Some of My Lives

by Rosamond Bernier

Over the next year or so I acquired seven outfits on very generous terms. Later, I gave most of them to the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum.

  Her personal life was inviolate; even her death was kept a mystery. When the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum put on a Madame Grès retrospective in 1994, her daughter let it be known that Grès was following the event with keen interest. “Thank you for not forgetting me” was her message to her American admirers. Only after the exhibition closed was it revealed, in the Paris newspaper Le Monde, that Madame Grès had died the year before.

  However odd, this was in line with her discretion and her solitary ways.

  Now It’s London

  I returned from Paris fascinated by the new stirrings in all the arts, so much to look at, to listen to, to read about. However seductive, the fashion world, I felt, was not the be-all and end-all of possibilities.

  I communicated my misgivings to my employers. I had serious thoughts about returning to Mexico. Then the Condé Nast high command—that is to say, Patcevitch and Liberman—came up with a generous proposition. A new position would be created for me, European features editor. “We’ve never had one before,” I was told (in fact they have never had one since). “We’ll see if you are worth it; otherwise we’ll bring you back in six months.” I didn’t come back for years.

  I left for my newly created post as Vogue’s European features editor, for which I had absolutely no qualifications beyond curiosity, in the spring of 1947.

  I started out in Paris as already described, then went on to London. I knew nobody. There were a few scattered members of my mother’s English family. Uncle Guy came up from the country to take me to lunch. We discussed the fate of the unfortunate Aunt Olive—she who was dissolved in a vat of acid. As Uncle Guy commented jovially, it was difficult to find the appropriate words for the condolence letter.

  The New York office had asked my opposite number in the London office to give me a cocktail party to introduce me to people of interest. The hostess was Clarissa Churchill, later to marry Anthony Eden. She gave the party but, in what I learned was typical English fashion, didn’t introduce me to a single soul.

  I was picked up by Cyril Connolly, whose Unquiet Grave I admired, so that was a good start. Cyril in turn, perhaps sniffing some dollars in the offing, took me to dinner more than once and introduced me to some of his Horizon contributors, including Stephen Spender and Dylan Thomas. Cyril, on hearing I had rented a château in the Dordogne—his favorite region of France—immediately invited himself for the weekend. To his chagrin he discovered it wasn’t a real château at all, but a bungalow next to some imposing ruins. Nevertheless, that summer he stayed for a month.

  Dylan Thomas attached himself to me and accompanied me on my rounds. One time I had to cover the movie Odd Man Out with James Mason. Dylan came along and came back with me to the Vogue office. It created somewhat of a stir, Dylan sitting patiently by my side as I typed out my report.

  Life in London was still very difficult for Londoners, with shortages and discomforts on every side. I was very popular because I practically ran a contraband operation, regularly bringing suitcases bulging with legs of lamb, cheese, butter, and cake from France.

  I was living in luxury at the Dorchester, thanks to Condé Nast, and had abundant hot water. After a while, I had a queue of English men of letters lining up outside my bathroom for a hot tub.

  There were spectacular kindnesses in return. I was asked to write an account for Vogue of the London theaters that were only lit by gaslights and candles—no electricity yet. I came down with the flu and couldn’t move. Stephen Spender came to my bedside and offered to go and cover the story for me—“and you sign it,” he said. Of course I didn’t sign his account.

  I simply looked up people I admired. I had the nerve to walk into Faber and Faber’s offices, having made an appointment with T. S. Eliot. He received me courteously and signed my copy of his Four Quartets.

  I had met Elizabeth Bowen, whose Death of the Heart I had been reading. It was getting near Christmastime. She asked what plans I had for the holiday. I had none. “You’ll spend Christmas with us,” she said. So I had a splendid Christmas dinner with Elizabeth Bowen and her husband, Alan Cameron.

  Later, Cameron very kindly took me to lunch at the Reform Club so that I could see what a traditional British club was like.

  In Search of Proust

  When I was sent to France by Vogue in 1947 with an open-ended assignment, to provide feature material, the first thing I wanted to do, as a passionate Proustian, was look up the surviving people and places connected with Marcel Proust.

