Elsa Schiaparelli

by Meryle Secrest

  The response of Parisians after four years of war has become one of history’s great moments. The barricaded streets, the tolling bells, the ripping up of hated flags, the surging crowds clambering over the tanks, the kisses, the tears, the snipers, the crackle of guns, the spontaneous singing of the “Marseillaise”: in those delirious mass demonstrations was expressed the overwhelming joy of people around the world. As it was happening, Albert Camus, in the offices of the Resistance newspaper Combat, was writing, “On the warmest and loveliest of August nights the everlasting stars in the Paris sky mix with tracer bullets, the smoke from fires, and the multicolored rockets of the people’s joy.” He also observed that the greatness of man lay in “his decision to be stronger than his condition.” These words would gain new significance a year later, at the end of the war, when the first survivors of the concentration camps arrived in the Gare de l’Est. The crowds who had come to welcome them were “horrified to see spectral figures, evident victims of Nazi brutality, stagger unsteadily from the trains. As some returnees, with unbearable pathos, croaked out the ‘Marseillaise,’ the crowds dissolved in tears.”

  The Hotel Majestic had burned to the ground. The Grand Palais was reduced to rubble, the Palais du Luxembourg had been damaged, and so were the Champ de Mars, the Palais Bourbon, the Place de la République, and the industrial areas around the banlieues. Some three thousand were estimated to have lost their lives in the fighting. But things could have been so much worse. More than most, Schiaparelli had reason to be grateful. Completely by chance, an American war correspondent had wandered into 22 Rue de Berri that day and helped himself to the facilities in her bathroom. Then he described the house for the American Journal, and so she learned that the same paintings were on the walls, the same furnishings in her rooms, and the same staff still caring for her precious possessions.

  Paris under the barricades in World War II (illustration credit 11.2)

  Schiaparelli had to wait for another year, until Germany surrendered in May 1945, to get back to Paris. But by then others equally resourceful but less hampered by official suspicion had made the first forays into a liberated city. One was Carmel Snow, editor-in-chief of Harper’s Bazaar. Snow was determined to make the first report, and such trifles as the fact that the German U-boats still patrolled the Atlantic paled in comparison with the importance of the scoop.

  She was finally permitted to leave in December 1944 and travelled by a devious route, south to Miami and Trinidad, then to Caracas via the southern Atlantic, arriving at Dakar in West Africa. Then it was on to Lisbon and Madrid, and finally a very slow and crowded train to Paris.

  Schiaparelli back again in New York in 1945 (illustration credit 11.3)

  It was another hard, cold winter, and, as Janet Flanner observed, Parisians were stunned and silent. “The population of Paris is still a mass of uncoordinated individuals, each walking through the ceaseless winter rains with his memories,” she wrote. There was no heat, very little food, very little electricity, store closings at five, one bath a week, and so on; a time of empty stomachs, chapped lips, and holes in shoes. American soldiers were queueing around the block to buy Chanel perfume, clothing prices had shot up, and what clothes there were showed the disappointing effects of cheap fabric, and not much of that. There were so few photographers out of uniform that Carmel Snow was obliged to use drawings to illustrate the magazine. Still, the mood in the couture houses was buoyant. One morning the snow fell heavily and draped the empty streets with a scintillating blanket of white. The editor was returning to her hotel one evening when she came upon a group of American soldiers in a snowball fight with some fifty of Schiaparelli’s midinettes. They were “all laughing, flirting, singing. It was a delightful scene.”

  Two months after VE day, on July 2, 1945, Schiaparelli at last made the trip herself, boarding an ocean liner in Boston. The SS Mariposa, one of four ships in the Matson Lines’ “White Fleet,” was a luxury liner, taking mostly first-class passengers when it was built in 1931. However, because it was fast it was refitted as a troop ship during World War II, and at that point was ferrying troops back to the U.S. from Le Havre. Schiaparelli was photographed as she left, in a “simple little rayon bolero frock that had three exact duplicates on the deck at sailing time,” the writer noted, and with a prominent run in her nylon hose. She wore her usual turban, some low-heeled slingback shoes, and “enough costume jewelry to make anyone else but the chic French designer look like a walking Christmas tree.”

