Walking with the Muses

by Pat Cleveland

  “Like this?” I asked.

  “Bend back more, more,” Bourdin said out of the darkness.

  “Okay,” Donna answered as we struggled to pose in such a way to cover our girl parts, so that we were showing only our flank sides.

  “Hide me. You have the bootie,” Donna said.

  “You have one, too.”

  “Yeah, but mine is flat.”

  “You have as much as I do.”

  “Lean back more, please,” Bourdin said quietly. “More.”

  “Show the shoes,” Donna said. “Wait—where did he go?”

  “He left again.”

  “No!”

  “Yes. There he goes past the dressing room. I see his silhouette.”

  “Can’t he close the door? I’m freezing.”

  “At least the light will keep us warm.”

  “My hair is so tight it hurts.”

  “Mine, too—and it’s still wet under all the goop.”

  “It’s probably seeping into our brains,” Donna said.

  “Did he even take a picture?” I asked. “I didn’t hear a click, did you?”

  Bourdin was in no hurry; that much we knew. Maybe this was how they worked in France, like sipping wine slowly.

  “Don’t move,” he said,

  “I have an itch,” Donna said. At that point, we were standing so close together, I could almost feel her itch, too.

  Pop! Flash went a strobe light. Bourdin finally took one shot. “It is good,” he said in his monotone. By now it was two in the morning, and Donna and I were beyond caring what Bourdin was going to do with these photos.

  Next, Bourdin’s assistant created a little bench out of a plank, which he then covered with shiny black oilcloth. Bourdin returned to the scene, a voice in the dark. “Sit on the plank, very near each other, with your backs facing the camera, please.”

  Donna and I were like two hot cross buns stuck together, sitting naked on a baking sheet, ready to go into the oven, because now the spotlight was so hot that it burned our backs.

  “It is good,” Bourdin said again after taking the picture. I tried to look around at the camera. “Just your back,” he said.

  Now, that upset me. I wanted to show my face, wanted him to see me, but he seemed interested only in my backside.

  “Thank you,” Bourdin said.

  “Thank you,” Donna and I answered in unison.

  “Where is he?” I asked Donna.

  “He’s gone, finished,” Christine said.

  At least the lights came on long enough for Donna and me to get dressed. Christine called a taxi and we returned home in a pelting rain. Ah, the glamorous world of modeling.

  I really appreciated Donna because, trust me, not all of the other models Antonio worked with were as fun-loving or just plain nice as she was. Exhibit A was Carol LaBrie, another one of “Antonio’s Girls” and the first black woman ever to grace the cover of Italian Vogue—or, for that matter, any edition of Vogue anywhere in the world.

  The first things I noticed about Carol were her large doe eyes and her pixie haircut, slicked close to her head. She came to the apartment one day while I was posing for Antonio, so she went into the small room with Juan and Corey to wait for him. After Antonio finished a sketch, I joined them in the small room for a break and to stretch after leaning on one elbow for an hour. Carol looked at me, sizing me up, and said, “So what do you think you’re doing with those?” She was standing right next to me, peering into my face. I had no idea what she was talking about. “Do you mind if I do something?” she asked.

  “Do something?” I said, puzzled.

  “Close your eyes,” she said. And then, in under a second—ouch!—she ripped off both sets of my eyelashes at the same time. Not my real ones, thank heaven (though it felt like it) but my fake ones.

  Juan and Corey began chortling. I actually thought they might be in on it. Then Corey said, “No, you didn’t!” They all doubled over with laughter, including Antonio, who had walked in by then. “Did the mean puddy cat get to you?” he said to me as Carol smirked at him.

  I was so hurt that I wanted to cry. “Here!” Carol said, handing me the lashes. “You won’t be needing these anymore.” She sashayed over to the door, opened it, and said, “Europe isn’t America. You don’t have to be fake over here.” She looked over at the boys and said, “Doesn’t she look so much better?” And with that, she made her grand exit.

