The new corporation filed an application with the Maritime Commission to buy four tankers, and this was approved two or three months later. Barely two weeks after that, the same tankers ended up in Greek hands. Nine individuals were eventually indicted by the U.S. Department of Justice on charges of conspiring to defraud the government in multimillion-dollar deals of surplus ships. Among them were Aristotle Onassis and Robert Berenson. In 1958 Onassis paid a fine, but Berenson is not mentioned in news accounts, so presumably the case against him was dismissed. That same year Berenson joined the foreign service as director of the International Cooperative Administration to Yugoslavia; in 1960 he headed the same mission to Libya. All seemed well on the surface. But, Marisa wrote, their father had suffered some financial reversals, and a wave of panic went through the house. One day a team of bailiffs knocked on the door. They were in debt, and their furniture was being seized. Marisa ran into her father’s office and found him sitting at a table, his head in his hands. He was crying.
By 1962 Elsa had become very concerned about the financial future of her daughter and her family. In December she went to spend Christmas in Klosters with them—they were renting, having been obliged to sell their house. Robert Berenson was ill, with a malady never described, and would die three years later. Elsa wrote, evidently thinking of him, “People are beginning to be terribly mortal.” She added, “Well of course you never know who’s going to be next—maybe me—but not likely for it is never the one it should be—Only I can’t go yet, because someone has to be around to look after Gogo & now she’s got only me to help her through this—it’s not a pleasant moment for anybody.”
Elsa was making her usual trips to New York, but the city had lost its appeal. The stores were showing very cheap things or very expensive ones, but there was a paucity of ideas. She lunched with old friends, including Charlie de Beistegui, but he had become impossibly rude and difficult. She ran into Gloria Swanson, who looked marvellous and was charming and kind. They went to a nightclub show together, but it turned out to be dreary. “No, let’s face it,” Elsa concluded, “New York is just awful, & terribly hot.”
Schiaparelli was back in 1966 for her annual visit, and Rena Lustberg, who was fashion director for Schiaparelli Stockings, took her around town. The visit, to approve the new styles and colors, was just a formality, since she never did disapprove. She was staying at the St. Regis, where Dalí invariably stayed, looking trim and chic as always, wearing her stylish turban. Lustberg did not know about Schiap’s terror of taxis and found out only when Schiap turned pale and trembling, so she hired a car for her. They became friendly. Schiap was obviously lonely and wanting to talk. She would invite Rena to her room for drinks and a tempting tray of hors d’oeuvres. They would go on to dinner, usually at the Colony Club. Whenever they appeared, the maître d’ would inquire whether Madame would like “her usual table,” which turned out to be a booth opposite the kitchen. One day as they waited to board the elevator at the St. Regis, as luck would have it, Dalí walked out. They looked at each other, but there was no surprised gasp of recognition, no smile, no words of greeting; Dalí did not even twirl his famous mustache. He simply nodded, Schiap nodded, and both of them kept on walking. Lustberg did not know why but was somehow convinced they had had an affair.
Schiaparelli in later years, date unknown, with her two granddaughters, Berry Berenson, left, and Marisa Berenson (illustration credit 13.4)
Schiap was in an elegiac mood, one of reflection and reconsideration. After all, she had become a dress designer by accident; it seemed an easy way to earn money. Supposing that she had been free to do something else, what could it have been? Perhaps a doctor—but she shuddered at the idea of being responsible for someone else’s life, and what if she was wrong? Perhaps a nun? That needed a stronger faith than she could muster. What about being a wife? Life with a man who insisted on dominating someone like her would be impossible. On the other hand, how could she respect anyone she could dominate? It was a conundrum.
On the other hand, she might not have minded being a kept woman. Courtesans could be very wise and knew “more about the souls of men than any philosopher.” It was a lost art. She would also have enjoyed being a cook. What was more satisfying than caring for the body as well as the soul? Or perhaps an actress, or a writer. The career that most attracted her, however, was that of sculptor: “The dream of being a Pygmalion could have been irresistible. Sculpture seems to me to be one of the arts nearest creation.” She was not sorry, after all these years, that she had closed her doors on the Place Vendôme. “I knew that in order to build more solidly one is sometimes obliged to destroy.” There must be a way to approach the old problems from a new direction, toward a new elegance in manners and clothes, a new aristocracy, leading to a recovery of one’s creative powers and sense of beauty. That moment must surely arrive. So she mused as the years passed.
