At the Center 3 страница

Over the years, La Pausa was to gain a reputation with Gabrielle’s friends as a remarkable place. The perceptive future American Vogue editor in Paris, Bettina Ballard, who came to know Gabrielle well in the thirties, would say that it was “the most comfortable, relaxing place I have ever stayed in,” and indeed the building’s design, combined with Gabrielle’s style of hospitality, was then most unusual. In those days, when the Côte d’Azur was just coming into its own, Gabrielle led the way in creating a new style of living for the holidaying rich. Bettina Ballard continued:

In her own home she wanted to be left alone unless she wanted to be seen, and her guests had the same privilege… the house was blissfully silent in the morning…

If and when you came down, there were small unostentatious cars with drivers to run you down the mountain to swim or shop in Monte Carlo. No life was encouraged around the villa in the morning. Lunch was the moment of the day when guests met in a group and no one missed lunch — it was far too entertaining. The long dining room had a buffet at one end with hot Italian pasta, cold English roast beef, French dishes, a little of everything… Chanel hated having servants under foot, and Ugo somehow managed to run the house superbly and still keep everyone out of sight but himself.¹³

The first majordomo at La Pausa was a Russian refugee, Admiral Castelain, who gave the relaxed impression that there were no other servants, and whom Gabrielle treated as a friend.

During 1929, as La Pausa was being painstakingly erected for Gabrielle and Bend’Or, their affair, however, was to founder. Gabrielle’s bid to become pregnant may well have been the trigger for Bend’Or’s return to his old routine of dalliance with pretty women. Gabrielle was a most un-jealous woman, but Bend’Or’s fling at this juncture provoked in her feelings of real insecurity. Failure to conceive was a grim reminder to this commanding woman of her ultimate inability to control life. We don’t know the details, but it seems most likely that a botched abortion during her affair with Etienne Balsan had left her unable to conceive. (One wonders if Arthur Capel would have married Gabrielle if she had become pregnant.) Gabrielle was miserable and frustrated, and her feelings sometimes turned to anger, which she would vent upon Bend’Or. This was a very bad idea. Nevertheless, for some time to come, the man whom few dared to cross would recall why he wanted Gabrielle, and he would return, bringing her gifts and his old enthusiasm and affection.

Meanwhile, another problem had rumbled on beneath Gabrielle’s determination to become pregnant: her devotion to her work. Inextricably interwoven with her life and who she had become, her need for work was ineluctable. She longed for a child, but every time she succumbed to a man, eventually Gabrielle began to hanker after work and its beloved companion, independence. In reality, she found equality with a man — perhaps with anyone — deeply challenging, which was why a man as powerful as Westminster had appeared such a good proposition.

While Gabrielle’s predicament as a woman was a reflection of her times, she also found that inescapable element of any relationship, the weighing scales of power, impossible, really, to balance for more than a few years. The deeply feminine part of her would make the poignant comment, “I never wanted to weigh more heavily on a man than a bird,” yet the other Gabrielle had an extraordinary drive to create, to organize and to lead. And she would voice her dilemma with tragic accuracy: “It would be very difficult for a man, unless he were strong, to live with me. And it would be impossible for me, were he stronger than me, to live with him.”¹⁴

No matter what she did to avoid it, Gabrielle’s work in the end was preeminent. The unresolved motives that drove her always proved stronger than the conflicting wish for emotional fulfillment and tranquility. Yet while Westminster tried to draw her back to him, at the same time, he himself had begun to drift away.

Gabrielle’s pride was at stake here, and she was edging toward disillusionment. No longer young, she had lived too much of her life in the glare of publicity for her to support a public slighting. And while her disappointment at failing to bear a child was secretly causing her such misery, as was her way, the woman perceived as so resilient, even heartless, hid her anguish from all but one or two.

One of those always there in times of need since Arthur’s death was Misia Sert. Gabrielle would say dreadful things of Misia, most of which were true. Describing her as having no sense of moderation or rationality, she said she was like a nomad from the steppes:

She has an acute thirst for success and a deep and sacrilegious passion for failure. For herself, whom she loathes, for the man she serves… She aspires to greatness, she loves to mingle with it, to sniff it, to control it and reduce it…

She had absolutely no shame, no sense of honesty, but she had a grandeur and an innocence about her that surpassed everything one usually observes in women… it’s because of this I adored her… In woman there is everything, and in Misia there was every sort of woman.¹⁵

Whatever Misia’s faults, Gabrielle would, nonetheless, continue to love her. Indeed, she would claim that she was the only woman who remained her true friend.