  They slept in dormitories; the ship was overcrowded and took an interminable two weeks to arrive. Schiaparelli was met at the docks by Yvonne, her longtime secretary, and they lunched at a well-stocked American mess. She wrote, “I do not think she had fed so well for a long time.” They then boarded an overnight train to Paris. After visiting the Rue de Berri she slipped, unannounced, through the door at 21 Place Vendôme. “Everyone from the concierge to the last midinette dropped her work to come to see ‘la patronne,’ ” Vogue reported. “The reception was of heartbreaking spontaneity, with tears of excitement; tears for all that had passed in the last four years …”

  Schiaparelli found that her workrooms were still functioning, although of the twelve she left in 1939 only eight were staffed. All of the important people were still there, including her indispensable tailor, René, “but many of the little workers, the girls who did the actual sewing,” had gone into dressmaking for themselves. It was the end of the season, so there were not many models in stock for her to look over. Not that it mattered. The evidence of the streets was enough to convince her that what had begun as amusing ideas: squarer shoulders, extravagant hats, skimpy skirts, had become exaggerated through several years of emphasis into absurdity. Women were overdue for a new look, and she knew exactly who was going to give it to them.

  But first she had to deal with the continuing issue of her own war record, now being seen in the context of the épuration sauvage, as it was called. Marie-Laure de Noailles had already seen it coming. As the daughter and heiress of an extremely wealthy Jewish banker, after the fall of France she was vulnerable to internment, or worse. She took the precaution of courting the general commanding Paris and became one of his closest friends. But that made her vulnerable to the charge of collabo once the tables were turned, and she knew it. Early in 1944 she was already predicting that the Noailles’ Parisian mansion would be destroyed, and pictured herself in the ruins, hair down, seated below one of her Goyas and wearing whatever remained of Schiaparelli’s toreador vest, waiting to be rescued by Bettina. As it was, no crowds rioted outside 11 Place des États-Unis or banged on the door late at night to inflict punishment on the Vicomte and Vicomtesse de Noailles, but others were not so lucky. Whole villages turned out to denounce women in the community who had slept with the German occupiers. The mildest rebuke was a shaved head; others involved being paraded naked, and worse.

  Old scores were being settled, but as Beevor and Cooper pointed out, nothing was simple. During the four years of occupation “France had witnessed every paradox imaginable, from anti-Semites who saved Jews to bien-pensant anti-fascists who betrayed them, from black-marketeers who helped the Resistance to Resistance heroes who pocketed ‘expropriations.’ ” After an orgy of humiliations, wildcat trials and summary justice, the De Gaulle administration managed to impose its authority and set tribunals in place to rule on the sometimes impossibly difficult decision of who had done what to whom.

  When it came to haute couture, those designers who remained in Paris were in a potentially difficult position as well, since in order to survive they had to work with German supervisors. How much was too much? It was one thing to deal with them professionally, but what about designers who met them in the right social circles, who shared a joke, a drink, or dinner?

  The question arrived almost at once. Lucien Lelong was summoned to account for having become, it was thought, too cozy with the occupiers. He was quickly exonerated, but a regional committee was formed, the Comité Régi
onal Interprofessionel d’Épuration de la Région Parisienne (CRIE), to examine the issues raised, such as “furthering the designs of the enemy” and “hampering the war effort of France and its Allies.” De Gaulle wanted a report on Schiaparelli and that was damning. So did Lelong. As soon as the European war ended, Schiaparelli was summoned by a mission of the CRIE, then in New York, to explain herself.

  The group, Lelong among them, was staying at the St. Regis. When she arrived she found her inquisitors seated in a semicircle; she sat in a corner. They asked some searching questions, ones she did not describe. She wrote, “I told this strange self-appointed council that my only crime was to have boldly defended the good name of French dressmaking from the beginning of the war to the end of it.” Under the circumstances it was probably all she could say.

