It Isn't All Mink: The Autobiography of Ginette Spanier, Directrice of the House of Balmain

By Ginette Spanier and Noel Coward

Ginette Spanier discovered her talent for ‘selling very expensive things to very rich people’ at Fortnum and Mason in the 1930s. This uninhibited and amusing account takes her from hiding in occupied France to the world of haute couture, as Directrice of the House of Balmain from 1947 to 1976 and friend to stars of stage and screen including Laurence Olivier, Marlene Dietrich and Vivien Leigh.

First published in 1959, this book is part of the V&A Fashion Perspectives Series. Selected by V&A publishing in consultation with our world-leading fashion curators, the Fashion Perspectives series offers an access all areas pass to the glamorous world of fashion. Models, magazine editors and the designers themselves take readers behind the scenes at the likes of Balenciaga, Balmain, Chanel, Dior, Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue in the golden age of couture.

• Language: English
• Publisher: V&A Publishing
• Release date: Feb 16, 2017
• ISBN: 9781851779208

Ginette Spanier

Ginette Spanier was Directrice of the House of Balmain from 1947 to 1976

Book preview

BOOK 1

Upbringing

1 – PARIS

I was what is called beautifully brought up. Any slips I have made were certainly not my mother’s fault. She took pains to make a ‘lady’ out of me. She also discouraged my theatrical instincts. I struggled against it. I still do. My mother and all my family were always so sure of what was right. I was not.

I was born in Paris before World War One in an atmosphere of white boots, white gaiters, white gloves. The silver box which now holds saccharine on our breakfast table used to be filled with a paste called Blanco and a little damp sponge. When we went visiting, our governess would dab whitening on the toes of our boots before we walked upstairs. I remember how the Blanco went grey and gradually became white as it dried.

My mother’s pride was that no imitation lace had ever crossed our threshold. It seems that the sight of my behind, covered in little frilly drawers, each frill edged with real lace, as I bent over making sand pies on the beach of Villers-sur-Mer, was a joy to behold. I was one and a half.

My name, as entered in the Mairie of the 17th Arrondissement of Paris, was Jenny Yvonne Spanier. Early on people started calling me Ginette. They still do, except for my husband and Danny Kaye who stick to Jenny and Lena Horne who calls me ‘Muggsie’ after a famous trumpeter called Muggsie Spanier.

I have wonderful parents. My mother Alice is tall, French, distinguished, discreet. I am a, show-off, with an enormous mouth and a temper, so there has been occasional loving friction between us. My father, Max Spanier, is English but of French extraction. He is kind, generous, optimistic. He shouts a great deal. He is also extremely brave.

Christmas Humphreys, QC, who wrote a book all about one of my father’s electrifying adventures called The Great Pearl Robbery of 1913, calls him ‘a Latin in temperament, with the inborn capacity of such for playing a dramatic part ... valiant in action ... a man who frets his nerves to pieces at delay.’

You see, he is a pearl expert whose knowledge is so acute that he can recognise any pearl if he has once handled it. In 1912 a famous necklace, worth £150,000, was stolen from one of my father’s friends. There was a very slight suggestion that father’s friend had ‘arranged’ things to get the insurance. This made my father fighting mad, to the point where he offered himself to decoy the crooks. He would play the part of a receiver of stolen goods. And one hot August afternoon, in the Holborn Viaduct Hotel, he faced three armed criminals and kept his nerve so well that he collected enough evidence to recover fifty nine of the sixty one pearls that made up the famous necklace and send the criminals to prison.

Imagine the atmosphere that this created in my childhood. No wonder my mother seemed nervous. No wonder, when father took us out for Sunday outings, he kept looking back out of the window of the cab as if he were being followed. He had to give evidence at the Old Bailey, and was accused by our relations of having run us all into danger. (Perhaps he did. Anyway, I love him for it.)

