What happened next was the event that Chanel defined as marking her forever – the deepest cut to her heart; the wound that would not heal. Although she never revealed the precise details of the tragedy, and they have tended to be misreported, an outline of the truth can be pieced together through diaries, letters, newspaper reports and Chanel’s own testimony. On 22nd December 1919, Captain Arthur Capel was killed in an accident while driving from Paris to Cannes. According to The Times and Reuters, he was travelling with his mechanic, a man named Mansfield, when one of the tyres burst on his car; the mechanic was seriously injured. Capel himself was to be buried on Christmas Eve in Fréjus, just inland from St Raphael on the Cote d’Azur.
Diana Capel was in London at the time – Duff Cooper’s diary records that she had gone back to Paris after their encounters the previous month, but returned to England on 22nd December. She telephoned Cooper on the morning of the 23rd, still unaware of the death of her husband. ‘I had no idea she was in London and was delighted to hear her,’ wrote Cooper in his diary that night. ‘She had come over from Paris the day before. Capel had meanwhile started for the South of France where she was to join him in a fortnight.’ (Other sources say that the Capels had planned to spend Christmas together in Cannes.) Diana Capel already had a lunch date that day – with Lady Rosslyn – but invited Cooper to join them; afterwards, he accompanied Diana to a bookshop, and thence to Asprey’s, where she had arranged to meet Lady Rosslyn again. The taxi journey from the bookshop to Asprey’s was ‘a long and very pleasant drive, long because of the blocks in the traffic, pleasant because I kissed her’. She jumped out of the taxi, forgetting the book she had just bought; when Cooper noticed this, he returned, to find her standing on the pavement in front of Asprey’s. ‘I put the book into Diana’s hands and at the same time noticed an expression of horror on the face of Lady Rosslyn who was standing behind her. But I thought no more of it and drove away.’ It was not until the following morning, Christmas Eve, when Cooper opened the papers, that he was shocked to discover the news of Captain Capel’s death in France.
When word of Boy’s death reached Paris, one of Chanel’s friends from her days at Royallieu, Léon de Laborde, volunteered to break the news to her. It was late at night by the time he arrived at her villa in Saint Cloud, and it took some time for her butler to come to the front door; Mademoiselle was sleeping, he said, but Laborde insisted that she be woken. When Chanel came down the stairs, he later recalled, she was wearing white pyjamas, and her short hair was tousled: ‘the silhouette of an adolescent, a youth in satin’. He told her that Boy was dead, and her face crumpled in agony, but there were no tears. ‘The worst of it,’ said Laborde, ‘was this woman crying with dry eyes.’ Then she packed a bag, and he drove her through the dawn to the south of France, until they reached the Riviera, where Capel’s sister Bertha was staying in a suite of rooms in a palace hotel. (Like her brother, she had married well – indeed, he had seen to it – thereby acquiring a large income and the title of Lady Michelham.) Bertha offered Chanel a bed to sleep in, but she said no, still dry-eyed, and sat up all night on a chaise longue. Boy’s body was burnt beyond recognition, and had already been sealed in a coffin before Chanel’s arrival. She did not want to go the funeral; instead, she asked Lady Michelham’s chauffeur to drive her to the scene of the accident. According to the driver, Chanel stood beside the wrecked car, which had not yet been moved from where it had crashed at the side of the road, and touched it with her hands, as if it were a living creature. Then she sat down and wept, and this time the tears overflowed.
‘In losing Capel, I lost everything,’ she told Paul Morand, a quarter of a century later. But she did not lose the House of Chanel that Boy had helped her to establish. And despite his betrayals, Capel did not stop providing for her after his death, along with the rest of his female dependants. When his will was published, by far the largest portion of his estate of £700,000 went to his wife and child (and future legal proceedings ensured that part of his fortune was passed to his second daughter, June, born in the summer of 1920, whose conception he had been unaware of at the time of his death). The will also included a bequest of £40,000 to Mademoiselle Chanel; an equal sum was left to an Italian countess, a young widow whose husband had been killed in the war. Chanel’s share was sufficient to invest further in her business (she expanded her premises in Rue Cambon), and to buy a villa of her own, Bel Respiro, in Garches, on the western outskirts of Paris.
