Yet there are few satisfying explanations as to why this is the case. As Burstein puts it, undoubtedly correctly, the reason there are hardly any good studies about Jewish social mobility is that Jews have resisted drawing attention to this trend, let alone explaining it, out of fear of provoking anti-Semitism. There are, after all, plenty of historic examples of Jewish success being used as an excuse for the targeting of Jews, and the Glass family experienced multiple incidents of that in their lifetimes. In the absence of proper analysis, the most popular theories range from the unhelpfully vague (they work hard, they care about education – as if other minority groups don’t?), to relying on repulsive eugenics ideas and conspiracy theories.
The rise of anti-Semitism on the Right[4] and Left[5] in the twenty-first century has reignited gross comments about Jewish prominence and alleged power. But it would be bizarre, and maybe even flat-out detrimental, to ignore this part of the modern Jewish story when talking about Jews in the twentieth century, because pretending this truth doesn’t exist merely leaves it free to be exploited by bigots and conspiracists. So when I started writing this book I knew I wanted to look at Jewish social mobility in the last century, and it didn’t take me long to realise that the person in my family who best embodies this storyline, as well as the probable reasons behind it, was Alex.
The path that brought Alex to Picasso began when he returned to the fashion business after the war. Some might think that the gravity of what he’d endured during the war would have made fashion seem intolerably superficial and ridiculous in comparison. But this would be a misunderstanding of what fashion means, and has always meant, to France.
Today Paris comes at the end of the fashion week cycle – the order always running: New York, London, Milan, Paris – and, sure, there is usually some kind of acknowledgement in those other cities that fashion week was happening. A minor politician might sit in the front row at some of the shows. The local mayor will make a speech welcoming the fashion journalists, dutifully trotting out statistics about how important – meaning lucrative – fashion is to the city. But these nods invariably feel merely dutiful – half-hearted and token. You can all but hear the faint grinding of teeth as these politicians demean themselves to consort with the lowbrow world of fashion.
Fashion weeks aren’t important to those cities. They are accessories rather than the main outfit, something that could easily be removed without anyone noticing the lack.
Paris is different. There, it feels like the whole city is invested in fashion week, as much as if a major football tournament or film festival was happening in the centre of town. Taxi drivers know where the main shows happen and waiters in cafés talk knowledgeably about whether the new designers at the big brands are living up to their hype. In Paris, fashion isn’t just an add-on, it is an integral part of the city’s identity; it has always been thus, and never more so than in the aftermath of the war, when Alex was reentering the industry.
In the run-up to the war, and during it, while women in Britain and America were being told to make do and mend, French women were instructed it was their patriotic duty to look fashionable: ‘Fashion will remain Parisienne in its most intimate fibre. You will dress yourself simply but elegantly. Those who are at the front want you to be pretty,’ read a fashion editorial in 1939.[6]
Even the Nazis understood the importance of fashion to Paris’s identity. Early in the war, Hitler set out to make Berlin the fashion capital instead of Paris, so in July 1940 Nazis marched into the offices of Lucien Lelong, a designer and then president of the Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture, and demanded he hand over all the records of the French fashion business. Lelong understood this was an attempt to hijack not just the French fashion industry but France’s culture and pride, so in November of that year he travelled to Berlin to insist that haute couture must stay in Paris. He argued that the designers and workers wouldn’t be able to produce anything if they were torn from their homes and families in France and forcibly repatriated to Germany. Surprisingly, the Nazis agreed and Lelong saved not just French fashion, but also thousands of lives, as many of the seamstresses who worked in haute couture – as well as the occasional designer like Alex – were Jewish refugees.
After Paris was liberated, some of the British and American forces were outraged at the fashionability of the Frenchwomen they saw. But as historian Anne Sebba writes, staying fashionable was seen in France as a form of resistance: ‘To look dowdy was a negation of patriotic duty, when by sporting extravagant costumes they could thumb their noses at the Germans. Fashion was, for the French, even after four years of occupation, anything but trivial.’[7]
Fashion was considered so untrivial that the resumption of the fashion industry was seen by the French as analogous to France reemerging from the ashes of wartime humiliation. So in 1945 Lelong, along with Nina Ricci’s son, Robert, came up with the Petit Théâtre de la Mode, an exhibition in which French designers dressed small dolls in their latest fashions. Despite the country being pretty much broke, the French Ministry of Reconstruction supported the show, because this was an important statement about the resurgence of French industry. The dolls were placed in sets designed by French artists, including Jean Cocteau, and the designers who took part included Balenciaga, Hermès, Lanvin, Grès, Schiaparelli, Rochas, and a designer described as ‘Alex’.
This was almost certainly Alex Maguy. ‘Alex’s’ doll, which is currently in the Maryhill Museum of Art in Washington, is wearing a loose black-and-white-checked coat with a green lining, which is very similar to Alex’s designs before and after the war. More tellingly, Alex definitely contributed a design to a similar initiative four years later called the Merci Train, also organised by Lelong, and nearly all the designers involved in the Petit Théâtre de la Mode also took part in the Merci Train. On top of that, he would certainly have known Lelong (through Dior, who worked for him) and Robert Ricci (through his mother, Nina) beforehand. ‘We can be almost completely sure he was also part of the Petit Théâtre,’ academic Ludivine Broch, who has written on the Merci Train extensively, told me.
