At times like these one clearly sees those aspects of her talent that have made Schiaparelli such a major figure in fashion history. There are, for instance, her rapid response to the unexpected and her ability to cope, finding creative solutions. There are an innate elegance and a sense of the fitness of things. As an extra fillip, there are her sense of fun, even in wartime, as evidenced by the pretend strap on the pretend handbag, and her ability to deal with the most unpromising idea. For instance, in the spring of 1940 she took the theme of red, white, and blue flags as a pretext for summer evening dresses that are object lessons in what a master can do with a clichéd theme. One is a sleeveless full-length gown, the silk of which is printed with the flag of the Royal des Vaisseaux, blocks of color in a deep mauvish blue, interspersed with blocks of red, yellow, and black and gathered below the back seam in a burst of loose folds sporting the fleur-delis and a French sailing ship in full regalia. Another, also sleeveless, a square-necked, belted evening gown, celebrates a different flag, this one of Franco-Scottish origins. It involved the Ogilvy, one of Scotland’s oldest and most distinguished clans, which fought for Bonnie Prince Charlie in the Jacobite risings. After the defeat at the Battle of Culloden in 1746, the Ogilvys followed their monarch into exile in France and founded the Scottish Ogilvy regiment. This regiment figures prominently across the front of the dress, along with its Latin motto: “Nemo Me Impune Lacesset” (No one Provokes me with Impunity). Schiaparelli loved symbolism, and the fact that she chose a Scottish theme is significant, not to mention the motto, which seems not only relevant for a nation at war, but for a woman in exile and in fighting form.
Schiaparelli was back in New York a few months after the war began. The French and British markets having dried up, New York was her last hope, but this had always been her major source of income in any event. She arrived on the Pan American Clipper at Port Washington, Long Island, in what A. J. Liebling called “a Yacht Club setting,” on December 9, 1939. She brought with (for her) a skeleton wardrobe of three day dresses, a wool suit, two jackets to be worn over anything, and three evening dresses. As she disembarked she was wearing a civet jacket with a matching hat. No doubt Schiaparelli was prepared to sell the clothes off her back, or reasonable facsimiles thereof, if necessary. And how much success she had as she ranged up and down Fifth Avenue is not known.
At least the New York Times had kind words for a winter raincoat made of a new impermeable tweed and warmly lined, whether with fur or with heavy flannel. It was, the author wrote, “the smartest waterproof wrap yet seen.” Another model that caught the reviewer’s eye was the Foreign Legion red greatcoat with its raglan sleeves and what were being termed “cash-and-carry” pockets. Underneath it was a “Maginot blue” beltless one-piece wool dress with a turn-down collar edged with bright red insignia to echo a French soldier’s jacket, a little number that was already in demand. However, whether or not New York, so well insulated from all thought of war, would be interested in the siren suit was an open question.
The Pan American Clipper, or “flying boat,” which, Liebling wrote, “looked like something a giant built with a Meccano set,” started flying between New York and Europe in 1937. The clippers were originally designed for airmail service, with passengers almost as an afterthought, depending on the final load, since there were strict weight requirements. By 1939 six large, long-range Boeing 314 planes, taking off and landing by sea, were shuttling every day between New York, Portugal, and elsewhere. They were designed for as many as thirty-four passengers but removed for military use as soon as war began. Smaller planes that could accommodate twenty-five passengers, at most, replaced them on the long and arduous flight across the Atlantic via the Azores and often, Bermuda as well. They navigated by the stars at sixteen thousand feet and required expert crews to deal with unpredictable maritime conditions—for instance, the planes could not take off on waves that were more than three feet high. Maintenance was strict and the only wartime crash came in 1943 when the Yankee Clipper made a bad landing in Lisbon and twenty-four of its thirty-nine passengers died.
