Sample text for A dash of daring : Carmel Snow and her life in fashion, art, and letters / Penelope Rowlands.

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Out of Ireland we came...

-- W. B. Yeats

"It could be happening" is the time-honored way that the Irish stories begin, and the story of Carmel Snow, who just may have been the greatest fashion editor ever, begins in a way that is about as Irish as any story could possibly get -- at least one that played out in New York and, crucially, in Paris, far more extensively than in Ireland. It could be happening that in Dalkey, a coastal village eight miles southeast of Dublin, one evening in 1887 -- August 27, to be exact -- labor pains caused a respectable matron named Annie White to rise up, as majestic as an ocean liner, from the table where a convivial, family-packed dinner party was taking place.

Dressed in one of the tentlike, floor-length gowns of the day, her habitual train sweeping behind her, this huge-breasted, amply built woman climbed into a waiting carriage, her youthful-looking husband, Peter White, in tow, and headed home to Saint Justin's, their large house overlooking the slate-blue Dublin Bay, where she gave birth to a spritelike creature, their third child and younger daughter, whom the couple piously named for Our Lady of Mount Carmel. The infant was baptized a week later at the Church of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Dalkey, a tiny, picturesque town that would be later known for its artistic inhabitants, James Joyce and George Bernard Shaw among them, but was then a fairly sleepy place, ancient in origin, and home to not just one castle but two.

The child's earliest years were spent in a constellation of six children in an atmosphere that a relative described as "both Chippendale and cottage." Carmel's parents had married in September 1883, in yet another Dublin suburb, Rathmines. Their union had been quickly blessed with a child -- Tom was born just over a year later -- and from then on others arrived in quick succession. Christine Mary came next, in July 1886, and then Carmel, whose middle name was also Mary, the following summer. Three other children -- Peter Desmond (known as Desmond), Victor Gerald, and James -- followed, all of them male and spaced about a year apart. The last was born in 1892.

Annie White's branch of the family was the more prominent one -- "Chippendale," if you will; her father was a prosperous merchant named Thomas Mayne who later served as a member of Parliament for eighteen years. Peter White's side, the "cottage" one, was literally more down to earth: his late father, also named Thomas, had been a farmer. From both directions, the children were inescapably Irish -- never an uncomplicated thing to be.

Ireland had been a "lordship" of the English crown since it was conquered by that country in the 1100s. Over the centuries, the extent of its Englishness had waxed and waned. By the time the young Whites were born, Irish nationalist feelings were running strong. Charles Stuart Parnell and other leaders were campaigning for home rule, which called for increased autonomy from Britain. It was a cause that Thomas Mayne, Annie White's father, whom an American newspaper described as belonging "to the old guard of Irish patriots," vehemently supported. His son-in-law, Peter White, born of the soil, was also a Parnellite, And he counted a prominent activist of the era, Michael Davitt, among his friends. (Davitt was, in fact, the Whites' landlord in Dalkey.)

A photograph, probably taken in the early 1890s, shows Peter White to be a handsome, solidly built fellow with light eyes, a long mustache -- almost a requirement of the era -- and a deep cleft in his chin, something he seems to have bequeathed to many of his male descendants. He was Irish to the core. In his work for the Irish Woolen Manufacturing and Export Company in Dublin, he aimed to resurrect a once-thriving national industry that, thanks to stiff tariffs and competition, notably from Scotland, had been in danger of dying out. Harris tweed had long eclipsed Donegal.

Ironically, by building a reputation for reviving dying industries in a country that seemed full of them, White ensured that his children's lives would unfold outside of Ireland. But none of that was clear, of course, when he was asked by the viceroy of Ireland, Lord Aberdeen, and his wife, the former Ishbel (the Gaelic variation of Isabel) Maria Marjoribanks, to be honorary secretary of the Irish Industries Association. (Lady Aberdeen was its president.)

It was once again, as it had so often been, a desperate time for Ireland, and the Aberdeens were determined to help. Together, they came up with a plan to use the small, craftsy things -- from lacework to bog wood ornaments -- that had been produced forever in Ireland's far-flung cottages and convents to turn the country's fortunes around. Besides reviving the country's traditional crafts, they wanted also to provide training in their production, thereby ensuring that some of its desperate citizenry had at least piecemeal work. Along the way, it was hoped, Ireland's image would be enhanced. "Irish goods were not sought after by the people who wanted the best things" is the delicate way the New York Times phrased the matter (in a 1911 article), "but in 1886, with the coming to Dublin of the Earl of Aberdeen, a movement for improving and extending the sale of Irish products began to take hold."

A Scotsman, Lord Aberdeen had recently been appointed to his post by the English Liberal prime minister William Ewart Gladstone. Newly in love with Ireland, he and his wife went straight to work on the seemingly intractable problems of their new country. For Ishbel, it was second nature to throw herself into a cause. Like her husband, she was the product of an aristocratic Scottish family. Born in 1857, she possessed a first-class intellect (she was said to have taught herself to read at the age of three) that, sadly, can't quite be described as irrepressible. While she longed to go to Girton College, Cambridge University's only school for women -- in truth, the perfect place for her -- she was prevented from doing so by her very traditional father. After her marriage, in 1877, Ishbel began what would become her life's work, aiding the poor. There seemed to be no limit to her charity.

The Emerald Isle was "still in the grip of poverty such as America has never known, not even in a depression," as Carmel later described it. It was rife with struggle of one sort or another. While the great famines of earlier in the century had subsided, the country was still reeling from an agricultural crisis that had climaxed in the 1870s. Much of its population was desperately poor. And the home rule struggle seemed perpetual; anarchy, or at least violence, flared up intermittently, notably after the Land League was banned in 1881. "Ireland is laid on us to do all in our power for her forever," Ishbel wrote in her diary. Before long, she and Peter White were putting in time on the country's unpaved, back-country roads, tirelessly scouting out both crafts and workers.

Peter White was perfect for the job. He was charismatic and hardworking, and he didn't hesitate to deploy his considerable charm in the service of the mission at hand. Before too long, he was making frequent trips to the United States, something he'd first done in the name of Irish wool. An article in the Citizen, a Chicago newspaper, gives an indication of how breathlessly this dashing Irishman -- still in his thirties -- was received in the New World. "Ireland never selected a more fortunate representative than Mr. Peter White," it reads. "His amiable and sensitive manner wins confidence everywhere."

For all their love of the place, the Aberdeens didn't last long in Ireland. They were just one domino in a row of them, and they all toppled over, one after another, in a long, jagged line. First, home rule lost in the House of Commons. Then Gladstone's Liberal Party collapsed. Its prime minister was out. And so, of course, were the Aberdeens. But in their time across the Irish Sea, they'd won over the desperate populace. As they headed back to England, people lined the streets, some weeping extravagantly; at one point, the couple's horses were unhitched and their carriage pulled along, ecstatically, by the crowd. "The scene in Dublin on his leavetaking after the fall of the Gladstone cabinet is said to have been such as never before witnessed since the days of O'Connel," the Chicago Times reported. The Aberdeens returned this loyalty by continuing their various pro-Irish endeavors after they'd returned home.

In 1888, when announcement was made that the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 -- soon to be known universally, if not correctly, as the Chicago World's Fair -- was being put together, the Aberdeens seized the moment, heading to the United States with both Whites in tow to raise money to finance an exhibit of Irish exports at the fair, which Peter White would organize and oversee. For the next few years, he and Lady Aberdeen traveled all over Ireland, visiting workers and meeting with officials, including the lord mayor of Dublin, to build support for the project. White made several visits to Chicago, and by 1892 had acquired the fairly grand title of Irish commissioner to the World's Fair.

The Aberdeens hoped to return to Ireland if Gladstone returned to power. But when he did, in 1892, some last-minute political maneuvering resulted in someone else being named Ireland's viceroy instead. As a consolation prize, the prime minister awarded Aberdeen the post of governor general of Canada. The Irish Pavilion would go forward, but with much less involvement from the Aberdeens.

In February 1893, just a few months before the fair was to open, White and Lady Aberdeen set out for one last tour, this time to the South "to pick the 'colleens' who would represent the Irish industries," as Carmel wrote. But then, as it so often does in Irish tales, death played its hand. White had already had lung trouble -- the whole family tended toward the tubercular, as his oldest child, Thomas White, later recalled -- and the travel, by rail and carriage, including an open-air version called an "outside-car," was grueling. As they were finishing their trip, "Mr. White felt himself seriously ill, but his love for the cause he had espoused and his indomitable spunk prevented him from giving in," an Irish paper wrote. On March 15, the Chicago New World announced that Mr. White would be late arriving at the fair. And then, quite suddenly, word came that he wouldn't be coming at all. "He caught pneumonia," Carmel wrote, "in those days a desperately serious illness, and a few weeks later he was dead."

His death, at the age of forty-three, on April 7, 1893, was reported in papers in both Ireland and the United States. "In the township of Dalkey there was universal evidence of the sorrow of the people," one Irish paper reported. Telegrams and letters flooded into Saint Justin's, and hundreds turned up for his funeral and burial in Dublin's Glasnevin Cemetery. It was a fitting place for a nationalist, having been founded earlier in the century in response to England's repressive penal laws, which had sharply curtailed the practice of numerous Catholic rites, even those involving the burial of the dead.

White left six children. His third born, Carmel, was only five. For the rest of her life, this toughest of magazine editors would attribute her own thick hide to the sight of her father "laid out like a waxen image" on the drawing room table. It was a vision that would haunt her for years: "The very thought of death was something I had to put out of my mind, and it may be that my ability to concentrate, to turn my mind, quickly and entirely, from one subject to the next, is the earliest lesson I learned."

She learned a thing or two, too, about strength from her mother, who, upon finding herself a widow with six children, made a daring decision. In a letter written on April 11, 1893, Ishbel wrote to Annie White on crested notepaper, acknowledging a suggestion from this very recent widow that she take her late husband's place at the world's fair. (He'd died only a few days before.) Lady Aberdeen responded with enthusiasm: "I believe this may prove best for you, as well as best for the enterprise. But you must not hurry yourself to settle anything -- just lie fallow while you can. But if you do decide on going, please believe how I shall personally rejoice...."

No "lying fallow" took place. Instead, the new widow moved with lightning speed, taking Saint Justin's apart, storing its contents among friends and family. She first sent her daughters to live at Loretto Abbey, a girls' school run by the Loretto order of nuns, whose convent, built in 1842, was just next door to the White home. The girls were too young for school, in their mother's estimation (Carmel was not yet six, Christine just a year older), so the convent functioned as a kind of holding pen. Even so, Carmel learned to read there and always remembered writing out her first words, "Loretto Abbey," in a tentative scrawl. Her other siblings were billeted among other relatives in and around Dublin.

Whether Annie White agonized over her decision to cross the Atlantic without her family can only be guessed; there's no evidence that she worried unduly over anything. Instead -- "a feminist before feminism" in one granddaughter's words -- she tended to plow assuredly ahead. The girls and their youngest brother, James Mayne White (later known as Jim), were next sent to live with their grandfather, Thomas Mayne, and their "darling grandmother," as Carmel called her, Susannah, at the couple's stately home, Cremorne, in the Dublin suburb of Terenure.

Reached by a long tree-lined driveway, Cremorne was a Georgian house with a limestone facade and a regal, stepped entranceway. Set on acres of land, it had an unmistakable grandeur and was as hivelike and full of intrigue as a dacha in a Chekhov play. Its shifting population included cousins, endless aunts and uncles of varying degrees of benevolence, and "the terrifying, Jove-like figure" that was grandfather Mayne himself. As for Carmel's three other siblings, Tom, Desmond, and Victor, they were sent to stay with Peter White's sister, Lizzie, who owned a shop in Clonalvy, and was forever complaining that the Maynes were grander than the Whites. To the horror of her nephews, this manifested itself in an almost obsessive attention to comportment. "She pounded 'good manners' into my brothers until they were sick of the thought of them," Carmel recalled.

