So went the first half of my afternoons with the gentle scholar Simon Liberman. Then in the second half of our visits…this is so curious, so unconnected: In the second half of our afternoon visits, I danced for him. He would put a Russian recording on his Victrola—preferably some wild, fast-paced tzigane song—and I became a fiery gypsy, twirled a scarf and whirled and leaped about his study, blending ballet and Russian folk dancing inspired by my particular love for the ballet Scheherazade. My friend clapped his hands and laughed, saying, “Faster! Faster!” He stamped his feet to the music and cried, “You have such talent!” He clapped some more and swayed in rhythm to the music, his eyes gleaming with pleasure behind the round, scholarly glasses. I may have danced to release some primal energies that needed unleashing after such serious adult talk; or it might have been my way of thanking him, in the most immediate and seductive way at hand, for the great adulthood he’d conferred on me through his conversation; or it might even have been some symbolic dance of seduction that had to do with my love for Alex, which I expressed by weaving a spell on his father. When I danced for Simon those many afternoons of my early adolescence, I danced with a certain taste of danger, too, beginning to sense the perils of the world in which Alex and Mother moved: that siren world of fashion, that domain of constant seduction, replete with perilous and facile lures, in which the principal conflicts among us, in the following decades, were to be played out.
There was another great source of delight during the year we lived at Seventy-third Street: our first American Christmas, which we spent in Washington, D.C., with John and Irena Wiley, a couple whom I revered more than any of Mother’s close friends. John Wiley, an American diplomat who in 1934 had married my mother’s closest chum from Warsaw days, Irena Baruch, had served in Moscow under William Bullitt in the mid-1930s, and had gone on to be chief of the American diplomatic mission in Vienna in 1938. He was an Indiana Quaker, a tall, stately, spectacled, genial fellow full of mischievous fun and ironic witticisms. Unlike most Quakers, he was a great connoisseur of wines and a Cordon Bleu–trained chef and also a very heavy drinker. A second-generation foreign-service officer, he had been born in Bordeaux, where his father had been serving as consul, and had been brought up all over Europe, speaking numerous languages.
John and his exotic wife, Irena, a painter and sculptor, were deliriously in love with each other and enjoyed the kind of idyllic marriage that every romantic girl dreams of re-creating in her own life. Irena Wiley, a niece of the great economist Bernard Baruch, was the daughter of affluent Polish Jewish intellectuals. She had been brought up by French and British governesses, had studied sculpture in London, Paris, and Rome, and was fluent in as many languages as John. “You don’t speak Romanian?” Irena and John had twitted me ever since I could remember. “There’s no reason not to know Romanian.” As genial as her husband and endlessly affectionate toward her friends, Irena was my mother’s height and equally imposing, with very long black hair tied into a simple bun, flawless olive skin, and slanting, almost Asiatic, almond eyes. Her center of gravity was totally different from that of most other westerners—she glided rather than walked, with slow, mellifluous movements, a bit stooped over, like a cat searching for yet another place in which to curl up. She chain-smoked, like John, through a long black cigarette holder, and, like John, who spoke in a basso profundo several tones below Chaliapin’s, her low, melodious voice had been made gravelly by nicotine.
John and Irena were the most thrilling people I knew. They were adventurous, reckless, endlessly curious, and cultivated. When on vacation, they would ride dozens of hours on barely passable dirt roads to visit obscure medieval churches or sleep wrapped in blankets, under the stars, in the ruins of Persepolis or Baalbek. And they throbbed with recent history. While stationed in Moscow in 1935, at the beginning of the great purges, they had sat a few yards away from Joseph Stalin as he reviewed a May Day parade, had seen close friends arrested at the dinner table who never reappeared. (The Moscow experience later turned John into an intractable Cold Warrior, and he was in part responsible for the excessive anti-Soviet paranoia that marked my mother until the end of her life.) The Wileys had also seen Hitler ride into Vienna at the time of the Anschluss, and a few days later had visited with Sigmund Freud in his study in Vienna, offering to spirit him to Great Britain on the next plane. Upon being recalled to Washington in 1941, they had smuggled a manuscript of Father Teilhard de Chardin’s The Divine Milieu out of Japanese-occupied Beijing. Indeed, next to the Wileys my notably cosmopolitan parents seemed provincial and sadly limited. Uncle John and Aunt Irena, as I’d called them since I’d first known them in prewar Paris, amply returned my affection: Their greatest sorrow was to have been childless. And perhaps because they sensed the vulnerability caused by my childhood’s upheavals, they lavished on me, until the end of their lives, abundant affection and advice.
