Elsa Schiaparelli

by Meryle Secrest

  One of Schiaparelli’s many entry visas into the U.S., this one granting her permanent residence in 1941 (illustration credit 9.6)

  With her usual efficiency Schiaparelli had already obtained the necessary visas for travel into Spain and Portugal. She also needed an American visa, which she obtained without much trouble because “I knew the man well who was in charge of the distribution.” She was going by Clipper from Lisbon, and so was everybody else. Tom Treanor, writing for Vogue in October 1940, observed that at the Palacio bar in nearby Estoril you could see anyone and everyone. “In the little restaurants overlooking the sea at Cascals, at the end of the railroad, almost any night you could see the Duke and Duchess of Windsor while they were here, playing their latest peculiar role, refugeeing.” The American visa to which Schiaparelli had referred with such nonchalance was almost impossible to obtain, as she must have known. “It’s become an art even to have a conversation with a consular employee, something to be arranged as carefully as a preferred table at the Paris Ritz on Sunday night,” Treanor wrote.

  Schiaparelli was somehow travelling with two titled Frenchwomen and their sons, whom she was going to help get across the border. The situation was a bit complicated because one of the ladies’ husbands was determined to prevent her from taking their offspring out of the country. Situations like that were as child’s play to Schiaparelli, who smuggled the little boy past a checkpoint by hiding him under her coat. (He must have been rather small.) Their journey inched along. They had to stop over in Madrid, and Schiaparelli, whose acts of grace under pressure were invariably followed by the shivers, calmed her nerves and soothed her eyes with frequent visits to the Prado. They got as far as Coimbra, a university town in Portugal, and had to stop again. So many refugees were pouring into the country that Lisbon was jammed to the rafters.

  Nothing happened for two weeks, “during which I never ceased asking for a permit.” So she decided to take matters into her own hands once again. She commandeered a taxi for her party and they drove to Lisbon, some 200 kilometers, or 125 miles, away. On arrival she had the good sense to go straight to police headquarters and argue their cause, which she did for several hours. Surely they could not put these two important ladies and their young sons in prison? They could, and almost did, but gave way in the end, perhaps from exhaustion. The victory was won, but there was naturally nowhere to sleep. They finally found a deserted casino, where they spent a miserable night and combed ants out of their hair next morning. This would not do, either, so Schiaparelli went out and hailed a passing car. This turned out to belong to a Belgian diplomat, who was charm itself (how did she do it?) and deposited her outside an extravagantly beautiful hotel, the Aviz. “In a rococo way,” Treanor wrote, “it is the most amazing hotel in the world, each room a masterpiece in paneling, gilt, tapestried chairs, canopied beds and cushioned rugs.” Of course the management would be delighted to receive them all. It had taken Schiaparelli something like a month to get as far as this, and she felt guilty, but not enough.

  No doubt she found a use for her evening gown and spent some long, lazy dinners with the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, who had problems of their own. The British government had named him new governor of the Bahamas, being no doubt privy to a secret Nazi plot to depose George VI and replace him with his older brother as soon as German forces had overrun Britain. This would surely happen in a matter of weeks. For their part, the duke and duchess were very tempted. After all, the duke had renounced a kingdom because the British would not allow him to place his twice-divorced American wife on the throne. So he had a very big axe to grind. The couple thought they really liked Hitler, but on the other hand … All kinds of pressure were being put on them to return to Spain, where the Germans could move in and remove them bodily to Berlin if necessary. Happily, at the eleventh hour, the British sent a destroyer and the duke and duchess embarked on their Caribbean idyll outside the danger zone.

  Another dear friend was also waiting to leave, Salvador Dalí. He tended to fall apart at crucial moments and, besides, was absolutely terrified of Generalissimo Franco and therefore, of setting foot on his native soil. So it had taken Gala—Dalí leaned on capable women—weeks to get him across Spain and as far as Portugal, and just in time. Two days after they crossed the bridge at Hendaye the Germans closed it permanently. Now they were waiting for an American visa while their friend Caresse Crosby pulled strings. Early in August they finally boarded the Excambion for New York, arrived safely, and sat out the war in comfort.