But why would he omit his surname? Broch pointed out to me that several designers who took part in the Petit Théâtre ‘were going for the one-name brand’, probably to make themselves sound a little more ritzy, more like Hermès or Chanel. But because ‘Maguy’ sounded so similar to the then popular Parisian designer Maggy Rouff – and it also wasn’t actually his name – he opted to use ‘Alex’ instead. But it may also be because of a message that was being subtly pushed by the Petit Théâtre, and France itself, in the immediate post-war era. There was no reference to the Resistance in the Petit Théâtre, and it’s notable that various designers who had openly worked for the Nazis, such as Rochas and Maggy Rouff,[8] were involved with it. The Petit Théâtre was staged in the middle of the épuration légale, in which France hurriedly condemned collaborators in an attempt to banish memories of the occupation to the past. So while there was certainly appetite in the country then to punish traitors, there was also a growing desire for the country to move on from this national shame. It was this mood that would ultimately lead to Perré’s quiet readmittance into society. So it may very well be that Lelong felt that Alex’s full name was too closely associated with his Resistance activities, or just his Jewishness, and this would serve as an undesired distraction – hence ‘Alex’. In normal circumstances Alex would never have gone along with this, but he was absolutely frantic after the war to restart his fashion business, so it is entirely possible he would have agreed, for this one-off, to drop his surname. Alex was an extremely proud man, but if there was one quality he had in more abundance than pride, it was pragmatism.
The Petit Théâtre was hugely popular from the day it opened at the Louvre in 1945, ultimately attracting more than 100,000 visitors and raising more than 1 million francs for the war effort.[9] It was so successful it then went on a world tour, travelling to Stockholm, Vienna, Leeds, New York and San Francisco, sending a reminder of
France’s superior couture culture to the world. After years of occupation and submission, France was defiantly reasserting its national pride.
A crowd at one of Alex’s fashion shows.
Two years later, Drew Pearson, an American journalist and anti-communist campaigner, organised what would become known as the Friendship Train. This was literally a train, filled with $40 million – $500 million today – worth of donated food and similar supplies that the train collected from American citizens during the course of its much publicised journey from Los Angeles to New York. The train was then shipped to Europe – France and Italy primarily – and was written about by the American media as a charitable effort to help the poor and humiliated European countries, which of course it was. But Pearson had an alternative political motive for sending the Friendship Train, which was that he feared that France in particular was now vulnerable to communism. This gesture from America would, it was hoped, remind France of the benevolence of its capitalist friends. It was a kind gesture, but one with a definite political edge. France promptly responded in kind.
The Merci Train was sent to the United States in 1949 and consisted of forty-nine boxcars filled with donations from French individuals and companies as thank yous to the American people, and each boxcar went to a different American state.[fn1] The gratitude the French people felt was real, but what they chose to send the Americans shows something was going on here beyond mere thankfulness. Church bells, French art, First World War souvenirs were all offered, all of which were very nice, but possibly not that useful to, say, families in North Dakota. And as with the Petit Théâtre, there were certainly no references in the Merci Train to the occupation and the Resistance.[10] Instead it was a proud statement of France’s cultural dominance and endurance, emphasising the country’s glorious military past with mementoes from the First World War as opposed to the more recent one, and souvenirs from French industries, such as art, automobiles and fashion. France was undoubtedly grateful for the supplies America had sent, but it would not be treated as a grovelling peasant, thankful for crumbs. Ironically, France was a lot less bothered by the Friendship Train’s ulterior motive – to save the country from communism – than it was by its more euphemistic purpose, which was to help a poor, struggling country. The Merci Train shows that even if France itself was still barely on its knees in 1949, the country had lost none of its pride.
To represent French fashion, Lelong repeated his Petit Théâtre initiative and commissioned what the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York described as ‘the most talented and well-known fashion designers of the time to create mini masterpieces’.[11] Alex was again one of those designers, and today his doll is in the Metropolitan Museum: she was wearing a beautiful full-length burnished blue dress with black piping around the neck and short sleeves, a cream blouse beneath, a black belt around the waist and black stripes at the bottom, and an elegant straw bonnet, with more black piping and long black ribbon.[fn2] Alex’s inclusions in the Petit Théâtre and Merci Train were undoubtedly an honour, but they also show how France had been forced to change in the past half-decade, even if it couldn’t acknowledge it openly. The former Polish refugee who arrived without a penny and unable to speak the language, whom France had tried to have killed only a few years earlier, was now seen as an integral part of the country’s grandeur. Alex had been deeply hurt by France’s refusal to naturalise him before the war; after the war, when he was considered an essential component to the country’s sense of pride, he had his validation.