The Pan American Clipper was designed for the luxury trade. There were lounges, separate dining rooms, seats that converted into bunks, and chefs from four-star hotels who prepared sumptuous six-course meals. Schiaparelli wrote that this was “the most comfortable and extravagant aeroplane I had travelled in,” despite a three-day stop at Horta in the Azores because of engine trouble. She travelled with seventeen other passengers, one of them an ambassador, but not the one she named, William C. Bullitt, U.S. ambassador to France. That came later. On this trip she was with Joseph P. Kennedy, U.S. ambassador to Britain, returning to Washington to report to President Roosevelt about the outbreak of a war that, he had long argued, could not be won. Among others in the passenger section were Pierre Matisse, a New York art dealer, son of the famous Henri, and Kennedy’s butler. Liebling, war correspondent for The New Yorker, wrote that the Pan American Clippers flying out of Portugal, which was neutral, or the boats to South America, were probably the only reliable way of getting out of Europe.
Tickets were expensive, hard to get, and fought over, so that the hotel rooms in Lisbon and Estoril were usually full of Americans waiting to escape from a rapidly escalating war. They were people with influence, such as ambassadors, high government officials, chief executives, aristocrats, and film stars. It is significant to note that Schiaparelli never had any trouble getting passage on the number of trips she made in and out of Europe, from the beginning of hostilities in September 1939 to the end of 1941, although she might sometimes have to wait for days in Horta for the plane to leave. She usually stayed in a hotel overlooking the harbor, which, as the Manchester Guardian reported, “was a small, low, white building with an arched veranda, set on a little hill. Very rarely it happens that two Clippers are in the harbour at one time, but on such occasions the long public room, the square drawing room, the veranda and the tiny bar with its local decorations are the background of impressive arrivals and strange encounters.” One never knew who might be waiting to leave and walking through the crooked streets of Horta, “among the old muleteers with pineapples and the figures in the dark, high-peaked hoods and capes, or only in the plain, bare hotel rooms.”
Not many were making the return trip, as Schiaparelli did at the end of December 1939. It was a trip Liebling had made two months before as he went to Paris to describe life in wartime France. Lisbon looked as normal as Port Washington, Long Island, had done when they left. But as soon as they were on a train going north and had crossed the Portuguese-Spanish border at Fuentes de Oñoro, it was clear that they had arrived in a wartime landscape. “The train passed camps surrounded by barbed wire and populated either by Republican prisoners of war or (the victorious) Franco’s soldiers.” Station platforms were crowded with soldiers in cotton uniforms and canvas shoes, and “an obvious flatfoot in plain clothes stood at the end of our corridor watching the first-class carriages.” He continued, “The bare rocky country through which the railroad passed stank of poverty and ruin.”
Arriving at Irun on the Spanish border just south of Biarritz, passengers bound for France “were marched through the streets to the villa of the fascist governor and kept waiting in the garden for a couple of hours until an assistant had gone through our passports.” Things were not much better after Liebling walked across the international bridge from Spain to Hendaye in France, where the passport control officers looked just as bored and indifferent. This was the route Schiaparelli took on her return to Paris in January 1940.
A writer from the Christian Science Monitor was at the station platform in Paris when the train from Lisbon arrived, waiting to greet Schiaparelli after her thirty-hour transatlantic crossing. She looked, the admiring reporter wrote, “trim, chic and smiling.” Schiaparelli was working on a fall collection, to be shown on April 23, 1940. She was talking about her new perfume, Sleeping, being given pride of place inside the painted gold bamboo bars of an oversize birdcage that ser
ved as a perfume display case at the Place Vendôme. She was about to design a “completely novel wardrobe” for clients en transit, inspired by her recent experience. She was pointing out the usefulness of suits with large pockets as well as little extra nooks and crannies artfully hidden away underneath the folds of a skirt, for valuables. The base of Napoleon’s column may have sandbags around it, but life flowed on in its usual course. Plenty of resident buyers remained in Paris, along with fashion journalists, or were arriving by steamboat, railroad, and transatlantic Clipper and ready to make their orders.
With the American market in mind, she was showing summer clothes for Florida and California while the petits mains shivered in their cold workrooms. Finland had repulsed a German attack two or three months before, and so there were Finnish embroideries, Finnish aprons, even a Finnish wedding belt. And since Maurice Chevalier had popularized a new song ruefully commenting on shortages of meat, butter, fish, and alcohol, Schiaparelli was introducing a “daily ration” scarf. As for her new perfume creation, that was contained inside a bottle shaped like a candlestick, its top in the form of a red flame. Since electricity, along with much else, would soon be in short supply, the reference was, as usual, up to the minute.
