Coco Chanel: An Intimate Life

by Lisa Chaney

  With almost nothing to go on, we are left to speculate on the reasons for Gabrielle’s prompt release by the Resistance. Remembering Arletty, whose popularity with her compatriots had not been enough to set her free, Gabrielle’s fame alone can’t have been sufficient to procure her release. The routine speculation is probably the closest to the truth: an influential figure let it be known that no proceedings were to be taken against Gabrielle. It is said that when the British forces reached Paris, some officers had been deputed to make sure of her safety. They couldn’t find her. She was no longer at the Ritz or the rue Cambon, and none of the staff were forthcoming. Gabrielle was eventually found, keeping a low profile at a modest hotel on the outskirts of the city. It was said that the orders to discover her whereabouts had come from Churchill himself.55

  Churchill liked Gabrielle, and one of his closest friends, the Duke of Westminster, was her ex-lover, with whom she had remained on close terms. Westminster may have stepped in and asked the prime minister to help her. Churchill’s possible intervention may have been encouraged by the knowledge that Gabrielle might have had things to say about the rumored pro-Nazi sympathies of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, with whom she was acquainted. This would not have gone down well.

  While many of Gabrielle’s compatriots were amazed at how she “got away with it,” a young English journalist, Malcolm Muggeridge, marveled. He wrote:

  By one of those majestically simple strokes which made Napoleon so successful a general, she put an announcement in the window of her emporium that scent was free for the GIs, who thereupon queued up to get the bottles of Chanel No.5, and would have been outraged if the French police had touched a hair of her head. Having thus gained a breathing space, she proceeded to look for help to right and to left… thereby managing to avoid making even a token appearance amongst the gilded company — Maurice Chevalier, Jean Cocteau, Sacha Guitry and other worthies — on a collaborationist charge.56

  Gabrielle’s lawyer, René de Chambrun, as the son-in-law of the Vichy prime minister Pierre Laval, was himself living very discreetly. He advised Gabrielle that she ought to do the same thing, and outside France. Gabrielle knew and liked neutral Switzerland, and that was where she chose to go into voluntary exile.

  Before she left, however, she received a postcard from a young GI who had called on her at the Ritz early in 1945.57 Hans Schilinger told her he had been sent by her friend, the now-celebrated photographer Horst, who had fled France for the United States early in the war. Horst had managed to get his compatriot Hans Schilinger to the States, where the young man then joined the U.S. Army. Horst had told his friend that if he was in Paris, he must “give my love to Coco,” and this Schilinger had done. The story is usually told that Gabrielle, in turn, asked Schilinger, if ever he came across someone called Hans Günther von Dincklage, to please write to the Ritz and let her know.

  Schilinger had indeed come across von Dincklage, and is supposed to have written Gabrielle a postcard telling her that he had secured his release from a POW camp in Hamburg. In reality, the sequence of events was appreciably different. Gabrielle had given Hans Schilinger the considerable sum of ten thousand dollars, and asked him to “go to Austria, find von Dincklage, give him the money and if possible conduct him to his home in Schleswig-Holstein.” This we know because Schilinger and von Dincklage were arrested by the British military authorities in the spring of 1945. The military recorded that Schilinger “was apparently accompanying Baron von Dincklage with a view to taking him to the latter’s family estate at Gettorf. Von Dincklage was in possession of US dollars 8,948 which were impounded on his arrest.”58 There was no possibility of getting von Dincklage back into France, and with the burden of Gabrielle’s own blackened reputation acting as a spur, by the winter of 1945 she had made her judicious move to Lausanne.

  28. Exile

  While Gabrielle’s life had been one of almost perpetual motion for decades, her Swiss exile launched her on an empty nomadic period. For several years before the war, she had spent her days in the rue Cambon and her nights across the road in the Ritz. Forever on the move, she also regularly left Paris for a few days, staying in the house of a friend, at resort hotels, or at La Pausa in the south of France. However, in leaving Paris for Switzerland, Gabrielle had lost something more important to her than any dwelling place — she had lost her business, her all-important work. At the rue Cambon it had always been possible to distract oneself from too much thought. Either a collection was in progress or it was the aftermath of the one just gone. There were the new season’s textiles, braids, buttons, shoes, hats, jewelery and other accessories to be discussed with the appropriate craftsmen and women; the hours with the models on which all ideas must be tried out; the friends, sycophants, and employees proffering queries and comments. Endless activity.