For the moment, however, Misia suffered, too, and Gabrielle came to her rescue. At her insistence, Misia had joined the Cutty Sark with a party sailing along the Dalmatian coast. While there was intermittent tension between Gabrielle and Bend’Or, Misia’s situation was more acute: her marriage was in ruins.

Sert had become besotted with a tall, narcissistic and self-destructive Russian princess, Roussadana Mdivani. Finding her beauty luminous, half of the Parisian haut monde appeared besotted, too. Roussadana’s brothers’ indigence led them to use their exotic charm and titles to make marriages with a series of American film stars and heiresses, acquiring for them a moniker, “the marrying Mdivanis.”

Meanwhile, Misia had worked her way through the repertoire of attitudes for the long-suffering wife. But her accustomed open-mindedness, as she waited for another of her middle-aged husband’s infatuations to subside, had, this time, been to no avail. And foolish Misia had herself also grown to love this self-absorbed and high-spirited young woman who was destroying Misia’s marriage.

When Misia had first met Gabrielle, Sert had been taken aback at her passion for yet another woman. Now his wife’s ardor for another woman only heightened his own desire for Roussadana, who so intertwined herself with their lives that the three of them no longer understood their motivation or their emotions. Geared as Sert was to the world of “fashion, the rich and the vaguely talented, he had moved from Misia’s lightness, with its solid basis of art, to Roussy’s frivolity, with its nihilistic base of chic.”¹⁶ In time, Gabrielle became more than a little besotted herself with the captivating creature, but for now, in hour-long conversations on the phone, she admonished Misia for involving herself with the girl, telling her she was playing a dangerous game. Misia replied that the forces that drew people toward calamity had her in their clutches and that she was powerless to do anything but try to subdue disaster.

Gradually, her increasing doses of morphine failed to keep her far enough removed from her emotions, and she was faced with the despair she really felt. Paul Morand would recall his admiration for Misia’s “joie de vivre, always concealed beneath a mask of ill-humor; that perfect poise even in moments of despair.” It must have been hard work indeed for Misia and Gabrielle to retain their legendary poise while concealing their real feelings from everyone — except each other — on board Bend’Or’s pleasure ship.

One day, Gabrielle and Misia received a telegram onboard the Cutty Sark from Diaghilev’s assistant, Boris Kochno, in Venice: Diaghilev was very ill; they must come at once. Gabrielle had Bend’Or sail the ship to Venice, and the two women went in search of their friend Diaghilev. There, in the Hôtel des Bains on the Lido, with sunlight shimmering off that endlessly lapping water, the beautiful young Boris Kochno and Serge Lifar, each at various times Diaghilev’s lover, were beside him: he was dying. The diabetes that Diaghilev had refused to attend to with any discipline was in its final stage. As his temperature rose steadily, he passed in and out of consciousness. He was moved when he saw that Misia and Gabrielle had arrived. His temperature reduced, he grew more cheerful, talked of plans, of new trips. Two nights later, there was a call to the women’s hotel and they rushed to his bedside. In the early dawn, just before the sun rose again on that watery paradise he had loved so much, the great Sergei Diaghilev quietly died.

As so often before, there apparently weren’t enough funds in the Ballets Russes coffers, and it was Gabrielle who paid for her friend for the last time: she saw to all the details of his funeral. As the small procession left the hotel in the early hours of the following morning — so as not to upset the tourists — it is said that Kochno and Lifar fell to their knees, and began to walk like that. Gabrielle was heard to say curtly under her breath, “Get up!” and they immediately obeyed. When the white gondola had “ferried the magician’s mortal remains” to San Michele, that lonely Venetian island of the dead, and the mourners watched as the coffin was lowered into its grave, they had to restrain Lifar, who tried to fling himself in after it.

Forty-two years later, Igor Stravinsky, arguably the twentieth century’s greatest composer, died in New York. His request to be buried near Diaghilev was duly honored.

