Vanity Fair's Women on Women

by Radhika Jones

  If Sabrina had vaulted Hepburn to the loftiest reaches of the Hollywood empyrean, her character survived the voyage intact. When her agent informed her of her new price tag, the ingenue gasped, “I’m not worth it. It’s impossible! Please don’t tell anyone.” Nor was she about to lose track of her dear new friend in Paris, who, every bit as much as Billy Wilder, had helped define her elegant professional persona. In November 1954, as part of their honeymoon, Hepburn and Ferrer flew to her native Holland for the Dutch premiere of Sabrina. Among the activities Hepburn engaged in during this triumphant home-coming—all organized for the benefit of disabled Dutch veterans—were a photo-signing session at a department store attended by thousands and a teatime fashion show in which Hepburn herself modeled dresses by Givenchy. Interestingly, photos of Hepburn taken during this charitable public-relations-tour-cum-honeymoon show the actress wearing exactly the same three outfits by Givenchy that she had worn as Sabrina. For the movie opening in Amsterdam she once again slipped into the embroidered organza ball gown; for a visit to her childhood home in Arnhem she recycled the Oxford-gray suit, over which, due to the cold, she wore a short fur coat. And in a photo published in the November 1954 Elle, she appears at a Dutch restaurant table smiling beatifically in the black Sabrina cocktail dress, with Mel hovering at her side. Evidently, Paramount allowed her to incorporate the costumes into her personal wardrobe—a practice continued throughout her collaboration with Givenchy, which helped maintain that rare fluency between her on-screen and offscreen personae.

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  A publicity blitz of a different kind attended the movie’s February 4, 1955, premiere in France. The Paramount machine, shrewdly hoping to capitalize on Sabrina’s French-fashion angle, opened the movie in Paris during collection week, on the day after Givenchy’s spring/summer couture show. Not leaving anything to chance, the publicity department pressed into service purveyors of all kinds of goods. Fifty music stores in Paris displayed in their windows record albums of the songs from Sabrina. Clothing shops, as well as the Campagnie Générale Transatlantique, whose steamship the Liberté figured prominently in the film, also got into the act. Further fueling Sabrina fever in France, Paramount offered—through the boutique Prénatal—gifts to any mother who on February 4 gave birth to a baby girl and named her Sabrina. More cunning still, throughout France and North Africa a “Do You Look Like Sabrina?” contest was staged, in which winners were awarded prizes of both money and products. The climax of all these festivities was the arrival of “Sabrina” herself, who held court at a press conference at the Ritz.

  The effect of the film on Givenchy was immediate and newsworthy. For his February presentation he hired his own Audrey look-alike, a mannequin named Jacky, as house model. Givenchy also named one of the dresses in his collection “Sabrina.” Elle reported that the couturier had been inspired throughout his collection by his new muse’s “flat chest, narrow hips, swan neck, and short hair.” Not surprisingly, the French movie critics greeted this “Cinderella story à l’americaine” with a shade more cynicism than their Stateside counterparts and their colleagues in the fashion press. One reviewer remarked that the Larrabee servants’ quarters would “bring joy to many French millionaires in search of lodgings.” Another complained that Audrey Hepburn reminded him too much of certain young ladies of Saint-Germaine-des-Pres “who cut their hair with rusty scissors.” Still another, apparently thinking of the scenes in which the actress wears the Sabrina dress, suggested that Miss Hepburn had been “transformed for five painful minutes into Miss Famine herself.” But most had generous praise for Hepburn, who, as the newspaper La Croix conceded, “had become a Parisienne down to the tips of her fingernails.”

  More important, Sabrina reaped industry accolades. The Writers Guild honored the uneasy troika of Billy Wilder, Samuel Taylor, and Ernest Lehman with its “best written American comedy” award, and the screenplay also earned a Golden Globe. In their poll of fans in more than 50 countries abroad, the Foreign Press Association of Hollywood and the Hollywood Foreign Correspondents Association came up with Audrey Hepburn as the winner of the “world film favorite” award. Sabrina also landed a bouquet of Academy Award nominations: best actress, best director, best cinematography, best screenplay, best art direction, best costumes. Of all these potential Oscars, however, only one came through—best costumes—an award which Edith Head shamelessly accepted without even the slightest nod of acknowledgment to Givenchy. Effectively, Head had treated Paris’s most admired young créateur as if he were just another anonymous cog chugging away in her vast wardrobe engine. Irene Heymann, Billy Wilder’s longtime agent, says, “Edith always thought she designed everything in town. She was notorious for never giving an assistant credit, even if she hadn’t done a thing.” But Head, obviously galled at being so completely upstaged (even if she was one of the few to know it), went even further, insisting in her memoirs and even until her death that she had created (as she wrote in 1959) “the dress, whose boat neckline was tied on each shoulder—widely known and copied as the Sabrina neckline.”

