by Lisa Chaney
In the end, however, not only did Gabrielle retain the custom of some of her richest society clients, such as Daisy Fellowes, Lady Pamela Smith, the South American Madame Martínez de Hoz and the Americans Laura Corrigan and Barbara Hutton, by 1935 business was very much improved for Gabrielle. Her clientele had grown sufficiently that her workforce had now reached four thousand. The Duke of Westminster had permitted her to adapt his nine-bedroom Audley Street London house to her own requirements. From 1930 to 1934, this became the center of Gabrielle’s cosmetics venture, part of her drive to grow by diversifying, it included the expansion of her perfume range, with № 22, Glamour and Gardénia. Like other couturiers, in order to maintain a high profile, she also now endorsed products and designed for manufacturers.
During the Depression, a young New York heiress, Maybelle Iribarnegaray, discovered that her husband was having an affair with Gabrielle. It was 1933. Her husband, Iribe, as Paul Iribarnegaray styled himself, was a thickset Basque with an impenetrable accent who often utilized his incessant womanizing to further his extraordinary talent. Besides the great Sem, Iribe had been the most talented and successful French prewar caricaturist, with a facile and sharp pen. He had then branched out and launched a successful design business, creating furniture, fabrics, wallpaper and jewelry. The success of his business had made him a significant arbiter of taste. Then, one year into the war, having dispensed with his first wife, the actress Jeanne Dirys, who subsequently died of tuberculosis, Iribe left for America, scooped up Maybelle and spent the next ten years in America, most of them in Hollywood.
Iribe worked on some of the legendary Cecil B. de Mille’s most important films, including The Ten Commandments, the largest-scale film yet made, and was promoted to artistic director of Paramount. By this point, he was also designing dresses and film sets, and was sometimes even directing. Iribe was witty and clever, with an unctuous charm, but he had also gained a reputation for being arrogant and argumentative. One day, when he reacted badly to de Mille’s criticism of his sets for King of Kings, de Mille had had enough and fired him. Iribe had also had enough, and left Hollywood, returning to France with his wife and her two children. With Maybelle’s money, Iribe now opened a shop on rue Faubourg Saint-Honoré—not far from Gabrielle’s residence, Hôtel de Lauzan — and reapplied himself to designing furniture and jewelry. He had always been intent on riches, fame and acceptance by society, and was envious of Cocteau, an old acquaintance and colleague, who infiltrated the haut monde with such ease.
On his return to Paris, Iribe hailed luxury, artisanship and nationalism as the cornerstones of his beliefs. Enslaved to money, he appears to have made and lost it at a great rate. For the moment, however, Iribe made huge sums, acquiring a luxury car, a yacht and a house in Saint-Tropez, the fishing village now transformed into one of the most select playgrounds of the rich. Colette hadn’t visited for a while, and friends warned her that it was overrun by “the sort of people photographed by Vogue.” Colette herself was in fact photographed by Vogue, but bemoaned the smothering of one of her favorite places with traffic and tourists. One morning, she found a horde of them awaiting her as she left the stationer’s, and wrote to a friend, “I didn’t hide what I thought of them.”6
Then Iribe did less well, so his long-suffering wife hustled and found him a commission from Chanel. Maybelle’s parents were meanwhile pressuring their daughter to curtail their son-in-law’s excessive spending; they were concerned he would bring them to ruin. This, combined with Iribe’s serial infidelity, finally brought the marriage to an end, and Maybelle left for America with her two children.
When Gabrielle and Iribe’s affair was still a well-kept secret, Colette and her lover, Maurice Goudeket, were inadvertently to discover it. (Gabrielle had met Colette at some point in the early twenties. They never became close, but with a number of friends in common, they met on numerous occasions.) At the end of 1931, “strangled by the Depression,” as Colette put it, and in financial straits—“Great God above, things are difficult for Maurice and me”—they were forced to sell their retreat outside Paris.