  I was given the well-known photographer Erwin Blumenfeld. “He is rereading Proust in preparation,” the features department asserted. That was news to Blumenfeld, who had never opened a page.

  It is a tourist circuit today, but at that time I don’t believe anyone had done anything like it.

  We started at Illiers (Combray in the novel), some sixty-five miles from Paris, an anonymous little town in the Beauce region. Proust’s father, Dr. Adrien Proust, came from Illiers, and Proust as a child spent the Easter holidays there with his family. The parish church, Saint-Jacques, looks very much the same as described in the novel, with its asymmetric church spire.

  “Humble yet majestic,” according to Proust, who had Tante Amiot say, “If it played the piano, I’m sure it would play with real feeling.” She became Tante Léonie in the novel, and her house on the rue du Saint-Esprit with its two entrances is still (or was in 1947) right there, the back door opening onto a tiny garden.

  In the novel, Gilberte has an impressive garden called Tansonville. It had two models, and I saw them both. One, on a much more modest scale, belonged to Proust’s uncle Amiot, who had made a little pleasure garden at Illiers with winding paths and flower beds and hawthorn hedges and a small pond. I saw it as an overgrown thicket of greenery. Monet provided the other model at Giverny, where he had dammed a stream and made a water garden that has now been brought back to its original state and is almost alarmingly popular.

  The Hôtel de la Gare still existed on the main square with its advertisements painted on the side for Chevaux et Voitures, Salons et Cabinets, and its Café et Billiards.

  The War of the Madeleines had not yet started; only one bakery claimed to provide the authentic madeleines prized by Proust. I am told there is fierce competition today from challengers to the title.

  The survivors of Proust’s world were aged parties, so I had to be quick on my feet to catch them. For instance, I had a date for tea with Reynaldo Hahn, Proust’s great friend, and to my dismay he died two days before our appointment.

  I met the aged aristocrat with my favorite title, the Duchesse de Clermont-Tonnerre, who as a young girl, Elisabeth de Gramont, had entertained Proust at her family’s property in Normandy. She brandished an ear trumpet and rustled with innumerable chains as she peered down my bosom, while I queried her about summer holidays with Proust at her family’s château.

  I was too late with the Comtesse Greffulhe, the famous once-great beauty who had been one of the models for the Duchesse de Guermantes; she died shortly after I arrived in Paris. But I went around to her fine town house on the rue d’Astorg, where her possessions were about to be auctioned off. It was strangely lugubrious to see the piles of porcelain, the candelabra, the tarnished silver, the endless accoutrements of vanished festivities.

  On a livelier note, thanks to introductions from the American-born Roman princess Marguerite Caetani (founder of two admirable literary magazines, Commerce and Botteghe Oscure), I went to see two very much alive relics. Prince Antoine Bibesco lived in a splendid apartment on the tip of the Ile Saint-Louis, with walls glowing with paintings by Vuillard. On a table in the anteroom was a stack of postcards with, in facsimile, a fragment of a letter from Proust to Anna de Noailles saying, “The only friend who really understands me is Antoine Bibesco.”

  Hearing the click of my heels on the parquet, even
before I entered the salon, he called out, “Will we make love before or after lunch?” “After,” I answered, to gain a little time. I got out of that one unscathed.

  The next appointment was with a distinguished minister who will remain unnamed. He opened the front door himself, in a long dressing gown. Once I was inside, he opened the dressing gown to reveal he was naked. Being young and agile in those days, I leaped over a sofa and from a safe distance fired a few questions at him, before darting out the door.

  I went to see another witness of the Proustian past, the Romanian-born princess Marthe Bibesco (a cousin of Antoine’s). She had written a little book, Au Bal avec Marcel Proust (Marcel Proust at the Ball), and I had hoped to pick up some firsthand material. She had recently returned to Paris from sitting out the war elsewhere and was temporarily living at the Ritz.