Gabrielle’s disillusion at Bend’Or’s philandering had sent her back to spend more time with her own friends. Concerned for Misia, she also had a room made permanently available for her at the Faubourg Saint-Honoré. Cocteau had already been there under Gabrielle’s wing for some time, with his new lover, the writer Jean Desbordes.

Cocteau’s mother had told Abbé Mugnier that Jean was “living at Mademoiselle Chanel’s, in the gardens of the avenue Gabriele.” Abbé Mugnier wrote:

After having accompanied the Princess Bibesco here and there… went to Mlle Chanel who was expecting us. The Serts, Jean Cocteau, a young English woman [Vera Bate], who works with Coco Chanel, were there… In Mlle Chanel’s garden… a vast fountain unfolds… back in the salon, heard Wagner on the gramophone, chatted with various people. I thought Mlle Chanel had a more charming face. Very kind by the way.¹⁷

Gabrielle’s socializing was not only for friendship’s sake. Maintaining her image in the face of society, often secretly awaiting her downfall, she gave particularly sumptuous entertainments and was much seen abroad. Not long before Diaghilev’s death, she celebrated a Ballets Russes performance with Misia, Diaghilev and their entourage, the artists Picasso, Cocteau and Rouault, and the composers Stravinsky and Prokofiev. She gave another of her magnificent balls to celebrate the end of another Ballets Russes season. The Hôtel de Lauzan was awash with the best champagne, caviar spilled from soup tureens, the gardens were lit by lanterns, a black jazz band offered up the most fashionable contemporary music. Serge Lifar, now the Ballets Russes’s principal dancer, and who would in time describe Gabrielle as his “godmother,” recalled the evening:

We drank rivers of champagne and vodka… Coco drank as much as anyone else. As always she flirted with the men. She was very kittenish, even purring, pretending she was completely captivated, when suddenly pfft! Nobody there! She was like a little Cinderella. She disappeared around two in the morning, so as not to miss her beauty sleep. She allowed men to think that everything was possible.¹⁸

In 1929, Henri Bernstein would record the sense of grandeur at her parties “in the white violence of the multitude of peonies — subtle, gay, moving parties which made several people envious (all those who could not be invited in spite of the dimensions of the beautiful lounges of the Faubourg St.-Honoré).”¹⁹

By February of 1930, Bend’Or had found himself a new wife, Loelia Ponsonby, one of the “Bright Young Things” and daughter of the first Lord Sysonby. Bend’Or had brought Loelia to Paris for an excruciating session, in which she met her future husband’s ex-lover. Understandably, Loelia found Gabrielle unsympathetic, describing her as “small, dark and simian… She was hung with every sort of necklace and bracelet, which rattled as she moved… I perched, rather at a disadvantage, at her feet, feeling that I was being looked over to see if I was a suitable bride… I very much doubted whether I or my tweed suit passed the test.”²⁰

Meanwhile, Loelia’s forthright cousin Lady Ponsonby was unimpressed by both Loelia and her new husband, and also by the growing idea of celebrity. Writing of the wedding party at Saint James’s Palace, she said that although the Duke

as a Rake may be, attractive & having style… his large flabby face mottled with dissipation… made me wonder… Apparently outside the registry office was the largest crowd ever seen at a wedding… To arouse real enthusiasm you must be either very rich or very immoral—& if you are very rich, very immoral and a Duke — most people now go off their heads.²¹

Sixteen years later, Gabrielle would say of her life with Bend’Or that she had grown tired of “that squalid boredom that idleness and riches bring about.” Despite Gabrielle’s wealth, idleness was never to be her problem; she never ceased working with great purpose, which was to secure herself, and others, in the modern world in which they found themselves. Thus she would say of Westminster’s life, “You have to wonder whether… this absurd fairyland… is not a bad dream.”²²

I had satisfied a great core of lethargy that hides beneath my anxiety, and the experiment was finished… Fishing for salmon is not life. Any kind of poverty, rather than that kind of wretchedness. The holidays were over. It had cost me a fortune; I had neglected my house, deserted my business, and showered gifts on hundreds of servants.

