The Last Collection

by Jeanne Mackin

Genres: Biographical; World War II; Women's Fiction

Synopsis

An American woman becomes entangled in the intense rivalry between iconic fashion designers Coco Chanel and Elsa Schiaparelli in this vivid novel from the acclaimed author of The Beautiful American.

Paris, 1938. Coco Chanel and Elsa Schiaparelli are fighting for recognition as the most successful and influential fashion designer in France, and their rivalry is already legendary. They oppose each other at every turn, in both their politics and their designs: Chanel's are classic, elegant, and practical; Schiaparelli's bold, experimental, and surreal.

When Lily Sutter, a recently widowed American teacher, travels to Paris to visit her brother, Charlie, he insists on buying her a couture dress for her birthday—a Chanel. Lily reluctantly agrees but wants a Schiaparelli, not a Chanel. Charlie's beautiful and socially prominent girlfriend begins wearing Schiaparelli's designs as well, and soon much of Paris is following in her footsteps.

Schiaparelli offers budding artist Lily a job at her store, and suddenly, Lily finds herself increasingly involved with Schiaparelli and Chanel's personal war. Their fierce competition reaches new and dangerous heights as the Nazis and the looming threat of World War II bear down on Paris.

Release date: June 25, 2019

Publisher: Berkley

Print pages: 352

Sample

The Last Collection by Jeanne Mackin
A Novel of Elsa Schiaparelli and Coco Chanel
Berkley
New York
Copyright © 2019 by Jeanne Mackin
 
Part 1
Blue
Of the three primary colors, blue is most suggestive of paradox: it is the color of longing and sadness, and yet it is also the color of joy and fulfillment. On a ship, at night, blue water merges into blue sky, so blue is the color of places with no borders, no edges.


If you throw salt into a fire, the flames will burn blue. Salt rubbed into a wound renews the pain, intensifies it. Seeing others kiss and embrace was salt in my wound, a blue flame burning the length of me.


Blue best represents the contradictions of the heart, the need to be loved and cherished at the same time that we wish for freedom.


Blue, the color of the Worth gown that the little girl Elsa Schiaparelli found in her Roman piazza attic, the color of the covers of the penny romances Coco Chanel found in the orphanage attic.


Blue is what made Elsa Schiaparelli’s daring color, shocking pink, so special: it is pink infused with blue, turning a demure blush into an electric surge. Schiaparelli turned girlish pink into the color of seduction by adding that touch of blue.


And always, there is the blue of the Paris sky on a June day.

Listen. I’m going to tell you a story about fashion, and politics. And of course, about love. The three primaries, like the primary colors.
1
New York, 1954
“For you.” Liz, the gallery assistant, handed me the telegram. Pale blue paper, bold blue lettering. I turned it over and over in my hands. During the war we had learned to dread telegrams. The war was over and whoever was coming home was already there, but dread remained, the fear of again reading those words, “We regret to inform you . . .”


“Aren’t you going to open it?” she asked.


“Of course.” I hesitated. The only people I loved, those still left to me, were just a few blocks away, downtown. No telegram would be needed, if something had happened to them; they were a local telephone call away. Open it, I ordered myself.


I sat on a packing crate and tore at the paper with my chipped fingernails, reminding myself that sometimes telegrams carried good news. It’s possible.


The message was brief. Come to Paris. Need to see you. Signed, Schiap.


Elsa Schiaparelli. Of course she would send a telegram instead of making a transatlantic phone call. It wasn’t the expense of the call but one of her many phobias and superstitions: she hated telephones. All the noise of the Madison Avenue gallery, the hammering, the whir of measuring tapes, the scraping of ladders being pushed across the floor, fell away. New York dissolved, and I was in Paris again.


I closed my eyes and remembered the accordion player on the corner of rue Saint-Honoré playing “Parlez-moi d’Amour,” the throaty laugh of Schiap as she shared a bit of gossip with her assistant, Bettina. Usually, it had been gossip about Coco Chanel, her archrival. Charlie, handsome in his tuxedo, blond bombshell Ania turning heads in the Ritz bar. The taste of strong café, the smell of yeasty bread, the colors, the gleam of the Eiffel Tower, the medieval miracles of rose windows in the churches.


