Elsa Schiaparelli

by Meryle Secrest

  The other thing to remember, another informant said, was that Schiaparelli was first and foremost a businesswoman, and her actions needed to be seen in that context. The South American trip was easy enough to explain. T-6 said that “formerly South American firms had imported from the Paris firm, and in the course of her trip subject attempted to divert such imports to the American section of Parfums Schiaparelli.” This sounds plausible, but if this was the reason, it is difficult to see why she should have kept it from George Parkinson.

  Questions remained, and Mrs. Prochet understood why the FBI should suspect Schiaparelli of being a foreign agent, because she was “a most obvious type.” She said, and so did others, that Schiaparelli’s constant trips could be explained by her desire to salvage whatever she could, and her unwillingness to publicly criticize the German occupiers was for “strictly economic reasons.” Certain New Yorkers had their own motives for spreading rumors about her. One was named. She was Sophie Gimbel, herself a designer and wife of Adam Gimbel, the president of Saks, who had made regular prewar trips to Paris to buy clothes designs from the leading designers. She rightly saw the eclipse of Paris as a new opportunity for young American designers, and from her prominent position as leading designer at Saks Fifth Avenue’s Salon Moderne, she played an important role in developing and promoting American styles. She was not going to be happy if Schiaparelli set herself up in competition in New York, so perhaps there was some truth to Schiaparelli’s dark reference to enemies in the fashion world.

  The British succeeded, at least temporarily, in their drive to block American funds meant for London when the U.S. Treasury froze the relevant bank accounts, along with $30,000 Schiaparelli claimed as her due. (The freeze was lifted in January 1943.) Meantime, T-6 said, “Schiaparelli is like a beggar having no income. Today the Schiaparelli endorsement does not mean anything since she is no longer in the fashion world in Paris. Her funds in a bank in France have now been confiscated and her private house in Paris has twice been inspected by the authorities so that it is believed this house will also be confiscated in the near future.” T-6 and others insisted that talk about her being a spy was “café society gossip.” She had been the subject of malicious rumor and entirely misunderstood. She was “a great woman.”

  In 1943 Schiaparelli was constantly in and out of Washington—she was giving a lecture series on what the Government Girl should wear. (The advice was something refined and not too recessive. High heels were out.) As visiting celebrity, she ran the gamut of society columns, which asked the same questions and found her as evasive as ever about predictions. In July she was staying with Nadia Georges-Picot whose husband, Guillaume, a former French diplomat, was now in Algiers working under General Henri Giraud, Free French commander-in-chief of the Allied landings in North Africa. Nadia was a wonder, the anonymous writer declared. When not taking an advanced university course, or entertaining, or boating on the Potomac, or writing her considerable reminiscences, she was designing a project to teach the women of North Africa how to make money by designing and making clothes. Her guest in her 22nd Street home was Elsa Schiaparelli. After three years of heavy fighting the Germans and Italians had been driven out of North Africa in May 1943, and Nadia would be leaving for Algiers in August. She “wailed” that she hated to leave her Washington friends. Schiaparelli was going with her. She did not much mind the thought of leaving the U.S. and longed to be in Algiers, which was “so much closer to home,” she said, evidently thinking of Paris.

  At the “gaily informal farewell party” no mention was made, gay or otherwise, of the fact that the ladies were about to enter the Mediterranean battle zone, and that Sicily had just been invaded by Allied forces, now fighting their way up the Italian peninsula. Nor did Schiaparelli mention her real reason for wanting to cross the Atlantic, although she had been trying to get back to Europe, or rather London, for several months. FBI files show she applied for permission to go to London for “legal business in connection with her perfume company.” She wanted to buy out the London company’s 50 percent stock holdings in the New York firm in return for a release of all claims against the New York company. The FBI did not approve. Schiaparelli should either be prevented from leaving or allowed to leave on condition that she not come back. Either way, she was in trouble. But even if she had American approval, the British did not want her and were not about to let her back in. Schiaparelli managed to plead her case to the British ambassador to the U.S., Viscount Halifax, one of the architects of appeasement before World War II. Halifax sent a coded telegram on her behalf, but even this was politely rebuffed.

