by Lisa Chaney
From Venice, the ever-restless Serts took Gabrielle down to Rome. “We arrived weary and drained, and were obliged to visit the city, by moonlight, until we were exhausted. At the Coliseum he [Sert] remembered the recollections of Thomas de Quincey, and said some wonderful things about architecture and about the parties that might be given amongst these ruins.”11 Recalling Sert’s gargantuan appetites and his inability to do anything on a small scale, Gabrielle said that “he was as munificent and as immoral as a Renaissance man.” His perennial good humor, his erudition and encyclopaedic knowledge of the oddest things made him, for Gabrielle, the perfect traveling companion. She said that this “huge, hairy monkey, with his tinted beard, his humped back, his enormous tortoiseshell spectacles — veritable wheels — loved everything colossal.”12 He led her through the museums of Venice, explaining everything, and found in her an “attentive ignorance… that he preferred to all his erudition.”13 Gabrielle thought Sert resembled “some enormous gnome who carried gold as well as rubbish inside his hump like a magic sack. He had extremely poor taste and exquisite judgment, the priceless and the disgusting, diamonds and crap, kindness and sadism, virtues and vices on a staggering scale.”14
Returning to Paris, Gabrielle appeared to have emerged from her emotional retreat, and the Serts pronounced her cured. Gabrielle would never be entirely cured of Arthur’s loss, bearing forever its scars. Nonetheless, her powerful urge for life was too strong to lie dormant in her for more than a certain amount of time. Exhilarated by the two Serts’ mad adventures, she had decided “to live.”
One of the first signs of this more positive frame of mind was that Gabrielle now made a dramatic move. There are several versions of this story. One has it that she appeared at Diaghilev’s hotel and asked if she might see him. Another, which subtly alters the balance of power, has it that she asked him to come and see her. One suspects it was the latter, and that her description is correct:
I understand that there is a great tragedy. He has fled London because he could not pay his debts… “I live at the Ritz hotel, come and see me, say nothing to Misia.” He came to my apartment… I gave him a check… I think he didn’t think it was real… He never wrote to me, he never compromised himself by a word.15
The astonished impresario, who had hoped Misia Sert would bail him out, had instead been given a very large sum by Gabrielle to relaunch The Rite of Spring. Her request that he tell no one was to no avail; Diaghilev thrived on indiscretion almost as much as his boon companion, Misia, and in no time at all she knew. The customary explanation for Gabrielle’s gesture of munificence is that she was flexing her cultural muscles: it wasn’t only Misia who could make things happen. Unlike Misia, however, for whom the cultivation of a salon was almost a raison d’être, the artist in Gabrielle meant that she was only moderately interested in one with herself at its center. (As we have already seen, her interest in power was not for its own sake; it was above all a means to an end, usually freedom to do her work and thereby maintain her independence.) Gabrielle never failed to fall under the spell of creativity, and what primarily interested her in Diaghilev’s case was the fact of his being another artist at work. Anything made well, however modest, never ceased to enchant her. There was, however, nothing modest about Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes.
The maestro, Sergei Diaghilev, was an extraordinary creature, an incongruous, distracted mix of impulse and caprice, generosity and meanness, combined with a breathtaking ability to manipulate. He had no qualms whatsoever about a ruthless dedication to his objectives, which were devoted almost exclusively to his art. As someone remarked of him, “It was not easy to resist Diaghilev’s pressure. He would wear out his opponent, not by the logic of his arguments, but by the sheer stress of his own will.”16 His single-mindedness made him arrogantly selective about his companions, and perhaps it was only in Venice that he first registered Gabrielle properly. Perhaps it was in Venice, too, that Gabrielle understood something better about Diaghilev himself. Certainly, she found his exotic foreignness most attractive. Later, she would describe him as “the most delightful of friends. I loved his zest for life, his passions, his scruffiness, so different from the sumptuous figure of legend.”17
Meeting once again this powerful and charismatic figure, three of whose ballets she had now seen brought to the stage, Gabrielle was keen to be a catalyst for the return of the most scandalous of them so far: The Rite of Spring.
