Like Alex, Dior had found the bohemian Parisian life a thrilling release from the cloistered, closeted world in which he’d grown up, but whereas Alex’s life had been circumscribed by poverty, Dior’s had been hemmed in by privilege, raised by starchy governesses and a dominating father who disapproved of his son’s artistic ambitions.[1]
‘I suggested to my family that I should study Fine Arts. There was an outcry! I was not allowed to join the Bohemians. To gain time and to enjoy the greatest possible liberty, I was enrolled as a student in the École des Sciences Politiques, which entailed no commitments. Such was the hypocritical way in which I contrived to carry on the life I liked,’ Dior later recalled.[2]
And the life he liked was a lot like the one Alex did, too: in his autobiography, Dior describes hanging out at the bar Boeuf sur le Toit, going to the Ballets Russes, watching Jean Cocteau films, seeing Josephine Baker on the stage. ‘What a hectic life! My parents were in despair at having a son who was so incapable of concerning himself with anything serious,’ Dior writes, and Alex would have sympathised, having had similar arguments with Chaya.
After the Dior family fortune collapsed in the stock market crash, and the art gallery Dior had opened with a friend shut down, Dior started working as a fashion illustrator. Soon he was making sketches for designers such as Schiaparelli, Alex’s old friend Nina Ricci – and Alex himself. It was inevitable the two of them would eventually meet as they mixed in the same circles, and it was through Dior that Alex befriended the aspiring designer Imre Partos, a Hungarian Jew, who would become a very important figure in Alex’s life in a few years’ time.
The other illustrator who provided sketches for Alex’s label was René Gruau, who became one of Alex’s most loyal, and most enduring, friends. He would also, in the next decade, become the most famous fashion illustrator in the world thanks to his future alliance with Dior. Gruau’s fluid, languorous illustrations of Dior’s famous New Look collection in 1947 helped to translate what became the most influential fashion breakthrough of the twentieth century to the masses, and he would continue to be the label’s artist for more than half a century, coining modern fashion illustration as much as Dior coined modern fashion. John Galliano, head of design at Dior from 1996 to 2011, later said Gruau ‘captured Dior better than any other’ because of their ‘enduring friendship’.[3] And both of them started with Alex in the mid-1930s.[4] Alex might have struggled at times as a designer, but his skill at talent spotting was pretty much unsurpassable, and this is a testament to his natural, and extraordinary, sense of aesthetics.
Yet even with Dior’s and Gruau’s help, the work was punishing. On one day alone, Alex did a fitting with a successful cabaret owner who insisted on drinking from her whisky bottle as he was draping the fabric around her, and walked through his studio completely naked between fittings, unbothered by the sixty employees working there; another fitting with the French singer Lucienne Boyer, described later in her New York Times obituary as ‘the queen of Paris nightlife in the 1930s’; and a third one with Suzy Solidor, a bisexual cabaret singer who was so popular with artists, including Tamara Lempicka, Jean Cocteau and Francis Bacon, that she became known as ‘the most painted woman in the world’. After the war she was known as something else when she was convicted of being a collaborator.
Alex was not a big name, like Chanel or Balenciaga, but he was doing well enough for his company to be valued in the early 1940s by the CGQJ at 2,233,823.30 francs, or almost 90,000 euros today – an unarguably respectable sum. (By contrast, Jacques’s business was valued at less than 200,000 francs, or 8,000 euros today.) In his salon, which he moved out of its original office space and into a far more glamorous setting on Avenue Matignon, he had twenty-nine armchairs, proof of the number of clients and journalists he regularly had to seat, and the salon itself was fronted with a large window, between a pair of heavy silk curtains, looking onto the street, through which children could peer into his workplace, just as he and Sara had once looked into Lanvin’s.