  She duly received me, wearing a trailing tea gown. It was four in the afternoon. When I explained my interest in her impressions of Proust, she waved a languid hand and said, “Before we go any further, ten thousand dollars please.” I thanked her politely and said the equivalent of “not today.”

  The best-known portrait of Proust is by his friend Jacques-Émile Blanche, as a bland young man with an orchid in his buttonhole. It is bad luck for us that Proust was never painted by a major artist. We know what he looked like, but the portraits that turn up over and over again are always the same ones, and none has that extra dimension which would make us know more about Proust than he cared to tell himself.

  I first saw the Blanche portrait on an easel in the conventionally luxurious Paris living room of his niece Madame Mante-Proust in the late 1940s. It was quite uncanny because the niece, sitting in her pale blue damask salon chatting about the social season, looked so much like the portrait. She had the handsome, melancholy eyes, heavy lidded, darkly circled. She talked about “cher Marcel” as she gestured at a pile of manuscripts by the window. This was before the manuscripts had been donated to the Bibliothèque Nationale. I spent fascinated hours going over narrow notebooks, many with additional pages attached in long accordion-like strips, almost illegible with corrections, paragraphs added, lines suppressed—a proofreader’s nightmare. The pages still exuded the faint musty smell of the medicinal powders Proust would burn for his asthma.

  I was so new in France that when I set out for Normandy with Blumenfeld, I did not know that August 15 was a national holiday and that not a single hotel room would be available on the coast. Blumenfeld was equally oblivious. The office manager at the time did not care for me, and I think he kept this dark on purpose. He did say, keeping in mind the pennies, “Keep away from the auberge Guillaume le Conquérant, and above all don’t have a meal there.” The auberge Guillaume le Conquérant was a favorite of Proust’s, and I was determined to reconnoiter there. I went in with my colleague, and we lingered over a delicious lunch.

  Somehow the manager heard our conversation in which we were wondering where we should spend the night. He came over and broke the bad news: there would be no question of a hotel room, let alone two, in the entire region. Seeing my dismay, to my surprise he made an astonishing offer: the upper floor of the auberge had been transformed into a little Madame de Sévigné museum, because she had stayed there. “Her bed is on display. If you promise to be out by six in the morning, I will have it made up for you, and your companion can sleep in the car.” We agreed, and to thank him had another meal at the auberge.

  At six in the morning Blumenfeld arrived to wake me up and take my photograph amid the grand drapery. I was just in my underwear; there had been no question of bringing in a suitcase. He made me a splendid print of the photograph as a memento.

  Since childhood, Proust, like his narrator, had been going to Cabourg, by the sea in Normandy. In his novel Cabourg becomes Balbec. It was our next stop. The Grand Hôtel was still closed; it had been severely damaged by the bombardments that preceded the Normandy landings. I managed to wangle my way in to see the shattered glass, the boarded-up windows, the elevator suspended between two floors, and the unstrung strands of the crystal chandeliers trailing like streams of tears. It was from the large windows of the Grand Hôtel dining room that the narrator first sees the group of the “jeunes filles en fleur” and falls in love with Albertine.

  The star performer of my cast of Proustian characters was Jean Cocteau. Cocteau and Proust were longtime friends. Cocteau was eighteen years younger than Proust. They came from similar backgrounds, well-off Parisian bourgeois families. Both were closely attached to their mothers. Both were homosexual. Proust kept his inclinations secret, Cocteau most certainly did not.

  Cocteau used to live over the gardens of the Palais Royal, near Colette. In my early days in Paris we sometimes met for lunch at an excellent restaurant nearby, Véfour. We both enjoyed the Regency décor and the champagne served in carafes.

  Jean was a spellbinder and he knew it. The fantasy, the gossamer verbal constructions, the reminiscences, the theories, the new activities—films, ballets. At four in the afternoon we were often still at table, Jean weaving a story with those legendary hands of his—“like articulated jewels,” someone said—making me a drawing on the back of the Véfour menu, his elegantly sharp features framed by carefully haloed hair (we both got our permanents at Alexandre’s).

  Of course I used to ask him about Proust. It might have been a set piece, but it was brilliant.

