“Purple?” Schiap asked, when I told her I had been to see Coco again. “Well, of course. Coco is thinking in terms of royalty. The empire.”
“The Roman Empire?” I asked.
“That, too. What Hitler dreams of, world conquest.”
For her next collection, Schiap was using as her inspiration the commedia dell’arte, with gowns as bright and light as a Vivaldi concert, as sexually suggestive as a negligee.
“Classical Italian comedy,” Schiap explained. “Columbine, Harlequin’s mistress who plays cruel tricks on her employer; Capitano, the military man in his bright diagonal stripes who is silly but very dangerous; Dottore Graziano, the know-it-all who actually knows nothing; Pierrot, the innocent in his baggy white suit; Scaramouche, the boastful clown, dressed all in black.”
They all had correlatives in the world around her. Scaramouche was her stand-in for Mussolini. Capitano was Hitler, with his silly mustache. Poor Pierrot represented all the young men who would soon be put into uniform and sent to the front. That season, Schiap made one of the strongest political statements of the year—and everyone just called it fashion.
“Eat, drink, and be merry,” she said. One of her mannequins came into the office wearing a muslin mock-up of one of the gowns. “This,” Schiap said, pointing out the underside of the jacket, “this will be lined with shocking pink, my color. And you . . .” She turned back to me. “What are you painting for me? A wave? A sunset?”
“Something much better.” I was already working on it, back in my studio. “A backdrop from one of the commedia dell’arte plays. The study of Il Dottore.” Dottore Graziano, in the commedia dell’arte, is always an old man who misquotes Latin to show off his education, and his study is typically book-lined and full of globes, but with a bit of female lacy clothing sticking out from under a chair.
In the doctor’s study I had painted a globe, and in a dark shadow of the upper right-hand corner of the poster I had inserted a little free-floating mustache, instantly identifiable as Hitler’s. And on the astronomer’s chart I painted in the Great Bear, for Schiap.
“How is Madame Bouchard these days? I haven’t seen her in many weeks.” Schiap shivered and buttoned her jacket tightly. It was late afternoon, already dark out, and the cold seeped through the walls.
“On her way to Boston,” I said. Everyone would know soon enough.
“Is she? Just as well, considering. Though there was a costume I had planned just for her.” Schiap sighed. “Chanel must be ecstatic about it. Von Dincklage will be all hers. For a while, at least. He is not a man who values fidelity. They say he has slept with half the beauties of the Riviera.”
“What about the other half?”
“Their husbands own pistols, I suppose,” Schiap joked.
“I don’t know if von Dincklage knows Ania has gone. He’s out of town, according to his driver.”
“You’ve seen his driver?”
“Bumped into him at the Louvre.” And then spent much of the afternoon with him, I didn’t say. Schiap gave me a strange look. Not just appraising. Considering. The same way she looked at a wheel of ribbon, wondering how it could be used.
The next day, the next week, the next several weeks, I stayed in my studio, painting, working on a new canvas, reconsidering completed ones, trying to imagine how Rosenberg would see them, what he might think of them.
Neither Charlie nor Ania were very good correspondents, so at first I wasn’t worried when I received only one brief note from Ania. I’ve learned how to cook a pot roast. Charlie says it is very good but I think maybe he hides some in his handkerchief. How is Maurice? Maurice was her favorite bartender at the Ritz.
Going splendidly, Charlie wrote. Two more patrons have offered financial backing for my clinic when I’m ready to begin working on it next year. One was at the Durst ball and is now back in New York. Neither of them said how happy they were, how well things were going or how Katya, Ania’s daughter, was.
Time magazine named Hitler as man of the year, that January. Charlie sent me a copy of the issue, with a brief note: “Come home,” he wrote.
The cover was chilling: a grimacing, satanic Hitler playing an organ, and on top of the organ a giant Catherine’s wheel hung with broken bodies. I took the magazine to the Place Vendôme and showed the cover to Schiap. She shivered. “I need spaghetti,” she said, putting away the fabric samples she’d been studying and slamming shut the cabinet door. “Call people. Anyone. Tell them to come over tonight.” Schiap hated using the telephone, was even a little afraid of it, so she always had other people make her phone calls.