  Givenchy today generously allows that, as moviemaking often requires duplicates of costumes in the event that a dress becomes damaged in some way, Head may have at some point executed a copy of the black cocktail dress in her Hollywood workrooms. Perhaps, then, it was this facsimile that she added to the costume collection which she began in the 40s and took on tour with her around the world.

  While it is true that Seventh Avenue manufacturers knocked off the Sabrina neckline by the truckload, the phenomenon Audrey Hepburn unwittingly precipitated went far beyond garment-district profiteering, Dreda Mele maintains. “Everyone in the street was copying Audrey’s hair, the way she moved, the way she acted, the way she spoke. Everybody wanted to look like Audrey Hepburn. She became a person of a whole generation. They copied her for 10 solid years after. She created an image above her movie image.”

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  Back at the Givenchy atelier on Avenue George V, the couturier is also meditating on the enduring fashion legacy of Audrey Hepburn. “I dressed so many other stars. Jennifer Jones, Lauren Bacall, Marlene Dietrich, Elizabeth Taylor—we had such problems with her, with the timing of her fittings. Not like Audrey, she was always late. And the essayages—with her poitrine—so difficult! But no one ever wanted to copy what I made for them. I once was asked to do a wedding dress in the same style as the Sabrina ball gown. For the marriage of her son, [former couturière] Meryl Lanvin asked me to make a version of the black Sabrina dress. Then, in my last couture collection, I adapted that design for another dress, which I showed with a jacket.” And for Barneys’ special Givenchy collection last year, he did yet another spin on the Sabrina cocktail dress—this time in silk faille and without any bows—which immediately became the line’s top seller.

  “Ever since Sabrina,” Givenchy continues, “Audrey kept exactly the same measurements. Do you want to see her mannequin?” One of Givenchy’s loyal assistants fetches from an unseen region of the atelier the dress form on which Hepburn’s clothes were fitted for four decades. Headless and limbless, with high little pancake breasts and black lines sectioning off the body into some obscure system of seamstress trigonometry, the dummy is an eerie yet somehow comforting evocation of the late actress—a De Chiricoesque portrait in stuffing, cloth, and metal. The dress form’s unchanging measurements tally up to an impressively taut 31 1/2-22-31 1/2 (the actress stood five feet seven inches).

  “Audrey’s style is so strong,” the designer continues, gazing reverently at the doll-like instrument of his profession. “Audrey’s silhouette is so strong. It doesn’t ever look passé. She is so present. It is difficult to think she is no longer with us—that I can no longer pick up the phone to call her. Her son Sean and I talk as if she is still alive. There are few people I communicate with this way—just my mother and Audrey. But I feel Audrey more strongly. Audrey is more recent. The force, the pre
sence, the image, is so strong. I was just in Switzerland with Sean for the christening of his daughter—Emma Audrey. We were in the same church, with the same Protestant father, where Audrey was married. And where her funeral took place. Then we went back to her house. Her presence was there, too—the personality, the simplicity, the love she gave to the rooms. It was all still there. The emotion is still so strong,” he adds, his eyes now brimming with tears. A discreet man, he reflexively bows his head—and then recovers to rise for a handshake. “Excuse me,” he says softly. “I am needed in the atelier.” He then disappears through a door to resume work on the very last collection of his career.

  (Hubert de Givenchy died in 2018, at age 91.)

