House of Glass

After the war, Mila was very isolated in Paris. Photos of her from that period show her with her beloved toddler daughter, holding her baby almost vampirically close to her, the only thing she had left in the world. There is never anyone else in the photo. She didn’t marry again, she barely made a living trying to run Jacques’s old business on her own, and in the letters she wrote throughout 1945 to the Service de Restitution des Biens des Victimes des Lois et Mesures de Spoliation, which was set up to provide some compensation to the Jews whose money and property was taken from them by Vichy, she frequently mentions being ‘dénuée de tout’ (completely bankrupt). Alex refused to see or speak to her and whenever he heard her name he would spit and say, ‘Elle a tué mon frère!’ Henri, uncharacteristically unforgiving, also refused to speak to her, furious that her stupidity had condemned his closest brother to his death. Worse, she remained unrepentant about it: Mila lived for another thirty years after Jacques died, and not for a moment did she ever think she made a mistake in telling Jacques to go back to the camp. She never asked herself if maybe she had listened to her brothers-in-law then perhaps Jacques might still be alive and she wouldn’t be living in penury on her own with her daughter in this dank old basement. After all, she would say, he gave his word.

Her sister Olga, who now lived in the United States, helped a little. But she found Mila such a drag, always complaining about her life and never taking any responsibility for her actions, that they hardly spoke, let alone saw one another.

The only people who helped Mila were Sonia and Sara. Both of them felt sorry for her, and even more sorry for Lily. They, unlike Henri and Alex, were able to look at the truth about what happened to Jacques square in the face; they knew what he was like – had always been like – and they also knew he was a grown man who had made his own choices. Unlike his brothers, they didn’t blame a foolish woman for his death. Whereas Alex in particular had always tried to make Jacques into something he wasn’t by denying his true nature, and continued to do so after he died, the women accepted him as he really was. So after the war Sara sent Mila provisions, and Sonia secretly visited her, bringing money and food, and listening silently to Mila’s endless list of grievances against the world. Sonia was known in the family as a chatterbox, because she said what she thought. But Sonia was also very kind and knew when to say nothing and let others speak, and she let Mila speak.

The only other person in the family who helped her was my father, who moved to Paris in the 1960s and happened to live around the corner from Mila. He occasionally went round to her apartment for dinner – Mila was an excellent cook, and loved to make heavy Polish dishes, but my father often had to pay for the ingredients. At other times, she would come to his apartment, ringing his doorbell at odd hours of the day.

‘I need to use your bath!’ she would call up to his window.

There was no bathtub in her apartment and so, at the age of fifty-something, she would go to see her twenty-five-year-old nephew, and beg to use his.

Lily grew up to be a sweet, quiet gentle girl, a lot like her father in many ways. But because of the consanguinity of her parents, she was born with a hole in her heart and she was known back then as a ‘blue baby’, because her lips purpled from oxygen deprivation, the consequence of her weak heart. When Lily was fourteen, Sonia heard about a doctor in Denver who specialised in helping such children, and she talked her neighbour, who happened to be a radio producer, into putting on a telethon to raise money for Lily to go there. Incredibly, this worked, and Lily flew to Denver to have her heart repaired. The operation was a success. When I was going through Sonia’s belongings, two decades after she died, I found a publicity shot of Lily leaving the hospital that the radio station took. It’s a very staged photo, almost comically so, with Lily sitting in a car, stiffly waving to a trio of nurses who wave back to her. But it’s also an extremely sweet photo, because of Lily: she looks so happy, a typical fourteen-year-old, her tidy plaits swinging gently as she waves to her nurses, a little girl about to enjoy health and happiness the likes of which she’d never previously known. Before she left the hospital, her doctor told her she should be fine, as long as she never got pregnant, because her heart was not strong enough to support two lives.

Lily as a teenager.

A few years later, when Lily was in her very early twenties, she was walking in Paris near the Luxembourg Gardens when she spotted a man sitting in a café and fell in love at first sight. His name was Victor, he came from Bolivia and they married almost immediately. She moved with him to South America, and, too in love to remember or care about any medical edicts, she quickly became pregnant. About five months into her pregnancy, my father got a call at his office in New York. It was Sonia, and she had just spoken to Victor who had called her in a panic: Lily was dying.