She had converted the basement of her rue de Berri mansion into a bar and dining room, and the effect was fabulous. The upstairs rooms were filled with flowers, tapestries, leopard-skin-covered chaises, and shocking pink cushions, but this subterranean room was simple with low, vaulted ceilings and almost no decoration, the kind of cell monks would have dined in. The austerity added to the sense of forbidden bacchanal. The room was said to have a secret passage that connected it to the Belgian embassy next door, and Schiap joked once that it would provide a good escape route, if needed. Conspiracies, old and new, hung in the air.
Bettina was there that night, and Elsie de Wolfe and a few other people, including a Frenchman from the fashion syndicate and his wife, both of whom seemed involved in imports, so we had a table of eight. Schiap taught me the ancient Roman formula for a dinner party: you and your partner, your two closest friends, two people you would like to know better, and two people who can be of use. Except we were only seven, since Gogo, who would have had the partner’s chair next to Schiap, wasn’t there.
Schiap cooked a huge pot of spaghetti for us. She was a good cook, preferring simple ingredients and old Roman recipes. At dinner, we were forbidden to discuss politics, forbidden to discuss that Time cover of Hitler playing his unholy organ. There were long silences between bouts of gossip, who was living a little too largely on the Riviera, who was no longer paying bills, often an omen of a bankruptcy to come, which couples were likely to separate in the coming year.
“Happiness,” said Elsie, one of Schiap’s two closest friends there. Bettina was the other. “How to find it, and keep it? That’s the question, isn’t it? It is somewhat easier when there isn’t already a husband involved, unless one is contented with a string of lovers after marriage. I personally think that is very hard on the complexion and the waistline.”
“Eat your spaghetti, Elsie. It won’t make you fat, not like bread does.” Schiap put a large forkful into her mouth to make the point. She chewed thoughtfully, her huge black eyes solemn, even a little mournful. “I can’t say from my own personal experience that husbands are so handy to have around.”
It was the most I had ever heard her say about her marriage to Compte William de Wendt de Kerlor so many years ago. It had been Bettina who had filled in the details, including a quick snip that his name had been longer than his capacity for fidelity.
“Girls don’t understand marriage, any more than I did,” Schiap said. “There was I, barely out of childhood, thoroughly convinced by my mother that I was unlovely, unlovable, and there was this gorgeous man telling me otherwise.”
“And so you married the first man who asked,” Elsie said. Elsie, who purposely hadn’t married till she was on the other side of middle-aged. Elsie, who’d had many women as lovers before setting up home with her Lord Mendl.
“Not quite the first,” Schiap said, grinning. “When I was a child, still living in my father’s house, I’d had a Russian suitor. My family liked him but oh, he was ugly. He was why I ran away from home, and I thank him every night in my prayers.”
“And, of course, there was the sheik,” said Elsie, who had heard these stories before.
“Just thirteen,” Schiap said, checking her watch once more. “Traveling with my father in Tunisia, and there was this Arab sheik dressed in white floating robes wanting my hand in marriage. Father said no. You should have seen the fantasia the sheik performed under my window, those dancing horses and their riders.” She sighed. “Lost romance. And who needs a husband? They get in the way. They give orders. Though children are worth everything you have to go through to get them. Oh, the illnesses, though. When Gogo was ill with polio I wanted to die, I thought.”
“I hear that Wallis and Edward plan to visit with Herr Hitler. Again.” Elsie de Wolfe twirled a modest forkful of spaghetti and jabbed it into her mouth.
“That’s not the wisest event to put on your social calendar,” said Bettina, lighting a cigarette. Her husband wasn’t with her that night— or most nights, for that matter. He was busy with politics, with his meetings with the other communists of Paris, the artists Picasso and Miró among them. I didn’t know at the time, but the Resistance was already beginning, already being planned for, even before the invasion.
“No politics,” Schiap said.
