Coco Chanel: An Intimate Life

by Lisa Chaney

  Gabrielle was, though, no longer the first to be consulted about style. Instead, she had become a public figure, whose time was bound up with serving her legendary name. How else was she to absorb that still remarkable physical and emotional energy? But while her frequently abrasive manner drove others to see less of her, there was a small group of young admirers who were more patient.

  Gabrielle had always refused to be interviewed for television, but in 1969, her friend the Opéra Comique dancer Jacques Chazot, who had made himself into an indispensable young society figure, wanted to make Gabrielle the first subject of a television series on famous women. He was overjoyed when she agreed. Gabrielle saw much of Chazot and believed that she could trust him. Without any rehearsals or script, in that soft, low voice, belying the incisive authority of her manner, Gabrielle held forth on camera for twenty-five minutes. She concluded with the pronouncement “Well, if they’re not pleased with this, what do they want?”25

  Editing the interview, Chazot was in a torment of indecision, until eventually he decided he would cut nothing. Bringing along his friend, the rebellious and already iconic writer Françoise Sagan, they watched it with Gabrielle. Her trust in Chazot had been well placed; she pronounced it “very good.” Having been rather slow off the mark, the French television service now realized the interview’s potential and readjusted their programming schedule with it in a prime slot.

  The response was tremendous. Chazot received all kinds of filming offers, and Gabrielle was gratified to receive a huge quantity of approving mail.

  Meanwhile, the younger designers, irritated by Gabrielle’s lack of indulgence over their work, were unable to see that much of their “rebellious decade” was simply a mass-culture version of the cataclysmic changes Gabrielle had experienced with that small and extraordinarily creative group of people either side of the First World War. And while her complaints were not all justified, essentially they were more farsighted. And at the heart of her complaints was something more significant than an irritable old woman’s aversion to change.

  Gabrielle had not been uniquely responsible for changing women’s appearance during the first decades of the century. While undoubtedly one of only a handful of initiators of a new, easy kind of female glamour, Gabrielle was different in that she herself lived the emancipated life her clothes were made for. Talking of having “liberated the body,” she had “made fashion honest.” More than any other designer, Gabrielle had been responsible for the democratization of fashion, making it more accessible to the majority than ever before. Her own radical life and work had gone hand in hand with the rise of political democracy, yet as a fashion designer, she had overcome the dilemma this created for the couturier: how to be exclusive. An American’s compliment, that she had “spent so much money without it showing,” delighted her.26 Of all the couturiers, Gabrielle had walked the finest line in dressing the rich as the poor, in other words, with simplicity.

  While often contradictory, the source of Gabrielle’s reaction to the sixties was that she had never been interested in attacking culture. She had espoused a different — and in some ways more serious — kind of liberation for women. Gabrielle was now old, and critical, but she also understood that jeans (originally workwear) were subtly different from her appropriation of fishermen’s tops or her lover’s polo shirt for women. Their new glamour was based upon living more emancipated, modern lives. In Chazot’s interview, for example, her point was serious when she said, “I do not approve of the Mao style; I think it’s disgraceful and idiotic… the idea of amusing oneself with such games, with such formidable countries, I think it’s dreadful.”27

  When it came to miniskirts, while Gabrielle’s objections revealed her age, she was also capable of saying, “I have no right to criticize, because [the time] isn’t mine. Mine is over… Frequently I feel so alien to everything around me. What do people live for now? I don’t understand them.”28 And then she made one of those typical comments, requiring a moment’s trouble and reflection to understand, and revealing her comprehension of those tumultuous times: “I’m very well aware that everyone is out of date.”29

  Age had some time ago crept up on the woman who had remained so perennially youthful, and her arthritis and rheumatism now grew more painful. To counteract the pain, and “inconvenience,” she swallowed quantities of vitamins, painkillers and sedatives. Then, despite her doubts and apprehension about the sixties, and while she had enough self-knowledge to be able to say, “Sometimes I realize I’m ridiculous,” she continued, driven by work. Gabrielle had understood long ago that work is vital to who we are. However, setting aside the striving involved in creativity, work consumed her, was her raison d’être. In the process, it had become her demon master. But as with the drugs — the only means by which poor Gabrielle could find any rest at night — she needed to dull her sense of isolation; in her waking hours, it was only through work that she found some sense of peace.

