Then, in November 1933, the Maison Schiaparelli moved into much handsomer London quarters. Earlier that year she and Henry were travelling to New York from the port of Villefranche, and he, too, was staying at the Savoy-Plaza Hotel. On this occasion they went to Hollywood together by train, experienced a modest California earthquake, went sightseeing by taxi in Chicago, and almost missed their train connection. On one of those long cross-country train rides Schiaparelli must surely have mentioned how much she would like to have a place of her own in London, and surely it was Henry who suggested the perfect solution: his brother Allan’s house at 6 Upper Grosvenor Street.
Schiaparelli (1934) in her Mayfair pied-à-terre, which had a secret connecting door hidden away upstairs (illustration credit 7.8)
It was, after all, the Depression, and without a wife, and with a son away at school, Sir Allan really did not need such a big house in Mayfair and would be delighted to rent it out. Everything happened with the madcap logic of a French farce. Tiring of Elsa, Wicked Uncle Henry “had then graciously passed her on to my father,” Sir Alistair wrote, “as a small quid pro quo for repeatedly being helped out of debt.” A very valuable house and a malleable mistress changed hands with smiles all around. Or perhaps it was even more collegial than that, fluid friendships and affairs intermingling with the usefulness and advantages of the right business contacts. Uncle Henry went on travelling with Elsa and soon became her trusted financial advisor. Lonely Sir Allan, realizing that poor Elsa had nowhere to stay in London, bought her an amusing semi-detached house in Lees Place, Mayfair, literally around the corner from 6 Upper Grosvenor Street. Twin Italianate villas shared a handkerchief-sized courtyard and a goldfish pond. Elsa moved into her house, with one-and-a-half bedrooms and her own entrance at number 5. Sir Allan took the other villa at number 5A. The upstairs bedrooms connected by means of a door cleverly concealed inside a cupboard. One imagines Sir Allan, as the evening drew to a close, in his raffish checked dressing gown and mohair bedroom slippers, gathering up his whiskey and soda and climbing into the cupboard for a tête-à-tête with his new mistress.
Or perhaps it was the other way around.
The ever-practical side of Schiaparelli’s nature could take comfort from the fact that she now had the full business attention of resourceful Henry along with the avuncular approval of the dull but reliable Allan. Schiaparelli, formerly baffled by the British character, now saw it in a delightful new light. “And dearly I love them because they are mad, mad, mad,” she wrote, no doubt thinking of Wicked Uncle Henry. She developed a great fondness for Scotland, as one of her frequent fuzzy accounts makes clear, walking ankle-deep through the heather. There were also weekends at Ropley that she does not describe but Sir Alistair remembered well. He wrote that she was a regular visitor. “She had a long face, like a well-bred but friendly horse, covered in beauty spots (which I didn’t find very beautiful) and wore exotic clothes and scent.” He grew to like her very much indeed, partly because of “the excitingly sophisticated presents she would bring, like Meccano steam-engines and power-driven model boats that really worked.” He liked Gogo, “a diminutive teen-ager when I was a child,” who smiled a lot and was very friendly.
He recalled frequent outings to a pebbly beach, full of seaweed and stagnant water, on the Solent an hour away, of which his father was very fond. He owned a primitive hut there with absolutely no inside conveniences, just the place for a picnic, or so Sir Allan thought. “On these great excursions to simplicity, we would set off with two chauffeurs, Whatmore the parlourmaid, a governess, a primus stove and several hampers. I have photographs, that still make me giggle, of the great couturière partaking of Marmite sandwiches on a wicker hamper.” (Marmite is a sticky, dark brown food paste with a salty taste.) There Elsa sat and shivered under an August sky in a vast fur coat.
Elsa, on right, at one of the Horne brothers’ jolly summer picnics in the 1930s (illustration credit 7.9)
Once Schiaparelli set up shop at 6 Upper Grosvenor Street, her social life took off with a vengeance. People streamed in and out of the salon all day, she was invited everywhere, and her mind became “increasingly receptive.” In those years before World War II, her imagination was still at its sparkling best, giving out ideas, most of them good. She was always hard to photograph, but a photo taken of her in 1937 is perhaps the most revealing. She sits, leaning slightly forward, wearing a daring hat, unique jewelry, and the most radiant possible smile.
