“I remember one time I was on my way to St. Moritz and happened to find myself in the same train compartment with Schiap. In due course she produced a complete travelling box of cocktails and all the glasses. She sent for ice and we had some delicious martinis on the train.” Bernier, who was tall, admired her. “She was a powerful personality. You never thought of her as being small.”
Schiaparelli’s attitude toward serious entertaining was both relaxed and shrewd. Like Poiret, she enjoyed creating extravagant parties, the more ambitious and outrageous the better. The party might not be cost effective, but how could one quantify goodwill and public relations? After World War II, extravagant displays of wealth started right up again, somewhat to the surprise of armchair historians who had been predicting the demise of such frivolities for most of the twentieth century. It was true that it was now considered necessary to give a ball for a charity and thereby impart a serious purpose, which the participants had not bothered to affect before 1939.
One of Schiaparelli’s parties of that period took place because she had not managed to get a date from the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture for the showing of her winter collection. So she decided to do it at home instead, in her spacious garden, at midnight. Platforms and tents were set up, runways built, chairs and tables imported, and the finishing effect was vast numbers of pink tartan hangings. There were also the kind of touches only she could invent, such as “strange animals in ball gowns looking out of windows.” Guests entering her front door found it festooned with pink tulle, and spotlights were trained on Mr. and Mrs. Satan, causing their red eyes to glow with menace. Outside a samba orchestra from Rio was making what Bettina called “an infernal din.” The theme of the collection was the grasshopper, the insect that had both frightened and fascinated Dalí, but the motif was not a part of the proceedings. That is, unless one included some “Brazilian dwarfs in check shirts” hopping around pretending to be monkeys and carrying plaid parasols, wrote Bettina, who was not amused.
The affair was a great success given the competition, which became more and more elaborate and expensive. There were evening affairs floodlit in glorious chateaux. Of all the hosts, perhaps Charlie de Beistegui, with his vast income from Mexican silver mines, was the most lavish and seigneurial. He would throw parties for five hundred at his Château de Groussay, attended by the Windsors, at which he might, for instance, present a ballet or a new play, offer fountains of champagne and munificent breakfasts at four in the morning. But his most memorable party, his fête de fêtes, took place in Venice in the late summer of 1951. Charlie had bought, three years before, the Palazzo Labia, a baroque seventeenth–eighteenth-century palace between two canals, the Cannaregio and the Grand, with a magnificent frescoed ballroom by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo. Cecil Beaton, who tended to see his own weaknesses reflected in the career of the misanthropic South American, once called Beistegui the Don Juan of interior decor. That was, Beaton said, because he fell in love with, then lost interest in, one beautiful house after another once he had finished enlarging and restoring it. And there was a great deal to like about this particular find, including a built-in theatre and a two-story library with twin spiral staircases.
Beistegui’s tastes had taken him from the early days when he admired and emulated Le Corbusier, all stark simplicity and hard angles, to his middle, surrealist period, and into a love of the baroque and the eclectic that lasted for the rest of his life. In fact his progress through the cornucopia of styles exactly resembled Schiaparelli’s; one is led to wonder which of them more influenced the other. Beaton admired Beistegui’s ability to mix and match, which could have also been said for Schiaparelli—and everyone knew what a generous host he was. As a finishing touch Beistegui decorated his rooms with people, and decorate them he did at his fabulous 1951 costume ball, which has entered the category of legend. All the top people came: Daisy Fellowes, Desmond Guinness, Natalie Paley, Alexis de Redé, Charles and Marie-Laure de Noailles, Etienne de Beaumont, Barbara Hutton, Lady Diana Cooper, Arturo and Patricia López-Willshaw, Salvador and Gala Dalí, even people like Gene Tierney and the Aga Khan who did not fit the usual categories.
