Mademoiselle Chanel

by C. W. Gortner

  If he was looking for support from Misia, he didn’t receive it. She went as quiet as a tomb, intent now on securing her own future. Diag’s keen interest took me aback. Peering through his monocle, he bombarded me with questions about my shops, and my hopes of developing a perfume. Portly and double chinned, with an enormous head that seemed to sit directly upon his massive frame and a streak of dramatic white in his ebony hair, he dressed flamboyantly but with style, his crimson velvet jacket bristling with embroidery, his great hands peppered with rings, and a black pearl affixed to his damask cravat.

  “So Russian,” he declared, turning effusively to the grand duchess. “Isn’t it, Your Highness? The French may have refined perfume for the modern age but we knew best how to wear it. Remember how everyone scented themselves with a different perfume for the ballet in Moscow—men and women alike, so that the entire house seethed like a summer garden? Ah, it was magnificent, like plunging into Aphrodite’s temple. One could perish of olfactory lust.”

  Grand Duchess Marie smiled. She was another superlative example of Romanov breeding, with her thick-lashed eyes and symmetrical features, her pampered complexion untouched by the sun, while I, on the other hand, had taken to sunbathing and was as brown as an Indian. I also noticed her slim hands were chafed and her cuticles ragged, like those of a seamstress.

  She saw me glance at them as she poured tea. With a gracious incline of her head, she said, “You must come visit me when you return to Paris. I’ve opened a small atelier myself, called Kitmir, where I do specialized embroidery and beading; Madame Vionnet has hired me to decorate some of her gowns. Perhaps I could be of assistance to you, as well.”

  If Vionnet had hired her, her work must be excellent. It impressed me, too, that unlike her brother, with his laments and drinking binges, Marie Pavlovna had rolled up her sleeves. “We must make our own way now,” she added, when I assured her I would certainly visit. “The past is dead. We must learn to adapt to everyday concerns.”

  I wanted to ask her if she knew anything about the tsarina’s perfume, but it was Dmitri, roused from his torpor, who said, “I told Coco about Alexandra’s special scent. She’s very intrigued by it and wants to know if we have the formula or know where Ernest Beaux is.”

  Marie’s reply was to lead me through the cavernous palazzo to her bedroom. Opening a drawer in her bureau, she removed a tiny bottle of diamond-shaped glass. “This is Rallet number one. Those savages looted our palaces and stole whatever they could, including Alexandra’s stores of perfume. It may be the only sample left.”

  With reverential caution, I uncapped the bottle and raised it to my nostrils. The fragrance immediately sank through me—a complex alchemy of flowers, with a hint of something deeper that evoked opulent privilege, the premier status of an empress: cultured, luxurious, and very expensive. Though not quite what I had hoped for, its tone conveying the slight fustiness of older women, it was still undoubtedly unique.

  “Try it,” urged Marie. “I don’t ever use it. It was never mine.”

  Dabbing a few drops on my wrist, I waited. When I lifted my hand to my nose once more, I gasped. There it was: the very essence I sought without understanding what it was, a hidden scent as disquieting as it was unexpected—the secret allure of feminine ardor, spent upon crisp white sheets.

  Marie’s face softened as I gazed at her, mesmerized. “Ernest Beaux is indeed in Grasse, in the village of La Bocca. He still works for Rallet but maintains his own laboratory to make custom scents. If anyone still knows the formula for Alexandra’s perfume, he does.”

  “I . . . I must see him,” I said.

  “Yes, I thought you might.” She turned to her desk. “I’ll write a letter of introduction.”

  FROM VENICE TO FLORENCE AND PISA, and then on to Rome. Before the torrid ruins of the Colosseum, Sert threw out his arms and proclaimed it Rome’s unburied skeleton. “Architecture is the bones of a city. Everything is bone structure. A painting, a sculpture, even us: a face without bones cannot last. You,” he added, pinching my cheek, “will look pretty even when dead.”

