Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky

by Chris Greenhalgh

  The vision pierces him.

  He’s shocked to discover how much the music moves him. Until now he’s always seen music as an absolute, pure and authentic: an essence that represents nothing but itself. Having resisted the expressive quality of his work for so long, he finds himself overwhelmed with the images and the memories it evokes. The back of his throat aches. His legs are trembling. Hearing it now, he’s puzzled by the impact the music has on him. And yet there’s nothing sentimental about the experience, nothing fuzzy or obscure. The recollections are sharp and exact, and the sense of loss all the more poignant for it. He feels the sadness hang upon his heart like a weight.

  The principal violinist is alone in witnessing it. Closest to Igor and keenest to catch his look, he sees a tear well in the conductor’s eye.

  Igor feels it brimming, forming a lens that focuses all the aches and longings, all the tendernesses and caresses of his time with Coco, distilling for an instant the months he spent in Garches. Then the tear, already distended, its droplet tensely stretched, breaks—and with it the memory of their relationship shatters into a thousand fragments. Unmendable. Abruptly the music bursts upon his consciousness. The percussion thuds, the strings tighten, and the brass arrives in orgiastic crashes. Great swerves of sound.

  And as it breaks, the tear slips from his eye, quickening down the plane of his cheek, slowing in the channel at the side of his broad nose. It warps finally around his mouth where, drawn into its dark space, it melts upon his tongue.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  On the last day of her life, a Sunday, Coco returned from a drive.

  Dismissing her chauffeur, she pushed her way through the revolving doors of the Ritz Hotel in Paris. Still disturbed by what she had seen, she felt exhausted. Her body felt so heavy, every step she took seemed about to pull her down.

  That morning, as announced in the newspapers, a cull of pigeons had taken place. Everywhere she looked, the boulevards were strewn with their bodies, the streets were thick with the litter of dead birds.

  Shocked by the sight of this slaughter, Coco had been startled, too, by the sudden silence that obtained. Aside from the occasional hum of morning traffic there was, she noticed, no undersong to the city anymore. Its melody, a kind of liquefied cooing furnished by the birds, had disappeared. Now everything suddenly seemed so still. Mist clung to the trees, making ghosts of them. The city seemed bleached of color. An odor of decay rose to Coco’s nostrils and almost made her faint.

  Back inside her permanent suite at the Ritz, she rested in her single bed. She did not have to go to work again until the following morning. Around her, the walls were white, the vases dense with flowers, and the shelves filled with leather-bound books. But inside her a sense of emptiness swelled.

  Lying there, she heard the church bells chime. The sound transported her for a moment back to her schooldays at the convent in Aubazine. She remembered prayers being whispered in the church by the altar, and candles glimmering over rows of dried flowers. And through the intervening years arose a penetrating whiff of incense lifting in clouds above the Madonna.

  Next to her, she saw the triple icon Igor had given her as a gift after leaving Garches some fifty years before. She wondered, Was it really so long ago?

  She smiled, reflecting how, out of the dense weave of the century, they had managed to snag in the developing threads of each other’s lives. In her memory, their love affair made a vivid pattern, a small but perfect dance. They were each in their late thirties then. In retrospect, it occurred to her how young they both had seemed. Now she felt so decrepit, so old and alone. She pondered what might have been had they stayed together; how differently for each of them things might have turned out. She still had, in storage somewhere, his mechanical piano. He had never returned to pick it up.

  Memories of the last half century mixed with the impression of the room’s whiteness, making the space within her seem infinitely wide. Slowly, as the sound of the bells faded, and the sense of her own tiredness grew, she drifted off to sleep.

  An hour later, she awoke abruptly. A bubble entered her stomach. Pain crowded her chest.

  She screamed to her maid, Céline: “Open the window! I can’t breathe! I can’t breathe!” The noise seemed torn from her.