La Gerbière was a pleasant house surrounded by trees and high up in the village of Montfort-L’Amaury, where the composer Maurice Ravel lived. Gabrielle came down alone from Paris, and made the deal with Maurice Goudeket to buy the house as they walked around the garden. Colette had had no idea her partner was confirming the purchase of their house until it was all over. She then realized that Gabrielle intended bringing Iribe here for their trysts: “a place for billing and cooing,” as Colette put it.
At the end of the transaction, she was left with a sense of Gabrielle’s decisive toughness. These two remarkable women may not have felt great warmth for each other, but they did feel a strong mutual respect. Gabrielle described Colette, correctly, as “this highly intelligent woman,” saying, “The only two female writers who appeal to me are Madame de Noailles and Colette.”
In 1933, by which time everyone who was anyone summered in the south of France, Misia met Colette one day and gossiped about Gabrielle and Iribe’s engagement. Colette then wrote to a friend: “I’ve just been told that Iribe is marrying Chanel. Aren’t you horrified for her? That man is a most interesting demon.”7 Iribe’s first wife had been a good friend of Colette’s. Colette didn’t like Iribe. Finding him fawning, she was suspicious of his thrusting drive to succeed. She described him as wrinkled and pale and said that he “coos like a pigeon.” His friend Paul Morand felt rather differently.
Back in Paris, having foretold the transatlantic cataclysm… having sensed that the time for misery was to come; Iribe felt that one had to fight against these curses and die, as a French artisan, for the individual and for quality. In love with the homeland he was returning to and disappointed by it, he was publishing Témoin.”
8
Iribe had founded the magazine Le Témoin before the First World War, and now persuaded Gabrielle to fund its relaunch. With forceful Iribe graphics, this time Le Témoin served to support a growing French nationalism. In one illustration, Marianne, female symbol of liberty in France, was Gabrielle, under a bench of sneering judges: Roosevelt, Chamberlain, Mussolini and Hitler. Iribe was now an archpatriot who despised his nation’s present government. Fierce antirepublican sentiment — the same that had brought Hitler to power in Germany not so long before — spawned a number of right-wing leagues, the aim being to overthrow the French Third Republic in favor of a strong, uniting individual. One of the most powerful right-wing elements, the Action Française, under François Maurras, wanted a restoration of France’s monarchy. Iribe wasn’t a monarchist, but he believed that democratic government was ineffectual.
As one element of the drive to patriotism, Le Témoin was anti-German and anti-Jewish. Above all, it was antiforeign, claiming France for the French alone. However, in 1934, Gabrielle was as shocked as the rest of Paris when a demonstration by forty thousand right-wing associations and war veterans ended by being one of the bloodiest since the Paris commune of 1871. Sixteen people were killed, more than two thousand were injured, the Right was narrowly defeated and the communists and socialists were roused to sink their differences in a new party, the Popular Front.
After more than a decade of entertaining and “show,” Gabrielle now gave up the Hôtel de Lauzan on the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, and moved into a large suite at a hôtel pension in the Ritz; her rooms were situated on the rue Cambon side. The furniture and objects she wished to keep were moved into a third-floor apartment she had made for herself in her rue Cambon building, at number 31. Here she would keep her clothes. For the rest, when Gabrielle felt the need of a home, she could travel south to La Pausa.
This move into the hotel had possibly come about after some prodding from the demanding Iribe. He had told her he thought her way of life was corrupting and didn’t understand why she needed so much. If she lived more simply, he might live with her. He said he hated complex people. Gabrielle apparently obliged, moving into two rooms in a family h
ouse nearby. After a short time, Iribe asked her, “Do you think I’m accustomed to living in such hovels?” and went to stay in the Ritz. Not long afterward, Gabrielle moved to the hotel, too.
This transition from the Faubourg Saint-Honoré to somewhere with its own servants meant that Gabrielle brought to an end her long association with her devoted majordomo, Joseph. Joseph had arrived when “given” to her by Misia on the eve of her wedding sixteen years before. Gabrielle and her manservant parted on bad terms: her ability to be unsentimental was at times quite ruthless. And yet, the loyal Joseph would never make any public criticism of his ex-employer.
