When the glove articulates and modifies the hand, as Richard Martin observed in Fashion and Surrealism, the result can be even more sinister and elegant. Schiaparelli played on the theme with particular finesse. Dilys Blum wrote, “She embroidered rings on glove fingers, decorated them with butterflies, paired gloves in contrasting colors, and dramatized them with red fingernails or gold claws. The ideas for several glove designs … may have come from Meret Oppenheim, whose sketches from 1936–38 closely resemble certain Schiaparelli designs, such as fur mitts … and gloves painted with blue veins … Another pair of gloves in the 1936 collection, black suede with red snakeskin fingernails, were also made in white.”
Picasso picked up the theme and reversed it, painting hands to look as if they were wearing gloves, a trompe l’oeil effect designed to befuddle and confuse the viewer, which, as both Schiaparelli and Dalí knew, was the whole point. Schiaparelli never seemed to mind who thought of what first. It was a communal burst of invention, the aim of which was to bring unconscious impulses into conscious awareness, along with an artist’s desire to surprise and shock. She was in her element. She wrote that she “went up into the rarefied skies of her most fantastic imagination and set off cascades of fireworks. Fantasy and ingenuity broke forth, with complete indifference not merely to what people would say but even to what was practical.” She wanted absolute freedom of expression and it had arrived; was even being celebrated.
Schiaparelli might also have mentioned her gift for recognizing talent, no matter how raw or unpromising. One of her discoveries in those years was an artist who was married to her house’s director, Michèle Guéguen. He was Jean Clément, in 1927 a self-made genius with a turbulent past, part chemist and part inventor, who was already experimenting in a seemingly minor art: the humble button. Volumes have been written about the button, usually its seductive uses in Victorian clothes with their dozens of tiny little closings that it was the pleasant task of a lover to pry apart, one by one. For Schiaparelli, the button’s seductive uses were secondary to its ability to elicit a frisson of surprise. A perfectly sober dress might, upon inspection, be held together with an exotic variety of shapes, things like acorns, stones, shells, fishes, carrots, faces, padlocks, and coins, sovereigns or French louis. This was a sarcastic reference to the continuing devaluation of currencies in the Depression years, perhaps one of the few times that such an item of clothing has made a political statement. On such seemingly minor details whole reputations are made in the world of fashion. Schiaparelli notes in passing that her house became known for “every kind of strange button.”
Buyers were less prepared for the uses she made of another utilitarian object, this one just coming into its own: the zip fastener. Nowadays this indispensable aid is used with discretion and is hardly visible. That would not do at all. Schiaparelli would not hide the zipper under a placket; on the contrary, she made it an integral part of the design. For instance, there is a sleeveless evening gown in black, white, and royal blue taffeta in which a black zipper figures prominently, angled on the front of its skirt. She used zippers anywhere and everywhere: on necklines and side seams, to zip sleeves in and out, close pockets, add or subtract skirts—in short, wherever she could think of them. She writes that she was surprised at the reaction: “Astounded buyers bought and bought.” Quick-change dressing had not just become easy but, in characteristic fashion, almost a mania for Schiaparelli; it became an art in itself.
As has become clear, Schiaparelli seized ideas wherever she found them and was to some extent dependent on a steady stream of those that came to her. Roger Jean-Pierre, who represented Jean Clément and his partner, Roger Model, recalls that Schiaparelli, habitually generous and encouraging, could also be unpredictable. One time he went to her with the team’s newest ideas for buttons and was coolly rebuffed with, “This time, Roger, there isn’t much here that I can use.” He went back to the designers and in due course returned with a fresh batch of ideas. Schiaparelli was pleased, said she could use them, and congratulated herself for having spurred them all to greater heights. Then she added, “Last time I was a bit hasty, so show me what you had again.” She liked them after all. It was annoying, but one took a tolerant view. Where taste, intuition, and mood were involved, one never knew.
