Instead, Coco was dispatched to the doctor, who performed a mysterious gynaecological procedure with a snip of his scissors. ‘The seat of pleasure is a question of structure,’ she told Delay, with her odd blend of the graphic and the cryptic. ‘As far as I’m concerned, if it hadn’t been for that little snip of the scissors … After that, it didn’t hurt any more.’
It was at about this time, she continued, that she ordered a tightly fitted dress from Chéruit, a fashionable Parisian couturier, in blue and white grosgrain: ‘I looked like the Virgin Mary.’ But it was so constrictive around the waist that when she wore the dress out to dine at the Cafe de Paris with Boy, she had to ask him to undo it for her. Afterwards, she couldn’t close its fastenings – Coco was undone in public – and didn’t have an evening coat to cover herself up. At that moment, she vowed never to wear corsets again.
There are echoes of a similarly uneasy shifting between freedom and subjugation, liberty and compulsion, in Chanel’s description to Morand of her relationship with Boy. They lived together in Paris, and he meant everything to her – ‘he was my father, my brother, my entire family’ – and there he instructed her as if she were his child. ‘Our house was full of flowers, but beneath the luxurious surroundings Boy Capel maintained a strict outlook, in keeping with his moral character, which was that of the well-brought-up Englishman. In educating me, he did not spare me; he commented on my conduct: “You behaved badly … you lied … you were wrong.” He had that gently authoritative manner of men who know women well, and who love them implicitly.’
But his implicit love manifested itself in explicit abandonment and infidelities; although Chanel seemed to accept that this ‘lion of London society’ had every right to be unfaithful to her. She maintained to Morand that Capel adored her as much as she adored him; that he was a perfect gentleman. ‘His manners were refined, his social success was dazzling,’ and yet he was ‘only happy in the company of the little brute from the provinces, the unruly child who had followed him. We never went out together (at that time Paris still had principles). We would delay the delights of advertising our love until later, when we were married.’ At the same time, Boy continued to enjoy the diversions of other women. Coco said she didn’t care – or at least, that is what she claimed to Morand – and yet her description of Capel’s behaviour hints at an anxious imbalance between anger and acceptance; and then there is that phrase of his again (or was it hers?) about chopping off his leg. ‘Boy Capel’s beautiful girlfriends would say to him angrily: “Drop that woman.” Not being in the least jealous, I pushed him into their arms; this baffled them and they kept on repeating: “Drop that woman.” He replied in that utterly natural way he had … “No. You might as well ask me to chop off a leg.” He needed me.’
But she also needed him – financially, as well as in every other way – and she was aware that he had the capacity to run away from her whenever he chose to; just as her father had run from her mother, and from her, too. Perhaps there were times when Coco felt angry enough to want to chop her lover’s legs off. Instead, she turned her scissors on his clothes. These she stole and cut up, so that he could no longer wear them out again. Yet in doing so, she transformed them into something new and uniquely her own, eventually building an empire upon the desire of other women to possess her creations; women who sought her, Coco Chanel, rather than Boy Capel.
That came later, however. First, she had come up with a plan to sell hats, although the question remained as to who, precisely, was to back her business, and where she was to live, and whether Balsan had been abandoned altogether. Many years later, confiding in Marcel Haedrich, Chanel said that she went on seeing Etienne Balsan after she left Royallieu, and he continued to declare his love for her. ‘We lunched and dined together – Etienne, Boy and I. Occasionally Etienne talked about killing himself, and I wept. I wept so! “You aren’t going to let Etienne kill himself,” I said to myself. “You’ll set them both free. Go throw yourself into the Seine!”’
Other, less torrid versions give more emphasis to Etienne and Boy’s financial discussions about who should pay what to keep Chanel. To Morand, Chanel claimed that Balsan returned from Argentina with a bag of lemons, which had gone rotten, as a gift for her. It remains unclear whether or not he intended this to be symbolic, in some unspecified way, or if Chanel herself had conjured up the rotting lemons as a mystifying metaphor, or was simply for once telling the truth. All that emerges with any certainty from her account to Morand was that matters between the three of them were confused: ‘there were tears and quarrels. Boy was English, he didn’t understand; everything became muddled. He was very moral.’