  Seeing the icon on her bedside table, an impulse seized her. She crossed herself. A series of images flashed across her eye: that first night at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées; the bunch of jonquils he brought her at the zoo; the nacreous button she sewed back on his shirt; the night of the storm when she fell into his arms; her hands trailing noiselessly across the keys of the piano; the sunlit walks they both took in the woods; the dancing on the tables at Le Boeuf sur le Toit; and the pistachio-colored parrot that drove them crazy squawking her name.

  The images condensed with hallucinatory clarity. She thought she heard a distant music: the spasms of a piano, a shadowy harmony. She caught and followed the song along the communicating rooms of her senses. And in the phantasmagoria of sudden memory she recalled how he looked as he leaned to kiss her, remembered sharply his dark eyes.

  The pain spread in bands across her chest, arrowing down her arms.

  She heard Céline utter something reassuring and saw her reach for a syringe. Her head lifted effortfully from the pillow. Her body arched upward, then fell back heavily. She felt something tighten around her. The scent of lilies touched her nose. A single tear filled her eye, tense with iridescence.

  Then everything went blank.

  An ocean away, Igor was getting out of bed in New York. He experienced a pain, as if a rib of his had cried out. A dull throb lingered as he rose to his feet. He stretched his arms to take away the ache. Then, dressing, he unwrapped a new shirt from a crinkly cellophane packet. He felt a tiny thrill of static exercise the hairs on the back of his hands. Teasing out layers of tissue paper, he detached a blanched cardboard support and a clear plastic halter from inside the collar. He released pins from the shoulders and the back. The sleeves were pleached like a cinema curtain. One square pocket framed the left breast. Then, undoing two or three buttons at the throat, he pulled the shirt on over his head. After a moment of half panic in which he felt he was being smothered, his head emerged through the neck of the shirt. Whitely he raised his arms as though about to fly.

  Back in Paris, the vacuum cleaner scythed in giant sweeps across the foyer. The revolving door of the hotel spun clockwise on its axis. Brushes at the top and bottom shirred against the floor and ceiling, keeping the cold air out.

  A BRIEF CHRONOLOGY

  1882

  17 June. Birth of Igor Stravinsky in Oranienbaum near St. Petersburg, where his father is a leading singer in the Imperial Opera House. The family lives on the fringes of court society.

  1883

  19 August. Birth of Gabrielle Chanel at a hospice in Saumur. Her parents are unmarried. Her father, an itinerant peddler, is away at the time of her birth.

  1895

  Chanel’s mother dies. With her sister, Gabrielle is taken by her father to an orphanage in Aubazine run by nuns.

  1900

  Igor becomes a law student at the University of St. Petersburg.

  Gabrielle is admitted to a religious institution in Moulins. The convent is both a fee-paying school for young ladies and a free school for impoverished and needy young women. Gabrielle makes occasional visits to Varennes-sur-Allier where, under her aunt’s tutelage, she learns how to sew and fashion pleats.

  1903

  Igor becomes a pupil of Rimsky-Korsakov.

  Gabrielle distinguishes herself as a seamstress and, after taking a room independently, begins to keep the company of lieutenants in the Tenth Light Horse Brigade, among whom she enjoys her first lovers.

  1904

  Gabrielle makes her debut as a poseuse (one of a number of young women enlivening the stage behind the main acts) at La Rotonde. She gains the nickname “Coco” from two songs: “Ko Ko Ri Ko” and “Qui qu’a vu Coco dans l’Trocadér
o?” The sobriquet sticks.

  1905

  Igor graduates successfully with a law degree.

  Coco leaves for a season as a singer in Vichy. She begins to design and make her own hats and gowns. After failing auditions with her “voice like a crow,” she is employed as a water giver at the municipal baths. In the winter, she returns to Moulins.

  1906

  Forbidden by a czarist decree to marry his first cousin, Catherine Nossenko, Igor finds a priest in a remote village outside St. Petersburg to perform the ceremony. No member of either family is present. Rimsky-Korsakov agrees to act as a witness. The couple set up home in Ustilug in southern Russia.