He used to bring back parcels of pearls, folded in paper, casually as patent medicines. He threw them on the table at mealtimes, saying, ‘Alice, what do you think of these?’ My mother always seemed completely unimpressed.

My childhood was safe and happy. I was the eldest of three – we were three girls. Adrienne Rose (known as Didine) comes next to me, very close. She is a serious replica of me. She has become a very good interior decorator. She had her early training with Syrie Maugham (Mrs Somerset Maugham of pickled furniture fame) who was not an easy lady. And now Didine is the best of the free-lance decorators at Peter Jones. She should be writing a book about her extraordinary experiences, instead of worrying about pelmets and close carpeting. She cannot say her ‘Rs.’ She does not swallow them, as Marlene Dietrich and Frank Muir do. She rolls them.

She tells wonderful stories. In our twenties we quite often went out for the evening together and on one occasion we were to be picked up by a very grand limousine. Didine was changing at the back of the Syrie Maugham shop when she heard the shop bell. Half unbuttoned down the back she shouted out, ‘Come on in, Ginette,’ before discovering to her horror that her visitors were King Edward VIII and Mrs Simpson. Didine, in spite of her déshabillé, curtsied low, rather priding herself on ‘carrying the whole thing off with an air.’ Then I arrived, waving a stocking in each hand. (I had decided, to save time, to change in the car going along.) So I curtsied too, stockings fluttering like the flags in the Trafalgar Day signals. Both Spanier girls, half-dressed, arrived very late indeed for their evening party. The final blow came when our hostess refused to believe why we were so late. ‘Yes, dears, yes,’ she said absent-mindedly, ‘punctuality is the politeness of Princes.’

Janine was our baby: our dearly beloved doted-over baby.

She was born English in our sunny Paris flat. She had an English complexion, a slow easy English attitude to life. When she grew up her dream was to live in the country and go with the dog and fetch her husband at the station every night.

She found the husband, Sam Kirkaldy, now a colonel in the regular army. She braved submarines by going to India to marry him, in 1944. Eight months later in Delhi she died of polio, in an iron lung, asking her husband whether she would still be able to have a child. We all miss her every day.

On my sixth birthday, I met one of the great influences of my life: Muriel Suzette Aubrey Chapman, an Irish girl of twenty-three, who came over from England to look after the little Spanier sisters.

From that moment onwards, my life took on a pattern, an equilibrium, a certain discipline which has lasted to this day. L’ennui is a desperate part of the existence of almost every child; on my sixth birthday, it disappeared from mine.

My first meeting with ‘Miss,’ as all French children called their English governesses, was in accordance with the best traditions of courtesy and decorum. I was full of curiosity at the arrival of the English lady, so, holding my small sister protectingly by the hand, dressed in a little plaid frock with a lace collar – my five curls impeccably bobbing round my head, I went into her room on that first memorable morning, and with my widest grin, I said very socially, ‘This is my leetle sistère,’ a sentence I had carefully learnt for the occasion. We immediately got on like a house on fire. There and then I refused to call her ‘Miss,’ so ‘Miss Shapman’ she became on that first day. She ended up as Deedee, our beloved Deedee.

At the beginning of the reign of my new friend I was of course on my best behaviour. I did her the honours of Paris, my small Paris of the 17th arrondissement – trotting at her side. Then, my spoilt, everyday nature came back to the surface and the struggle began. It was violent, sometimes bitter but, on both sides, never without respect for the opponent. It ended with full honours to Deedee. I was turned over, my knickers taken down (those knickers with the real lace frills) and soundly beaten with the back of a hair brush – an ebony hair brush with embossed silver initials M. S. A. C. Jokes are still made about those embossed silver initials. Deedee maintains to this day that I was just ‘slightly tapped.’ The fight was over. I was a slave and from then onwards started the loveliest, gayest nursery existence that any little girl has ever enjoyed.