The two youngest Glasses were always charmed by Parisian style and as adults they recreated it enthusiastically in their own wardrobes: Alex wore formal three-piece suits and buckets of cologne, with shoes that had two-inch heels for some much-longed-for extra height, and Sara wore berets, wide belts and peasant-style blouses with tapered trousers. When you move to a new country and don’t want to be seen by the natives as a foreigner, you can change your accent, or you can change your clothes, and the latter tends to be easier. It is a way of leaving who you were behind and sending a pleadingly optimistic message to those around you that says, ‘I know I may not sound like you, but I am one of you.’ Or maybe it’s like being a besotted lover in a new relationship, copying your partner’s style. Whichever, it’s an expression of love.
And Alex expressed his love for France through his clothes. He built up a successful export business selling a fondly exaggerated image of French chic to, in particular, British and American customers. It was a style that felt a little kitsch for Parisians, but for foreigners this heavily outlined version of French style was a canny formula. It was also one that reflected Alex’s status as an immigrant. Like a man who moves to Britain and immediately adopts the mannerisms of Bertie Wooster, or one who moves to the United States and becomes a hardcore baseball fan, or like Henri, for that matter, in his three-piece suits in the 7ème arrondissement, it was not enough for Alex to simply be in France. He had to embody that country. As much as he thought of himself as an outsider, there was always a part of him that wanted to prove to the French bourgeoisie that he understood them, and was better than them. So there had to be an exaggeration, an overcompensation, and he made clothes that were Frencher than French.
A friend, Sara and Alex.
Alex also turned out to be excellent at selling. He had watched those obsequious couturiers carefully through the window as a kid, and he was happy to copy them, if it sold some dresses. That he did it with his rough Yiddish accent made it seem even more authentic to clients bored with the polished patter in other salons. Also, Alex really loved to sell – unlike other couturiers, he did not see it as beneath him to push his goods, to tell women that if they were buying the blue dress they really also ought to buy the red, and maybe to make up a little lie from time to time and say that the English princesses had been in the other day and ordered these skirts, so perhaps the client should, too, as they would soon be the latest fashion. As a salesman, Alex united the schmooze of French designers with the pushiness of the market traders in the Pletzl and back in Chrzanow, and it was an extremely effective combination.
One of the ironies of fashion design is that a profession ostensibly built to celebrate female beauty has, for more than a century, been dominated by gay men. The question of whether Alex was gay or bisexual was one that was raised in his lifetime by his friends and colleagues, but always behind his back. When I was starting to research Alex’s life in Paris I met the now late designer Ilie Wacs, who worked as a sketcher for Alex in the 1950s. After some preliminary small talk he brought up Alex’s sexuality: ‘He was such a dandy, you know? Always in heels, always heavily perfumed, but he talked about his girlfriends, so we in the studio could never figure it out. Did anyone in your family know?’
No one in the family did. Alex rarely spoke about his romantic life, and no one dared to ask. It may be that Alex was neither gay nor straight but both and neither: Paris in the 1920s and 1930s was a centre for not just the sexual freedom of Josephine Baker but also the sexual fluidity of Jean Cocteau. In the artistic and fashion worlds in which Alex worked, such sexual liberation would have been, if not the openly acknowledged norm, at least a quietly accepted practice, and the idea of putting a name to such experimentation, to define yourself by who you happened to take to bed on Tuesday, would have seemed as absurd as naming yourself after the colour of the jacket you happened to wear on Wednesday. Such things were mutable, and nailing down the sexual preferences of the individuals in Alex’s milieu is like
trying to fix a wave to the shore.
But while Alex’s friends would have been comfortable with homosexuality, his family – and more specifically, his mother – would very much not. Same-sex relationships were not accepted in the world in which she grew up, which was also the world in which Alex grew up, and Alex desperately cared about the good opinion of his siblings and his Ornstein cousins. Certainly in his memoir he takes enormous pains to stress his heterosexuality. He writes about how one of his neighbours initially refused to speak to him, ‘because he believed that all couturiers were homosexuals. But he quickly discovered that I was an exception, a rare exception, to that rule. He soon saw many very pretty ladies coming up the stairs to my place.’ There are multiple if vague references to various ‘conquests’ – all emphatically female – and dimly described remembrances of young women who desperately wanted to marry him.