Two weeks and two days after the collection opened, on Friday, May 10, Germany invaded the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg and the war, Liebling wrote, began a new phase. Early that morning, the air-raid sirens began to wail. “At once the little Square Louvois in front of my window took on the aspect of an Elizabethan theater,” Liebling wrote, “with tiers of spectators framed in the open windows of every building. Instead of looking down at a stage, however, they all looked up.” The anti-aircraft guns were making such a tremendous noise “that startled birds flew out of the trees … and circled nervously in squadrons over the roofs.” Tracer shells lit up the sky and airplane motors could be heard, although the only plane that actually appeared was so high up “that it looked like a charm-bracelet toy.” He continued, “People stared uneasily at the plane, as they would at a stinging insect near the ceiling, but it went away harmlessly enough … so most of the spectators soon closed their windows and went back to bed.” Holland was already collapsing, and Belgium would soon be gone. A sinister new phase of the war had begun but, as yet, most people did not realize it. The implications for a defense of France were felt only by “the most highly sensitized layers of the population: the correspondents, the American and British war-charity workers, and the French politicians.”
Schiaparelli was determined to get Gogo back to safety in New York, and to help oversee the lucrative perfume business there. In fact, a year later she would form a new branch of her company, Elsa Schiaparelli Inc., with herself as president. She left it until almost too late. On June 10, 1940, the day Gogo arrived on the U.S. liner Manhattan from Genoa, along with two thousand other refugees, Italy declared war on the Allies. Four days later, on June 14, 1940, the Germans marched into Paris. It was a narrow escape for Gogo, the second of that spring and for her mother as well. Returning from the country one day by car, they were forced to brake and run for the ditch after two German planes appeared and began strafing the road. After her safe arrival in New York, Gogo told the New York Journal American that she still carried two machine-gun bullets that she picked up on that road. The fact that Gogo was an American citizen, and the U.S. was not yet at war, made the trip comparatively straightforward. Gogo took the train to Genoa, and while she was waiting for the liner Manhattan to depart, had a drink in a hotel lobby with Louise Macy, one of her mother’s socialite friends, who was also on her way back to New York. There Gogo met another American, Robert L. Berenson, a twenty-six-year-old representative in Europe for Grace Lines, the shipping company. Gogo said later, “I thought he was after the sophisticated Louise, but in point of fact he was courting me.” They all sailed on the same boat, and “there is nothing more romantic than a shipboard romance,” she said. “We were engaged within two weeks.”
As soon as Gogo was back in New York, Schiaparelli seized on the opportunity to launch a new line of fashions (ostensibly designed by Gogo herself) for junior-miss departments of American stores. A series of promotions was put in place and “Gogo Juniors” was being represented by Horwitz & Duberman, a firm of New York wholesalers. Bonwit Teller introduced the new line in the spring of 1941. One of the allover prints, a motif of cute little Cairn puppies, referred to Gogo’s own dog, Popcorn. This might have been appropriate for a fourteen-year-old but had to be embarrassing to a girl who was engaged to be married. True to form, Schiaparelli had already anticipated that. Every junior miss needed her own hope chest, and so among the styles were “copies of the trousseau … the bride-to-be is packing into her own bags for the month-long honeymoon in Bermuda.” If she had been somewhat shielded before, Gogo was now being introduced into a role she instinctively disliked, that is, as a showcase for her mother’s work, whose private life was going to be put on the stage for commercial advantage. Interestingly, she did not wear a wedding dress that her mother designed, but one designed by Fira Benenson of Bonwit Teller. It was extremely sedate and discreet, in heavy white crepe with a high neckline, long sleeves, and a train. She also chose for the wedding a moment when her mother was on another continent.
