She arrived. It was summer. Coco had on a little white quilted satin tailleur, skirt, below the knee but short, a white ribbon and a gardenia in her hair, and a white lace shirt. I have never seen anybody look as delectable, as adorable. What age was she then? She died at eighty-eight. What difference did it make? Helena Rubinstein was in a very distinguished coat to the ground. By “distinguished” I mean the buttonholes and the loops were so beautiful; the collar was really high; the coat was bright shocking-pink Chinese silk. The two women stood facing each other. Then they went back to Reed’s room. After a while I went back to see if they were all right; I thought perhaps they had a suicide pact! They hadn’t moved. Helena said, “I only like your husband’s room. I love it here.” The two of them stayed in there the rest of the evening talking about God knows what. I went in from time to time to check up on them. They never sat down. They stood—like men—and talked for four hours. I’d never been in the presence of such strength of personality. Both of them. Neither of them was a real beauty. They both came from nothing. They both were so much richer than most of the men we talk about today being rich. They’d done it all alone. Of course, there’d been men in their lives who had helped them, but they earned every cent they made. You ask if they were happy. That is not a characteristic of a European. To be contented—that’s for the cows. But I think that they were, at least when they were in power, at the wheel, and when they were running everything. And they did—these two women ruled empires.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
How I adored Paris! When I went there in the twenties and thirties, I stayed at this ghastly hotel on the boulevard Haussmann with third-rate Indians in it. They were always strangling women across the court. It struck my maid so much: “Such terrible and vulgar people! Why do we stay here?” We! I came because it was inexpensive, and I was spending my money elsewhere.
Lunch was never a big part of the day with me. I’d often have it in my little room upstairs in my hotel, my cheap hotel, to save time, so I could get right back to doing what I wanted to do.
In the evening, in those days, there would be dancing. And the dressing for it! Don’t forget, we were beautifully dressed all the time. I mean, we didn’t go out with any old thing to Studio 54.
I used to spend my day at fittings. I used to fit my nightgowns. I had three fittings on a nightgown. Can you imagine? People say: What in the world were you doing that for? Because that’s the way you got a nightgown. Too beautiful, and cost about twelve dollars. You ought to have seen the material. The choice! The different types of crêpe, of satin. The different weights. The different colors—greige, a combination of grey and beige that you never see today. The lace! The way they were put together! It was a whole life. The life of fashion was very strenuous. I’d fit all afternoon—very strenuous. Oh, very strenuous—no question about it. And your shoes. Gloves made to order at Alexandrine. Hats—Reboux. And Suzy.
I don’t know how to shop in America. In Paris, if I’m going to see the collection, it’s one thing; if I’m there for a fitting, it’s another. It’s all very efficient; the French are very smart—they’re very good business people. Those places are wonderfully run. But in America it’s different, Bloomingdale’s is the end of shopping because there isn’t anyone to wait on you; you just sort of admire things. Then you see a man; you think he’s a floorwalker: “I’m sorry, lady, I can’t help you. I’m like you, I’m just looking for somebody to help me.” So you go out into the street with tears in your eyes: you’ve accomplished nothing and you’ve lost your health!
Or I go into, say, Saks Fifth Avenue, and there on a rack on wheels are two dozen five-thousand-dollar dresses. On a rack! It shocks me. I mean, first of all, to get through Saks is quite a performance. You get off the elevator; you’re in the wrong department; you turn and get back on the elevator. Then you get off again, past the lingerie, past the cosmetics, and on for miles through the shoe department, and then finally you get to the five-thousand-dollar dresses, dangling there, Oscar de la Rentas, Bill Blass, each next to the others on a rack. Of course, lots of people enjoy the variety. They go home empty-handed. But they’ve shopped. It’s a sport. In Paris it’s a serious interval in one’s life—perhaps twice a year. It’s a pilgrimage.