But to Haedrich, Chanel presented herself as the muddled one of the threesome, a little girl who didn’t understand the machinations of two older men. ‘I was just a kid,’ she said, insisting that she had celebrated her eighteenth birthday with Capel when she came with him to Paris. ‘I had no money. I lived at the Ritz and everything was paid for me. It was an incredible situation. Parisian society talked about it. I didn’t know Parisian society … It was very complicated. The cocottes were paid. I knew that, I’d been taught that. I said to myself, “Are you going to become like them? A kept woman? But this is appalling!” I didn’t want it.’
What she did want was to earn her own living. Eventually, after protracted negotiations, Balsan and Capel agreed to share the cost of setting her up in business to sell the hats that she was already making for herself, and for her friends (and their girlfriends). Among her first clients were Emilienne d’Alençon, Suzanne Orlandi and Gabrielle Dorziat, the cocottes-turned-actresses who began to wear Chanel’s designs on stage and in magazines. Capel covered the running costs; Balsan provided the Paris premises at his bachelor apartment in Boulevard Malesherbes. ‘They had decided to give me a place where I could make my hats,’ she said to Haedrich, ‘the way they would have given me a toy, thinking, “Let’s let her amuse herself, and later we’ll see.” They didn’t understand how important this was to me. They were very rich men, polo players. They didn’t understand anything about the little girl who came into their lives to play. A little girl who understood nothing of what was happening to her.’
It seems highly likely that Coco did understand something of her circumstances, or at least the practical arrangements that had been put in place; but her constant emphasis on her youth and innocence, when she was already in her late twenties, is perhaps more indicative of real confusion on her part, rather than her simply being disingenuous. After all, her status was ambiguous with these men who said that they loved her but treated her like a plaything. And troubling questions still remained. What were their real feelings for her, and how long would they be sustained? How would she survive without them and which of them would be left heartbroken?
The one certainty was her decisive approach to fashion. Just as at Royallieu, Coco dressed like a young convent girl or a schoolboy, and made hats that were stripped of embellishments, of the frills and furbelows that she dismissed as weighing a woman down, and being too cumbersome to let her think straight. They weren’t entirely original – at first, she bought simple straw boaters from the Galeries Lafayette department store, and then trimmed them with ribbon herself – but they were chic. ‘Nothing makes a woman look older than obvious expensiveness, ornateness, complication,’ she said to Claude Delay in old age, still wearing the little straw hats of her youth. ‘I still dress as I always did, like a schoolgirl.’
And in doing so, Coco began to edge her way to the centre of attention, elbowing past her rivals and competitors, whether the society ladies or the cocottes or couturiers. (Paul Poiret, whose fame at the time was such that he dubbed himself the ‘King of Fashion’, said of Chanel’s early days as a milliner, ‘We ought to have been on guard against that boyish head. It was going to give us every kind of shock, and produce, out of its little conjuror’s hat, gowns and coiffures and jewels and boutiques.’) Thus the day came, she told Morand, when she felt able to insist
that Boy should dine with her at the casino in Deauville, rather than attend a gala there without her: ‘All eyes were on us: my timid entrance, my awkwardness, which contrasted with a wonderfully simple white dress, attracted people’s attention. The beauties of the period, with that intuition women have for threats unknown, were alarmed.’
Whether they were prompted by alarm or jealousy or simple curiosity, the beauties flocked to buy hats from Chanel at her milliner’s establishment. Soon, her business had grown too successful for Balsan’s apartment, and backed by Capel – whose own fortunes were prospering further – she opened new premises on 1st January 1910 at 21 Rue Cambon. ‘I still have it,’ she told Paul Morand. ‘On the door, it read: “Chanel, modes”.’ She summoned her sister, Antoinette, and her aunt Adrienne to Paris to help – both of them beautiful, as well as skilled seamstresses; Adrienne still the consort of Baron de Nexon – and Chanel worked alongside them, but also went out and about, as her own best model. ‘In the grandstands, people began talking about my amazing, unusual hats,’ she said to Morand, ‘so neat and austere … Customers came, initially prompted by curiosity. One day I had a visit from one such woman, who admitted quite openly: “I came to have a look at you.” I was the curious creature, the little woman whose straw boater fitted her head, and whose head fitted her shoulders.’
