The World of Carmel Snow: Editor-in-chief of Harper's Bazaar

PROLOGUE

Carmel Snow died suddenly on May 7, 1961, exactly one week after she and I had concluded a long, intensive period of collaboration on her memoirs. The first tribute to her appeared in Eugenia Sheppard’s column in the New York Herald Tribune, and because it beautifully places and pictures Carmel Snow, I have asked permission to quote from it.

THEY REMEMBER CARMEL

Carmel Snow was a bit of a witch. The slim little woman, ex-editor of Harper’s Bazaar, who died Monday was, in her time, feared, catered to, and almost superstitiously respected for her uncanny insight into unhatched fashion trends. (She knows, they used to say as they studied her poker face at fashion shows).

Her deep, throaty voice and spellbinding delivery rolled out every year at the Fashion Group’s Waldorf shows in paeans to French fashion, especially Balenciaga. While she was idolizing Balenciaga she herself became the idol of the American fashion world. …

Today they remember her, though not so much as the ultimate fashion pro, the sure-fire authority on what will be what, but as an enchanting little woman who lived the elegance she preached. . . .

Tom Brigance thinks of Carmel Snow at home in a mauve housecoat. With that blue-white hair of hers, she looked like a peony. At lunch with her in Paris, The Paris women all turned round to look at her. …

Everyone expected Carmel Snow to look like Carmel Snow, and she always did. It was a big assignment but she never let the fashion world down, according to John Fairchild, publisher of Women’s Wear Daily. I’ll never forget her in that white Balenciaga hat trimmed with a red rose.

What a wonderful way to go down in fashion history, not just as the great editor and fashion authority who always guessed right, but as a bewitching little person who wore the prettiest housecoats or hats. Nobody would have been happier about it than Carmel Snow.

Nobody would. But she had a story that she wanted to tell. Because she operated almost entirely by instinct and intuition, she honestly sought in her retirement to learn the secret of her success and pass it on. Since much of her material was tape recorded, I have been able to reproduce it in her own words. Try to listen for the deep, throaty voice with a trace of a Dublin accent.

M.L.A.

1

One evening in 1948 I was half-listening to the radio when I heard the rasping voice of Walter Winchell: "Flash! The romance of the year is between Carmel Snow of Harper’s Bazaar and Christian Dior. Naturally I could hardly believe my ears, and frankly my first impulse was to sue for enough money to retire on for life. My lawyer heard the broadcast at the same moment and phoned me to say, You’ve just made a hundred thousand dollars."

Instead of a hundred thousand dollars, I got from Winchell one of the few retractions he ever made (it was clever, if equally outrageous: Same magazine. Different girl.) and from Dior a dozen American Beauty roses with a card, To my ‘fiancée.’ Tian. I also, I think, got the theme for this book. At that time I had no thought of writing my memoirs (actually, retirement was the last thing I was interested in), but I suddenly realized that although a personal romance with a great designer was equally uninteresting to a happily married woman, my romance with Design itself, with Fashion, has been the mainspring of my active existence. I think my life as the editor of a great fashion magazine has been a long love affair. And now that I have retired (without the fortune), I think my not-so-secret romance can be told.

It was a late-blooming romance, as often happens in Ireland, where you find sons and daughters waiting to marry until their mothers release them by dying peacefully in their arms. In Ireland, moreover, fashion hasn’t the all-pervasive glamor it has in America and especially France. It could be happening, as Irish stories begin, that I was born with an instinct for fashion, but I was born in a suburb of Dublin, where the great Maud Gonne’s dusty black dresses attracted no more and no less attention than the plumes and laces that rode in the Viceroy’s carriage. Joyce remembered the jingle jingle jaunted jingling of a Viceregal procession, but he didn’t describe, as Proust would have done, the clothes worn by the Viceroy’s lady.

Lord Aberdeen was the Viceroy when I was born, and his Countess, without knowing it, changed the course of my life. In 1886, the year before my mother left a dinner party just in time to produce me, Lady Aberdeen organized the Irish Industries Association. This was when Ireland was still in the grip of poverty such as America has never known, not even in a depression. The object of the Association was to find markets for the home and cottage industries that kept the country barely alive, and Lady Aberdeen persuaded my father, Peter White, to become its Honorary Secretary. As the managing director of the Irish Woollen Manufacturing and Export Company, he made frequent trips to America and had already brought back orders for Irish crochet that kept hundreds of women employed when starvation stared them in the face. In 1888 he and my mother accompanied the Aberdeens to Chicago on an important mission: to arrange for an Irish Village at the World’s Fair that was to be held there in the summer of 1893. If anything could promote Irish handicrafts, this great exposition would do it.