  Schiaparelli was not charged and there was probably a reason for that. As Dominique Veillon pointed out in Fashion Under the Occupation, CRIE examined fifty-five cases in a two-year period and none of them concerned haute couture. She wrote, “There, as elsewhere, it would seem that the lower strata took the blame for the rest, and … it was better to be a famous couturier than an employee.” She was referring to the case of Madame X, a saleslady at the Galeries Lafayette, who was sentenced to two months’ suspension from work for having been too nice to her German clients. In another case the manager of a fancy goods firm was put on trial for having travelled beyond the Rhine. Schiaparelli could easily have faced trial for similar minor offenses and much more.

  Yet she escaped. The country was bankrupt, desperately needed exportable goods, and an art such as couture carried weight, economically and socially, because “everything that belonged to the domain of creation and good taste seemed to be directly exploitable and profitable.” In short, a liberated France needed her, could not do without her. She was home free.

  Not all the women fraternizing with the Germans were working-class; a few were prominent women of fashion. Chanel’s flagrant affair with a Nazi officer was eventually excused. Arletty, the French film star and Schiaparelli’s colleague, was not so lucky. The first terrible rumor going around Paris was that her breasts had been cut off. This never happened, but the likelihood is that she had her head shaved, because her hairdresser recalls making a wig for her. And Arletty, who had le don de la réplique (the gift of the retort), is said to have answered her accusers with, “My heart is French, but my ass is international.” Then there were the two daughters of Daisy Fellowes. Jacqueline de Broglie’s Austrian husband, Alfred Kraus, was accused of betraying members of the Resistance, and she had her head shaved. Daisy’s other daughter, Ermeline de Castéja, was locked up in Fresnes Prison for five months with prostitutes. “Their chief amusement, she told a friend later, was to jiggle their bare breasts at the men in the block opposite.”

  Then there were Gaston and Bettina. They had the biggest problem of all: the role Gaston had played in the founding of Vichy and his close association with Pétain, an act that, if it was once seen differently, had long since been understood as the establishment of a puppet government. Beevor and Cooper wrote, “Patriots who had supported the old Marshal in 1940 found by 1944 that his ‘path of collaboration’ had been the path of dishonour and humiliation at the hands of the occupying power.” It was said that Vichy was responsible for the Gestapo’s torture chambers on the Rue des Saussaies. “In a relentless campaign, L’Humanité did all it could to exploit stories of massacre and torture to their utmost.” What was undeniably true was that in 1942, Pierre Laval handed over thirty-seven thousand Jews and their children to be deported to Nazi concentration camps. Pétain was also implicated because he had been informed of the atrocities and injustices being committed and had done nothing, Beevor and Cooper wrote.

  The Bergerys, who had been living in Ankara for three years, were being warned by the Noailles and other friends not to return to France until passions had cooled. But Gaston was back in a few months. Bettina explained, “He insisted he wanted his story judged, because otherwise no one would know what he had or hadn’t done.” He was an honest man who had nothing to fear from public opinion, and so he returned voluntarily, she told everyone. What was not generally known was that, in the autumn of 1945, a warrant had already been issued for his arrest. She boasted that they had been given a special plane, one originally built to carry tanks, so that they could bring their household goods as well. They stopped off in Athens, slept in Corsica, and arrived the following morning. Both were arrested immediately and taken to the Ministry of the Interior. After brief questioning Bettina was released and went to stay with friends. She wrote, “Gaston is put in the worst cell in Fresnes which seems a little severe … because after all one travels thousands of miles to give oneself up, [so] why on earth do they think he will run away?”

  She was busy from seven in the morning until one a.m. trying to arrange things and begging friends to send food parcels to supplement Gaston’s diet of watery soup and not much else. “Everyone admits his ‘dossier’ is wonderful and that he has rendered much service to his country, but he shouldn’t have represented Vichy …” Now the newspapers were printing lies. She and Gaston could prove that “he never did any of the things they claim he did.” She was complaining to everyone. Their friends were torn between their admiration for Bettina’s loyalty and her inability to realize just how high feelings ran and just what kind of light Gaston Bergery had put himself in by playing a prominent role in a discredited regime. Had her friends known the truth, they might have judged Bergery even more harshly. As it was, this adept politician and perpetual turncoat, having watched the tide of war turn against him, was finding all sorts of virtues in De Gaulle’s victorious arrival. Just one day before Paris was liberated, on August 24, 1944, Gaston, as Vichy ambassador to Turkey, sent De Gaulle a letter offering to put himself and his embassy at the disposition of the victor and his government. If there was a reply, it has not survived.