The war had not been kind to Igor Stravinsky. Little of his music had been played, and he was eking out an existence with his family in neutral Switzerland. With the successful launch of his ballet Pulcinella, however, enhanced by Picasso’s stage sets and costumes, all was set to change. Stravinsky both reclaimed his position at the center of the Ballets Russes and was relaunched as the musical darling of the most elevated Parisian salons.
For many years, with the cream of Europe’s elite, le tout Paris had reveled in the ritual of Venice’s Rabelaisian Carnevale festivities, and a series of glittering balls was followed assiduously by the journals of style. Vogue was so enamored of the festival that it became the sole subject of each February’s issue. The midwinter trip to Venice broke the tedium of the cold season, and in the emotionally chaotic postwar years, the pre-Lenten festivities were indulged in with particular abandon (Carnevale was the Italian Mardi Gras). For those unable to get to Venice, a round of parties was held in Paris, in private ballrooms. Fancy dress was already popular, and because many of the young now believed that life was pretty worthless, they sought escape in partying with a kind of nihilistic fervor.
Stravinsky’s Pulcinella brought the fashion for fancy dress out onto the theatrical stage. If Diaghilev hadn’t vetoed it, Picasso would probably have put the female dancers into contemporary dress, and the strong connection between contemporary art and fashion would have been made more explicit. Picasso’s new wife, the dancer Olga Khokhlova, “had many new robes from Chanel to show,” as Stravinsky would report.18 Olga was a devotee of Gabrielle’s clothes before her marriage to Picasso in 1918, and as his reputation began to soar she was far less constrained by cost. While Picasso indulged his insatiable appetite for sexual encounters outside marriage, he also indulged his beautiful bourgeois wife’s passion for avant-garde fashion.
After the premiere of Pulcinella, a legendary costume party was thrown for the beau monde by the affable and extravagant young prince Firouz of Persia, then a favorite of Parisian society. (He died not long afterward, probably at the hand of an assassin.) The relay of partygoers’ cars was directed out of Paris by men flashing electric torches at crossroads toward a bogus castle rented by an ex-convict friend of Cocteau’s. (The ex-convict’s business was illicit nightclubs, and he regularly had to escape capture by the police.)
On this occasion, “vast quantities of champagne were drunk. Stravinsky got tight, he went up to the bedrooms and, collecting all the feather pillows, counterpanes and bolsters, hurled them over the banisters into the great hall.”19 The ensuing pillow fight was so enthusiastic that the party went on until three the next morning. It was at this party that Gabrielle met Stravinsky once again. Afterward, he left for the provinces.
Still in festive spirit, Misia’s and Picasso’s friend the “fiendish social tyrant” Count Etienne de Beaumont gave one of his magnificent entertainments, a regular highlight of the Parisian spring calendar. From early May to the end of June, this included a series of events that took place across the city as the beau monde disported itself before its peers, all aching to outdo one another in the outlandishness of their costumes and their behavior.
Etienne de Beaumont and his wife, Edith, were then at the apex of the Parisian elite. After the war, the young couple had quickly become two of the city’s most significant hosts, and events at their spectacular hôtel particulier, at the heart of the fashionable seventh arrondissement, were noted for their edgy flavor of modernity. Vogue cooed, talking of “dinners and balls without ceasing,” and did its part to keep the Beaumonts in
the forefront of everyone’s minds. Their friendships and patronage of artists of all kinds, including Picasso, Braque, Satie, Cocteau and Massine, and their reputation for daring and exhibitionism, were heralded at an evening in 1918 at which American jazz was played by black performers, arguably for the first time in France.20
The height of each year’s entertainment was the Beaumonts’ spring costume ball, a melding of seventeenth-century court masques and the most radical avant-garde. These spectaculars always had a theme, and the one for 1919 was that guests “leave exposed that part of one’s body one finds the most interesting.”21 No matter how incredible the guests’ costumes, Beaumont always strove to upstage them, with one extraordinarily androgynous outfit after another, and always designed by him. Etienne de Beaumont liked men; his wife, Edith, liked women. They also had a great fondness for each other.
