“Right,” she agreed. “After dinner. Here we go, into the lion’s den.” We went back into the dining room, and Gogo had her chair placed next to mine.
“How was London? I missed you.” Schiap’s voice was full of love and concern.
“Fun,” Gogo said. “Is there any more spaghetti? I’m starved.” A maid brought in a plate, and Schiap piled it with noodles for her daughter.
“What did you do? Who did you see?”
“Lots of people. Lots of things,” Gogo said. From the hall we heard the sounds of servants pulling suitcases, a servant paying off the taxi driver. “What have you been doing?”
“Working. Going to parties. Missing you.” Mother and daughter smiled at each other across the littered table. The candles had dribbled wax over the tablecloth; Schiap scraped at a patch and rolled the wax between her fingers, never taking her eyes from her daughter’s face.
“What’s new in Paris?” Gogo asked the table in general, but it was the Englishman who spoke up in a lecturing tone.
“The Duke and Duchess of Windsor have visited. Stayed at the Ritz, of course. They seem to spend as little time as possible in London now. It was a great mistake, giving up the throne. England will regret his abdication.”
“I’ve heard the duke and duchess prefer Berlin and Berchtesgaden to London,” Gogo said, her voice chilly. “Maybe London is glad to be rid of them.”
“No politics,” Schiap reminded us.
“But, Madame Schiaparelli, as dressmaker to the most influential women in Europe, surely you find yourself interested in their various causes and opinions? You must find yourself praising fascism over communism. One must take a stance.” The disapproval in the Englishman’s voice stretched it out like a bowstring ready for the arrow.
Schiap had been clear from the start: she was against Hitler, against the Nazis and the fascists, against Mussolini.
“I am more interested in my clients’ diet, their exercise habits,” Schiap said. “You wouldn’t believe how much weight some women put on between fittings, and then after they have dieted it back off they come in, complaining the new gown doesn’t fit.”
She laughed but there was a harsh glitter in her eyes, and for the rest of the night, whenever the Englishman tried to speak, Schiap cut him short and changed the subject.
“Causes indeed,” Schiap muttered, when she and Gogo and I were left alone at the table, well after midnight. “It’s men like him that make trouble for me.”
He had intentionally set up a predicament for Schiap: to speak against fascism, and alienate many of her wealthy customers and her own native land, or speak against communism and cut herself off from the workers and her own beliefs.
Schiap looked exhausted. Dark circles swallowed her eyes; her skin was sallow, pale. She grew even paler when Gogo told her she had been followed from the train station.
“Would they do that?” Schiap asked, thinking aloud. “Arrest my daughter?”
Bettina was still finishing her coffee. “They wouldn’t dare,” she said. “The publicity, the protests from the high and powerful, would be terrible.”
“You will stay here,” Schiap said. “With me. No more traveling alone.”
Gogo began to protest, but Schiap gave her a look that quieted her.
“And you,” she said to me, “you will pack up your things and move into a guest room. Here.”
I knew what she was saying, and that the room would come with strings attached. I was to help keep an eye on Gogo.
“Will I be allowed to bathe alone?” Gogo asked.
Schiap rose and began to snuff out the candles between her thumb and index finger, wetting the tips of her fingers between each snuff.
“I have spoken. And soon, you will both leave Paris. For an extended time. When I make Gogo’s arrangements, I’ll make yours as well, Lily.”
“I don’t want to leave. I love Paris,” I protested. “I may have a show at Rosenberg’s.”
She laughed. “Oh, to be so young. To believe you always have the choice.”
* * *
• • •
Schiap joined an antifascist society that winter. I knew only because Gogo let it slip that her mother was spending time in the 11th arrondissement, where the society’s headquarters were, and Schiap could have no other reason for traveling to this gray, working-class neighborhood. Certainly, none of her clients lived there. Schiap did not speak of it, even when I asked her directly. “I have no politics,” she insisted. “I am an artist. I am not a politician.”
Schiap was working even more feverishly than usual, as if she’d had a premonition or a dream of the world to come, a world in which tailors would soon be soldiers and textile mills turned out khaki wool uniforms, not rainbow-colored silks and satins.