But still, she sensed danger all around. Eventually, she told Haedrich, she ventured out to Maxim’s for the first time, accompanied by three escorts (‘one of them was an Englishman who was determined not to be impressed by anything’). It was in 1913, and respectable women did not eat dinner at the restaurant, but Coco was happy to be there with Capel and his friends. ‘I’d been told that the cocottes went to Maxim’s,’ she remarked. ‘I liked the cocottes: they were clean.’ But as in the convent at Aubazine, even amidst cleanliness, there was blood.
A couple sat down at the next table, and immediately, another woman appeared, and asked the man to come outside. Coco watched as the man shook his head, a gesture met with a volcanic eruption of violent rage. ‘She broke a glass and began to slash at his face with the base of it. There was blood all over. I fled at once, I went up the stairs, the little spiral stairway. I ran into a room and crawled under a table covered by a cloth. I didn’t want to see any more of that quarrel and that blood. How horrible! I was weeping because the three men I was with had done nothing. All that mattered to them was that they shouldn’t be spattered by the blood.’
Thus Boy, her supposed protector, nevertheless left her vulnerable; and all she could do was to hide beneath a cloth. She had lost her heart to Capel, and he proved himself capable of being heartless, at least in the ease with which he conducted his infidelities. ‘He really understood me,’ she told Haedrich, 60 years later. ‘He handled me like a child. He said to me, “Coco, if only you’d stop lying! Can’t you talk like everyone else? Where do you dig up the things you imagine?”’ But she was not imagining his affairs with other women, even though she pretended not to care (and in doing so, was perhaps false to herself). ‘I couldn’t have cared less whether he was unfaithful,’ she said to Haedrich. ‘I found it rather dirty, but it didn’t count between us.’ And to Morand, she claimed to have had so much fun with Capel that nothing else mattered. ‘“Tell me who you’re sleeping with, it would amuse me greatly,” I would say to him.’ Boy Capel laughed, she said, but in other accounts she did not seem to be as amused as he was, nor quite as nonchalant as she had claimed to be.
True, to the outside world, they were a glamorous and successful couple. Chanel’s business was growing, and she began to sell clothes, as well as hats. As always, she based her designs on what suited her – boyish jersey pieces, many of them inspired by Capel’s own English sportswear – and he backed her taste with his capital. But it was as if she had put away her dreams of romance – of the mauve dress she longed for as a young girl – and seemed to accept that bridal lace would never be hers. ‘The age of extravagant dresses, those dresses worn by heroines that I had dreamt about, was past,’ she said to Morand. ‘I had never even had those convent uniforms, with capes, adorned with pale blue Holy Ghost, or Children of Mary, ribbons, which are a child’s pride and joy; I no longer thought about lace; I knew that extravagant things didn’t suit me. All I kept were my goat-skin coat and my simple outfits.
‘“Since you are so attached to them,” Capel said to me, “I’m going to get you to have the clothes you have always worn remade elegantly, by an English tailor.” Everything to do with Rue Cambon stemmed from there.’
But for all the outward success of her designs – and the impeccable surface that she presented to the outside world – inside, something was troubling her. ‘I often fainted,’ she told Haedrich, recalling a day at the racetrack when she had collapsed three times. ‘I had too much emotion, too much excitement, I lived too intensely. My nerves couldn’t stand it. And all at once … I was standing beside a gentleman who had a horse running. Suddenly I had the feeling he was slipping away from me, fast. What a terrible feeling. I fell to the ground, thinking, this is it, it’s all over.’
She did not name the gentleman slipping away from her; but if she did fear the loss of Boy Capel (her lover who was also ‘my brother, my father, my whole family’), it may have contributed to her sense of overwhelming emotion. ‘Several times I’d been brought home unconscious,’ she said to Haedrich. ‘These weren’t any hysterical woman’s swoons. I fell down, my eyes turned black … I was taken for dead.’ Chanel returned to these episodes again and again in her conversations with Haedrich. ‘They talk to me about attacks of nerves,’ she said (without specifying who ‘they’ might be). ‘For two years I couldn’t cross a street or go into a church. So I stopped going to Mass …’ Yet whatever the true cause of her dread and anxiety, she believed that Capel had a miraculous ability to heal her: ‘Boy Capel cured me, with exceptional patience, simply by repeating: “Faint if you want to.” He took me wherever there were people, and said: “I’m here. Nothing can happen to you. Faint while I’m here.”’