  Gabrielle’s lack of occupation during the war had been frustrating enough, but in Switzerland, she didn’t even have the consolation of rue Cambon nearby. Aside from a handful of friendships, for more than twenty-five years, her work had represented the one permanent fixture in her life. Her lovers, her friends, her family, where she lived — these were forever changing. Gabrielle was almost a caricature of the Heraclitean notion that the essence of life is flux, and to resist this change is to resist the heart of our existence.

  Whatever she might have sometimes said to the contrary, she had chosen change as her life, and would say, “I am scared only of becoming bored.” Constant movement was the one thing that would keep this fear at bay. She also knew that moving on, carrying no baggage from the past, was the climate out of which she was best able to create. Gabrielle came closest to being a revolutionary when understanding that, within her there was a “deep taste for destruction and evolution.” This was what she meant when she said, “Fashion should express the place, the moment… fashion has a meaning in time but none in space.”1

  Without her business — both the building and the exercise of designing — as the fixed point in her life, Gabrielle’s incessant movement had lost its meaning and acquired an aimlessness that did not suit her. Leaving Lausanne, she wandered from one grand Swiss hotel to another and back again. With her energies previously harnessed creatively, she now had no outlet for her restlessness and “revealed a certain weariness,” a disenchantment with life, as her old friend Paul Morand put it.

  Morand, who had worked for the Vichy government, had recently taken refuge in Switzerland with a number of other political exiles like himself, so as to avoid any legal judgments being meted out by his homeland. He had lost almost everything. As an impoverished and vilified ex-member of the French literary establishment, in the winter of 1946 he took up Gabrielle’s invitation to visit her in Saint Moritz. There, at Badrutt’s Palace Hotel, they sat together over the course of several evenings, and Gabrielle told Morand her story. With nothing to do, with her youth now behind her, inevitably, she looked back.

  (These were the evenings referred to at the beginning of this book, and the record of which, years later, Morand would publish as Gabrielle’s “memoir,” The Allure of Chanel. In his introduction, Morand would recall that “with nothing to do for the first time in her life,” Gabrielle was “champing at the bit.”) Reflecting on her heart, which “unburdened the secret of a taciturn disposition,” Morand remembered Gabrielle’s voice “that gushed forth from her mouth like lava, those words that crackled like dried vines, her rejoinders, simultaneously crisp and snappy… a tone that was increasingly dismissive, increasingly contradictory, laying irrevocable blame, I heard them all.”2 He heard her doubts about when to return to the rue Cambon, and how she felt both “trapped by the past and gripped by time regained.” She was part of an age which was suddenly “foreign to her… black bile flowed from eyes that still sparkled, beneath arched eyebrows increasingly accentuated by eyeliner.”3 And although Morand’s Gabrielle was formidably alert and well informed, her star was no longer in the ascendant.

  Sitting in the palatial opulence of the Swiss
hotel, she talked. Far too intelligent not to be self-aware, she said of herself, “I lack balance… I talk too much,” but she added, “I forget quickly, and furthermore… I like to forget. [Emptying her mind enabled her to create.] I throw myself at people in order to force them to think like me.”4 The contradictions came thick and fast, and while she did always forget, this woman of paradox also declared, “I have never forgotten anything.” Saying that “aging is Adam’s charm and Eve’s tragedy,” Gabrielle now had more time than she wished to contemplate the possibility of her own decline. On the one hand, she despised women who faced aging without dignity, and on the other, she was unable to comprehend the thought of her own nonexistence. She would say that the idea “of youth is something very new, who talked about it twenty years ago?”; she also said that 1939 was the first time it had occurred to her that she was no longer young: “It hadn’t occurred to me that I could grow old. I’d always been among bright, pleasant people; friends. And all at once I found myself alone, separated from everyone I liked. Everyone I liked was on the other side of the ocean [she means those who had fled to the States].”5 But there were distractions. A few old friends, such as Visconti, visited her in Switzerland; there was a handful of new Swiss friends, and a new female companion, Maggie van Zuylen.