Diana Capel was to marry for a third and final time in 1923-to the 14th Earl of Westmorland – and became a longstanding client of Chanel. But in circumstances that remain a tantalising mystery, Diana and Coco had somehow established an acquaintance in the aftermath of Boy Capel’s death. For it was from Bel Respiro that Diana Capel wrote an undated letter to Duff Cooper, presumably soon after Chanel had moved into her newly redecorated villa in March 1920. ‘My dear Duff,’ wrote Diana, from the house of Chanel, ‘I haven’t written before to thank you for the letters because I have been, and still am, and I suppose shall go on being so terribly, desperately unhappy, but I like to feel your sympathy surrounds me and that you are thinking of me.’
What, one wonders, did Coco and Diana think of each other? Both had suffered the loss of Boy Capel, and both had been made to suffer by him. Duff Cooper recorded in his diary in January 1920 that at the time of Capel’s death, Diana’s relationship with her husband had become ‘impossible’; ‘he had entirely ceased to live with her and hardly ever spoke to her … he confessed she had got on his nerves and he could hardly bear her presence.’ No record survives of what passed between Coco and the pregnant Diana. Indeed, no one appears to have known of their time spent together then; and notwithstanding the curious bond they shared, one can only speculate about the origins and nature of their relationship. Julian Fane, Diana’s son from her third marriage, observed her enduring reticence on the subject of Capel and Chanel. ‘I can recall my mother referring to Boy Capel only twice:’ wrote Fane in a memoir about his mother, ‘to say he was very witty and amusing on occasions and if he wanted to be, and to complain that Chanel had refused to return furniture he had lent her.’ But Fane knew from his mother’s friends that Diana had been unhappy from the early days of her marriage; before she gave birth to her first daughter, she had spent Easter alone in Paris, ‘minus her husband and crying in front of a fire that was also out.’ As for her part, Chanel kept her feelings about Diana private.
Chanel’s grief at Capel’s death was too profound to remain entirely hidden; she manifested her bereavement by ordering that Bel Respiro be painted beige on the outside, but with its window shutters lacquered in black, so that when the shutters were fastened, it was as if the eyes of the house were closed. In her previous house in Saint Cloud, where Capel had visited her, she had commanded that her bedroom be decorated in black – walls, ceiling, carpet, sheets – all in the colour of mourning in memory of her dead lover. After only one night, however, she changed her mind, giving instructions that the decorator should redo it in pink, and telling her butler, ‘Get me out of this tomb.’
One of the surprising things about Boy Capel, the playboy industrialist, was that he was also a theosophist, and taught Coco that there was a life after death, although not of the kind she had been educated to believe in at Aubazine. ‘Nothing dies, not even a grain of sand, so nothing is lost,’ she later told Claude Delay, in explanation of Capel’s theosophy and its influence on her. ‘I like that very much.’ Any bitterness she had felt towards Capel appears to have been removed from her public celebration of his memory. To Paul Morand, she spoke of his ‘rare spirit’ and his ‘gentle authority’, which she never found in another man. ‘Beneath his dandyism, he was very serious, far more cultured than the polo players and big businessmen, with a deep inner life that extended to magical and theosophical levels.’ If her belief in his power contained an element of magical thinking, then it was true to his own. Six months after his death, she said to Morand, she received a visit
from ‘an unknown Hindu gentleman’, who gave her complete faith that Capel was watching over her, still offering her his protection. According to this story, the Hindu gentleman said to her: ‘I have a message for you, Mademoiselle. A message from someone you know … This person is living in a place of happiness, in a world where nothing can trouble him any longer. Receive this message of which I am the bearer, and whose meaning you will certainly understand.’ She did not tell Morand – nor anyone else – the details, but her faith in Capel was restored: ‘it was a secret that no one, other than Capel and I, could have known.’
So the wishful link was kept intact, and although it was secret – as mysterious as the mosaic symbols in Aubazine; as cryptic as a medieval Catholic code – it nevertheless survived Capel’s death. And whatever the details of Capel’s message to Chanel, something of their bond has endured. There is the double C, and there is black; the colour of mourning turned into a celebration of chic. True, the little black dress wasn’t formally identified as the shape of the future until 1926, when American Vogue published a drawing of a Chanel design, and announced: ‘Here is a Ford signed Chanel.’ It was an apparently simple yet elegant sheath, in black crêpe de Chine, with long narrow sleeves, worn with a string of white pearls; and Vogue proved to be correct in the prediction that it would become a uniform, as widely recognised as a Ford automobile; fast and sleek and discreet.