Her circle of friends was shrinking, and as she approached eighty, Elsa herself was in fragile health. It did not help that in 1970, a friend more or less died on her doorstep. Tony (not otherwise identified) appeared one evening just as she was starting to eat dinner, somewhat tipsy. “He had a stiff whisky and then stayed for the meal, during which he consumed a full bottle of wine,” Bettina recorded. Then he became “hilariously confused, tripped over the carpet and fell flat on the floor. Elsa was petrified. She thought he was dead, but it turned out he was not. He picked himself up painfully, believing he had broken his arm. Her maid and cook got him into a taxi, took him home and put him to bed. Next morning the whole of one side of his body was stiff. Marie-Laure stayed with him all that night. He was taken to the American Hospital the following morning, had a second stroke and died.” Elsa thought Tony must have taken opium or some other kind of drug that had been adulterated, but Bettina doubted that. “Anyway whether he was 83, as announced, or 88, as one says, Tony died young, which must be some satisfaction to him.”
A year later Schiap herself had a medical crisis, a pulmonary embolism. Her symptoms: difficulty breathing, chest pains, and palpitations, pointed to a deep vein thrombosis. She made a good recovery, but other small incidents followed, and she began to have problems moving around. Marisa, still staying at the Rue de Berri, wrote, “Stairs became more difficult for her, either going up or down.” The house’s elevator was always breaking down, and the fact that three floors separated Schiaparelli from her bedroom became an almost insuperable barrier. She came to the reluctant decision to sell her beloved house. It was the work of a moment to find a buyer and a reasonably spacious apartment. But as the time for leaving drew closer, she was faced with an equally difficult problem, one she could hardly bear to think about. Obviously she owned far too much furniture for any apartment, not to mention books, pictures, objets, and all those precious souvenirs gathered over the decades. What was she to give away or sell when she did not want to lose any of them? Marisa wrote, “Time had stripped her of everything that made sense of her life.”
Schiap had not yet moved out of the Rue de Berri when she had another “congestion cérébrale” and was rushed to hospital, paralyzed on one side. Yet another crisis followed, and she slipped into a coma. She was moved back to her own bed and died there in her sleep on November 13, 1973. She was eighty-three years old. Marisa was at her side. She wrote, “I think that, unconsciously, Schiap had wanted to die in the house that she had already sold, rather than leave it alive.”
The handsome historic house on the Rue de Berri is no more. It was long ago torn down to make way for an office building and a parking garage. But clues to the way it once looked were on view when the Marisa Berenson collection was put up for auction at Christie’s in Paris in January 2014. Pictures, furniture, lamps, furs, costumes—in particular a fantastic collection of Chinese and North African jackets and caftans—gave potential buyers a firsthand look at the discriminating and original mind behind them.
Who but Schiaparelli, in 1931, could have invented a feathered boa in yellows, blues
, pinks, and emerald greens? What about those wineglasses made of coconut-brown wood engraved with roses on silvered metal stems? That curious upside-down fish, the tail of which supports something that turns out to be an inkpot? Two wooden Moorish figurines in elaborate costumes engaged in a stately dance? Or a screen by Marcel Vertès, that artist who so delicately identified the mood of her work in his perfume advertisements, with his impudent, droll, and cavorting spirits?
Here at last was a close-up look at the Aubusson tapestries on a Chinese motif that had hung in her salon and were always seen in black and white photographs, now revealing their delicate blues, grayish greens, and Chinese reds. Here, too, the lifesize figures of Mr. and Mrs. Satan so often described by visitors, looking even more malevolent with their cloven hoofs and glittering smiles. Everything was up for sale. Among the tables, chairs, and screens, the forgotten memorabilia of a long life, one found a christening robe of unbleached organza, five boxes of talcum powder, a 1936 portrait of Gogo by Léonor Fini, two empty perfume bottles, a group of assorted buttons, forty tightly rolled calico dress patterns, a handbag, and an eighteenth-century English painting of two little girls playing with toys. From such tantalizing fragments, Schiaparelli had summoned up a whole world.