With her children squared away, their tough, fearless mother set forth. She had work to do, a figure to cut, and she was certainly not going to resign herself to an Irish widow's fate, living under the wing of her domineering father, or any other man for that matter. A photograph of her taken at about this time shows her to be tight-lipped and determined. While she looks severe, even plain, by anecdotal accounts she was lovely -- otherwise sensible American journalists seemed to swoon, at least verbally, in her presence. "And a mighty pretty woman is she," one reporter wrote (quite unnecessarily, I might add) as the fair began. The Chicago Herald commented rapturously on that "sweet-faced woman with her dimples and her Irish bloom."

Carmel's more sober description was of

a very magnetic woman, with hazel gray eyes, a dimpled smile, and auburn hair braided around her head like a crown. She was vain of figure (in my childhood she always had a train sweeping behind her) but it was her wit, which lost nothing in the telling, that made her all her life the center of an unusual group of friends.

From her first weeks in the United States, when Annie befriended the great Canadian stage actress Margaret Anglin, then on a national tour, she attracted people who mattered.

"The Maynes were all beautiful," one relative, David Sheehy, reports. "They were tall and dark and very good looking." Both Carmel and Christine felt their looks compared unfavorably with their mother's. Their hair was limp, by comparison, and Carmel recalled her mother cutting the eyelashes of both girls in the hope that they might grow back thicker. (They didn't.) By contrast, White's hair, piled on top of her head in one photograph, is indeed luxuriant, as is her almost unbelievably complicated-looking lace-and-silk gown. (At some point, she began wearing a wig; Irish relatives recall her visiting the Old Country with a whole trunk of them.) But mostly it's the extraordinary hourglass figure one notices -- the waist not tiny, exactly, but trim enough, especially relative to the enormous bustline straining above. White looks centered, hardly a concept floating around in her day. You sense that she could take on anything. She came, as Sheehy reports, "from very determined stock."

The voyage she made was simple enough, traveling by boat westward across the Atlantic, but in fact it was a radical act "in that period when women, particularly upper-class Irishwomen, seldom ventured beyond the protection of their families." The odds against her were daunting, yet she bulldozed ahead, gathering so much momentum that failure scarcely seemed possible. Accompanied by her sister Agnes, White sailed on May 4, 1893, from Queenstown (now more commonly known by its Celtic name, Cobh) in County Cork. Given the era, it was only natural that her father, the family patriarch, would keep an eye on his widowed daughter by sending one of his four then-unmarried daughters along. The wonder is that she was allowed to go at all.

By the time the sisters sailed into New York Harbor, then caught a train to Chicago, Lady Aberdeen was already at the Irish Industrial Village, also known as the Irish Village, readying things for the grand opening less than a week away. Situated off a long boulevard grandly called the Midway Plaisance -- a hugely popular feature that seemed to contain all the known world in the form of African towns, mosques, medieval villages, Polynesian huts, pagodas, and more -- the Village had "the best and most prominent position in the fair," in Countess Aberdeen's estimation.

It, too, was exotic. Lady Aberdeen had loaded on the Irishness. To enter it, you passed through a reproduction of the doorway of a chapel that had been built on the Rock of Cashel by Cormac, a twelfth-century Irish king, then through a copy of the ancient cloisters of Muckross Abbey in Killarney. And that was just the beginning. Beyond, there lay a vast, circular lawn with a Celtic cross at its center that was surrounded by a ring of cottages -- some transplanted from Ireland, others just copied, most of them thatched. In the distance lay the showstopper: Blarney Castle, or rather a copy of it on a two-thirds scale. It was Ireland in miniature, and "visitors were enchanted with it," Carmel reported.

Lady Aberdeen had moved into the first cottage near the entrance, a replica of Roseneath Cottage in Queenstown, which she and Peter White had visited on one of their last trips together. It had a deep thatch and latticed pillars and a sign over the front door reading "Cead Mile Failte," Gaelic for "a thousand welcomes." Inside, its walls were as green as the Old Country itself, and it was full to the brim with Irish antiques. The other dwellings around it, similarly charming, contained examples of traditional Celtic crafts. One was devoted to lacework, another to jewelry, yet another formed a concert area where Irish music was played.

According to the Chicago Post, a fourth structure was filled "with Irish rich bog turf which looks, as our Irish Americans put it, fit to eat." (To each his own.) This dirt, to name it for what it is, was actually for sale -- for a princely dollar per square -- along with such other native Irishisms as blackthorns and shamrocks. There's something unique about the Irish love of their country's earth, the "ould sod," as they fondly call it. The rest of us may not understand it, but customers with cash, mainly nostalgic immigrants, certainly did. And business was brisk. Yet another cottage took the bog further; here, young men whittled ornaments out of its famous oak trees, offering them for sale along with Galway marble and, endlessly, more lace.

The Irish Village was formally dedicated on May 11 in what the Irish Times described as "a brilliant scene." A few weeks later, Countess Aberdeen transferred its management over to Annie White, before crossing the Atlantic to join her husband, who was soon to assume his Canadian post. From then on, the village was hers. Peter White may have been "the guardian angel of the Village," as one paper called him, but his widow was the one who "made it the hit of the fair," as Carmel wrote. Annie had a hand in everything, revising things constantly, restlessly seeking perfection when others might have given up. No detail was too small. When it occurred to her that she'd forgotten to include wonderfully intricate Carrickmacross lace in the exhibit, she telegraphed back to Ireland "to get all the cottages of County Monaghan to work making lace," a relative, Helen Sheehy, recalled.

White's first home in America was a comely thatched-roof cottage that she and Agnes shared. It was full of antiques, shipped by the elder Maynes from Ireland so that their daughters might feel at home. The stories Agnes brought back from the fair delighted her Irish relatives for years. She recalled meeting Buffalo Bill, giving rise to an oft-repeated rumor within the family that Annie and the American frontier scout and showman, whose real name was William F. Cody, had had a romance. (Curiously, Buffalo Bill allegedly also crossed paths with another larger-than-life female -- Diana Vreeland -- many years later. "What chic old Bill had! With his beard he looked like Edward VII....")

Stories about the Irish Village took up a disproportionate amount of space in the press. White was mediagenic, as were many of the hundreds who worked for her, most imported from Ireland to dance jigs, spin yarn, and more. The young girls, in particular, were notoriously fun loving, and their pranks -- pouring water on sleeping tramps, imitating roosters so that most of the fair reported early to work -- were covered, with scant amusement, by the local papers.

And then there was the little matter of the big rock. The Blarney Stone has long been reputed to make "anyone who kisses it a great talker," according to Carmel, "so no Irishman is going to miss an opportunity like that if he can help it." When it arrived, the stone provoked enormous excitement in Chicago. "Blarney Stone Here," a headline in the Chicago Post blared on June 16, adding that the rock measured one foot square and was being kept in a safe. Carter H. Harrison, the city's distinctly non-Irish mayor, duly kissed it -- how could he not, if he ever hoped to be reelected? -- which was solemnly reported in the press. ("Mayor on His Knees" was the Toledo News's mischievous headline.)

But there was increasing evidence that the so-called Blarney Stone was exactly that, a bit of blarney. In mid-June, the New York World referred to "an alleged piece of the Blarney Stone." A month later, on July 15, the heat was turned up: the St. Paul Dispatch reported that Sir George Colthurst, owner of the original Blarney Castle, as well as its namesake stone, was considering a trip to Chicago to out the impostor stone. Before long, the Boston Globe was reporting that in fact the original rock hadn't budged an inch from Ireland, no less made it to the Midwest. Some papers reported that the Chicago stone was there in part -- a chip off the old block, you might say. Rumors swirled, every article in the press seemed to contradict the next, yet no one from the Irish Village quite clarified the matter, not even the saintlike Lady Aberdeen.

Whatever its origin, the thing was referred to as the Blarney Stone, and, mainly, people wanted to believe it. Hordes came to kiss it, paying ten cents each for the privilege, so many that it turned greenish from tobacco juice. One commentator put the whole thing in perspective by pointing out that wasn't the original Blarney Stone itself unrepentant nonsense? (Not, I conjecture, to a certain kind of Irish.) There is no record on whether he was run out of town....

What is recorded is that Lady Aberdeen's village, so recently at risk after the death of Peter White, was a "wild success," in Carmel's words. Ireland could be found there, distilled, and that was enough for Chicago's vast immigrant population, Hibernian or not. The cozy thatched dwellings, the lace-making demos, the turf fires burning beneath pots of boiling potatoes, all evoked something so powerful that nothing as tacky as a faux Blarney Stone could threaten it at all. Later in life, Annie White, never modest, sounded positively coy as she described her unexpected success. "Well," she told her family, "there I was in my widow's bonnet, and the newspaper gentlemen were very kind to me." One of her most slavish fans was the Irishman Peter Finley Dunne, who, writing as Mr. Dooley, was one of the most famous -- and opinionated -- Chicago journalists of his day.

After the fair closed, and with the backing of the Aberdeens, White took on a new project -- a Chicago shop dedicated to bringing Irish crafts to the public. But first White had to sail back to Ireland to face her father, without whose permission she could never manage to stay. Their argument was long and protracted. Thomas Mayne, who had visited Chicago for the fair -- "where every cab driver did him," as Carmel put it -- knew firsthand that the United States was a terrible place. And besides, a woman's place was in the home. But White was a steamroller, if not a Mack truck, and in the long run she prevailed, although not after agreeing to leave all six of her children in Ireland, at least for a time. The boys would receive an Irish education and the girls at least a partial one; they'd join their mother once it became clear that the shop was a going concern.

So White returned to America alone. For the three of her children who lived there, life at Cremorne was crowded, but always entertaining. Ireland is full of "sons and daughters waiting to marry until their mothers release them by dying peacefully in their arms," as Carmel wickedly described the phenomenon, and the Mayne family home was no different: a full six unmarried aunts and uncles, of Annie White's thirteen siblings, still lived at home. The White children scampered about the house and grounds, puncturing the tires of their grandfather's "high bicycle" -- an old-fashioned penny farthing -- and stopping the pendulum on the elaborate dining room clock. For young Carmel, it sounds like a nice enough childhood, particularly since "like many girls it was my grandmother I loved. Her temperament, like her birth, was gentle (she was born a Verscoyle, which means something in Ireland), and since I have much of my mother's determination in my character, it was far easier to get on with someone who never wanted to dominate me." And perhaps, given her mother's "determination," as she discreetly calls it, it was a blessing to have been raised, at least for a time, beyond her sphere of influence.

To her relatives, White's decision to run a shop was a scandal. But it turned out to be a canny move. She hit the deck running, socially and in every other way, hosting tea parties at her Michigan Avenue apartment and attracting the artistic crowd she always favored. And the store was a triumph. The Chicago Evening Post heralded what they called "a first class shop" in a story entitled "Beautiful Things on Sale in the Irish Industrial Store." The store burst with Irishness in the form of linens, handkerchiefs, silk and wool underwear, hosiery, pottery, and the inevitable carvings of bog oak. The sales staff included some of the same lovely, mischievous colleens who had caused such a sensation at the fair. "Our object in establishing this depot is to help the thousands of poor women in Ireland who have nothing to do and know not what to do with themselves," White said. "We desire to help them to an opportunity of employing themselves in a work that will give them a living and will at the same time give the world something that is worth having."

