Mademoiselle Chanel

by C. W. Gortner

  God, or whatever pitiless deity ruled our fates, had forsaken me.

  I would never forsake myself.

  MY BATTLE WITH SCHIAPARELLI played out before the eager press. Those final years before the cataclysm sped past were nothing but an escapist return to foibles, with hemlines dropping and everything festooned in beads and feathers. Nights whirled away at champagne-drenched parties held under Chinese lanterns, on floors fitted with tiny springs to add buoyancy to the dance. I attacked Schiaparelli with everything in my arsenal. While she became ever more extravagant and superficial, her black gloves spiked with red satin fingernails, her blue leggings showing under flounced dresses, I cleaved to elegance, though I did succumb to the rage for shoulder pads and pale satin luxury. I denounced her in interviews as a futurist with nothing to say of the future, an optical illusion. She retorted, “Chanel launched the sailor sweater and short skirt, but I took her sweater, changed the line, and voilà—Chanel is finished!” Colleagues took sides; Time magazine put Schiaparelli on its cover and pronounced her “the new genius in fashion.” Harper’s Bazaar proclaimed, “Chanel remains the quintessence of restraint in an unrestrained world.” Magazines delighted in our rivalry because it sold copies. They were not engaged in a life-or-death struggle for their reputation, as I was.

  At the annual lavish costume party held by the Comte de Graumont, Schiaparelli showed up in an aquarium-print sari and a wig piled to pompadour heights, speckled with amphibious-looking gewgaws. I had never seen her up close before, marking her long face and bovine eyes; on her arm was none other than the mustachioed Spanish artist Salvador Dalí, along with his scowling Russian-born wife, Gala.

  I wore white silk from head to toe. Bronzed from my recent time on the Riviera, my hair coiled in loose waves and pearls dangling from my throat, I sallied forth to introduce myself. Schiap, as her friends called her, seemed bemused; Dalí expressed himself “honored beyond words”—which was just as well, for I smiled at Schiap and said, “Shall we prove we needn’t quarrel in public?” and invited her to dance. She was delighted, exhibitionist that she was. The Graumonts’ balls were notorious for a liberal mingling of sexes, with men dressed as Marie Antoinette and women as Hitler, complete with his block-square mustache. Schiap threw herself into my challenge with abandon as I guided her around the crowded dance floor, closer and closer to the candles stuck in wax at the corners. Her glazed smile was directed outward, away from my face, to the crowd mesmerized by our pas de deux.

  Flame seared her hem. I gasped and leaped away. The delighted guests swarmed her with bottles of soda water and sprayed until her gown was a sopping wreckage, assuring she did not go up in a blaze. As she glared at me through now-crooked false eyelashes, mascara streaking her face, I murmured so only she could hear, “Now you will remember that a little goes a long way.”

  A caw of high laughter erupted, turning everyone toward the tables. There, clutching the side of a chair as he cackled uproariously, with malicious glee, was Salvador Dalí.

  I winked at him.

  IN THE SPRING OF 1936, France elected a new left-wing coalition, the Popular Front. Our new socialist premier was Jewish, prompting the dailies to blare: “France under the Jew!”

  Since Iribe’s death, I had closed my ears to politics. I heard (as everyone did) and read in newspapers (as many did not) of Hitler’s stranglehold on Germany, his tirades at the podium denouncing Marxism and the malign Jewish plague overtaking Europe, but I put it out of my mind.

  But not for long. The unrest soon struck home. That spring, the working class held the largest strike ever seen, hoisting their petards and marching in the streets. The infection spread; one morning I crossed the place Vendôme to my shop to find my entry barred, my seamstresses and saleswomen blocking the door as cameras flashed. They refused to let me pass, chanting some slogan that rang in my ears as the reporters turned their attention on me. Fleeing back to the Ritz, I telephoned my lawyer in a rage, threatening to sack the entire lot.

  René advised caution. As he had with the Wertheimer fiasco, he suggested moderation, a meeting with my workers to hear their complaints.

  “Meeting?” I cried. “I’ll close my atelier first. I had to work like a mule for everything I own. I will not give them what they have not earned.”

