Elsa Schiaparelli

by Meryle Secrest

  Schiaparelli’s solution to keeping out the cold in 1938: monkey fur and suede (illustration credit 8.3)

  What accounted equally for her success was her practical sense; her observation that evening wear, dinner for instance, could benefit from a matching jacket, so modest and obvious, was taken up and became the rage for concerts, the theatre, and nightclubs. One just added a hat, the more towering and feather-covered, the better. Ballard continued: “Night racing at Longchamp, for example, looked like the opening of a Schiaparelli collection … Her day suits were the backbone of her collection …” Simple and basic as they were, they had a certain style that set them apart and served as the perfect foil for dramatic hats and plenty of jewelry. Part of the equation, what gave the suits away, were the wildly silly buttons—Schiaparelli was the first to use these as decorative elements. It was “L’audace, l’audace et toujours l’audace,” to quote one of Napoleon’s maxims, and the fashion press was rapturous. In April 1935, Vogue commissioned Cecil Beaton to design a whole page devoted to Schiaparelli’s ideas of the moment: chintz beach hats in newspaper prints, Tyrolean flowers running around a belt of calf leather, a fan of crumpled fabric made of glass, a choker of huge beads tied with a crepe handkerchief, and gloves made from alternating leather and Irish crochet.

  As part of her general strategy Schiaparelli continued to commission artists, musicians, and writers such as Bérard, Cocteau, Etienne Drian, and Marcel Vertès to do prints for her. When it came to fabrics, she continued her experiments, not always with the results she expected. In 1934–35 she came up with rhodophane, a so-called glass fabric, fragile and brittle, that had to be interwoven with ribbon strips of silk, rayon, or metal to keep it from tearing and that, the story goes, disintegrated once the object was sent to the dry cleaner. She worked more closely than ever with textile designs of her own imaginings: shaggy furs made of metal, moirés in metallic gunmetal, wrinkled velvets, fabrics made from tree bark, cellophane, and straw—whatever made news.

  Elegant insouciance: a blue silk fabric of her own design, 1933, called “Treebark” and trimmed with sable (illustration credit 8.4)

  She also continued the more or less hazardous business of having her picture taken by top photographers, notably Cecil Beaton. The reigning aesthetic was rather different from today’s warts-and-all approach. Beaton, with his soft-focus, fairy-tale gift for reinventing his sitters as goddesses, was a fairly safe bet for a woman in her forties. She approached him one day with an offer: Madame would so much like to give Mr. Beaton’s sister a present of an evening dress. That did the trick, and Madame and her publicity person arrived at the appointed hour, although Beaton thought she appeared rather nervous. Then things began to go wrong. There were paper backgrounds that refused to stay in place. The lights were in position but would not turn on. When they finally did, a silver screen crashed to the ground and a gargantuan glass jar, filled with lilies, overturned and flooded the floor. Beaton wrote, “Just as we thought we had the situation in hand, a new rivulet would course across the parquet floor,” headed for Schiaparelli’s delicate gold sandals.

  Schiaparelli wrote an equally vivid but rather different account. She said, “He made Schiap sit for hours, turning this way and then that, until with that strange sensitiveness that inanimate objects sometimes have, a huge crystal chandelier, moved perhaps by the exasperation surging in Schiap’s head, crashed down from the ceiling, just missing her head. Poor Cecil was so frantic that he took a magnificent photo in one second, and he doubtless blessed heaven … that murder had not taken place.”

  The publicity person in question is not named but could have been Bettina Shaw Jones. As a walking advertisement, no one wore Schiap’s clothes with more panache. In 1930 she was sketched “at Florence’s” by Headley, wearing a slinky black dress of ciré satin with a bow at the high waistline, and given prominent mention at a Picasso opening in a gown of heavy “crepon,” another Schiaparelli invention, in dark blue, cut with a square décolletage and a train and topped with a necklace of bright blue coq feathers. Hoyningen-Huene photographed her in a fur coat and cloche hat, in a Schiaparelli pajama suit of white linen, in a ski outfit, a beige sports coat, and, especially, a Chinese-red cape of quilted taffeta that looked simply splendid with her cool blond good looks. She would be seen around town with handsome young men, which probably annoyed people who thought a girl over thirty was an old maid. Bettina would never admit to that, indeed did not have to admit, because after she lost her passport she seized on the opportunity to turn back the clock. So instead of being thirty-two in 1934, she was six years younger and back in her twenties again. She was still in love with Gaston and he, at last, was single.