  In a quieter moment, she would also confide to one of her last intimates her belief that “a woman is a force not properly directed. A man is properly directed. He can find refuge in his work. But work just wipes a woman out. The function of a woman is to be loved.” And she confessed her feeling that “my life is a failure. Don’t you think it’s a failure, to work as I work?”30 This formidably powerful yet always feminine woman, who had found consolation in work, also believed that women “ought to play their weakness never their strength. They ought to hide that… One ought to say ‘yes but’… in other words play the fish.”31

  31. I Only Hear My Heart on the Stairs

  Gabrielle’s aversion to any kind of constraint had not diminished with the years; she was defiant: “I never settle down anywhere, I’ve chosen freedom.” Stimulated by the unpredictable, she remained irritated by much organization, and “loathed people putting order into my disorder or into my mind,”1 declaring, “Order bores me. Disorder has always seemed to me the very symbol of luxury.”2 And while the houses she had owned were beautiful and innovative in their design, she also said, “It’s not the houses I love, it’s the life I live in them.”

  In her Hôtel Ritz suite, and her apartment on the rue Cambon, meanwhile, Gabrielle had created sumptuous and atmospheric surroundings, luxurious interiors filled with private symbols. Yet the apartment at 31 rue Cambon was never at heart a domestic one. Gabrielle had entertained many friends there over the years, but she also conducted business there. Someone now very familiar with the apartment describes it as “the place where she kept her memories, her links with her close friends, and her past. But if it had been a really intimate, personal apartment it would have had a bedroom. In some ways she lived her life like a man.”3 Neither was there a kitchen at rue Cambon; Gabrielle had food brought in. And while she could juxtapose grandeur with simplicity and severity with comfort, in truth, Gabrielle had little interest in the hearth.

  A hotel, where she slept and ate most of her meals, is essentially an undomestic space, and its underlying atmosphere of transition precisely served Gabrielle’s needs. Although she lived in the Ritz for more than seventeen years, in theory, at any moment she could be on her way: “In a hotel I feel I am traveling.” An echo of her nomadic childhood — in whose recollection Gabrielle often spoke of trains — this existence also represented her undaunted and slightly cracked refusal to be tied down. Her openness to the possibility of change in turn represented the possibility of creativity, leading her to say, “When I can no longer create, I’m done for.”4

  By contrast, the symbols of others’ rootedness affected Gabrielle more adversely as she grew older. For example, she hated Sundays. Traditionally the family day, it was also the one when her salon was closed, making it more difficult to divert herself — with work — from admitting her sense of isolation. She professed to dislike marriage, and children, and on occasion used her unerring capacity for fantasy to erase spouses and their progeny from the lives of those around her. In the same spirit, she was quite capable of trying
to destabilize a relationship. Good ones unsettled her. Gabrielle could also quietly admit to the one member of her family with whom she remained close, her namesake, Gabrielle Labrunie, “Actually, it’s you who has been right in life. You are much happier than I am. You have a husband and children. I have nothing. I am alone with all my millions.”5 Gabrielle told one of her favorite models, “I envy you because I always wanted to have children, and I had an abortion and I could never have any. It’s not true when I say that I find children disgusting.”6

  In the late sixties, when Gabrielle was in her late eighties and had become more famous still, she was once again acceptable to most of France. Yet while this enabled her to go anywhere and meet almost anyone, this usually left her unimpressed. There was, however, the odd exception. Claude Pompidou, elegant wife to de Gaulle’s prime minister, had for some time been one of Gabrielle’s clients, and she realized that Gabrielle would like an invitation to the Elysée Palace. De Gaulle’s permission must be sought. Eventually, he agreed, and Gabrielle went — accompanied by her friend, ex-prefect of police and ambassador André-Louis Dubois — to dine alone with the Pompidous. Claude Pompidou found Gabrielle beautiful, wonderfully dressed; intelligently observed her complexity, her failings, her “boldness,” and yet still found her fascinating.

