While nowhere near as successful as his former illustrator Dior, Alex had a genuine talent for making beautiful clothes that lasted. As a child I loved to play with the coats he had made for my grandmother, which she still had in her closet thirty, forty, even fifty years after he made them. And given that he was an independent designer with no financial backers, he did impressively well. The sleek and sporty look for which he became known before the war turned out to be a canny choice, because even if all of France had fallen in love with Dior’s feminine New Look, Alex’s smart coats, sharply tailored dresses and streamlined suits were a popular look in America. Ava Gardner bought dresses from him; Marlene Dietrich bought a jacket. His friends from the Foreign Legion, including General Koenig and Lieutenant-Colonel Magrin-Vernerey, occasionally came to his presentations, and some of the most carefully preserved photos I found of Alex’s salon show him proudly posing with his fellow legionnaires – all of whom look a little bemused by their couture surroundings. Sala tried to come to Paris as often as possible for his shows, and she kept several photos that show him accompanying his beautiful sister, wearing an elegant Alex Maguy dress and coat, to her seat in his salon. His friends from the art world came too. Kisling was by now living in the south of France, but when he was in Paris he would come to Alex’s salon every day and certainly to the shows if he was in town. Alex always thought of ‘Kiki’ as a foster brother, the one who taught him how to be both Jewish and Parisian, Bohemian and serious. Most of all, Alex writes in his memoir, Kisling taught him to look at paintings, to seek out the life of happiness in art that had eluded him in childhood.
Kisling felt just as fond of Alex and wrote Sala reports of their times together.
Alex and Sala at a ball in Paris.
Chaya, Alex, a female friend and Kisling at one of Alex’s fashion shows in Paris.
‘I have made an unexpected visit to our dear brother, and you should see our Alex, how happy he is. His wit, his humor, and his life are marvelous!’ he wrote to Sala on 29 March 1947.
Alex’s life was glamorous, but it was not exactly marvellous. My father remembers sitting backstage at Alex’s shows and watching him carefully style and dress his models, pinning this sleeve, lowering that hem. And then after the show, he would watch his uncle obsequiously thank every fashion editor and store buyer who had come to his show, bow his head humbly as American and French customers told him they liked the dress but it was in the wrong colour, they liked the coat but it was too long.
‘For you, madame, I will fix it,’ Alex would murmur.
Afterwards, my father would see Alex almost prostrate with despair in his workroom, worrying that he hadn’t sold enough clothes, infuriated that the designs he’d sweated over were casually dismissed by ignorant customers, terrified that he wouldn’t be able to pay his seamstresses, that he wouldn’t be able to eat.
Today, the big labels like Dior are awash with money (mostly from make-up and accessories rather than clothes), but in the main it is very, very hard to be a fashion designer. When I was a young journalist occasionally posted to New York and Paris, I would often interview well-known designers who quietly spent their days shivering in underheated studios, barely keeping creditors from the door. In several cases, I’d interview a designer one day and find out he or she went out of business the next. For all the lipstick-shiny confidence fashion projects from the pages of magazines, the truth is not that many people have more than $3,000 to spend on a dress, and so designers are forced to give clothes to celebrities for free, in the hope of some publicity. They then have to write off the loss, hoping against all likelihood that their little gamble will pay off. As Alex’s memoir makes clear, it has always been thus:
‘The fame of a couturier is linked to the fame of the women he dresses. They were often more celebrities than normal clients and needed to be treated as such. They often “forgot” to pay. It’s part of the business. So a couturier has a dual responsibility: First, make women more beautiful in the great tradition of Parisian fashion. Second, support a business. To reconcile these two responsibilities is unimaginably difficult,’ he wrote.
Alex’s clothes were regularly featured in fashion magazines, French and American, and he himself was photographed in the society pages of French papers with beautiful women, such as the French singer Lucienne Dhotelle (known as ‘la môme Moineau’) and the American singer-songwriter Betty Comden at the races at Longchamp or the Parisian nightclubs. But despite the surface fabulousness of his life, his business was crippled by debts, and he would go for days without eating in order to pay his staff of 150.