How long had it been? I’d been twenty-five when I met Schiap in Paris. She’d been forty-eight, only nine years older than I was now. And I had thought of her as old, though she never had. “Women don’t age if their clothes stay new,” she had told me once. “Grown women must never dress childishly, but neither should they accept age as inevitable. It is not, not in fashion.”


After the war Schiap and I had gone separate ways, eager to get on with our lives, to return to what had been interrupted, to try to find what had been lost. Of course, there is no going back. Time is an arrow that flies forward, not back. I’d learned that particular lesson well. Too much looking over the shoulder turns you to salt, like Lot’s wife, salt which burns blue.


Even so, why did Schiap “need” to see me? Why not just “want” or even demand, as she was known to do? There had usually been a bit of drama in her messages, a bit of the self-importance and self-absorption often found in the personalities of the very driven, the very successful. She’d earned that drama, the very famous, some would say infamous, Elsa Schiaparelli, designer of the most beautiful, and sometimes most bizarre, women’s clothing ever worn.


“Bad news?” The assistant put down the wooden frame she was carrying.


“No. I don’t know what it’s about,” I said, folding up the telegram and putting it in my pocket. “Just from an old friend. In Paris.”


She gave an exaggerated sigh of relief. Mr. Rosenberg’s gallery employee was a caring person, likely to give you a hug for no reason, to hold your hand if she suspected you’d had bad news. I liked that quality in her, and I liked how her hands, pale and slender, reminded me of Ania.


“Paris. I’d love to go there some day. You’ve been, haven’t you?”


“Yes. I’ve been.” Oh, how I had been. “We’re just about done. Can we call it quits for today?” I needed to think about that telegram, to decide.


“But the show has to be hung by Monday.” She looked more worried than ever. It was my first show in the famous Rosenberg gallery, and not to be taken lightly. I had been in several group exhibits, and even sold some paintings, but if this show was well received . . . well. I’d be successfully on my way.


Liz looked at the telegram I was still holding. “Okay,” she agreed.


“We can finish tomorrow. Go. Go home.” And that was what Schiap had said to me once, years ago. Life was breaking into repetitive refrains, pulling me back.


The echo of her words didn’t startle me, though. It was the echoed action of opening a telegram and reading those words that had. Come to Paris. Need to see you. Exactly what my brother, Charlie, had written sixteen years ago.


Of course I would go. Impossible not to, in both cases. As Liz began to clean up, I found a scrap of paper and began the list-making needed for any complicated journey made during a busy time. I’d stay for my opening reception and then I’d take an airplane to Paris. An airplane! Before the war, the ocean had been busy with steamers to-ing and fro-ing; now, people traveled by air. It was cheaper. It was faster. Schiap had been one of the first to fly transatlantic, had loved the possibility of being in Paris for breakfast on Monday and New York for breakfast on Tuesday.


Liz folded the stepladder and gave me another concerned look over her spectacles, always worn low on her nose, the way Coco Chanel wore hers when she thought no one was looking. Outside the gallery window, Madison Avenue throbbed with life. New York had recovered from the war. The shelves in the neighborhood delis were full; the window displays at Bonwit Teller, Macy’s, Henri Bendel were opulent. The city was stronger than ever, like a flu patient who wakes up to find himself healthier for having spent a few days in bed.


The children out walking with their mothers or nannies that day were well-fed, rosy-cheeked in their winter hats and mittens; the women were dressed in their new postwar coats and dresses, mostly Dior and Dior knockoffs; the New Look, the yards of fabric in the full skirts speaking of wealth and prosperity, the pinched-in waists making women ultrafeminine once again.


The Madison Avenue women looked so gay in their new clothes, the fashions meant to restore the world to glory, or at least to normalcy. Schiap had taught me that. Clothes aren’t just clothes. They are moods, desires, the quality of our souls and our dreams made visible. The female shape morphs into the dreams and hopes of a generation. Clothes are alchemy, the philosopher’s stone, my friend Schiap would have said. The second skin, the chosen skin, the transforming art we wear on our backs.