Between Gabrielle’s fashion house and her textile and jewelry workshops, her expenditure was large. The effects of the Depression and the need to cut costs may have been another contributing factor in her move from the Faubourg Saint-Honoré to the Ritz. She now permitted herself to lean on Iribe. After years of grumbling resentment against the distributors of her perfumes, the Wertheimers, Gabrielle had begun a legal tussle with them over her “abused rights.” Iribe was sufficiently bullish that Gabrielle overestimated his abilities as a negotiator and asked for his assistance.
The serious lawsuits Gabrielle now brought against the Wertheimers drove them to attempt removal of her as president of the board. In September 1933, Gabrielle had given Iribe power of attorney, and he presided over a board meeting. But he was reckless enough to refuse signature of the minutes, giving the board just the ammunition it wanted; he was voted off by a majority. Continuing with the company’s reorganization, the Wertheimers succeeded in removing Gabrielle as president in 1934. Outraged, she could do little for the moment.
In 1934, Gabrielle was again in Roquebrune for the summer, at La Pausa. Friends staying included the composer Poulenc, the dancer Serge Lifar, and Horst P. Horst, a young German photographer. Another friend who often stayed at La Pausa was the Italian count Luchino Visconti, the future film director. Gabrielle had known Visconti for several years. At this time, Visconti’s self-consciousness about his position as a nobleman of leisure drove him to put much of his energies into his racehorse breeding. He met Gabrielle and her friends in Venice at the Lido or at the Venetian palazzo of his sisters-in-law, Madina and Niki Arrivabene, and in Paris. Serge Lifar recalled how it appeared as if all society was in Venice, and they all thought themselves
unique, exciting and beautiful… During those years… at Venice there were the great popes, like the Visconti, and the Volpi “doges.” Between Paris and Rome, society communicated and intertwined continuously. In Paris, those who welcomed me were the same ones I met in London, Rome or Venice, all capitals on that axis of triumphant worldliness.9
Visconti’s biographer wrote that “Visconti loved Natalie Lelong [half sister of Dmitri Pavlovich], who had an affair with Serge Lifar and several women as well; Chanel had an affair with Visconti, who also loved Niki Arrivabene — they all loved each other and were all beautiful, bisexual and attractive.”10
Despite his painful shyness, when Visconti arrived in Paris, his background and his handsome looks gave him a natural entrée into the Parisian version of the sophisticated Venetian milieu. When he was there, he had an open invitation to Gabrielle’s much-coveted lunches and dinner parties, where he found “the most glittering, famous and interesting wits at her table.” One or the other of Visconti’s sisters-in-law sometimes accompanied him, and one of them remembered these occasions as “so chic, one could die.”
Although Visconti’s understanding of Gabrielle wasn’t comprehensive, he came to know her well. Describing her as La Belle Dame Sans Merci, he recalled “her sufferings, her pleasure in hurting. Her need to punish, her pride, her rigour, her sarcasm, her destructive rage, the single-mindedness of the character who goes from hot to cold, her inventive genius.”11 Visconti was a connoisseur of interiors, making a number of fine ones himself, and admired what Gabrielle had created at La Pausa. He added that the gardens were “special again,” saying that Gabrielle “was the first to cultivate “poor” plants like lavender and olive trees, discard lilies… and flowers of that kind. The house was decorated in beige leather and chamois sofas, pieces of Provençal and Spanish furniture, then totally out of fashion, and everything was in soft colors like a painting by Zurburan.”12
After years of wrestling with his homosexuality, Luchino Visconti had finally reached an accommodation with himself. This in turn led to some major decisions. Rejecting a conservative aristocratic existence and the comforts of family — in which, nonetheless, he believed profoundly — Visconti had decided he would make his mark on the world through art. In company with a number of others, he had fallen passionately in love with the photographer Horst, who had recently cemented his reputation with a set of alluring photographs of Gabrielle. Horst remembered that she