From the summer of 1941, when Uncle John, like most American diplomats posted in Europe, was recalled to the State Department, to 1945, when he would be assigned ambassador to Colombia, the Wileys lived in their brownstone in Georgetown. This is where we joined them for Christmas in 1941, a fortnight after Pearl Harbor and the United States’ entry into war. As we arrived at their snug, welcoming house filled with treasures from the Orient, I was assigned the task of masterminding the lighting of their huge Christmas tree, which reached to the ceiling. Those were the days when trees were lit with real candles, which were set into little metal holders that clamped onto the tree’s branches, and I planned the spectacle for those hours of the evening in which the room was sure to be occupied. Aunt Irena and Uncle John were born educators, and they reached out to me with fervor and generosity—never before had I felt so integrated into adults’ lives, so firmly placed at the center of their world. Did I want to see the Jefferson or Lincoln Memorial this morning, or was I in favor of a little ride down the Potomac? What recording would I like them to play next, Mozart or Chopin?
So the Wileys surrounded me with respect, with admiration—it is rare and marvelous for a child to be admired—and their home felt like a nest warmer and more nourishing than Alex and Mother’s. It was while basking in the Wileys’ affection, in fact, that I perceived the first glimmerings of any kind of a vocation. On New Year’s Eve, upon coming home from a party at their friend Cissy Patterson’s—my first past-midnight outing ever—I slid into my bed in the cozy study/guest room that stood off the Wileys’ living room. At my request, Aunt Irena had put on a recording of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto for my bedtime music. As its first measures rang out, the grown-ups came in one by one to give me a kiss and tuck me in, Uncle John last with a gallant peck on my wrist, reminding me yet once more that there was “no reason not to know Romanian.” I was listening, I believe, to Fritz Kreisler’s rendering of the concerto. I closed my eyes as the grown-ups were exchanging their last few words in the room next door: Uncle John was commenting on the meeting President Roosevelt was having with Winston Churchill in Washington that very week; its principal achievement was the creation of a Combined Chiefs of Staff, which would unite the British and American high commands…then everyone parted for the night, and I allowed the music to invade me. A few minutes into Kreisler’s cadenza, I was suddenly filled with a sense of the beauty and wonder of the future. I had often doubted our survival during the arduous past year, and now I suddenly knew a future could actually occur. But the cadenza was also filling me with what I can call only a sense of destiny: It was demanding me to strive and to make my mark upon the world—it was intimating that with the proper striving I could achieve. Over the past days, the Wileys had expressed their great faith in me, as no one else had since my father’s disappearance, and there and then I decided that I wasn’t going to let them down. So I fell asleep immersed in the Wileys’ affection and trust, cradled in the music, filled with new determination for the future, offering God gratitude for our survival, for my guardians’ erratic but abundant warmth, and for the love and loyalty of friends
such as the Wileys. I woke happily into the first morning of 1942, certain that the New World would bring my fledgling family all kinds of joys and surprises—which indeed it would, for in 1942 Mother and Alex began to fulfill their ambitions to rise to eminence in the New World.