  Overwhelmed by everything I had experienced, I was also weary of Misia and suitcases, longing to return to work, to start my journey to Grasse and the quest for my perfume. By now, I was determined: Marie Pavlovna had given me her sample, insisting it was but a memento, and she carried within her the scent of her tsarina.

  In return, I promised to visit her in Paris and help her expand her own business with commissions from my atelier. She would help me create gowns to rival Vionnet’s, for now I was past the mutual distance I had thus far maintained with my rival. To launch a perfume, I needed the clothes to go with it—clothes with Russian flair, evoking bygone splendor.

  Upon our return to France in the autumn of 1921, Dmitri no longer infatuated me.

  I had set my sights upon a different obsession.

  V

  The year ended with tragic news.

  My younger sister, Antoinette, whose impulsive marriage to Oscar Fleming had resulted in predictable disaster, had met an Argentinian and fled with him to Buenos Aires. She became pregnant, and like Julia before her, her lover promptly deserted her. Left penniless in a foreign land, she had sent me an urgent missive through a kind stranger who took her in, but it arrived too late. Antoinette had fallen victim to the catastrophic Spanish flu.

  Sitting alone in my room after telling my servants not to disturb me, I wept for her. I recalled my flippancy when she announced her intent to marry, my impatience with her willingness to conform to whoever came her way, my certainty that we’d never see each other again. Now she was gone. I was the sole daughter left of my parents’ ill-fated union. Once I recovered from the news, I wrote to Louise in Moulins to see if she knew where my lost brothers, Alphonse and Lucien, were. Louise returned word that both were alive. Alphonse was a veteran of the war; with the subsidy paid by the government, he had opened a tabac shop. He was married, with three children. Lucien was an itinerant vendor like our father, sowing in his wake a series of unhappy mistresses before he, too, married and settled down, as much as any Chanel man could.

  In memory of Antoinette and Julia, I arranged to send my brothers monthly payments to augment their earnings. I also wrote to my nephew André at his school in England and had him brought to Paris to share a long weekend with me. The notion of family terrified me, for I would never have chosen the circle into which I was born, but I wanted to see my nephew.

  He surprised me when he arrived, with his subdued resemblance to my sister Julia, but also graced with the angular cheekbones and long-lashed dreamy eyes of the Chanel men, reminding me with a jolt of my father. He was almost ten years old, and remarkably thin of build like me. As he entered my boutique on rue Cambon, he looked about with a discerning expression at my displays. As I swept down the staircase to greet him, my scissors hung on a ribbon from my neck, needles and stray threads stuck to my jacket, and my dogs capering at my heels, he held out his hand.

  I paused. Then, with a smile, I clasped it. He shook my hand as though he was meeting an important stranger, standing very erect. “Mademoiselle Chanel,” he said in excellent French, his diction clipped, with the nuance of an English boarding institution, “I am very pleased to make your acquaintance.” He did not even look down at Pita and Poppée, who were engaged in a thorough inspection of his lace-up boots.

  Around us, my staff made a collective cooing sound, hands at their chests in that way women will do when impressed by a child’s manners, no matter whose he might be.

  “Yes.” I winked at him. “But I trust we will soon be more than acquaintances. You must call me Tante Coco. Mademoiselle Chanel makes me sound like a schoolteacher, and I should think you’ve had quite enough of those for a while.”

  A flush crept into his pallid cheeks. “Tante Coco,” he repeated, evidently taken aback by my candor. Then his face suddenly twisted, as if he was holding back an inopportune hiccup. Instead, though he tried his best to control it, a wet lit
tle cough came out, which he immediately tried to smother by covering his mouth.

  “Are you sick?” I exclaimed. “Did you catch cold on the boat?”

  “No, no,” he replied, but he coughed again, harder this time, sending Adrienne racing into the back room for a glass of water. “It’s nothing, just a tiresome cough I always have.” He sounded embarrassed, as if he suffered from a harelip or other gross inconvenience. “I’m not allowed to play cricket because of it. My headmaster says it’s my French lungs.”

