In 'Shocked,' Patricia Volk Honors Two Formative Femmes
A Tale Of Two Beauties
Volk's father thought his wife was the most beautiful woman in the world. Every year on her birthday, he gave Audrey the same present: a bottle of perfume called "Shocking" and made by Elsa Schiaparelli.
"And he would make the gift wrap himself out of as many $100 bills as it took to get the job done," Volk remembers.
The perfume was one connection between Audrey, her daughter and Schiaparelli. According to Dilys Blum, who curated a Schiaparelli show at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2003, there's at least one other connection.
"[Schiaparelli] knew what she wanted and she knew how to manipulate people," Blum says. Audrey was like that too: She wanted perfection and she knew how to achieve it.
Volk says her mother "had a vanity table in her bedroom that was entirely constructed of mirrors, even the drawers and the legs and the stool that she sat on. And on the top, there was a triptych of mirrors and she could look straight ahead and just see herself head-on, or she could glance side to side and see her profile."
At that vanity table, little Patty Volk watched her beloved mother pin back her hair, dip three fingers into a jar of cold cream and smear the cream on her cheeks.
Then, Volk writes:
She plucks four Kleenexes:
FRRRIIIP!
FRRRIIIP!
FRRRIIIP!
FRRRIIIP!
and tissues off the Pond's. Here she sometimes pauses, meets my eyes in the mirror and says, "Never let a man see you with cold cream on your face."