In 1951, after 108 collections, Alex was invited by the French ambassador to Denmark to take part in a charity show for ‘the most famous haute couturiers’. By this point, his business was nearly bankrupt, so Alex hesitated to accept. But he hadn’t got this far by being shy, and he thought to himself: ‘Remember when as a child you dreamed of French couture in your little, lost Galician village. Now, after a twenty-five-year career, they’re inviting you. Prove by your presence that you’re not finished.’
So Alex went, but initially felt humiliated when he saw how the other designers had been able to bring dozens of models with them, dressed in the most expensive brocades. He couldn’t afford even a single model or outfit. But if the Nazis couldn’t destroy Alex then certainly fashion wouldn’t, so he decided to make a virtue out of his poverty. When it was his turn, he borrowed a model from a designer friend, got up on stage ‘taking my courage into both hands’, and with only a case of pins and about two metres of cotton, constructed an evening gown in front of the astonished audience in seven minutes. He got a standing ovation, and one Danish newspaper that covered the event described it as ‘a sensation’.[17] A one-off dress he made with his own hands in front of the audience: it was a characteristically defiant gesture from Alex in defence of the art of couture, and an illustration of Alex’s refusal to give up, ever, even when the odds seemed utterly hopeless.
Alex returned to Paris and carried on as a designer for a few more years, but it was clear that couture was becoming part of the past. In 1955, Le Monde’s fashion critic compared Alex’s classical style with the more modernist looks that would define the 1960s when the journalist reviewed his show alongside that of Pierre Cardin: ‘We are seeing two trends clash: some still want to reflect the female silhouette, others want to reshape it. We will soon learn who played it best,’ wrote the critic of the two designers.[18]
There was no competition: although the journalist praised Alex’s ‘sylphan silhouettes’ and ‘the astonishing and much-applauded striped pieces’, Pierre Cardin’s ‘shocking spectacle inspired by interplanetary journeys’ was clearly the future.
At the same time Alex’s fashion business was struggling, someone else’s was taking off. His cousin Maurice’s son, Armand Ornstein, was no longer the little boy hiding in the woods but an extremely handsome young man-about-town. Around this time, he teamed up with a young designer called Daniel Hechter, and Hechter’s name would become as much of a byword for French 1960s fashion as Mary Quant and Biba were for British 1960s style, thanks to the extremely successful business he and Armand built together. Today, Hechter is widely credited with popularising prêt-à-porter and helping to kill off exactly the kind of fashion that Alex made. Prêt-à-porter literally means ‘ready to wear’, as in buying clothes directly off the rack, and this is how nearly everyone buys clothes today, whether they shop at Zara or Prada. Alex, however, was firmly in the older tradition of haute couture, which means each outfit is specially created for each customer, making it extremely beautiful, but expensive and ultimately impractical.
By the 1950s haute couture was already on its way out, and today, even in the big fashion houses like Dior, it accounts for an infinitesimal percentage of the company’s overall sales. Alex, as a small Parisian couturier, was one of the last of an already dying breed, and while his stubbornness about retaining his independence undoubtedly hastened his end, it would have come eventually. The fashion world was changing and would soon be unrecognisably different from the one in which he trained. Alex could be pragmatic about some things, but not his art, and in this area alone he would not compromise for the sake of survival.
Alex never explicitly blamed Armand for the death of his fashion business, or even talked with Armand about fashion. In fact, he would have been furious to hear anyone suggest they were even in the same business: Armand and Daniel Hechter’s clothes were intended to last just a fashion season, whereas Alex’s, as he would be the first to say, endured forever. But he certainly raged against the fashion revolution Armand and Hechter inspired:
‘Once there were forty great couture houses in Paris. How many exist today? Four or five at most. Ready-to-wear finally killed personal elegance and individual charm. It made Paris ugly. Today, it’s the brand a woman wears that is noticed, not the woman herself. One wears Sonia Rykiel or Chanel and circulates like an automobile and its nameplate. What an absence of taste. How sad,’ he writes in his memoir.