Within the year the store had expanded, moving to newer, larger quarters just down Wabash Avenue, from number 268 to 179. By now almost a year had gone by since Peter White's death. On the anniversary, Ishbel Aberdeen cabled his widow from Ottawa, saying: "How glad he must be if he has been permitted to watch your noble life this year." If he was thinking at all, he was no doubt astonished at how much his wife had pulled off in his absence.

As the business prospered, White began to send for her children. Carmel and Christine came first, sailing together, each with one piece of luggage, from Queenstown on the Lucania, a large Cunard Line ship that had been built the year before, and arriving in New York on October 27, 1894. In making this trip, they followed a well-worn trajectory: by 1890, a full 39 percent of Irish-born people -- about three million in all -- lived overseas, according to historian Roy Foster. And 84 percent of Irish emigrating at the time headed for the United States.

They were young to make the voyage, very young. The ship's manifest lists Carmel as being only six at the time, although in fact she was seven, while Christine -- recorded here as "Christina" -- was eight. They were just thirteen months apart, near enough to qualify as "Irish twins," as the old joke goes, and about as close as two sisters could possibly be. Even so, Carmel recalled the experience as daunting. "It was two frightened children who traveled alone on the big boat to New York. People were kind to us -- I remember playing round games with an elderly man who took pity on us -- but our arrival in America was too overwhelming to be remembered." After their boat pulled into New York Harbor, they were met by a friend of their mother's who placed them on a Pullman train headed for their new home in the Midwest.

Carmel recalled the train's arrival in rapturous terms:

Then Chicago at last and our mother meeting us. As we drove through the streets she felt she must prepare us for our new life. "Now you won't be living in a big house like Cremorne," she warned us. "It'll seem to you tiny after what you're accustomed to." We drew up before the apartment house where she lived, got out, and gaped. This was a bigger house than we'd seen in all our lives! Even when we were shown our small part of it, it still seemed tremendous -- drawing room, dining room, bedrooms only for us!

By then, the Wabash Avenue shop had evolved. Since much of its business involved the sale of Irish fabrics, handspun linens and the like, it seemed only natural to offer dressmaking services, too. From the start, the White girls had custom-made clothes -- their mother dressed them alike in garments that, designed to last for two years, were invariably huge. "We felt too small for our clothes, and this huge building, and this strange new world."

When White went off to work each morning, she left her daughters behind in the apartment building on Michigan Avenue, considering them too young for school. Forbidden to play with the janitor's children -- the only potential playmates around -- the girls were desperately lonely. So education, at last, was allowed. Their first school was a convent in Davenport, Iowa, where they settled in nicely, adoring the nuns. Carmel spent Sundays, their one day away from classes, buried in one book or another. "We were still shy, different, foreign children," she recalled. And there they might have stayed, quite happily, had their mother not learned, to her infinite horror, that the father of one of Carmel's classmates was in law enforcement.

"Descendants of the McGuillicuddy of the Reeks would never associate with a policeman!" she's said to have huffed at the time. (If such a claim were true -- and it's scarcely possible to confirm -- it would position Carmel as one of the descendants of the original kings of Ireland, true Celtic royalty and more impressive, in its way, than the watered-down, largely Teutonic lineage of those monarchs across the Irish Sea.) It was made abundantly clear to all within earshot at her daughters' school that, while White might have lowered herself to the point of being in trade, she had no intention of loosening her standards any further. So the girls were shipped off to Dearborn Seminary in Chicago, which catered to the Windy City's genteel classes and was presumably unpolluted by the presence of children of blue-collar workers. It was here that Carmel learned for the first time that there were non-Catholics in the world, when one of her teachers shocked her by saying she'd never heard of Our Lady of Mount Carmel.

The girls spent three years at Dearborn, returning home for holidays, where life was always exciting. Mrs. White entertained all sorts of people, including Margaret Anglin, who stayed with the family when she was starring in a play in Chicago. "With her beautiful carriage, eyes lifted to heaven when she spoke in a pose copied by a generation of schoolgirls, she lit up our house when she entered it," a starstruck Carmel recalled.

She dated her visit to this unnamed play as

the beginning of my delicious involvement with what I see in the theatre, just as my devouring of Dickens at this time was the beginning of my emotional engagement when I'm absorbed in a story...together with my lifelong involvement in the personal affairs of everyone around me, it planted in me the seed of romance.

She was so wrung out by the play's tragic end that she crawled over to the great thespian's bed (to Carmel's rapture, the actress was sleeping in her room) and whispered, "Margaret, if I'd been that man, I'd have married you, dear." A diva who cheerfully agrees to share a child's room? It's hard to imagine a modern star taking such accommodations in stride. But Anglin was a family friend, and besides, actresses -- those wanton creatures -- were held in about as low social esteem as possible at the time. Grand hotels were for grander divas.

Other visitors to the White household included Josephine Sullivan, a celebrated harpist whose performances had been one of the highlights of the Irish Village. Stagestruck as she was, young Carmel could scarcely tolerate the presence of Miss Sullivan, who was the daughter of A. M. Sullivan, an opponent of Parnell's. "Our family was passionate Parnellites," she explained, admitting that even the presence of the young woman's gilded harp (a "coffin-like object when traveling that required a cab to itself, and that stood in our drawing room like a baleful presence") was a "nightmare" to her for this reason. As such comments indicate, Carmel was an intense child, funny, observant, sheltered in a wide-eyed way. Her slightly detached way of seeing things seems decidedly foreign: this world was new to her, and she wasn't going to miss a thing.

Chicago felt even more like home after another sibling, Tom, graduated from Clongowes Wood College, in the southeastern Irish town of Naas (where one of his older schoolmates was James Joyce). Annie brought him over first, "because he was the oldest," his daughter, another Carmel, recalls. He arrived in the Midwest in 1900, at the age of sixteen, ready, in the time-honored way, to seek his fortune in the United States, happy to find himself in the company of his mother and long-absent sisters.

Tom was an impressive young man, bright and hardworking, and his career in the States -- most of it spent in the publishing empire of William Randolph Hearst -- would truly be meteoric. But, for now, he was also just a kid, a funny one, who had a wicked verbal wit, in the Irish manner, and delighted in tormenting his young sisters. He loved shooting pats of butter up on the dining room ceiling then waiting until they, inevitably, rained down on a sibling's head -- "preferably mine," according to Carmel, who, of all her brothers, was exceptionally close to Tom. "We spatted like Kilkenny cats (I've always had a touch of 'the Irish' in me), but we adored each other, and at home we were always clowning." When things got too wild, she'd pack a suitcase and announce that she was going to Bloomingdale's (then a lunatic asylum in New York, first in Manhattan, then in Westchester County -- not the clothes emporium).

After a few years, White declared formal education to be over for her daughters -- in truth, it had hardly begun -- and they were moved into the next phase, that of being finished, like furniture. It was time to be transformed into ladies. Their first stop was a boarding school in Winnetka, Illinois, of all places -- "our happiest school years," Carmel reports, although the two exceptionally close sisters scarcely made other friends. The center of their lives remained their Chicago home: "our mother's circle of theatrical and artistic friends was fascinating to us."

Then, at some point in 1903, it was on to another finishing school, this one in Brussels, which, Carmel quipped, "compared to Paris is like the sister of the girl you're in love with." Although she would be admired all her life for her "eye" -- her sense of exactly how things should look -- her ear was another story. Blame it on the convent in Brussels, the Soeurs de Sainte-Marie, where Carmel mastered her famously idiosyncratic French, which she spoke with a pronounced, almost comic Irish accent. She learned the language "on the pillow," as the French say, but not in the sexy way that expression implies. Instead, she absorbed it involuntarily after her bed was placed between those of two Belgian girls -- best friends who had been separated for quietness's sake -- who chatted to each other as she tried to sleep. "They talked to each other continuously over my head and I remember the sensation of distinguishing first words, then sentences, then this strange language was suddenly comprehensible to me." Although some in later life made merry with Snow's French, it would serve her for the rest of her life. "I could always make a compliment or have a row," as she put it. What else would one need?

It was also in Belgium that Snow experienced the first of many defiant fashion moments. Told to wear an underslip in the bath (a standard antisin ritual), she demurred, bathing naked instead, then swishing the undergarment around in the water to make it seem she'd obeyed. It was a small rebellion but a telling one, and one that she would always remember. "For all my shyness then, modesty has never been one of my afflictions," she noted. Later, Carmel and Christine, still teenagers, were allowed to leave the convent for a week to accompany their mother to the Paris fashion shows, which then mainly featured floor-length dresses, some with bustles, and all requiring enormous swaths of cloth. White put her daughters to work memorizing the fashions they saw -- Carmel was assigned the top of each outfit, her sister the bottom -- so that she could copy them later in her shop. "I found that I could remember the details exactly, that I actually had a photographic eye for fashion when I focussed it," Carmel wrote. It was an ability that would serve her all her professional life.

Back in the United States, White was going from strength to strength, her business booming, her social circle expanding. If there was a stigma to being Irish -- and there certainly was -- it was one she chose to ignore. Hers is an immigrant's story without pain: there was no loneliness or poverty in even her earliest weeks in the New World. And if you factor out her childlessness in those first years, a temporary condition, her new life was an immediate improvement over the old. She'd left a domineering father behind, not to mention a society that would have kept her in widow's weeds -- with all the isolation that that implies -- for many years to come.

Success came almost as soon as she touched down on American soil. For a time, everything was put in service to her shop. And then, suddenly, it wasn't. Or at least not that one. In about 1903, White attended the Paris openings with the four sisters who were the proprietors of T.M. & J.M. Fox, Inc., a custom dressmaking establishment in New York. Founded in 1885, their firm was -- "One of the oldest and most exclusive dressmaking establishments in the United States," according to the New York Times. By now, the Foxes "had all become wealthy out of it and were ready to retire," the paper added. After watching White in action in Paris, scouting out fashions to reinterpret (some might say steal) in her Chicago boutique, it was clear to them that their business would be safe in her hands. Before long, they'd offered it to her for sale.

Manhattan can be notoriously charmless and cruel to newcomers. And White was just about as much of an outsider -- an Irishwoman, of all unmentionable sins! -- as you could get. But she was also unafraid. Her Chicago life, clearly, had run its course. She decided to close the Irish Industrial Store "for good and always," as the Times recounted in 1911, in a breathless-sounding article about White's life in the unforgiving canyons of Manhattan. "She did not care to have any one [sic] else in charge of what had been so intimate and personal a venture." Instead, she opted to move to a new, vast city, where such adjectives scarcely applied. "Anonymous" and "impersonal" would be more apt.

Copyright © 2005 by Penelope Rowlands

Chapter 13: Triumphing Over All

Richard Avedon was restless. It had been several years since the young photographer had found his way into the pages of the greatest magazine of his time. With awesome speed, he'd infiltrated its pages until he'd become as much a part of the magazine as the estimable Dahl-Wolfe. He was all of twenty-five. One peak, though, remained to be climbed. Early in 1948, he confronted Carmel as the time for the spring collections approached. Take me to Paris with you, he said, or I'll move over to Vogue -- a terrifying threat.

Covering the French collections was the pinnacle for a fashion photographer; nothing else could substitute. By trying to force Carmel's hand, Avedon took a risk, but it was a calculated one. Given the mutual affection that he, Brodovitch, and Carmel shared, he must have known that he would prevail. But there was a natural obstacle -- a huge one -- to his going in the form of Dahl-Wolfe, who was expecting to accompany Carmel to the collections, as always, that year. Nothing would be worth her wrath if she found herself supplanted. And besides, "Dahl-Wolfe was invented by Carmel," as Avedon has said; the editor's affection for the photographer, and longtime support of her career, was genuine.