The first result of my ‘pash’ for ‘Miss Shapman’ was to send me overboard for England. After all, my father also was English. A country that could claim those two was the one for me. Passionately English I became on the spot. (I have never regretted this decision taken so long ago.)

That was the great influence in my childhood: the English one. Paris lay all around me of course; there was the boulangerie at the corner where we would buy our favourite treat: a loaf of English bread. It was called pain de mie, white and soft inside, smooth crust on the outside and delicious eaten with thick strawberry jam. I can remember eating it in the nursery with the hanging lamp pulled down low over the table and the corners of the room in darkness.

That was a winter treat. In the summer we took a large house in the country, or at the seaside, where the family came from all over Europe to stay. I have an enormous family: and they would gather in our house from England, Austria and Germany. I didn’t like any of them much, except my mother’s brother, Uncle Charlie, who was my hero.

He was very attractive: a bachelor. (I got jaundice when he married, which showed a sad disturbance.) He had made his fortune in America. He used to give outsize presents: a doll’s pram, a bicycle and (much later) my first dress from a famous Couturier. I remember that occasion well. I was about eighteen and Uncle Charlie took me to ‘Philippe et Gaston’ in the Champs-Élysées.

It was my first experience of the fuss and drama and tradition and ceremony of La Haute Couture. There were the premières vendeuses like black-robed birds of prey, obsequious and yet somehow intimate with their customers. There were the secondes vendeuses, little slaves running around madly. It was a great emotion being the focal point of all this: the Customer.

The Collection passed in front of us. Not one dress did I like. I said so. To have an evening dress from a Grand Couturier was such an event (after all, it might never happen to me again) that I could not compromise. I had to have the dress of my dreams.

It was not in that Collection. Uncle Charlie was absolutely furious. I see his point. A girl of eighteen who thought she knew better than Monsieur Philippe or Monsieur Gaston ... (whoever they were). But I was firm. Either the perfect dress or nothing at all. Finally I was taken to Molyneux and there I got the perfect dress.

My family’s great theme, incomprehensible to me, was moderation. That was the golden rule of existence. Moderation in behaviour, riches, everything. That was what they preached. We never had butter and jam on bread together. I wanted to grab at life with both hands. I will never forget the scene when I went three times on the merry-go-rounds in the Champs-Élysées. My grandfather with his square white beard, smelling of some lovely toilet water, went on and on about it. And he ended his peroration with this incredible question: ‘If you go three times on the merry-go-rounds, how many times do you expect Rothschild to go?’

Now why should I not go on the merry-go-rounds as often as Rothschild? Because I had less money? All right then, one day I would have enough money, if that was what was needed. I would not only go on the merry-go-rounds in the Champs-Élysées as often as I wanted, but also on all the merry-go-rounds ... of life itself.

Nowadays, when I meet the Rothschilds at a party, I always giggle inside when I think what a much better time I am sure I am having than they are. They may have been more often on the roundabouts when I was a child, but how I’ve made up for it since!

The great fuss made about money was never quite clear to me when I was a child. We used to visit a great deal and I had lots of little friends. Many of my friends lived in houses that seemed to me like palaces. There were menservants with white gloves and a hush about the place. My best friend Manon and her mother Aunt Coco, and Aunt Coco’s sister Aunt Geo, all seemed to have more money than we did. Tante Geo used to lean over my cot to kiss me good night. She smelt lovely, wore enormous pearls round her neck, had copper-coloured hair and a soft fur coat almost the same colour. I suppose it was sable. I am sure, thinking of the way Aunt Geo looked, that it was her influence that made me long subconsciously for my first mink coat.

The minky way of life, as lived by Tante Coco and Tante Geo, their children Jean and Armand and Manon was something that I longed for. Manon had boy cousins (Jean and Armand) and naturally curly hair. That was richness.... I went through agonies having my hair curled. I had bigoudis – little leather things with ribbons on either side which divided my hair neatly into five portions – twirled up into pulling and hurting torture every night when I lay down to sleep.... Manon didn’t.

