Billy nodded. She had heard what he said and she knew he was right, but it didn’t seem important. “I understand, Dan.”
“I think you’d better move to Los Angeles. You’ll know lots of people there. But you’ll have to live above the smog belt. Ellis can’t take smog in his condition because only one lung is really working. Find a house high up in Bel Air and I’ll be out at least once a month. The medical men there are superb. I’ll refer you to the best. Of course I’ll make the trip out with you to get him settled.”
Dr. Dorman couldn’t bear to look at Billy, sitting as straight and still as a queen, as lost as a child. It would have been far better for both of them if Ellis had died. He had been afraid of something like this since the day he learned of their marriage. He assumed that Ellis must have had his fears too. It would explain the scale on which they lived, one that Dan Dorman knew had never been the style of his old friend, and the uncharacteristic way Ellis had thrown himself into a world he had ignored in the past, as if he were living to give Billy a splendid time while he could.
“Are you sure that we can’t live at the house at Silverado, Dan? Ellis would like that so much more than a strange place.”
“No, I don’t advise it. Go there for the vintage, by all means, but you should be near a major medical center as much of the time as possible.”
“I’ll send Lindy out to buy a house tomorrow. She could probably get it ready for us as soon as Ellis can be moved.”
“I think you can plan on packing up by mid-January,” Dorman said, rising to leave. As Billy went with him to the door she could hear the pain in his voice, which he tried to keep so matter-of-fact. He had really known Ellis as well as anyone in the world except herself. Yet, in his professional capacity he was supposed to remain unemotional, dealing only with the facts, a support, not a griever. She felt she had to offer him some comfort, although the situation held none at all. She put her hands on his shoulders after he put on his coat and looked down at him with a faint smile, the first smile since Ellis had had his second stroke.
“Know what I’m going to do tomorrow, Dan? I’m going out to buy some new clothes. I’ve got absolutely nothing to wear for California.”
Among her collection of sentimental souvenirs Valentine loved one best. It was not even a family photograph, merely a yellowing newspaper picture, one of hundreds that had been taken on August 24, 1944, the day on which the Allied Armies liberated Paris. It showed grinning, waving American soldiers triumphantly driving up the Champs-Elysées in their tanks. Almost delirious Frenchwomen had hoisted themselves aboard the war machines bringing bouquets of flowers and indiscriminate kisses for the jubilant, long-awaited victors. One of those soldiers, not in the particular picture she cherished, but somewhere in that glorious, legendary parade, was her father, Kevin O’Neill, and one of those rejoicing, tearful women was her mother, Hélène Maillot. Somehow in the wild carnival of that day they had managed to stay together long enough for the redheaded tank commander to write down the name and address of the little midinette with big green eyes. His tank corps was stationed outside of Vincennes, and before it was ordered back to the United States, at the end of the war in Europe, he had taken a French bride.
Kevin O’Neill sent for Hélène as soon as he could, and they lived in a walk-up apartment on Third Avenue in New York City where the witty, tempestuous Irishman, brought up in a Boston orphanage, was fast learning all the skills of a master printer. Until Valentine was born in 1951 her mother worked for Hattie Carnegie. Although she was much younger than many of the other highly skilled dressmakers in that illustrious couture house, her Paris-trained workmanship was impeccable. Within three years she had become a fitter, specializing in the fabrics that are most difficult to handle, chiffon, crepe de Chine, and silk velvet.