Such human complications were Carmel's meat and drink. A solution would be found, and it was. "Carmel recognized Dick's threat as genuine and arranged for him to go to Paris secretly.... It was a strictly undercover operation," according to Mary Louise Aswell. Avedon, the self-described "little guy in a black suit with shiny black hair parted over here..." did end up in the French capital, but so did Dahl-Wolfe, while an operation was mounted to keep the latter in the dark. Taking Avedon was a shrewd decision. Although he was now shooting regularly for the magazine, he was new to the collections and their round-the-clock demands. To try him out as a backup photographer made eminent sense.

Dahl-Wolfe went to Paris a week early to scout for locations. Avedon flew later with Carmel. Their adventures began on the plane ride over. "She put her coat over my lap and said, 'I don't put on my seatbelt,'" adding, conspiratorially, that General Eisenhower didn't either. And then she began to talk, indulging in that Irish national pastime. "She talked through the night, telling me the story of her early life in America." They stayed at the San Re;gis, only meters from Dior, a hotel "known only to those who heard about it from someone else," according to Dorian Leigh. Carmel commandeered the penthouse suite, a space with an unsavory history: during the war, she told Avedon, the hotel had been requisitioned by the Nazis, and her own suite had been reserved for the führer himself.

From the moment they arrived, Avedon and Dahl-Wolfe led parallel lives. It seems incredible that the editor got away with it, and on numerous occasions she almost didn't. At one point, when Dahl-Wolfe appeared unexpectedly at Dior, Avedon and Carmel leaped into a dressing room to avoid being detected. And there were other near misses. Collection weeks had long been a time of subterfuge -- think sheet-wrapped models sneaking through streets -- now there was a hidden photographer as well.

On this trip Avedon was initiated into the whole Paris shebang, beginning with early-morning strategy sessions in Carmel's suite, overwhelmingly fragrant from the bouquets sent by the couturiers, "in the exchange of compliments we intersperse with inevitable rows," as she put it. She conducted meetings

while she was barefoot and dressed in a slip, although always of course wearing pearls She'd dress as we talked, talking to me the whole time. She walked out as this vision. It was like someone going on stage with the speed of a theatrical change. No time was wasted.

She had even been known to receive selected guests while in the bath. In later years, Sally Kirkland, the fashion editor of Life magazine, recounted a similar scene.

You know the first act of Rosenkavalier? While the Marschallin in the opera is drinking her morning chocolate and getting dressed for the day, she receives her lawyer and her major-domo and a milliner and a perruquier and some orphans and an animal vendor and an Italian tenor. Well, the Marschallin had a quiet morning compared to the morning I once spent with Carmel.

Carmel said..."come tomorrow -- is a quarter to eight too early for you?" So I said, "Oh no, not a bit too early." I practically had to stay up all night to make it, but I got there at a quarter to eight, and of course I was about two hours behind Carmel. She'd been up at six to get some outfits from Balenciaga for Avedon to photograph. She'd been stone-cold naked under the suit she'd put on so it was easy for her to get back into her nightgown, which was the way I found her -- she'd kept her pearls on, though. And that hotel suite was in full swing.

Two telephones were going full blast, with a secretary in the sitting room to pick up one phone when Carmel picked up the other beside her bed. There seemed to be a thread running through some of the calls: "Number seventy-seven and Number seventy-three...No, no, those are the two," so I gathered that those were the O.K. Balenciaga suits, and that the calls were the postmortems Carmel always holds after showings. If she made a call herself she'd start right in, very low, sort of like a conspirator: "Hattie, this is Carmel. What did you think of Balmain's collection?"..."Larry, this is Carmel...." and so on and so forth.

In between phone calls Carmel dictated cables -- very good ones -- bawling out the home office for some monstrous commitment they'd made, giving direct answers to questions and good advice on the periphery of the collections, such as telling Dupont not to give up hope, Givenchy had used nylon in his collection -- all very clear and concise and quick.

Some jewelry person came in with samples he spread out on the bed next to Carmel's, then a lingerie lady with same, then a man from the studio with some layouts for approval; Marie-Louise Bousquet hobbled in for the day's gossip; Avedon rushed in with his contact prints. Carmel picked up her magnifying glass, peered through it at the sheets of tiny pictures for three minutes, then began puncturing the ones she wanted with a pencil, all the time talking or dictating.

Suddenly in came a woman who walked straight past all of us into the bathroom. Nobody paid the slightest attention to her. I saw her open a bag she carried and begin laying out some kind of instruments on a table. When she came into the bedroom Carmel said Bonjour, stripped down the sheet to expose her flank (gents were still standing around of course), the woman gave her a poke with a needle, and away she went.

Well, by nine-thirty, when Carmel got up to dress for the day's first fashion show, I was ready to go back to bed.

The injection, by the way, was probably vitamin B12 -- Dahl-Wolfe got them in Paris, too -- although given the pace Carmel sustained, one can be forgiven for wondering if it wasn't combined with something less legal. Whatever the source, nonstop energy was required. Her mission after the war was nothing less than "to help revive the French luxury business by whetting the vast, lucrative American appetite for its wares," as Judith Thurman has written.

Avedon hadn't hired any models for the trip -- that certainly would have given the game away -- but he brought his wife, Doe, with him instead. There were numerous restrictions on models in those days. For one thing, they, like any other contributor, had to pledge allegiance to their respective magazines: "Both Vogue and Harper's Bazaar felt they should have exclusive use of their models," according to Dorian Leigh. "A model couldn't go back and forth between the two without losing friends at one of them." And there were other rules, such as the unwritten one that said that no mannequin could do more than two collections with the same photographer -- term limits, in a sense.

Mary Jane Russell fell afoul of this one in the early 1950s, after she'd done two collections in a row with Louise Dahl-Wolfe. When the time came for the next showings, the photographer went looking for a model -- "calling Eileen Ford three times a day," in Russell's words -- but couldn't find anyone who seemed right. Weeks went by, the departure date was approaching, when Russell received a call from Carmel saying, with a laugh, that Dahl-Wolfe "is interviewing people looking for the next Mary Jane Russell," and asking if the real one would save them a lot of trouble by agreeing to travel for the magazine once more. Others were often hired in France, including two of the better-known House of Dior models, Lucky and Re;ne;e.

Dorian Leigh had her turn when she went to Paris with Avedon for two years in a row, beginning in 1949. As always, it was a frenzy. One night, during an all-night session at the Bazaar studio, in a nineteenth-century building just across the perfect, compact place François Premier from the San Re;gis, Carmel helped her into an extraordinary Dior creation,

an absolutely marvelous dress, a mass of pearls and sequins and everything. [Carmel] zipped me up in it and I said "Imagine having this cleaned." She answered "Don't be ridiculous. He'll tear it off of you. You'll never have to have it cleaned."

This romantic, even Gothic flight of fancy was pure Carmel. The scenario she outlined was hardly far-fetched -- like so many American models loose in Paris, Leigh seemed to be pursued frantically by every man she met. Her life at home, though, was very different than the editor supposed; Carmel was surprised to learn in the middle of a photo shoot that the slender, impossibly young vision before her was already a mother. "Madam, the model has three children," Avedon told Carmel, photographing Leigh as she posed in the place de la Concorde.

The clandestine photographs Avedon took during this first, surreptitious trip to France were published in a double spread in the June 1948 Paris issue. The shots, of two striking evening gowns -- dotted swiss Schiaparelli, white tulle Dior -- were done, as the captions inform us, "in the extravagant poses fashionable in the days of Nadar." Avedon worked with a large-format camera, an eight by ten, which did perfect justice to the Bazaar studio's cubic proportions. His model was framed, lovingly, dead center. His shot took in the whole scene, right down to the artificial ways in which he'd created his vision: the cloth draped under the skylight, dappled light filtering through; the painted backdrop paper. All artifice was apparent, a very sophisticated conceit for so young a photographer. After years of working with a Rolleiflex, "which gives you too much information and feels too easy -- as if the camera is taking the picture," working with the larger-format equipment was a relief, Avedon later said. Still, it would, by his own admission, take him years to master.

By now, all photos, sketches, and copy generated in Paris were sent back by air -- saving more than a week each time. The Paris staff knew the schedules of Pan Am flights to New York, and even which pilots flew them, and would bring the material directly out to the planes on the runway at Le Bourget. Someone from the New York office would then be dispatched out to Idlewild, as Kennedy International Airport was then called, to meet the flights at the other end. This direct approach wasn't only faster -- it beautifully bypassed Customs, too.

One can imagine the fireworks when, after the issue went to press, poor Dahl-Wolfe -- the veteran -- took in the extent of her betrayal. If she reacted as she often did, she would have stayed away, in a fury, from the magazine for days. Still, she didn't leave for good. "It took all of Carmel's genius for diplomacy to keep both her valued photographers on her staff, but she did," Mary Louise Aswell wrote. From then on, for years, Avedon was a frequent presence at the French openings.

Dahl-Wolfe also went and other photographers occasionally had a turn -- among them Lillian Bassman, whose softly focused, deeply feminine images were a distinctive presence in the magazine at this time. When Bassman was elected to go instead of Avedon, not long after the latter's triumphant Paris debut, Avedon, who was a close friend of hers, defused a potentially awkward situation by throwing a party to celebrate. Gleb Derujinsky also occasionally went, contributing, among other things, a famous series of photographs of the model Carmen posing in front of a man on a ladder, a lamplighter, who was busy illuminating one of the streetlights -- they were still gas in those days -- in the place de la Concorde. One photographer hired to do the collections for Bazaar, the German-born Karen Radkai, loved telling how, as she was saying good night to Carmel at two or three in the morning after a shoot, the editor said: "Now, Karen, we've had a busy time and I'm sure you're tired. So have a good rest and sleep late and don't call me before seven o'clock."

The next year, Leigh prevailed upon Avedon to take her sister along to France, too. Since the girl in question was a young, redheaded beauty named Suzy Parker, not a lot of arm twisting was involved. Parker had started modeling with the encouragement of Leigh; as with Bacall, a Bazaar cover (in Parker's case, when she was only fifteen) helped to launch a career: she would go on to become one of the most famous models of all time. Both Texas-born women were knockouts, but Leigh was surely the more astounding character. Then in her mid-twenties, she was a mechanical engineer by profession -- one who also claimed to have published sonnets in The New Yorker. Endorsed by Vreeland and Dahl-Wolfe, she landed on the cover of Bazaar on her very first assignment. Later, Truman Capote, once her neighbor in an apartment building on Lexington Avenue in New York, would base the flighty, promiscuous, borderline criminal Holly Golightly, the protagonist of his novel Breakfast at Tiffany's, on Leigh, or so she claimed. (In this, she wasn't alone. As Gerald Clarke has written of Capote, "Half the women he knew, and a few he did not, claimed to be the model for his wacky heroine." There were so many claimants that the author began to call it the "Holly Golightly Sweepstakes.") In any case, modeling wasn't Leigh's last stop: she later founded her own agency for models in Paris, wrote cookbooks, and more.

Bazaar had rented an old prewar taxi that year; in it, the magazine's crew careened from one appointment to another. For Avedon, Paris time with Carmel "was all teaching -- through gossip, through conspiracy." She introduced him to Be;rard, even, at one point, he says, to Colette, by then one of the national legends of France. "She wanted me to be exposed to everything. She wanted me to read the writers she was publishing. It was all through stories and great daring."

At the shows, Carmel, beside him, kept up a running dialogue, telling wickedly witty tales in her deep Irish voice about everyone in the room, which mannequin was having a secret liaison with which married aristocrat, who was a lesbian, and on and on. Avedon was startled to hear her whisper at one point that very sedate-seeming Madame Grès was involved in a me;nage-à-trois. Great funniness was part of it: "There was nothing but laughter, nothing but stories." Babs Simpson, attending the shows with Carmel at one point, recalls that "she'd call over the girl with the most hideous possible dress on and say to me in front of her, 'You've got to have this! It's just your dish.'" At which point both women would dissolve into giggles.