  Six months went by and Schiaparelli was renewing her assault. This time she was asking the State Department for permission to go somewhere else. She wanted to go to North Africa to join the “French Women’s Ambulance Corps,” specifically a unit called the Rochambeau. This had recently been formed following the gift by a wealthy New Yorker, Florence Conrad, of ten new American ambulances. The equipment was being sent to North Africa along with a staff of women nurses and drivers.

  Quite why Schiaparelli abandoned her teaching-women-sewing project is not clear. Perhaps she was privately advised that rescuing the wounded sounded better, even though her nursing experience was cursory at best and she did not know how to drive. Then she learned the Rochambeau unit was leaving without her. She wrote, using the habitual third person, “The alleged reason was that she could not drive a car, but instinctively she knew that this was not the true reason.” So she went to work on General Antoine Béthouart, then chief of the French military mission in Washington, and tracked him down to his small hotel room. “Gathering all her moral courage she … demanded to go.”

  Béthouart, by then an experienced man of affairs and a brilliant tactician—after D-day, his troops would be the first to reach the Danube and enter Austria—was faced with something of a diplomatic dilemma. What could he tell her? That the French thought she was a collaborator? The British thought she was anti-British? The Germans thought she was an Anglophile? The Americans suspected her of espionage? How to deal with this small, tough, determined lady? There was only one solution. She received a short, sharp answer: absolutely not.

  Schiaparelli concluded that it was all the fault of Arturo López-Willshaw, a South American playboy she had known in happier days, now ensconced at the St. Regis with his wife, Patricia, to wait out the war. López-Willshaw had bought two expensive hats in Paris and these, by a devious route that included a stop in Buenos Aires, ended up in New York. They were bought for Patricia, but she refused to wear them. Schiaparelli wrote, “They were the first hint of fashions coming out of Paris, monstrous, but wickedly, supremely elegant,” so López-Willshaw gave them to her. One was “all veils and blue and yellow wings.” She wore it the night of Arturo’s next party, being held at the Blue Angel. Sometime in the course of the evening she must have told its story. Next day there was a headline in the New York Sun: “Nazis Pushing Paris Fashions.” It was only a matter of time before Schiaparelli received a visit from the FBI. She wrote, “Though they never broached the subject directly, they asked me all sorts of vague questions. As there was nothing to blame me for, they left me alone …” It must have been the hats.

  Little did she know.

  Schiaparelli kept banging on the doors of anyone and everyone she thought could get her back to Europe. Meantime, her son-in-law, Robert L. Berenson, called “Berry” by the family, a distant relative of the Italian art historian Bernard Berenson, was no longer in New York. He left his position at Grace Lines, the shipping company, to enlist in the army. He was soon shipped to the European theatre of operations and awarded a commission while in action. After Allied victories in Italy in 1943, he served as captain of the Port of Naples, was appointed aide de camp to General Mark Clark, and then decorated with the Silver Star with two Oak Clusters. Photographs show him as tall, with a round, pleasant, not-quite-handsome face, and there is one of him on the ski slopes with his obviously delighted wife. Their
s would be a happy marriage. But meantime Gogo was on her own, “restless and nervous,” so her mother was almost relieved when she joined the American Red Cross.