  Yet another friend, Jean-Michel Frank, was “waiting and waiting, like a character in Casablanca,” for the visa that never came. He finally managed to get a berth on a boat to South America and crossed the border into the U.S. at the end of 1940. He was in New York at last, but not for long. To everyone’s horror, he committed suicide one Saturday afternoon a few months later. He was forty-six years old.

  It had been a menacing summer, Treanor observed, full of superficial amusements and hidden terrors. “As Jean-Michel Frank (in unpressed suit) summed up the situation with Madame Dalí (in remnants of Schiaparelli), ‘For the most part, you see people who live in the greatest luxury travelling in a suitcase, while some Balkan who can’t sign his name to four thousand dollars has arrived with trunks and trunks.’ ” Even famous people were being turned away, which makes Schiaparelli’s wartime travels back and forth across the Atlantic in relative ease harder and harder to understand. As before, she obtained tickets for herself and everyone else in her party and arrived in New York on July 20, 1940. This was the trip she made with the U.S. ambassador to France, William Bullitt, who had been recalled. He had just had a narrow escape: while he was having lunch at the Air Ministry in Paris, a German bomb crashed through the roof and dropped several floors. The ambassador promptly left, luckily as it turned out, because an hour later the bomb finally exploded and demolished the building. As for Schiaparelli, arriving with four suitcases and $70,000 worth of jewelry, her clothes collection was gone—the ship carrying it had been torpedoed. But as she embraced Gogo that summer day in 1940, at least she was alive.

  CHAPTER 10

  * * *

  THE “COLLABO”

  In Suite Française, Irène Némirovsky’s luminous novel about the Nazi occupation of France, two of her fleeing characters reach the Grand Hotel in Vichy in central France early one morning. “Collapsing with exhaustion, they looked around fearfully, as if they expected, once through the revolving doors, to plunge back into the nightmare of an incoherent world, with refugees sleeping on the cream carpets of the writing room, a hotel manager who … refused to give them a room, no hot water for a bath and bombs falling in the lobby. But, thank God, this Queen of French spas had remained intact … All the staff were in place … the coffee was delicious, the cocktails were mixed with crushed ice and the taps poured out as much water as you liked …” They felt they had been reborn.

  Vichy was an oasis in the middle of chaos, and for a very good reason. The French government, assembling rapidly after the flight from Bordeaux, had closed ranks behind Maréchal Philippe Pétain, that hero of Verdun, as its new chief of state. He in turn had named a select two hundred to join him in forming a “Vichy National Council,” a new government and a new state, and had signed grovelling armistice terms with the German conquerors on June 22. In it France agreed to be split into two zones, with the northern half, its population roughly 29 million, under direct German control and the second half, or “zone libre,” as it was called, comprising 13 million, under the puppet control of Vichy. Germany consequently took for itself Paris and the industrial north, as well as the western coastline as far south as Spain. Italy lopped off some more on its own southern borders. Anyone coming and going after France fell had to be equipped not only with Portuguese and Spanish visas but required German permission at the Spanish frontier. A further “laissez-passer” was needed to enter the free zone, and that was just as difficult to obtain as any of the others. Yet early in December 1940, barely fi
ve months after escaping to New York, Schiaparelli was back in France, staying in luxurious surroundings in Vichy and making phone calls.

  For the reason why, one has to go back to World War I and the career of Gaston Bergery, who was just twenty-two when war started in 1914. During his years of service, along with the rest of his countrymen, he conceived a profound admiration and devotion for Pétain that he never lost.