The black dress, nevertheless, had made its appearance long before that. Chanel herself identified its origins as dating back to 1920, in a conversation with Paul Morand: ‘At about that time, I remember contemplating the auditorium at the Opera from the back of a box.’ She understood her own mind by then – she did not need anyone to tell her that a tiara should be worn to the opera. And she did not approve of what she saw before her: ‘those reds, those greens, those electric blues’, brought into fashion by her great rival, Paul Poiret, ‘made me feel ill.’ And so – or so she said to Morand – Coco made a vow to herself: ‘These colours are impossible. These women, I’m bloody well going to dress them in black … I imposed black; it’s still going strong today, for black wipes out everything else around.’
But Coco Chanel was not wiped out; she was not consumed in the wreckage of the end of her affair with Boy Capel. She moved onwards, propelled into the Jazz Age; even propelling the age forward in her own image; carrying other women with her in her wake, out of the past and into the future, wearing black as a symbol of strength and freedom.
MISIA AND THE MUSE
If Boy Capel was the love of Chanel’s life, then Misia Sert was her closest friend; not that the two women’s relationship was always friendly, for it was too passionate to be contained by friendship, and sometimes spilled over into jealousy, even hatred, occasionally with what seemed like sexual intensity. That their relationship began when Capel was already turning his attentions away from Chanel is not coincidental; and if Misia’s own description of the meeting is to be believed, it was love at first sight, at least on her part.
Misia – who was so famous at the time that she was known throughout Paris by her first name – met Chanel in 1917. This was an era when Misia was queen of the city, a muse who had reigned over artists since her youth, capricious and compelling, a law unto herself, with a court who paid heed to all her pronouncements. ‘What I admire in Misia is that joie de vivre always concealed behind a mask of ill-humour; that perfect poise, even in moments of despair,’ observed Paul Morand in his diary in April 1917. ‘And then Misia is Misia, someone with no equal and, as Proust says, a monument.’ As such, she had been painted by Renoir, Vuillard, Lautrec and Bonnard; inspired the poetry of Mallarmé, the prose of Proust, the music of Debussy and Ravel, and the gossip of Cocteau and Picasso. A gifted pianist herself, Misia had sat on Liszt’s knee and performed Beethoven for him as a child. ‘Ah, if only I could play like that,’ he said, with his customary charm, and predicted a dazzling future for her; thereafter, Misia was taught the piano by Fauré, who regarded her as a prodigy. Her powerful position at the centre of the inner circle of Parisian art was consolidated by virtue of her close friendship with Serge Diaghilev, the director of the most sought-after ballet company in the world at the time, Ballets Russes. Chanel was 11 years younger, and not yet as socially pivotal in Parisian society, but Misia fell for her when they met at a dinner party at the home of Cecile Sorel, a glamorous French actress who was already a client at Rue Cambon.
Sorel was living in an apartment on the Quai Voltaire, where the windows were draped with leopardskin; ‘somewhat moth-eaten’, recalled Misia in an unpublished chapter from her memoirs, which she dictated in the late Forties. ‘At the table my attention was immediately drawn to a very dark-haired young woman. Despite the fact that she did not say a word, she radiated a charm I found irresistible. She made me think of Madame du Barry [an eighteenth-century milliner’s-assistant-turned-courtesan; mistress to Louis XV, and guillotined in the French Revolution]. Therefore I arranged to sit next to her after dinner. During the exchange of banalities appropriate to a first meeting in a salon, I learned that she was called Mademoiselle Chanel and had a milliner’s shop in the Rue Cambon.
‘She seemed to me gifted with infinite grace and when, as we were saying goodnight, I admired her ravishing fur-trimmed red velvet coat, she took it off at once and put it on my shoulders, saying with charming spontaneity that she would be only too happy to give it to me. Obviously I could not accept it. But her gesture had been so pretty that I found her completely bewitching and thought of nothing but her.’
Misia went straight to Rue Cambon the following morning in search of the woman who had so enchanted her. ‘In her little boutique one found sweaters, hats, and accessories of all kinds. When I arrived, two women were there talking about her, calling her “Coco”. I don’t know why the use of this name upset me so, but my heart sank: I had the impression that my idol was being smashed. Why trick out someone so exceptional with so vulgar a name? I was indignant!’
And then Chanel herself appeared, ‘the woman I had been thinking about since the night before’. Misia started talking to her, and did not stop; Chanel hardly spoke a word. ‘Magically, the hours sped by … The thought of parting from her seemed unbearable.’ That night, Misia and José-Maria Sert, a flamboyant Spanish painter who was to become her third husband, went to dinner at Chanel’s apartment. ‘There, in the midst of countless Coromandel screens, we found Boy Capel, who represented important British interests in Paris.’