After Valentine was born, Hélène O’Neill left her job and settled happily into domesticity, vastly indulging her other great talent, cooking. To Valentine, even before the little girl was old enough to understand a word of any language, she always spoke French. When Kevin was home they all talked English, and what a jolly, disputatious, loving noise they made, thought Valentine. She didn’t have too many specific memories of those early years, but she still felt, and would feel throughout her life, the warmth and gaiety and optimism in which the small family was enclosed, as if they lived on a tiny, safe island of grace and happiness. The music of those days included the songs of France: Charles Trénet, Jean Sablon, Maurice Chevalier, Jacqueline François, Yves Montand, Edith Piaf. The only way in which her mother betrayed her occasional moments of homesickness was in these records and in the words of the song she so often sang, which began, “J’ ai deux amours, mon pays et Paris …”
In 1957, when Valentine was six, the summer before she was to start first grade, Kevin O’Neill died, in a matter of days, of viral pneumonia. Within a week his widow decided to return to live in Paris. Hélène O’Neill had to earn a living, and Valentine needed a family to love, now that they were only two. All the big Maillot family lived on the outskirts of Versailles but if Hélène and Valentine stayed in New York they would be alone.
Jobs above the rank of simple seamstress in the haute couture are either almost impossible to find or instantly available because of a fluke. In the Paris of the late fifties the women who worked in the great design houses were almost as devoted to their jobs as if they had taken vows. The head fitters, in particular, who had the responsibility of an entire atelier, composed of from thirty to fifty workers, lived for the glory of their firm. It sometimes seemed that they had no life outside the feverish, controlled hysteria of their particular maison de couture, and often they grew old in its service, where their abilities were appreciated and their idiosyncrasies became the stuff of tradition.
In the early fall of 1957, at the worst possible time of the year, just after the presentation of the fall collection, the incredible happened: A chief fitter and a pillar of dependability at the house of Pierre Balmain eloped. Her persistent suitor, a lusty, middle-aged restaurant owner of Marseilles, had told her that after four years of spring collections and fall collections being used as an excuse for delaying their marriage, it was now or never. The fitter, who was almost forty, looked at herself in the mirror and knew that he was right. Intelligently, she decamped without telling anyone in advance. The next day, when the extent of her crime was discovered, the wrath of the entire house of Balmain almost set number 44 Rue François Premier on fire.
On the afternoon of that same day Hélène O’Neill applied for a job at Balmain’s. Normally she would not have stood a chance of starting as anything more important than a first or second “hand,” the level of a highly skilled seamstress, but Balmain, facing a deluge of orders for the most remunerative season of the year, had no choice but to hire her immediately as a fitter. By the evening of the first day, the stocky Savoyard knew how fortunate he had been. Hélène’s slender hands handled chiffon with the authority and patience that the fabric demands. The test of battle came when she had had to fit a dress on Madame Marlene Dietrich, Dietrich who knows as much about how a dress should be made as anyone in the world and is twice as difficult and demanding than it seems anyone in the world could possibly be. Everyone at Balmain’s breathed a collective sigh of disbelief mixed with relief when the fitting went off without a word. When Dietrich said nothing, it meant that the work was perfect. Madame O’Neill’s reputation as a wonder worker was made—her place secure.
A fitter’s hours are long. In a house like Balmain, which dresses not only rich women of the world but also busy actresses, there are many fitting appointments scheduled for early morning and late afternoon. If just one client arrives late, and there is always at least one such tardy lady every day, the tight work schedule becomes a nerve-racking race against the clock. A fitter is on her feet or on her knees all day, except during lunch, and by the time evening comes she is often close to physical and nervous collapse. Before a collection, she will often work until four or five
in the morning, fitting the new models on girls who often faint with fatigue. In the fifties and sixties what the French couture was really all about was not the endless succession of “new” looks that the fashion press wrote about so breathlessly but the fit of the dress or suit or coat. Without good fitters, any dress house, designer’s inspiration or no, would have been bankrupt within a year. (These days, with only three thousand women in the world regularly buying all their clothes from the Paris couture, the dress houses remain open in order to sell their ready-to-wear and their perfumes; haute couture is merely a loss leader, a loss leader which, nevertheless, makes the world brighter.)