On later visits Carmel would insist that Avedon leave his shoes out for polishing in front of her hotel suite door, rather than his -- purely to give John Fairchild, who became Paris bureau chief of the influential Women's Wear Daily in the 1950s, something to gossip about. In time, Fairchild would transform the sedate trade journal, founded by his father, into the self-described "fashion bible" it's become today, one that, besides presenting in-depth coverage of the industry, "raked over the personalities of high fashion: the couturiers and their socialite clients," as Teri Agins puts it. Even before he did so, he was fair game. Anyone was. "Everything was like that, it was work out of joy," as Avedon puts it.

When Carmel was in town, the magazine's photo studio was a hive of frenzied, buzzing activity. "We all worked around the clock. There was just an enthusiasm...," Avedon says. Messengers, editors, assistants ran in and out; photo sessions lasted until dawn. Some people never seemed to leave, leading Dahl-Wolfe to liken the place to a boardinghouse. "Even taxi drivers took their meals there with us," she wrote. The place was run by Andre; Gremela, a darkroom technician and, in Avedon's words, "perfect artisan," who'd worked with a dynasty of Bazaar photographers, going back to Hoyningen-Huene. "He performed magic in the darkroom," Mary Jane Russell recalled. A wardrobe assistant named Olga completed the team. The studio was tiny.

There was hardly enough room to unpack the dresses. In a tiny kitchen on the mezzanine, a maid cooked French lunches, and the darkroom smelled of the garlic sausage on Gremela's breath. He never slept and was always wearing a soiled lab coat. Every night, he'd string clotheslines from wall to wall and hang up the negatives to dry, making his prints the next morning, one at a time, in his simple trays.

For Gremela and others, Avedon's work was a revelation.

The pictures Dick had taken were so different from anything he or any other fashion photographer had done before that everyone who saw them got excited....They were particularly admired by the French fashion photographers who had been cut off from anything new for many years.

The tools Avedon took for granted -- seamless white backdrop paper, electronic flash attachments -- were looked upon by his French counterparts with envy, being almost impossible to obtain in Europe at this time. They were part of what made his work look new. Another substance he relished -- natural light -- was easier to come by. "I was interested in the challenge of shooting with no props, no artificial light, no background, little help," Avedon has said, "just a dress, a model, and her pensive beauty in isolation."

On free evenings, the young photographer might join Carmel and members of a shifting cast for group dinners in Paris -- a ritual, then as now, of the collection season. They'd meet for drinks at the Ritz or the Plaza Athe;ne;e, then head off to somewhere farther afield, perhaps to Le Cheval Noir, on the outskirts of town, or Le Coq Hardi in the bois de Boulogne. Anyone might turn up. Later, Carmel sometimes included favorite niece Kate White, a midwesterner then residing in Paris, taking as much pleasure in the company of this glamour-free young relative as in the couturiers, artists, and titled Parisians with whom she also dined. "I was living in a maid's room then, but she always had time for me," White recalls. Frederick Vreeland, Diana's son, who spent many family summers in Paris, recalls attending dinners with Carmel where his tablemates included the likes of Be;rard and Cocteau. "Carmel moved easily in these magical circles in Paris. She was accepted in these magical circles long before my mother was. For a college kid this would be very impressive stuff."

Vreeland herself went to the collections for Bazaar on one occasion, in the 1950s, and it was not a success. "Carmel took her only once to Paris and she'd never take her again," recalls fashion editor Gwen Randolph Franklin, who rejoined the Bazaar staff in the early 1950s, insisting on equal billing with Vreeland when she did so. (Only one editor, Patricia Cornwell, had managed this before.) "Diana was like a designer -- a creative -- and also wanted to throw her weight around," Franklin says. "That was too much competition, as I see it." Vreeland was appalled by what she found in the very epicenter of the fashion world. She "fled in horror at the frenzy of it," according to Ballard. "Bettina...how can you work in this confusion night and day? How can you understand fashion smothered like this?" she asked. "The sheer terror of it, the indignity!" It was just the atmosphere that Carmel adored.

Carmel's Paris entourage expanded with the years. When both her secretaries, Dorothy Monger and Cookie, retired due to ill health, she replaced them with Catharine Stewart Dives, who began accompanying her boss to Paris, taking the room next door at the San Re;gis and working on captions and corres-

pondence that were dispatched by courier to New York each night after Carmel went to

bed. Everything was accelerated. Kate White recalls her aunt calling her in the hotel lobby as she waited there one evening to say she was on her way down. "I can remember her saying, 'Je descends,' which meant, more or less, 'Clap your hands and get the chauffeur at the door.'" Everything, including drinking, was conducted with great efficiency. Since "she loved dry martinis, and lots of them," as Givenchy puts it, she adopted a system to ensure that they'd be close at hand. Laura Pyzel Clark recalls that, after attending the shows with Carmel, "we'd go up to her room and she'd order 'trois martinis secs s'il vous plaît tout de suite.'" One of the three drinks was for Clark, who would only sip politely at it. The others were for Carmel, who liked to know that, when she was done with the first, she could move right on to the next.

Church figured in, of course. As Kate White recalls,

I was with Aunt Carmel and she picked me up, driving with a chauffeur when she suddenly said, "Kate dear, we're going to stop by this chapel." The chauffeur said to me, "Madame Snow comes in every afternoon." I knelt on the prie-dieu and Aunt Carmel sat before me. She looked like a ten-year-old girl. She was not Carmel Snow giving orders, she was in front of someone much bigger than she was to whom she owed attention.

A new, more earthly companion was Balenciaga. Carmel had known -- and championed -- this designer for years, since he'd opened his first fashion house in Paris in 1937, showing black, long-sleeved tight-bodiced dresses. Vogue's Ballard, who also attended his debut show, recalled finding these offerings modest indeed. But she later realized that she was

too inexperienced a fashion editor to foresee the genius of this gentle Spaniard or to dream that he would dress the most elegant women in the world. It took Carmel Snow, of Harper's Bazaar, with her wise, experienced fashion eyes, to understand and to push the talent of this unknown man from his very first collection.

The designer was notoriously reclusive. "Balenciaga, as usual, was not in evidence," Carmel wrote teasingly a few years later. "I don't think that anyone has ever seen him in person."

Balenciaga's architectonic clothes, designed in his fashion house on the avenue George V, had a strictness, a purity of line that made them immediately recognizable. He was "an absolute master of the cut," in the fashion writer François Baudot's words. His own premiere, Madame Feliza, described him as having "the precision of a surgeon." It wasn't just about style, but about technique. "He was the architect of the Haute Couture. You could have fantasy, ideas, but what counted was the construction of a dress....He was the man of the straight line." Although he was little known in the United States, even into the 1940s, this wasn't true in France, a point that was driven home to one American editor who, ensconced in a Paris taxi just after Dior burst onto the scene, was startled to hear the driver ask, "So now Monsieur Balenciaga has some competition, no?" (As Carmel liked to point out, everyone in Paris is interested in fashion.)

For years, Paris's couturiers had been swimming against the tide -- the flood, even -- of the tiny-waisted New Look. But Dior's canvas- and tulle-lined fabrics, his padding and artifice, were anathema to the Spaniard (as they were to Chanel, who famously said, "Dior, he doesn't dress women, he upholsters them"). By contrast, Balenciaga felt that fabric should speak for itself, that a woman's body, and the way it moves, should dictate the design of her clothes, not the other way around. The Spaniard went his own way, always, following his own strict inspiration, only changing his silhouette, as Ballard has pointed out, every six years. Even Dior, whose vision was so different, revered Balenciaga, calling him "the master of us all." "He was deep, without detours," Hubert de Givenchy says of him. "I worked with Fath, Piguet, Lelong, Schiaparelli, but when I met him, I saw that I knew nothing."

Carmel dated the start of her friendship with Balenciaga to August 1946, after Bousquet brought her to dine in his opulent avenue Monceau apartment, with its satin-lined walls, rare bronzes, and Louis XVI furniture. "This was the first time I had really talked to Balenciaga -- and how we talked! It was enchantment all around." So much so that Lucien, her driver, whom she'd ordered for ten, had to wait in the car for four more hours until both women emerged.

If Balenciaga was relatively obscure in America, that changed almost overnight during the fall collections of 1950, when he unveiled the barrel look, which in the witchy way of fashion, managed to make the New Look seem dainty, overblown. As Carmel wrote in the September issue:

After his opening there was a five minute ovation, but the "monk of the couture" still refused to appear. Almost no buyer has ever met the mysterious couturier, yet the Balenciaga look -- elegant, individual, never casual, never theatrical -- is the epitome of fashion today.

"This year's suit has rounded lines, rounded armholes...," Carmel told the Fashion Group. "A new Paris suit makes the suits of last year look angular and skimpy." Many of these pieces, including a wool ensemble with an outsized, smocklike jacket and a narrow skirt that stopped just below the knee, would look avant-garde if worn today. The palette of this superb colorist tended to Goya shades -- "the color of Spanish earth and rocks and olive trees." His hats were simple; Carmel favored his pillbox, and she wasn't alone: it became a classic in the 1940s and remained one for as long as women wore hats. "Why has this great dressmaker come into his own?" Carmel asked in a fashion-industry newsletter.

It's because he builds clothes for the WOMAN not for HEADLINES. He knows a woman's body better than any living dressmaker. The dash of a Balenciaga dress lies in a bold, vigorous affirmation, in the forceful use of the colors you see in Spanish paintings. [Emphasis hers.]

His fashion shows were usually "tense performances," Carmel wrote. "Where Dior collections had a Mozartian lightness and grace, Balenciaga's were paraded with sombre solemnity," in Ernestine Carter's words. His couture house, unlike Dior's, was unadorned, its atmosphere austere. His models, dubbed "monster mannequins" by the fashion world, were ferocious, including one, named Colette, who moved

with her Dracula walk, her big head low like a bull ready to charge, her shoulders hunched down, her arms swinging low, and a look of almost violent hatred on her face as she passed, concealing the number of the dress from the spectators.

(This trick was one played by many models. "They took a very wicked pleasure in putting their number in a pocket or holding it upside down," Susan Train recalls.)

"One never knew what one was going to see at a Balenciaga opening," Vreeland once said. "One fainted." Or more. In the winter of 1951, Balenciaga unveiled the "semi-ajuste;" or semifitted suit -- sharp-collared, pulled tight in the front yet loose in the back, ballooning behind like a spinnaker. The suits were classic Balenciaga -- plain lines, little trim -- but they billowed out behind to a shocking degree. It was "a total break with the New Look," according to Marie-Andre;e Jouve, and, indeed, everything else. In showing these styles, the designer turned his back, once again, on everything he'd done before.

As the loose, asymmetric styles came out, the audience "sat there hating them," Carmel recalled.

"Why should a woman look like a house?" -- you could feel their hate in the room. Instead of the screams and Bravos! that greeted Dior, there was an uneasy silence when the showing was over.

I was seated as usual in the front row, and I stood up. I began to clap. No one joined me. I simply continued to clap, slowly, deliberately, loud.

The aftermath was turbulent. "Everyone screamed that women would never accept this too-big-for-you look," Ballard wrote. Some journalists sniped that the suits were "badly adjusted," not "semi-adjusted." But Carmel continued her applause in glossy pages a few months later, calling the designer's new cut "a revolution" in Bazaar. The traditional spring Paris issue burst with Balenciaga, eclipsing every other designer, with the near-exception of Dior. And, sure enough, its readers came around.

