A small, poised personage was waiting for Charles Collingwood on March 18, 1960, the day he made one of his Person to Person television interviews across the Atlantic. The show, which Edward R. Murrow began in 1953 and made famous, was taken over by Collingwood for its final two years in 1959. Collingwood, if not comfortably ensconced in an armchair as Murrow had been, lobbed gentle questions from a New York studio at Elsa Schiaparelli, at home in the Rue de Berri. The idea was to make the event as relaxed, informal, and unscripted as possible. But since it was live, considerable advance planning was essential, including as many as six television cameras, snaking cables, special lighting, and wireless microphones, and Schiaparelli looked, not into the camera, but somewhere out of the frame as she talked. So the whole affair was slightly surreal, which she probably liked.
Schiap, as Collingwood called her, was then almost eighty, a trim figure in a dark dress with matching bolero-style jacket, a double row of pearls at her neck, and a rather handsome brooch pinned to one side, much in the manner of European royalty. She often wore a turban but in this case her upswept dark hair was becomingly arranged in an off-center knot of curls, and she wore low-heeled pumps. For a couturier with a reputation to uphold, it was a shock to find her so conventionally dressed. As the segment began, she was waiting patiently, standing against the fireplace in her living room, her hands behind her back. This was in the days of black-and-white television, a huge disadvantage given what was clearly a storm of color: shocking pinks, vivid turquoise blues, and saffron yellows inspired, perhaps, by Tunisian painted doorways. It was a cabinet of curiosities, and she was the small dark eye of calm.
Schiap began to talk with animation, rolling her r’s in fluent, accented English, primarily about her much-admired Boucher tapestries of singing, dancing figures. “As you see, they are very gay; they bring music and laughter. It is a very happy room, like the rest of the house.” She pointed out her wide-screen television set, something of a novelty in Paris. She had tried to integrate its industrial lines into her vintage surroundings by propping it on a stack of seventeenth-century leatherbound dictionaries with modest success, indicating them with one elegantly shod toe. One had the impression of a cumulative clutter as the years went by, in which recent finds had been jammed into the general hubbub by the simple expedient of putting them on top of something else; paintings on chairs, books in great wobbly piles, vases drooping with daffodils and calla lilies. There were animal horns mounted in silver, spotted marble leopards, painted candlesticks, and Murano glass vases, pillboxes and trays, tapestries and Bessarabian rugs and mirrors and huge swags of satins and velvet in massive patterns over windows. A room that simultaneously beckoned and repelled, since there was clearly nowhere to sit.
Schiaparelli at about the time of her Charles Collingwood television interview, 1969 (illustration credit 13.1)
Schiap had freed one Recamier-style sofa for the occasion and claimed it, legs decorously crossed, looking serenely ahead with her high forehead, perfectly spaced eyes, and self-possession, describing her early life and, once in a while, revealing a wide, disarming smile. She retold the story about going to the ball in a homemade gown full of pins and what happened as they began to fall out. She talked about the immediacy of her success, reiterating one of her familiar themes about how much women lost when they chose to compete with men. She talked about an era of elegance in fashion that was gone forever. She said most women had too many clothes anyway. They should think hard, buy only what they needed, and then the very best. She did not know why she had been so successful; it was just a matter of luck and timing. She thought male designers were better than women because, like it or not, women tended to design for themselves, whereas male designers were more objective and could see what looked good on a woman—a kind thought, if debatable.
Schiaparelli in 1950, on the hunt for yet another auction find. The person with her is not identified. (illustration credit 13.2)
She described her travels, her perfume business, and how she gave dinner parties. If it was a casual meal, they might meet in her cellar bar. Formal dinners took place in her crowded dining room, with its circular table and its Louis XV Revival small gold chairs. For instance, on the table in pride of place was a huge porcelain boar’s head, its mouth open to reveal a lolling tongue, from the East India Company and very Daliesque. There was an exquisite rooster, all in silver, with a detachable head, that served as a wine dispenser. She did not use it for that. “What, you don’t serve wine?” said Collingwood, misunderstanding. There was a huge, ornate candelabra on the table, leaving barely enough room for one more ornament, a large white china lamb. She lingered over the lamb, clearly her favorite. Whenever there was a dinner party the lamb took pride of place, surrounded by flowers and grass so that he could eat, too. Collingwood clearly did not know what to do with that idea. Schiaparelli revealed a small smile.