Going to Paris for the collections always gave me a chance to see Bébé Bérard, who was such a delectable artist. That’s one of his sketches over there on the wall. Bébé Bérard, to me, was like someone from the age of Charlemagne. Don’t ask me why I say that, but I do. He had the clearest eyes in the world. Why this should be so I have no idea.
He was my very best friend in Paris. He was the friend of everybody in Paris with talent. And where he put his hand was like the golden touch. Whether it was in art, in fashion, in the ballet, in the theatre…Bérard bridged every world.
The sad thing about Bérard is that what the world has in hand today of his is so little compared to what he produced. So much of what he did was mise en scène. But the productions that I saw…to me, there’s never been any scenery in the world except Bérard’s.
Once he did Molière. I can’t remember what the play was; Ecole des femmes, I believe. It started in a rose garden with rose trees everywhere and underplantings covering the stage and rose trellises up here, and everybody moved within and without these trees and then…the lights dimmed. As they dimmed, slowly…down came a chandelier! And another, then four more, and we were looking into a great drawing room. It sounds so simple. I haven’t made it sound like anything. But no one could have done it but Bérard.
Then…the way he did La Folle de Chaillot! In a cellar this old madwoman is speaking of getting up in the morning, and what she does when she puts on her face and how she sees herself in the mirror and how her eyes come to life…this mad poetic dreaming…the speech, of course, was Giraudoux’s; but Bébé’s set showed the little cellar room where this poor old thing slept on a pile of rags…and it was the tallest set you’ve ever seen in your life. Everything—but everything—was rags, rags, rags…but there was something so beautiful about it. Years later I ran the text in Vogue, in which Giraudoux describes the madwoman’s morning maquillage. It had all come back to me one morning when I was making up my face.
The set, of course, was thrown out when the play closed. Unfortunately, there’s no room in the world for used scenery. All you have are the memories. It’s like an opium dream that came to an end.
Bébé always used to say to me, “You must come with me and walk through the cemetery, Père Lachaise, and we’ll see all our old, old friends.” Every name on every stone, of course, is a name we’ve been brought up with—it’s civilization. I’m sure it would have been fascinating. We never went. But often, on Sunday’s, we’d go out to an old rundown château not far from the center of Paris. The château was empty, and we used to walk around and look at this wall with all these wonderful animals on it—stags and dogs and horses… you’d know this wall if you’ve ever seen Cocteau’s movie of La Belle et la bête.
As well as I knew Bébé, I never really knew Jean Cocteau. But I remember an evening with Cocteau in his hotel room right before the war. It was in a funny little hotel on the Right Bank near the rue Cambon on a street you never noticed when you passed it. His room was narrow and very sparse, with an iron bed, but beside it was a low table very luxuriously fitted out with the accoutrements of an opium smoker. Cocteau was lying on the bed, wearing a little red and white handkerchief like a brigand wears around his throat, which he kept pulling tighter and tighter. I’d never heard of this before and I’ve never heard of it since, but I was told it affected his thyroid and stimulated him because of the pressure—true or false, how do I know?
The room was full of smoke, and Cocteau never stopped talking. I don’t know how many pipes he’d had by then, but it was a lot. And I became so dehydrated I thought my throat was going to crack, but he never stopped talking long enough for me to ask for a glass of water. He had Jean Marais kneeling on one side of the bed and another b
eautiful boy kneeling on the other side, in attendance like baroque archangels…but I was a new audience. So he talked and talked and talked. Of course, I was fascinated by what he was saying. He talked exquisitely, fantastically…it was one of those ecstatic, marvelous dreams that come out of a good smoke. I can’t tell you a word of what he said.
Finally, at about one-thirty in the morning, I couldn’t take it any longer and I left. When I got back to my hotel, I think I drank six bottles of water. Then…the next morning, I woke up with a hangover that would have killed a Marine. I felt as if I’d been pushed into the Iron Maiden at Nuremberg—with knives going in all around the crown of my head.