‘Should I tell Mila? She’s just getting over pneumonia and I worry that she wouldn’t survive the trip,’ Sonia asked my dad.

‘Sonia, I can’t tell you what to do – you know her better than me,’ he replied.

‘Fine, never mind!’ Sonia said, slamming down the phone.

Sonia decided not to tell Mila, believing, maybe correctly, that travelling to Bolivia and seeing Lily die would kill her. But not knowing pretty much killed her, too. After Lily died in Bolivia, Mila found out that Sonia had known beforehand and hadn’t told her, thereby preventing her from saying goodbye to her daughter. Understandably, she flew into a desperate rage and refused to speak to Sonia ever again. But this meant that for the last ten years of her life she hardly spoke to anyone. Instead, she sat in the same basement flat Jacques had bought for them thirty years earlier, crying on her own, surrounded by tear-soaked photos of Lily. She herself died in the early 1970s, a sad and lonely life that finally came to an end. And when she went, Jacques’s branch of the family tree – blighted by bad luck and bad circumstances, both of which were made infinitely worse by bad choices, from father to mother to daughter – withered away to ashes.

Alex with the Aymards in Saint-Gervais-d’Auvergne, 1943.

10

ALEX – Myth-making

France, 1940s

IN THE AUTUMN OF 1940

, Alex, fresh from demobilisation, was in Grenoble with his fellow resistance fighters, the Sizaines, talking about how to save their now humiliated country. Alex was keen to sneak back into Paris to see his family, to save his mother, to check on his business. But his close friend and fellow Sizaine, Jean Baptiste Seytour, who – unsurprisingly, given his name – was not Jewish, convinced him they would do better establishing a base in the unoccupied southern zone before making Resistance runs to Paris. Alex agreed, but where should they live? Alex’s money was in Paris. Seytour had the answer for that too.

Seytour, an aspiring actor, had grown up in Nice, and, luckily for him and his fellow legionnaire, his father still lived there. So he and Alex moved in with Pierre Seytour, and for the next few years, they lived a pretty fabulous life down on le Midi. Alex’s friend Kiki Kisling lived nearby, and they often went to his place for dinners and drinks. Alex’s former draftsman, Christian Dior, was also down in the south of France, after being demobilised from the army, and he was staying with his father and beloved youngest sister Catherine in the pretty village of Callian near Grasse, about 40 kilometres from Cannes. According to Alex’s memoir, when loyal friends in his salon in Paris sent him a supply of civilian clothes, he shared them with Dior because the two of them were the same size (short, in other words). Alex’s other illustrator, René Gruau, was there too, and it was in this period that he became friends with Dior, establishing a lifelong working relationship. It was through Gruau that Dior learned he could resume his draftsman work down in the south. He was soon even busier than he’d been in Paris because several designers had outlets in Nice, Cannes and Monte Carlo, and they desperately needed an illustrator as there were no photographers – or film – to take pictures of the dresses.[1] Among these designers were Chanel, Hermès – and Alex Maguy. Although Alex’s salon in Paris, like Jacques’ fur business, had been taken from him by the CGQJ under ‘Aryanisation’ laws, he was, in recognition of his war record, given permission in 1941 to open up a salon in Cannes. He chose an elegant little building at the plum address of Place Mérimée, on the promenade next to the seafront.

‘Cannes was a refuge for Parisians in exile,’ Dior’s biographer, Marie-France Pochna, wrote, describing how the Bohemians would spend their days sunbathing on the beach and their nights throwing costume parties so wild the police threatened to shut these ‘bacchanalian orgies’ down. It was a world that would have felt cheeringly familiar to Alex.

As well as height, work and social life preferences, another connection between him and Dior was a proximity to Resistance activity. Alex was working with the Sizaines and Dior’s sister, Catherine, was about to become an important figure in the ‘Massif Central’ network. Gitta Sereny later described the Massif Central as ‘one of the most dynamic intelligence [Resistance] movements in Europe,’[2] and it had similar ambitions to the Sizaines, as it focused on gathering information about German train and troop movements for purposes of sabotage. It was also one of the most brutalised Resistance networks: most of its leaders were killed by 1942 and Catherine Dior herself was arrested in June 1944 and deported to Ravensbrück.