  Bergery was as much of a phenomenon as Schiaparelli and equally self-made. His beginnings were even more obscure than hers, since he was the illegitimate son of Marie-Louise Morel, who later married Jean-Paul Bergery; Gaston took his name. But it was an open secret that his real father was Baron Arthur von Kaulla, member of a prominent Jewish family, a brilliant financier, bank director, and chairman of the Mercedes car company.

  Bergery served with distinction in World War I, was wounded and decorated, then attached to the Secretariat of the Versailles Peace Conference and subsequently became deputy Secretary-General of the Inter-Allied Commission for Reparations. He was launched on his career as diplomat, author, lawyer, Mayor of Mantes, founder of a newspaper, and rising politician on the national scene. By the time he and Bettina met he was a deputy for Seine-et-Oise, member of a radical socialist party, and had acted as director of the cabinet for Edouard Herriot, Minister of Foreign Affairs. His views were populist, socialist, and anticapitalist. In 1936 he co-founded the Front Commun, a new political party designed to counter the growing fascist threat in Europe. He took prolabor positions and championed the nationalization of monopolies. He was being talked about as a future prime minister of France.

  Bettina adored him but was far too clever to let it show. The New York American wrote that “Bettina Jones” was being wooed by “one of France’s most lionized Communist politicians” and being addressed as “Comrade” by her teasing friends. She claimed she could not make up her mind whether or not to marry Gaston. “I really don’t know,” she kept saying in the summer of 1934, as the newspapers followed her every move. She was going to Spain for a holiday with her friend Natalie Paley to think it over. She kept saying she “didn’t know” for a couple of months, at one point adding that M. Bergery was not yet divorced, which was not true. Less than a month later, on August 6, 1934, the two were married in the small town of Mantes-Gassicourt (now Mantes-la-Jolie) in Normandie. The town hall where they exchanged vows was decorated for the occasion with red-and-white flags. Bettina wore the quilted red cape, which was much remarked upon. She added in a footnote to the New York American article about her wedding that the flags were “red for the left, white for the right, common front for both sides,” which was loyal, and also sounds like hedging her bets. “A Gotham Beauty’s Sway over French Politics,” the Sunday Mirror’s headline ran. Everyone thought what good luck it was for Schiaparelli to have such an outstanding model plus publicity director and window dresser marrying into such influential circles. And indeed it was, because when Schiaparelli, at the height of the Depression, decided for business reasons that it would help to have a French passport, Gaston stepped in to facilitate the change of identity.

  It also helped that Bettina had such presence of mind. She and Gaston took a trip to Africa in 1937. As luck would have it, their plane crashed in elephant grass some eight feet tall, which helped to cushion the impact; both escaped unharmed. But then Bettina was bitten by a snake. It turned out to be harmless, but no one knew that at the time, and her would-be medicators wanted to cut off her leg. Bettina ran away. When it came to sangfroid, no one could beat Bettina. After they came back to Paris, they kept a monkey as a pet and, Bettina Ballard wrote, the animal “went after women who came to tea and gave too much attention to the brilliant convers
ation of her husband.” Bettina had another solution for keeping Bergery’s legions of admiring ladies at the proper distance: “She was famous for putting out a cigarette on the dress of any woman who flirted with … Gaston.”

  Putting Gogo into an English girls’ boarding school was probably Sir Allan’s idea. In 1934, she was fourteen and her mother was spending much of her time in London. Abbot’s Hill School in Hemel Hempstead was about thirty miles northwest of the city, in a spacious country house surrounded by parkland. The school, established in 1912, was being run by a socially prominent headmistress and was famous for its extensive curriculum—one of its programs being regular ski trips to Europe, and Gogo loved to ski. All seemed well. Schiaparelli went back to Paris and was caught up in the business of transferring her establishment from the Rue de la Paix to the Place Vendôme. Some months went by before she saw Gogo again.