These little asides are frustrating in their opacity and almost laughable in their clumsiness. My father had warned me not to take Alex’s memoir too seriously, and while I’d been prepared to treat his descriptions of his achievements with some scepticism, it soon became clear to me that the more questionable elements of his story were the references to his personal life. Alex always found it easy to talk about what he did, but how he felt was a very different story. Unlike the shoebox in my grandmother’s closet, he fully intended his memoir to be seen by others, so there was a limit to how honest he could, and would, be. If he wasn’t willing to discuss the possible complexities of his sexuality with his family, he certainly wasn’t going to do so in a book that he hoped would immortalise his reputation with the public.
Alex’s sexuality, like my grandmother’s sadness, was something none of us in the family talked about while he was alive, or even after he died. It can be hard to see someone you know so well clearly, to fit together the puzzle pieces when your mind can’t even grasp how the image should look. But I wondered if the truth was more obvious to those who worked with him. So I asked one of Alex’s assistants, who he employed in the 1980s, if she ever got any sense of her former boss’s sexuality?
‘When I knew him he was almost rampantly heterosexual – he was like an octopus around me sometimes,’ she said. ‘But I always got the impression that he was largely homosexual for the first half of his life and largely heterosexual for the latter, just from who he was hanging out with at those times. But honestly, I don’t think Alex would have ever even thought about it in those terms. It was just who he was at those times.’
In the early 1930s Alex bought a home that was as luxurious as his salon had become: a duplex on the Île de la Cité, with large bay windows that looked out over Paris. To help him decorate his apartment he pulled in his friends Christian Dior and René Gruau to advise him. On the walls Alex hung paintings by his friends, such as Pascin and Kisling, and when he threw cocktail parties all his guests would stand on his terrace and watch the flashing lights of the bateaux mouches – tourist cruises – as they sailed up and down the Seine. Even though his working days were exhausting, his nights were relentless: if he wasn’t throwing parties in his glamorous apartment, or seeing his siblings, or going out for drinks with his beloved cousins, he was running around Montmartre or Montparnasse with his friends. After all, to stay at home and do nothing – like his father did, like his brother Jacques did – was to feel nothing. To do everything was to live. And just as Alex was living exactly as he wanted, he realised he’d have to lose it all.
WHILE JACQUES’S CAREER was more typical of a Jewish immigrant and Alex’s was the more exceptional, when it came to their feelings about the approach of Nazism, it was Jacques who was the unusual one and Alex more archetypal. Jacques’s blind belief in France’s loyalty towards foreign Jews put him in the minority, while Alex’s nervousness was far more common among their demographic. For obvious reasons, eastern European Jews recognised the dangers of Nazism far quicker than French ones, and many realised it was worse than what they had previously escaped.[5] Alex was even more pessimistic – or realistic – than most of his peers. His experience in the pogrom as a child had left him with a lifelong cynicism about anyone’s loyalty towards Jews and, as much as he loved Paris and became a part of Parisian life, he never kidded himself that he was anything but a foreigner, and his lifelong retention of his Yiddish accent was a statement of that, to himself and to others. He refused to assimilate his tongue, instead defiantly remaining, as he put it, ‘authentic’.
Unlike Jacques, he didn’t take his safety in France for granted. So no matter how dazzled he was by his newfound popularity on nights out in Montparnasse, he never forgot the dark forces that had so blighted his childhood and now approached France. He demonstrated against Action Française and Croix-de-Feu, two nationalistic political parties that Alex rightly recognised as riddled with anti-Semitism, and he watched their rise closely and the accompanying national mood for appeasement. Being involved in the art world gave Alex particular clarity on the situation, as Jewish artists were increasingly seen in the 1930s as symbols of destruction of France’s heritage. Le Figaro’s Camille Mauclair raged against ‘The Monparno crowd’. In one article, he claimed ‘the proportion of Semites is around 80%’, and he insisted that Alex’s friends were conspiring to destroy French art:
One must admit that if Jews have produced marvellous poets, they have never excelled in plastic arts. How then to explain that the current art market is in the hands of Jewish merchants and critics, and that they therefore push Jewish painters to the forefront of ‘living art’, all agreeing to attack the Latin tradition and to obey the spirit of negating criticism, of dissociation, of overturning of values, which is the old Bolshevik base of their race.[6]
By 1935, the major art magazines refused to include even the names of these immigrant Jewish artists in their emphatically French pages. The national mood was becoming all too obvious to Alex. ‘In the horror of the pogroms, I had seen the damned beast take form, seen its hideous face. It grew and grew, ever more monstrous. And now it appeared everywhere, here in France, among so-called patriots, but in reality degenerate reactionaries, all wearing the same grinning mask,’ he wrote.