For almost a year, Christian Dior had no idea whether his sister was alive or dead, until he got a phone call in May 1945 saying that she would be arriving in Paris the next day by train. When she came home, she had been so starved that it was several months until she could eat solid food. But no family’s story was simple in occupied France, and the Diors are a neat illustration of that: whereas Catherine was in the Resistance, her niece, Françoise, became a full-throated Nazi, promoting Hitler and burning down synagogues.

Dior himself would spend much of the war working as a designer for Lucien Lelong alongside another aspiring couturier, Pierre Balmain. Lelong – who would play an important part in Alex’s life after the war – managed to keep his label open during the war. The few other designers who were able to do this – Jacques Fath, Marcel Rochas, Maggy Rouff – did so by selling to wealthy French collaborators and visiting German officers. In fact, according to fashion historian Dominique Veillon, this proved to be such a lucrative market that the French fashion industry made 463 million francs in the year, up from 67 million francs only two years earlier.[3] As much as Dior loved Catherine, he also had to eat, and so he spent the later part of the war selling clothes to the wives of men who enabled the torture of his sister. It was very hard to avoid working for collaborators if you worked in the luxury sector and lived in France during the war.

For the first few years of the war, Alex’s life in the south of France was comfortable and glamorous. He was living in the Seytour family’s flat and his life was as sociable as it had been in Paris, hanging around with, as he puts it, ‘my friend Seytour’.

An obvious question about this period of Alex’s life is whether he and Seytour were lovers. Certainly Alex writes about him in his memoir more warmly than he does his own family, and it’s not a completely outlandish conclusion to draw about a fashion designer and an actor living together so closely for so long. According to Seytour’s records he was married the whole time he was with Alex, to a woman named Caroline Antoine, but there is no mention of her in any of Alex’s records, and that marriage ended in divorce in 1944, without any children. As far as I know, Alex never told anyone in his family about Seytour, and after he left Nice he never saw him again.

Alex’s salon became so busy he had to employ twelve people to help meet the demand. But as well as being a working salon, the shop became a hangout for Resistance fighters. The Sizaines would meet there often and, in the absence of any weapons, as the British hadn’t yet started parachuting in supplies, they plotted how to derail German trains coming into France. Other Resistance fighters who came to Alex’s salon included the French novelists Joseph Kessel, who worked as an aide to Charles de Gaulle during the war and later wrote Belle de Jour, and his nephew, Maurice Druon. Kessel’s lover, Germaine Sablon, a singer and actress and just the kind of person Alex would know from Paris, was another frequent presence.

The mystery of what Alex actually did during the war only became more puzzling the more you asked him directly about it. It wasn’t that Alex didn’t talk about his war years; it’s just that the few stories he told were disjointed, non-chronological and utterly improbable, anecdotes so worn down with re-telling they were like sea-tossed pebbles, smoothed from years of repetition, the grit long since washed away. I – and many others – suspected they were a smokescreen for something else, distractions, jimmied-up anecdotes rendered into self-mythologies. The question was: what he was distracting people from?

Almost everyone who thrived and survived in France during the war later engaged in some kind of self-mythology. Once the country was liberated and the shame of France’s collaboration was exposed to the world, the reality of the recent past, for many people, needed to be obscured, black covered in white. For some the motivations were obvious, for others the story was more grey.

When Alex’s memoir arrived in the post, I flipped through the stories of early 1930s Paris to get to what I hoped would be the long-awaited answer of what Alex did to survive the war. There were some stories, ones my father and I had heard dozens of times from Alex himself: barely sketched allusions to arrests and brave standoffs against collaborators, more fully sketched stories about his glamorous life as a couturier in Cannes. On page 118 it looked as if he was about to start detailing what life was actually like during the war. I turned the page eagerly – but there was no page 119. Nor a page 120, 121 or 122. Instead, the memoir blithely skipped from 1943 to 1945 with the story resuming on page 131.