There was something equally peculiar about Schiap’s assertion, obviously a conviction, that she was physically strong and had acquired her stubborn trait because she had been fed goat’s milk as a baby. Behind the placid exchange lurked the faintest hint of the irrational, a jolt of antic amusement, unexamined qualities of mind and heart that had turned a scatter-shot, moon-struck interior into something resembling a magic toyshop.
The room also contained a large, Empire-style birdcage on a stand. It was full of birds but none of them were alive, because, she said, the cage was much too fragile to house the real thing. Since most of her possessions referred, obliquely or not, back to some ghostlike memory, it was not hard to find the reference: in this case, her prize possession. It was Picasso’s Birds in a Cage, painted in 1937 and, perhaps prudently, not on view for the TV tour. Quite when Schiap bought it is unknown. The painting shows two doves, one white, seated on a cushion with wings folded, beside what looks like four eggs. The other, a black dove, its wings open, has battered against the sides of the cage and broken through, about to take flight. The painting is believed to refer to the period in Picasso’s life of 1935–36 when Marie-Thérèse Walter, one of his many mistresses, gave birth to a baby girl. That happened to coincide with the arrival of another mistress, the surrealist photographer Dora Maar. When Marie-Thérèse discovered this fact she challenged Picasso to choose between them. He liked things the way they were. If she felt that way, she had better fight it out with Dora. The battle supposedly took place, because the black dove (Dora) obviously won.
If Schiaparelli knew anything about the supposed history of her painting, which has its ironical aspects, she made no mention of it. For her, Birds in a Cage represented two aspects of herself in the long struggle for self-realization. She wrote, “Inside the cage a poor, half-smothered white dove looks dejectedly at a polished pink apple; outside the cage an angry black bird with flapping wings challenges the sky.” This was not quite right, either, because there is more than one round object inside the cage, clearly a clutch of eggs. And the black dove is not yet free from its prison. However, its symbolic importance is obvious enough. Schiap wrote that even if she were to end her life in abject poverty, as her mother predicted, sleeping on a straw mattress with a crust of bread in an empty room, she would not be alone, because “the Picasso would be hanging on the wall!” To her the painting symbolized a long journey. “In spite of success, glamour, and despair, the only escape is in [to] oneself, and nobody can take that away.”
Collingwood had introduced Schiap as inventor of shocking pink and Shocking perfume, and had little apparent interest in her career as a prominent couturier. That could have been because she did not want to talk about it. When Mary Blume, feature writer for the New York Herald Tribune, quizzed her on the same subject the following February, she said she had not attended the spring collections because “they bore me to death.” When in New York, she shopped at Ohrbach’s, and in Paris she bought from Balenciaga, that favorite of Givenchy’s, perhaps because of his reputation as a couturier’s couturier. When Blume arrived at the Rue de Berri she found
Schiap at an easel, working on a painting. Asked to recollect the moment fifty years later, she said, “I sort of conjure up an easel with a small invisible canvas on it, but I think I am making this up.” But she was not. Schiap had shown her work on Person to Person, causing the host to gushingly comment that she was about to make a name as a painter as well. Schiap responded calmly that she did not know about that; she was just having fun. She was perfectly right to be modest about the painting, which was a shameless Toulouse-Lautrec pastiche of two apaches dancing, or rather, one determined partner pulling the other off his feet, while the victim’s face expressed a silent scream that would have done justice to Munch.