Gabrielle was asked by Beaumont to help design some of the costumes for his 1919 spring ball. Beaumont loved nothing better than accentuating his power through manipulating his friends, and typically kept them in suspense about their invitations. He made a point of leaving off two or three who expected one, and anyone “in trade.” When Misia discovered, to her embarrassment, that her friend Gabrielle Chanel had not been invited, she protested by refusing to take up her own invitation. Instead, on the night of the ball, she collected Gabrielle “with Sert and Picasso as our escorts… and mingled with the chauffeurs crowded in front of the house, to watch the costumed guests make their entrance.” They must have made an odd quartet: Picasso, known to several of the guests; Misia and Sert, well-known to most of them; and then Gabrielle, unknown to a great many but recognizable as an immensely stylish woman.
Misia said they had an uproarious time sending up the guests. No matter how up-to-date the upper class’s attitudes to the arts, to bohemia, they still appeared mired in the suffocating and ancient habits of social superiority. Indeed, Etienne de Beaumont had no qualms about using Gabrielle’s skills while rejecting her as a guest. It wouldn’t be long, however, before he and his wife comprehended Gabrielle’s growing significance and were then all too keen to include her in their suave set.
It is commonly said that once Gabrielle gained power, she made it her business to subject the haut monde to the same condescension she had suffered at their hands. But Gabrielle was a more complex and ambivalent creature than that.
16. The Strangest and Most Brilliant Years1
In 1921, after several months at a small Breton seaside resort, Stravinsky had been driven to distraction for lack of stimulation and returned to Paris in search of a house for his chronically ill wife and four children. His financial position was precarious. Recognizing his difficulties, Gabrielle suggested that Stravinsky bring his family to stay at Bel Respiro. She had spared no expense in the creation of a beautiful and consoling retreat, and by late September that year, the Stravinsky entourage, including extended family and various domestic and childcare staff, had settled themselves into Bel Respiro’s luxury.
Writing to an old friend, Stravinsky sounded tense. Apologizing for the brevity of his letter, he said his nerves were “in a poor condition”; possibly a reference to the emotional complications developing at the villa.2 Stravinsky had fallen for Gabrielle. When she voiced concern for Stravinsky’s wife, Catherine, his “very Russian” response was: “She knows I love you. To whom else, if not her, could I confide something so important?”3
Stravinsky took to absenting himself from Bel Respiro and visiting Gabrielle at the Ritz, where she had taken a suite while his family was staying at her house. The composer’s originality as a musician was augmented by his brilliant, intense and highly ambitious nature. He was not handsome, but his memorably strong features were an interesting contrast to his notably dandyish appearance. His aloofness added an attractive element to a complex personality. Gabrielle said, “I liked him… because he was very kind, because he often went out with me, and it’s very pleasant to learn… from people like that.”4 They went out to clubs, to parties and, once, with Misia and Sert, to the Paris fair. This is borne out by the passport-type photograph they had taken of themselves to commemorate the event.
Gabrielle had little knowledge of music, but Stravinsky set out to teach her. Unsurprisingly, she proved an able pupil. In the process, she developed a passion for Stravinsky’s compositions. He, in turn, developed a passion for Gabrielle, and it wasn’t long before they were launched into an affair. Gabrielle had been seduced once more by that Slavic cast of mind she seems to have found so irresistible — first Misia, then Diaghilev and now Igor Stravinsky.
If the composer’s nerves were strained by the management of his liaison, his stay at Bel Respiro was, at the same time, very creative. Not only did he finish the brilliant Concertino for String Quartet, he also completed Les noces villageoises, a ballet he had struggled with for several years. This was first heard, in 1923, at the magnificent town house of Winnaretta Singer, the Princess de Polignac and heiress to the vast Singer sewing-machine fortune. Winnaretta’s highly dedicated musical salon was one of the most powerful in Paris, and on that evening, Stravinsky, Diaghilev, the whole of the Ballets Russes and a number of other guests were present. The princess, who had by then become one of Gabrielle’s clients, was asked, “Why do you not ask Chanel?” and in her famously imperious manner she answered, “I don’t entertain my trades people.”5 Winnaretta Singer admired hardworking, self-made women, and her refusal to associate with Gabrielle may well have been partly out of jealousy; she was one of Stravinsky’s most important patrons.