When the arrangements were made my father was put in charge of organizing the Village, and in February of 1893 he toured Ireland with Lady Aberdeen to pick the colleens who would represent the Irish industries. The weather was bad, travel by rail and carriage and outside-car was exhausting, and my father already had lung trouble. He caught pneumonia, in those days a desperately serious illness, and a few weeks later he was dead.

My earliest memory is being taken by my nurse to see my father laid out like a waxen image in the drawing room of our house in Dalkey. Now that I have no fear of death whatever, it seems incredible that I could have been affected as I was, but that image of death haunted my dreams 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.

The earliest school lesson I learned was writing, and I remember the very words: Loretta Abbey, Dalkey, in a large childish scrawl not too different, I’m afraid, from my handwriting today. Our house overlooking the beautiful bay of Dublin had been rented by my parents from their friend Michael Davitt, the Irish patriot. Now, with six small children to provide for, my mother had to plan a new future. My older sister Christine and I were sent to the convent next door while the house was dismantled, and our return home was to our Grandfather Mayne’s house, Cremorne, in Terenure.

My mother had made a momentous decision: To take over her husband’s tremendous responsibility and run the Irish Village at the Chicago World’s Fair. My two oldest brothers, Tom and Desmond, were dispatched to relatives of my father’s in Clonolvy, while Christine and I, with the two youngest boys, Victor and Jim, were sent to my mother’s family.

So Cremorne is the first place that I remember vividly, though many later visits to that big square house set in the midst of fields and gardens (the tree-lined driveway led from a gatehouse like an adorable doll house) quicken my memory of the large household ruled by the terrifying, Jove-like figure of my grandfather. Four young grandchildren can’t have been too welcome there, since four unmarried daughters and two unmarried sons were still living at home, but our saintly grandmother was already schooled in patience. Her husband was passionately fond of music— from morning till night on Sundays the house shook with the organ music he played to her uncomprehending ears— and her holidays were one long agony of sitting beside him at concerts and operas in Bayreuth, not knowing one note of music from another.

Our Aunt Clare’s musical taste was somewhat different. She was the belle of the household. When her beaux weren’t strolling through the hot-house with her, or out on the tennis court, they were clustered about the piano while she sang to them in her lilting Irish voice and we children hung about like little pitchers. Her favorite song, and ours, was prophetic if you substitute Carmel for Brigid:

"Brigid alannah come jump out of bed,

Shove up the window and stick out your head,

Fly with me now to countries afar—

Begorrah, bejabers, bedad and arragh."

I can’t say the aunts always loved us. We also got in the way of our Aunt Gertrude’s beaux, and our Aunt Suie, who was the born old maid destined to look after the servants all her life, was forever complaining about us as well. Our Uncles Gerald and Vincent were the last two in a family of fourteen and near enough our age to egg us on to mischief. Our grandfather’s high bicycle was sacrosanct, and we punctured its tires. The dining room clock had a bronze figure holding a stick for the pendulum that was irresistible to us. We reached our little hands in and stopped it. Thunder and lightning rolled about our heads.

It was our darling grandmother who loved us, and 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.

My mother’s determination had meanwhile taken her a long way in that period when women, particularly Irishwomen, seldom ventured beyond the protection of their families. In Chicago the Irish Village was a wild success. From the entrance copied from the twelfth-century chapel built by Cormac, the bishop king of Munster, to the reproduction of Blarney Castle housing the Blarney Stone itself, visitors were enchanted with it.

The arrival in Chicago of that famous stone was never forgotten by my Aunt Agnes, the fourth unmarried sister of my mother’s sent to the Fair with her by my grandfather. The Blarney Stone is supposed to make anyone who kisses it a great talker, so no Irishman is going to miss an opportunity like that if he can help it. When the stone was unpacked the rush for it was something only my mother could cope with. She ‘put her foot down with a strong hand’, Aunt Agnes said, "but I found two little chips broken off on the journey and folded them in my handkerchief. She wasn’t beyond kissing them herself."

Visitors to the Fair were allowed to kneel down and kiss the Blarney Stone after they’d viewed the exhibits in the picturesque thatched cottages that ringed the Village. Here by a turf fire over which the potato-pot boiled they watched lacemaking as it was done in the cottages of Carrickmac-ross, or bog-oak carving, or spinning-wheels preparing homegrown wool for a Donegal weaver. Here was a dairy with some of the pretty colleens as dairymaids, and here in Tara’s Hall a friend of my mother’s played the harp that was to appear one day at our door like a shrouded apparition.

