The Poet & The Horloger : The Enfant Terrible

Chloë Cassens is the representative of the Severin Wunderman Collection, the largest in the world by groundbreaking French artist Jean Cocteau (1889–1963). It forms the entire contents of the Musée Jean Cocteau–Collection Severin Wunderman, located in Menton, France. She is also the founder of Sacred Monster, a project that educates and celebrates the lives and legacies of Cocteau and Wunderman. Here, she gives 7Hollywood an inside glimpse into the connection between her grandfather, Gucci, and the subject of his obsession.

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In November of 2021, I woke up to my family’s group chat pinging, pinging, pinging. Ahead of the release of Ridley Scott’s House of Gucci, the author of the book that the film was based on had given an interview.

Instead of leading the conversation with discussion of the film or its leading lady, Sara Gay Forden spoke of another outsized figure: Severin Wunderman, my grandfather. She told a story that encapsulated his personality: in the late 1990s, she reached out to interview him for her book, to which he responded with a threat (“I was literally shaking in my boots”). But on a second ask, backed up with more work, he responded with an invitation to interview him that month, either at his château in the south of France, or his home in London.

“I spent five or six hours with him. He was an incredible person. I could have written a whole other book about Severin,” she said.

My family was excited, as it was very rare to see Severin’s name in print, let alone over a decade after his death. I read the article to my boyfriend at the time, who responded: “You should be the one to write the book about him.”

Then, one day in October 2023, I found myself in the elegant Parisian home of Dominique Marny, who is the head of the Comité Cocteau – and his closest living descendant. We were discussing Severin’s story, the one which, despite looming large over my family, remains a mystery to others.

“You know what Cocteau and your grandfather had in common?” she asked, her big blue eyes communicating that she had had a great epiphany. “They both could see what others couldn’t.”

Severin Wunderman was born November 19, 1938, in Brussels. His family included his parents as well as two older siblings. A Jewish family, all of them went into hiding while Belgium was under Nazi occupation, and all survived. Severin was a toddler, hidden in the network of Dom Bruno Reynders.

Dom Bruno placed Severin in a convent for blind children. As the only sighted child, he spent his time there leading the children around the grounds. At such a young age, he had no idea that he was hiding at all.

When the war ended and the family reunited, the time came to collect little Severin from the convent. He had spent his entire conscious life under the care of the nuns, who were ready to convert him to Catholicism and refused to return him to his father and brother.

So his father and brother kidnapped him. He did not know who they were, and went kicking and screaming. When pressed for details of this decades later, Severin would say that all he could remember was seeing dead bodies covering the forest floor of the Ardennes as they made their way back to the city. Shortly after this traumatic event, Severin’s beloved mother passed away. Nathan, who adored his wife – they would walk together after dinner, always holding hands – fell apart. So Severin made his way to Los Angeles, where his sister raised him.

A handful as a child and troublemaker as a teenager, he attended Fairfax High School and worked as a valet, parking cars at the infamous Garden of Allah on Sunset Boulevard. Ever entrepreneurial, he also managed a string of paperboys.

Following a botched surgery, he moved back to Brussels, where he married his first wife. In the 1970s, he immigrated again to Los Angeles. (Severin married and divorced seven times, leading his children to jokingly call him ‘Liz Taylor.’ He is survived by his children Nathan, Raphaelle, Deborah and Michael, and grandchildren Justin, Sadie, myself, Josephine, Max and Maya).

I have seen and heard Severin be ascribed several identities. Belgian, American, and Jew are the most frequently used; survivor, titan, and genius have also been in the mix. By the end of his life, he was known as “The Time Lord.” Although his passport was American, I have always perceived him as European, which was also the descriptor he’d use. And while his English was not too heavily accented, he had a tendency to quote odd, mis-translated proverbs, owing to the fact that he was a polyglot who spoke countless languages, sometimes learned via his romantic partners. It was this knowledge of language that

would lead to the chance of his lifetime.

As the legend goes, Severin had an idea. He wanted to pitch Aldo Gucci, Chairman of his family’s namesake company, this: a watch, branded exclusively for Gucci, priced to entice buyers who could become legacy clients over time. While now a mainstay of luxury fashion brands everywhere, who market and sell perfumes and lipsticks as their entry products, adding watches to the mix was at the time an unheard-of concept.

The lore states that Severin showed up at the offices without an appointment. A phone rang, nobody was there to answer it, and Severin picked it up. Aldo Gucci, expecting confirmation of a rendez-vous he was to have that evening, was annoyed by the younger man on the other end, and began to swear under his breath in the Florentine dialect of Italian that was his mother tongue.

Severin, who had picked up Florentine Italian from a girlfriend, more than understood the insults being lobbed his way, returned them and challenged Mr. Gucci to say it in person. If ever there was a Wunderman motto, it would be “he who throws the first punch, wins”.

They grabbed each other to fight, but instead burst out laughing. The long relationship between Aldo and Severin would lead to hundreds of millions of dollars earned for Gucci via Severin’s watch license, which kept the company afloat through years of financial hardship.

My grandfather revolutionized the world of timepieces; of that, there is no doubt. He put his earnings towards his collection of Jean Cocteau and his contemporaries – and to charity. Although not the most devout Jew, Severin put the most weight into the mitzvah of tzedakah, which is to give without expectation of receipt – including accolades or attention. Severin gave untold amounts of money to charitable causes, always under the condition of anonymity, although he accepted the title of Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2004.

Which leads me back to that late Parisian morning last year, where the descendant of Jean Cocteau gave a descendant of Severin Wunderman at least one answer to a frequently asked question: “What was it about Jean Cocteau that fascinated him so much?”

Mme. Marny cracked it when she said that it had to do with the eye, the ability to see what others couldn’t. Severin’s life started that way, in the most literal sense, leading those blind children around the convent; he would go on to see gaps in the market, opportunities to innovate and collaborate and where these sights settled, fortune was found. He saw the beauty and value in the life’s work of Jean Cocteau.

I recently watched an old interview of my grandfather’s and was astonished by many things. One of them was the total and unwavering confidence that he had in himself. Severin knew how remarkable his life’s trajectory was, but also recounted it as if the outcomes were obvious. He described having no other option in his life but to be self-reliant, and at the same time, simply knew that his success would be inevitable because he was relying on himself.

Eyes are a motif consistent throughout the work of Cocteau. They’re highlighted on pottery, in drawings, and in his films. While his friends Buñuel and Dalí were famously slicing through them in their classic film Un Chien Andalou (1929), Cocteau’s were frequently open wide – and when shut, done with great meaning. Cocteau’s eyes, like Severin’s, gave and received information in equal measure, as we all do. But what they were seeing was something unique and not of this world.

I’d like to leave you with a quote from John Berger: “The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled. Each evening we see the sun set. We know that the earth is turning away from it. Yet the knowledge, the explanation, never quite fits the sight.”

Jean Cocteau and Severin Wunderman’s lives crossed somewhere in the gray area between sight and knowledge, and with both of them dearly departed, the crossing will always remain there; where there are many stories and few hard facts.

Perhaps, we can all come closer to finding the knowledge that exists between what is seen and what is known. It certainly won’t be boring.