  Gabrielle had many years ago nurtured her image, now she was tending her legend. And while saying, “May my legend gain ground, I wish it a long and happy life!”7 she had also become its victim. Unable sometimes to distinguish it from herself, she had said some years before, “My legendary fame… each of us has his or her legend, foolish and wonderful. Mine, to which Paris and the provinces, idiots and artists, poets and society people have contributed, is so varied, so complex, so straightforward and so complicated at the same time, that I lose myself within it.”8 Her friend the novelist Michel Déon recently recalled to me how “with time, she turned a cynical eye on her milieu… She didn’t care, because being a celebrity no longer went to her head. I have rarely seen someone desire victory so much and then so disdain its rewards.”9

  Gabrielle’s friends were only temporarily able to hold back her solitude, in which she had become imprisoned, and one day, she posed a mournful question to one of them: “What’s going to happen to me? What can I do?… In bed at night I say to myself: “Why do you put up such a front? Why don’t you dump all that?”10 But she couldn’t. She talked on, through shyness and through fear. Indeed, years before, she had declared with that startling self-awareness, “I prattled away out of shyness… How many windbags, mocked for their self-assurance, are simply quiet people who, deep down, are frightened of silence?”11 Meanwhile, that “prattling” public self made a habit of toughness and self-aggrandizement: “So much insensitivity… the jewelry, the rings on her thin fingers… the monologues, the Chanel jargon, with the opinions, the judgments without appeal.”12 It was as if poor Gabrielle had welded her armor of self-protection to her mind and frequently to her heart. Her inner plight, accurately described by a young friend as the “truant furies,” had overtaken her.

  Her solitude had deepened even further with the deaths of her oldest friends and ex-lovers. Hardly had the war ended than José Maria Sert had gone. Then, in 1950, Misia, whom she had loved, and hated, for so many years, and who knew so many of Gabrielle’s secrets that they had both long since dispensed with any pretense. In 1953, the Duke of Westminster, with whom, as with Dmitri Pavlovich, Gabrielle had always remained on close terms, died of a heart attack after only six years of his final and happiest marriage. The sympathetic, horse-mad Etienne Balsan, who had recognized that, in Sachs’s words, “Her spirit and her heart were unforgettable,” had rescued Gabrielle from her servitude, and died in South America. Following his daughter’s marriage and move to Rio de Janeiro, Etienne had gone there, too. His wish to die quickly had been answered when he was run over by a bus, in 1954.

  When Adrienne de Nexon (née Chanel) died, in 1955, she took to her grave the most intimate details and appreciation of Gabrielle’s background. At Solesmes, in 1960, when Pierre Reverdy, the man for whom Coco “would have gladly given up everything,” died, only his wife and the monks were present at his simple funeral. As with all the rest, Gabrielle only heard about it through the papers. In 1963, Jean Cocteau, whom she had supported and denigrated for more than half a century, died, too. And on Pierre Wertheimer’s passing, in 1965, she lost the man who for so long had fulfilled for her the stimulating role of beloved adversary. In 1969, the aging Paul Morand would write in his journal: “We are the last ones, the survivors. We talk of people, of stories which only Cocteau, Poulenc, Radiguet, Etienne de Beaumont, Misia could understand. Only Chanel remains.”13

  In 1960, when Gabrielle’s favorite, Marie-Hélène Arnaud, had been employed by her for six years, she told Gabrielle that she didn’t want to be a model forever. Gabrielle tried to keep her by hiring her father, an academic, at a huge salary. Apparently, M. Arnaud had heard that Marie-Hélène was going to be made director of Chanel and would need help. In the hope of dissuading Marie-Hélène from leaving, Gabrielle had hinted at this herself. Marie-Héléne said she felt no animosity toward Gabrielle: “I loved Coco… it never crossed my mind that someday I would replace her.” But Gabrielle was unconvinced, felt threatened and when the young woman did leave — her father followed soon after — Gabrielle spoke ill of them, hurt at what felt like rejection by the lovely Marie-Hélène. Gabrielle turned a good many friends away in these years in a similarly unjust fashion; a few, such as Serge Lifar, put up with her inconstancy, although even he tended to see her less.

