Coco Chanel (41 page)

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:

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:

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

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

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:

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.

23

“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 N° 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
:

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.