They arrived by gondola and candlelight in a crush of wigs, fans, jewels, crinolines, and medals. Since the Tiepolo mural depicted the famous meeting of Cleopatra and Mark Antony, Lady Diana Cooper appeared as Cleopatra, wearing a gown by Oliver Messel, as inspired by Tiepolo, and attended by black pages; Baron Alfred de Cabrol was her Mark Antony. Jacques Fath was the Sun King, and his wife was the Queen of the Night. Daisy Fellowes, as the Reine d’Afrique, was attended by a barefoot slave carrying a parasol. Patricia López-Willshaw came as the Empress of China, her nails so elongated that they looked like ice picks. As for their host, who was dressed as a patrician Venetian, or perhaps he was Zeus, he had donned platform shoes to make his modest five foot six a good foot taller, so that he towered above his guests, and he created another sensation with cascades of curls tumbling around the shoulders of his scarlet cloak.
The up-and-coming couturier Jacques Fath made about thirty of the costumes, providing a tremendous boost to his growing career. Nina Ricci, Schiaparelli’s prewar competitor, made others, and so did Salvador Dalí. Schiaparelli herself is known to have designed costumes as well, but there is no mention of this, and if she was invited, as she must have been, there is no record of it. Her position as reigning couturier was being challenged by a new group of younger designers, and although her people were faithful to her, or as faithful as very rich clients addicted to novelty ever are, one by one they were peeling away. Schiaparelli was obliged to straddle a certain divide. She wanted the rich and famous, as long as they were still active enough to be appearing in society. They had to be just right. It was almost as tricky as the constant search for mannequins of the right age: not too young but not too old, either. To her credit, Schiaparelli had anticipated the problem when she began to single out young men like Paterson. Then she found Hubert de Givenchy, clever, gifted, handsome and wellborn; just the kind of person to attract a young clientele. But there was always the chance that he would leave the way Givenchy had, taking his customers with him.
There is a further factor. Givenchy made the offhand comment, speaking of Gaston Bergery, that one knew his wartime record but that, since he went everywhere, one could not go on cutting him indefinitely. Schiaparelli could well have sensed the same grudging acceptance and been bound to resent it, justifiably or not. She was working ceaselessly to reestablish her reputation. But too much had happened to undermine that easy flow of ideas, those high inspirations of the prewars. She was, after all, sixty in 1950, although she always hid her age. Her postwar designs too often show a falling off of concentration, a kind of ennui. They are too often pedestrian or clumsy, like the little girl’s dress covered with snakes. Her sense of the fitness of things seemed to have deserted her. She was giving up the fight.
In theory at least, Schiaparelli’s empire was still expanding. From the very beginning she sought to extend her reach by making numerous licensing agreements with U.S. manufacturers for coats and suits. By 1951 she had expanded to underwear, then to a line in men’s sportswear and ties and all manner of auxiliary items like hose and nail polish. By the winter of 1952–53 Schiaparelli had licensing agreements with eleven clothing and accessory manufacturers, not to mention mattresses and shower curtains and her name was on them all. But in contrast to the impression given by Palmer White in Empress of Fashion that she had created the designs herself, she had not. These were the work of American designers, as Dilys Blum has established in Shocking! The Schiaparelli Separates, for instance, were being designed by the American designer Pat Sandler. These were profitable agreements, and her sole role was to approve the designs and the color range. Thanks to Givenchy, the boutique had made a profit (that situation was reversed after he left), and then there were perfumes, which continued to sell well. Shocking in particular, with its Mae West bottle, which had become as synonymous with the name of Schiapare
lli as Chanel’s No. 5 was with hers, was dependably profitable.
But Shocking, launched in 1937, was suffering the fate of many other prewar perfumes in the postwar years. Its creator, Jean Carles, who had designed Tabu by Dana, as well as perfumes for Christian Dior and Lucien Lelong, had originally used a subtle amalgam of spices, floral essences, and animal derivatives to produce its very special blend of floral and musky elements—what has been called an Oriental fragrance—and these elements either were in short supply or would soon be banned. Carles, for instance, used such extracts as oakmoss (lichen), once commonly available, now banned, along with animal-derived musks. After Schiaparelli’s death, the perfume was sold and of necessity reconfigured. This was done in 1979 and 1997 by Martin Gras of Dragoco and bore only a passing resemblance to the 1937 original. The result has been described as smelling like “a hot jasmine tea” with a clove and a few dried rose petals thrown in. Although it is no longer made in the U.S., a German version of Shocking is for sale on the Internet in an eau de cologne, at a hefty price. A bottle of the prewar version has reached the status of an antique and, if it can be found at all, can fetch as much as sixteen hundred dollars (or a thousand pounds).
