their seamless dresses with dropped waistlines and nonexistent derrières. As has been noted, hair followed the same relentless trend: the upswept styles of the 1890s simply would not work with the cloche hat, now universal. Then, in 1927, the shingle cut was replaced by the Eton crop. “There was,” James Laver wrote, “nothing to distinguish a young woman from a schoolboy except perhaps her rouged lips and pencilled eyebrows.” The right look, the right style, the right feeling—as a designer, Schiaparelli had it all.
A small chic hat, with the right look at the right angle, as created by Schiaparelli (illustration credit 5.2)
Schiaparelli’s answer to the indispensable little black dress, with a suitably daring hat. The fabric is called “côte de zébre” and the belt is made from antelope hide. (illustration credit 5.3)
Barely two or three years after she opened her doors, Schiaparelli’s designs were being copied by the pattern makers, for home sewers who wanted copies of her “nonchalant chic.” This group of four was being offered by the Ladies’ Home Journal in October 1930. (illustration credit 5.4)
Schiaparelli was rapidly outgrowing the self-imposed limitation that “Pour le Sport” implied. When she dictated that the bust had to come up, the waistline had to reappear, and the skirts go down, she was at the same time opening up opportunities for her talents that went far past handmade sweaters and matching skirts. As Chanel was doing, she was responding to the realities of women’s changing roles and drastically different needs in everyday life. Women who went to work in factories, drove cars, took tickets on trams, or typed in offices neede
d freedom of movement, not yards of skirts and petticoats that had to be picked up or kicked aside whenever they tried to walk. Chanel designed clothes that were easy to move in, skirts that were short, and gave her look of casual chic an indefinable elegance. She was the first to launch the little black dress, long-sleeved, of the finest silk crepe de chine, that became almost a uniform for smart women between the wars. And she invented the jersey cardigan jacket with its pleated skirt and pullover top that, in various incarnations, endures to this day as the quintessence of Chanel.
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