Photographs of Schiaparelli at the time (1934–36) show what the effort was costing her. Wearing a simple black V-neck dress with a belt and a white insert at the neckline, she is posed in front of a handsome desk liberally adorned with flowers and beside a fireplace and an overflowing bookshelf. She looks, as ever, calm and unhurried. But her new, curlier hairstyle, parted in the center, does not flatter, and there are dark shadows under her eyes. The demands of success, coupled with her perfectionism, were taking a heavy toll. And she was trying to have a private life as well, even though she might claim she was too busy for such things, men in particular. Long-term relationships with men were out, she wrote. But this is not true, if one can believe her daughter. Gogo told an interviewer that her mother had a twenty-year love affair with a Scot, who turned out to be “the nearest thing I ever had to a father.” Elsewhere in her memoir Schiaparelli refers to “my beau Peter.” A lengthy search has failed to uncover a beau named Peter, or anyone named Peter at all. Schiaparelli was as careful to avoid naming this mysterious friend as she was in omitting her husband’s name, so “Peter” is surely a blind. However, there certainly was someone in her life. It turns out there was not one man, but two, and both were Scotsmen.
They were brothers. The first, James Allan Horne, was the oldest of five. His parents were lowland Scots from Edinburgh who were once in comfortable circumstances, but Arthur, the father, gambled away the family money and, “almost as important in the Scotland of those days, its social status.” Arthur’s compulsive risk-taking was balanced by his wife’s sober and penny-pinching ways. Jessie ran “an austerely Presbyterian household,” her grandson Alistair recalled in his enchanting memoir, A Bundle from Britain. On Sunday all whistling was forbidden and the only reading allowed was from the “Gude Book.” This may account for a curious split one finds among their sons, between charming and unscrupulous gamblers on the one hand and careful, emotionally stunted caretakers on the other.
James Allan Horne, always called Allan, belonged to the latter group. Born in 1876, he was “educated privately,” which, Sir Alistair explained, was usually a euphemism for home schooling by parents who could not afford private school. He was conscientious and industrious and, like many sons of impoverished families, went out to India to make his way as a clerk in the well-known trading firm of Jardine Skinner. By the outbreak of World War I “he was rising forty and life had definitely begun to smile on him at last, as it frequently did upon the ambitious and hardworking under the Raj in those days,” his son wrote. “He already played polo, had his own racehorse, had shot his first tiger … and generally lived the life of a happy bachelor.” Fairly soon he was made controller of munitions in Bombay, acquitted himself honorably, and was knighted in 1919. In 1925 he was back from India, wealthy, and made a brilliant marriage with Auriol Camilla Sharlia Blanche Hay, descendant of a long line of Scottish peers. Her grandfather was the 12th Earl of Kinnoull, and she could trace her ancestry back to the year 1251. He was forty-nine; she was thirty-two.
Sir James Allan Horne, left, one of the brothers who made Schiaparelli’s London salon a reality (illustration credit 7.6)
Sir Allan bought an imposing town house in Mayfair at 6 Upper Grosvenor Street, next door to what is now the American Embassy. Their only child, Alistair Allan, was born there on November 9, 1925. The bride, an author and poet, threw herself into giving dinner parties, dances, poetry readings, and musical soirées. Her blue drawing room, columnists declared, was one of the most artistic in London. Her boudoir looked like the inside of an Indian temple and only her typewriter struck a discordant note.
Weekends were spent at their country house, Ropley Manor, near Winchester some fifty miles from London. This sixteenth
-century coaching inn “in a sleepy hollow, surrounded by gardens and vast lawns,” had been enlarged in a haphazard way over the centuries. Sir Alistair wrote, “It was not a big or particularly grand house … but it rambled, its many dark corridors exciting to a child.” One entered a hall paneled in dark Elizabethan oak, up the main staircase to a large, rectangular gallery full of priceless Chinese scrolls of Manchu emperors, “and the strange-hued light rendered their cruel faces … and the women’s tiny deformed feet especially sinister.” There his father would make a brief weekend appearance, “clad in a raffish, checked dressing-gown and mohair bedroom slippers … surveying the scene with a happy smile on his face, then disappearing into the sanctuary of the Smoking Room for a whiskey and soda.” The marriage was not a success. By 1929 Auriol had moved out of 6 Upper Grosvenor Street into a house of her own. A year later, when Sir Alistair was not quite five years old, she and a friend were in Belgium when the car in which they were being driven crashed in the mist and darkness outside Antwerp. They were flung into the river Scheldt and drowned. She was only thirty-seven.