  “We met in London one weekend,” she wrote. “I was quite stupefied by the sight of her. Where was her charm? Where were her looks? She stood in front of me like an oaf in a horrible blue uniform. She was no longer my little ‘pug’ with a sweet round nose, but a graceless, puffed-up, fat, and very ugly little girl …” As for Gogo, she dismissed her experience in Abbot’s Hill as “medieval.” No doubt a solid English diet of bread for breakfast, potatoes for lunch, bread and cakes for tea, and more bread at suppertime had the predictable result. Galvanized to action, Schiaparelli dedicated her Sundays to taking Gogo out for a slap-up dinner of roast beef in the local pub. “As we drove away from the school we would invariably meet several other girls waiting behind the bushes to be picked up.” Schiaparelli would order beer as well, which led to the rumor that she was taking schoolgirls for a pub crawl.

  A few years later, a considerably slimmer Gogo was being described as “tiny, practically hipless,” fluent in English, Italian, and French and learning German. Her legs were healed and had become stronger through constant exercise, riding to hounds sidesaddle with the Pytchley Hunt, swimming, playing golf in the summer and winter sports in Sestrière, where she won cups for skiing. After leaving Abbot’s Hill she went to school in Paris, spent a winter in Munich, and took cooking lessons from a Russian chef. In London she lived in her mother’s house with a chaperone, went on holidays to Morocco or Rome with her mother, and then might spend a few weeks visiting Daisy Fellowes’s villa at Cap Martin and from there head to Monte Carlo. She travelled with her own pink silk sheets.

  In personality she was shy, blushed easily, and was not much interested in clothes. She liked to mess about in old sweatshirts, ski pants, and no makeup. When she was younger, her school holidays always seemed to conflict with her mother’s openings, so she might be bundled off to spend holidays with Prince Lobkowicz’s family in Kitzbühel, where, presumably, she perfected her skiing. To Bettina Ballard, Gogo was the “popular spoiled pet of both capitals,” and everything mother or daughter did was news. As with other children of famous parents, Gogo had a difficult time carving out a role for herself. As she explained later, if a child was humble and modest, people would say she was “not a patch on her mother.” On the other hand, if she was assertive, she would be accused of riding on her mother’s reputation. She might have felt exploited since Schiaparelli, almost in spite of herself, could not help dressing Gogo in mother-daughter outfits that, her daughter complained, were much too girlish. Or later, identical outfits in which, in photos, both were in profile, looking impassively toward each other. Schiaparelli was too much the businesswoman not to seize on the idea of designing “junior miss” clothes, which, naturally, Gogo would then have to wear. No wonder she claimed not to be interested in clothes.

  Things improved once Gogo was old enough to be left alone in London and become a debutante. She drank martinis, smoked cigarettes in long holders, and wore daring dresses. There is a photograph of her at a British Embassy party in Paris, dancing with a tall young man, wearing a dress her mother had designed on a musical theme and looking ecstatic.

  She was nineteen and making up for lost time with a vengeance, invited to the theatre and for weekends in the country, dancing until the small hours at nightclubs and the last to leave a debutante ball. She had become quite pretty again, her mother wrote approvingly, and “was asked in marriage many times,” another mark in her favor, and she luxuriated in the freedom to sleep until noon unless, of course, she had a sports date. In that case she was up with the dawn. At last she was taking an interest in clothes. One of them was a figure-hugging evening gown in dark blue that, her mother thought, made her look like “an irresistible vamp.” By way of decoration there was a large heart in shocking pink sequins on the bodice, placed in just the right spot. That one was Gogo’s favorite.

  The world was descending on the Paris salon, and Schiaparelli “squared her shoulders” to deal with it. She wrote, “At the Place Vendôme the unexpected was always taking place. One never knew if it was high or low tide, or what one would find in the salon upstairs. Women pilots, air hostesses, women from art schools, the army, or the navy; pilgrim mothers of America, tourists with rhinestones in their hats, royalty past and present; past, present, and future presidents’ wives, ambassadresses, actresses, painters, architects, playwrights, admirals, generals, journalists, explorers, governors of all nations, decorators, duchesses and duchesses-to-be; royal Italian princesses, and a prevalence of princesses who were to be seen every day, including employees like Sonia Magaloff, Paulette Poniatowsky, and Cora Caetani.”