  I might as well have shouted to the wind. After several days of the strike, our new premier signed an agreement granting the working class everything I had predicted. The people took their victory to the streets. Seething at being locked out of my own shop, I dismissed three hundred of my staff. I would have fired more had René not advised me to relent, lest my business suffer irreparable damage. Other designers who had refused to conform to the law had found themselves coming to work to deserted ateliers.

  I did relent, because I had no choice. But my harsh rule, which had ensured my success for over thirty years, grew harsher. Everyone who worked for me now knew that a single infraction, a single instance of tardiness or sloppy work, would show them the curb.

  They had their benefits. In return, I would exact a heavy price.

  NINETEEN THIRTY-SEVEN CAREENED INTO 1938.

  La Pausa became my haven, my nightly injections of the sedative Sedol my refuge. My insomnia returned worse than ever, until I couldn’t sleep without a dose. Misia took furtive trips with me to Switzerland, where we could buy drugs without prescriptions. I refused to concede that I was dependent, even after seeing the terrifying results of addiction when Jojo Sert’s young mistress perished of advanced tuberculosis and an enslavement to morphine.

  Growing fear over the economic instability incited the rich to export their assets, costing the Banque de France millions and the Popular Front its power. In Spain, the brutal civil war sent thousands of refugees across the border; in England, King Edward abdicated to marry Wallis Simpson. I sent a gift to the royal couple and a consoling letter to Churchill, inviting him to La Pausa, as he had helped draft the abdication speech and was heartbroken.

  During his visit to La Pausa that final summer, Churchill was beset by what he called his Black Dog—a pervasive melancholy from which he found relief only when he turned to his writing or watercolor painting. He spent the weeks at my villa working on both, while his wife and I attended to his comfort and shook our heads over the Simpson affair that had turned England upside down. Before he left, Churchill advised, “You must prepare to leave Europe at a moment’s notice, Coco. I fear war is upon us.”

  Like the rest of the world, I did not heed his warning.

  VII

  How did we let the cataclysm happen? It was quite simple, really. Like everything unexpected, it crept through the back door while no one but Churchill was watching.

  The spring season of 1939 saw Schiaparelli and me again in a full duel, her collection dominated by sulfuric yellow and plum purple gowns embroidered with the silhouettes of faces and cellophane butterflies, topped by monumental grosgrain hats. I countered her with camellia-print dresses, Gypsy-inspired evening wear in the defiant tricolor of the French flag, as well as expanded prêt-à-porter pieces that included truncated pressed-pleat jackets over ruffled blouses and tweed slacks, all in additional sizes for petite women—a first among my peers.

  In September, Hitler invaded Poland; we sat, stunned, listening to the news over the wireless at La Pausa, Misia letting out a howl of despair for her native land. General mobilization began against Germany. Soon thereafter, upon my return to the Ritz, I received a telegram from my nephew André, who was living in Lembeye, near the Pyrenees, in a house I had bought him after his chronic bronchial issues took a turn for the worse. Despite his medical condition, France had called him to service. He entrusted his wife, Katharina, and daughter to me.

  With his telegram in hand, I turned to Misia. “I think I should close the atelier.” I had not articulated the thought until this moment, yet as soon as I spoke, I realized that deep down the decision had been building all along, ever since the strike had forced me to concede to my workers.
I had enough money. I had saved far more than I spent, my frugality ingrained in me since childhood, and I had the sense that now was the right time to retire. It would be a difficult adjustment, no doubt; one I might find cause to regret, but with the terrible news all around me, it would also be a sensational gesture of solidarity with my country as we braced for conflict. Once again, war tendered me an opportunity. Only this time, rather than profiteering, I would walk away with my head high, unfettered by a struggle that suddenly felt pointless.

  “You would do that?” Misia regarded me through hollow eyes. I’d expected an incredulous burst of laughter. After all these years, how could I even entertain the idea, much less feel at peace with it? But her desolate expression and subsequent silence only reflected what I felt. She did not protest as she might have on any other occasion. While we had been through one war and survived it, this time both of us knew it would be different. Hitler’s savage reprisal on Poland and pitiless advance across Europe signaled a darker twist to German aggression. Cornered after the first great war by Allied powers and a treaty that had brought Germany to its collective knees, they would now wreak their vengeance.