  Marguerite Nametalla was an Egyptian (it was said she had been a violet seller) married to the diplomat Baron Egmont van Zuylen, whose home was the immense medieval De Haar Castle, in the Netherlands. Maggie was elegantly beautiful, with pale skin and green eyes, and enjoyed dramatizing her “unwealthy origins.” Her son-in-law, Guy de Rothschild, described her as “witty and gay, lively and provocative, she combined audacity and fantasy. Completely natural and devoid of timidity, her sense of humor… her repartee, her gift for imitation, made her seem like a character in a play.”6 André Malraux would proclaim that “Chanel, General de Gaulle and Picasso are the three most important figures of our time,” and of Maggie van Zuylen, he said, “Hers is intelligence in its purest state, since it is unencumbered by any intellectual baggage.”

  “Maggie could participate in any conversation, for while conscious of her lack of culture, she never gave it a second thought.”7 Her vivacity was seductive, and Gabrielle felt renewed in the company of this worldly and vital younger woman. She also became her lover. In the winter of 1945–46, they entertained each other uproariously with their sparkling and acid wit. Writing many years later in his journal, Paul Morand would say that before Gabrielle “became exclusively lesbian, I lived with her and Mme. de Zuylen at the Beau Rivage, shared their private life… in Lausanne. They didn’t hide when I found them in bed together.”8

  Gabrielle had so far outwitted her demons by “never resting.” Still on the move from everything she found too painful, she was obliged to use her hotel hopping as a new method of forgetting.

  Did she make herself forget, too, the mounting deaths of her friends, lovers and family that reminded her of time passing? Her two brothers, whom she had cut off so peremptorily at the beginning of the war, were both dead, Lucien felled by a heart attack early in the war, and without seeing their sister again. Gabrielle rarely referred to her family. She was one of those who had so outgrown their roots that in doing so she had rejected them, left them far behind. When they pulled her back, they did nothing but remind her of a childhood that she said she remembered every day and that she spent her whole life trying to avoid. Either through a sense of social inadequacy or a genuine impatience with the roots that were of no use to her emotionally, psychologically or financially, Gabrielle had made the decision and ruthlessly thrust them aside.

  Excising almost all her family from her life, Gabrielle appears to have retained only her aunt Adrienne and her nephew, André Palasse, and his family. She brought André and his family to Switzerland in an attempt to improve his health, but André would eventually die of tuberculosis.

  In 1942, Gabrielle’s friend Max Jacob had died in the appalling Drancy internment camp, in Paris’s outer suburbs; his sister and brother had already been sent to be gassed in Auschwitz. That same year, Duke Dmitri Pavlovich had died in another kind of prison, a sanatorium in Switzerland, where for more than a year he had struggled with tuberculosis. In 1948, Vera Bate-Lombardi died in Rome. But before Vera, Gabrielle’s old friend José Maria Sert’s death was announced. Theirs had been what Gabrielle called a relationship “with all the ripples that the clash of characters as entrenched as ours can stir up.” Sert was “as munificent and as immoral as a Renaissance man,” who had done nothing to curb the pace of work, food, drink and the drugs that his doctors had said would kill him. One day, in November 1945, while laboring on his huge mural in the cathedral of Vichy, he dropped dead.

  Misia had been quite unaware that Sert was close to death, and was bereft, afterward writing, “With him, disappeared all my reasons to exist.”9 Her beloved brother had already died; and her divorced niece, now living with her, would be killed in a car crash, leaving Misia more alone than ever. The dosage and frequency of her morphine increased. It was her only way of keeping at bay the inevitability of loss and its sibling, pain, made worse by the sequence of her own aging. She survived by spending increasingly long periods shielded from reality under her cloak of narcotics: “Chatting at dinner parties, or wandering through the flea market, she would pause to jab a needle right through her skirt.”10 And here was one of the great differences between Misia and her friend and sometime lover Gabrielle. Both of them had long ago reached a state where they could not live without their drugs. But where Misia’s addiction meant that she became utterly controlled by it and used her narcotics in increasing quantity, Gabrielle was never in that position. She was dependent, but her great force of character never allowed the morphine to control her; Gabrielle controlled the morphine.

