The Charmed Life of Rosamond Bernier
Some of my Lives: A Scrapbook Memoir, by Rosamond Bernier
Few people can look back on a life as rich as Rosamond Bernier's. Published to coincide with her 95th birthday last October, Some of my Lives: A Scrapbook Memoir, gives us tantalizing glimpses into the many fascinating personalities Bernier has known in the course of her long life. Artists, musicians, and fashion designers whose names are household words populate this witty, charming book. Leonard Bernstein, Coco Chanel, Aaron Copland, Alberto Giacometti, Frida Kahlo, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Gertrude Stein...practically the whole pantheon of the arts in the 20th century makes an appearance in its pages.
Ms. Bernier was born in 1916 in Philadelphia to an English mother and an American father who was a successful lawyer and chairman of the Board of Directors of the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra. Samuel Rosenbaum's Hungarian Jewish parents "said the Kadish over him" when he married an Episcopalian, and Rosamond was brought up like a wealthy English girl, with riding lessons, a French governess, and frequent visits to England on luxury ships.
When Rosamond was eight years old her mother died. Two years later, when she was not quite ten, her governess fell ill and her father put her on a ship by herself to return to her English boarding school. Every evening aboard, Bernier would change into a party dress, go down to the dining room for her favorite dish of cold smoked tongue, then proceed to the smoking room for gambling. "I had spectacular luck," Bernier writes. Her good fortune seems to have held remarkably well through most of her life.
During a childhood steeped in music, Bernier played the harp 
and came to know many legendary personalities such as Otto Klemperer, Eugene Ormandy, Leopold Stokowski, Walter Gieseking, Sergei Rachmaninov, and Jose Iturbi. She was most impressed by Klemperer, "not only because he was enormously tall, way over six feet, but also because of the jocular way he threw butterballs at his wife at table." Stokowski "had a seductive, caressing accent, entirely self-invented. He was born in London." Ormandy "was not given to understatement." Asked by Bernier's father how things had gone after a conducting tour, Ormandy would invariably reply, "I was a zenzation."
Bernier attended Sarah Lawrence College and, during a holiday in Mexico after her sophomore year, met Aaron Copland, who was "very hard up" and told her he missed marmalade with his breakfast. The next day Bernier "enlisted an obliging boyfriend" to deliver a whole carton of marmalade to Copland, beginning a life-long friendship. Bernier returned to college but left without graduating to marry the young man who had driven her to deliver the marmalade. The wedding took place in Bernier's family's home in Philadelphia, and Aaron Copland attended bearing a wonderful gift: he had written out every word of Rosamond's favorite song and orchestrated it "for sole performance on Peggy's Harp and Lew's Guitar."
Lewis A. Riley Jr., Bernier's first husband, was a handsome and wealthy American living in Mexico, where he was developing the coastal land around Acapulco. There, Bernier learned to pilot a plane, witnessed the birth of a volcano, and assembled a menagerie that included an ocelot, an anteater, a marmoset,
a kinkajou with a drinking problem, tropical birds and, most unusual of all, a small penguin from Antarctica who became a favorite swimming companion. While living in Mexico, Bernier became friends with Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera and hosted many colorful personalities, among them Jane and Paul Bowles, and a drunken gringo who had been thrown off a bus. He turned out to be Malcolm Lowry, the author of Under the Volcano.
After an amicable divorce, Bernier went New York for a visit, and a friend invited her for drinks and introduced her to the full "high command" of Condé Nast. A few days later, with zero experience, Bernier had received not one, but three job offers at Vogue! Bernier laughed when Condé Nast's CEO, Iva Patcevitch, proposed a starting salary of forty-five dollars a week. "Why, Mr. Patcevitch, my ignorance is worth more than that," she told him. When the offer was raised to seventy-five dollars a week, she took the job and was dispatched to Paris to report on the reopening of the French fashion houses after the war. By 1947, she was Vogue's first European features editor.
Bernier's first important couture show in Paris was presented by the house of Lucien Lelong. The clothes were designed by "a shy, cherubic, unknown young man" who two years later would revolutionize the fashion landscape with the New Look. Of course, he was Christian Dior. Bernier soon got to know the top couturiers and "their kindnesses were extraordinary." Often she was lent clothes or was called up before a sale. At one point she had her own vendeuse at Balenciaga, the motherly Madame Maria, who once sent her to the Madrid branch to have outfits made at a fraction of the Paris price.
In the mid-1950s, Bernier left Vogue and founded the art magazine L'Oeil (The Eye) with her second husband, French journalist Georges Bernier, who does not get a mention in the book. Once again, luck and friendship helped compensate for lack of experience, as Picasso offered her "un regalo" and sent her to his sister's house in Barcelona, where he had kept a large body of unpublished work. When the first issue of L'Oeil appeared, it caused a sensation. Over her years editing L'Oeil, Bernier wrote about - and became friends with - the likes of Matisse, Giacometti, Henry More, Joan Miró, Braque, Fernand Léger and just about every major name in 20th century art.
In 1970, after 20 years of marriage, Bernier found herself suddently divorced and jobless, an event she vaguely alludes to as a "period of per
sonal upheaval." She moved to New York and agreed to give a few college lectures, which soon turned into a career as a "professional talker" (her words). Five years later, she married the British art critic John Russell in a lavish ceremony hosted by Philip Johnson in his famous Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut. The all-star guest list included Aaron Copland, Pierre Matisse (son of Henri), Virgil Thomson, Andy Warhol, and Helen Frankenthaler, as well as Leonard Bernstein, who wrote the music for the occasion.
Bernier's next chapter found her lecturing on 20th century art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Delivered without notes and in stunning evening dress, Bernier's lectures sold out months in advance. She stopped lecturing after some 250 performances in 2008, the year Russell died after 33 years of marriage. "They were wonderful years," Bernier says. "I treasure every one of them. " A year later Bernier began writing Some of my Lives.
Bernier's anecdotes keep you enthralled from page one and never flag. In one incident, all hotels are full and she ends up sleeping on Madame de Sévigné's bed at a Museum - as seen in the cover of Some of My Lives. On another occasion, she arranged the shoot where Horst took his famous photo of Gertrude Stein at Pierre Balmain's Paris salon.
The much-reproduced image shows Stein, a "massive unmovable monument," with her poodle Basket looking at a model in an evening gown. Bernier and Vogue illustrator Eric are the two small figures in the background.
Bernier's encounter with Coco Chanel in 1954 is one of the most riveting chapters in the book. Bernier had come prepared with questions, but she did not get to ask any of them. Chanel kept talking for nearly two hours and her observations on how women are perceived, what they should wear and how they ought to behave, her own trajectory and philosophy of life, reveal a complex, brilliant woman. I was spellbound.
If the book leaves you a bit jealous, wondering what it would be like to be born with a silver spoon in your mouth and with the gift of seeming as effortlessly charming and chic as Bernier, it is also an inspiration. Bernier has had a wonderful life, but her success owes as much to focus, determination, and hard work as it does to privilege and luck. Throughout, she shows an uncanny ability to be in the right place at the right time and to enchant everyone she meets. Although she reveals little about herself, it is possible to glimpse a woman of great resilience, optimism, generosity, and pluck. A lifetime member of the International Best-Dressed List, Bernier has written a very elegant memoir indeed.