My mother lived in a cottage on the Village grounds. I never saw it, but a grandfather clock that stands in my country house today came to me from the collection of beautiful old furniture she brought with her. Though it was my father who organized the Irish Village, it was my mother who made it the hit of the Fair. I asked her once how she did it. Well, she said in her wonderful Dublin accent, there I was in my widow’s bonnet, and the newspaper gentlemen were very kind to me.

The newspaper gentlemen, including the famous Finley Peter Dunne, were fairly bewitched. My mother was a very magnetic woman, with heavy-lashed hazel-gray eyes, a dimpled smile, and auburn hair braided on the top of her head like a crown. She was vain of her 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. Margaret Anglin, one of the great actresses of her day, became her closest friend in Chicago. And at the Irish Village she met four sisters who were later to change the course of my life once more.

What changed it now, when the Fair closed, was her visit to Lord and Lady Aberdeen in Canada, where Lord Aberdeen was again Viceroy. Because of the success of the Village, they urged my mother to open a shop for Irish handicrafts in Chicago. Some of the exhibits remained to be sold and more of the real thing, not Jersey City imitations, could be imported from Ireland—Donegal tweeds with the smell of the bog in them, laces and knitted goods and the fine embroidered linens that I was to sponsor, years later, when Sybil Connolly brought them to America. My mother had made such a splendid representative, they were more than willing to back her.

For an Irishwoman, backing was also needed from her family, so home she sailed to Dublin and a long argument with her father. My grandfather was terrifying not only to small children. A woman’s place was at home he said, even if living in Ireland did mean for her dragging the devil by the tail. If my mother hadn’t matched him in determination my story would be a different one altogether. But match him she did, on every point except one. She was not to take her children back with her to Chicago. My grandfather had once visited that terrible city, Where every cab driver did him. If her boys grew up there they would grow up thieves and pickpockets. The girls might join her later if she made a go of the shop, but the boys would get their education in Ireland, make no mistake about that.

Life at Cremorne wasn’t easier after our mother sailed away again. But when she sent for my sister and me, 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. I know that a friend of my mother’s met us and put us on a Pullman train for Chicago, but I know it because I’ve been told. My sister remembers being given a banana and hiding it under the seat when she’d taken a bite because she’d never tasted a banana before.

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!

With our mother’s departure for work each morning it was also lonely. We were still too young for school our mother thought (the convent in Dalkey had been just a place to get us out of the way), and none of her friends here had children to play with us. I recall that we weren’t allowed—and wanted so desperately!—to play with the janitor’s children. We used to watch them longingly, but what would our grandfather say if we learned bad manners and got ugly voices? The flourishing shop on Wabash Avenue now did a certain amount of dressmaking so we had pretty clothes, but they were different clothes, and since they were designed to last two years, this first year they were bound to be too big. We felt too small for our clothes, and this huge building, and this strange new world.

The shop had taken on fitters and seamstresses because the beautiful blouses and underwear sent over from Ireland were not only dowdy; they never conformed to American sizes. (The bills were nonconformist too. There were always two bills in the shipments, the right bill and the wrong bill for the customs. That was at the time when the saying was, If all the prayers of Donegal were listened to, the McKinley tariff would be repealed.) One day two women walked into the shop and asked for work—they could sew, they said. They could indeed—I’ve never forgotten the dolls they dressed for my sister and me at Christmas. Because of the perfection of their work, they enlarged my mother’s business. Because of the quiet retirement of their manner and because no one knew where they’d come from, they were mysterious even to us children. Only when they announced at the end of a year that they must leave did we learn their story. They were nuns from St. Louis who had been waiting out their bishop’s decision on a disagreement they had had with their Mother Superior. The bishop had now declared in their favor and they returned to their convent.

A convent seemed the solution to our problem, too—the problem of what to do with my sister and me. Once more we left home, this time for Davenport, Iowa. All of Sunday, the one day we were allowed to read for pleasure, I would be stuck in a book—we were still shy, different, foreign children—but we adored the nuns, and if my mother hadn’t discovered that one of our schoolmates was the daughter of a policeman, we might have come out of our tight little Irish shells. Descendants of the McGuillicuddy of the Reeks would never associate with a policeman! So after spending the summer in Ireland, as we were to do for many years, we went back to Chicago and a Protestant day school.

The night before we entered Dearborn Seminary I remember sitting up till all hours consoling my sister. I was the more adventurous, but I got a bit of a shock the next day. A teacher called out our names. When she came to Carmel White, What a peculiar name, she said, and I said, thinking the whole world was Catholic—I never dreamed of anything else— I’m named after Our Lady of Mount Carmel.

She never raised her head. A relative, I suppose, she remarked, and went on with the roll call. That anyone wouldn’t