  As soon as the door shut, the boys collapsed in laughter all over again. I was so furious that I felt like smacking all three of them, but instead I started sobbing, my mascara running and streaking my cheeks. Having heard so much about Carol from Antonio, I’d hoped to be her friend, but in my book, you just don’t do something like that to another girl the first time you meet her.

  chapter 34

  PLEASE PLEASE ME

  A photo shoot for Vogue Italia, shot in Karl Lagerfeld’s Paris apartment, 1971.

  Courtesy of Guy Bourdin.

  Until I arrived in Paris, I don’t believe I had even heard the name Karl Lagerfeld. But in the days after I moved into the apartment on Rue Bonaparte—where Antonio, Juan, Donna, and I were still living like puppies in a box—it often seemed that I heard little else. It was Karl this and Karl that, morning, noon, and night. Antonio explained that he was a German-born designer who created the collections of the French fashion house Chloé, and that he had hired Antonio to work with him to illustrate the current collection. Donna knew Karl well because they had appeared in L’Amour together, and she wore a lot of his clothes.

  One day Corey, another good friend of Karl’s, came by the apartment to say that Karl wanted us to come over that night. Donna was working, so it was just me and the three boys. Off we went to Karl’s apartment, arm in arm, skipping along the narrow streets. Finally, I was going to meet the mystery friend who’d been so generous to us all.

  The boys had told me that Karl grew up in a castle. That sounded like a fairy tale; then again, just being in Paris and walking through its beautiful small streets on a summer evening was fairy tale enough for me. There is no greater feeling than being the only girl out with three gorgeous guys in the most romantic city on earth.

  We nearly tripped when we walked into the garden courtyard of the building at 123 Rue de l’Université because we were laughing so hard at some wisecrack Antonio had made about Juan. When I got a good look at the garden, it took my breath away. In the center was a fountain with a marble statue of a dancer, and around the edges was white lattice covered with roses and jasmine, which reached up to an intricately carved iron balcony graced by tall French doors lit from within. I breathed deeply; the smell was divine.

  “Which apartment is his?” I asked Juan.

  “There’s only one,” Juan said. For the briefest instant, I experienced a flash of the intense class envy I had first felt at Madame Metcalf’s house in Connecticut: What I would give to be rich enough to live in a place like this, I thought. Then I shrugged it off. Be grateful you can even visit, my inner voice told me.

  From the garden, we ran up l’escalier, which wound up to what the French call the first floor. A pretty young maid showed us in, and as she walked in front of us, I noticed the seams up the back of her silk stockings. I want those, I thought as our heels clicked over onyx-colored marble floors. On the mirrored ceiling was a huge art deco chandelier that cast long shards of light on the dark mirrored walls. The entrance alone was three times bigger than the apartment we were staying in.

  In awe, I stood there like a fish, mouth wide open, about to swallow a fisherman’s hook. Antonio actually had to poke me in the ribs and tell me to close my mouth. I was lost in contemplation of a tall cut-glass vase of long-stemmed white calla lilies when someone said, “Boo!” I jumped.

  “Karl!” Juan said in a screechy voice. “You scared us.”

  “Good,” Karl said. “That was my intention, my dear.” He chuckled in satisfaction.

  “Come on, Karl, I know your tricks,” An
tonio said.

  Corey was gazing in the mirror. “You should wear kohl on your eyes, Karl,” he said, whipping out his kohl stick and ringing Karl’s eyes with smudgy black circles. “There. That’s better.”

  Karl glanced in the mirror. “Mysterious, like the old movie stars. Now we are all like Greta Garbo in Mata Hari, no?” Then he whispered in Juan’s ear, and Juan laughed as if Karl had said something terribly naughty.

  So this was the legendary Karl. I could see why they all loved him so much. He was very European-looking (though if Antonio hadn’t told me, I wouldn’t have been able to place his nationality), with thick, dark, wavy hair and a big smile. He spoke rapidly, in delightfully accented English. “How do you like Paris, my dear?”

  The question was directed at me, but I couldn’t speak. Antonio answered for me. “She likes it,” he said. “Tell him you like it.” I just nodded, feeling like an idiot.

  “Is the apartment comfortable?” Karl asked.

  “Yes,” I managed, barely audible.