His first step was to deal with the one member of his family who he considered to be the easiest to manipulate and the simplest to get out of France: his sister Sara. In 1937 Alex managed to find a way for her to go to New York and, in doing so, very possibly saved her life. And yet he doesn’t mention this event once in his memoir, or even that his sister left France. This initially astonished me: after all, not only was this a major event in the family, but given how much Alex liked to trumpet his successes, to ignore the fact that he, with great prescience and skill, ostensibly saved his baby sister from the camps seems inexplicable. The most sympathetic explanation would be that by the time he was writing his memoir Alex knew all too well how homesick Sara was in New York, so he couldn’t bear to revisit this saga because of the guilt. And there is some evidence in the letters between them over the next few decades that he was aware to some extent of how unhappy she was. But a more likely reason, I think, is that Alex simply didn’t consider it was that big a deal, not compared to what was happening to him at the time, and so he just didn’t bother to write it down. He was writing his story and therefore he focused on himself – he did not want to write about what happened to his sister. And this sums up what it was like to be related to Alex: if he liked you, his generosity was immense, his heart enormous. But these qualities were too often obscured by his infuriating self-centredness, which sometimes came across as a lack of interest in other people. Alex loved his siblings very deeply, to the point that they were the only people in the world who had the ability to hurt him. They were the bruise on his arm that was too tender to touch. And so while his mother and siblings hardly make an appearance in his memoir during the 1930s, the truth is he tried to save them repeatedly.
When Alex realised he could only get Sara out of France, he set about trying to get French citizenship for himself and his famil
y. He was too late: on 21 September 1937 his application for naturalisation was rejected, despite his having lived in France for almost two decades and his growing celebrity. Alex refused to be beaten and so, in defiance of the unarguable odds, he tried again, and once again he was rejected. Devastated, on 20 September 1938 he wrote a furious and heartfelt letter to the government in protest:
I was painfully surprised when I learned that my naturalisation application had been rejected. The very serious circumstances we are now going through make this refusal even more painful. I am young, brave, fit and eager to have the opportunity to defend this French soil that was welcoming to me and my family. I work with many French people and we fight heart and soul together for our work; it is my dearest desire to now continue the struggle with them – in French – in the most serious of conditions. I hope to have contributed to the renown of French taste and couture abroad. It is for me a moral obligation and an expression of gratitude for your country that make me ask you, sir, to reconsider my application.
But it was no good; for once, Alex couldn’t make a sale. The noose around foreign Jews in France was already too tight. German and Austrian Jewish refugees were being rounded up and put into French internment camps; there was no chance France was going to give citizenship to a family of Polish Jews, and, Alex realised, even less chance the country would protect them.
HE CAME UP with another idea of how to save his family: he would sign up to fight, protecting the home he loved from becoming like the former home he hated. So once France reluctantly joined the war in September 1939, he decided to follow in the footsteps of his friend Kiki Kisling, who had fought in the French Foreign Legion in the First World War, and join up. ‘I’m ready to sacrifice a limb of my body to win this fight against the Germans, my enemies,’ he told his friends.
But it turned out that France wasn’t so keen for his limbs. The Legion was already becoming oversubscribed, largely with Spanish Republicans[7] but also because the German and Austrian Jews who had been interned by France were told they would be released if they joined the Legion. So Alex required some help convincing the Foreign Legion that they needed a five-foot-two-inch Polish-born fashion designer, and he turned to someone who would become a very important part of his life, a man called Colonel Jean Perré.