Coco Chanel (45 page)

As always, however, Gabrielle was contradictory and frequently paradoxical. And while her politics were not particularly sophisticated, one should never forget her intelligence or that, at some residual level, she remained deeply antiestablishment. As a result, her politics were more ambivalent than straightforward provincial conservatism. Despite her apparent dislike of left-wing politics, in 1936, for example, Gabrielle designed the costumes for her friend Jean Renoir's film
La Marseillaise,
which hailed the rights of the French people united against exploitation. In that same year, she was the second financer of Pierre Lestringuez's powerfully left-wing magazine,
Futur.
She would also, as mentioned, make the costumes for Renoir's
The Rules of the Game,
his lacerating satire of the establishment.

 

In these years leading up to the Second World War, the rich in France had little confidence in the government. As a consequence, they exported their capital, the Banque de France lost billions and the political climate was increasingly unstable.

In December 1936, Winston Churchill had come to Paris with his son, Randolph, and dined with Gabrielle (and Cocteau) in her suite at the Ritz. Churchill was there to prevail upon his friend Edward VIII not to marry his lover, Wallis Simpson. During the course of the evening, Churchill was reduced to tears at the thought of the abdication of his king. However, a few days later, he was obliged to help the king with alterations to the speech in which he was going to do just that. The following year, when Edward VIII's abdication had made him the Duke of Windsor, he married his divor-cée, Wallis Simpson, and Gabrielle sent gifts. Shortly afterward, Léon Blum's Popular Front government was out of power, replaced by Camille Chautemps. After several rapid changes of French government, in March 1938, Hitler sent troops into his native Austria and was cheered as the country united with the Third Reich.

In the late thirties, Gabrielle had been drawn, uncharacteristically, into the flourishing theme of escape then popular among the couturiers and their clients. Ornate and extravagant romance, inspired by a revival of nineteenth-century style, nostalgically recalled apparently better times. Hand in hand with the political turmoil of the period, these years saw a crescendo of particularly extravagant themed balls, to many of which Gabrielle was invited as one of the star attractions. She attended Comte de Beaumont's ball, the American ambassador's party, and the astonishing Lady Mendl's party for seven hundred at Versailles. In diamonds and white organdy, the hostess was ringmaster to ponies, clowns and acrobats in white satin. Gabrielle's escort that night was Arthur Capel's longtime friend the Duc de Gramont, and the guests danced on a floor built upon thousands of tiny springs that swayed to their movements.

While Gabrielle's day clothes retained their typical simplicity of line, one could argue that with evening wear her famed restraint sometimes deserted her. This may well have been because she was neither immune to the political turmoil around her nor to the competition she was experiencing from a handful of talented newcomers, such as Balenciaga. Unusually, one glimpses a hint of indecision in Gabrielle's work, giving an impression of less self-assurance in this period. And while her attacks on Schiaparelli's inadequacy were essentially correct, at the costume ball of the season, Gabrielle let slip her position of haughty superiority, revealing her defensive feelings.

The painter André Durst's mansion, already more stage set than home, was conceived as the house from Alain-Fournier's elegy for those times recently lost,
Le Grand Meaulnes.
Durst wanted his ball to be a reenactment of the one in the novel. Bettina Ballard was there:

Careful to remain in the public eye, Gabrielle continued socializing and was noticed at one great costume ball after another wearing dramatic revivalist outfits. Interestingly, to the modern eye, for the first time, she looks a little dated. Having contributed so much to the look of her century, somehow the clothes of the previous one just don't look right on her. It is ironic that the woman who had become successful through her radical simplification of women's dress, in the years before and after the First World War, on the eve of the next cataclysm joined in this escapist attention to the past.

Salvador is Salvador Dalí and, for several months, he and Gabrielle had been having an affair. A few years later, she would brush the romance aside and say she indulged in it only to annoy Gala. Reading the series of Dalí's letters to Gabrielle, one can see that he, however, had clearly both fallen in love with Gabrielle and was amazed by her. In spite of his (intentionally or not) surreal way of communicating, one sees that Dalí was no fool, and he undoubtedly appreciated something of the great breadth of Gabrielle's character. This included “seeing” her melancholy. He would no doubt have agreed with her comments when she said: “I provide contrasts . . . which I cannot get used to: I think I am the shyest and the boldest person, the gayest and the saddest. It's not that I am violent; it's the contrasts, the great opposites that clash within me.”
⁵

Gabrielle's horror of loneliness left her still yearning for love and companionship. But after Iribe's death, disillusionment would harden her. She seemed resigned to the thought that nothing lasts and you take what you can while you can. And for all her growing self-presentation as invincible and hard, as much as anything this was because of those violent contrasts she had described. On the one hand, she was very strong; on the other, her vulnerability never left her. Thus she could say, “Anyway, that is the person I am. Have you understood? Very well, I am also the opposite of all that.”
⁶
Thus one is not entirely convinced by Gabrielle's protestations that she was untouched by her affair with Dalí and that her only thought had been to spite his wife, Gala, extremely annoying though Gala Dalí was.