The second of Schiaparelli’s amours was Henry Spence Horne, almost a generation younger than Allan and her contemporary—she was a year older. He was his mother’s spoiled favorite. Both brothers were good looking, but Henry, at about five foot ten, was particularly handsome, with a little mustache and always sporting a cigar. He had, his nephew recalled, “a very grand voice,” lived on a luxurious scale, tipped like an emperor, and was enormously generous. His financial acumen was genuine, but he had the family curse: whenever he had money he could not resist gambling it away.
“Wicked Uncle Henry,” as he was called, served in World War I, was wounded and sent home, and took a job with a London stockholder. Such was his talent for figures that he became a partner in short order and could afford to buy out the firm. He was quick, clever, and loved nothing so well as a goal. He found one, he thought: cement.
Mergers were the plaything of the day, because a number of marginally successful companies were ripe to be consolidated into one big company that would centralize management and cut costs. He made his first forays into the business in 1924 and immediately went bankrupt, according to P. Lesley Cook, a historian on the subject. This hardly seems to have caused him a moment’s distress. By 1925 he had set up three separate, interlinked companies, known as the Horne Group; two of them also had interests in other industries, including newspapers and publishing. Then he bought out seven small cement companies, one after the other, incidentally making handsome profits in fees generated. By 1928 these had been merged into the Allied Cement Manufacturers Ltd. Their sales logo was a red triangle.
The only known photograph of Henry S. Horne (left), here pinning a championship sash at the Seager Evans 1938 awards onto a much-decorated winner (illustration credit 7.7)
In a few years he was a wealthy man, one of the most talked-about of post–World War I London financiers. He was speculating on farmland as well, and bought a handsome manor house in Sussex with a 4,500-acre farm where he spent weekends. Everything he touched in those days turned a profit. In 1928 his assets were close to £500,000, an immense sum in those days, and some of his shares showed dividends of 300 percent. Besides being chairman of the Allied Cement Manufacturers Ltd., he directed three other companies: British Cement Products, Anglo-American Foreign Newspapers Ltd., and the Carmelite Trust. He was a force to be reckoned with, although just how he had accomplished this massive juggling act, one newspaper wrote, “was the subject of considerable speculation in recent years.”
That undertone of doubt was merited. “Henry himself evidently sailed, financially speaking, quite close to the wind,” Sir Alistair wrote. One of his associates was Clarence Hatry, described as “a shallow, baldish, unhealthy-looking little man” who had amassed something called the Hatry Group after merging steel and iron concerns into the United Steel Companies, worth $40 million. Just as the deal was being finalized, the stock market was crashing and the London Stock Exchange Committee discovered that Hatry’s deal was being financed with fraudulent stocks. Investors lost $145 million, and Hatry went to prison for nine years, two at hard labor.
Wicked Uncle Henry never went to prison, but he crashed in an equally spectacular way during the Great Depression. The success of his strategy, according to Cook, depended on buying up firstrate companies that were undervalued. Unfortunately, the plants he bought were second-rate, at best. A bigger competitor, the Blue Circle Group, had two-thirds more capacity than his own plants and was much more efficient. So when Horne took the rash step of beginning a price war between his own group and Blue Circle, he was already on a losing course. Then the Depression hit, demand dried up, his plants were closing down, and he was up to his neck in debt. Horne was stripped of his directorships, several of his companies went bankrupt, and he ended up in bankruptcy court in 1930 with assets of £84,000 and liabilities of £831,000. Alistair Horne believed he had been a millionaire three times and a bankrupt four. He “exuded luxury and mischief.” Henry was either up or down financially, and Allan would bail him out time and again. His father’s Scottish face, Alistair recalled, “would take on a look of anxiety as Henry would arrive grandly at Ropley” in a Rolls-Royce that was twice as large as the one driven by his father’s chauffeur, Kenyon.