  As deputy from Nantes, Bergery was in the left wing of the Socialist party, stridently anti-fascist, pacifist, against totalitarian power whether from the left or the right, and an early critic of communism. In her paper “Gaston Bergery and the Political Composition of the Early Vichy State,” Diane Lab rosse argues that Bergery was an important critic of politics-as-usual, and his trenchant criticisms earned him the respect of intellectuals, “many of whom came to think of him as a new and dynamic type of leader who was capable of leading France at a time of domestic and international turbulence …”

  Yet by July 1940 Bergery had joined a collaborationist government, was writing Pétain’s speeches, and was author of the Bergery Declaration of July 9, 1940, the founding document of the authoritarian Vichy State, which had voted the Third Republic out of existence. Labrosse writes, “Many historians have suggested that by 1940 Bergery had become … a left-wing fascist, a ‘jacobin,’ part of the ‘fascist drift’ of France. Others dismiss him as a mere political opportunist.” She believes that Bergery provided a positive, strongly leftist influence, in the early months of Vichy at least. He would soon be given the important post of ambassador to Russia, representing Vichy. For Schiaparelli, getting privileged passage under the aegis of Vichy was as easy as a phone call to Gaston and Bettina Bergery.

  The French politician Gaston Bergery in 1934, posing before a poster for the “Common Front Against Fascism,” which he helped form (illustration credit 10.1)

  Early in November 1940 Bettina was skiing in a remote village in the French Alps when “Elsa called up from Vichy where she just arrived. ‘Horrible trip,’ she shouted over the telephone but she couldn’t understand anything I said,” she noted in her diary. “I should go to Vichy and then Paris with her, but it takes a day and a night to get to Vichy.” Elsa was back from her American cross-country series of appearances, most of them in department stores, which ended with a truncated fashion show of her latest designs. She liked to give the impression that she was raising money for French relief, but it is hard to see this in a transcript of the speech that has survived. Word on Seventh Avenue was that now that haute couture was effectively abolished, or at least neutralized, native talent was free to create a properly native fashion. In fact, a great many budding American designers got their start in the war years. This naturally did not please Schiaparelli, who was at pains to spread the word that Paris could not be knocked off its pedestal as easily as that. She loved to give advice about what women should wear, and how they should wear it. The loss of the collection was dealt with in typically forthright fashion: she simply had copies made in New York.

  Gaston Bergery in 1940, as a prominent Vichy official, left, in front of the Hotel Majestic, Vichy, with Stanislas de La Rochefoucauld (illustration credit 10.2)

  Some sixteen new designs were shown on the tour and subsequently photographed for Vogue. They were for the most part quite conservative coats, suits, hats, and accessories, with a dinner suit thrown in, as well as some so-called lounging pajamas that would seem rather formal nowadays, with a pink wool jacket and pink velvet collar embroidered with beads. One of the items that caught the eye of the fashion press when it was shown at Bonwit Teller in late September showed Schiaparelli’s continuing gift for trompe l’oeil and the cunningly hidden. Or perhaps it had to do with her love of conjuring tricks. At any rate, the model seemed to be in a tweed jacket in a beige-and-rust plaid teamed with a dark brown skirt. As the mannequin paraded around the room, she removed the jacket to show a brown crepe bodice with a high neck and some clever tucking. That might be predicted. But then, with a flick of the wrist, the mannequin removed her skirt, to demonstrate that this had concealed a simple afternoon frock of brown crepe. After they had recovered from their surprise, the audience applauded: and Schiaparelli had shown, once again, that it is perfectly possible to wear a complete wardrobe on one’s back. Bettina had already received some favorable reports from her friends, one of whom wrote to say he had heard Schiaparelli lecture in New York’s Town Hall. She looked splendid, spoke clearly and to the point, and she provided “the best pro-French propaganda we have here.”