One of the popular themes in British women’s fiction of the period is the sedate matron from the provinces who comes to London and discovers, to her horror, how provincial her outlook is on life. E. F. Benson’s immortal heroine Lucia, leader of artistic circles in her small town of Rye, scrambles to acquire the necessary airs and graces, not to mention clothes, when she is suddenly transported to the big city. The heroine of E. M. Delafield’s The Provincial Lady in London, written in 1933, is horrified to see, after taking a small and unfashionable London flat, just how dowdy her clothes look. She gamely tries not to stare as she is ushered into a friend’s living room “entirely furnished with looking-glass tables, black pouffes [padded footstools] and acutely angular blocks of green wood.” She wonders whatever the vicar’s wife will think.
Elsa in foreground, out on the town in London, attending the opening in June 1936 of Tovarich, a Gilbert Murray production. “Eddie” Marsh, in the background, is in animated conversation with Syrie Maugham, a noted interior decorator, former wife of Somerset Maugham. (illustration credit 7.10)
In fact, most of English post–World War I society was still in the thrall of what might be called a watered-down Victorian aesthetic: large-patterned wallpaper, clashing cretonnes, and heavy and graceless odds and ends of inherited furniture. The same serene lack of taste extended to clothes, even among society’s future leaders of fashion, if one can believe the memoirs of Loelia, Duchess of Westminster, published in 1961. When she “came out” in the 1920s, she wrote, “luckily basic requirements were fairly simple. One had two hats, a best and an everyday, and a coat which went over everything. Skirts ended somewhere between ankle and calf according to age and taste … Dresses were very loose … As nothing had to fit, dressmaking was comparatively easy, and … I made a lot of my own clothes …” Such an attitude would have horrified Schiaparelli if she had known about it when she wrote her own memoir, which she did not. The very small, chic in-crowd she inhabited was already up to her challenge. Kenneth Clark’s wife, Jane, for instance, never pretty but always distinctive-looking, had been interested in clothes since her youth and, like Schiaparelli, would experiment in homemade outfits devised from upholstery brocade held together with plenty of safety pins. Once her husband shot to prominence as the youngest director ever of the National Gallery in London (he was just thirty when he was appointed), she took up her role as a fashion leader with a vengeance.
Elsa, bottom left, attends a weekend house party in 1938 at Faringdon House, the Berkshire home of Lord Berners, a noted author and composer, second from left. Others in the group are, from left, the Baroness Budberg, H. G. Wells, Robert Heber-Percy, and Tom Driberg. (illustration credit 7.11)
A sewing pattern translation of a fairly tricky Schiaparelli design: blouse, flared skirt, and capelike top (illustration credit 7.12)
One of their friends, Sir Colin Anderson, recalled that in the 1930s Jane, who was short and of impeccable tomboyish proportions, wore trousers “of emerald green velveteen with a row of large scarlet fly buttons, not up the front, but creeping up behind, along the division of her buttocks.” They were undoubtedly designed by Schiaparelli, as was her silk day dress, the fabric of which was printed all over with newspaper clippings and accompanied with a hat of the same material. This was “stiffened and folded into the shape of a child’s paper hat.” Jane bought several other Schiaparelli successes, including a white and silver lamé gown that she wore at court and the Duchess of Windsor’s lobster evening dress. She was photographed with her husband and Salvador
and Gala Dalí at an opening night party wearing a simply cut Schiaparelli evening coat of what looks to be an unusual watered heavy silk or taffeta. There is no photograph of her wearing an upside-down shoe, which might have been a bit much even for the wife of the director of the National Gallery.
Lady Clark was one of the brave ones. The state of mind of the ordinary customer can be judged from the cartoon of a lady visiting an haute couture salon. She shrinks back as a saleslady flaunts a backless and frontless evening gown with daggerlike shoulder detail. The caption reads, “Why should Madam be afraid? Schiaparelli isn’t.”