  “It is not the time for fashion,” I said. “After this, none of us can make dresses again.”

  Did I know what was coming? I believed I did. But I was the only designer in Paris who proceeded to gather my staff and inform them of my decision. My atelier at rue Cambon, as well as my shops in Biarritz, Deauville, and Cannes, would close indefinitely; I would continue to sell my perfume and jewelry but nothing else. For that purpose, I would retain a small staff; the rest were to leave by the end of the week. Outraged, convinced I was punishing them for their defiance during the strike, my workers appealed to the labor board. Lucien Lelong, president of the Chambre Syndicale, which oversaw the fashion industry in Paris, took me to lunch to convince me to keep my shop open, citing that as during the First World War, we would be required to hold charity shows and fashion auctions, perhaps even design uniforms for the military.

  I snorted. “I doubt the swastika will make a suitable accessory.”

  Perhaps something else motivated me, something unvoiced—a bitter disillusionment with everything in my life. Iribe’s unexpected death and my rivalry with Schiaparelli, the advent of another war that would compel me to adapt as the world fell into chaos; perhaps it had all finally sapped me of my relentless drive.

  At night, alone in the Ritz, I smoked and looked out to the place Vendôme and the streets beyond, the lights blacked out in case of air raids. Though the Germans had recently swept into Denmark and Norway, life still went on around me, my friend Lifar still dancing at the Ballets Russes, the cabarets, bars, and restaurants still thriving. I had shuttered my atelier but Paris remained open, exuberant, even though everyone of status was losing male servants and relatives to the draft, bundling up their children to dispatch them to safety in the country, storing valuables in safes before taking residence in easily vacated hotels. Our memory of the last war permeated our existence. Only now, our haunted déjà vu had a quality of exhaustion about it, a resigned wait for the inevitable. Most of my intimates, such as Cocteau and Misia, declared they would never abandon Paris. After all, the Germans had not invaded the city before. I shared their sentiment, even if it increasingly began to sound more like desperation than defiance.

  Nevertheless, I doubted. Had I made an impulsive error in closing my atelier? Was I the first to surrender in a conflict that had thus far yet to take its toll?

  Only time would tell, I thought, turning back to my suite. I took the low staircase leading to my garret bedroom, as austere as a nun’s cell; I had paid the hotel to install it so I could have a quiet place to rest, with nothing near me save Boy’s ticking watch, which I faithfully wound every day. Nestled within crisp white sheets, I let my mind drift backward in time, to my youth in Moulins, Vichy, and Royallieu, reliving my frenetic yearning to escape, those first awkward hats, the disappointments and compromises, until I reached the hour when Boy took my hand.

  He was still here with me, tangible, his dark green eyes warm, his thick hair tousled as he leaned over me, a satyr of musk, to whisper, “Remember, Coco, you are only a woman . . .”

  For the first time in years, I slept without my sedative.

  A SIMULTANEOUS KNOCKING at my suite door and the insistent ringing of my telephone jolted me awake. Stumbling down the stairs, I grappled for the phone receiver; it was Misia on the other end, babbling frantically: “They’re coming into Paris, Coco! The Germans—they are invading. You must come to the house at once. Jojo is here with me. We’ll hide and—”

  “Misia,” I said, cutting her off, for she had telephoned me several times in the past few weeks with similar dire predictions, “I must call you back. Someone’s at the door.”

  The Ritz’s maître d’hôtel waited on my threshold; with an apologetic incline of his head, he relayed the terrifying news as if he was informing me about a temporary shortage of hot water. “Mademoiselle, I fear I must inform you that our defenses have crumbled. The wireless reports that German panzer divisions crossed the Ardennes and are marching upon the city; we are in imminent danger of air strikes by their Luftwaffe. The metro is closing down. Herr Elminger has advised me to inform all residents that while we plan to remain open and will do our best to accommodate, we cannot guarantee anyone’s safety.”