  Elsa on a lecture tour in the U.S., summer 1940 (illustration credit 10.3)

  Schiaparelli was frantic to get back to Paris. Someone who, as Hortense MacDonald once complained, reads every letter that is delivered, whether meant for her or not, is not going to be happy when her whole world—and the perfume business was becoming increasingly valuable—is left to drift. But there was a further reason why she needed Bettina with her just then. A month after she left Europe, in August 1940, a group of German officials visited the Chambre Syndicale, the association of French couturiers. Its president was Lucien Lelong, who evacuated to Biarritz along with Schiaparelli and stayed behind after she left for New York. The message was that Parisian haute couture would cease to exist. French couturiers, and their businesses, were to be relocated to Berlin or Vienna. There they would abandon their unfair artistic advantage and learn how to create a new German look, one that would please German women. No one was going to like this idea, Schiaparelli included.

  Lelong refused. “It stays in Paris or not at all,” he supposedly said. He explained that the industry was supported by thousands of independent dressmakers and artisans working in specialized fields: fabrics, leathers, perfumes, jewelry, and the like, who could not be so easily exported. Lelong left for Berlin with a delegation in November 1940 to argue his case. Perhaps he had hoped to take Schiaparelli with him. He might still have been there when Schiaparelli made her urgent call from Vichy. In any event the Germans, with more pressing problems, abandoned their plan, and French fashion, albeit in drastically truncated form, continued through the war years. As well as Schiaparelli, there were Jeanne Lanvin, Nina Ricci, Robert Piguet, Jacques Fath, Maggy Rouff, Marcel Rochas, and Lelong, who would soon employ (in 1942) a young fashion designer named Christian Dior.

  What happened after that is not clear, but Schiaparelli must have made another short trip to the U.S., perhaps in mid-December (and certainly on the Pan Am Clipper) because she was back in New York in the New Year and sailed from Jersey City to Lisbon on January 5, 1941. (She arrived a week later, on January 11.) The American Export liner Siboney was, she wrote, “so old that water poured in from every side,” and was taken out of service once they reached Lisbon. Fortunately Jacques Truelle, French ambassador to the U.S., was on board, and since there was no furniture on the boat, perhaps they sat and chatted on the floor of the main salon. It was all in a good cause, because Schiaparelli had agreed to accompany an American Friends Service Committee shipment of some $60,000 in vitamins and medicines meant for children in the Vichy zone. The boat went via Bermuda, where the shipment was seized and Schiaparelli’s motives examined with more than usual care. Once in Lisbon, Schiaparelli headed straight to Sir Noel Charles, British ambassador to Portugal, and straightened things out in her usual brisk fashion, and the shipment was sent on its way.

  Whom you knew—who might turn out to be important—had become vital. Besides Sir Noel, Schiaparelli was on easy terms with U.S. Ambassador Bullitt—and in the days before Pearl Harbor, when the U.S. still maintained a consulate in Vichy, she knew an important American consular official, Douglas MacArthur II, nephew of the general, and his wife, Laura Louise, nicknamed Wahwee. In fact, she writes that they were “my very dearest friends.” No doubt this was why she had no trouble obtaining the coveted U.S. visas as she came and went after the fall of France. She was also on good terms with Otto Abetz, a former art teacher who later became Hitler’s ambassador to occupied France.
He was attached to a special unit, headed by Joachim von Ribbentrop, whose mission was to recruit French fifth columnists (secret sympathizers and supporters), at which he had considerable success.

  As the war continued, Abetz became more and more powerful. William Shirer called him “the notorious Otto Abetz” in his Berlin Diary, and others referred to him as “King Otto I” and France as the “Kingdom of Otto.” Any slight was immediately punished. The story is told that Elisabeth, the estranged Catholic wife of the Baron Philippe de Rothschild, from the wealthy Jewish family, was among the visitors at an opening of one of Schiaparelli’s collections in 1941. Finding herself seated beside Abetz’s wife, she quietly changed seats. The next day she was sent to the women’s concentration camp at Ravensbrück, where she died in 1945. To be a friend of Abetz was dangerous, and according to an Office of Strategic Services (OSS) declassified secret document, Schiaparelli was “a great personal friend.” Whatever that meant.