But he wasn’t always there; he came and went; he appeared and disappeared. When she worked, she said, her health recovered; and although she never admitted it, the House of Chanel seemed to give her more stability – a sense of where she stood in the world – than she gained from Boy Capel. Hence the story she often told of her distress at discovering that Capel had deposited bank securities as a guarantee for her business and overdrafts, and that the money she believed she was making had not yet repaid her debt. On the evening he told her this, they had been on their way to dinner in Saint-Germain; she immediately insisted that they return to the apartment they now shared in Paris. ‘I felt sick,’ she told Morand. ‘Impossible to eat… We went up to our flat in the Avenue Gabriel. I glanced at the pretty things I had bought with what I thought were my profits. So all that had been paid for by him! I was living off him. I began to hate this well-brought-up man who was paying for me. I threw my handbag straight at his face and I fled.’
She rushed outside, running through a downpour of rain as stormy as her outburst, not knowing where she was going. But Capel ran after her, caught up with her on the corner of Rue Cambon, and took her home to the apartment that he paid for.
The following morning, she told Morand, she went back to Rue Cambon at dawn. ‘“Angèle,” I said to my head seamstress, “I am not here to have fun, or to spend money like water. I am here to make a fortune.”’ A year later, Chanel was earning sufficient money to have no more need of Capel’s financial support, and she rejoiced in her independence. Her clothes looked simple – sleek and fluid, designed to be worn without corsets and with insouciance – and she sometimes gave the impression that her success as a designer had come as easily as slipping on a cardigan. It may be that her aesthetic subverted the cliché that appearances can be deceptive (whatever the subterfuges Chanel practised in reshaping her life, the twist she gave to modern fashion was that the line of beauty need not necessarily be misleading). ‘Fashion, lik
e landscape, is a state of mind, by which I mean my own,’ she declared to Morand; but her territory of effortless chic took far more planning and hard-headedness than she let on. The rewards, however, were considerable, for her work, like her clothes, liberated Chanel from other constrictions. ‘I was my own master, and I depended on myself alone,’ she told Morand. ‘Boy Capel was well aware that he didn’t control me: “I thought I’d given you a plaything, I gave you freedom,” he once said to me in a melancholy voice.’
Even so, the House of Chanel still linked them together; for in some unspoken way they had set it up as partners. There was no business contract to bind them together, just as there was no marriage certificate, but it nevertheless joined them, as the double C logo seems to suggest; Chanel and Capel; overlapping, but also facing away from each other.
Something of this capacity for closeness, combined with an ability to turn their back on one another (and others, too), is apparent in the role that both played in the upbringing of Andre Palasse. Chanel had some support from Capel when she assumed responsibility for her nephew; and although she revealed little about the circumstances of his childhood, she did tell Delay that Capel had called Andre his son, and that every time the little boy saw a coal barge on the Seine, he would say, ‘Look, that’s ours.’ (Capel had already expanded into coal transportation, as well as mining.) ‘It’s not ours, it’s Boy’s,’ Coco would tell him; and she smiled as she told Delay the answer that Andre gave her: ‘But he told me you’re going to marry him.’
No marriage transpired, and Coco sent Andre to boarding school in England, to Beaumont, where Boy had been educated. Here the little boy was taught to speak perfect English, and to behave with British reserve, remaining at a distance from his aunt, who may have been his mother, and from her lover, who called him his son. Andre’s daughter, also named Gabrielle, was born in 1926, and recalls her childhood with absolute clarity, but learned quickly never to question her father or her great aunt (whom she still refers to as ‘Auntie Coco’) about anything relating to the family history. Gabrielle accepts with apparent equanimity the circumstances of her father’s childhood, and the possibility that Coco might have been her grandmother rather than her great aunt. ‘Several people who were close to her were sure that this was true,’ she says, but also acknowledges that she will never know the truth. ‘There were so many things she invented – she invented a fairy tale that had nothing to do with reality – even though she lived her own fairy tale, by making her way from the orphanage in Aubazine to Rue Cambon. But the truth hurt her too much – she preserved herself by hiding the truth – and she found a way of putting aside the things that hurt her.’
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