During the war women were filling shells in ammunitions factories, spending lonely nights on top of skyscrapers listening for the angry growl of Messerschmitts. Perhaps they nursed the wounded at Normandy or the Ardennes. But that was over. Women were staying home, making families. New York was full of babies and strollers, and thanks to the new bras, women’s bosoms were as full and pointed as weaponry.


Every once in a while a different kind of woman would pass by the window with an expression in her eyes that made me wince: loss, the kind that paints permanent blue shadows around the eyes. My face had looked like that, during the war, after I’d opened my We regret to inform you . . . telegram.


I watched out the gallery window until Liz came out from the back room, jangling the door keys. The next time I stood and stared out a window the view would be of Place Vendôme, not Madison Avenue, the view outside Schiap’s boutique, that elegant, glorious circle of Paris where Napoleon stood guard on top of his tall colonnade. Napoleon and all his little soldiers. Except Charlie wouldn’t be there. And Ania . . . so many wouldn’t be there.


Okay, Schiap. Let’s hear what you have to say. Maybe she had some gossip about Coco Chanel, her old enemy? The thought made me smile. It would be like the old days, full of malice and fun. No. It wouldn’t be. Nothing would ever again be like the old days. And then I thought of even older days, the long sad days before I had met Schiap, when, young as I was, I thought my life was already over.


England 1938


There are moments of convergence in life when the stars align just so. Every mundane detail, from the burnt morning toast to the ladder in your new stockings, when the universe itself becomes a question demanding an answer. The answer will decide the rest of your life. Stay. Or go.


That moment, for me, occurred on June 6, 1938.


“Telegram for you,” said Gerald, the school physician, my supervisor, once my brother-in-law. By then, we had both said farewell to any family relationship, to anything other than stiff greetings, cold nods of the chin as we passed each other in the school halls or met to discuss work.


The telegram on his desk was from France and it had already been opened. Since I worked for the school, Gerald assumed any correspondence sent to me would be about a work matter and he could read it. He was wrong, this time.


“From your brother,” he added. He didn’t hand it to me. I had to reach over, pick it up from his desk.


Come to Paris. I want to see you. Arrived from Boston, here for the summer. Meet me at Café les Deux Magots. June 9. Two pm. Charlie.


I read it twice, then folded it and put it into my pocket.


“You won’t go, of course,” Gerald said, looking up from his folder of medical charts. “To see your brother.” His glance was icy. I didn’t blame him for this, nor was I surprised. If the situation were reversed, if I thought Gerald was responsible for the death of my brother, I’d give him the same look, even worse, a dragon look, a dragon breath to incinerate.


“I won’t?” I said.


“Classes aren’t finished. The term hasn’t ended.”


“Of course,” I said. “Here are the notes for the week.” I kept notes on the girls who took my art classes, especially those who had been ill, and Gerald, as school physician, read them dutifully. The boarding school had a reputation, an excellent one, of educating and caring for exceptional girls, especially those with serious and long-term health problems. There were several recovering polio victims, young girls with uncertain steps who needed daily therapy and exercise, and a girl with a stutter so severe she could barely speak. At the school, they were able to receive treatment while also living a social life with other girls their age.


Keeping the notes on the students was part of my contract with the school. Free room and board and a decent if not generous salary in exchange. It had seemed a suitable arrangement two years ago, after Allen’s funeral, when I had no idea of where and how I was to live. The school’s offer of employment had seemed an answer of sorts. And it meant I could stay where I had been happy with Allen.


Passing on those notes had come to feel like a betrayal to my students, a breaking of confidence. Art begins as a private exploration of dreams and desires and should be kept private till the artist deems it is ready to be shown. My notes to Gerald betrayed those secrets I discerned in the paintings and in our classroom conversations. What about those dark places that we need to keep for ourselves, those mysterious shadows where others couldn’t intrude with their shoulds and should nots, their Freudian theories and respectable dictates?


Florrie, a quiet girl with red braids, had confessed yesterday to sketching a nude male but had torn it up before anyone could see it. Next time, I told her, let me see it first. Hands and feet are difficult, all the bones, tendons. The other parts are actually rather easy. Look at Michelangelo’s statues. Simple geometry. Florrie, intelligent girl that she was, had the sense not to giggle. She’d be married in a few years. A mother soon after, a busy responsible woman with a trunk in the attic full of her unused art materials.