Even though his business was, in part, killed by one member of the next generation of his family, Alex later managed to pass his legacy on to another younger relative: Alexandre de Betak, his great-nephew and Henri and Sonia’s grandson. Almost every week through the 1970s and early 1980s, Henri brought Alexandre over to Alex’s for lunch – Sonia, of course, was not invited, and nor were Alexandre’s mother and sister, Danièle and Natasha – and Alex would lecture his great-nephew about art and elegance. (When I later heard about these lunches I thought of Gigi in the 1958 MGM film, adapted from Colette’s novel, enduring regular lunches with her Aunt Alicia, who would teach her niece about all the important things in life, like how to admire jewellery and the right way to eat an ortolan.) Alexandre resented having to get dressed up in a suit for these lunches – why did he have to spend his day all hot and uncomfortable when his sister could wear what she liked and stay home and play? While Alex would talk to the bemused little boy about fashion and all the beautiful people he knew, Alexandre would quietly wonder why, if his great-uncle knew so much about style, did he have lifts on all of his shoes? But something about these lunches stuck in Alexandre’s mind, because this introduction to fashion would prove to be a formative one.
Before Alex shut his salon for good, he had one last gift to give a favoured customer: a young Chinese architect called Ieoh Ming Pei, better known now as I.M. Pei. Alex and Pei met in Paris in 1951 when the latter was on the Wheelwright Traveling Fellowship, and Pei and his wife, Eileen, had been told about Alex’s salon by the American architect Philip Johnson. Alex never lost his knack for spotting who was worth schmoozing, and as his alliance with Perré proved to him, befriending powerful and prominent people could only be beneficial. Alex spotted early on that Pei was worth keeping in his life, and in the hope of achieving this, he wrote in his memoir, one of his last gestures as a designer was to send the Peis a small Modigliani sketch as a token of gratitude for their support. I emailed Pei’s sons, Chien Chung and Li Chung, to verify this story and initially they thought it unlikely as they doubted if their parents had ever owned such a sketch. But a few days later they emailed back. They had found the Modigliani in the back of their father’s closet. Pei might have never bothered to hang it, but, once again, Alex had told the truth.
But while Pei might not have been overly awed by Alex’s present, he liked Alex: whenever Pei would spot him at parties he would call out, ‘Shalom, Alex!’ much to Alex’s delight and everyone else’s bemusement. In the early 1980s, when Pei was being widely vilified for his plans to build a small pyramid in front of the Louvre, Alex was one of the very few who supported Pei, and stood up and said so. He wrote letters to Pei and about Pei to newspapers, saying that what French art needed was Pei’s pyramid. Pei later returned the favour by putting Alex, by now extremely wealthy, in touch with Moshe Mayer, a real estate developer who worked with Pei, about planning the Alex Maguy Foundation in Israel, which had it been built would have been the ultimate proof of Alex’s social ascendency. The foundation never actually materialised, probably due to cost and Alex’s health, but yet again Alex was proven right about the value of having successful friends.
Alex finally shut down his salon in the mid-1950s, ending that chapter of his life. The next chapter would bring him the immortality and enormous wealth he had always longed for, and expected.
ALEX’S CAREER IN art began, naturally, with his friends. He first sold off his last fashion pieces, settled his most urgent debts, and with what was left, opened a small gallery on the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, just around the corner from Avenue Matignon, where he’d had a salon before the war. He named it Galerie de l’Élysée, emphasising its proximity – and insinuating a connection – to the Élysée Palace, the residence of the French president. Alex had always longed to be established in French society, and being neighbours with the president proved his establishment status. In characteristic fashion, he threw a glamorous opening night party for the gallery to which he invited all his old friends and colleagues, including Dior.
‘I’ve come to wish you good luck, Alex. Have no regrets. Don’t forget, I began with paintings and you will finish with paintings,’ Dior said to him.