That year she created her Cigarette line, a small collection of slim dresses and coats, a collection that used much less fabric than those that had gone before, anticipating rationing and shortages.
Practical, but still whimsical. It was, after all, a Schiaparelli collection. When Schiap, extravagant by nature and desire, tried to be practical, it didn’t always work out. There were, for instance, the smoking gloves she designed, with a cuff of little tubes in which matches could be stored, and an attached striking plate.
Unfortunately, the spark of the struck match could easily ignite the gloves. This happened once in the salon, to a customer from the Midwest who shrieked in panic until Bettina put out the tiny flame with her coffee. Schiap went pale and stayed pale for the rest of the day, and I knew she was remembering the Durst ball, when Coco had waltzed her into the flames. The gloves soon disappeared from the boutique.
Schiap was undeterred in her quest to create clothes that were both practical and whimsical, to keep going. Coco, though, was thinking about closing down production entirely.
“If France goes to war, what would be the point of a new collection?” She had sent a note that I was to come to her salon and try on some things. She knew that I was living at Schiap’s home then. There were no secrets in Paris. Schiap had sent a maid to do my packing, in case I resisted, and a van to move my canvases, my easel, my paints.
Coco showed me a winter coat, fabulously heavy black-and-white tweed with a sable fur color. “The silly woman forgot to pick it up before she left. I don’t think she’ll need it now. She lives in Miami.” Coco put on her tortoiseshell spectacles as I tried it on, the better to see me with.
The coat was too short and too wide, but there was plenty of fabric in the hem that could be let down and seams could be taken in.
“You can have it at cost,” Coco said. “You’re going to need something warm this winter.” I was still wearing my old wool coat, once a rich indigo blue but now faded to mauve and unraveling on the left cuff.
“I can afford it at cost if you take off the fur collar,” I said.
“I’ll make a gift of it,” Coco decided. “Consider it a late Christmas present.”
Schiap laughed when she saw me in it. “You should have told me you needed a new coat! You look like a bourgeois matron,” she said. “If you must wear it—”
“It’s very warm,” I protested.
“—if you must wear it, wear it only with these gloves.” Schiap gave me pink leather gloves with circus horses embroidered on them. They looked quite nice with black-and-white tweed. And Coco, of course, would know they were Schiaparelli gloves I was wearing with her coat.
* * *
• • •
At New Year’s, the parties began and continued. We celebrated St. Valentine’s Day and those of many other saints I’d never heard of. Any excuse for a party, that winter. Paris and the Parisians partied as if too much wine, too much food, too much laughter, too many costumes, and too many practical jokes could delay what now looked inevitable. All you had to do was look at a map to see where Hitler was headi
ng.
I painted every day in a cleared-out room at Schiap’s, thinking, Monsieur Rosenberg will like this color, or, No, he won’t care for that but I’ll make him see it, make him respond, planning for when I would take two canvases for him to see. Eventually, all the paintings I made for Monsieur Rosenberg, I destroyed. They were no good, not even to my eyes, especially not to my eyes, and I began painting only for myself, and those paintings worked. Sometimes, I used the tip of the brush to write theorems and formulas, reminders of Allen and his love of mathematics, into the wet paint and smeared them so they showed only as swirls and scratches. But when I thought of Allen, I thought of Otto, too. One love lost; a new one not yet found. I hadn’t seen him since the day we went to Rosenberg’s gallery.
Each evening Gogo and I met with her friends in nightclubs and we drank too much, ate too much, laughed too loudly. There’s supposed to be a calm before the storm. We weren’t calm. We were too busy making the memories that would get us through long nights. Remember when Gogo growled, pantherlike, at the snooty Dome waiter? When Schiap painted a clown face on the store mannequin? When Gogo pretended to be a Spanish countess? Schiap dressed for one party as a radish, in red velvet, and we, dressed as birds, pretended to peck at her.