Yet Bend’Or told Gabrielle he wouldn’t be able to accustom himself to living without her. Gabrielle knew that this was because her willingness to say no to him impressed him. “It was a shock for him; it threw him off balance.” ²³

As the duke’s lover and his equal in many ways, for several years Gabrielle shared the life of a man a good many regarded as nothing more than a selfish playboy. Gabrielle did believe that once she was gone, Westminster permitted some of the rich man’s parasites to encircle him again. But a devoted employee and friend would write of him:

He was in charge of the greatest landed fortune in the country for fifty-four years, from the reign of Queen Victoria to that of Elizabeth II, from an aristocratic to an egalitarian, if not socialist, society. Whatever his services to his country in war, his personal qualities and defects, he should be judged by his success or failure discharging the responsibilities brought by his wealth.²⁴

And after ceasing to be his lover, Gabrielle would say of him, “We have remained friends. I loved him, or thought I loved him, which amounts to the same thing.”²⁵

While Westminster was married to Loelia Ponsonby for seventeen years, they had separated long before they were finally divorced. In Westminster’s fourth wife, Anne Sullivan, he would at last find a woman who was willing to appreciate his qualities and negotiate his foibles, and with whom would he spend six good years before his death, in 1953.

The Crash

“The upheaval of values characterizes our era, some say. A somewhat naive statement, since only one value dominates our times: money — first through the plethora, then through its lack.” So wrote the diarist Elisabeth de Gramont, in her measured and sardonic tone, when the fevered pitch of the twenties finally reached its climax in November 1929, after the Wall Street crash. Gramont told how the preceding decade had seen “all values, the only ones left in this world… going up like a column of mercury,” and described the luxury cars — the Rolls-Royces, the Hispano-Suizas, the Mercedes — and the spendthrift lifestyle of the speculators and the war profiteers, and how artists called it a golden age because “from the masterpiece to the daubed, everything sold for exorbitant sums.” People previously of moderate means acquired new ambitions, buying châteaus, racing stables and yachts, and the price of property continued rising astronomically. When the banks failed, many people’s assets were reduced by as much as 90 percent.

A well-to-do Englishman, weathering the storm in a Paris hotel, described how a man shot himself in an adjacent room, an old American woman threw herself out of the window clutching her cat to her bosom, and another woman was saved from an overdose of sleeping pills only because her Pekinese barked and gave the alarm. The Englishman wrote, “I lost lots of money, and Coco Chanel was in a panic, while Misia Sert… remained quiet in her flat on the top floor of the Meurice,”¹ the famous Parisian hotel.

Gabrielle was in certain panic in this period of great dearth, but she hid it well from her reduced number of clients, and still made money. This was helped by the fact that in the few short years since its introduction, Chanel № 5 had become the world’s highest-selling perfume.

Meanwhile, Adrienne Chanel’s faithful lover, Baron Maurice de Nexon, had finally been released by his father’s death to receive his inheritance and marry. And in April 1930, “Mademoiselle Gabrielle Chanel, dress designer, residing at 29 rue Faubourg Saint-Honoré,” was Adrienne’s chief witness at the quiet Paris wedding. On that day, Gabrielle’s thoughts must have dwelt on her initial fall from respectability, when she chose to live openly with her horse-mad Etienne Balsan. Did she regret? Probably not; nevertheless, she must have recognized the irony of having recently given up a man who had now married someone else, while her aunt was at last entering into her own marriage. Some of the old Royallieu friends, including Etienne, were present on that otherwise happy day.

That summer, Misia was Gabrielle’s almost permanent guest at La Pausa. While she had not recovered from her desertion by Sert (she never would), Misia nonetheless enlivened the atmosphere for the villa’s numerous guests. Dmitri Pavlovich was also in the south of France, and introduced Gabrielle to the present tsar of Hollywood, Samuel Goldwyn. As America’s economic crisis worsened with each month, Goldwyn was doing his best to counter it by turning Hollywood into an even greater star attraction than it had so far been. He engaged Gabrielle in earnest discussions. She was reluctant, but Goldwyn persevered: he wanted her to come to Hollywood.