  “I listened to him with the ears of my heart,” Jean began. “When he started to talk, his moaned parentheses became so beautiful that people who had meant to go simply couldn’t leave. Proust’s way of talking followed the convoluted lines of his writing, with sentences spun out, interwoven, superimposed, with threads lost and picked up again—punctuated with great bursts of laughter.”

  A further description of Proust by Cocteau comes from Francis Steegmuller’s Cocteau: “He would receive fully clothed—collar, tie, gloves—lying on the brass bed, which was a carryover from his childhood. There were tables littered with medicine bottles, piles of school notebooks, and, on an ebony table in the corner, an accumulation of photographs: duchesses, cocottes, dukes, doormen of great houses. There were slipcovers everywhere, the chandeliers were wrapped in muslin—there was an opalescent coating of dust over everything. He never allowed Celeste [his housekeeper] to dust, thinking this made his asthma worse. The whole place reeked of the anti-asthmatic powder he used to burn.

  “Proust’s rooms were always ordinary, if not bleak; he paid no attention to their décor, but simply accumulated bits and pieces from his family—everything disappeared under the sea of manuscript pages that billowed everywhere, overflowing from bed tables, chairs, and mantelpieces. The only personal note: his portrait by Jacques-Émile Blanche was on the right wall.

  “There, in his cork-lined room, at some advanced hour of the night—the only hours Proust received his friends—he would read to them from Swann’s Way.”

  Cocteau said he would start reading at any place, mistake a page, jump one, interrupt himself, lose his place in all the extra pieces he tacked on, splutter with laughter behind his gloved hand. “His modesty was legendary. He would repeat, ‘It’s too silly … I really can’t go on,’ and apologize for making them listen to such foolish stuff.”

  Visits to Matisse

  One of the few times I saw Henri Matisse out of bed was when I went to call on him in the spring of 1948. I was new in Paris on my Vogue assignment. I had made friends with Pierre Matisse, the distinguished dealer, in New York, and he gave me an introduction to his father.

  The great man was in his Paris apartment, 132, boulevard du Montparnasse, which he had taken over after the war. He received me kindly, with French formality, calling me Madame (I was a young person at the time). I had chosen my dress carefully, thinking of what might please him: it had pink and blue intertwined stripes against black. I was rewarded. He admired it. He was conservatively assembled himself, a blue tie and blue sweater bringing out the blue of his eyes; white beard neatly trimmed, e
very scanty hair in place.

  I brought family news from New York. Communications were still difficult. He explained that he was not staying in Paris for long; he was about to go back to the south of France. He had left his regular apartment in a large wedding cake of a building at Cimiez, above Nice, called the Hôtel Régina, after Queen Victoria, who had stayed there when one only went to the south of France in winter. During the war Cimiez was thought to be too exposed to Allied bombing before the landings, so he had moved inland to Vence, where he had rented a villa called Le Rêve.

  I had brought along a recent publication, a magnificent album about him with loose color plates and a text by Louis Aragon, published by the famous Swiss publisher Albert Skira, who was to play an important part in my professional life. Rather timidly, I asked Matisse if he would sign it.

  “Leave it here with me,” he said, “and come back for it tomorrow.” I followed his instructions. When I went to pick it up the next day, I found he had added a quizzical little self-portrait and inscribed it “Hommages respectueux.”

  The combination of the friendliness of the informal drawing and the formality of the inscription—“Respectful homages”—for a young person was typically Matisse.

  That summer I was in Antibes, visiting Picasso (a great throwaway line, but it happened to be true). An appointment was arranged for me to see Matisse at Vence. I had not realized what a nightmare it would be to get there. There was no public transportation, I didn’t drive. I finally came upon a very ancient taxicab driver who just happened to be there on holiday with his equally ancient cab. My appointment was for noon; we left in what should have been plenty of time.

  Soon, to my dismay, I realized we were hopelessly lost. My driver was from Avignon and didn’t know the region. What under other circumstances would have looked like idyllic landscapes—many made familiar from early Matisse paintings—began to look like visions from Dante’s Inferno to me.