When Schiap died, Bettina Bergery was not surprised. She wrote in her diary, “At the end of the afternoon, Schiap’s new perfume secretary called up to say she had died in the night. No detail about the death.” The tone is curiously detached. Bettina adds, “I feel nothing.” What happened to cause this response is not known. But she adds, “She was a remarkable creature all the same and part of the family that life brought to me … I shall certainly miss her. ‘One less of us,’ as Boris [Kochno] says at funerals.” Bettina’s handwriting had become more and more shaky. Mass was celebrated at the fashionable church of Saint-Philippe-du-Roule in the 8th arrondissement, and well attended. Bettina’s long entry concerned itself mostly with who was there. The account is interrupted with worries about Gaston, who was rapidly fading as a result of Alzheimer’s and would die a year later. Bettina wrote, “He is losing his mind and going pipi everywhere.” Gaston was constantly slipping out of the house, wandering the streets, getting lost, and then the police would have to bring him back. Meantime she did not have enough help at home and watched him constantly.
Schiaparelli was entombed, not in the family vault in Rome—she had given up her space in favor of a relative—or at Père Lachaise or anywhere else in Paris. Close friends had a house in Frucourt, a sleepy little village in Picardy no one had ever heard of, and Schiap loved its village churchyard for its beauty and tranquility. Only a few attended the ceremony, including Gogo, the two granddaughters, and Gogo’s second husband, Gino Cacciapuoti di Giugliano, a Neapolitan nobleman. Schiaparelli’s tombstone is a plain graphite slab marked with a Picard cross, and her signature marks the spot, traced in gold.
Whenever she was in Hammamet, Schiap’s favorite place to sit was the moucharabia, the terrace that was part room, part porch; a kind of way station between the regulated life and unbounded vistas. Jean-Michel Frank’s orange sofa, of Moroccan leather, padded with bright pillows from the local bazaar, was her invariable choice. As twilight fell, she would cover herself with a Scottish rug of yellow-and-black tartan, surround herself with her favorite objects (a silver cigarette case from Leningrad, a red rug bought from the Bedouins, Chinese slippers, Swedish matches, Turkish cigarettes) and sit peacefully in a kind of reverie, as if transformed into Arethusa after escaping from a river god.
What thoughts floated through her mind cannot be known. Perhaps the Swiss guards at the Vatican, whose uniform, she once said, was just about perfect. Perhaps she was remembering her childhood as she skipped in the gardens of the Palazzo Corsini under the mathematical rows of tangerine and lemon trees. Or the Cocteau statues on Daisy Fellowes’s lawn, a salon all in silver leaf, lipstick pockets, upside-down shoes, beetle necklaces, sparkling blue wigs, telephone handbags, the raucous laugh of Uncle Henry, lilacs in the living room, Gogo’s screams in the “méchante boîte,” Mario gasping for breath, Marie-Laure in espadrilles, a baby in an orange crate, or a Satan with glaring eyes.
Perhaps she remembered the time when she and Gogo crouched in the ditch while German planes strafed their car, her own bold sorties into enemy territory and frantic escapes. Perhaps she still saw in her mind’s eye the flash and dash of an Arab in white on a black stallion, Jean-Michel Frank painting dancing figures on her living-room walls, faces in droplets of blood, flayed skin, and a man bleeding on the floor of a Mexican bar. How often had she misjudged and blamed others, and how often refused to forgive herself? Was that even possible?
The house in Hammamet
The allée to the beach in Hammamet
Perhaps she thought about none of these things as she lingered in this special place. Perpetually self-critical and dismissive, perhaps she never considered the extent to which she had transformed a lowly craft into a high art. Joan Acocella has described the way Isadora Duncan’s life was a reflection of her times; the same could be said of Schiaparelli. Like Duncan, she too embraced the utopian idealism of the period, with its visionary, communistic views. She too was influenced by art’s return to primitivism and symbolism, and the wave of feminism found its expression in her own radical ideas about dress reform. She invented her particular idiosyncratic version of “free love.” Even when it became unfashionable, she persisted in her belief in a spirit world, another existence, and these convictions grew, if anything, stronger as she aged. For her, Hammamet was “the last port before the next world,” and the maxim that prefaces her memoir, written in the 1950s, was the ancient Chinese belief: “Birth is not the beginning; death is not the end.” When darkness fell, one imagines her in her Chinese slippers, her Scottish rug over her shoulders, padding down an allée flanked with oleanders that led from her house to the beach. And perhaps she stood gazing out over the sea, and then turned to look back at the familiar sight of a long line against the horizon, the line that never breaks.