When the Second World War came along the Germans took Manon and Tante Coco, and Manon’s two children and put them in an oven and burnt them. And they took Jean ... my almost brother ... and tortured him in the Mont Valérien prison before they shot him. And because he was a Jew they tore bits off his last letter before sending it to his wife.

Even when I was a child I can remember hating the Germans. My father was an Alsatian before he became a naturalised British subject; and he hated the Germans with violence. He used to tell us how when the Kaiser came to Strasbourg our grandfather had left the town rather than hang a German flag in the window. So, when I refused to learn German in my nursery Father backed me up.

In July 1914 we went to Belgium for a two-month holiday. Father was to join us later. Suddenly a wild telephone call from him in Paris (a telephone call from another country was an event in itself) told us that war was upon us, that we were to go to Ostend where he would meet us.

In Ostend we found ourselves cut off from Paris. All trains were commandeered for the Army. We must go to London. We could go back to Paris from London once things had calmed down. Father went off to the port to find a boat to take us to England.

We children were undressed and put to bed. I got down on my knees as usual for my evening prayers. I just wouldn’t get up. Deedee, while trying to respect my religious fervour, was in a state of nerves. Finally she burst out at me in her most Irish accent, ‘Ginette, do get up.’ I looked up at her, it seems, and said, ‘But Deedee, I want to go to England so much and I know I can only go if there’s a war and I can see that’s wicked.’

‘Leave it to God, Ginette,’ said Deedee.

2 – LONDON

That winter was jolly cold: there was no central heating and my hands had broken out in chilblains. Nevertheless our arrival at Daleham Gardens had been a huge success. My aunt had fainted and Father burst into tears.

Being British I found was not at all what I had expected. My life changed completely and all my efforts were bent on adapting myself to my new existence. I wanted to be unrecognisable from all the little girls in gym tunics whom I saw walking about in Hampstead. I saw myself (as in the pages of a book by Angela Brazil) in a hard straw hat, with a hat band and a hockey stick. I was very clothes conscious indeed.

Mother entered us at a school called Frognal School, which did not have hard straw hats, but did play hockey and did have a school song ‘Labore et Honore’ which had been written by Evelyn Waugh’s father. Alec and Evelyn used to play cricket with us and Evelyn was no better at cricket than I was. I was not very good at hockey either: all that bullying off and floundering in the mud with those aggressive girls.

‘Self control, Jenny,’ ‘Public spirit, girls,’ and ‘Go it, Frenchie, don’t waddle,’ are the three slogans I remember from Frognal School. The first everyone said all the time, the second we heard when we were walking in a long crocodile and had to step into the road to let someone pass on the pavement – the third rang in my ears in glory the day I won the Junior 1oo yards.

Otherwise my life was dominated by my chilblains. There was nothing we could do about them: we tried everything, even a dark brown sticky ointment that oozed from the bandages and stained everything. One day Mother’s help, Mrs Thorn (I don’t think she was the one who had religion, and filled the house with tracts) suggested we should consult an Indian Princess called Madame Cavalier who lived in Carlyle Square, Chelsea.

Madame Cavalier was perfectly splendid about our chilblains. She received us in great pomp and mystery, wearing a beautiful sari and she massaged our horrible fingers. Not only did she cure us but she introduced the Spanier family to the Queen.

She organised a charity fête in her house and all the star parts went to the Spanier women. Mother represented France in the Grand Tableau of the Allies, I recited a poem written by Madame Cavalier herself which started, ‘I hear a bell, a silvery bell,’ my sister Didine danced in a Greek chiffon tunic and stockings (Queen Mary would not tolerate bare legs) and Janine, our darling, presented the bouquet. The Queen said, ‘Thank you,’ and Janine answered, ‘Don’t mention it.’

When the war ended we took a large house in Finchley Road, Golders Green, and Mother converted the top floor into a double bedroom and sitting-room for Didine and myself. And we started to