Elsie de Wolfe gave the final ball of the season, the Circus Ball. The marvelous Elsie outdid herself with this one, bringing in Lipizzaner horses in jeweled harnesses, the orchestra of the Cirque Medrano, an all-female Viennese orchestra, a gypsy orchestra, acrobatic performers, and at midnight, a grand parade. Elephants had been hired as well, but they wouldn’t cooperate and were left behind at the Versailles train station.
I dream of them sometimes. I am traveling by train and I look out the window at the platform where we have stopped and there, in an early-summer twilight at a Paris train station, are four huge and stubborn elephants waving their trunks in irritation, trumpeting, as their keepers and the other travelers race back and forth in panic.
One of the socialites, that night at Elsie’s ball, caused a stir by wearing a Schiaparelli satin cape over a Chanel dress. Both Coco and Schiap were furious. They laughed icily and air-kissed and then, fuming, went their separate ways for the rest of the evening.
And between the balls, Schiap and Gogo traveled. Together.
• FOURTEEN •
It was during Schiap and Gogo’s ski trip in Switzerland that Coco, for reasons of her own, invited me to travel with her. I’d gone to visit her one cold and miserable day in February when solitude and terrible discontent had driven me from my studio.
“You look terrible,” she said, looking up from the copy of Vogue she’d been reading at her desk and taking off her glasses. She stood and walked a circle around me, appraising. “You need fresh air. Exercise. Pack a bag, enough clothes for a few days. We will drive south.”
Just like those two, I thought. Schiap wants snow, Coco wants sunshine. They didn’t even agree on how they had first met. I’d asked them once, as a test. “We met at one of Elsie de Wolfe’s balls,” Schiap said. “Coco dressed as a page boy. She likes to show off her legs. Such skinny things.”
“We met at Longchamps, after the races,” Coco told me. “Schiap was wearing one of those ridiculous hats shaped like a shoe. People were laughing at her, and she didn’t even know it.”
Two women, so different, with Coco wearing her strands of pearls over her back; Schiap twining her pearls around her wrists. Schiap was fun-loving and her anger passed quickly, like a summer storm. Coco’s anger simmered just beneath the surface for months, years. Leftist Schiap; right-wing Coco.
“I’m busy, and I don’t like driving in automobiles,” I told Coco, leafing through the magazine she had just put down. It was the British edition of Vogue, and the cover was of a white dove carrying a friendly greeting card to Mussolini in Italy. England still thought war could be avoided.
“Well, then we will take the blue train,” Coco insisted.
Le Train Bleu was second only to the Orient Express for luxury, and I knew Coco would travel first class, not in the recently added second-class Pullmans for those who traveled without maids and jewel cases, who wore wool and chenille instead of satin and sable.
“The ticket is on me,” she said, reading my thoughts. “Consider it a birthday present for whenever your birthday is, or was.”
I waited to hear what the price would be. Not the ticket price.
“When we get to La Pausa, we’ll send Schiap a little postcard.” Coco grinned. “Let her know what a good time you’re having with me.”
I considered. Would Schiap feel betrayed, or would she see through this ploy? She herself had asked me to spend time with Coco, to sniff around as it were, though she never explained what exactly I was supposed to be looking for, and I thought perhaps it was truly just to annoy Coco. Both Coco and Schiap were trying to involve me in their rivalry and campaigns for revenge, but I didn’t mind. In fact, I enjoyed the company of both of them, as different as they were.
“Okay,” I agreed. “Maybe I could give you a painting in exchange for the ticket.”
Coco smiled. She didn’t collect contemporary work from unknown artists. She was right, though. I needed a change. When I painted, colors were starting to blur, to lose their vibrancy. The canvases were getting dull.
Get out of Paris, away from the leaden sky, the winter days of freezing drizzle, the anxiety, the waiting to see what was going to happen. France and Germany were still at peace. Yet there was a different smell in the air; sometimes the sky seemed a strange color, as if our senses perceived what our minds still denied.
Fresh air, sunshine. Grilled fish right out of the ocean. Yes.
Why did Coco take me to her villa? Perhaps Coco had the same thing on her mind as the curators of the Louvre and the rest of Paris—the coming war—and she wanted to enjoy the freedom of travel while it was still easy, still luxurious. Perhaps she wanted to show me some of her truth, her reality, who she was away from the work, the cutthroat competition.