We know little of the details, but during Stravinsky’s affair with Gabrielle, he was able to complete his memorial tribute to Claude Debussy, Symphonies d’instruments à vent, recognized as his most important work of that decade. Its spare and urbane quality has been related to the way postwar reconstruction became an important aspect of all Parisian artistic endeavor. The symphonies are seen as a new departure in Stravinsky’s music, for which no label yet existed, and which was at the heart of the modern sensibility.6 There is no doubt that this brief but intense period at Bel Respiro saw Stravinsky liberated to resolve several long-standing musical problems.
The composer and his lover may have been worlds apart, but one can appreciate the attraction this now quintessentially modern woman had for a man whose musical power had already acted as a force blasting away the last of musical romanticism. With the end of the war, the intellectual climate had been transformed by a sense of the futility, the sheer irrelevance of so much that had gone before. A fellow composer, Pierre Boulez, would say in the future that “something radically new, even foreign to Western tradition, had to be found for music to survive, and to enter our contemporary era. The glory of Stravinsky was to have belonged to this extremely gifted generation and to be one of the most creative of them all.”
Seven years after composing The Rite of Spring, Stravinsky made significant changes in preparation for its new staging. One of Stravinsky’s children recalled how the house was often filled with “the echoes of the piano,” resounding with “music so powerful that it scared us.”7 In this new version of the great ballet’s score, Stravinsky was delineating the outlines of a more urban, cosmopolitan modernism than in its earlier, more folkloric incarnation. This was exactly the atmosphere emanating from Bel Respiro, and from Gabrielle herself. Stravinsky’s artistic imagination cannot but have been stimulated by having an affair with a woman who exemplified that very sense of modernity the composer now incorporated into The Rite of Spring.
While the ballet was relaunched by Diaghilev on December 15, 1920, its scandalous reputation had gone before it. And the air of anticipation was so intense that success was almost inevitable. One admiring critic wrote that audiences had simply needed time to catch up with the modernity of the composer’s great work. Gabrielle, whose sponsorship made it possible, would later say, “I loved the Ballets Russes very much… when Diaghilev would tell me, “but it will be very expensive to put this on — I didn
’t care at all.”8 Declaring that money was an “accursed thing,” and because of that “it should be squandered,” Gabrielle used her patronage to put into practice her professed belief that the only real point of wealth was its ability “to make us free.” She not only “squandered” it on Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, she was to become, albeit as discreetly as possible, one of Diaghilev’s and Stravinsky’s major patrons for several years to come.
From its first night, this Rite of Spring was heralded as a classic, and Gabrielle was present at the grand supper party Diaghilev gave to celebrate the launch of the new season. Among the guests were the principal dancers, the Picassos, Stravinsky, Misia and the choreographer and principal dancer, Léonide Massine. Massine became overwrought, made himself completely drunk and apparently burned “Picasso’s hand with a cigarette (Picasso never moved).”9 Diaghilev had just discovered that Massine, his present lover, was having an affair with one of the female dancers.
Diaghilev’s fantastic possessiveness made him incapable of forgiving Massine. And although his reaction to Massine’s affair would drive Diaghilev to an emotional collapse, he was obdurate that his gifted friend would no longer work with the Ballets Russes.
While this episode was particularly dramatic, emotional dramas of one kind or another were not only constantly being played out behind the scenes in the Ballets Russes, they were integral to its existence. Somehow, Diaghilev and his troupe created an ongoing atmosphere of chaos, out of which they made their extraordinary ballets. Picasso’s own kind of creative chaos had a very different rhythm, however, and he had vowed he wouldn’t work with those mad Russians again. Diaghilev’s notoriously unscrupulous passion and conviction were nevertheless so persuasive that he had succeeded in luring back the painter, normally intractable once his mind had been made up. Even Diaghilev’s fellow Russian, Stravinsky, obviously familiar with the vagaries of the Russian temperament, once declared:
