But very few great designers, if any, started in as lowly a position as did Valentine. In 1967 she became a midinette, one of the slaves of the couture. Her mother’s position was responsible for her getting the job, but from then on she was on her own. A midinette can ruin a yard of brocade worth two hundred dollars and that is the last of her. A midinette can take too long to finish basting hemlines and that is the last of her. Every dress in the collection is priced to include the cost of every last stitch, every last hook and eye, every inch of trim, each button, right down to the number of pieces of tissue needed to pack it in the big, white Balmain box. One careless midinette can cost the house its profit on a dress or suit.
For five years, from 1967 to 1972, Valentine progressed steadily, from midinette to second hand to first hand, making, in only a few years, a leap that usually takes twenty years if it is ever made at all. She had started far ahead of the others in technical skill, thanks to the intensive training her mother had given her on the sewing machine at home, and now she absorbed the side of the business that took place outside the atelier. After the first two years she was often needled in the fitting rooms, where princesses and movie stars and the wives of the richest men in South America stood in their lingerie for hours, sometimes with sweat pouring down their faces in the perfumed, airless atmosphere, sometimes in tears of rage and disappointment at the way their new clothes looked on them. Valentine learned to anticipate within seconds the moment at which a woman would try to blame the house of Balmain for the fact that she could not wear a garment with the same allure as could a mannequin who was four inches taller and weighed sixty pounds less than she. She also absorbed the techniques used to deal with this frequent occurrence, techniques developed over lifetimes of selling by the hardened, canny, cynical chief vendeuses. From the women who were fitted, often in pain from the discomfort of standing absolutely still for hours at a time in their beautiful, handmade, high-heeled shoes, she learned the power of vanity and the stubbornness of the determination to possess exactly the right dress, no matter what agony was involved. She learned more about women, especially rich women, than any girl her age should know.
Now Valentine was able to attend the rehearsals of the new collections, held for the staff only, where she could see the dresses she had worked on herself, and hundreds of other designs she had never seen before, pass by on the quick-stepping, nerve-sick mannequins. Now she could watch as Balmain and his assistants conferred over what pieces of jewelry, what gloves, which hat, and what fur scarf was needed to complete each ensemble to perfection. Valentine had been born with taste. Now, daily, it grew in the Balmain forcing garden. She found that she became able to divine accurately, from seeing the rehearsal of a collection, which dresses and suits would sell the most and which original designs would never be bought, not even when they ended up on the sale rack after that particular collection was completed. These dresses are picked over by women who wait like vultures for this occasion, buying dresses that have been worn every day for four or five months by the mannequins, all of whom sweat like racehorses crossing the finish line as they calculate whether or not they have intrigued a customer into ordering the dress they are showing, thereby earning themselves a tiny commission.
Valentine herself would never have deigned to buy something en solde, even if she could have afforded it. She made all her own clothes and very artful they were. It would not do for her to appear at work in anything but the traditional black skirt and sweater and white blouse, yet even these somber garments, designed to indicate the vast social gulf that separates the workers in the couture from the customers, looked special on Valentine, but not special enough for anyone to take much notice. She had cut her impossibly curly hair as short as possible and left the plaid ribbons in a drawer, so that now she looked almost like a sober, industrious working girl—if you happened never to glance above her neck or look her in the eye, and customers of the house, totally intent on their own reflections, rarely did.
In spite of her quick temper, it never caused Valentine any irritation that she was obliged to disguise herself like this. Even Madame Spanier herself, who was dressed entirely by Balmain, always wore a severe suit, either black or gray flannel, set off by her inevitable triple strands of pearls. The awed gossips of the atelier reported, however, that she possessed the most magnificent clothes for evening, which she wore when she and her husband went to every important first night in Paris with their closest friends, such stars as Noel Coward, Laurence Olivier, Danny Kaye, and the terrifying Madame Dietrich herself.