  He took the glass Adrienne extended to him. As he sipped, I gauged him carefully. He was very slender. It hadn’t struck me as unusual because I could still remember how gangly my siblings and I had been at his age—all jutting knees, ankles and elbows like pegs, as though we lacked flesh for our bones. We had in fact lacked it, but André should not. I had placed him in the most expensive school at Boy’s recommendation. If anything, considering the cost of his board and tuition, my nephew should be rosy and plump.

  “Sit here.” I guided him to a nearby chair. He drank all the water but declined more. His cough had abated but I didn’t like how it left him breathless, blue veins visible under his temples. “Are you tired? You had a long trip. Shall we go home and rest awhile?”

  “I . . .” He hesitated, reaching down to pet my dogs as they sat beside him with adoring expressions. I had the sense that he wasn’t used to voicing preferences, so I urged, “What would you like to do? It’s your holiday. We can go wherever you like.”

  This time, his blush was definitely one of timidity. “I should like to see your atelier, if that isn’t an imposition? I hear you are very famous.”

  “Is she ever!” declared Adrienne. “The most famous designer in Paris!” She gave him a wide smile. “And I am your great-aunt, so you must call me Tante Adrienne.”

  “I have two aunts?” He looked at us in awe. I saw my dead sisters then in his eyes, our lost childhood, and that haunted sensation that we did not belong anywhere.

  “You do.” I took him by the hand. “Let me show you how famous your aunt is.”

  He went wide-eyed as I gave him a tour of my premises, from the ground-floor boutique to my second-floor salon where clients had their fittings and I presented my collections; up past the apartment on the third floor to the workroom with its fabric-strewn tables and dummies on which garments were fashioned, overlaid by the clatter of sewing machines and my seamstresses’ chatter.

  I showed him my toiles in muslin to create my clothes and the alterations of a dress that his arrival had interrupted. “This is for a baroness. She needs it next week, but I have to fix it because she lost weight after her last fitting and . . . Well, this is how I work. As you can see, I might be famous but it’s not very glamorous.”

  “Oh, it is.” He appeared utterly fascinated. “It’s like nothing I have ever seen.”

  “Then you must come work for me when you finish your education,” I declared, and the moment I spoke, I realized I meant it. I had not thought he would affect me as he did. While he was my sister’s son, I’d never felt any maternal sentiments, yet as he wandered the workroom, asking polite questions that my seamstresses were delighted to oblige, I watched him through a haze in my eyes that I did not realize was caused by tears until Adrienne pressed a handkerchief into my palm.

  “Careful,” she murmured. “Your heart is showing.”

  I scowled, dabbing my eyes. “Does he look frail to you? He is too thin, isn’t he?”

  She nodded. “Yes. I hate to say it, but that cough of his; I don’t like the sound of it.”

  “I’m going to take him to a specialist. French lungs, indeed. If that school has been neglecting him, they are going to hear from me. With what I pay them, they can damn well light a fire in his room every night to offset the foul English damp.”

  I made the appointment with the best physician in Paris; while he had André take off his shirt, exposing his painfully narrow chest, I hid my tumult, fearing a diagnosis of tuberculosis. “A mild weakness in his bronchial tubes,” the doctor declared. “He needs to stay warm. If possible, he should reside in a dry climate.”

  It was not possible; André had his schooling to complete, but I sent him back at the end of his visit with a satchel full of herbal remedies and telephoned the headmaster to demand regular monitoring of his health. Before he left, I took him to the Ritz for afternoon high tea; I thought it the quintessential English experience, but he laughed and said they never served such delicious croissants or éclairs at Eton. His hearty appetite reassured me, so I queried him about his studies. He was not poorly treated, and he expressed genuine enjoyment with his school. Only his delicate health gave him the sense of being different, in the way he interacted with the other boys and the restrictions it placed on him.

  “Well, you’ll have to find other ways to prove yourself,” I said. “You must be the best student, read everything you can to strengthen your mind. Education is the most important thing you can possess; without it, you’re just another ox under the yoke.”

  He tilted his head, mulling this over. At length, he nodded with that preternatural maturity which made me think that despite his physical impediment and uncanny resemblance to my brothers, André would grow up to be a fine young man, unfettered by the wanderlust that had wreaked such havoc on the Chanel men’s lives.