Another person from his fashion past who supported Alex in his move to the art world was the illustrator René Gruau. He helped Alex to decorate his gallery, and shortly afterwards he painted an extraordinarily evocative portrait of Sala on one of her trips to Paris. This painting originally hung in my grandmother’s apartment and now hangs over my parents’ fireplace in London, and it captures her elegance and wistfulness better than most photographs. Her elbow is leaning on a table and her chin rests on the back of her hand while she gazes behind her; he immortalised her as always looking back, towards the past. In its tenderness and precision, it was clearly painted by someone with enormous feeling for the subject and her family. In 1974, almost forty years after they first met, Alex hosted an exhibition of Gruau’s work in his gallery which he called ‘Alex Maguy Présente Son Ami Gruau’. For the chosen very few, Alex could be extremely loyal and sentimental. (Kisling also painted a portrait of Sala; Alex had told Bill at that fateful dinner in Chaya’s flat in rue des Rosiers that famous artists loved to paint his sister and, decades later, thanks to Alex and his extraordinary career path, that lie eventually became true.)
Alex’s idea with the Galerie de l’Élysée was to have shows that featured only seven paintings – seven was his lucky number, and it’s also a significant number in Judaism, representing creation and fortune. Each of his shows would be centred on a theme, and his first show was called ‘Paris, Parisians, and Parisiennes’; his second was ‘The Landscapes and Faces of France’. When he was a designer he made adoring near-pastiches of French style, and as a curator he put on shows specifically celebrating French style. Little Sender was still enchanted with the fantasy of the country his father used to describe to him on Kostalista, despite everything it had done to him and his family.
Over the next decade, he built up a hugely successful gallery, showing works by, among others, his old friends Chagall, Pascin and Kisling (who sadly died soon after the gallery opened), as well as Bonnard, Renoir, Monet, Braque, Miró, Bacon and Boudin, and sculpture by Giacometti, Henry Moore and Gauguin. Alex had exceptionally good taste in art, the kind only someone with a deep love of his subject can have, as opposed to someone merely chasing after the hot new thing in the art world. The gallery quickly developed a reputation for having the finest pieces from the greatest modern artists, and Alex became a name again that was cited in the gossip magazines:
‘Among the many notable celebrities at the party, we saw Jacqueline Auriol [a French aviator] in the company of Alex Maguy’, read a typical caption from a French magazine, which Alex cut out and sent to my grandmother and which she faithfully saved. But there was still one goal he hadn’t achieved yet: meeting Picasso.
Alex had been trying to attract Picasso’s attention for decades. He genuinely revered him as a lover of art but he also liked him as a person: short, tough, sexual, a fighter, deeply moral but complicated, adored by men and women, one who didn’t obey the rules and was rewarded for it; Picasso was an idealisation of Alex’s own self-image. After the war, Alex had a tangential connection with Picasso through his friends Georges and Suzanne Ramié. Like Alex, the Ramiés had been involved in Resistance activity in the south of France, but now ran a pottery, called Madoura, on the Côte d’Azur. Fortuitously for Alex, this workshop became one of the most important centres of twentieth-century ceramics, because it was the exclusive producer of ceramics by Picasso. Alex tried in vain to utilise this connection. In 1949 he’d designed a dress covered with images from Picasso’s paintings and wrote to the artist to tell him, under the pretence that he was asking for permission but really just making his presence known to his artistic hero. (If Picasso did reply to that request it has long since been lost, but Alex did make the dress.) Alex became friendly with a young woman, named Jacqueline Roque, who worked at Madoura Pottery. But Alex was not the only male friend of the Ramiés to have noticed Jacqueline: in 1953, at the age of 26, she caught the eye of Picasso, who was more than four decades older than her, and he embarked on a long campaign of seduction. Now Alex had yet another connection to the artist, and once he opened his gallery, he wrote to him more frequently, asking for his blessing to feature this or that painting, inviting him to his shows, even sending him birthday greetings. ‘Dare I ask you to do me the honor of being my guest for the baptism of my little yacht?’ he wrote on 13 April 1960, referring to the boat he’d recently bought and kept moored down in Cannes. (Picasso declined that invitation.) Undaunted by constant refusals, Alex tried again almost exactly a year later, saying that he had a proposal for Picasso that involved Alex’s ‘very, very close friends at the House of Dior’. A few days later the phone in his gallery rang: it was Jacqueline, inviting him to their house in Cannes, Villa La Californie. Barely able to breathe with excitement, Alex said he would be there. Once again, a personal connection worked in Alex’s favour. Eventually.