But on Sundays and holidays Valentine could dress as she pleased, in her own designs. From the age of fourteen she was her own mannequin, with her mother helping her with the fitting. After a day of pinning and repinning the clothes of perfect strangers, Hélène O’Neill gladly spent hours working on the creations of her extraordinary daughter. She did not, of course, tell Valentine that she was extraordinary. That was a mother’s private opinion, perhaps prejudiced, for she did not want to be vainglorious, but this slim, quick, alert girl, with her father’s sudden, unaccountable Irish moods and her mother’s skillful hands and logical approach to life, was certainly not ordinary—Hélène O’Neill was positive of that, no matter if she were her own daughter.
Valentine was aware, from the day she started to design, that even if she could somehow bring her creations to the notice of Monsieur Balmain himself, it would have been a worthless exercise. Whatever he might have thought of her talent, her style did not fit into the prevailing tone of the house, which was rich clothes for rich women. Valentine did not design for multimillionaire wives in their early-to-late middle age who spent their time at charity balls or having lunch at the Ritz. She did not have the stately Begum Aga Khan or the altogether too stiffly dignified Princess Grace in mind when she sketched a dress. In her imagination she was designing for another kind of client entirely. But who, besides herself? She knew, as surely as she knew anything, that her clients existed. But where? And how would she find them? Never mind, she told herself with the vast optimism that lived side by side with her vast impatience, it would all come together—it was bound to. And she ran gaily across the Rue François Premier to La Belle Féfé, the red-awninged café that was almost an annex of the house of Balmain, to fetch a pot of strong tea for a buxom English countess who had just announced that she was about to faint dead away and the dress for her daughter’s wedding not half fitted yet.
Hélène O’Neill kept getting thinner and thinner. Her hands worked fabric just as deftly as ever, but as she had to pin and re-pin more and more times before she was satisfied, the clients became restless. She had taught Valentine to cook as well as she did herself. Now, frequently she couldn’t finish the dinner Valentine had made for her. Sometimes, although not often, she uttered a little moan of pain when she thought she was alone. By the time Valentine persuaded her to see a doctor—“What do they know,” she would say, sniffing in disdain—she had only a few months to live. Dead at forty-eight, of a swift spreading cancer, Hélène O’Neill was mourned by the entire staff of Balmain, all of whom came to her funeral in the old Versailles cemetery.
A week later Valentine went to the American Embassy on the Place de la Concorde with her birth certificate, which her mother had always carefully kept with her marriage documents and her husband’s army papers. She had not discussed her decision to apply for an American passport with anyone, neither with her mother’s sensible, unimaginative family nor with anyone at chez Balmain. Now, finding herself alone, she was operating on pure instinct, allowing the surge of direction-finding impulses that had always whispered to her in the past, to guide her wholly, completely.
She was not quite twenty-two, but she had five years of experience at Balmain’s, she had been a first hand for a year, and she knew, without thinking about it twice, that she would be a first hand for another five years at least and then, certainly, a fitter if she stayed in Paris. And there her promotions would have to stop. Unless, of cour
se, she got married and retired from the couture. But the idea of turning into a housewife more interested in the price of a kilo of beef than in the doings of the great world to which she had been insidiously exposed in the rarefied atmosphere of Paris couture—oh, no! She had always been bored by her nice, middle-class girl cousins, who admired her Sunday clothes so extravagantly but otherwise found little in common to talk to her about. Anyhow, the last time she had been in love was at the age of sixteen with the young Versailles cure who assisted at Sunday Mass, and even that deliciously impossible passion had lasted only six months. No—no—Paris was over for her, Valentine thought, weeping for her mother. She would pack up everything in the apartment and send it to New York. After she had given her month’s notice and removed her own and her mother’s life savings from the Crédit Lyonnais, she would follow her furniture and seek her fortune—in the United States. Was that not, after all, a very traditional thing to do?
New York City had changed during those fifteen years she had been away, and decidedly for the worse, Valentine thought, as she walked in discomfort on the streets bordering Third Avenue on which she had played as a child. Now she was barely able to push through the crowds of Saturday’s Generation happily waiting in line to get into a movie theater, as if the act, or was it perhaps the art, of waiting in line was the main event, rather than the film. She had spent a week searching the dimly remembered streets for a cheap apartment, but Bloomingdale’s, that fabulous flower of American culture, and the multiplying profusion of art movie houses had made the neighborhood so trendy that the rents were absurdly high.