Needless to say, the editor's demonstration had a career-enhancing effect; a definitive book on Balenciaga even uses the chapter heading "Madame Snow Applaudit" (Mrs. Snow applauded) to describe a turning point of his career, at least as far as the United States was concerned. Before this editor -- ouch -- took a stand, Balenciaga was considered too far out for an American audience. But afterward, "the fashion world began to pay attention," Carmel wrote. "The rest is fashion history." It was also more evidence that, as she said in a lecture a few years later: "You can't keep an exciting fashion down, and it's no use trying. Fashion is an element mysterious as uranium and just as explosive, but light -- lighter than air."

Light or not, acclaim wasn't necessarily the outcome the great designer -- a recluse, who loathed the press -- was after. "His Spanish sense of dignity is outraged by publicity," Ballard once wrote. "The more journalists plead for stories, for clothes to photograph, the more the entire house of Balenciaga closes itself into its shell." He wasn't fond of customers, either: he'd slip into his maison de couture through the back door so as not to encounter them.

Most revolutionary, from an American point of view, was his concept of cursi, that Spanish word for which there's no English equivalent. Perhaps "vulgar" is the closest word. Editor Anne Hopkins Miller recalls Carmel explaining that "if you wore blue shoes and and you feel you have to have a blue bag that's what Mr. Balenciaga would call cursi, which basically meant bad together. Carmel felt that anything that was too contrived was cursi, bad taste." To tell conforming American women of the 1950s that their bag and shoes shouldn't necessarily match was subversive indeed. But they listened, apparently, and gradually yet another useless fashion convention loosened its hold.

After the clapping incident, Carmel and Balenciaga's relationship, already warm, heated up. "Balenciaga was Carmel's tenderest spot," as Aswell has written. Like Dior, he had impeccable taste, and a string of beautifully appointed country houses. Carmel visited him at Igueldo, his house in San Sebastián, "the Spanish watering place near the little fishing village where he was born." Furnished with "beautiful, rather uncomfortable, Spanish antiques," she found this residence to be "as remote and simple as his personality." Even so, she returned numerous times, often with Bousquet, and at one point with her teenaged daughter, Brigid, and one of her Foxcroft classmates. Carmel also visited his seventeenth-century residence near Orle;ans. Although she claims to have once sent a very young and very talented man named Hubert de Givenchy to see Balenciaga there, bearing a letter of introduction that she had written, Givenchy recalls first meeting Balenciaga through Marie-Louise Bousquet. In any case, Givenchy went on to apprentice with the Spanish designer, before opening his own fashion house in the French capital in 1951. His debut collection was impressive enough that it landed him in Bazaar as "the new name to know." By the fall of 1954, the magazine was reporting that "his whole collection has real authority and technique, as well as ideas. Givenchy is now among the top designers."

Carmel's enthusiasm for Balenciaga seemed to intensify with every passing fashion season. "Ours is an intuitive relationship that simply ignores the language barrier," she wrote with girlish enthusiasm. "I speak no Spanish, he speaks no English, our French isn't especially competent -- but I never once doubted that I could understand all that he was saying." One night they sat up till dawn together while he told her the story of his life -- one that had, they discovered, strange parallels with hers: both had fathers who had died young (Balenciaga's was the captain of a fishing boat) and widowed mothers who had opened dressmaking establishments (although Señora Balenciaga, unlike Annie White, actually took up sewing herself) in order to support their families.

Balenciaga took frequent cures to Switzerland for sinus trouble and chronic nervous exhaustion and advised Carmel to do the same. She went to one once, in Zurich, for a day -- and bolted. Leisure wasn't her thing and, besides, "I'm afraid I have yet to finish a course of treatments for anything." It was he, too, who suggested the revitalizing shots that had become as much a part of Carmel's Paris routine as fortune-tellers and La Me;diterrane;e. As Nancy White once told a cousin: "In Paris, Aunt Carmel lives on martinis, French pastries and vitamin B injections."

The story of their friendship, as told by Carmel, sounds downright romantic. Certainly for her it was. Her marriage had long lacked passion; Palen's attentions were elsewhere as, for that matter, were her own. In this romantic vacuum, her feelings for this intense Spaniard could only bloom. Just as she venerated his precise tailoring, exquisite materials, futuristic cuts, she came to worship Balenciaga as a man. Inevitably, Paris wags began gossiping, maliciously, about the editor's unrequited crush. "A lot of people said she was in love with him, which I completely understand," says Givenchy. "He was so very talented." Susan Train adds: "She was totally in love with Balenciaga. She was mad, insane, about him. She never let him alone. Given that he was a shy, reclusive man, this kind of exhausted him after a while. It drove him crazy." Carmel had already given up other designers to wear only his clothes. But now her fittings took place at his apartment among the antiques, where the designer fussed over her outfits "endlessly until they entirely pleased him, often suggesting changes in color -- I think he took pride in the way I wore his creations."

He must have, since he designed one of his classic suits for her, "because I have no neck," as she told Ernestine Carter. He first showed this loosely fitted jacket with a collar set away from the neck in the early 1950s, then did a variation of it each year. "The stand-away collars allowed women, and their pearls, to breathe," in the mystical words of Jacqueline Demornex. Calling it "the great suit of our time," Carmel adopted it as a uniform, ordering it in seemingly every fabric, every shade. (Avedon has an abiding memory of her wearing a watermelon-colored one during a period when her hair was bright lavender.) She loved the way the suit's collar, set away from her face, made her neck seem longer. Since the look was stark, she softened it with a silk scarf, which she was taught to tie on the bias, with cool perfection, by Balenciaga himself. This tradition passed from one pair of fashion hands to another: years later, Carmel showed her niece Nancy White how it was done; she, in turn, passed that knowledge on to Geoffrey Beene. The American designer included scarves, knotted in just this same way, in his collections for the length of his career.

Taciturn and difficult, Balenciaga extended his friendship to very few. So when he began sending bouquets to the San Re;gis, as many other designers did routinely, to greet Carmel on her biannual arrivals in France, the gesture seemed entirely uncharacteristic. Inevitably, the editor put a romantic spin on it. "She was in love with Balenciaga from afar and she misinterpreted every sort of business thing she did as something part of a romance that she imagined," Avedon recalled.

One day, over lunch with Balenciaga, at Le Grand Ve;four, Carmel spied the great French writer Colette (who, like Cocteau, lived in one of the apartments in the adjacent Palais Royal) at a table across the room. By then an invalid, Colette had been carried down from her apartment to lunch with Carmel's old chum Anita Loos and the actress Paulette Goddard. The editor beckoned both women to her table, knowing that they both admired Balenciaga, before going off to introduce herself to the writer, whose work she'd published for decades, including the winsome story "Gigi," which appeared for the first time in America in Bazaar in 1946. "When I performed the introduction, without a moment's hesitation, without even glancing at each other, both women curtsied to Balenciaga as Englishwomen curtsy to royalty." It was a reaction she understood.

She herself copied this worshipful gesture, at least figuratively, by promoting his career at every imaginable opportunity. And the designer made it easy, again and again, by the daring way he leaped from some new, previously unimagined silhouette to another. He never stopped breaking rules -- indeed, he refused to acknowledge that any existed. His chemise or "sack" dress, a simple sheath that eliminated bust or seam darts, which he designed in the mid-1950s, was in its way as radical as the New Look, but it had nothing like the Dior fashion's popularity. "The dresses were so unusual that we put them on backwards at every fashion show," said Dorothy Fuller, then a fashion director at the Chicago department store of Marshall Field & Co. "We only discovered that later on." Once again, Carmel set out to turn the tide of public acceptance for her beloved friend. As the New York Times reported in its issue of September 21, 1957: "Carmel Snow, editor of Harper's Bazaar, defended the controversial new chemise dresses from Paris yesterday by saying they were neither 'sad sacks' nor 'sexless.'" Her advocacy never flagged. When Fuller's successor, Kathleen Catlin, put in an order for the dresses, she received a cable from Carmel commending her on taking such a risk. "My dear, how courageous!" Such tactics worked, apparently. As Teri Agins points out, "By the late 1950s, every smartly dressed woman in America donned a chemise, and the style lasted through the 1960s."

Convinced that it perpetuated copying, Balenciaga had a pathological hatred of the press. In 1958, both he and Givenchy infuriated buyers by changing the date of their collections to a full month after everyone else's, "to prevent leakages and copies of his pet ideas before they can appear in American stores," according to the New York Times, thus obliging American buyers who wanted to see their work to return to Paris a second time each season. Both designers offered to make an exception for Carmel, but as Ernestine Carter later reported, "she scornfully declined to accept different treatment from that meted out to her colleagues."

Carmel herself didn't offer such treatment to any designer. She may have loved Balenciaga, but she featured his clothes in her pages because she thought they merited the space and attention, and for no other reason. Had his talent vanished overnight, her friendship toward him might have continued, but his clothes would no longer have been seen in the pages of Bazaar.

As long as she believed in you, she nurtured you along, as Marc Bohan, whom she'd known for years as a designer for Patou, discovered.

She looked at collections from a business point of view, how individual clients would react, how stores would react. After a collection she'd take me out to lunch and explain exactly what worked and what didn't. [Life's] Eugenia Sheppard did the same sort of thing. There were no flowers or compliments....She was very, very professional.

To Bohan's surprise, "there was no 'copinage,' with Carmel Snow as there was with everyone else, except for Eugenia Sheppard," meaning that neither would promote a designer, or a style, without merit. It was never a question, as it was known to be with other editors and journalists, of covering a collection because it seemed fashionable to do so or because its creator was a friend.

No matter how much Carmel did for Balenciaga, even she could fall out of favor with the mercurial designer. One day his head vendeuse barred her from entering one of his shows "because he was afraid she'd break the fashions before anyone," according to Geri Trotta. Infuriated, Carmel threw her handbag at the woman, before storming out. It was a burst of temperament -- surely not the only one to take place in the fast-paced, high-stakes collection season -- but its sole witness, Marie-Louise Bousquet, "instead of shutting up about it, spread the word all over Paris," Trotta reports. Carmel's sidekick, who had a distinctly poisonous side, seemed strangely happy at this turn of events. "She would work any angle," Trotta says. "She was jealous of Carmel. She was so pleased that Carmel had been barred from Balenciaga's collection."

At one point, Carmel and the designer became so estranged that a young fashion assistant from the magazine, Barbara Slifka, accompanying her mother to Paris, where the older woman was shopping, was asked to sit out the show in the dressing room "because I was with Harper's Bazaar." Later in this trip, Slifka innocently asked Carmel if there was anything she could do to help her while she was in France. "My dear, I've been covering these collections for years. I don't need any help" was the frosty response. (Actually, as it turned out, there was one thing she could do....Before Slifka knew what she'd agreed to, she, like so many before her, found herself returning to America with a few extra, label-less clothes in her bags....) On the plane back to New York that year, Carmel sat next to an unidentified American designer who asked herself, rhetorically, in the course of their long transatlantic conversation, if it was worth traveling to the collections, given the pressure and expense. And then she answered the question herself. "I've never worked harder than I did in Paris -- but I'm not tired, I'm stimulated -- comforted by all the beauty -- and I've got enough inspiration for four years in my pocket." No doubt her seatmate agreed.

