by Lisa Chaney
Chanel was everything but serene. After the throes of work came what she called “the evening’s anguish.” Once the sun had set, and the rue Cambon had emptied, she felt powerless, almost without personality: in the now silent hive she remained alone with the guard. Her helplessness was so deep and so moving that I acquired the habit of staying there for dinner once or twice a week.15
Claude Delay tells how Gabrielle would say, “I’ve wept so much, now I don’t cry any more. When one doesn’t cry any more it’s because one no longer believes in happiness.” But she said this because she loved romance. And secretly she always hoped that it might happen. She was always waiting for something to happen… But it never did.”16
Lilou Marquand, too, witnessed Gabrielle’s fantasies, her dreams of an ideal man, and heard stories about Gabrielle’s father as the personification of this ideal. On other occasions, he was a wastrel and drunkard. Lilou tells how “in some ways Chanel had remained very romantic. She liked handsome, tall strong men. When she saw one in the street she always said, “You see, he’s probably someone wonderful.” She had spent some of her best moments in their company and she couldn’t get used to their absence. “From time to time I need to rest my head on a shoulder. Too bad I don’t have that, too bad. It doesn’t matter.”17 But of course it did. Gabrielle would say, “When men were strong, they were chaste and gentle… Tenderness is strength watching over you.”18 And Claude Delay recalled an episode that had touched Gabrielle deeply when witnessing that tenderness she had lost and for which, above all, she longed. Returning to the Ritz one evening:
She saw a man who was drunk stumbling over his woman companion. He was paralyzed. He must have wanted to have dinner at the Ritz. He was in a dinner jacket, very well turned out; she was in an evening dress. She stood in front of him and put both his arms around her neck, and they walked like that, she holding him up. She signed to the hotel people not to help her. I would have run to go with them at the least sign. But she didn’t make it. And when the woman’s hand went near the man’s lips, he kissed it.19
And Gabrielle confessed to Claude: “The only time I hear my heart now is on the stairs.”20
In company with the few who took the trouble to see through the carapace of Gabrielle’s self-defense, Claude could not but be affected. As time passed, like Lilou Marquand, she was called upon more frequently to help relieve Gabrielle’s isolation. She hated dining alone. Having alienated a good many, she had brought on her own head this reminder of her pressing solitude, but lamented, “I cannot eat when I’m alone, when there’s no one across from me to talk to.” Claude Delay recalls the poignancy of managing Gabrielle’s suffering:
There was her primitive mistrust and her disconcerting feminine resistance… these were never to leave her. She knew very well what it was to be lost, to be miserable. But I had a husband; I had two little girls. I felt a criminal that I had to go back home. I had dinner with her at the Ritz, sometimes in her room. And at the end, at the door, you know, I felt a criminal. She hated to be alone. Because she hated to go back to her loneliness without love; to the terrors of the past, to the somnambulism of her childhood; to her dreams. Why? Because she lived again those things. Her father’s abandonment, her mother’s fragility, the deaths; and of Boy… The imagination, which is the opposite of the deadly ruthlessness of the world. It gives you peace…
She was a woman of life not death; that twin struggle between death and life, we carry on in every act of our life. But she felt life the right way. She had a healthy psychic attitude.21
Indeed, if Gabrielle had not in many ways had a “healthy psychic attitude,” she could not have withstood her past. Nevertheless, each time she was “left,” it was revived and she collapsed. Lilou Marquand remembered an event highlighting Gabrielle’s disproportionate response. It took place on one of the regular visits to Switzerland with Lilou and François at the Grand Palace Hotel. (Gabrielle increasingly preferred the life of a hotel to the little house, Le Signal, she had bought beyond Lake Geneva and restored for her “retirement.”) François was almost always by Gabrielle’s side. She liked his sense of humor, appreciated his uncomplicated, unassuming presence. She gave him money, bought him an apartment, sent him to Switzerland for cures, took him ever more into her confidence. She would say of him, “Ah, how restful they are these ordinary people who are what they are, natural. Not at all like the Parisians, all those liars.”22