  “I like to read. And I don’t ever want to be an ox.” He smiled. Then, without warning, he stood, came around the table, and to my surprise, embraced me. He did not speak. He just held me tight, his little body like a splinter against me, until I said softly, “They’re going to think we’re lovers,” and I bit my lip, cursing my own ineptness with children.

  He replied, “That’s because I love you, Tante Coco. You smell like Paris.”

  With Antoinette’s death, I finally felt like the orphan I had so vehemently denied being as a girl. I vowed André would never experience the same. He would never know the desolation my sisters and I had endured, because he had me.

  A FEW WEEKS AFTER ANDRÉ LEFT and before I embarked on my trip to Grasse in the summer of 1922, I left my atelier early and made my way to the Hôtel Continental on the rue Castiglione, a short walk from rue Cambon. From the lobby, I had word sent upstairs. A half hour later, Diaghilev arrived, rumpled and emanating the sour tang of cigarettes and drink. He blinked in confusion before his vodka-soaked brain recognized me, and he stammered, “Mademoiselle Chanel, no one told me it was you.” He was obviously flustered, the dandified overlord of the Ballets Russes exposed as a paunchy, intemperate man.

  I handed him a sealed envelope. He was bewildered until I explained, “I’ve thought a lot about what you said in Venice about Stravinsky and launching a new performance of his Rite. I am in complete agreement as to his genius; I was at the first performance of the Rite in 1913. You will find there sufficient funds to bring him to Paris and begin production. Tell him the couturière Coco Chanel offers him and his family my home of Bel Respiro until he can find an appropriate residence elsewhere. But I would request one condition.”

  He gaped at me, the envelope in hand.

  “No one is to know,” I said. “I hope you will oblige.”

  I smiled as I walked away, fully aware that the first thing he’d do after ripping open the envelope to find my check for 300,000 francs would be to race to the nearest telephone to tell Misia. Much as I loved her, it was time she learned that I was not beholden to her anymore.

  Stravinsky arrived the following week, leaving his two daughters behind in Switzerland with his wife so they could finish out the term in the convent school where he had enrolled them. He was gaunt, pared to mere flesh and bone, his thick lips quivering as he thanked me repeatedly and offered to put Katya to work in the house to repay my generosity.

  “Nonsense,” I said. “I have plenty of help. When she arrives, she must rest.” I led him up to the room where he would stay, after having shown him the Steinway piano I had installed in the living room for his use. As we passed D
mitri in the hall, Stravinsky edged around the glaring Romanov and almost wept when he beheld the spacious suite I had prepared for him.

  “Is he your new lover?” Dmitri spat out with more passion than he had displayed in months. “That bespectacled wreck who stinks of gratitude and penury?”

  I eyed him, refusing to dignify his question with an answer. He was looking rather a wreck himself, his vodka consumption having reached alarming heights. “I’m going to lock up the liquor if you don’t take a bath this instant and put on a fresh shirt,” I finally said. “We leave for Biarritz tomorrow and I’ll not have you looking like a stray dog. Be at the Ritz by nine. I’m going to stay there for the time being.”

  Our affair was in its final throes, of that there was no question.

  But I still needed him for this final task.

  WE DROVE FIRST TO BIARRITZ in my Rolls, where I checked on my maison to find that business had begun to falter, the migrations of the rich having sent them flocking to Cannes and Monte Carlo instead. Taking the winding roads through Toulouse to Nîmes, Dmitri and I stopped in Marseilles and went on to Cannes, where I scouted a location for a new establishment. We then went on to the village of La Bocca in Grasse. It took us a few days to find Beaux’s laboratory, tucked among endless fields of roses, jasmine, and fragrant lavender—an oasis of calm in a serene, extremely prosperous region that had been the beating heart of the French perfume industry since the seventeenth century. Once we found him, his employers at the House of Rallet refused us access until I showed them the letter of introduction from the Grand Duchess and Dmitri presented himself in person for an afternoon tea at their château.