  I knew the Ritz’s longtime director was serving in the army; his deputy director, Herr Elminger, was a Swiss citizen who had employed his native land’s much-vaunted neutrality to keep the 150-room hotel, a bastion of Paris, running as smoothly as possible. If he advised what amounted to an evacuation, then the situation must warrant it. Misia, it seemed, had not been exaggerating this time.

  “How long do we have?” I asked, thinking of my shop across the place Vendôme, of my apartment now crammed with my objets d’art since vacating my residence on Faubourg Saint-Honoré—my priceless statues and antiques, my gowns and the other detritus of my wandering life. I couldn’t take any of it with me, and as I thought of leaving it behind, risking everything I owned to the marauding Germans, I experienced a viselike tightening in my chest.

  “Not long,” he replied. “Personally, I would suggest sooner rather than later, mademoiselle. Many of our residents are leaving now. The roads out of the city are reportedly already very crowded.”

  “Yes, of course.” I paused, trying to get my bearings. “I wish to pay my bill in advance to hold my suite for two months, in case this . . . all turns out differently. Will that be agreeable?”

  He nodded. “We will do whatever we can, unless the Nazis make reservations.”

  I almost laughed at his droll remark. “And I’ll need a chauffeur,” I said, “if you can possibly find one. I can pay whatever is required. Also, please send up a chambermaid to help me pack my suitcases.”

  As he nodded once more and departed, I turned in a daze back to my suite. For a paralyzing moment, I had no idea what to do next. I stood barefoot in my pajamas, clenching and unclenching my hands, as bewildered as the day I had arrived before the gates of Aubazine.

  When the flustered chambermaid arrived, I set her to packing my traveling trunks. Wrapping Boy’s watch in a handkerchief, I slipped it into my coat pocket and left my suite to push through the frantic crowd of fleeing guests on the staircases, hastening down the narrow passage connecting the hotel’s bar and back entrance to rue Cambon.

  In the distance, the disconsolate wail of the air-raid siren on the Eiffel Tower shattered the June air. Outside the shop, the street remained eerily deserted, as though it was just another morning with people still indoors, brewing coffee as they blinked away the excesses of the night. Inside my shop, I found Hélène and my loyal première, Madame Aubert—the only two of my staff I had retained—coiffed, dressed in uniform black, and standing at attention behind the counters. They looked up at me with stupefied expressions, much as I imagined I must have looked in my suite, until I barked: “What are you d
oing here, waiting like fools for customers? Have you not heard? The Germans are upon us. Quick, we must close the shop. Those bottles of perfume and the jewelry”—I stabbed my hand at the vitrines—“bring them up to my apartment.”

  Leaving them, I took the staircase to the third floor, grappling for my keys and unlocking the mirrored double doors. They opened onto a scene suspended in time—and the sight of it, like a serene oasis in the midst of the growing clangor in my head, brought me to a pause.

  Slowly, as though I might disturb a fragile spell, I moved down the entryway lined with my Coromandel screens, their lacquered surfaces festooned with women in wind-flung kimonos astride herons, the wraithlike clouds floating above soaring volcanoes beckoning me to linger and admire a world untouched by time. Misia’s two blackamoors, which I had not been able to part with, seemed to welcome me deeper within, the clack of my heels silenced by the thick beige carpet as I glanced toward the looking-glass kaleidoscope of my salon. I turned in the opposite direction, through my vaulted dining room into my sitting room, where more of my concealing screens—the most exquisite and antique, inherited from Boy—glimmered in a patina of scarlet and gold, like flame against the neutral-colored furnishings and floor-to-ceiling shelves lined with my leather-bound books.

  Powdery light drifted through the windows. At my rolltop desk, I went still, my gaze drifting from the small gilt-frame painting of a lion propped above the desk, downward to my tortoiseshell fan with its embedded opalescent mother-of-pearl stars, set carelessly next to a stack of my embossed cream stationery.

  As I let myself caress the fan, I was overwhelmed by how tenuous, how unbelievably fickle, life could be. Would I see these precious objects again? When, if ever, would I return to this place which had for so long sustained me?