As they sat in the hotel one day discussing the next collection, Gabrielle said to François, “You don’t understand a thing, my dear, I’ve asked you three times to abduct me to no avail. Are you pretending not to understand what I’m saying or are you deaf? I say it again in front of Lilou: will you marry me?” François got up immediately, left the table and checked out of the hotel. It took Lilou six days to find him, there in Lausanne, in another hotel, and she said:
He was still in shock, furious that he might have passed for an old lady’s gigolo. He couldn’t believe that a character as extraordinary as Chanel could love him. I asked him to be generous, to understand that she still had the heart of a sentimental young girl and a romantic mind… He came back to the hotel and no one ever mentioned it again.23
In the absence of François, meanwhile, Gabrielle had been “distraught. Distraught at the rejection. Then, instead of her single dose of Sédol each day to sleep, she took more. Three, four of them. For days she didn’t go out. It was terrible, terrible. François was in her confidence, he was her support.”24
Back in Paris, François and Lilou had acquired the habit of playing cards outside Gabrielle’s bedroom each evening, to be nearby as she went to sleep:
We had sworn to her that we’d never abandon her. But still Mademoiselle was frightened. My return was always a surprise. Simply to see me, to hear my “Good morning” or my “Goodnight” overwhelmed her. “You see, when you’re here the loneliness, the anguish, it all flies away!” Ah, if only night had not existed… If Mademoiselle had been able to go directly from the evening to the morning! She would have lived without the horrible suspicion that she was being abandoned.25
Gabrielle’s unstill mind meant that the sleepwalking from which she had suffered intermittently since childhood had grown worse. In her sleep, she cut up curtains, bedspreads, towels; making them into new designs carefully laid out upon the floor or hanging up on hangers. She was found sleepwalking naked in her rooms; on other occasions, she wandered through the Ritz and was gently guided back to her suite. Once, she was discovered hurrying along a corridor in her nightgown in the small hours with a wild expression on her face. Her maid, Céline (Gabrielle insisted on calling each new personal maid Jeanne, no matter what her real name might be), once watched as Gabrielle walked into her bathroom, broke a comb then turned on the water in the basin. To a friend, she would make a most revealing comment: “I’ve never known just what it was I wanted to forget. So, to forget, whatever it was — probably something that was haunting me — I threw myself into something else.”26
In order to make a life, Gabrielle, when young, had recreated herself, and this had nourished and encouraged her for many years. In her heart, meanwhile, she knew the truth of what haunted her. But lacking that emotional resilience, with time her frantic attempts to throw herself “into something else” through work had grown ever less successful. Even in sleep, her need to forget no longer left Gabrielle, and she was obliged to fill that, too, with work. Finally, worried about embarrassing herself in sleep, Gabrielle told Céline and Lilou that she wanted to be tied down to her bed, leaving her unable to “stray” through the corridors of the Ritz at night.
But the sadness of Gabrielle’s trials was not to end there. One of her favorite models recently remembered that after dinner with Lilou and Gabrielle one evening, she came with them to Gabrielle’s rooms. The model was astonished at the ritual of Gabrielle’s preparations for the night, and watching Lilou and Céline strap her to her bed, she objected, “But are you mad, why are you tying her up, wha
t’s going on?” And Gabrielle told her that recently she’d been found “cornering the elevator man… and dragging myself through the hotel.” The model continued:
She’d been taking morphine for 25 years and morphine made her delirious. She told me,
“I want to make love.” She didn’t say “make love,” she used the direct word.
“It’s not because I don’t want to fuck, it’s because I’m ashamed of my body.”
So I think that at this moment (when she was injected with her morphine), she was delivered from her inhibitions, and then, she’d leave her room. Searching. So she explained to me that she started to have herself tied up to her bed. After that she was in her dream and said, “We’ll say goodbye now. Lilou, tie me up.”27
Gabrielle began falling over. She injured her leg, cut her nose, hurt her hand. But she was terribly wary of being treated by the doctors, fearful they would disclose her weakness to the press. (Rumors of Gabrielle’s reduced health had indeed been going around the news offices for some time.) She had a minor stroke, was hospitalized, and felt humiliated at her infirmity. She was becoming very frail.