Valentine had a nice sum of money from her savings and inheritance as a cushion to sustain her while she looked for work as a designer. If worst came to worst, she knew that with her technical skills she would be hired in a millisecond anywhere on Seventh Avenue, but she had no intention of sewing for a living ever again. That was not why she had left all the family she had in the world, her blood relatives and, far harder to leave, her loving Balmain collection of surrogate mothers and aunts, who made her last month there nothing but a succession of tearful scenes, which slowed up any number of fittings, much to the consternation of Monsieur Balmain himself. Things had reached such a pass—not just one but two Baronesses de Rothschild had actually been kept waiting—that the head of Valentine’s atelier had tried to enlist the efforts of Madame Spanier herself to persuade Valentine not to leave France. But Madame la Directrice, that quintessence of the French businesswoman when matters of commerce were concerned, owned a thoroughly bold and British heart. She had been born and brought up in England, although her mother was of French birth, and this quintessential Parisian was 85 percent English by inclination, with the other 15 percent of her heart belonging to New York. When she took a good, long look at Valentine’s lovely, vivid face and learned that she spoke perfect English, her own adventurous blood leaped in excitement at the challenge and the opportunity she saw for her. She couldn’t think of anything more absolutely divine, more absolutely exciting, more absolutely thrilling than for Valentine to become a great, great success in New York, she informed the dumbfounded girl. She must not even dream of wasting her life in a workroom—hadn’t she, Jenny Spanier, started by selling gifts in the basement of Fortnum and Mason’s in London and quickly become the special saleslady to the Prince of Wales when he came in for his Christmas presents? Of course Valentine must go! And when she came back, she would come as a client—and they would make her a special price!
Remembering her inspiring interview with Madame Spanier, Valentine took fresh courage and decided to follow up a tip she had had from the room clerk at the inexpensive hotel at which she was staying while she looked for an apartment. There were old office buildings all over town, he had told her—not advertised though, it wasn’t strictly legal or something—in which lofts were to be had. The floors were now too ancient to hold up heavy machinery, but the lofts could be made livable if she wasn’t too choosy.
Valentine turned down four different lofts, each one more dilapidated and dubious than the other. The fifth loft she saw was on the top floor of a building in the Thirties. The janitor told her that three other lofts on the floor were inhabited, one by a couple who had night jobs, one by a quiet old man who had been writing a book for the last ten years, and one by a photographer. The two rooms she inspected did not seem to have holes in the floor, and something about it, perhaps the windows looking toward the Hudson, perhaps the two skylights, reminded her of Paris. Valentine rented it immediately. Was she always going to be nostalgic, she wondered. In Paris she had spent all her pocket money on American records and American movies. Now, in New York, she was attracted by a place that had a suggestion of Paris in its shape and light. Within two weeks she had all her furniture out of storage and arranged much as it had been in Paris. Her room lacked only a full larder to make her feel really at home, she decided, and she set out on a shopping binge that ended with the rescue of her two bottles of wine by Spider.
This Elliott, she reflected after he had left, his appetite having fully justified the supply of pâté and cheese she had bought, was easy to talk to, once she got over the shyness of entertaining a man, an American man at that, alone in her apartment for the first time in her life. Her French cousins had been introducing her to prospective boyfriends from the time she was sixteen, but none of them had even remotely resembled her vague idea of a man. She had turned up her freckled nose at even those good catches whose secure office jobs at Renault or any of the other factories that ringed Paris had allowed them to purchase their own little Simcas. Either they sounded like silly schoolboys to Valentine, who had always been too wise for her age, or else they seemed like premature grandfathers, so stuffy and boring and predictable that she could imagine them presiding over a table full of descendants before they even took a wife. Valentine didn’t realize it, but her idea of what a man should be had been formed by the years of American films she had seen on Saturdays. She had gone to watch Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid no less than nine times, Bullitt six times, Bonnie and Clyde eight times. Her ideal man was an amorphous mixture of Redford, Beatty, Newman, and McQueen. Small wonder she hadn’t found him in a middle-class Frenchman.