Once I told my maid that the most thrilling thing in the world was going to happen any hour now. Mr. Bérard was planning on coming to New York, to America! You know how the French hate to travel—but Bérard was going to come. We didn’t know exactly when he would come, or even if, really…but we’d hoped. One day my maid came to me and said, “Madame, I have seen Mr. Bérard.” I said, “How could you possibly recognize him? You’ve never seen him before.” “But, madame, he is just as you described him—a little man, a dancer, with pointed shoes, and his face turned toward heaven.”
What ecstasy! She summed up everything I felt about him, she had passed him in the street and knew immediately who he was.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
When I went to Paris for the collections and to see Bérard, I stayed at the Crillon. The Crillon was quite an old-fashioned place when I was there all those years. I always had the feeling of total privacy. I mean that you come in and the place would be solid with people. You take the lift to your own floor, and that’s it; you wouldn’t know anyone else was in the place. Everyone looks after you beautifully. No one makes a mistake: you’re not called at ten minutes to seven, you’re called at exactly a quarter to seven. And a certain sort of splendor.
Some hotels are created not so much by splendor as by a great concierge. The Grand Hotel in Rome is attractive to me because of its divine concierge, Buzo. Do you know him? He’s the best-looking, the sweetest, the most intensely interested…if there’s one person on earth, it’s you. Everybody gets the same treatment. And at the same time he’s talking Arabic to somebody in Cairo, and he picks up the next phone and is talking God knows what to somebody in Borneo.
I’ve come in the middle of the night, I’ve just telephoned, and he is there and he has a room and everything is hunky-dory. But you wouldn’t get that from the French or the English.
Do you know the Cavendish on Jermyn Street in London? Rosa Lewis was the proprietress. She was once the mistress of Edward VII and was passed on to Lord Ribblesdale, who was painted by John Sargent—the beautiful one with the top hat. He left her this hotel, which was rundown but had great character. She had a somewhat arbitrary system of billing. If she liked you or she knew you were a student and didn’t have much money, you could stay at the Cavendish for almost nothing. But if you had a rich name, and especially an American name, she could really sock it to you when the bill arrived.
Dolly Schiff, the daughter of Mortimer Schiff, the banker, and I were in London together—it must have been in ’30, ’31—and Dolly said: “Let’s have lunch at the Cavendish.”
I said, “I never heard of anybody lunching there. I wonder if they have a dining room.”
“Of course they have a dining room.”
The doorman, a little short man, came up to us.
We said, “We’d like to have some lunch, a very light lunch.”
In a few minutes a little white terrier appeared. And then in another moment Rosa herself appeared. She was an enormous woman; she filled a lot of space. She had a bottle of champagne in her hand. “Now, you young ladies, you’re both American, aren’t you?” Very, very anxious to know our names. If Dolly says that she’s a Schiff, we’re just in for it; we’ll get the bill for fifty quid to pay for the last hotel guests she charged a few shillings for a week’s stay because she liked them.
She got out a card table in her private little sitting room and put down the champagne. There’s never been such an attractive lunch, ever. But she kept prying, trying to find out who we were. Finally she said, “Now, how would you like to see some of my pretty rooms?”
“That would be lovely.”
Dolly said, “I have a lesson at the Royal School of Needlework”—she really did; it wasn’t an excuse at all—“and I mustn’t be late for it. So I’ll leave you here.”
She took my car. I couldn’t get out of the hotel. I began to panic. Rosa Lewis took me upstairs. She opened a door. “Major! Major! Are you there? Here’s an American girl for you!” She pushed me in and then kept pushing me into the bathroom where the old boy—you won’t believe it!—was lying in his bath, staring up at me from one of those huge tubs with claw feet.
I said, “I beg your pardon. I guess we all know our hostess: she’s very exuberant and very sort of…and good afternoon.”
And down I went, as fast as I could get there, to anyplace. I mean anyplace! Down the back stairs and out into Jermyn Street, where I hailed a cab!
What an adventure!