Her arthritis and rheumatism had made her less nimble; at work she would jab herself with pins. Sucking the injury, she would yell, “Ouch, what was that?” and while she was exhausted and would sometimes say, “There are days I want to drop everything,” the underlying theme was always the same: “I must think of my collection, because that’s the future.” And, of course, as long as there was the possibility of another collection, of working, there was always the possibility of avoiding death.
By 1970, while knowing that it drew nearer, Gabrielle often found the thought of not existing an impossibility. Yet in saying “I don’t believe much in death,” she was contemplating something further: “The soul departs: the ordeal has lasted long enough. For the Hindus it’s merely a transformation… “Give up one’s soul to God”—I like that expression… what remains of us is what we’ve thought and loved in life.”28
On that Saturday in January 1971, Gabrielle had been particularly irritable with her assistants; she was even short with her devoted Claude Delay. Gabrielle’s collection was almost upon her, and her nerves were raw:
Coco had mood swings all the time. One day she was ruminating and I was there. And she was talking about women: “Nowadays women don’t need men! We’re independent…” And she would hold forth like that for ten minutes all alone. And all my life, I see her, she walks two steps, she turns back and says, “A woman without men, what’s the point?” That was Chanel. An idea and its opposite.29
She changed her mind constantly, one minute telling Claude she was going to give it all up, that she wouldn’t do it anymore; then, away from work, she was waiting only until it was time to go back to the rue Cambon. On her bedside table was Erlanger’s Richelieu; she told Claude it was “the best story there is in the history of France… it’s better than Alexander Dumas, but it hasn’t got so much passion.”
On that Sunday, January 10, Claude returned and lunched with Gabrielle, then accompanied her on her customary drive around the Longchamp racecourse. The sun shone pale through the wintry mist. Later as they drove back through the place de la Concorde — the great square through which Gabrielle had fled, almost sixty years before, from Arthur Capel’s truth about her business not making any profit — Gabrielle bowed, telling Claude she was saluting the moon. It was full. Bidding Claude farewell, Gabrielle told her, “I’ll be working tomorrow.”
In her suite, she told Céline that she was very tired and must lie down; Céline could only persuade her to remove her shoes. Gabrielle lay drowsing. Later, she told her maid she would eat in her rooms, read the restaurant menu, then cried out, “I’m suffocating… Jeanne… the window.” Céline rushed to her side; Gabrielle’s face was taut with pain and she held her hands over her chest. She was too weak to break the phial of morphine always by her bed, and taking the syringe, Céline injected her to relieve the pain. Gabrielle murmured, “So that’s the way one dies.” Celine immediately phoned the doctor, but when she returned, she saw that her mistress was quite still. She closed Gabrielle’s eyes.
Next day, newspapers across the world announced the death of “one of the greatest couturiers of the century,” and tried to encapsulate her achievements as the woman who had become a legend in her own lifetime. Claude Delay returned to pay Gabrielle her own respects and found her “very small under the white Ritz sheets drawn up to her heart.” On Gabrielle’s bedside table was the beautiful icon Stravinsky had given her in 1921.
On January 14, a funeral service was held for Gabrielle in the Madeleine, the great parish church of the Parisian elite, close by the rue Cambon. Gabrielle’s small coffin was covered in a mass of white flowers, with the exception of two wreaths of red roses, one from the Syndicat de la Couture, the other from Luchino Visconti.