Compared with almost any American girl of her age, Valentine was sexually very unsophisticated. At twenty-one and seven-eighths, she was still a virgin. Her evenings had been filled with homework until she was sixteen. From sixteen on she had worked at the luxury equivalent of ditchdigging nine hours every day and spent her evenings with her mother, designing and sewing clothes. Her rare free times, spent alone at the cinema and with her family on Sundays at Versailles, did not lead to sexual adventure. Who could fail not to be a virgin under those circumstances, she asked herself indignantly. She had reluctantly allowed herself to be kissed by some, but only a few, of those uninteresting young men she had been introduced to. Her nature was straightforward and abrupt, and she’d never had the need nor, she thought, the inclination to learn how to flirt. She was not one of the women to whom it comes naturally. The only time Valentine had burned with passion, it had been for a priest who wasn’t even the one who had heard her confession—that, at least, would have been an experience she thought ruefully. And everyone had the idea that French girls were so sexy, so racy, so “oo-la-la,” as if they hadn’t changed from the stereotypes of Mademoiselle from Armentières in World War I. “ ‘Hinky dinky parlez-vous’ indeed!” she said haughtily to herself and turned to her treasured pile of the last three weeks’ issues of Women’s Wear Daily.
Valentine, who gravitated toward extremes, who combined, with occasionally dizzying results, Gallic logic with Celtic fancy, had, as it frequently happens, failed to understand herself. Her lack of sexual experience had nothing to do with her capacity for sensuality. That capacity had always been there, held in close restraint by the enormous demands made on her concentration and energy by the life she had led in Paris. However, her sensuality had found an outlet she wasn’t aware of, in the
one area of her daily life that was hers alone, her fashion designs. They had a quality that is usually expressed only by a woman herself—a quality called, in French, du chien. When a woman has du chien she has something that is not chic nor elegance nor even glamour, yet falls somewhere in the same category of descriptive terms. Chic is in the way a woman wears her clothes, not the clothes themselves. Elegance is in the line and quality of the clothes and the line of the body under them and in the wearer’s personal intensity about the importance of perfect details. Glamour, a word that is so impossible to pin down that it doesn’t exist in any language except English, is a combination of sophistication, mystery, magic, and movies. Chien is spicy, tart, amusing, pungent, tempting, and puts the male world on notice that this is no ordinary woman. Chic and elegance have nothing to do with sexiness, glamour has much to do with sexiness, chien has everything to do with sexiness. Catherine Deneuve has glamour, but Cher has chien. Jacqueline Bisset and Jacqueline Onassis both have glamour, but Susan Blakely, Brenda Vaccaro, Sara Miles, and Barbra Streisand all have chien. So did Becky Sharp and Scarlett O’Hara and so did Valentine O’Neill, both in her person and in her work. Chien is often only recognized by the effect it has on others, and Valentine’s ignorance of her own quality was normal, considering how surrounded she had always been by females at school and at work. Chien is one of the aspects of a woman that must be reflected by men. Other women do not give her credit for it since it stirs no particular response in them.
Valentine had started buying Women’s Wear Daily from the first day of her arrival in the United States. This newspaper of the fashion industry is completely indispensable to anyone connected in any creative or executive capacity with the enormously important business of selling things to wear. If you are a manufacturer of buttons in Indiana or a maker of tennis shoes in Japan or a fabric designer in Milan or a department-store buyer in Wisconsin or are in any significant way connected to the fourth largest industry in the United States, you are a fool if you do not read Women’s Wear Daily. It is the most important daily trade newspaper in the world. In addition it has excellent critics of all the arts, fascinating Washington coverage, important inside glimpses of the film and theatrical world, and consistently revealing columnists. And, finally, it deals with design, with designers, and with the people who wear the prettiest clothes and go to the very best parties all over the world. A society woman who had to choose between Women’s Wear and all the fashion magazines and society columnists put together would always pick the newspaper.
Scruples Page 18
