‘Paris was a shock,’ Norine recalled. ‘We arrived in the city in the middle of a coal strike so for several days in the week there was only candlelight. We were issued with bread coupons and told to keep a close watch on our passports because of theft.’ Nothing went quite as planned. The sisters were due to continue their travels, by train, to Switzerland, where they were going to study for a year. But after waiting at the railway station for several hours they discovered that their train had already left.
We tried to call the American Embassy and, not knowing how to use the pay phone, a gentleman stopped to offer his help. We had all kinds of do’s and don’ts from our mother and did not know what to do. We noticed he was not French – he told us he was from Russia, but was a White Russian. He kept repeating ‘I White Russian!’ and we had no idea what that meant but thought it sounded like a good thing. We knew that Russia was a big concern right after the war.
He offered to drive the girls to the American Embassy, and they accepted as he said he wanted to do something ‘nice for Americans’. He had a Volkswagen – a car they had never seen before, and it made a big impression on them. When they eventually returned home, Norine and Marilyn never dared tell this story as they knew their parents would be furious.
Then they discovered that the H?tel George V, where they thought they had rooms, was overbooked due to a UN conference. Arrangements were made instead at the Plaza Athénée but the girls were young, it was after midnight and ‘we were very frightened … We had no idea that it was such a good hotel and complained. The clerk said if it was good enough for Madame Roosevelt we would be OK.’
Once settled, the girls went shopping, visiting stores whose names resonated from American magazines. They went to Hermès, which that day to their surprise was candlelit, to buy gloves for family and friends, and then on to a delicious lunch of roast duck at Maxim’s, ‘chosen because that was the only name we knew from catalogues’. Two ladies from the Embassy then took them to a Molyneux show – one of very few fashion houses showing at that time. At the end of their trip the sisters bumped into a schoolfriend from Illinois, Julie Loeffel, who spoke so little French that she could not even get her sunglasses fixed, so the trio went shopping together at Dior, where Julie was swiftly spotted and hired as a house model. Julie lingered in Paris and was selected to model one of the couturier’s most extraordinary ball gowns, the Venus, fashioned from grey silk tulle with a glittering overlay of scallop-shaped petals said to have been inspired by Botticelli’s Venus, and embellished with small pearl clusters, sequins and crystals. Reluctantly, after a year she returned to live in Glencoe, Illinois.
These young ingénues who knew nothing about life outside the United States may have been cosseted by their parents’ deep pockets, but nonetheless were imbued with a spirit of adventure, both excited and repelled by risk-taking. And Julie’s story illustrates the powerful, magnetic appeal to Americans of Paris as a thrilling city where dreams could still come true. Barbara Probst Solomon, in early 1948 a young American would-be writer, was obsessed by a certain idea of Paris which she had gleaned from books. She too had an adventurous spirit and was not bothered by strikes or lack of food. Barbara grew up in a privileged, cosmopolitan Jewish family in a magnificent house in Westport, Connecticut, where individualism was encouraged. The family were neighbours of ‘Jay’ Gatsby, or at least the man she believes was F. Scott Fitzgerald’s model for Gatsby. Both parents were highly cultured intellectuals whose lives had been damaged by the First World War, during which her father* had been badly gassed in the trenches near Amiens and so spent three years in an American field hospital recovering, while her older brother had served in the Second. As a sick child, Barbara had spent hours in bed reading illustrated books about Paris, especially Madeline by Ludwig Bemelmans, first published in 1939, swiftly graduating to the semifictional Proust. From the age of seventeen she had been desperate to go to Paris instead of college in the US; now her parents agreed under one condition: that her artistic mother would accompany her on the transatlantic voyage.