Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky

by Chris Greenhalgh

  1938

  Igor’s daughter Ludmilla dies of tuberculosis. She had been working for Chanel.

  Coco, in response to the constant strikes that have beset her shops, announces that Chanel is closing down.

  1939

  Following the death first of his wife and then his mother, and with Europe on the brink of war, Igor emigrates to the United States and sets up home in Beverly Hills, California. Arnold Schoenberg, Igor’s chief rival, lives a ten-minute walk away. The two never meet. Igor does, though, meet Walt Disney, who, for a handsome fee, appropriates The Rite for his film Fantasia.

  Coco designs the costumes for two French films, The Marseillaise and La Règle du Jeu.

  1940

  With Catherine now dead, Igor is free to marry his mistress of twenty years, Vera Sudeikina.

  1941

  Coco remains in Paris during the war. She takes a German lover, a high-ranking Nazi officer, von Dinklage, or “Spatz,” who had terminated his first marriage some years earlier upon discovering that his wife was partly Jewish. Unusual for a French citizen, Coco is allowed to keep her suite at the Ritz. She attempts, unsuccessfully, to regain control of her perfume business from the Wertheimer brothers, citing Nazi laws that forbid Jews to control the manufacture or sale of goods.

  While loathing the Nazis, Igor nevertheless flatters and courts Mussolini. When the Nazi press describes him as Jewish, Stravinsky is quick to deny it. The best part of his European income comes from Germany.

  1942

  Igor composes Circus Polka for a parade of elephants at the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus. The elephants find the piece rhythmically difficult.

  1943

  Coco hatches a bizarre plan, dubbed “Operation Modellhut,” for a peace settlement between England and Germany. She tries to contact Churchill and visits Berlin, where she conducts secret talks with senior Nazi officials, including Schellenberg.

  1945

  As the war ends and Hemingway downstairs “liberates” the Ritz with members of the Resistance, ordering seventy-three martinis in the bar, upstairs Coco is arrested upon suspicion of collaborating with the Fascists. The Duke of Westminster—and possibly even Churchill himself—intervenes. She is quickly released and leads the life of an émigrée, mostly in Lausanne, Switzerland, where her neighbor in time will be Charles Chaplin, on the run from Communist witch hunts.

  Stravinsky becomes an American citizen. At his naturalization ceremony his chosen witness, the film star Edward G. Robin-son, is discovered to have been an illegal immigrant for over forty years. With his Ebony Concerto, Igor attempts to mix the strategies of classical music and jazz.

  1948

  Igor meets Robert Craft, who will become his musical champion, chronicler, and confidant for the remainder of his life.

  1949

  Coco and Igor meet for lunch at Maria’s in New York.

  1950

  Misia Sert dies. Chanel washes and perfumes her body, dressing her in white and festooning her bed with white flowers. She attends the funeral dressed in white, as she did for Diaghilev.

  1951

  First performance of Igor’s opera The Rake’s Progress, with libretto by W. H. Auden.

  1953

  Igor is a convert to the twelve-tone chromatic or serial system of composition, long championed by his recently deceased rival, Arnold Schoenberg.

  After eight years of exile, and aged seventy, Coco decides to return to Paris and throw herself back into her work.

  1954

  5 February. Coco launches her fashion comeback in Paris. After an initially cool reception, she dominates the fashion scene until her death.

  1955

  Coco’s aunt and friend Adrienne dies.

  1957

  Igor’s Agon is first performed: another “white” ballet, for twelve dancers.

  1961

  Coco designs the costumes for Alain Resnais’s Last Year at Marienbad.

  1962

  Igor visits Russia at the invitation of Soviet authorities. He composes The Flood for CBS television. He is a guest of John F. Kennedy at the White House.

  1963

  The assassination of JFK in Dallas. Next to the president, Jackie is wearing a pink wool Chanel suit, which is spattered with blood.

  1964

  Igor composes his Elegy for JFK.

  1969

  Coco, a musical version of Chanel’s life, appears on Broadway with libretto by Alan Jay Lerner, music by André Previn, and costumes by Cecil Beaton. The septuagenarian Katharine Hep-burn is engaged to play Chanel. Coco, in suggesting “Hepburn” for the role, had meant the much younger Audrey. Instead of covering, as promised, the 1920s and 1930s, the musical fashions a saccharine version of a seventy-year-old’s comeback. Pandering to American audiences, the scenario suggests erroneously that it was an American designer who helped her make the crucial decision to return to work. With a budget of nine hundred thousand dollars and a mirrored set, the show is the most expensive in Broadway history. Coco hates it. The reviews are lukewarm. Plans for a film by Paramount are shelved.

  Largely for medical reasons, Igor moves to New York.

  1970

  Chanel No. 19 is launched, the number reflecting the date of Coco’s birth.

  1971

  Coco dies in her bedroom at the Ritz on Sunday, 10 January. On her bedside table is an icon given to her by Igor in 1925. At her funeral service in the Madeleine, the church is filled with her favorite white lilies. She is buried in the main cemetery in Lausanne, Switzerland. On her headstone are five marmoreal lions.

  Igor dies on 6 April in New York at the age of eighty-eight—one year for every key on the piano. His funeral procession in black gondolas along the Venetian canals is accorded the same pomp and ceremony usually reserved for a head of state. He is buried on the mortuary island of San Michele, Venice, close by the grave of Diaghilev, who was laid to rest there by Coco forty-two years before.

  1984

  A new perfume, Coco, is launched.

  1989

  Karl Lagerfeld, the new Chanel fashion impresario, launches a new collection for the 1990s at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées . The pageant opens to the music of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I would very much like to thank Susan Shaw, Charlotte Rawlinson, and Chris Fletcher for their many helpful suggestions. Heartfelt gratitude to my agents Caroline Davidson and Kathy Anderson, and to Sarah McGrath and Sarah Stein at Riverhead, for their exemplary professionalism and kindness. And thanks above all to my wife, Ruth, for her generosity and unfailing support.

  Chief among the books I consulted on Chanel were Edmonde Charles-Roux’s Coco Chanel; Axel Madsen’s Coco Chanel: A Biography; Frances Kennett’s Coco: The Life and Loves of Gabrielle Chanel; Amy de la Haye and Shelley Tobin’s Chanel: The Couturiere at Work; and Janet Wallach’s Chanel: Her Style and Her Life. On Stravinsky, biographies by Stephen Walsh and Michael Oliver proved especially useful, as did the collaborative volumes written with Stravinsky and edited by Robert Craft, most notably Conversations with Stravinsky; Expositions and Developments; and Memories and Commentaries.