“Well, the fascists have got the trains running on time.” This, from an Englishman I had disliked at first sight, a friend of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, a rotund and pompous fellow of limited conversational skills, who had been silent most of the evening. He had been pinching Schiap’s maid when he thought we weren’t looking. I already knew that all the mannequins and vendeuses at Schiap’s boutique stood clear and made faces behind his back. He was there that evening as one of the people who might be of use to Schiap. A businesswoman must, on occasion, court money and influence, no matter where it came from.
“It will be a high price they pay for those timely trains,” Elsie said.
He harrumphed at her, and Schiap hastily passed around the bowl of grated cheese.
“And what will we do when Hitler invades Poland?” Bettina asked, leaning aggressively forward. “Will we let him destroy the country?”
“Poland’s problem,” the Englishman said. “Should we die for Danzig? What a mistake that would be.”
“Experience is the name we give our mistakes,” I said, hoping to lead into a different conversation. Schiap was looking angry and unhappy.
“That’s an Oscar Wilde–ism.” Elsie put down her fork and looked hard at me.
“Our Lily has been educated,” Schiap said, and I preened a little at the flattery.
“A knowledge of Oscar Wilde is hardly suitable for a lady’s education,” grumbled the Englishman.
“I met poor Oscar.” Elsie leaned forward, her elbows on the table. “When I was just a girl myself, living in New York. I had an afternoon salon full of freethinkers, some good conversation about art. All the bohemians came, and when Oscar Wilde was in New York he came, too. A charming man.” She glared at the Englishman, who had spilled tomato sauce on his tie. “So well dressed and well mannered. And wit. When he spoke, you thought diamonds should fall from his mouth, like in a fairy tale.”
The Englishman harrumphed again and murmured something under his breath about sodomy and the Germans knowing better. We all ignored him.
“When I first came to Paris, I stayed at the L’Hotel Paris, hoping I might get his room, the one with the terrible wallpaper,” I told Elsie.
“That particular wallpaper is long gone,” Schiap said. “You know, he hated the Ritz and all that in-room plumbing. Thought it noisy and unhygienic.”
“Well, there’s my point, exactly,” said the Englishman.
We were having dessert by then. Schiap put down her spoonful of lemon sorbet and rolled her eyes, finally exasperated beyond endurance. “Dear Coco loves the Ritz . . .”
Before she could finish her thought, the door of the dining room was opened and Gogo rushed in, her hat crooked on her head, her cheeks flushed. “Mummy!”
Mother and daughter flung themselves into a tight embrace.
Something was wrong. Gogo had been in and out of town all autumn and often returned to Paris without telling anyone. She was sometimes aloof with her mother, the way children are when they are grown but still haven’t quite forgiven all the wrongs of childhood. Schiap hated it when Gogo was away, but sometimes she was too busy to spend time with her when she was in Paris.
That evening, they hugged as if she’d been away for years, not a few days. As if they were frightened. They hugged so tightly that the smart hat Gogo wore fell to the floor and was trampled on. After having her office searched twice, Schiap was worried even more than usual that her daughter might be arrested on a trumped-up charge, or even abducted. Schiap wasn’t as wealthy as Coco, but she was still pretty damn rich. Ransom might be asked. They had taken Lindbergh’s child; why not hers? We were moving into days when trust would be a very limited commodity. But I had never seen Gogo afraid before. Gogo, who had survived childhood polio and long separations from her mother, years of pain and therapy. She looked fragile, but she was tough, that girl. That evening, she was shivering, and not just from the cold.
“Hi, Lily,” Gogo said when Schiap had released her. She inclined her head slightly to the door.
I excused myself and followed Gogo back into the hall, where a maid waited to take her coat. The hat was still on the dining room floor, forgotten, dripping onto the carpet.
“I don’t want to tell Mummy. She’d fuss and shout and never let me out of her sight again. But I was followed. I’m certain of it,” she said. “A taxi behind mine. He got out at the corner when the taxi stopped here. He walked behind me.”
“You must tell your mother. She should know.”
Gogo considered for a moment. I was flattered that she had confided in me, but this was too important to keep as a secret between us.
“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 heading.
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.