These commercial ventures were helping to support the couture business, which was losing money. There was the issue of vastly increased production costs after the war. Schiaparelli told the New York Times, “Life has changed for elegant women. Even people with money aren’t spending it the way they used to. Today only a feeble minority of women will pay the prices we are forced to ask.” As Givenchy discovered, she had always been wasteful in her buying of materials and much else. Perhaps, as he also thought, she had been too sure of herself as a dictator of fashion to realize that the ground had shifted under her feet. Just how much she lost when she lost touch is the point. The exhibition Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity attempted to come to grips with this subject when it opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2013. As Roberta Smith observed, at the end of the nineteenth century “painters and writers intent on bringing a new reality to their work were among the first to see fashion as a vital expression of modern life.” From Degas, Renoir, Manet, Albert Bartholomé, and James Tissot, they began to pay such exact attention to what women were wearing that the Metropolitan was able to exhibit, side by side with the art, examples from its own collection of the very costumes being depicted. This was more than just verisimilitude. It had to do with something that artists understood: “an almost hallucinatory swirl in which art and artifact continually change places.” Beyond that was the way in which fashion expressed the roles women played in culture, and as an outer carapace for the inner self. This in turn called for a sensibility exquisitely attuned to the slightest tremor of change as small as the shape of a button or the size of a pleat. Schiaparelli’s success had been based upon her intuitive understanding of that expression in its smallest manifestations. Once she lost that magical gift, she lost her power. Business dropped off. Her debts mounted. Banks refused to lend her any more money. The collection she presented on February 3, 1954, would be her last.
In a series of articles written for the Star, a London tabloid, in 1953, the year before she went bankrupt, Schiaparelli’s tone was melancholic. People liked to tell her how lucky she was, which was irritating, because she never had a moment’s luck and whatever she achieved she had to fight for. Even fame gave her no comfort. “I do not believe for a moment that women who make tremendous successes of their lives are happy. Fame for a woman is invariably built on unhappiness and disappointment …” She also wrote, “Alas I am not in love with myself for I am devoured with a burning desire to criticize. I criticize everything and everybody. I criticize other women … and most of all, I criticize myself.”
Fault-finding, disillusionment, the emptiness of success—it sounded like a mood of depression, which could be expected. Some months before that, she underwent an operation. She does not say for what, but her description of it is nevertheless revealing. She was given “one of the new drugs,” what, she did not know, which acted on her in a strange way. “I saw or I sensed with the eyes of my mind the knife slide through my flesh, and I was acutely aware of the various layers of this flesh,” she wrote. The fact was, she felt no pain and no fear, either, just completely detached from the event—“as if it were happening to somebody else”—rather suggesting she might have had an out-of-body experience. Given her beliefs, it is not surprising that she told her surgeon afterward. “Being a very wise man, he smiled and merely said, ‘It might happen …’ ”
A couple of weeks later she was recovering at home when she contracted “a slight cold” and was given another new drug. She had a violent allergic reaction. “Without warning I went mad,” she wrote, and spent a “fiendish” night. Her servants at the Rue de Berri found her “crawling over the floor like a wounded animal.” She was given a powerful sedative, slept for twenty-five hours, and woke up with “the feeling of having dipped into a different and unknown world.” These crises combined to bring about an altered sense of awareness. “Life as I knew it felt different and a little tasteless, as if some of the salt had been taken out of it.… I was haunted by the feeling that something was out of tune in my outlook and reaction to life.” She was living “in much closer contact with the beyond,” so that she had to make a conscious effort to leave the house and meet people. When Gogo suggested they attend the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II on June 23, 1953, normally something that would not have interested her, she decided to go. She went to Ireland and then to visit her mother and sister in Rome. She felt like a farmer who, after working all day in his fields and weeding his flower garden, suddenly realizes “he has forgotten to prune his fruit trees.” What had she forgotten? Why had she become a couturier? What was the point of it all?