When millions of Americans were now jobless, Goldwyn understood that reducing his costs would be a mistake: he must make his films even greater extravaganzas of escape. Recognizing the need to encourage a more middle-class audience to view his films, he believed that women would be more attracted if they knew they were to see the very latest fashions from the hand of the most famous Parisian couturier. He would pay Gabrielle the fabulous sum of one million dollars a year if she would visit Hollywood twice a year to dress his female stars, both on and off the stage. The great salesman Goldwyn failed to comprehend Gabrielle’s hesitation. She would be clothing the women who peopled the dreams of millions. They would not only advertise Chanel in every dream palace in the world, but also every time they set foot in any public place. Gabrielle finally consented.

In the spring of 1931, she set sail for Hollywood with Misia as her companion. It was an extraordinary enterprise, and there was no question that in these testing times, her enormous bursary would come in useful. Whatever came of Gabrielle’s attempt at dressing Hollywood, she and Misia would distract themselves together. Gabrielle was not at all concerned at the thought of dressing some of the most famous women in the world. But could she convince them her style was what they wanted? On her arrival in New York, word had already gone out, and Gabrielle was besieged by journalists. She told The New York Times:

It’s just an invitation. I will see what the pictures have to offer me and what I have to offer the pictures. I will not make one dress. I have not brought my scissors with me. Later, perhaps, when I go back to Paris, I will create and design gowns six months ahead for the actresses in Mr. Goldwyn’s pictures. I will send the sketches from Paris and my fitters in Hollywood will make the gowns.²

The reporters found Gabrielle taken aback at the scores of interviewers and the reception committee crowding out her suite at the Hotel Pierre. She answered questions, declaring that longer hair would be back in style, that a chic woman should dress well but not eccentrically. She said that flower-based perfumes were not mysterious on a woman, that men who used scents were disgusting, and that where, previously, people of elegance had led fashion, it was now the young who set the tone.

In a second interview, Gabrielle spoke about giving the films fashion authority, although saying she wasn’t quite sure how it was going to work out once she arrived in California. The New York Times reporter found Gabrielle “a woman whose business is charm in dress. She does not make speeches, nor has she any theatrical affectation or exhibition — her answers are simple, direct.” Gabrielle said that she never saw her clients at her salon; that her work was “impersonal.” A gown was designed on a model, and that ended it for her. She seldom had the opportunity to see a frock, and even more seldom had the inclination. Typical Gabrielle! Once something was done, it was gone; she was bored and on to the next thing: “I needed to cleanse my memory, to clear from my mind everything I remembered. I also needed to improve on what I had done. I have been Fate’s tool in a necessary cleansing process.”³

Her brief was to clothe the greatest stars of the time: Norma Talmadge, Clara Bow, Gloria Swanson, Lillian Gish, Ina Claire and Greta Garbo. Interestingly, the records for rue Cambon show that the witty and intelligent Ina Claire had already become a private customer of Gabrielle’s, in 1926. Indeed, it was Ina Claire’s Chanel wardrobe that became one of the best advertisements for Gabrielle in the States. Meanwhile, the film and fashion worlds were laying bets on whether Gabrielle really could impose her fashion dictates on the notoriously petulant and self-willed actresses of the silver screen, a group known neither for their decorum nor for the elegance of their style.

When Gabrielle and Misia arrived in Hollywood, Gabrielle was once again mobbed by reporters. The French guests were entertained at a celebrity reception in Gabrielle’s honor, and here she met several of those actresses she was due to design for, such as Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich and Claudette Colbert. The renowned directors George Cukor and Erich von Stroheim were also at the party, and von Stroheim charmed Gabrielle. She said of him, “Such a ham, but what style.” Meanwhile, Goldwyn’s chief publicist dubbed Gabrielle “the biggest fashion brain ever known.”

At another party, George Cukor introduced Gabrielle to his new “find,” Katharine Hepburn.

Gabrielle was taken around the studios, saw how films were made, saw the clothes, met the costumers, understood what the camera wanted and learned that her role was to create clothes that accentuated the personality of the stars. She was supposed to design costumes that would still be in fashion two years after she had created them; that was how long it took to make a film. She wasn’t impressed by Beverly Hills, and the ruthlessness of the studio system appalled the woman who had fought so hard for her own independence. She believed the stars were “producers’ servants,” and didn’t have much time for many of the actors either. She thought that “once you’ve said the girls were beautiful and there were a lot of feathers around, you’ve said it all… You know perfectly well that everything “super” is the same. Supersex, super productions…” Gabrielle would, however, enjoy quoting Garbo, saying to her later, “Without you I wouldn’t have made it, with my little hat and my raincoat.”