Shortly after beginning to work at Balmain, Hélène O’Neill realized that she couldn’t possibly live in the heart of her family at Versailles. If she added the burden of the journey back and forth each day, on that crowded little train, she could never maintain the stamina necessary for her difficult work. She found a tiny apartment for herself and Valentine in an old building in the network of streets within walking distance of Balmain and arranged for her daughter to begin school nearby. On Sundays and holidays the two of them visited one or another of Hélène’s brothers or sisters who lived as close to each other as possible and vied with each other in spoiling their widowed sister and fatherless niece.
Most French schoolchildren go home for lunch. Valentine’s home became the house of Balmain. By the age of six and a half she was accustomed to walking inconspicuously through the employee’s entrance and being greeted with a grave handshake from the guard. Gliding silently upstairs through the corridors deserted by the lunchtime exodus, she found her mother sitting expectantly in the corner of her atelier, one of the eleven at Balmain. There was always something hot, nourishing, and delicious in Hélène’s covered basket for them to share. Many of the other workers also brought their lunches from home, and soon Valentine found herself adopted by forty women, many of whom were not on speaking terms with each other from one year to the next, but all of whom had a soft word for Madame Hélène’s well-behaved, little half-orphaned daughter.
After school, Valentine refused to go home to an empty apartment. Instead, she took her heavy book bag and crept back into her own corner of the atelier, sometimes doing her homework with quick concentration and sometimes intently observing the busy, self-important comings and going of the room. She took great care to never get in anyone’s way, and within a few months she was such a familiar figure, there in her corner, that the robust, often irreverent working-women spoke as freely to each other as if she hadn’t been there at all. She heard wonderful tales of the clashes of temperament that took place in the fitting rooms, of the good and bad points of customers named Bardot and Loren and the Duchess of Windsor, of the fights to near death between one première vendeuse and another over the location of seats for the collections or the possession of a new customer, and of the antics and scenes of jealousy in the cabine where the mannequins dressed—gorgeous, dramatic girls with theatrically heavy eye makeup and names like Bronwen and Lina and Marie Thérèse. But, for the most part, when Valentine had time to spare from her homework, she was fascinated not by gossip but by the work she saw going on so steadily: the way in which a dress, which she saw start out as several unpromising pieces of stiff white muslin cut into a pattern, would, over a number of weeks and at least one hundred fifty hours of hand labor and three or more fittings, be worked, stitch by stitch, into a chiffon ball gown destined for a Duchesse de La Rochefoucauld and priced, even in those days, at something between two and three thousand dollars.
It went without saying that the echelon of command at chez Balmain did not know that a child was being all but brought up in one of their workrooms. Pierre Balmain, for all his kindness, and Madame Ginette Spanier, the all powerful directrice, who ran the house from her desk at the top of the main stairs, would have taken a decidedly dim view of such a lapse. Several times, on the rare occasions when Madame Spanier, raven-haired, explosive, superbly exuberant, and quite irrepressible, burst into the atelier to successfully mediate an impending revolution, Valentine had always hidden behind a rack of finished ball gowns, which was placed just next to her little stool for exactly that purpose.
When Hélène’s last fitting was finally over and her customer had departed into the Paris night in her waiting limousine—for, in those days, twenty to thirty thousand women flocked to Paris each season to outfit themselves completely in great custom clothes—the mother and daughter would walk home to their simple supper. After they had finished, Valentine always had more homework, but an evening rarely passed without her asking her mother about the happenings at Balmain. The details of workmanship fascinated her. She wanted to know the rationale behind each seam and buttonhole. Why did Monsieur Balmain always use an odd number of buttons, never an even number? Why did Madame Dietrich send one skirt lining back six times to have the seams changed? Wasn’t it just a lining, after all, not the dress? Why were all the ateliers for tailoring completely separated from those for dressmaking? Why was one atelier in charge of the jacket and skirt of a suit, while another worked on the blouse and the scarf that belonged to that suit, since they were destined to be worn together? What was the vast, apparently unbridgeable difference between being able to cut wool and cut silk? Why did men fitters always work on anything that was tailored, and women fitters work the softer designs?