How far she went as an artist is not known, but that she turned her back on fashion is not quite true, either, if only because of Bettina. After Schiaparelli closed the doors of the Place Vendôme, Bettina went to work for Lanvin-Castillo and then for Madame Grès. She was writing about it all for French, British, and American magazines, including Vogue. Bettina was au courant on everything, including, in 1958, the new Saint-Germain-des-Prés look, which was “black woollen stockings, no lipstick, a tweed middy blouse and the same dirty necks they always wore,” she told her sister Anne. “I’m all for pearls and mink hats myself.” Dior having died at the unexpectedly early age of fifty-two in 1957, he had been succeeded by the young and gangling Yves Saint Laurent. Schiap and Bettina went together to Yves’s opening show. Bettina later reported, speaking of Saint Laurent and his look-alike, the equally waiflike young art sensation Bernard Buffet, that “two thin, pale, sad, shy, long, uncomfortable young vampires … have driven everyone mad. M. Buffet appears at his weekly vernissages with Marie-Louise Bousquet biting one of his ears and Louise de Vilmorin kissing the other, while M. Saint Laurent has Figgy R … and Mrs. Luling running before him like motorcyclists before M. Coty” (René Coty, president of France from 1954 to 1959).
“At M. Saint Laurent’s coronation at Dior’s the public behaved in a way the convulsionaires of St. Médard [a popular medieval saint] would have found excessive. And at Bernard Buffet’s exhibition of the life of Joan of Arc yesterday they were all half-swooning with their eyes sticking out in ecstasy before those colored cartoon strips of history for children … with poor Joan of Arc looking like German 1915 caricatures of people in concentration camps.
“When both heroes appeared together at Marie-Louise Bousquet’s before, Marie-Louise, Carmel Snow & Lilia Sangro nearly went into fits historiques and 3 young ladies of Vogue were carried out fainting, the emotion was so intense …” Later, “Figgy was saying, ‘It’s a madhouse’ & ‘It’s wonderful!’ & Elsa asked, ‘What’s a madhouse?’ and, ‘What is so wonderful?’ The others answered with one voice, ‘Dior, of course.’ ” In her usual straightforward way, Schiap replied, “ ‘It isn’t wonderful. It’s disgusting nonsense. [Marcel] Boussac [owner of the Maison Dior] has bought up all the dresses. It’s a racket worse than gangsters & that miserable Fellagha [bandit] boy of 21 pushed into that publicity circus around the revolting publicity funeral!’ She continued, ‘I don’t doubt he’s better than Dior, anyone would be—Dior never knew how to cut a dress, he had to prop them up with whalebones & stuff them with petticoats to make them stay on & he made women into such ridiculous monsters it stopped men looking at them.’ Whereupon,” Bettina continued, “Figgy and the Beau [unidentified] … screamed with rage & there was an uproar. Pamela burst into tears, floods & floods. ‘Dior was my best friend—I adored him, & I can’t hear him spoken of like that,’ sobbed Pamela, while handkerchiefs were supplied, & Figgy said to Alexie [unidentified] ‘Take me home’ & threw herself into the car with such violence she shot right through it & out the other side onto the pavement.”
But Bettina had not finished. “After his first showing at Dior’s, Saint Laurent went onto the balcony of the shop holding his hand over his nose while the whole of the shop, all the workroom people & vendeuses, & customers, went into the store & applauded … And all the other couturiers died of jealousy because there was a trick they had never thought of, & Chanel (who had reopened four years before) announced she would retire again, & Balenciaga refused to show to the buyers next day, as he was supposed to—and I won’t tell you what a state my Mr. Castillo was in, who had the misfortune to show a collection on the same day.” She concluded, referring to Saint Laurent’s girlish styles, “Everyone in Paris has gone mad, as you will notice when you see your most decrepit friends in the little starched baby dresses above the knees Diorissimo put them into.”