Did you know I’m always having the most extraordinary conversations with taxicab drivers? They have views, I can tell you, on everything. Just the other day I walked out to the corner of Park Avenue, hailed a cab, stepped into it, and asked to be taken to the Museum. It was a Monday and I was back in business, so I took out my papers and stretched my legs, as I always do when I’m alone in a cab. After five blocks or so, the cab stopped at a red light and the driver said, “Madam”—I knew he’d been looking at me in the mirror for the past five blocks—“would you mind if I asked you a question?” Do you remember in the middle of the war when I drove you and Clark Gable to the end of Long Island to visit your friend Millicent Rogers?”
“Yes,” I said, “I remember it very well. And I remember you, too.”
Millicent had picked up this driver during the war. Because of the gas rationing she wasn’t allowed a car and driver, but she took a fancy to this man and his taxi, and he practically became a member of the family. She’d send him out with her maid to match a pair of sandals, or if she needed her maid at home, she’d send him out to match this color shirt and this color cardigan…. Eventually, he became totally her employee, and anytime the two of us went anywhere, she’d send this taxi for me, and this man. Her one and only beloved taxi driver.
He never looked around at me. He looked through the mirror and we talked about Millicent Rogers the rest of the way to the Museum.
I didn’t give him a big tip. That would have been patronizing. But as I left him, I said, “Neither of us will ever forget that beautiful woman, will we?”
Talk about style! Millicent and Elsie Mendl were the two women in my “American Women of Style” show at the Museum I knew best. Millicent often lived in St. Anton, in Austria. What was so charming was that she used to go into Innsbruck to sketch all the nineteenth-century costumes in the museum and have them made up by the village tailor. Then she’d arrive in Paris wearing a really nifty black Schiaparelli suit…matching this with the shirt that she’d had made in the village and also some marvelous thing on her head. Or else she’d have on a very chic hat and a dirndl skirt.
Have I ever told you about the night I saw Millicent at a party at the old Ritz-Carlton here in New York? She started out the evening wearing a dress by Paquin—black silk with a bustle and a train. When dessert was served, she spilled some ice cream and left the room to change into another dress. When the coffee was served, she spilled some of that and went off to change into another dress. Millicent’s pure American: Standard Oil—that’s H. H. Rogers. After divorcing Millicent’s mother he went through marriage after marriage to be free, and in a hurry, to marry yet another: one of his ex-wives was dug up because she had glass in her stomach, another because she had gunpowder in her something or other…one scandal after another.
Millicent liked beautiful men, and she was just m
ad about Clark Gable. Mad! They were having a big love affair. He wasn’t all that handsome. His head was too big. She was seductive beyond discipline…a lot for Clark to handle. Perhaps a European could have done it, but he was an American and he was very naïve. He was meat and potatoes—and sex. I’m sure he was never terrible to her in the way of cheating on her in a common way, but he drank. Clark would order three cases of scotch, lock himself in his hotel room, and give orders that no calls were to be put through. He didn’t shave, he didn’t bathe—he drank. And ten days later, or two weeks later, he emerged.
But I wish I could give you a load of his eyelashes! He had the most beautiful eyelashes I’ve ever seen on a man—on a human being. They were exactly like a Shetland pony’s. Now you’re probably not as intimate with Shetland ponies as I am. They’re terrible little beasts—but they have the longest, fuzziest eyelashes of any creature you’ve ever seen. Clark’s were exactly like that.
I remember one evening with him at El Morocco when it was at the height of its chic. We arrived; we stood behind the red velvet rope. By then, the word had gone out that Mr. Gable was in the house, and Mr. John Perona, the owner, came to take us to our table. Clark grabbed my hand. “Don’t look left,” he said, “and don’t look right—just keep walking. Hold on to your hat, kid—the place is gonna blow!”
As he said it…the place went berserk—I mean berserk! The stares! The people leaning out over their tables! These are “sophisticated” people I’m talking about…it was almost animalique, like a roaring zoo. All I can tell you is that that place did blow. Power has got to be the most intoxicating thing in the world—and of all forms of power, the most intoxicating is fame.
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