In March of 1954, Bettina wrote, “Elsa came to dinner in a sad state. She’s been ill and her heart ‘acts up’ so she can’t sleep at night.” She looked as if she had hardly bothered to comb her hair, and there was a hole in her stocking. She wanted to talk about the importance of playing with children when you had them, her mind returning to old, nagging reminders of things she had neglected to do. She fell asleep during the dinner and then “came out staggering to leave.” She talked about bank managers who had supported her for years refusing to lend her any more money, and disastrous sales.
A couple of months later, in May, she was back again, looking better and wearing a pale blue blotting-paper coat that was “smarter than anything I had seen shown anywhere this year,” Bettina wrote loyally. Elsa was once more back from Rome, had gone to a big party the night before, and was trying to write a book about herself. “She didn’t know how to write and didn’t know what anyone would make of it.” It was the fault of her enemies for the decline of her career. The Chambre Syndicale de la Couture had done everything it could “to get me down and out.” They had treated her “very badly, always.” She added, “I really don’t feel like living in this country any more.” Bettina thought she was worried about her health and pretending not to. But she was being adorable. “Elsa is sweet. She’s in a mood of gentlest, kindest affection now.” There was such charm in her black eyes. “She’s always a personnage.”
The staff had left and the House of Schiaparelli was no more. But a small suite of offices remained open at 21 Place Vendôme. Elsa could afford to stay on at 22 Rue de Berri, thanks to the perfume business and licenses, and to travel as before. And there were the consolations of Hammamet, on the Tunisian coast, where she had bought a small but charming beach house in 1950. She and her friends had stopped there on her ill-fated cruise to Greece. She already knew George Sebastian, a Romanian host and bon vivant, who had discovered Hammamet before the war. In the 1930s he built Dar Sebastian, one of the great Moorish houses, now a museum, and they were invited to dine. It was a perfect house, Schiaparelli wrote, “like a line that never breaks. The architecture is white and smooth—arcade after arcade, alleys of ever-growing cypresses, and a vast,
crystal blue swimming pool …” Hammamet was an unpretentious fishing village with an old Turkish fort. Cocteau and Camus were among the French intelligentsia who had discovered it, and Sebastian had gathered around him an equally sophisticated crowd of photographers, fashionable architects, writers, and others in the manner of a minor sultan, or eighteenth-century master of ceremonies. He admired Schiaparelli and entertained her and her friends lavishly. How she would love to have a house there herself. But there was nothing for sale. But then she discovered “a jolly old Irish colonel” who wanted to sell, and she moved in.
Sylvia and Robert Blake, a young American foreign-service couple stationed in Tunisia, rented the house for a couple of summers in the 1950s. Sylvia Blake recalled that the house was of white stucco and quite small, with perhaps two bedrooms. Everything was simplicity itself, white walls, black wrought iron, and neutral furnishings. There would be orange and yellow throw pillows made of a puckered nylon that could be easily washed. There was a long white terrace with black and white stone tiles facing the sea, and everything was understated and practical, with straw chairs that you could fold up and carry down to the beach. It was very hot, but there never seemed to be mosquitoes, and so they spent lazy days in the sun watching the camels on the beach, with their slow, ambling gait. They would drink cocktails on the porch while the shadows slid across the stone tiles. Schiaparelli went there as often as she could, and reveled in her solitude. “After buying this house … it suddenly struck me that I had unconsciously turned to the orient which my father had so greatly loved.”
In the summer of 1954, Schiaparelli was thinking about it again. Bettina wrote to her sister Anne, “Elsa is being brave and valiant and keeping her chin up and all that—She is really someone very nice and courageous and always good in time of trouble—but her luck is out. She meant to go to her house in Hammamet—50 km from Tunis—a house she adores—and bought for a refuge—to retire from the world—go swimming and read and write and have all her old copains to stay with her and ride around on camels with Bedouins—& now just when she needed it most, she can’t go there, for the Arabs are cutting up everyone into little bits and machine-gunning them as well” (a reference to the war of independence, which was raging). “Poor Elsa—she’d asked us to spend the summer there with her—We explained we couldn’t (Gaston couldn’t go so far away for so long and it’s not worth it for a week only.) Today she said, ‘Of course I could go and be murdered by the Arabs; it would be a solution—but it’s still a little too soon for that.’ ”
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