  Coco’s friend and sometime lover, Étienne Balsan, inherits money and purchases an estate at Royallieu, where he breeds racing horses. Coco goes with him as an “apprentice.”

  1907

  Igor’s Symphony in E Flat is performed by the court orchestra in St. Petersburg. His first son, Theodore, is born.

  1907-8

  Coco lazes around, taking advantage of château life. She impresses all as a horsewoman and fraternizes with stars of the turf. She makes occasional sorties to Paris.

  1908

  Coco meets Arthur Capel (“Boy”). Bored with leisure and equestrian life, she begins to make hats for friends.

  The Stravinskys’ first daughter, Ludmilla, is born.

  1909

  Set up by Étienne in an apartment in Paris, Coco begins business as a milliner and becomes an immediate success.

  1910

  Premiere of Stravinsky’s Firebird—his first collaboration with Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. Igor sets two of Verlaine’s poems, “La Lune Blanche” and “Un Grand Sommeil Noir,” to music. A second son, Soulima, is born.

  Coco begins an affair with Boy and moves premises to rue Cambon, number 21, where she is licensed as a milliner.

  1911

  Igor completes Petrushka. A critic describes the score as “Russian vodka with French perfumes.” He meets Debussy and Ravel and dedicates his next piece, King of the Stars, to Debussy, who comments that it might receive performances on Aldebaran but “not on our modest Earth!”

  1912

  Coco makes hats for leading theater productions and encounters a wide circle of artists.

  1913

  The Rite of Spring is conducted by Pierre Monteux at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris on 29 May. The music, together with Nijinsky’s choreography for the Ballets Russes, causes a riot. Coco attends the opening performance. She opens her first shop in Deauville. On its white awning, her name is stenciled in black.

  1914

  Igor’s Nightingale is premiered. Exempted from military service, he seeks refuge from the war, in Lausanne, Switzerland. Birth of his last child, Milène.

  Baroness Rothschild patronizes Chanel’s shop. Coco enjoys her first success as a dress designer.

  1915

  Aristocratic ladies fleeing an advancing German army repair to Deauville and to Chanel’s to restock their lost wardrobes. Chanel turns out nurses’ uniforms for those who volunteer help in hospitals and makes chaste bathing costumes for highborn ladies. She opens a shop in Biarritz across from the casino. Her total workforce now numbers sixty.

  1916

  Coco gains complete financial independence. With most male designers co-opted into the war effort, she is left clear to mop up the fashion market. Her workforce expands rapidly to three hundred.

  1917

  Following the Revolution, Igor is forced into permanent exile from Russia.

  1918

  Igor’s Soldier’s Tale is premiered in Lausanne.

  1919

  Boy dies in an automobile accident. Heartbroken, Coco has her bedroom decorated all in black, including black curtains and bedsheets. She goes to Venice with her friend Misia Sert to recover. There she meets Diaghilev.

  Igor’s Five Easy Pieces is performed in Lausanne.

  1920

  Igor rearranges the music of Pergolesi for his ballet Pulcinella and finishes his Symphonies of Wind Instruments. He also revises The Rite of Spring.

  Coco moves from number 21 to number 31 rue Cambon, registering for the first time as a couturiere. Diaghilev—whose name W. H. Auden will use as a slant rhyme for “love”—introduces her to Stravinsky. Igor is invited to stay, along with his family, at her newly purchased villa in Garches. The two become lovers. Coco meets Grand Duke Dmitri, with whom she later has an affair. In the same year, Chanel No. 5 is born.

  1921

  Following the death of her maid, Marie, from Spanish flu, Coco sells the villa in Garches and takes an apartment in the Faubourg. A piano is the first piece of furniture installed. Stravinsky and Diaghilev are among those who regularly visit and play. Chanel meets Picasso and the poet Pierre Reverdy, whom she takes as a lover. No. 5 is launched commercially.

  Igor composes The Five Fingers and enjoys a successful revival of The Rite of Spring, sponsored by Coco Chanel. He meets Vera Sudeikina, who will eventually become his second wife.