  How fascinated everyone was, Bettina Bergery wrote many years later, “when Marlene Dietrich tried on hats, crossing her celebrated legs and smoking a cigarette exactly as she does in a film, but no one has ever done in real life before. The prettiest and neatest of the Hollywood stars … is little Norma Shearer. All the girls in the shop love Claudette Colbert—Merle Oberon and her waves of perfume that make them faint—Katharine Hepburn choosing the things that all American girls always buy in the boutique—Lauren Bacall with her aristocratic Polish face and her hoarse gutter voice. How Garbo was the best-dressed person at your last year’s cocktail party—how small she looked and how she never stopped talking … and how Ginger Rogers, after a day on an airplane from New York danced all night …

  Schiaparelli, who was a fine skier, chastising Bettina, who was not, in this photograph taken in Megève, France, 1930s (illustration credit 8.5)

  “And remember Amelia Earhart’s evening dress with wings that make her look airborne … Remember how Michèle Morgan was bright and shy as a kitchen, straight from her concierge mama … blinking her Siamese cat eyes at the dresses. And little Annabella, like a fourteen-year-old boy, when she was working on her first René Clair film … and Constance Bennett and Gloria Swanson and freckled Myrna Loy in a coat much too big for her, and Joan Crawford with Douglas Fairbanks junior, and Gary Cooper, very shy, mad Dorothy Rubio with her great big diamond and Domenica Walter with hers—each of them convinced that her own was two carats more than the other …”

  Bettina went on: “Do you remember how … Aragon, the great Communist, was so infuriated at having to deliver [some packages] by the tradesmen’s entrance that he wrote scatological verses on the walls of your tradesmen’s staircase and had them photographed in the Surrealist review?

  “Do you remember how everyone in your shop loved Mamie Eisenhower when she sat in the salon with her folksie charm and such a lot of conversation, and how well she chose her clothes?”

  Great numbers of stars of theatre or film, European as well as Hollywood, came to 21 Place Vendôme to be dressed. Starting in 1936, Schiaparelli designed for several Hollywood films, but her influence was felt long before that. In 1933, the costume designer Adrian had picked up broad padded shoulders for Joan Crawford, and the idea of split skirts, apron dresses, ostrich feathers, dinner dress with matching jackets, startling hats, and prominent zippers followed along without attribution, as well as a craze for big gold jewelry. The situation was quite different in Europe, particularly once she had established her
London salon; in a single two-year period she outfitted stage and film actresses in fifteen productions.

  Since every couturier wants a woman in the public eye to wear her clothes, Schiaparelli was no more relentless than anyone else. But the fact that she was dressing so many actresses and film stars would indicate that she had a knack that other designers lacked. As in the example of Katharine Hepburn, Schiaparelli enjoyed discovering unexpected aspects of her client’s physical appearance. She cites the example of a client from the Midwest who was timid, overweight, and did not know how to dress. With Schiaparelli’s help she went on a diet, had her hair restyled, chose very plain dresses and superb jewels along with daring colors. Schiaparelli wrote, “She seemed to become taller, and her rather large bones, that were a drawback in the beginning, became strangely interesting and took on a certain special beauty.” The lady had received the kind of clear-eyed, detached but friendly attention most women never get in a lifetime, and it came from someone who had made the successful experiment on herself.

  Kay Francis, American actress, went to Schiaparelli’s in 1935 to buy herself a completely new wardrobe. (illustration credit 8.6)

  With Marlene Dietrich, for instance, whose presentation of a certain look was already well established, Schiaparelli added the softening effects of a large black fur hat and oversize fox fur collar that hugged the neckline. From being formidable, almost forbidding, the great star became approachable and cuddly (in a sexy sort of way). On the other hand, when it came to someone with the fragile porcelain beauty of, say, Vivien Leigh, Schiaparelli might propose a day dress with a simple gathered neckline and flyaway cap sleeves in brilliant blue, splashed with sweet williams in luscious shades of fuchsia. Another English actress just making her reputation was Wendy Hiller, who gave an unforgettable performance as Eliza Doolittle in the 1938 film production of Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw. By then Schiaparelli was so busy, she did not have time to design specifically for the film, but had to choose from items already in the collection. It is amazing, therefore, that she turned the eager, slovenly, bright-eyed Eliza of the opening scenes, by careful costume stages, into the magnificent aristocrat who sweeps into a ballroom for the film’s climactic scene.