  “When Gogo was finally ready to leave, Schiap went to Washington for a second goodbye,” she wrote. “At the station she left Gogo, a tiny being under an enormous rucksack far too heavy for her slight, limping, small figure.” Gogo was on her way to India by way of Melbourne, Australia. “After 45 days at sea, we—16 women and 4,000 men—finally got to Bombay. They put us women in a whorehouse, for lack of other quarters, and all night long sailors banged on the door. I thought it was hilarious …” They went on to Bengal, where their mission was to open a service club and perform amateur dramatics for servicemen. There was an interminable train journey in suffocating heat and then another long, bouncing journey by jeep until they reached their destination. This was on the outskirts of an impenetrable jungle. “Jackals and hyenas howl all night and you can see their bright eyes in the dark,” she wrote to her mother in 1944. “Everything is dry and dusty, although the humidity is 98 degrees …”

  Gogo does war work for the French Red Cross in World War II. (illustration credit 11.1)

  Three of them had been sent to open up the club, but when they arrived there was “nothing but an empty barn with clouds of dust blowing in from the road. So we have to start from scratch, pave the road, paint the furniture and construct a kitchen in three weeks.” In a country full of poisonous snakes they did not fancy sleeping on the ground in tents, so they set up house in a deserted temple, after whitewashing the walls and adding blue paint and curtains. There were no toilet facilities, all drinking water had to be boiled, and because of the fear of malaria, they were well covered up as soon as the sun went down. Gogo told “Mummy” she should consider herself “the luckiest person on earth” to be where she was. The experience, she wrote, “will certainly make a man out of me if nothing else.” Perhaps it did, but there was a price to pay. Despite all her precautions Gogo contracted amoebic dysentery and was severely ill for months and sent back to New York. Her mother wrote, “In due course all that remained of this war adventure was a mass of short curly hair, where previously it had been uncompromisingly straight, and a profound dislike of India.”

  In 1943–44, part of Schiaparelli’s willingness to brave travel through battle zones probably had something to do with Sir James Allan Horne, who was beginning to look like her savior once more. (Wicked Uncle Henry, having disappeared somewhere in South Africa, was engaged in his harebrained shipping scheme.) Sir Allan, one imagines, was the person most likely to help her untangle the perfume contract, which would release funds in New York and perhaps put her business back on its feet in Upper Grafton Street. How to do it was a continuing challenge. At first she argued that her presence was urgently needed on the London-based Medical and Surgical Relief Committee. When that did not melt any hearts in passport control, she pleaded that she was broke and needed to get to London to withdraw funds from her bank there. That was not going to work, either, since the British government imposed a draconian limit on the amount of money allowed to leave the country until well after World War II. Allan would help her, of that she was certain. But Allan’s health was failing, as his son, Alistair, who had spent the early war years as an evacuee in New York, volunteered for the RAF, and returned to Britain, discovered.

  “Now 68, he was visibly aged, and seemed so much smaller,” Alistair Horne wrote. “His whole world had got smaller, too, shrunk within itself—and poorer.” He was living in a tiny two-bedroom house in his familiar Mayfair neighborhood, eating “tiny, single-person’s rations for his evening meal,” or walking to one or another of his clubs, something like a half a mile away in the blackout.

  “His nose seemed as rubicund as I remembered, his complexion perhaps a little more florid, suggesting that the lonely evenings had encouraged him to become an enthusiastic, possibly even heavy drinker.” He was still chairman of Seagers Gin and Sorbo Rubber and made regular visits to the factories, or studied the dwindling profit reports in his modest downtown office. Alistair wrote, “Like so many of the elderly in Britain, the war passed him by and flowed around him, making him feel an encumbrance and one more useless mouth.” He was warm and welcoming, with plans to buy a country cottage when the war was over, and would, no doubt, have made a great fuss of Elsa if she had reappeared in London. It is possible, even likely, that he approached the new owners of 6 Upper Grosvenor Street on her behalf, because they wrote offering the premises, newly refurbished. They would even find a staff. Nothing came of the idea, and Allan and Elsa never met again.

  One night, returning from dinner in the darkness, Allan was hit by a car and his skull fractured. He died six weeks later without regaining consciousness, on February 2, 1944.