A decorous advertisement for playing cards, undated (illustration credit 9.4)
Schiaparelli and Gogo, in matching outfits, 1938
After war was declared, and nothing much happened for months, Schiaparelli’s clients had started drifting back to Paris. They were ordering clothes again, and girls were coming back to work. But as the situation grew more grave, the cancellations started. Elsa said, “We had our materials cut, dresses half-sewed, but the clients had gone. It was disastrous …”
In that crucial month of June 1940, the government left Paris, first for Tours and then for Bordeaux. Liebling wrote, “The last impression of Paris we carried with us was of deserted streets everywhere except around the railroad stations, where the crowds were so big that they overflowed all the surrounding sidewalks and partly blocked automobile traffic …” Anyone who could leave left the city on Monday evening, June 10, or Tuesday, June 11, and the roads leading south out of Paris “were gorged with what was possibly the strangest assortment of vehicles in history. No smaller city could have produced such a gamut of conveyances, from fiacres of the Second Empire to a farm tractor hitched to a vast trailer displaying the American flag … During the first few kilometers cars stood still for from five minutes to an hour at a time …”
Events were spinning out of control, and Schiaparelli must have felt, as Julien Green did in his diary of June 1940, “la fin d’un monde,” torn between confusion, disbelief, hope, and anxiety, as he wrote, “like the passage from nightmare to reality …” She describes how a friend sent some flowers to the house while she was out: masses of fragrant lilacs. Among her many superstitions was the belief that lilacs “always seem to synchronize with disaster,” and she had left orders that lilacs should never cross her threshold. But here they were, and they were spectacular. So, telling herself she was a fool, she filled the sitting room with the blossoms. Surely it was a coincidence that the next day, two tall poplars “that stood like silent sentinels in my garden” came crashing down. At five the morning after that, “a friend who was in the Cabinet telephoned me: ‘Schiap, the Germans will be in Paris in a few hours. I advise you for many reasons to leave immediately.’ ” She and a skeleton staff had been offered space in Edward Molyneux’s summer quarters at Biarritz, so she made immediate plans to go on ahead, preparing for the arrival of about twenty of her staff. They had to travel however they could. She packed in a rush and almost at random—an evening dress without its jacket, an old Egyptian wooden bird, a jewel case full of some valuable pieces, and a Scottish dirk, perhaps a gift from one or other of the Hornes, its scabbard ornamented with gold and topaz, as symbolic and perhaps literal protection.
Schiaparelli does not describe the trip south and west to Bi
arritz, but others have left vivid descriptions of the hazards they faced as they walked beside horsedrawn carts or pushed heavily laden prams. “As they passed through empty villages, abandoned dogs and cats met them, scrounging for food … And all along, there was both the fear and the reality of strafings by Stuka and Messerschmitt fighter planes, which by then were unchallenged in the air. Every attack sent people tumbling from their cars or dropping their bicycles as they sought protection in ditches; many were killed or wounded,” Alan Riding wrote. “The lucky travelers headed toward provincial homes where family or friends waited to receive them. Most found themselves hungry or homeless, refugees in their own country.”
Schiaparelli’s overriding concern, along with that of the other couturiers headed for Biarritz, was to finish the work on the new fall models and get them shipped out of the country to New York while there was still time. One by one, tired and hungry, her devoted workers arrived and were housed in makeshift quarters. Beds were set up in hospital formations, and she even opened a canteen. “Alas, it was all for nothing.” Before they could finish the collection the Germans were almost at Bordeaux and all transport had stopped. One evening she and other couturiers in the same dilemma, including Lucien Lelong, Jeanne Lanvin, Cristóbal Balenciaga, Jacques Heim, and Jean Patou, met in a building overlooking the sea front. It was a menacing scene: “black water, black sky, with a crack of thunder sounding like guns in the dark. The electric lights blew out …” Paris fell on June 14, and the armistice was signed on June 22. She wrote, “When the capitulation announcement was made the work people, standing in a crush at the door, burst into tears.”
Schiaparelli had signed a contract with the Columbia Lecture Bureau for later that year and a coast-to-coast tour. The theme was to be “Clothes Make the Woman.” Under the circumstances she decided to leave at once. To illustrate her talk Schiaparelli had designed a sample wardrobe, and that had been already made and shipped. Meanwhile, she could hardly leave her Paris business in the lurch. Five of her staff, including her director, Louis Arthur Meunier, and a secretary, Yvonne Souquières, agreed to return to Paris, reopen the boutique, and sell whatever they could. The remaining dozen or so workers now staying at the house in Biarritz were invited to remain there, since the rent had been paid for a year. Most of them, she thought, would return to Paris anyway. She wrote, “The terrible moment for me came when I had to tell my people I could not pay them. I could only divide the cash I had with me.”
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