  Karl held my hand in his and patted it kindly. “I must change,” he said. “We are going out to dinner, and I can’t go out in my smoking jacket, can I?”

  While he was changing, Juan led us into a nearby room—also dark, mirrored, and spacious—that was filled with exercise machines. Antonio lay down on a push bench and rolled the heavy barbells over his chest and tried to pick them up. “Karl lifts these? I can’t even budge them,” he said, giving up. Juan tried but couldn’t lift them, either.

  “Wow, you two really need to work out,” Corey said, but didn’t touch a thing.

  Karl came into the room. “Exercise is my new obsession,” he said. “It’s good for the body, don’t you think?” He held out something to me. “Here, my dear. This is a little something I’d like you to wear tonight.” It was a stunning black jacket, intricately beaded in rose flower patterns, with the tiniest deep red bugle beads. “It’s a Schiaparelli,” he said, draping it over my shoulders.

  I’d learned about Elsa Schiaparelli’s designs at school. Not only that, Berry Berenson had told me that Elsa was her and Marisa’s grandmother (fashion certainly ran in that family!). This jacket was at least forty years old, and wearing it was like donning a piece of history. I was overwhelmed; I’d just met Karl, and already he had given me this incredible garment to wear.

  The five of us went to a little restaurant that served Italian food just a few blocks away. The host guided us to a private room in the back, since we didn’t want to sit at the tables on the street. I was feeling like a star in my beaded jacket. And then I saw Carol LaBrie. She was sitting at the table waiting for us, wearing a beaded jacket that at first glance was nearly identical to the one I had on. It sparkled, reflecting the candlelight, and as I got closer, my jacket did the same. We could have been twins. Carol was not amused. Come to think of it, neither was I.

  At the restaurant, Karl and Antonio arranged for me to accompany Antonio to Karl’s atelier the following day. Bright and early the next morning, there we were in Karl’s workshop, which was up a squeaky wooden stairway in a very old building. Inside was a wonderfully creative space. There were small sketches on corkboards, with attached squares of swatches, and along the walls were dozens of tubes of rolled-up silk, colorful bolts of wool, and smooth, shiny satin. The floors were covered with tapestries, which mingled, chameleonlike, with tiny pieces of unrolled bias tape, scraps of muslin, and shredded threads.

  A short, sturdy French woman was kneeling on a green cushion, sewing a hem on a delicate long tulle dress draped on the croquis form in front of her. She looked over at us and went back to her work. Was she doing the double-hem stitch, or maybe the plain-hem stitch? I used to do those stitches, and I’d get knots in my threads from rushing—and I was always rushing. I watched her and thanked my lucky stars that it wasn’t me having to hem that dress.

  Antonio had begun to sketch when Karl came into the room, bristling with good cheer. “We must dress you,” he said, putting his gentleman’s purse on the sketching table.

  Karl looked at what Antonio was drawing and got so engrossed that his face lit up. He sat down beside Antonio, picked up one of the markers, and quickly started a cartoonlike fashion drawing of his own. “Well, it’s nothing like yours,” he said, showing it to Antonio, “but you can get the idea, no?”

  Karl looked at me and made a few marks on the paper. “We can turn you into anything,” he said, showing me the paper. “This is you as Josephine, the woman who stole the heart of Napoleon.” I was awestruck at how quickly his hands moved; he even wrote a short story beneath his drawings. “What do you think?” he said to Antonio. “She can be our empress.”

  Then Karl approached me, felt-tipped pen in hand. “You know, dear, you are missing just one thing.” He extended the pen and drew a little round beauty mark on my cheekbone. Eerily, I heard my mom’s voice in my head: The beauty mark is like the period at the end of a sentence. “There, now you look as though you are from the royal French courts,” Karl said. He clapped his hands to get the seamstress’s attention. “Madame! Bring the dress!”

  La robe—“dress” in French—was thrown over my head. While I was worming my way into it, I could hear Karl discussing it in French with the seamstress. “Monsieur Lagerfeld . . . ,” she said, and I could tell by the tone of her voice that she was protesting. I poked my head out, glad to get air. Really, dressing is sometimes like inching your way through a dark tunnel, especially if you’ve never seen the dress before. The good news is, it’s a surprise when you manage to get it on, like being born again with a different skin.