All that inspiration, the sheer love and energy that Carmel expended on behalf of France and its fashion industry was rewarded on April 13, 1949, when the ordre de chevalier de la le;gion d'honneur was bestowed upon her by the French government. "Please do come," she wrote to Nancy White, who had become director of fashion at Good Housekeeping, another Hearst title (and one her famous aunt had been known to deride as "Good Housecooking"). "I do wish I could ask Del [Nancy's husband, magazine publisher Ralph Delahaye Paine Jr.], but as I am only allowed ten people in all and have to include about five business people, children, husband, etc., I am afraid I can only have you," she wrote. It was a small, immensely proud group: Palen and the girls, young Carmel's mother-in-law, Mrs. Sumner Welles, Frances McFadden, Richard Avedon, and Nancy White all gathered at noon at the French consulate, then located in Rockefeller Center. The award was presented by Ludovic Chancel, the consul general, in the name of President de Gaulle, in gratitude for "Mrs. Snow's long friendship for France, her influence since the end of the war in reestablishing the prestige of French art, French crafts and French design in the United States." She was rewarded for her absolute loyalty. In her daughter Brigid's words, "I never saw her in an American-made suit, that's why she got the Le;gion d'honneur." A tribute in the magazine just after noted that "Carmel Snow estimates that she has covered the Paris collections at least sixty times."

Be;rard had made a "charming memento" of the occasion -- an elaborate sketch of the award, festooned with decorative ribbons and motifs, and signed by some of the people she loved the most in Paris, among them Dior, Balenciaga, Schiaparelli, and Molyneux. It was a particularly treasured gift, since the troubled, addicted, hugely talented Be;rard had died unexpectedly two months before the ceremony, on February 12, 1949, at a theater where he'd been designing the costumes and sets for a play by Molière with his usual extraordinary artistry, conceiving the costumes in shades of gray "with rare little flames of color," as his friend George Davis described them. He'd had two strokes and been warned by his physician not to return to work, but the doctor's words were futile. Be;rard died "as he had lived for many years," Flanner noted in The New Yorker, "while working, after midnight, in the Marigny Theatre." (Fittingly, Molière himself had expired the same way.) "Be;be; was our blood donor," Cocteau cried when he heard the news. "How can I work? I have lost my arms." Is it too cynical to imagine that, over at the Vogue camp, there was a certain satisfaction in knowing that Be;rard might have been gone, but at least he wasn't working for Bazaar? In any case, Chase, true to form, didn't pass up the opportunity to chastise him posthumously.

We used to think it was an overdose of drugs that killed Be;rard, but there is a school that holds to the theory that it was bread. Everything on earth was wrong with him including high blood pressure and diabetes. His doctor told him that he wasn't to eat bread, but he craved it. Along with the opium and liquor binges he'd go on bread binges, gorging himself with it, thrusting it down his throat like a ravenous animal.

So Be;rard was there, in spirit and in sketch, at least, when Carmel had her moment of triumph. From then on she had the red ribbon symbolizing the French award sewn just below the collarbone, on the left, on all her clothes, up to and including her San Re;gis bathrobe. On clothes that had no ribbon, a tiny rosette "began appearing in all her buttonholes," according to Hopkins. It's strictly forbidden for anyone who hasn't won the award to wear such symbols of course: Carmel duly instructed her staff buying her clothes to remove the ribbons before they wore them, which they sometimes did. One day her daughter Brigid, then a student at Barnard College, wore one of her mother's jackets to school only to be confronted by a French professor who asked, quite reasonably, "Aren't you a bit young, miss, to be wearing the Legion of Honor?"

By now Carmel was in her sixties, and a legend. One staffer, Jo Jeanne Millon Barton, who worked as a secretary to Melanie Witt Miller, editor of the Junior Bazaar section, recalls Carmel "thrilling the secretaries" simply by walking by. Although she looked her age, even older, Carmel, like her mother before her, seemed to become more decisive and powerful with every year. "She was Mrs. Snow and she was blue haired and when she stepped into a taxi everyone stopped to look at her," Avedon recalls. She'd lunch at chic restaurants, such as the Colony or L'Aiglon where "everybody knew her," A. G. Allen says. Or at the Pavillon, a restaurant that "she'd done a lot to create," according to Truman Capote.

New York was hers, just as Paris was. A portrait, taken by Derujinsky in this period, shows Carmel seated at her desk, her head cocked to the side like a bird's, looking almost preternaturally alert. In the background, chintz curtains on one side and a whimsical painting on the other seem to hint at two sides to her character -- the one traditional, rooted in upper-class Ireland and New York; the other irresistibly drawn to the newest, and most imaginative, in art. Characteristically, Carmel is wearing pearls, two sets of them, one three stranded, of smaller beads, the other, a single one, of larger ones. Her Balenciaga has an off-the-shoulder look; her white pillbox, designed by him as well, is set smartly toward the front of her head. In her right hand, she holds a writing implement -- a blue pencil? Her beautifully manicured left hand, the three-fingered one, rests matter-of-factly on an outsize layout page.

After years of pain, Carmel had had her index finger on that hand amputated in about 1951. The discomfort remained for years, and she would later conclude that her decision to have the operation was a mistake. Sometimes, as she pointed out, teasingly, she was perhaps too decisive. After it was removed, she had no apparent self-consciousness about the missing digit, as Flanner remarked. "She merely used that hand with a strange widened grace." When she counted on her fingers, the way we all do, she inevitably included the missing one, too, Avedon recalled, although it was long gone.

The magazine in this period reflected the usual daring juxtapositions -- one 1949 issue showed photographs of le tout Paris -- among them Dior -- dressed in extravagant, artful costumes for a costume ball given by the Comte Etienne de Beaumont, while, a few pages later, photographer David Seymour documented Polish youth playing nonchalantly in the rubble of the Warsaw Ghetto. There were wonderful portraits, not just of movies stars, politicians, and the like, but of key socialites, such as the formerly camera-shy C. Z. Guest, who, like so many, was snared by a wickedly persuasive Diana Vreeland.

When first asked to model, the beautiful blonde replied that she couldn't because her husband and his family absolutely hated publicity of any sort. Diana looked her straight in the eye and said, "But they'll never know, my dear." Diana absolutely and completely seduced me right then and there. And I believed her, that's the amazing part.

For all its disparate ingredients, the shock value of the early years of Carmel's tenure at Bazaar -- the eye-opening layouts, avant-garde clothes and art -- had been tempered. Both fashion and graphics had become tamer, like the times. Still, there were moments of great inventiveness. There are the famous shots -- Avedon, Dahl-Wolfe -- many of them often reproduced, such as the one of Dorian Leigh, clad in a gray flannel, flounced-sleeved Dior dress, euphorically embracing a cyclist from the Tour de France. But also striking are the everyday fashion shots, the unsung images that don't turn up in retrospectives or illustrated books, such as Avedon's picture of a trio of models wearing outsize silk coats (by Norman Norell for Traina-Norell), topped with "curve hats" by John Frederics -- huge swoops of brim that might have been worn by monks, albeit polka-dot-wearing ones, in medieval Europe. And whoever actually penned the words, the copy for a piece on "India pink," is pure, delicious Vreeland: "This year's pink, the pink of the East, pure fresh and singing against sunburned skin."

A new magazine, one geared to the latest in the arts, flared up in this period, when Fleur Cowles, an old acquaintance of Carmel's from the New York magazine world, created Flair, her legendary rag. The magazine had "spectacular backing," according to Capote, and a no-less-spectacular editor -- the well-connected, if unruly, George Davis, who had left Mademoiselle in 1949. Visually, it was the opposite of Brodovitch, so chaotically imaginative that it bordered on kitsch. As the New York Times noted: its "windowed covers, die-cut pages and foldout features sent it to stardom and doomed it to failure as an expensive folly...."

Fleur Cowles knew Carmel

when I was running Look. But when I started Flair I was enemy number one.

"How dare anyone go into the class market?"

For me Harper's Bazaar was not a competitor. I didn't want to be like a magazine at all. I never did two issues that were like each other.

Of Carmel, she says: "I never crossed her path if I could help it. She wasn't a warm, motherly person. She was not what you'd call a friendly figure. Everyone looked up to her but they didn't necessarily like her." She once told a Bazaar editor that Carmel was so hard that she made "concrete seem like ice cream." But concrete endures and Flair didn't -- it ran for only twelve issues, from February 1950 to January 1951, and Davis was gone even before it folded.

In late 1950, McFadden finally retired, her departure hastened, Carmel thought, by a particularly noxious piece of marketing: a "Sunset Pink" promotion to introduce a new train called the Sunset Limited to Bazaar's readers. The magazines editorial and marketing departments came together on this one -- never a particularly comfortable fit. In any case, the January 1951 issue was awash in a rosy hue, from its cover, which featured a sleeveless pink Larry Aldrich linen dress, through numerous advertisements -- manufacturers had trotted out myriad rose-shaded products, from belts to underwear, for the occasion -- down to the editorial pages, which featured not just pink fashion, but pages highlighted by blocks of the same shade. The whole thing must have appalled Brodovitch; in any case, it "was too much for Frances McFadden," Carmel noted, "who forthwith retired from the Bazaar to write. With her, much of the joy went out of my office work." The managing editorship was a crucial position -- "she really depended on her aide-de-camp very much," as Edson puts it. But few could touch McFadden's unique combination of crack organizational skills and literary acumen.

The search took on comic proportions. When Rosamond Bernier of Vogue received a message asking her to lunch with Carmel and Vreeland, she knew that a job offer must be in the wind -- the de;tente between Nast and Hearst on the subject of hiring each other's staff had long since dissolved. But she was shocked to discover what they had in mind.

I'd never had a job before. I can't imagine why they called me, except that I spoke French and I was relatively presentable. It was a fluke. There was Carmel Snow in her neat little Balenciaga drinking her martini before lunch. I remember Diana arriving very late. She came loping in and said -- I've never forgotten it -- "I've just been to the most divine funeral." They grandly offered me to be managing editor. I'd never done anything! It was ridiculous.

Loyally, Bernier reported on the offer to the retired-in-name-only Edna Chase, to which the latter responded with that offhand, ego-demolishing instinct that was so effortlessly hers. "She said, 'Ridiculous child, ridiculous child, you couldn't possibly do the job,'" Bernier recalls.

Other candidates approached the magazine, among them George Davis. For Carmel, his overture -- and for a job involving not just editing but management! -- must have been too rich. Her reply was tactful, affectionate -- and about the firmest no imaginable.

Knowing Frances as I do, I cannot regard her departure as temporary, and for that reason I must look for someone who can be considered a Rock of Gibraltar for some time to come. I have the greatest respect for your editorial talent, George, both for your creative ideas and your ability to work with authors, but knowing this magazine as you do, you know how many things are involved in the job of a managing editor -- and these other facets of the job -- working with promotions, handling decisions when I am away, etc., etc. -- are, I think, not your forte.

Putting it mildly. She went on to say that "you have a very rare talent, and I do appreciate it," and to suggest that he freelance for Bazaar and others. Ever the editor in chief, she made sure to push for first dibs. "I'd like to feel that we would be the first to consider your ideas, as they come to you." Davis's editing career ended here. He went on to become a full-time writer, although, sadly, one known more for the intractability of his writer's block than for anything he actually produced. Although he was forever planning to write another novel, "like his friend Be;be; Be;rard he had too many other interests and distractions to concentrate on his work," Carmel noted. "He was an inveterate collector, of objects, of gossip, of people. He hadn't Be;be;'s tragic vice [i.e., drugs], but he was every bit as experienced a procrastinator."

The search for a managing editor got increasingly desperate: "Mrs. Snow would go to a cocktail party and say to whoever was at her elbow, 'Who would be a good managing editor?' from among the guests," Edson recalls. She finally hired a man who had been vetted by her astrologer, according to Bassman. But the stars, alas, must have been off course. "He collapsed on the job," she adds. "The poor guy left after six months, he had such an ulcer. He just couldn't deal with the Vreelands." Others came and went with alarming rapidity -- as if spinning through a well-oiled revolving door.

Beyond her Paris trips, which bookended the year, Carmel took numerous smaller ones at about this time, including one in about 1950, when she and her daughters headed down to Haiti for Christmas and New Year's. Mary Palen's friend Francine du Plessix Gray, who accompanied them, recalled deplaning at Port-au-Prince.