But Misia had eyes only for Chanel; to such an extent that her lover (who, like Capel, had his own ‘petites amies’) was somewhat discomfited. ‘Sert was really scandalized by the astonishing infatuation I felt for my new friend. I was not in the habit of being carried away like this …’
In fact, Misia was frequently carried away by passion: for artists, musicians, husbands, ballets; for melodrama and tragedy, in which she was often centre-stage. But she also had a talent for amusement; for amusing others, and herself, amidst the tumultuous sagas that she created around her, and those that were not of her own design. Misia was the inspiration for Cocteau’s heroine, the Princesse de Bormes, in his novel Thomas l’imposteur, and his description of her still has a compelling immediacy, even now, when she has been relegated to a footnote in the histories of others. ‘She played with life the way a virtuoso plays the piano. Like a virtuoso, she was able to create great effects as easily with mediocre as with the most beautiful music. Her duty was pleasure … She had understood, unlike most women in her set, that pleasure is not to be found in things themselves but in the way you take them …’ And at well over 40, the Princesse, like Misia, ‘had sparkling eyes in the face of a young girl, eyes that boredom could deaden in a second’.
Born in St Petersburg on 30th March 1872, Misia was the daughter of a Polish sculptor, Cyprian Godebski. Her mother, Eugenie Sophie Servais, died giving birth to her, having followed her unfaithful husband to Russia when she was nearly nine months pregnant. Misia’s story was even more dramati
c than Chanel’s: at the time of her birth, her father was having an affair with his mother-in-law’s sister, who became pregnant with his child. This muddled state of affairs was not improved by Godebski’s lack of interest in Misia, or any of his other children; they were handed on from his mistresses to wives to assorted relatives, while he pursued his successful career as an artist. Yet despite (or perhaps because of) her father’s absences and neglect, Misia grew up to fall in love with charismatic men who subsequently abandoned her in the unhappiest of circumstances.
Like Chanel, she was educated by nuns, although the high walls that confined Misia were in the heart of Paris, at the Convent of the Sacred Heart on the Boulevard des Invalides (now the Rodin Museum). She was sent there at the age of 10, after the death of her maternal aunt, who had previously been caring for her; though Misia continued to see her father and stepmother, Matylda Natanson, on at least a monthly basis, at their grand house in the Polish district of Paris, near the Parc Monceau. Her stepmother died when Misia was 15, whereupon her father summoned his daughter from the convent, and ordered her to kiss the corpse. Misia later recalled that she never forgot the terror of that enforced kiss, or the sight of the veiled lady standing beside her father at the bedside, his mistress, Catherine, the Marquise de Ganville.
Misia’s life continued in this theatrical manner, like the gothic romances she was fond of reading as a girl; yet despite her tendency to lop years off her life with a similar alacrity to Chanel (both women altered the birth dates in their passports, erasing a decade with a stroke of their pens), she had no need to invent the details of her extraordinary escapades. That some of her adventures sound implausible makes them no less real. But they were often marked by a curious blurring of the boundaries of her familial and emotional ties; a reflection, perhaps, of her father’s somewhat incestuous relationship with his wife’s aunt. Misia’s first husband, for example, was her first stepmother’s nephew; and if that seems confusing, then what followed was even more complicated. Married at 21 to Thadée Natanson, the editor of La Revue blanche, an influential avant-garde arts magazine, Misia was subsequently pushed into the arms of Alfred Edwards, a newspaper magnate with an immense fortune and vast property holdings, including the Théâtre de Paris and its adjoining casino. In a drama that enthralled Paris, it was Natanson himself who did the pushing, after he resolved to hand over his wife in return for financial rescue by Edwards. The latter had fallen for Misia as soon as he first saw her (and what Edwards wanted, Edwards got, even if he had to pay dearly for it). Misia was 28 at the time, and the ensuing triangular relationship was not yet resolved five years later, when she married Edwards in 1905; for whatever else the consequences of the wedding, resolution was nigh on impossible with a man of such violent and peculiar passions. Edwards’ chief sexual perversion was coprophilia, but his jealousy could be equally disturbing; he was so possessive that when he took Misia to Madrid in 1903, he confined her to their hotel room, aside from the occasional shopping expedition. ‘Edwards went out alone, after carefully locking the door of my room,’ she recalled in her memoir. ‘I spent whole days locked up. He was as jealous as a wild animal, and I should not have been surprised to hear him roaring outside my door.’
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