“The notes seem a little brief this week,” Gerald said, still not looking at me.


“There wasn’t much to write.” I certainly wasn’t about to reveal Florrie’s growing curiosity about the male physique. “Miserable weather, isn’t it?” Rain pelted at the windows, running down in sad rivulets. Not go to Paris? When Charlie has asked me to come see him?


“Good for the gardens.” Gerald studied the neatly arranged papers on his desk, pushing and sorting in a way that indicated this meeting was over.


“So much green,” I said.


Green is a secondary color made by mixing yellow and blue. Blue for sky, yellow for sun; chloros, or green, in nature. And that’s the problem: only the true greens of nature look believable. All other greens look what they are: imitation. Green is unreliable. There are so many wrong greens, greens where the yellow is too dominant, making a sickly tint like a fading bruise, or greens where the blue is too dark, making the green look like a storm cloud over an angry ocean. To me, only when green is accented with black does it look authentic in a painting, black pigment made from burnt bones. Fire. So much of life is about fire and destruction.


“Travel is very difficult these days,” Gerald said. “All those Austrian refugees clamoring at the embassies.”


The sad clock ticked. Footsteps rushed down the hall, one of the girls late for her class. I studied the pattern in the worn carpet, torn between obeying Gerald, and my duty to the school, and a growing desire to see Charlie. It had been a long time.


Gerald looked up and I could see in his face that awful puzzlement: Why is she alive, when my brother is dead? It was my fault, and it was unforgivable. I agreed.


I ate boiled beef and greens with the students and other faculty in the dining hall that night, and then went to my studio. I hadn’t painted since the accident, since Allen’s death. Colors defied me, wouldn’t come true. I would try a study in blue, but when it dried it would be gray, only gray, and I didn’t know if it was my vision that had changed or the paints themselves. It was like a singer losing her voice, knowing what the notes are but not being able to replicate them. Death can do that, make reality as hard to hold on to as water dripping through your fingers.


That night I tried to size a canvas, just to see if I could still do it. It felt important not to lose the craft of painting, even if the art of it eluded me. The schoolgirls were at a dance in the great hall, drinking pineapple punch and pretending, as Allen and I had, that they were somewhere else, somewhere festive and gay. I could hear the gramophone, a Freddy Martin song, “April in Paris.”


One of Allen’s favorite songs. I was so distracted I applied the glue too thickly and ruined the linen. I decided not to try a second one. Why waste school supplies? I turned off the lights, locked up the room, and crossed the graveled courtyard to my little bedroom over the school garages. It smelled of gasoline, but I had my own entrance, a modicum of privacy. An owl hooted. Somewhere in the fields beyond the manicured lawns a fox barked, a rabbit screamed. Life and death in the peaceful English countryside.


I listened to creeping darkness, a light patter of rain on the roof. What if I did go to Paris, and see Charlie? I dared a brief moment of happiness. And there it was, a pale blue rising in me out of the gray, not quite joy, but something close to it. Anticipation.


I hadn’t seen my brother since my husband’s funeral. Charlie had wanted to visit, but I always said no. I did not want consolation or reminiscing about earlier times. I wanted to be alone with the heartbreak.


My father had been a physician famous for his treatments of skin grafting during World War I. After he and my mother died of the Spanish flu, Charlie and I were taken in by my father’s sister. I was five, Charlie only three. He barely remembered them, so during our childhood I would make little sketches of Momma and Poppa from my own memories to share with Charlie, so that he would know them, at least through my own memories. Art can do that, save the best of the past for us.


Aunt Irene had married a man who owned the northeast franchise of the Fuller Brush Company, but they were childless. Their parenting style required that we be fed, housed, and educated but never coddled, so Charlie and I grew completely dependent on each other, two primary colors not needing a third to be complete.


After I finished high school my aunt and uncle supported me through a year of studies at the Art Students League. I exhibited one small oil, a portrait, in a minor exhibition in a small downtown gallery, and thought I was on my way to a career—but when I was nineteen Aunt Irene said, “Enough! You can’t be a student forever!” She offered to “finish” me with a trip to Paris for a month. I wouldn’t go unless Charlie came with me.


That was in August of 1933, when, after the crash, a Hooverville appeared behind the Metropolitan Museum on Fifth Avenue, tin and cardboard shanties in straggling rows of the newly homeless. In Paris money stretched further—whenever my aunt said that, I imagined bills and coins of rubber, stretching like broken hairbands. We shopped, dined, walked in the parks. When my aunt was resting in the hot afternoons, Charlie and I went to the Louvre.


And one day, when I went to revisit the Mona Lisa, a young Englishman, tweedy and polite, was sitting there, on what I thought of by then as my bench. He looked straight ahead at the Mona Lisa in front of him, and the ginger color of his hair and mustache, the sharp line of his nose, reminded me of one of Renoir’s early self-portraits. Say what you will of the cloying sweetness of some of his subject matter, Renoir knew how to use color.


The Englishman rose gallantly and offered to share the bench. “Allen Sutter,” he said, taking my hand. That single touch, a warm grasp, and I felt I had been jolted awake from a deep sleep.


“Lily Cooper, and my brother, Charlie.”


The three of us sat down and pretended to study Mona Lisa, but all the while I was giving Allen sideways glances and he was returning them. He was thin and tall, and his eyes were very dark brown, not the pale gray that often goes with red hair. Unusual coloring that made me want to try a portrait of him. And then I wondered what it would be like to kiss him, to hold him.


Why him? It was the time, the place, and there was a sparkle in his dark eyes that made me want to make him laugh. Coup de foudre, the French call it, the lightning strike. Love is partly what we feel about the other person and partly how that other person makes us feel about ourselves. With Allen, from our first meeting, I felt confident and pretty as a girl in one of Watteau’s paintings of country courtships.


After that initial encounter, for the next two weeks, we met at the Louvre every afternoon, when my aunt was napping.


When Aunt Irene did finally return to New York in September, I didn’t go with her, insisting that I was going to stay in Paris and study art there.


She peered hard at me when I told her. “If I hear so much as a whisper of misbehaving, your allowance will be cut off and you will return immediately to New York,” she said. “Do you understand?” Charlie studied the ceiling and gave me a little poke in the ribs.


When Charlie hugged me good-bye at the pier, just before he boarded, I had my first and only moment of doubt. We had never been separated before. “Don’t behave,” he whispered. “Have fun.”


Three months later, Allen and I were married in a civil ceremony at the Mairie de Paris. Well, I suppose you are ‘finished’ now, my aunt wrote, when I sent her a telegram announcing my marriage. Try and be happy. You’ll find it’s not as easy as it seems. Good luck, and love. Fingers crossed.


Allen and I spent our honeymoon in a Left Bank one-room studio, eating bread and cheese and rarely rising from the mattress we had put on the floor. We were young and so delighted with each other we couldn’t imagine needing anything else. In that first year I didn’t even miss my brother, who had begun medical studies in Boston. Allen was lighthearted and full of practical jokes, a perfect antidote to my somber childhood, his sunny yellow next to my gray-blue. He once taught children in our apartment building how to fill water balloons and drop them from the roof, a morning’s work that did not endear us to others in the neighborhood. He was playful, and passionate in our lovemaking, teaching me the delights the flesh could provide, the way colors burst upon closed eyelids in ecstasy.


Allen was a math tutor who helped students prepare for the difficult baccalauréat exam, and I received my allowance—it was to continue until my twenty-first birthday—so we made do for an entire year in Paris, with the mattress on the floor and a single cooking ring smuggled into the room. But one morning the silly jokes were gone and he was serious. When I asked what was wrong, he said that it was time to plan for the future. “I have to provide for you,” he said. “And there may be children, you know.”


Children. Believe it or not, I hadn’t even thought of that, hadn’t realized that there could be even more love in the world than I already had. “Children,” I repeated. “Lovely. Let’s practice.”


His brother, Gerald, got him a job as math teacher at the girls’ boarding school outside London, where Gerald was resident physician. Newly serious, somewhat reluctantly, we left Paris and went to damp, cold England. As much as I had grown to love Paris I didn’t mind, because I was with Allen. We were a universe of two. A quiet universe of two, still waiting for my first pregnancy to happen, when two years later I, still waiting for motherhood and bored of so much countryside, begged Allen to go to a dance in town with me.