NOTES
ABBREVIATIONS
BAL In My Fashion, Bettina Ballard, 1960.
BEE Paris After the Liberation, Antony Beevor and Artemis Cooper, 1994.
BET Bettina Bergery, diaries and letters, Beinecke Library, Yale University.
BLUM Shocking! The Art and Fashion of Elsa Schiaparelli, Philadelphia Museum of Art catalogue, Dilys E. Blum, 2003.
DAL Salvador Dalí, the Surrealist Jester, Meryle Secrest, 1986.
FBI Federal Bureau of Investigation.
FLA Paris Was Yesterday, Janet Flanner, 1972.
HB Harper’s Bazaar.
HEA Hearing by the Grand Jury on the Death of William K. Dean, April 11–22, 1919, Courthouse, Keene, NH, 1989.
HOR A Bundle from Britain, Alistair Horne, 1994.
JON Paris: Biography of a City, Colin Jones, 2004.
LAV A Concise History of Costume, James Laver, 1974.
LIEB The Road Back to Paris, A. J. Liebling, 1939.
MOD Modesty in Dress, James Laver, 1969.
MODE Théâtre de la Mode, ed. by Susan Train, 2002.
PAL Elsa Schiaparelli: Empress of Paris Fashion, Palmer White, 1986.
PHILA Dalí, Philadelphia Museum of Art catalogue, 2005.
SH Shocking Life, Elsa Schiaparelli, 1954.
CHAPTER 1 • THE ORPHAN
1 a recurring image: Dawn Ades, Dalí, p. 249.
2 Palazzo Corsini: official Web site, Accademia dei Lincei.
3 perhaps the ugliest man: SH, p. 12.
4 astonished to find himself married: SH, p. 13.
5 “fought to unify Italy”: SH, p. 20.
6 “Vade retro, Satana!”: SH, pp. 12–13.
7 “looked half starved”: SH, p. 5.
8 when she was born: SH, p. 2.
9 “The struggle had begun”: SH, p. 2.
10 “a dream world”: SH, pp. 2–3.
11 her mother’s wedding dress: SH, p. 7.
12 “the
first and only spanking”: SH, p. 6.
13 he had turned black and blue: DAL, p. 43.
14 “he liked … to ‘cretinize’ ”: DAL, p. 44.
15 a hardened plug of cotton wool: SH, p. 16.
16 in a pile of manure: SH, p. 9.
17 “will you pay the cab?”: SH, p. 8.
18 feigned hysterics: SH, p. 15.
19 “I was … locked in”: SH, p. 11.
20 plain, cheap, and dull: SH, p. 7.
21 “many happy hours”: SH, p. 13.
22 “Mars was inhabited”: SH, p. 13.
23 somehow caught a glimpse: SH, p. 15.
24 “I was possessed”: SH, p. 19.
25 “A chi amo”: SH, p. 20.
26 “he hurried to Switzerland”: SH, p. 20.
27 the rudiments of sewing: SH, p. 17.
28 “my heart beat passionately”: SH, p. 23.
29 “a real child”: SH, p. 23.
30 her family sends him away: SH, p. 23.
31 helping to care for orphans: SH, p. 24.
32 “a heady consumerist mix”: JON, p. 407.
33 the population was expanding: JON, p. 411.
34 “an Oriental harem”: LAV, pp. 224–225.
35 “a zouave effect”: SH, p. 25.
36 “a queer way”: SH, p. 25.
37 disintegrated altogether: SH, p. 25.
38 “This is the place”: SH, p. 24.
39 She listened, spellbound: SH, p. 26.
40 “a complete communion”: SH, p. 26.
CHAPTER 2 • THE PICCADILLY FAKER
1 tall, slim, and elegant: PAL, p. 34.
2 as far away as Duluth: on May 25, 1913.
3 some highly suspect drawings: June 2, 1901.
4 Bureau of Investigation report: May 3, 1919.
5 “a drifting cloud”: SH, p. 27.
6 “she would be married”: July 10, 1915.
7 had to be deported: Bureau of Investigation files, June 20, 1919.
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