  As a solace, during these years, Gabrielle came to rely much on her small group of younger friends and assistants. These included her butler, Jean Mironnet—“François,” as she called him — and two or three young women. François, the son of Norman peasants from Cabourg, was a man who didn’t speak too much, and unlike Gabrielle’s more sophisticated and better informed friends, there was much she could teach him. Whatever his private thoughts, François looked up to her, and a few years before her death, Gabrielle promoted him as a kind of companion. He was often by her side, sat silently behind as she worked on her collections. He kept her pills and gave her the water to take them with, was ready to help if she needed an arm on the stairs, remembered anything she might have forgotten. He was invited to eat with her and accompanied her when she traveled, now only to Switzerland. “Monsieur François” was Gabrielle’s “quiet gentleman-in-waiting,” who did his best to make sure she was rarely alone.

  Aside from her models, the significant young women in Gabrielle’s life were her great-niece, Gabrielle (Labrunie); Claude Delay, daughter of the psychiatrist Jean Delay; and Lilou Grumbach (née Marquand), Gabrielle’s assistant from the late fifties onward. Lilou Marquand’s actor brother was Christian Marquand, friend to Roger Vadim. He was also friend to the Mille brothers, Paris Match editor Hervé and interior designer Gérard. (The Milles’ rue de Varennes apartment was one of the most powerful postliberation Parisian salons, and Gabrielle felt at home there. Hervé and Gérard were old friends who had known her since 1935, and Hervé regularly did “battle on her behalf.”) Lilou Marquand, meanwhile, had made a botched attempt at meeting Gabrielle, and asked the Mille brothers for their help. They told her they were going to dinner with Gabrielle that very evening; why didn’t she come along? Someone mentioned to Gabrielle that Lilou would like to work for her, but she made no comment. Then, as everyone was leaving, she said to Lilou, “You’re starting on Monday.”

  After Marie-Hélène Arnaud’s departure, Lilou found herself being taken more into Gabrielle’s confidence. In theory, her job was handling press and public relations; in practice, her role was far more extensive than that. Among other duties, she acquired responsibility for photo shoots and was in charge of the dressing rooms, the cabines. Seeing Gabrielle almost every working day for the last fourteen or so years of her life, Lilou came to know her well. She was strong enough to withstand Gabrielle’s rage
s and outspokenness, and while remaining an employee, she also became an intimate. In an interview with the author recently, she laughed and said, “We used to shout at one another. She would scream. You could hear everything we said downstairs, but she’d reply: “I don’t give a damn!” Lilou lost track of how many times over the years Gabrielle had sacked her.

  As the sixties had worn on, by day, Gabrielle remained indomitable. As her friend Claude Delay says, she was “very strong, very violent, not a sweet little character. She was a force. She was exigent. Demanding of herself and of others.”14 However, in quieter moments, and by night, Gabrielle’s vulnerability had grown more disabling. When the end of each working day forced her to halt for the rest she sorely needed, she was increasingly defenseless against the sense of abandonment that now overcame her each night on finding herself alone. The mark left by her mother’s emotional and physical frailty had not equipped Gabrielle with that specific emotional strength required to come to terms with her father’s abandonment, and it had lain unresolved. In this way, throughout her life, Gabrielle had suffered inordinately when she felt herself “left,” be it by man or woman, in life or through death. Her strength of character had enabled her to survive, but without the emotional tools to face her demons, with time they had grown more frightening. Lilou Marquand would say: