The Last Collection Read online

  ALSO BY JEANNE MACKIN

  A LADY OF GOOD FAMILY

  THE BEAUTIFUL AMERICAN

  THE SWEET BY AND BY

  DREAMS OF EMPIRE

  THE QUEEN’S WAR

  THE FRENCHWOMAN

  BERKLEY

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  1745 Broadway, New York, NY 10019

  Copyright © 2019 by Jeanne Mackin

  “Readers Guide” copyright © 2019 by Jeanne Mackin

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Mackin, Jeanne, author.

  Title: The last collection: a novel of Elsa Schiaparelli and Coco Chanel / Jeanne Mackin.

  Description: First edition. | New York, NY: Berkley, 2019.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018043153 | ISBN 9781101990544 (hardback) | ISBN 9781101990551 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Chanel, Coco, 1883–1971—Fiction. | Schiaparelli, Elsa, 1890–1973—Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Biographical. | FICTION / Contemporary Women. | GSAFD: Biographical fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3563.A3169 L37 2019 | DDC 813/.54—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018043153

  International edition ISBN: 9780593099339

  First Edition: June 2019

  Cover photo by Alfred Eisenstaedt / The LIFE Picture Collection / Getty Images

  Cover design by Rita Frangie

  Interior art: art nouveau pattern by Curly Pat / Shutterstock.com

  This is a work of fiction. All incidents and dialogue, and all characters with the exception of some historical figures, are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Where real-life historical persons appear, the situations, incidents, and dialogues concerning those persons are not intended to change the entirely fictional nature of the work. In all other respects, any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  For Steve

  CONTENTS

  Also by Jeanne Mackin

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraphs

  Part One: BlueChapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Part Two: RedChapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Part Three: YellowChapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  Readers Guide

  About the Author

  The fashion world is no place for timid dedicated souls; it is a field for strong, determined egotists who have an innate desire to impose their wills on the world—wills of iron disguised in rustling silks and beautiful colors.

  —BETTINA BALLARD

  I am not a heroine. But I have chosen the person I wanted to be and am. Too bad if I am disliked and unpleasant.

  —COCO CHANEL

  Fantasy is a flower that does not flourish on passivity. Determination is what it needs.

  —ELSA SCHIAPARELLI

  PART ONE

  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.

  • ONE •

  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 was 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. “Gro
wn 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 was 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, and 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 need 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.