Wicked Uncle Henry had a longtime mistress, Edith Day, star of Jerome Kern’s Show Boat in the 1920s, to whom he was more or less faithful all his life and whom he eventually did marry. Sir Alistair wrote, “In old age he would remind me, nudge, nudge, ‘You’ll never guess what Edith and I were doing the night your father rang to say, “It’s a boy!” ’ ” That meant whenever Henry had money, he was lavishing it on some losing theatrical venture or other, most of them launched by the great theatrical impresario Charles B. Cochran. He spent a fortune, £20,000, to build the world’s fastest racing car, the Golden Arrow, money he never recovered. This magnificent machine was raced only once, in 1929, when it was transported to Daytona Beach, Florida, and set the world’s land speed record of 231 miles an hour. The winning driver was Sir Henry O’Neil de Hane Segrave, who died a year later while trying to establish a new speed record on water. Such were Henry’s powers of persuasion that in one of his last interviews, Segrave said he was giving up racing and thinking of going into cement.
There was also the matter of Seagers Gin, for which Wicked Uncle Henry was briefly chairman. Sir Alistair wrote, “He all but ruined it by chartering a vast yacht in which to entertain his friends at the Spithead Coronation Review of 1937, to watch the panoply of British naval might, the like of which would never be seen again. Seagers tottered, and invited my father to take over.”
The FBI, which took a meddlesome interest in Schiaparelli’s affairs, did not like the sound of Henry Spence Horne. It was said that he was professionally charming, especially to wealthy ladies, the name of Lady Northcliff being mentioned—she was the wife of the newspaper magnate—before turning the full power of his persuasiveness on Schiaparelli. Quite when that happened is unclear. Schiaparelli had not returned to England since she and De Kerlor were unceremoniously ejected in 1916. She had no particularly pleasant memories. But instead of recoiling in horror, she listened tolerantly as she was urged to open a salon in London. The person doing the urging was “my beau Peter.” He was “an incorrigible dreamer,” with “la manie des grandeurs” (delusions of grandeur). Since the odds are good that they met just as his entire empire was being wiped out, she certainly was right about that. He followed her “wherever she went.” This could only have been Henry Spence Horne. Her star was rising just as his own had taken a spectacular nose dive. He knew all the top people, an invaluable open-sesame for an Italian newcomer like Schiaparelli. She needed the dash and flair that he knew he could provide.
There are aspects of Horne’s temperament, his strengths and weaknesses, that curiously resemble those of De Kerlor. Both were immensely charming, talented men, with the gift of persuasion and the superb inner confidenc
e that Schiaparelli always felt lacking in herself. How easy they were with people, how logical they made everything seem, and how wonderfully daring they were. And the two each had a fatal flaw: De Kerlor, the self-anointed psychic detective who saw faces in bloodstains and, at an admittedly higher level of the game, Wicked Uncle Henry, who had a dazzling sleight-of-hand when it came to juggling money but was too careless to look closely at what he was buying. And both were faithless.
In November 1931 the Chauve-Souris (Bat), a touring revue that had started out in prerevolutionary Moscow, opened at the Cambridge Theatre in London, and Schiaparelli designed many of its costumes. This early foray of Schiaparelli’s into the worlds of theatre and film was mentioned in an advertisement for Lux detergent in the British newspapers, accompanied by a photograph of a breathless and youthful Schiaparelli who assured her readers that Lux was what they needed to keep their laundry looking fresh and new. The appearance of this testimonial more or less coincided with the arrival of Schiaparelli’s nontheatrical designs in London. They were being sold with little fanfare by the French Model House on the second floor, with an entrance on Burlington Gardens. The main entrance was around the corner at 1 New Bond Street—much more chic.
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