  Procuring Misia’s drugs had become dangerous, yet she bothered less and less about concealing her habit. “Once, in Monte Carlo, she walked into a pharmacy and asked outright for morphine, while a terrified Gabrielle pleaded with her to be more careful.”11 In those postwar years, Misia traveled to Switzerland to spend time with Gabrielle, and also to collect her supplies, as she and Gabrielle had done together so many times before. But Misia’s name was now found on a drug dealer’s list in Paris; she was arrested and thrown into a cell with fellow addicts, prostitutes and down-and-outers. Friends got her out after twenty-four hours, but at seventy-six, she was greatly shaken by the experience.

  Now too frightened to answer the door, Misia turned ever more to her chemical oblivion. In September 1950, when there was little of herself left to destroy, Misia made her last trip to Switzerland to visit Gabrielle and collect her latest consignment of drugs. Not long after returning to Paris, she withdrew to her bed. A month later, her maid called friends to her bedside; she was dying. Gabrielle came, and stayed until Misia retreated into that silent space before death. Late that night, her breathing quietly stopped. Early the following morning Gabrielle took charge, as only she knew how. She had Misia’s body removed to Sert’s great canopied bed, then set to work to “perform her last rites for her friend.”

  She arranged Misia’s hair, made up her face and decorated her with her jewels. In white, on a bank of white flowers, a pink ribbon across her breast, at its center one pale rose. Thus Misia was presented by Gabrielle to her mourning friends. Misia’s biographers would say that Gabrielle had made the years fall away and that Misia looked “more beautiful than ever.” With more realism, in a typically arch aside, the novelist Nancy Mitford wrote, “Dolly… had just come from the deathbed of Misia Sert. Mlle Chanel was there doing up the corpse. “Well, Coco was doing her nails — I thought it was kind of her — but I must say, she had overdone the makeup.”12 The funeral was held in the Polish church, in rue Cambon, close by the Chanel boutique.

  First Sert and now Misia were gone. Whatever dreadful things Gabrielle might have said of Misia, these two had been a source of strength and comfort to each other in an enduringly passionate friendsh
ip lasting for more than thirty years. Gabrielle said, “Whoever mentions Sert mentions Misia,” and so it must have been in her own heart. With the death of the prodigiously unreconstructed Sert and his woman, a crucial aspect of Gabrielle’s life’s entertainment, exasperation and support was gone, leaving her world a diminished one. While declaring that “I am much more frightened of women than I am of men,” she added, “Women never amuse me. I feel no friendship for them… They don’t play the game, but expect it to be played for them.”13 Meanwhile, Misia, who like Gabrielle was “neither good nor bad,” was also the one about whom Gabrielle would say with stark simplicity, “She has been my only woman friend.”14

  As she sat in that Swiss hotel with Paul Morand, Gabrielle’s now unsparing tongue demonstrated the formidably tough exterior few were brave or imaginative enough to challenge. Yet hidden in her armory of words, every now and then, alongside the unrelenting worldliness, Gabrielle revealed her other self, a diffident, fragile and lonely creature. This vulnerable woman who admitted, “I have only ever found loneliness… at the age of six I am already alone,” went on to say defiantly, “It is loneliness which has forged my character, which is bad-tempered, and bronzed my soul, which is proud, and my body which is sturdy.” At the same time, she said, “I have a horror of loneliness and I live in total solitude. I would pay so as not to be alone.” (In fact, she often did. On her annual trips to Italy, for example, she took lovers, saying later, “One doesn’t go to Italy for gentlemen. But I always paid.”15 And reading her comment “I would have the duty police constable sent up so as not to dine alone,” the thought of von Dincklage, there in the background, springs to mind.