The woman who put fashionable women into raincoats had met the stars, met the producers, wasn’t that impressed and became impatient to get back to France. En route, she stopped again in New York, for what turned out to be a most useful set of encounters. She met Carmel Snow, now editor of Harper’s Bazaar; Margaret Chase, editor of Vogue; and Condé Nast, the extraordinary magazine publisher who had a gift for making money; he lived in a thirty-room penthouse on Park Avenue. Nast had amassed a fortune through his publishing company; this included Vogue and Vanity Fair. His manipulation and machinations were legendary, and Gabrielle would always have a difficult relationship with this gifted yet unscrupulous man.

Something that impressed Gabrielle perhaps the most about the United States, and was to have a lasting effect on her attitudes, was the way she saw clothes sold in the great metropolis of New York. Taking a trip around the most elegant department stores, including Bloomingdale’s, Macy’s and Saks, she also visited the Seventh Avenue garment-making district, and was fascinated by S. Klein’s, the huge discount store on Union Square.

Samuel Klein had begun, in 1912, with six hundred dollars, and by 1931, he owned the world’s largest women’s-wear store, selling as much as twenty-five million dollars’ worth of clothes every year. This was then a vast sum. Klein made no attempt at aesthetics — the floors were bare, and there were no salespeople. Riffling through crude iron racks, customers selected dresses (all copies of one kind or another) without assistance and tried them on in crowded public dressing rooms. Klein didn’t advertise, relying on rapid turnover and a markup of around 10 percent. If something on the $7.95 racks was there for more than two weeks, it was marked down a dollar. At the end of another two weeks, its price was cut again. Sometimes, dresses were sold for as little as one dollar. Large signs in Yiddish, Armenian, Polish and English read: “Don’t try to steal, our detectives are everywhere.” Today, versions of this type of clothes shopping are common, but in 1933, Gabrielle was amazed.

S. Klein would become part of American mythology, and Gabrielle returned to France, confirmed in her prophesy to her fellow couturiers that copying was inevitable and Klein’s selling policy was a sign of things to come. Refusing to believe this, the couturiers exerted themselves each season to prevent the pilfering of their ideas. And Gabrielle would say, “Fashion does not exist unless it goes down into the streets. The fashion that remains in the salons has no more significance than a costume ball.”⁴ She said she wouldn’t have been able to realize all her ideas, that she liked seeing them used, and that copying was not the drama for her that it was for other couturiers: “What rigidity it shows, what laziness, what unimaginative taste, what lack of faith in creativity, to be frightened of imitations! The more transient fashion is the more perfect it is. You can’t protect what is already dead.”⁵ (Gabrielle meant she had already moved on.)

By the twenties, Gabrielle had come to believe that haute couture would inevitably be translated “down into the streets.” And her increasingly unfitted and simple shapes could now be replicated relatively easily; they also required less yardage than previous dresses and could be copied in cheaper fabrics. New synthetics, such as rayon, were emulating much rarer textiles, such as silk, and the haute couture copies were being made up at a fraction of the cost. The line of descent began with the unofficial drawings taken — secretly — from the shows. Specialist copying houses made a living out of less costly versions of designer clothes. This idea went down through women’s personal dressmakers until it reached the cheaper, mass-market end of the garment trade and the “woman in the street.”

Following through her thought that she was quite willing for her clothes to be copied, in 1932 Gabrielle presented a fashion exhibition at the Duke of Westminster’s London house in aid of charity. (The two remained on close terms.) The idea was that dressmakers and manufacturers should come along with the express intention of copying Gabrielle’s designs. Five hundred or so society and entertainment personalities attended over the course of several days. The Daily Mail reported how “many visitors bring their own seamstresses because this collection is not for sale… Mademoiselle Chanel has authorized it being copied.” The other designers in Paris went to great lengths to protect their designs and were absolutely opposed to Gabrielle’s initiative.

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