The political events of 1942, however, turned out to be heartrending to anyone supporting the Allied cause. On the Russian front, German armies advanced southward into the Caucasus and laid siege to Stalingrad, where the battle raged for many months, leading hundreds of thousands of Russian civilians to die of hunger. In North Africa that summer, Rommel’s forces dealt heavy blows to British troops at Tobruk and forced a humiliating retreat, which would be stopped only at El Alamein. A few months later, on November 8, the Allied forces that landed in Morocco under the command of Dwight D. Eisenhower and George Patton met unexpectedly stiff resistance from German armies. And two days later, Germany retaliated in a way that brought sorrow to every French émigré: Coming home from school on November 11, 1942, I was about to put my key in the door of our house when I saw the front-page headline of the New York World-Telegram lying on the threshold: “German Troops Sweep into Vichy France.” Oh no no no, I wept as the ardent patriot I was. They were occupying the south of France—not an inch of my country’s sacred soil was now free; nothing of France was left beyond that community of men who’d pledged to continue the fight, whom my father had almost succeeded in joining. I summoned up my childhood heroes—Clovis, Charlemagne, Joan of Arc, Henry IV—to return and save our country, I also wept hard as the child I still was: They had invaded Va-et-Vient and overrun those joyous sunlit acres in which I’d spent some of the happiest months of my life. What would become of the house, of Maria? Would anything, anyone survive? I thought of my blue bicycle, of my proud, scary ride to the farm to fetch Alex’s milk, of all the joys we’d shared in a free France, and the child and the patriot wept together.
FIFTEEN
Saks Fifth Avenue and Condé Nast
In the 1940s and 1950s, no Manhattan store, with the possible exception of Bergdorf Goodman, more grandly characterized American elegance than Saks Fifth Avenue. And in those decades, no area of this lavish realm better epitomized American high style than the Salon Moderne on Saks’s third floor, a suite of rooms walled with Louis XV boiseries and pale-blue damask, which was looked on as the mecca of women’s custom-made fashions. Originally founded in the 1930s, the Salon Moderne was directed by a tall, blond, willowy dress designer called Sophie of Saks, who throughout the prewar years had made it a showcase for Paris-imported clothes. For in private life, Sophie was the wife of Adam Gimbel, Saks Fifth Avenue’s founder and president, an ardent Francophile who made a point of reading one book a week in French and, upon the onset of World War II, began to suffer withdrawal pains from his beloved Paris. Upon the cessation of trade imposed by wartime, Sophie had started to design a line of her own custom-made clothes. But both Gimbels desperately wished to recapture the Salon’s prewar European cachet; and in 1942, when they met the lively, beautiful émigré milliner Tatiana du Plessix, who was currently working at Henri Bendel, they sensed that they might have the winning ticket.
Hats were big business in those years, for throughout the history of fashion millinery styles have changed at a far faster pace than those of any other vestment—think of the phrase “old hat.” One of Vogue’s retired fashion editors estimates that during the 1940s she and her colleagues acquired a minimum of ten new hats each season to remain in style, giving the last year’s bunch to their maids. So a polished talent such as Tatiana’s was in great demand. Upon meeting her and being impressed by her skills and cosmopolitan éclat, Sophie and Adam Gimbel offered her a job making hats for the Salon Moderne, upping her Bendel salary to $125 per week. “Don’t ever learn English, you’ll sell more hats that way,” Adam Gimbel told Mother, and she more than amply followed his advice.
Gimbel’s decision to blend his wife’s talents with Tatiana’s was a dazzling success. Within a few years, Sophie’s only competitors in American made-to-order clothes would be Mainbocher and Hattie Carnegie, and Tatiana’s only possible rivals were Lily Daché and John Fredericks. Sophie and Tatiana’s motley crew of customers included stars such as Claudette Colbert, Marlene Dietrich, Madeleine Carroll, Irene Dunne, and Edith Piaf; the socialites Mrs. E. F. Hutton, Mrs. Pierre Du Pont, Mrs. James Van Allen, and Mrs. Charles Henry of Philadelphia; assorted magnates such as Estée Lauder, Betsy Bloomingdale, Mrs. Darryl Zanuck, Mrs. Walter Annenberg and her daughter, Enid Haupt, Harriet Deutch (heir to the Rosenwald-Sears-Roebuck fortune), and Anita May (wife of the founder of the May company.)