  THE RENEGADES

  FRIDA KAHLO

  DIARY OF A MAD ARTIST

  By Amy Fine Collins | September 1995

  As frenzied mourners watched the earthly remains of Frida Kahlo roll away into the crematory, the artist, known in her day for her macabre sense of mischief, played one last ghoulish trick on her audience. The sudden blast of heat from the open incinerator doors blew the bejeweled, elaborately coiffed body bolt upright. Her ignited hair blazed around her head like an infernal halo. One observer recalled that, deformed by the phantasmagoric, flickering shadows, her lips appeared to break into a grin just as the doors closed shut. Frida’s postmortem chuckle—a last laugh if there ever was one—is echoing still. Half a century after her death, Kahlo, around whom a whole industry has sprung up like a garden on a grave site, grows more alive with each passing decade.

  What Elvis Presley is to good old boys, Judy Garland to a generation of homosexuals, and Maria Callas to opera fanatics, Frida is to masses of late-20th-century idol seekers. Every day at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the 1931 double portrait of newlyweds Frida and Diego Rivera draws a worshipful horde, as reverent as the devotees gathered daily before the Louvre’s Mona Lisa. Says Hayden Herrera, author of the groundbreaking 1983 biography Frida, “Her paintings demand—fiercely—that you look at her.”

  Kirk Varnedoe, a chief curator of the Museum of Modern Art (which is exhibiting two of its three Kahlos in a summer show of women’s art), reflects on the Frida Phenomenon: “She clicks with today’s sensibilities—her psycho-obsessive concern with herself, her creation of a personal alternative world carry a voltage. Her constant remaking of her identity, her construction of a theater of the self are exactly what preoccupy such contemporary artists as Cindy Sherman or Kiki Smith and, on a more popular level, Madonna—who, of course, collects her work. Kahlo, incidentally, is more a figure for the age of Madonna than the era of Marilyn Monroe. She fits well with the odd, androgynous hormonal chemistry of our particular epoch.”

  In fact, a whole cross section of marginalized groups—lesbians, gays, feminists, the handicapped, Chicanos, Communists (she professed Trotskyism and, later, Stalinism), hypochondriacs, substance abusers, and even Jews (despite her indigenous Mexican identity, she was in fact half Jewish and only one-quarter Indian)—have discovered in her a politically correct heroine. The most concrete measure of Frida’s nail-digging grip on the popular imagination is the number of publications on her: 87 and counting. (Though she has also been the subject of at least three documentaries and one Mexican art film, the world still awaits the movies promised by Madonna and Luis “La Bamba” Valdez.) [Salma Hayek would play Kahlo in Julie Taymor’s 2002 film, Frida.] Says art dealer Mary-Anne Martin, who as founder of Sotheby’s Latin-American department presided over the first auction of a Kahlo painting, in 1977 (it went for $19,000—$1,000 below the low estimate), “Frida has been carved up into little pieces. Everyone pulls out that one piece that means something special to them.”

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  Just when Frida fever seemed on the verge of cooling down, the public’s attention has once again been riveted by her—1995 is turning out to be yet another annus mirabilis in the Frida chronicles. This May her 1942 Self-Portrait with Monkey and Parrot (acquired in 1947, reports Kahlo expert Dr. Salomón Grimberg, by IBM from the Galería de Arte Mexicano for around $400) sold at Sotheby’s for $3.2 million. This is the highest price ever paid for a Latin-American work of art, and the second-highest amount for a woman artist (Mary Cassatt holds the record). About the auction record he set, Argentinean collector and venture capitalist Eduardo Costantini states firmly, “There is a correlation between the painting’s price and its quality.”

  And riding the wave of what Sotheby’s director of Latin-American painting, August Uribe, calls “a thrilling, historical sale,” next month Abrams is releasing with great fanfare what may be the publishing coup of the season: a facsimile edition of Frida Kahlo’s diary, an intimate, enigmatic written and pictorial record of the last and most lurid decade of the artist’s tortured life. Though this document has been on display at the Frida Kahlo Museum in Coyoacán, Mexico (formerly her house), since it opened in 1958, only a handful of researchers, such as Hayden Herrera, have been permitted to page through it. And even then it has resisted coherent interpretation. The situation has been further complicated by the fact that an executor of Kahlo’s estate, wealthy Rivera patron Dolores Olmedo, has jealously guarded the diary. It took the savvy young Mexican art promoter Claudia Madrazo two years to persuade Olmedo to allow publication, in order at last to make the strange workings of Frida Kahlo’s mind, quite literally, an open book.