Whatever the personal feelings of her fellow couturiers, virtually all of them were there to render her homage, including Balmain, Balenciaga (whose graciousness and forgiving nature sent him there “to pray for her” despite her having destroyed their close friendship with unkindness), Castillo, Marc Bohan and Yves Saint Laurent. Notwithstanding Gabrielle’s criticism of most of them at one time or another, they cannot but have been conscious that her remarkable life’s work had brought great credit to their profession. Gabrielle’s friend Michel Déon made a plea for compassion in one’s final judgment:
One shouldn’t turn one’s back on Coco but, on the contrary, help her to erase everything that had embittered her so much it was making her suffocate. Between the imaginary world where she was taking refuge and the cruel world which had hurt her… the gap remained impassable. 30
Meanwhile, standing in the front row for the entire funeral ceremony were Gabrielle’s models, all dressed in Chanel suits. Behind them were the forewomen and foremen, the seamstresses and numerous assistants who made up the team at rue Cambon, without whom Gabrielle’s ideas would have been impossible. A fascinated crowd joined Paris society, and Gabrielle’s friends, who included Salvador Dalí, Lady Abdy, Antoinette Bernstein, Serge Lifar, André-Louis Dubois, Robert Bresson, the Mille brothers, Jacques Chazot and Jeanne Moreau, whose friendship Gabrielle’s defensiveness had made her reject.
A much smaller group of mourners, including Gabrielle’s great-niece, François Mironnet and Lilou Marquand, later followed Gabrielle’s coffin to Switzerland, where she was laid to rest in the cemetery of Lausanne. Why Switzerland? While deeply French, Gabrielle was also ambivalent about her compatriots, just as some of them were about her. She had said, “The French don’t like me, it can’t be helped.” She had also said, “I have always needed security,” and in Switzerland, apparently, she felt secure. A marble headstone was raised to her, with the heads of five lions, her zodiac sign, carved in bas-relief. Below them is a cross, below that, simply:
GABRIELLE CHANEL
1883–1971
However many words were written on Gabrielle in the weeks after her death, typically, in death as in life, she would manage her legacy. In that remarkable memoir she had given to Paul Morand just after the war, she had “written” her own epitaph:
My life is the story — and often the tragedy — of the solitary woman. Her woes, her importance, the unequal and fascinating battle she has waged with herself, with men, and with the attraction… and dangers that spring up everywhere.
Today, alone in the sunshine and snow… I shall continue, without husband, without children, without grandchildren, without those delightful illusions… My life has been merely a prolonged childhood. That is how one recognizes the destinies in which poetry plays a part… I am not a heroine. But I have chosen the person I wanted to be.31
AFTERWORD
Those on Whom Legends Are Built Are Their Legends
Gabrielle once said to Morand, “Contrary to what Sert used to say, I would make a very bad dead person, because once I was put under, I would grow restless and… think only of returning to ear
th and starting all over again.”1
When one of her managers was asked if Gabrielle had thought about the future of Chanel, he retorted, “Certainly not. She was much too egocentric.” Yet while Gabrielle had told her Zurich lawyer that she “longed for peace” and wanted no publicity after her death, she had also been thinking for some time about her successor, and her personal fortune. With regard to that fortune, she did her best to avoid giving any of it to the French state. Taking her lawyer’s advice, that Lichtenstein was a superior tax haven to Switzerland, in 1965 she set up a foundation there — named Coga, after Coco-Gabrielle — and then made her will. This stated: “I establish as my sole and universal heir the Coga foundation.” Having thus bequeathed the majority of her personal estate, Gabrielle made certain bequests to a handful of people. Her added verbal instruction to help the needy, and gifted artists, was sufficiently vague that it is possible nothing has ever been put into effect.
Gabrielle’s manservant, François Mironnet, was apparently at first informed he had “inherited Mademoiselle,” however, the document proving this was never found. The estate did, nonetheless, make an out-of-court settlement with Mironnet. Others who made claims on Gabrielle’s estate were not so fortunate. Over the years, her bankers and lawyers have maintained a stony silence over the Coga Foundation, and its function remains a mystery. So does the extent of Gabrielle’s personal fortune. In 1971, Mironnet claimed it was worth $1.5 billion. The Wertheimer family claimed it was $30 million. It has been estimated that, at the time of Gabrielle’s death, the House of Chanel brought in approximately $160 million annually.
Gabrielle’s manager was mistaken about her failure to contemplate a successor, because several years before her death she had discussed it with more than one friend. Where her manager had been correct was in Gabrielle’s inability to put anything into practice. The House of Chanel had become her final solace, her raison d’être. If she handed it over, there would be nothing left for her but to die. In avoiding choosing a successor, Gabrielle implicitly staved off death.