CHAPTER 8
* * *
SHOCK IN PINK
Besides Schiaparelli, one of the important people in surrealist circles in those days—important because he had money—was Edward James. James was one of those nonconformists that upper-class Britain occasionally produces: rich, cultured, and bizarre. Born into a wealthy and stuffy family, he spent the rest of his life in mulish mutiny against the ruling manners and mores, and was therefore vulnerable to artists with mad schemes, the madder the better. Having inherited the then vast sum of £1 million at the age of twenty-one, he dispensed it so freely on works by Picasso, Magritte, Tchelitchew, and others that in the end he had an enviable collection and no money. Dalí was quick to exploit James’s weakness. In 1937 he took a fancy to a silk robe braided with colored sequins and sent the bill to James, along with a note that he was sure James was about to give him a present. James obligingly did.
James was “an extremely elegant young man, dapper and small-boned, who wore shirts from Italy and ties from Paris; he was perfection,” Sir Hugh Casson recalled. He was also a mesmerizing conversationalist, speaking in “precisely clipped, beautifully rounded phrases” reminiscent of Churchill at his orotund best. He was particularly close to Dalí, and whenever that artist’s imagination began to falter, James was ready to jump in and prop it up. “Why not have a Surrealistic dinner party in which dwarfs stood on the table and held the candelabra? Why not a menu of oysters that appeared to be chilled in ice but were actually smoking hot? Why not fish-skins stuffed with steak … and carrots masquerading as peas?” James was Dalí’s chief patron and inseparable companion in fantastic schemes, along with perhaps the most brutal deformations ever inflicted on an English country house designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens. It included downspouts made of bamboo columns, a great clock in colored glass, plaster bedsheets hanging out of bedroom windows, and, as the pièce de résistance, a living room turned into a dog’s insides, its walls heaving in and out and some piped-in heavy breathing. (This last idea was abandoned as impractical.) But even their curiously intense relationship was tested by the affair of the polar bear.
Bettina Bergery tells the story in a letter to Schiaparelli recalling some of the triumphs of their halcyon days before World War II. “You could write about Edward James, who is a real lively classic English eccentric who, at the age of 22, still looked like David Copperfield … [In 1934] he made Dalí a present of an enormous stuffed white polar bear (8’ tall) which Dalí dyed pink and put drawers in his stomach. I found it so funny I borrowed it to put in the window … I dressed it in an orchid satin opera coat and lots of jewels. Edward, arriving the day of the collection, burst into tears when he saw it. ‘To think!’ he exclaimed, ‘of this white bear shot in the Arctic by my grandfather that I always saw in the drawing room at home when I was little! And now to think I should find him again dyed shocking pink and covered with false diamonds in the principal dressmaking establishment in Paris!’ And he went into the show window to throw his arms around the bear, and all the buyers going up the stairs were astonished to see the slight young man embracing a giant pink bear in an opera coat and sobbing …”
Then there was the day that Edward arrived at the boutique to try on a few clothes. He put on one multicolored brocade dressing gown after another and liked the effect so well that he climbed into a shop window and sat down calmly in the lotus position. He stopped traffic for several hours, and finally Schiaparelli had to climb into the window and beg him to come out.
The window in which Edward James chose to make his theatrical debut was particularly prominent, being at 21 Place Vendôme. Schiaparelli had outgrown the Rue de la Paix and in 1935 she moved again. The story is that she declined an offer to take over Poiret’s distinguished quarters at 1 Rond-Point des Champs-Elysées. She was right to refuse, not just because she might have faced invidious comparisons but because the art of the flaneur—strolling about—is practiced to perfection in Paris as nowhere else. And to be a flaneur on the Rond-Point, the crossroads of three of the grands boulevards, was beginning to require some fancy footwork to avoid being run over. The Place Vendôme, with its wide open sidewalks, was tranquil by comparison. It was set like a crown jewel in the middle of the Parisian luxury trade. And luxe it was, ever had been since 1686, when one of Louis XIV’s ministers persuaded that sovereign that the city needed a really grand square to house the royal library and royal mint, not to mention acting as a magnificent vista looking toward the Place des Victoires, where the king’s equestrian statue still stands.