My lasting memory of Carmel Snow is of going down the steps single file behind her, exiting the plane. She emanated this marvelous smell of "Joy." She had this great head of white hair and this Balenciaga tweed suit and I thought, "When I grow up this is what I want to be like." I thought, "This is true elegance." It was the elegance of a mother superior. She was a brilliant, alcoholic mother superior. I was in awe of her. I loved the kind of haughtiness of her style.

Once on the island, "we were given a lot of leeway," du Plessix Gray recalls. "She went her own way, reading, pondering, drinking." Other travel companions included the American designer Jane Derby, ne;e Jeannette Barr, who had opened her own ready-to-wear business in New York in 1938 (and whose company would be taken over by Oscar de la Renta decades later), as well as Russel Carpenter, another friend. There is no mention of travels with Palen. "One never saw the father," says du Plessix Gray.

At about that time, a very young Polly Allen, later Polly Mellen, came to work for Bazaar, fascinated by all she saw and utterly enamored of Vreeland. "It was love at first sight....She was the most ugliest [sic] woman you ever saw and the most fascinating woman you ever saw." From her first interview at the magazine, she was intrigued by the two editors' complementary styles. "Carmel was a strict lady. No bullshit. She's strict. She's demanding. She's disciplined. She's Catholic. Discipline, but humor -- and a businesswoman." The fashion editor was something else. "Designers who thought Mrs. Vreeland was a bit outre;, they'd talk to Carmel, who was so down to earth."

Polly Allen Mellen's debut was tenuous. She was undone by the fashion she had to photograph at one of her first sittings -- "they were like the maid's clothes!" -- and baffled as to how to style them. They had to be reshot, by her estimation, seven times. At this point, Carmel decided to call a halt, saying to Vreeland, "We cannot keep this young woman," but the latter demurred, saying, "Yes, we can, please Carmel, I see something in her." And she prevailed. (In time, of course, Polly Mellen would become almost as well known as her mentor, revered for her offbeat eye.) There was another close call after Mellen intentionally had a dress she considered ugly photographed both inside out and backward. The designer was "a nasty man," in Mellen's words. He was also a friend of Carmel's. Say no more.

She wasn't fired. But other editors were in flux, including the indispensable Mary Louise Aswell, who left to retire in 1956, succeeded first by Pearl Kazin, her former assistant, and then by Alice Morris, "who took over the fiction with brilliant assurance." There was office gossip, of course. An editor named Constance Woodworth -- "glamorous!" in Mellen's description -- on Vreeland's staff, was said to be having "a mad affair with Serge Obolensky," the suave man about town. "We were always tittering about that," says Anne Hopkins Miller, who started at Bazaar in the late 1940s as a secretary to fashion editor Patricia Cornwell before moving on to work with accessories editor June Dickerson Cuniff, who had "the best taste in the world."

For young women, fresh out of college and embarked on their first real jobs, Bazaar was an unusual experience. Miller remarks that it was only after she'd moved on to other employment that she discovered that not every office was as packed with brilliant people as the magazine had been. In fact, most places turned out to have no resident geniuses at all. When she started at Bazaar, the designer Billy Baldwin, who had spruced up Carmel's office at some point, outpasteling and outchintzing her earlier efforts, seemed to be "always rushing in to chat with Carmel about something." (He'd also done Vreeland's office, as well as the famous red "garden in hell" living room in her Park Avenue apartment.) Vreeland herself "used to sweep through like the empress of Ethiopia, talking to the help. Everyone, even Joe the electrician, adored her." Then there was Brodovitch, "always running down the hall with big blowups" in his hands. "I loved him with a passion, sad, tortured guy that he was." (His son was by then employed as a delivery boy at the magazine.) Meetings in Carmel's office were more crowded than ever, with a number of editors circumnavigating the pages on the floor in their stocking feet.

Miller was embraced as if by family. On her first Christmas at the magazine -- the first she'd ever spent away from home -- she returned to her apartment one afternoon to discover that Avedon had left a fully decorated Christmas tree at her door. And one day Carmel "called me into the office and said, 'Annie, I wondered if you'd like to have a little Schiaparelli'" and handed the astonished young staffer a red velveteen sack dress. More would come, including "The very best thing she gave me" -- a shawl-collared Balenciaga coat of brown melton wool.

A milestone passed in 1950: Carmel and Palen became grandparents that year, when their daughter Carmel's first child, R. Thornton Wilson III ("Toto"), was born on May 16 at LeRoy Sanitarium, formerly known as Harbor Sanitarium and the same place where Carmel had given birth to her daughters. With Toto's arrival they assumed new identities -- she became "GanGan" and he "Pardy"; their grandchildren would multiply, as they tend to do, in the years to come.

Toto was meant to have been a Catholic. As his father, Thornton Wilson, recalled.

When Richard was born...I signed the papers with reluctance. I went into this priest's office on Seventy-ninth Street and I said, "I don't believe in signing." He was an Irishman and he said, "Oh, Mr. Wilson, it's just a formality. It's just a formality. Forget it. It doesn't mean a damn thing." I signed the paper to make the wedding possible. You agree to bring your children up in the Catholic tradition. I'm an Episcopalian.

So the minute Richard was born the priest was waiting outside in the foyer, and I went down to my father's apartment on Sutton Place and he said, "Are you having some trouble up there?" And I said, "Well, yuh, a little bit." So I said, "The old lady's there with the priest and they're all ready to come and baptize Richard." He said, "Give me that telephone and give me the number." He got her and said, "Wilson here." He said, "What's the name of that child? Will you spell the child's name for me? Does it begin with a 'W'? Let's go through it, W-I-L-S-O-N. Who's picking up the tab for all this stuff? Wilson, right? All right," he said, "God damn it. You lay off my grandson and my family and we'll have none of that goddamn nonsense. And you tell that priest to get the hell out of there." And you know, she didn't say "boo" to him. They became great, great friends. That's the only time I think anybody ever defied her.

Ultimately, Carmel Wilson converted to Episcopalianism. Just after the birth, the new young family headed out to Rolling Hill Farm for a stay of several weeks with their new baby. On their return to New York, Thornton was surprised to find a bill in the mail from his notoriously tightfisted father-in-law: Palen was asking for rent for the trio's three-week-long stay.

By the early 1950s, Carmel was in her mid-sixties and it was becoming clear -- perhaps even to her -- that she couldn't go on forever. Certainly, Brodovitch was winding down. He'd long done work on the side, including the blurry, evocative photographs he took of the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo while the company toured the United States in the 1930s, published in a limited edition by a small New York publisher in 1945. Later, he and editor Frank Zachary together created Portfolio magazine as an American version of Graphis. "It was probably the inherent constraints of the fashion magazine that partly accounted for his burgeoning interest in projects beyond the confines of Bazaar," as Kerry William Purcell has written. In other words, Bazaar -- which Brodovitch, in more disparaging moments, had been known to refer to as "the catalogue" -- was becoming increasingly stale.

Portfolio was a tour de force of graphic design. Anything might be found there -- a kite designed by Charles Eames; an Apollinaire poem, "II Pleut," its words sprinkling graphically down the page like the rain that is its subject. It must have been a euphoric experience for the art director to be freed from such mundane considerations as hemlines and "pearls of little price." It also began to encroach upon his time, something Carmel, who missed nothing, soon realized. Worse yet, some Portfolio meetings were held down the hall in the art department -- in short, right under her nose. Just before one was to begin, Zachary looked up to see the formidable editor in chief standing in the doorway. Her eyes met his. "Mr. Brodovitch works for Harper's Bazaar, not for Portfolio," she said, speaking calmly and concisely. "So I took the hint," Zachary recalls. "I picked up my marbles and left."

Whatever lift Brodovitch received from this dream project was tempered in its first year, when he was struck by a Hearst delivery truck on Fifty-seventh Street, injuring his hip. "He walked around the office on two crutches. I think he was racked with pain," Miller recalls. "He'd come off the elevator looking ravaged," adds Bassman, who took over the art department for a year while he recovered, taking the pages out to East Hampton -- where the Brodovitches had a weekend home -- for his comments and/or approval. His absence was a particular loss to the spirited group of photographers, including Bassman and her husband, Paul Himmel, Arnold Newman, and, briefly, Diane Arbus, who took his famous Design Lab class, which had been convening in Avedon's studio since 1947. It was a grim period for the Russian, whose life rarely seemed much brighter. "He became very disenchanted with the world," Avedon says. "He became a really hard drinker."

Carmel lost a key ally, sometimes even an unwitting one, in 1951, when William Randolph Hearst died on August 14 that year, after a four-year illness. He was still involved, if erratically, in the day-to-day workings of his publishing empire, still keeping close tabs on his editors and their publications. According to his son, Bill Jr., they would hear from him

at ungodly hours...long after we had gone home and to bed....Pop didn't repeat instructions. So editors and publishers had to snap out of their slumber quickly; several kept notebooks beside their phones. We feared missing any instructions because the old man would surely recall them.

For Carmel, Hearst was an old adversary, but also a kindred spirit. Like her, he was unabashedly himself, unafraid to express an opinion that might differ from anyone else's. For Hearst, she was a rare find -- someone as independent-minded as he. It's hard not to admire this publisher in some ways, in spite of his eccentricities, repugnant prejudices, and sometimes unsavory political beliefs. If he believed in someone, and he believed in Carmel Snow, he could be disarmingly open-minded, too. He abhorred the new, particularly in the visual domain -- it wasn't just Picasso he detested, but seemingly every other modern artist. Yet for twenty years he allowed Carmel and Brodovitch, confirmed modernists, to show as much that was new in their pages as any fashion magazine before or since.

Changes were coming to the magazine world, ones that transcended Hearst or any other publisher. Years later, Louise Dahl-Wolfe wrote:

On thinking back my memory is haunted still by a remark that Carmel Snow made to me sometime after the end of the war: "My dear, life will be very difficult in the future." I realize now that she was talking about the coming world of technology -- the machine age, a commercial age.

She could as easily have been talking about the creeping commercialization of fashion magazines. Advertisers increasingly held sway. There were more and more "musts," things that had to be shown, whether they merited it or not. Still, there were pockets of resistance. In the early 1950s, Shopping Bazaar editor Jane Strong accepted an ad from a company that offered "pearlized baby shoes," a service in which infants' first footwear was made into permanent keepsakes. Strong soon found herself summoned to the sales department, where she learned that "the ad girls wanted me to run a photo" of these horrors in her pages. (By placing an ad, they were entitled to coverage, in the advertiser's view.) In a panic, she raced down to Carmel's office, located on the floor below. "I said, 'Mrs. Snow, what should I do?'" The editor didn't hesitate: "You certainly don't want anything to do with that." With her blessing, Strong declined.

Even so, "little by little we were being forced to do the shabby business," as Pere;nyi puts it. The notorious "Must List" began to be distributed to editors in the 1950s, which listed which advertisers' fashions had to be shown in the magazine. Some found ways around this, including Vreeland, who, when she was unable to find a garment worth photographing among the manufacturers on the list -- and it happened -- might approach one to ask that they change a color combination or tool with a design until they came up with one that merited space in the book. In general, the more ad pages a manufacturer took out, the more coverage was expected in return. Lilli Ann, the San Francisco clothing manufacturer, advertised on page 3 of the magazine for decades; at some point it became the norm that once a year an outfit of theirs would be featured on a Bazaar cover even though, as Pere;nyi points out, "Carmel wouldn't have been caught dead in a Lilli Ann suit." Such arrangements would become more commonplace -- at Bazaar and elsewhere -- in the years ahead.

Copyright © 2005 by Penelope Rowlands