  There is a coda to this story. At the end of the war Alistair Horne, who happened to be in Paris on leave, called on beloved Madame Schiap (still under something of a cloud as a collabo) at her palatial house on the Rue de Berri. “I … expected that, thrilled to see me grown into a dashing captain of the Coldstream Guards, she would kill every black-market fatted calf, and weigh me down (in place of Meccano models) with voluptuous real-live ones. Alas, all I got was a cup of tea, and a first introduction to the true meaning of Parisian froideur.” He mused, “I still wonder what they could have done to each other.”

  Bereft of her Horne sponsors, Elsa soldiered on. Early in 1944 she tried again, using the offer of Upper Grosvenor Street as her latest pretext and making promises about starting up a business in London again, whether for couture or just perfume was not clear. The spokesman for Trading with the Enemy Department remained skeptical. “It is clear that the spiritual home of [Schiaparelli] and her trade is in Paris and I imagine that she really wishes to come to this country in order to be nearer to France …” Permission denied once more. One of the few compensations during that period had to do with the FBI, which officially dropped its case against her on March 9, 1944. She was free at last to leave and reenter the U.S. No charges were ever brought.

  On June 4, 1944, Schiaparelli, usually a sound sleeper, awoke with a start at two a.m. Instinctively, she turned on the small radio beside her bed and heard “the detailed and incredible description of the Allied invasion of Normandy. The room, the hotel, New York no longer existed. I felt disembodied …”

  It was a miracle. Everyone was calling everyone else, and friends and enemies were temporarily united in their surprise and joy at the unbelievable news. “We all had hope. We saw freedom … We believed that we had merely to call the Air France bureau and buy a ticket to Paris …” That was not going to happen just yet. But liberation was on everyone’s lips, except those, perhaps, for whom the Occupation had scarcely affected their privileged lifestyle. People like, for instance, Carlos (“Charlie”) de Beistegui, who could always retreat to his country estate when Paris looked unpleasant. As the Allies prepared to land, Beistegui had recently returned from visiting the Noailles in their country estate of southeastern France. They had converted some of their rooms into a convalescent home for sick children and had been reduced to travelling on bicycles or bicycle-driven taxis. But for the most part they entertained freely, spent hours in their gardens—Charles de Noailles was a passionate gardener—and lived on comfortable terms with their conquerors.

  Beistegui’s own country home, the Château de Groussay, was, as luck would have it, near a small town on a main railway line due west of Paris and directly in the path of the Allied advance. He ignored that fact even when British planes, just ahead of the landing, began dive-bombing the nearby train station, and went on giving dinner parties outdoors as usual. One evening one of his guests happened to be Bébé Bérard. As he put his fork to some peas, Bérard was startled to discover, in the silver platter from which he was eating, the reflection of a British plane diving straight for the dinner table (as it seemed). He was thoroughly unsettled. Beistegui, in a letter to Bettina Bergery, loftily remarked that he had not noticed it.r />
  As the Allies advanced, the great decision became whether to leave Paris in German hands for a few more weeks while Patton pushed the German forces back to the Rhine, or take Paris as they went. General Dwight Eisenhower, supreme commander, wanted to postpone responsibility for a city of two million people, along with its need for food and materials, while he fought a war. De Gaulle and General Philippe Leclerc were frantically trying to change his mind. The situation in Paris was explosive, and an uprising was already taking place. No one wanted another Stalingrad. The German authorities had mined the city and were preparing to retreat. Hitler was determined to leave Paris in flames. “Is Paris burning?” became one of the most enduring questions in history, inspiring a best-selling book and a film.

  The irony was that General Dietrich von Choltitz, the new military governor of Paris, who had assumed command just two weeks before, had no desire to blow up one of the most beautiful cities in the world. He, too, wanted the Allies to act immediately. “If they did not come in time and Hitler discovered the degree of procrastination in following his instructions,” Antony Beevor and Artemis Cooper wrote in Paris After the Liberation, “he would order in the Luftwaffe.” Eisenhower was persuaded. Shortly before midnight on August 22, Leclerc received the order from General Omar Bradley to advance on Paris. “The exultant yells of ‘Mouvement sur Paris!’ provided an electrifying charge of fierce joy.”