had had a row with Vogue [in fact, Condé Nast] and no photograph of her was allowed to appear in the magazine. I was sent to her: I photographed her and she said that the photographs were good of the dresses but looked nothing like her. “How can I take a good photograph of you if I don’t know you,” I answered. So she asked me to dinner. At that time she had had a row with Iribe… and she was thinking of him when I took my photographs. She adored them. “How much are they?” she asked. “Nothing,” I said. “To be able to take a photo like that of you was wonderful”—and we became friends.13
In the summer of 1935, Gabrielle was at La Pausa awaiting Iribe, who had spent the previous weeks in Paris. He called to say he would arrive on the sleeper from Paris the following morning and suggested they could begin their day with a game of tennis. According to some sources, Iribe was warming up when Gabrielle joined him. Halfway through the first set, she went over to the net to ask him not to hit the ball so hard. Looking at her over the rim of his sunglasses, he stumbled and then collapsed. He had suffered a massive heart attack. Two days later, Iribe died in a nearby clinic, never having regained consciousness. Years later, Gabrielle would confess to believing she had caused his death because she’d persuaded him to resume the game when he’d complained of feeling faint.14
Gabrielle was in a terrible state; it felt as if her own life was finished. Her affair with Iribe may have been a tempestuous one, but she had felt both stimulated and supported by this dominating man. Unusually, she had allowed herself to lean a little.
At night, Gabrielle’s anguish grew worse as she lay alone, rigid with wakefulness and grief. Misia rushed to La Pausa. The doctor was summoned and prescribed a sedative, Sedol, to calm her and ensure some sleep. Gabrielle would later say that it wasn’t so as to live she had taken it, but simply to “hold on.”
Once again, a man had “left” her and, once again, she was alone. Each time Gabrielle lost someone, she appears to have relived her desertion by her father and been plunged into an emotional crisis. But this time the effect was bad indeed. Not only did she feel again that desertion, she also experienced the most terrifying reminder of her own mortality. The night was impossible without the sedative. For a few hours it numbed her grief and protected her from the sense that every time she closed her eyes she was no longer alive. Gabrielle quickly became dependent on this blessed release from pain, and after this period of abject misery, she continued injecting herself each night with Sedol to help her relax and find sleep.
Years later, in the sixties, Gabrielle’s Swiss doctor would tell her assistant, Lilou Marquand, that while on a skiing trip to Switzerland, Gabrielle had broken her ankle. This was most probably the year following Iribe’s death, when Gabrielle was indeed on a skiing trip with Etienne de Beaumont and other society friends. She was given morphine to combat the pain from her broken ankle, and Lilou Marquand went on to say, “The pain disappeared, and habit did the rest.” Saying that “this story was not well known” and that Gabrielle seemed to have forgotten it, Marquand, who knew Gabrielle well, speculated that even if her doctor might not have told her everything, “Did she really believe she was only injecting a little bit of morphine in a liquid with
added vitamins?”15 However, Gabrielle always had her own truths, and as time went on, one of these would be that what she injected herself with was a simple sedative.
When Gabrielle came to describe her relationship with Iribe, we understand something of what it had meant to her. She said he was
a very perverse creature, very affectionate, very intelligent, very self-seeking and exceptionally sophisticated… He was a Basque with astonishing mental and aesthetic versatility, but where jealousy was concerned, a real Spaniard. My past tortured him. Iribe wanted to relive with me the whole of that past lived without him and to go back through lost time, while asking me to account for myself.16
One suspects that, perhaps along with Reverdy, Iribe was the other man to whom Gabrielle confided the most about her past. She and Iribe had set out “on the trail of my youth” and visited the convent at Aubazine, far away in Corrèze.
Yet, years later, Gabrielle also said that
he wore me out, he ruined my health. My emerging celebrity had eclipsed his declining glory. He loved me, subconsciously… so as to be free of this complex and in order to avenge himself on what had been denied him. For him I represented that Paris he had been unable to possess and control… I was his due.17