  Once she had Olmedo’s blessing, Madrazo showed up at the office of New York literary agent Gloria Loomis with a fuzzy color photocopy of the diary. “I flipped,” says Loomis. “It was original, moving. And I told her, yes, American publishers will be crazy about it.” The New York Times broke the story of the diary, announcing on its publishing page that an auction would be held that week. “The next morning the phones went mad,” Loomis recounts.

  The Mexican press had picked up the Times story, and a furor erupted. In Mexico, where Kahlo is known as la heroína del dolor, “the heroine of pain,” the artist is—like the Virgin of Guadalupe—a national idol. “They were demanding to know who is this gringa who has the right to do this to our national treasure,” Loomis says. “I had to reassure the Mexicans that I was auctioning the right to reproduce the diary in facsimile, not the diary itself.” Loomis invited a series of publishing houses to view the color photocopy in the Banco de Mexico’s New York offices and place their bids. “I was immediately intrigued,” says Abrams editor in chief Paul Gottlieb. “I dug in my heels and went for the moon—and we won!” Though Gottlieb won’t divulge the amount of his successful bid, he allows that it is more than the $100,000 estimated by an insider in the Times article but “less than $500,000.” Even before the first book is sold (the initial print run is more than 150,000) Abrams undoubtedly will have made good on its investment, for Frida-mania has a global reach. Abrams has already sold the foreign rights in nine different countries, and these editions will all be published simultaneously with the American one. “A miracle,” Gottlieb declares breathlessly. Madrazo will publish the diary in Mexico under her own imprint—and her plans for Frida objets based on the diary are currently under way.

  What is so compelling about Frida’s esoteric scribblings and doodles, which are unintelligible to the casual reader (especially one with no Spanish) and, at best, puzzling to most Kahlo experts? “They’re hypnotic,” says art historian Sarah M. Lowe—who, in her succinct notes to the text, has valiantly endeavored to make sense of Kahlo’s wild, sometimes polymorphously erotic pictographs and stream-of-consciousness ravings. (Carlos Fuentes is the author of the belletristic introduction.) “The diary is the most important work Kahlo ever did,” Claudia Madrazo asserts. “It contains energy, poetry, magic. They reveal a more universal Frida.” Continues Sarah Lowe, who cautions that her comments on the diary are not definitive, “In Kahlo’s paintings you see only the mask. In the diary you see her unmasked. She pulls you into her world. And it’s a mad universe.”

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  Most pertinent to the diaries is an understanding of how the daughter of a lower-middle-class German-Jewish photographer and a hysterically Catholic Spanish-Indian mother became a celebrated painter, Communist, promiscuous temptress, and, later (during the diary years), a narcotic-addicted, dykish, suicidal amputee afflicted with a bizarre pathology known as Munchausen syndrome—the compulsion to be hospitalized and, in extreme cases, mutilated unnecessarily by surgery.

  Thanks to an astonishing, largely unpublished body of research as complete as Hayden Herrera’s exhaustive biography and complementary to it, compiled by an unlikely scholar—Dr. Salomón Grimberg, a 47-year-old Dallas child psychiatrist—it is possible to amplify these facts of Kahlo’s life and even, Grimberg says, “decode 90 percent of the diary.” Like Kahlo, Grimberg grew up in Mexico City, where he commenced, while still an adolescent, his rigorous investigations on the artist. A somewhat casual interest became an earnest fixation during his pre-med studies, when he started working at Kahlo’s former gallery, the Galería de Arte Mexicano. There he started amassing records about every work of art she ever created, tracking down lost paintings, collecting pictures by her and other artists, and befriending anyone whose life had intersected Kahlo’s. Though Grimberg is something of a pariah in the art world, where his unapologetic zeal and his affiliation with another profession are eyed with suspicion—“I am a bastard of art history,” he admits—his knowledge of his subject is unrivaled and incontrovertible. He is routinely consulted by auction houses and dealers, often without compensation, who rely on him to locate, document, and authenticate art by Kahlo and others. And he has been given (again, without remuneration) the texts of other, better-known scholars’ books for fact checking. He is, however, a paid consultant to Christie’s, a curator of museum exhibitions, the author of numerous pioneering scholarly articles, as well as a co-author of the catalogue raisonné of Kahlo’s work.