Tatiana and Sophie’s talents complemented each other perfectly. Tatiana’s spry creations added a dash of intrigue and wit to Sophie’s very traditional comme il faut elegance; a typical touch of her whimsy was to garnish a winter hat with a thermometer or a tiny revolving weather vane in lieu of the traditional feather. Yet her headgear remained ideally suited to 1940s ultra-feminine tastes, for she designed with an intimate sense of women’s needs, aiming to make them both seductive and comfortable. Tatiana’s fame, according to The Christian Science Monitor, was based on the fact that “[her] hats, whether they are large or reduced to almost nothing at all—have a way of fitting on the head. Tatiana…blends imagination with a taste for color and material and an unfailing sense of how her hats will look and feel when they are put on.” By contrast, “Lily Daché’s and John Fredericks’s designs were far more outlandish and contrived,” says cultural historian Rosamond Bernier, who bought a half-dozen hats from my mother in 1945. “Tatiana’s were never outré, her taste was impeccable, and she had a laser eye for what was most becoming to your particular features.”
Both Sophie and Tatiana, who became the closest of friends, were workaholics and rarely went out at noon, so they lunched every day in Sophie’s office. Helen O’Hagan, who was then the Salon Moderne’s press officer, relates that both Sophie and Tatiana loved to talk, but even at those office lunches Tatiana tried to remain the center of attention. “She carried on about whom she’d met at dinner parties that week and who should be sat where at different kinds of social functions,” O’Hagan says. “Then the two of them would discuss their bridge game for the following Saturdays and Sundays, whom they’d enlisted to play. When Tatiana had hogged the stage for a bit too long Sophie would lean over and poke her knee and say ‘Tats, enough! Let someone else speak!’” Even during lunch, O’Hagan relates, Tatiana always sat in a chair that directly faced the Salon Moderne’s entrance, keeping it wide open so that she could quickly jump up and catch any customer who wandered into the salon at lunchtime.
When a client did come in, the dictatorial Tatiana seldom let her choose a hat. She allowed no fingering or perusing of models: She immediately imposed her preference, and that was that. “Tatiana simply brought something out and said, ‘Thees ees hat for you,’” said our close family friend Ethel Woodward de Croisset, who frequented the salon in the late 1940s. “And then she put it on your head and made a loud one-word comment in French, such as ‘Formidable!’ or ‘Divin! ’”
But my mother’s success as arbiter of fashion was based on cultural and social skills that far transcended her craft as a designer. Like Elsa Schiaparelli, who created some of the 1930s’ most inventive headgear, Mother had studied sculpture before learning the millinery trade. Steeped in art history under Uncle Sasha’s tutelage, Tatiana raided some of the world’s most beautiful paintings for her designs: She modeled many of her snoods and wimples upon the coifs of the women in Vermeer, her favorite painter of all time; Velázquez and Goya were equally constant sources of inspiration (“Passementerie trimming brought a Spanish look to a bicorne of black Persian,” The New York Times said in its review of Tatiana’s fall 1950 collection. “The Spanish note is a favorite with this designer.”) The floral abundance of Russian folk art and the highly charged aesthetic of Russian Orthodox liturgy may have been equally powerful influences in her work, as they were in her pench
ant for mammoth costume jewelry. Moreover, hats were always more regimented by social protocol than any other vestment, and Tatiana’s stint as a diplomat’s wife had enabled her to master a code that was still central to midcentury elegance: the fittingness of each chapeau to a particular social occasion. Her expansive character was also ideally suited to becoming an all-around adviser and confessor for hundreds of New York women. Not unlike hairdressers, who often become their clients’ closest confidants, she was a gifted cosmetician and lay psychiatrist: An important source of her success was that she was able to convince plain women that they were beautiful. “I listen to problems and solve by putting flowers on heads,” she used to say about her customers. “They parade out of salon full of confidence, like prize racehorses.”
Them Page 32