Daisy Fellowes, of course, was there, now sixty-five and in seeming good health. Bettina saw her recently, she wrote to Anne. In December 1962, Bettina and Schiap had one of their long talks, because Daisy had suddenly died a week after they both had seen her and neither of them could deal with it. Elsa said, “Daisy, I just can’t conceive—because you know I had dinner with her—all by herself—just we two—you don’t know how nice she was, and full of things she was going to do … Well, I’m glad I had that time with her & I’ll keep the memory of it …” Bettina’s reaction was that Daisy’s death meant the end of her world. She asked herself who was left. “Elsa of course, but she’s always a little disintegrated. When she shut her shop she lost half of herself.”
Gogo was always on the move, and so were Marisa and Berinthia, born a year apart and inseparable. Elsa spent holidays with them at Klosters, or at Saint-Tropez or Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat. There would be an annual trip to Venice, where Schiap, who always stayed at the Hotel Danieli, lunched on the Lido beach in her own cabana, dining from gold plates and attended by servants in white livery wearing white gloves. Berinthia—called Berry Bee to distinguish her from her father, also called Berry—was blond and athletic, with a strong chin. She took up photography. Marisa, tall and reed slim, with auburn hair, was introspective, single-minded, and intense. Her vivid features and arresting looks bear, in certain lights and the right angles, a clear family resemblance to her famous grandmother. After becoming one of the world’s top models, she became a film star and successful memoirist.
Pictures of Gogo’s family taken on holiday show a united group. In one, subsequently published by Marisa, Robert Berenson sits on a capacious sofa with a daughter on each side in pretty peasant costumes. Gogo is on the floor in front of her husband. There are small floppy dogs on laps, and everyone is laughing. Despite appearances, the girls and their parents, especially their mother, were not close. The girls attended a series of boarding and finishing schools in Switzerland, Italy, France, and England. Just as their mother and grandmother before them, they suffered from the physical, but also psychic, distance from their mother. Berry, the more extroverted of the two, told Judy Klemesrud of the New York Times in 1973, without apparent bitterness, that she seldom saw her mother, perhaps only every two or three years. “I really don’t have that much in common with her.” She was then living with the actor Tony Perkins, whom she later married. Marisa writes about the agony she felt at age five or six, when she was sent to live in a pension far from home, feeling betrayed and abandoned.
A studio portrait, 1960 (illustration credit 13.3)
As for her grandmother, Marisa found her cold and distant, but she could be generous. Schiap invited her to live at the Rue de Berri on the top floor under the eaves, she wrote in Moments intimes. She had her own small apartment with a private entrance and access up the service elevator. She could come and go as she pleased and lived there for several years. As her mother had been, she was intimidated by Schiaparelli’s cold eye, which took particular exception to her rapidly dwindling skirt lengths. They clashed once Marisa set her career path on becoming a model. Nice girls did not do this. Nice girls from good families waited until they made appropriate alliances with nice boys from good families. Schiap even set Marisa up with a suitable candidate, but Marisa recoiled. Schiaparelli’s point of view hardly makes sense unless one understands that in the world of her day, the career of a mannequin was anonymous and short. She could hardly have known that Maris
a’s looks and her gifts as an actress would catapult her into international fame. What she was deeply aware of was the emptiness of mere ambition, and there she had a point. Neither she nor Marisa had successful marriages.
In the early days of their own, happier marriage, Robert Berenson and his wife had a town house in New York on East Seventy-first Street and a house in Cove Neck, Long Island, as well as in Klosters. Berenson was president of two of Aristotle Onassis’s shipping companies and commuted to Wall Street by seaplane, operating in the world of high finance and shipping. After World War II, surplus government tankers were for sale at bargain prices, but only to American companies. When a group of wealthy Greek shipowners tried to buy them, they were turned down by the U.S. Maritime Commission because they were foreigners. Just two weeks later, in September 1947, three stockholders formed the United States Petroleum Carriers, Inc.; one of them was Berenson, holding one hundred shares.
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