  There were a few surprises in store for Bettina as well. She had expected to move into their old apartment at 29 Rue de Bourgogne. But that was locked and barred. They had also expected a speedy trial, but had to wait four years. As it turned out, Bergery should have been grateful for the delay. In the first rush to justice, his idol Pétain, then aged ninety, was condemned to death. (The sentence was commuted, and he died in prison in 1951.) As for his archrival, Laval, he had already been executed by a firing squad.

  No doubt the authorities were extremely interested in whatever Bergery could tell them about the inner workings of Vichy. They were also interested in the close friendship between the Bergerys and Franz Joseph von Papen, Catholic monarchist, nobleman, politician, soldier, chancellor to Hindenburg during the Weimar Republic, and German ambassador to Turkey during the war. Papen was at his post when the Bergerys arrived. It is clear from the extensive correspondence between Nini, Papen’s daughter, and Bettina, that they were in almost daily contact. There is a handwritten note in Bergery’s file with the Ministry of the Interior to the effect that Nini was Bergery’s mistress. If true, that does not seem to have affected her relationship with Bettina or vice versa, which is consistently affectionate and loving.

  Gaston Bergery’s trial finally took place on January 24, 1949, and lasted for a week. He argued energetically on his own behalf and had amassed testimony from powerful friends. He was acquitted. Bettina wrote, “That lurid melodrama of a procès [lawsuit] took up all [our] time. To look at it was exactly like the children’s Guignol in the Tuileries. The procureur [prosecutor] was the villain & wore the same dress & hat as the toy one—with the same carved curly nose & chin & beady eyes & varnished face & kept popping up and screaming with his arms out like that, too. He was too bad and Gaston, the hero, was too good. At the end of each scene, to make it more dramatic, Gaston was taken away chained to improbable criminals you wouldn’t believe if you saw them in Grand Guignol … So of course in the end there was an apotheosis of virtue rewarded while the wicked were thwarted & confounded—disappointed gnas
hings of teeth—The public was exactly like the public of children with the same reactions, crying and shouting with joy at the finish.

  “Since then the telephone has never stopped ringing and there is so much mail the letters are carried up in laundry baskets.” Showing the nerves of steel that brought him through the ordeal, Gaston had “escaped” to the Alps for some serious skiing. Since these were “heights I can never attain,” as Bettina obliquely put it, they were taking separate vacations.

  CHAPTER 12

  * * *

  PICKING UP THE ARROW

  The problems Schiaparelli faced when she returned to the Place Vendôme centered around what had happened during the four years that she was not there. The Germans had not succeeded in their bumbling effort to turn Berlin or Vienna into some kind of Aryan approximation of French chic. But they had made life increasingly difficult for haute couture by hedging it around with restrictions and continually tightening its access to materials, which amounted to the same thing. Even so, Schiaparelli & Cie had managed to staff the majority of its workrooms, and there was a continuing demand. Beevor and Cooper wrote, “It is often supposed that the principal customers for luxury clothes were the occupiers themselves; yet the ration cards known as cartes couture, issued to buyers, proved otherwise. The Germans took only two hundred a year from a total which dwindled from 20,000 in 1941 to 13,000 in 1944.” The world of fashion had come through, as Kenneth Clark liked to say, by the skin of its teeth.

  Perhaps more to the point, Paris had vanished from the fashion world in the U.S., always Schiaparelli’s biggest market, and a vigorous home-grown variety had emerged with none of the same handicaps in terms of manpower and materials. Her dilemma was the same one everyone else faced. Edmonde Charles-Roux wrote, “We must remember that this was an epoch during which the different couture houses were still imprisoned in a world of prejudice and jealousy, where each was an impregnable fortress set against the other, each supported by a clan of friends, backers, those who inspired artists, and loyal clients …” Some sort of common effort was obviously essential. But what? Then someone had a bright idea.