Royalty gave its approval, but the expense was too great, or perhaps just inconvenient. The project languished until private money took over, and Jules Hardouin-Mansart designed an octagon for grand residences embedded in a square, incidentally covering them with roofs that bear his name. The diamond-faceted idea turned out to be irresistible and became the principal address, not just for some very grand families, but for really expensive watches and jewelry, along with that hotel everyone knows, the Ritz. The Place Vendôme is dominated by a statue of Napoleon that underwent several vicissitudes before being re-erected and now stands unchallenged. From her windows the new dictator of fashion could clearly see, through a veil of gauze, the silhouette of the little Corsican in dim outline. She had her photograph taken against a window with this very special view behind her, looking suitably regal.
Schiaparelli takes her rightful place in her spacious quarters on the Place Vendôme in the shadow of Napoleon. (illustration credit 8.1)
Schiaparelli had inherited ninety-eight rooms that formerly belonged to Madeleine Chéruit, designer of richly ornamented dresses in taffeta, lamé, and gauze. Chéruit died in 1935, and Schiaparelli jumped at the opportunity to acquire this particular ready-made space. But eighteenth-century formality was not quite what was required. Enter Jean-Michel Frank, who was already moving away from his severe boxy style into something a bit more relaxed, if not exactly rococo. He painted the entire interior of the salon white, with touches of gold, including the intricate moldings, using lights concealed in semi-abstract plaster columns (designed with the help of Alberto Giacometti) to flood the rooms with light. The second floor, or piano nobile, was used for showrooms, with the remainder of the space devoted to offices and workrooms. Frank replaced the traditional heavy window treatments with cotton dress fabrics. He chose white wide-wale piqué to cover the windows, edged with ruffles and tied back with blue-and-white striped piqué; the same fabric appeared on furniture coverings. The wooden parquet floors were left bare.
Nothing was allowed to detract from the parade of new creations, not even the ashtrays, curiously designed by Giacometti to stand on little spiraling columns. On the ground floor, casual traffic was directed to another impudent innovation, in days when couturiers laboriously cut and fit to individual measurements: ready-to-wear. Here were all kinds of knits, lingerie, swimsuits, dressing gowns, hats, belts, scarves, handbags, and jewelry, displayed with imagination and whimsy on straw figures. The idea that anyone could actually buy and walk away with something was audacious; it was the first real Parisian boutique. She called it “Schiap,” pronounced “Skap,” and the name stuck.
The second-floor showrooms were dominated by a grand curving staircase from which mannequins made their stately descent, and were jammed for the opening collection on February 5, 1935. Bettina Ballard, Vogue fashion editor, recalled that there was always a fi
rst-night feeling of excitement at any Schiaparelli event. “The best seats were reserved for her smartest customers: Millicent Rogers, the Honourable Mrs. Reginald Fellowes, Contessa Gab de Robilant, Contessa Cora Caetani, the Marquise de Polignac and such notable devotees … The small salon would contain the crowded uncomfortable press (on tiny gold chairs) … After each opening … Schiaparelli would stand in the doorway by the stairs where no one could escape her eye, quick to gauge the reactions of the spectators, making the darkness of her humor felt if the farewell atmosphere was not enthusiastic enough. I loved writing cabled reports to Vogue after the Schiaparelli collections as it was so easy to remember all of the amusing details and drama of the show.”
Interior of the Schiaparelli boutique, 1950s
The theme of the first collection was “Stop, Look, and Listen.” Schiaparelli’s unerring instinct for self-promotion included the newsprint fabric worn by Jane Clark, and the idea continued in a multitude of guises over the next decade, as scarfs, linings, hats, handbags, gloves, neckties, and even billfolds, whatever she could think of. She had already launched the collection the day before it opened by talking about it on CBS Radio, quite a trick when one considers she was conjuring up images, or at least ideas. She had reached the enviable stage of being famous for being famous, and everyone wanted to write about her. Bettina Ballard observed that when one looked at the major fashion magazines of the 1930s, the “highly individual chic of her clothes stands out from the pages like a beacon, making the rest of the couture look pretty and characterless … Schiaparelli’s clothes were always photogenic, and no artist ever did a bad sketch of a model—they had such sureness of line, such boldness.” This made Vogue’s editorial decisions easier, “which may have accounted to some extent for the preponderance of Schiaparelli models shown in the top magazines …”
Elsa Schiaparelli Page 17