We arrived in the sunny, rosemary-scented South of France, after a night of wining, dining, and sleeping on the silk sheets of Le Train Bleu as the French landscape flew past our windows, to La Pausa, her Riviera home.
Coco’s villa on the Riviera had been built expressly for her, from the ground up, on property that had once belonged to the Grimaldis of Monaco. The property and the villa had been subsidized by funds from her then-lover Hugh Grosvenor, the second Duke of Westminster, one of the wealthiest men in England.
The money might have been his, but the atmosphere was all Chanel: vast open spaces, a neutral palette of whites and beiges, an understated garden of olive trees and lavender that blended into the surrounding hillside. And the little touches, those furnishings and additions that make something personal . . . they were a story in themselves.
The large interior stone staircase was a copy of the one at Aubazine. “The orphanage where I grew up,” Coco said. “The memory of it never leaves me. The orphanage, the nuns. You can die more than once, you know.” Black and white, browns and beiges, the color of habits, of empty walls had become Chanel’s favorite colors transposed into a palette of neutrals.
Coco had taken a fine revenge on a world that had made a misery of her childhood, turning on its head the clothing of abstinence and making of it the trappings of beautiful and sensual women who dined at Maxim’s, had affairs with princes, bought their jewels from Cartier by the handful.
“When I was at the orphanage, I sometimes daydreamed about setting it ablaze.” Coco said it sweetly, the way another woman would have said, As a child I wanted to be a ballerina.
“Were you thinking of the orphanage when you danced Schiap into the candles and set her ablaze?”
We were outside, sniffing in the sweet odor of lavender and wild thyme growing on the stony hillside.
“I wasn’t thinking of anything,” Coco said. “I saw the flame
s and danced toward them. There was so much glittering, the candles, the mirrors. I was like a moth, I suppose.”
“Why do moths fly into candles?” I wondered aloud.
“You make things too complicated,” Coco said. “They are attracted by the light and the heat. Have you never been cold, never afraid of the dark? Come. I’ll give you the tour.” A full staff awaited us indoors: upstairs and downstairs maids, a gardener, a butler, a cook and assistant, standing at attention like soldiers. She greeted each one by name, asked after children, aging parents, and then led me indoors, pride of ownership making her posture even more regal than usual.
The most wonderful aspect of La Pausa was the view from the windows of the three wings: each window framed a glimpse of sea and landscape worthy of an easel and canvas.
“Down there”—she pointed to the coastline far below us, past the hillside balcones of the Riviera—“is where the Virgin Mary is said to have landed, with Mary Magdalene, after the crucifixion, before they started traveling north on land. That’s why this house is called ‘the pause.’ Quaint legend.”
“Are you a believer?” I asked.
“You don’t abandon your faith. It abandons you. But never completely.”
Coco led me back up a huge stone staircase. One of the maids, tidy and formal in black and white, swung open the door of one of the upstairs’ bedrooms. “This will be your room,” Coco said. “I hope you will be comfortable.”
Creamy white walls, beige plush carpet, heavy oak furniture, a table with fresh flowers already set on it, a huge bed with a pale blue satin cover. A large carved bookcase, filled with books.
“Mostly history books,” Coco said. “Winston’s choices. Myself, I prefer novels.”
Winston Churchill. I was meant to be impressed, and I was.
“Winston stayed in this room,” Coco said. “Now you can say you slept in Churchill’s bed. Lunch is at one.” She laughed and disappeared to her own suite of rooms.
The maid flung open the window, and the air, even in winter, was soft and smelled of green life, not coal fires and automobiles. She began to unpack my bag, so there was nothing for me to do but wander and stare in awe, as Coco had intended, at the lavish antique oak English furnishings, each piece perfectly situated, the black doors and white walls, the extraordinarily high ceilings, the hillside olive grove. I went for a long walk through the gray-herbed hills, thinking of nothing, soaking up the color, the scents.
The Last Collection Page 21