Most of her questions Hélène found easy to resolve, but the one question that interested Valentine the most was one she could not answer. “How does Monsieur Balmain get his ideas?” Finally she told the persistent child, “If I knew that, my little one, I would be Monsieur Balmain—or perhaps Mademoiselle Chanel or Madame Grès.” And they would both giggle at the idea.
Valentine never stopped wondering. One day when she was thirteen she began drawing her own ideas for dresses and found the answer. The ideas just came—that was all. You imagined them and they came and you tried to draw them and if they didn’t look right you tried to think why and then draw them over again, and again, and again.
But that wasn’t enough, of course. You had to know if the sketches you drew would work on a human body. She, Valentine, could sew beautifully. She had been learning from her mother for eight years. But just knowing how to sew could lead, at best, only to a job like her mother’s, which seemed to get more exhausting every year. Or perhaps to becoming a little neighborhood “couturière” who stole ideas from the great collections and reproduced them as best she could for her middle-class clients. Even then Valentine knew that such a future wasn’t good enough.
Valentine had never been just another French schoolgirl. When she arrived in Paris at the age of six she was a boisterous, red-haired American kid ready to fit easily into first grade—in New York. Overnight she had had to turn into a French schoolchild, one of the legion of overburdened, well-behaved, pale, little creatures whose youthful lives are expected to be devoted to learning. Even the smallest French village schoolhouse gives its children an education that puts any American public school to shame. She made the transition well, and by the time Valentine was ten she was studying Latin as well as making her first acquaintance with Molière and Corneille, perfecting her exquisite penmanship, and spending long hours with the terrible labyrinth of French grammar, which can be learned only by years of endless repetition and analysis.
She had become an arresting-looking young girl. Her features, pointed, delicate, and full of quick intelligence, were classically Gallic. Yet her coloring, the furiously red hair, the brilliant, naughty, light green eyes, the three freckles on her nose, the splendidly white skin, all were classically Celtic. Even in the uniform of the French public-school girl—a drab pinafore, always just a little too short, worn over a long- or short-sleeved blouse, according to the season—she managed to stand out from the crowd of others. Perhaps it was the particular way she had of tying back, with bright plaid ribbons, her thick braids from which curls nevertheless escaped. Perhaps it was her vitality, which couldn’t be contained withi
n the strictly required limits of schoolgirl docility. Valentine was always a creature of extremes. She led her class in English and drawing. She was last in math, and as for deportment, it was best not spoken of.
By the time she was a teen-ager, Valentine was the only girl in school who collected Beach Boys records; all the others adored Johnny Halliday. With a sense of dedication she went to American movies every Saturday afternoon, preferring to go alone so that no one could distract her. Although she thought in French, she never allowed her English to be forgotten or even grow rusty, as usually happens with so many languages spoken fluently in childhood. She always remembered that she was half American, but she never talked about it, even with her mother. Her dual citizenship was like a magic talisman to Valentine. Too precious—and too remote—to be exposed.
As Valentine approached the age of sixteen she decided that there was no point in continuing her education. After sixteen she could legally leave school and take a job. What good was there in being able to repeat by heart vast amounts of the literature and poetry of France, to say nothing of more mathematics, for someone who was destined to become a designer? For she was going to be a designer, although she was the only one who knew it.
Even if there had been a Parsons School of Design or a Fashion Institute of Technology in Paris, as there are in the United States, at that time Valentine would not have had the money to pay for years of schooling. The only route for her was to become an apprentice. An apprentice is not supposed to be creative. Even the great fitters and cutters of the couture are not supposed to be creative—creativity is left to the master couturier, each one of whom has learned his métier working for other couture houses, often beginning as a sketch artist. Even Chanel lacked technical knowledge when she started, set up in a hat shop by her lover of the period. It is rare when a designer can actually cut and sew, as can Monsieur Balmain and Madame Grès.
Scruples Page 17