  In this case, I couldn’t see my own image, which meant I was powerless to show the dress to its best advantage. Then I caught a glimpse of my reflection in a freestanding oval mirror set between two windows and saw Karl behind me with a white powdered eighteenth-century wig in his hands. He placed it carefully on my head and, with a big downy puff, applied white powder all over my face. “You are my Marie Antoinette,” he said. “She said let them eat cake, but my dear, you look like the cake.”

  He stepped back and contemplated my appearance. “The fullness of the back, you see,” Karl said as Antonio sketched away. “What do you think? I will make it more simple.” With that, the seamstress got a terrified look on her face, as if she might have to take the entire dress apart. “Or pleated at the neckband, like a court lady . . .” The seamstress followed with her eyes as he pointed.

  Off came the dress with a great deal of pulling and me dodging the straight pins. Being pinned is one of the hazards of being fitted; those tiny sabers scratch deeply, burn your skin, and leave scars.

  Karl drew more ideas on paper, clearly naturally high on creating. His enthusiasm was contagious—Antonio was in a great mood, too—and it made me happy. Within the next hour, the two of them came up with many more sketches, and I had changed into a host of different characters in a host of different time periods. Karl had a great deal of intuition; he was creating me, as was Antonio.

  That afternoon I added another name right next to Antonio’s on the list of people I wanted to please: Karl Lagerfeld.

  chapter 35

  RHAPSODY IN BLUE

  More posing at Karl Lagerfeld’s place for Vogue Italia, 1971.

  Courtesy of Guy Bourdin.

  Karl had invited us out to dinner, so Antonio, Juan, and I walked from our tiny flat over to Karl’s art deco palace on Rue de l’Université. Donna and Corey would join us at the restaurant.

  Karl greeted us in his evening smoking jacket and silk ascot. He looked like a perfect gentleman of the 1920s. “Excuse me, my dears,” he said. “I must change my jacket.”

  He went into the other room, and when he came back, the maid was following him, carrying mounds of chiffon in the exact midnight blue of the candy boxes I’d been seeing in shops all over Paris. “My dear,” Karl said, looking directly at me, “it is evening and you need something long, so I want you to wear this.”

  The maid accompanied m
e into Karl’s exercise room off the foyer, where I stepped out of my own dress and she helped me put on the blue one, holding up yard after yard of pleated chiffon. It reminded me of a choir robe, but it was too transparent for church, that’s for sure. As I slipped my arms into the sleeves, I remembered that I wasn’t wearing underwear, because I hadn’t wanted my panty line to show through the matte jersey dress I’d had on. There wasn’t much I could do about that now.

  The room had no mirror, so I couldn’t see what I looked like. I quickly walked back to the boys, awkwardly covering the front of my body. With all those yards of chiffon flowing behind me, I felt ready to take flight. Karl and the boys’ eyes seemed almost to pop.

  “Brava, Miss Cleveland,” Karl said, clapping. “I made this dress on Marlene Dietrich, but now I have decided it is yours. You are the only one who can wear this.”

  “Me?” I was nearly speechless.

  “Do you like it, my dear?”

  “Yes, very much.” I was trying to digest what he had said. It was as if Karl had just given me a magic robe: That was how special it felt to be wearing a dress that had been made on Marlene Dietrich.

  Antonio’s eyes grew even wider, because he adored Dietrich, and he hated it when I was shy and didn’t speak up for myself. “Say thank you to Karl,” Antonio said. I had been just about to do that, but of course Antonio had to jump in and needle me, like a smart-alecky big brother.

  “Thank you, Karl,” I said quietly. I was too busy in my head to be mad at Antonio for embarrassing me.

  I saw myself in the hall mirror, and I started walking up and down Karl’s foyer, just expressing how I felt in that dress. I moved about until I was almost dizzy with excitement, then stood perfectly still and all the pleats landed straight. I lifted my arms and the yards of fabric looked like a cloud of blue mist surrounding me.