Gabrielle came and went from La Pausa, regularly allowing one or more of her friends to stay for lengthy periods in her absence. During the thirties, one of these guests had been Pierre Reverdy. While Reverdy had exiled himself to the monastery outside Paris in the twenties, periodically he found the life of an ascetic insupportable and returned to the outside world. For some time, this had also involved an intermittent “return” to Gabrielle.

 

In that summer of 1938, Dalí's letters to Gabrielle repeatedly stress how they are “terribly anxious about this nightmare you are living with Roussi.” This was Roussadana, the Russian girl who had married José Maria Sert.

Sometime before, Roussadana had become addicted to morphine, and in recent months she had also been reduced to a painful thinness. When she and Sert arrived to stay at La Pausa, Roussadana looked terrible; she was permanently feverish and coughing. Gabrielle took over. Sert didn't “believe” in illness and, anyway, he was far too selfish to take a proper interest in his wife's failing health. Gabrielle insisted they take Roussadana to a specialist for X-rays, and the verdict did not surprise her: Roussadana was in an advanced stage of tuberculosis. The doctors insisted she must enter a sanatorium, but the ravaged young woman absolutely refused to do so. Finally, Gabrielle used the ruse of paying a visit to her doctor in Switzerland. Would Roussadana come with her? When their train had set off, Roussadana showed Gabrielle the bruises given her by Sert in his fury at seeing her leave. She called them “Sert's last gifts.”

Arriving in Switzerland, Gabrielle persuaded her to enter a clinic. On receiving the news in Paris, Misia rushed to Switzerland to see her, but once there, she was repeatedly refused entry. She was told that the smallest upset could be fatal for Roussadana. Distraught, Misia returned to Paris, convinced it was Gabrielle, not the doctors, who had prevented her from seeing the dying young woman. She may well have been correct. Misia suffered terribly at not being able to see the woman who had not only destroyed her marriage but whom she also adored.

As a final pathetic twist, tradition has it that Roussadana's morphine addiction was now so relentless that although mortally ill from tuberculosis, she could survive only short periods without a new fix. Ever the resourceful one, Gabrielle procured a substantial quantity, then brought Roussadana a large basket of marzipan “flowers,” ordered from Fauchon in Paris, into each one of which she had inserted a “dose” of morphine.
⁷

Not long after Roussadana and Sert had married, Abbé Mugnier dined at the Robert Rothschilds. The Abbé talked with Misia about what he called her “peculiar social situation.” Painting a touching portrait of her, he was amazed at her lack of vitriol, saying that she “didn't speak ill of her husband either.”
⁸
And when, on December 16, 1938, Roussadana Mdivani Sert was released from her suffering, Misia had been prevented from bidding her farewell. Jean Hugo (great-grandson to Victor and the writer and artist whose benign personality led Maurice Sachs to describe him as having no enemies) wrote that Roussadana lay smiling as the Reverend Conan Doyle administered the last rites. The insane Sert had arrived with a blue eiderdown in which he wanted to wrap Roussadana's body. The eiderdown was too big for the coffin, but he was determined. Gabrielle was also determined to have her lilies in the coffin, and they argued; a depressing image.
⁹

 

A few weeks earlier, on September 21, the Western powers had abandoned Czechoslovakia to its fate, agreeing to appeasement rather than confrontation with Germany. The following day, Churchill had voiced the opinion of many when he wrote to
The Times:

His words would of course prove correct, and time was running out.

25

The Paris spring collections for 1939 continued, meanwhile, with their escapist historical theme.
Vogue
said that “Paris, the worldly, the sophisticated—Paris, where a woman is hardly considered a passable beauty until she is thirty-five—this Paris has suddenly gone completely innocent, quaint, modest, girlish.” Describing the “modest grace” of the evening clothes, the magazine said, “You can choose between the provoking gypsy modesty of Chanel's bodice-and-skirt dresses, Mainbocher peasant types, or the eighteenth-century modesty that is in every collection.” Gabrielle's day clothes remained simple, but for evening, she “did” charming peasants, too, and had full skirts in multicolored taffetas, puff-sleeved and embroidered blouses, short bolero jackets and handkerchiefs tied at the neck. And while her signature (fabric) camellia flowers were pinned to shoulders and necklines, she also had several pieces taking up a tricolor theme, trimming them with red, white and blue. For the first time, Gabrielle was interviewed by the American National Broadcasting Corporation (NBC) in Paris. Schiaparelli was interviewed, too, but separately.

In January 1939, Franco's fascists' success had driven almost half a million Republican soldiers and civilians to flee across the border into France; in February, the Republican government had followed them into exile. With the army routed, Madrid was left to the fascists and starvation. In March, Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia; three weeks later, Mussolini invaded Albania, opening up a route into Greece. France's coalition leader, Edouard Daladier, declared the introduction of emergency powers, and began talks with Britain and the Soviet Union on an alliance to prevent Hitler from invading Poland. To the consternation of London and Paris, Stalin now chose to sign a nonaggression treaty with Germany. This gave him the possibility of regaining territories in the Baltic, Romania and Poland, taken from Soviet Russia at the end of the First World War, and also meant that the balance of power had swung in Germany's favor.