  1922

  Igor divides his time between the family home and Vera’s. Thanks to Catherine’s tact, his mother—who is reunited with the family in Biarritz—remains oblivious of her son’s affair, as she will until her death seventeen years later.

  Coco designs costumes for Cocteau’s Antigone, so beginning a long professional association.

  1923

  Igor’s Les Noces (The Village Wedding) is completed.

  1925

  Igor comes to prominence as a virtuoso pianist and undertakes his first tour of the United States.

  The year of the little black dress. Its funereal chic scandalizes and captivates Parisian society. Like the Model T Ford, it will become a design icon. Reverdy leaves Paris. Coco meets Winston Churchill and is courted by his best friend, the Duke of Westminster. The affair lasts for five years, and there is much speculation in the British press about marriage. During this time she tries desperately, but unsuccessfully, to have a child.

  1926

  Coco designs the costumes for Cocteau’s Orphée. She begins a fashion for wearing mismatched earrings, sporting a black pearl in one ear and a white pearl in the other.

  1927

  Igor collaborates with Cocteau on a production of Oedipe Roi. Coco designs and makes the costumes. Struggling to keep up with demand, she grants sole right to manufacture and sell Chanel No. 5 to the Wertheimer brothers. Over the years, she is to have many battles with the family, who regularly block her attempts to launch or promote new scents.

  1928

  Igor writes the music for George Balanchine’s Apollon Musagète , calling it a “white” ballet—a ballet based, in other words, entirely upon abstract choreography, devoid of any narrative or expressive interest, and performed in monochrome. Again, Coco provides the costumes.

  1929

  Both Igor and Coco visit Diaghilev on his deathbed. Coco organizes and pays for his funeral and burial on the mortuary island of San Michele near Venice.

  1930

  Igor composes The Symphony of Psalms.

  The Duke of Westminster, tired of Coco devoting so much time to couture in Paris, finally elects to marry a fellow aristocrat (Miss Loelia Ponsonby). Coco’s reaction is typically combative: “There have been several duchesses of Westminster. There is only one Gabrielle Chanel!”

  1931

  Coco is inveigled to Hollywood by Samuel Goldwyn and contracted, for one million dollars, to costume the stars exclusively, both on-screen and off. She goes with Misia, and the studio supplies a special train from New York decked out in white. Though she is fêted like royalty, and supposed to visit twice a year, her stay is brief and she never returns. She is suspicious of Hollywood, which she sees as controlled by Jews. She designs costumes for three films only, including Tonight or Never with Gloria Swanson.

  1932

  Coco has a liaison with designer and cartoonist Paul Iribarnegaray (“Paul Iribe”). She sponsors the ultranationalist and
anti-Semitic newspaper Le Témoin, for which he is an illustrator. She allows her face to be used in drawings to represent the French republic against the threat of “aliens.” The Fascists, it is claimed, learn from Chanel the power of the color black. The same year, Coco hosts a private exhibition of diamonds designed by herself—an apparent volte-face for a woman who, until now, has done much to democratize costume jewelry and ennoble fake gems.

  1934

  Coco moves to the Paris Ritz and leaves the Faubourg for La Pausa. As a result, Joseph, her butler, is dismissed. The two part on bad terms. He has worked for her loyally for seventeen years. Despite many lucrative offers from newspapers and biographers, he reveals nothing of the secrets of Chanel’s household.

  Igor finishes Persephone. He becomes a French citizen.

  1935

  Igor performs, with his son Soulima, Concerto for Two Solo Pianos in Paris. After a second U.S. tour, he moves to Biarritz.

  Coco grieves after the sudden death of her lover Paul Iribe.

  1936

  The Chanel staff strike following Coco’s refusal to implement a government directive reducing the working week to forty hours. She is refused entry to her own shop.

  1937

  Igor attends the opening of the Athénée in Paris. He seats himself next to Coco in the audience. Card Game is premiered in New York. He is invited to Hollywood as a guest of Charles Chaplin, himself an accomplished composer.