He was tired, and wanted to stay in. He already had his slippers on, his pipe lighted, a pile of algebra tests on the table, waiting for grading. “Come with me,” I pleaded. And he did.


If I had known then how easily, how quickly, how total destruction could arrive around the next bend in the road, I would have locked him in his room, like a treasure, and me there, locked in with him.


Instead, I killed him. I was driving, and I hit ice on the road, and barreled into a tree. A brief memory of screams, and when I woke up, in the hospital, Charlie was there, trying to comfort me, to calm me, to rouse me back to life, but not even Charlie could do that. My universe had collapsed, because Allen had died in the crash.


After the funeral, I sent Charlie back to Boston, to his medical studies. Gerald, my brother-in-law, told me to stay at the school as long as I needed; he would move me to a smaller room, a room for one person, a widow’s room. My punishment, and I accepted it, wanted it. Gerald never looked me in the eyes again.


But now Paris, the city where I had fallen in love with Allen, was calling me again. Paris, and Charlie—I wanted to see them. Both of them. I wanted to take a deep breath, to walk on city streets, to have even a small vacation from misery, from the constant ache for Allen.


I found a scrap of paper and began making a list of what I would need to pack.


Two days after receiving Charlie’s telegram, Gerald drove me to the train station. I had given the girls a final evaluation, turned in my paperwork, and ended the semester early. Gerald was furious and I could see in his face that he wished I would lose my passport in Paris, that I would never return, never stand before him again, reminding him. I was alive. His brother wasn’t.


When I arrived at the Gare du Nord the next day, it was a sunny June afternoon, and the cavernous station was busy with girls in summer frocks, les hommes d’affaires with their briefcases and rolled-up shirtsleeves, younger men sitting at the buffet tables drinking coffee and watching the crowd, looking for a specific face or perhaps any pretty face. I found a cab on rue de Dunkerque and went to meet Charlie, my little brother.


He wasn’t at Café les Deux Magots when I arrived, still a little sick from the Channel crossing and train ride. I checked the telegram—correct time, correct place. Charlie was late. This was unlike him, good responsible Charlie, but it was spring and Paris and I decided not to worry, to take in my surroundings, to observe how the Parisian women sat in their chairs, how they tilted their heads to the side, lifted their coffee cups with their hands wrapped possessively around them, women with the colorful frocks and dark eyes that Matisse painted.


Saint-Germain-des-Prés was busy and the café crowded. All the tables huddled under the faded awning or sprawling into the street were occupied and the air was thick with the hum of conversation, the chink of coffee spoons against china, and occasional bursts of laughter. When the café door swung wide I could see the two brightly painted Chinese figurines posed atop pillars that gave the café its name. The mandarins looked very contented, those two, subdued and self-possessed, as if nothing could startle them.


Sunlight gilded the pavement and the gray façades of the buildings across the street. A ginger cat strutted past, back arched high, sniffing his way toward the fishmonger’s shop. Schoolchildren in blues and plaids, a fruit seller with trays of oranges and apples and grapes—a rainbow, all in one place.


The sky was the shade of blue that Rossetti had used for the sky in Dantis Amor. I wasn’t a fan of the ethereal pre-Raphaelites, but when their colors appear in a real sky the effect is fabulous.


“Another coffee?” The waiter hovered over me, formal in black trousers and white towel tied around his waist. I tapped the paperback spread-eagled on my table, pretending I was preoccupied, though I hadn’t read a single word since I had sat down, a half hour earlier.
“Yes, please.”


He squinted and leaned a little toward me. “Perhaps an aperitif as well? A Pernod?”


I shook my head. “Just coffee, please.”


A group of boys wearing new khaki-green French army uniforms took the table next to me. Two and a half million young Frenchmen had been put into uniform that year, according to the BBC. Yet we all hoped, still believed, there would be no war. Roosevelt said so, over and over in his fireside chats.


It was a warm day, so the newly conscripted young soldiers had taken off their berets and neatly folded them into their front pockets, makin