By the time Alex contributed to the Merci Train, he had fully resurrected his fashion house. This effort began in 1945 when he sold a painting by the Jewish artist Chaïm Soutine[12] – which he’d bought before the war and stashed away during it, probably with a friend – for 200,000 francs. From that sale he was able to rent a room on rue Jean Goujon, just behind the extremely posh Avenue Montaigne, which he turned into his new couture salon. In his memoir Alex claims that Imre Partos and Christian Dior helped him decorate his salon, which is certainly possible as Dior was building his own salon around the corner on the Avenue Montaigne, after spending the war designing for Lelong’s label. Two years later Dior would launch his New Look collection, which would both establish his name as the greatest designer of his era and confirm at last that Paris had regained its position as the capital of haute couture.
Alex had the kind of salon he’d dreamed of since he was a teenager, and he filled the room with what he had managed to save of his small art collection, including paintings by his beloved friend Kisling. One thing he did not have, however, was material for making clothes.
It was hard for all designers to obtain fabrics in France after the war, and part of the reason Lelong originally commissioned the designers to make clothes for miniature mannequins was that they wouldn’t need as much fabric as for actual models. Alex worked so hard – cobbling together whatever scraps of material he could find, asking friends abroad and almost certainly his sister to send over whatever fabrics they could, raising money, coming up with the designs, making them and finding the models – that the night before his show he collapsed with exhaustion. So Lelong, as eager as Alex for this show to be a success, stepped in and presented it for him.
Lelong and Alex shared a connection that went beyond an ambition for the French fashion industry: both were suspected of collaboration. Lelong saved the fashion industry from being relocated to Germany, but his success ultimately worked against him as it suggested to some that he was not to be trusted. Surely, they said, an innocent Frenchman could not work with the Germans as successfully as he did.[13] Alex, who himself was the subject of whispers because of his alliance with General Perré, became one of Lelong’s more vocal defenders, insistently reassuring any sceptical designers of his innocence.
Alex knew some regarded him with suspicion, but this did not put him off dabbling in shadowy ambiguity. He himself believed, he writes in his memoir, that Lelong ‘was guilty of much’ during the war, although there has never been any evidence he was guilty of anything. Nonetheless, Alex also believed Lelong was worth defending because ‘my real concern was to get my couture business relaunched’.
Lelong was not the only suspected collaborator Alex worked with. Serge Lifar was one of the greatest ballet dancers of the twentieth century and for three decades was the director of the Paris Opera Ballet, including during the war. After Paris was liberated he was tried and condemned as a collaborator and banned from the stage. Alex, however, took it upon himself to defend him and asked a journalist friend on Nice-Matin to write a piece in defence of Lifar.
His friend was astonished, asking Alex how he, of all people, could ask him to do such a thing.
‘Don’t think I am asking for the pleasure of it. I don’t have a choice,’ Alex replied.
Of course, Alex did have a choice, but Lifar had commissioned him to make costumes for his ballet, for the career-saving sum of 500,000 francs. At this point, the theatre was pretty much the only place where a designer could make money as few private citizens could afford couture, and Lifar’s commission was a lifeline. Once again, Alex was looking out for himself, and he won: Lifar was able to stage his ballet and Alex finally got his company off the ground by making the costumes, with the assistance of his old friend Imre Partos.
When I first read these stories I was astonished, because the image of Alex working with known collaborators was definitely not the Alex his family knew. After all, at the same time Alex was defending Lelong he was instructing his little sister to hunt down Émile Best with a gun. Once in the 1960s, when my father was with Alex at his office, a German museum called him and asked, in careful French, if they could borrow a painting. My father watched Alex’s face turning red as he listened. At last he spoke: ‘As long as there is breath in my body, no painting of mine will ever be hung in your country!’ he shouted back in German and slammed down the phone. In the 1980s, at a fancy cocktail party in Paris, Alex was introduced to someone he describes in his memoir a
s ‘Austria’s Consul General’.
‘Come join us, Alex, you speak German so well,’ a mutual friend said.
‘Not German – Yiddish,’ Alex replied loudly.
‘A chilled silence fell over the elegant room,’ Alex writes. ‘I planted myself before the consul general: “You killed my father,” I said. “He was a soldier in your army in 1914. He was gassed in Italy, on the Piava. He died from it. And now you have a Nazi president, Waldheim.[14] Have you no shame?”’
Even in the 1990s, when Alex was in his eighties and I would visit him in Paris, he would regularly hiss ‘Collaborator!’ at various galleries and businesses we walked past that, he swore, had sold out the Jews sixty years ago.
But by then, Alex had the luxury of being safe, established and secure. In the war period and its immediate aftermath, his life-saving pragmatism took precedence over his loyalty to a greater cause, and he worked with suspected and convicted ‘collabos’ when he needed their help, during the war (Perré) and immediately after (Lelong, who was probably innocent; Lifar, who definitely was not). Once he was reestablished, he would rather spit on such people than talk to them, but he didn’t deny his past alliances, faithfully recording them in his memoir. He might not have been entirely open about some things, but he didn’t lie about what he’d had to do to survive. He was passionately proud of being Jewish, but his ultimate cause was himself, and this is why he not only survived but would, very soon, become more successful than even he could have imagined.
House of Glass Page 26
