Coco Chanel

by Justine Picardie

  In some ways, Marie did create something new for herself: on 5th February 1922, it was her embroidery that was, for the first time, the centrepiece of the Chanel spring collection. The Grand Duchess christened her business Kitmir (naming it after the Pekinese dog owned by the former Russian ambassador to Washington, who had retired to Paris after the Revolution; he was a traditionalist, she remarked in her memoir, who ‘refused to compromise with a new world, his loyalty to what had been before amounting to a religion’). After opening a workshop, Marie employed several Russian girls, and as the business expanded, the number of her employees grew to 50 or so.

  Nevertheless, something of a previous world remained, at least in the sense that Chanel’s designs were inspired by long-established Russian influences. She reinterpreted the roubachka (a traditional embroidered blouse), the pelisse (a military style coat with frogging) and the sailor’s jacket (its lines borrowed from the Russian military uniform), as well as using swathes of fur; working in an atmosphere imbued with the scent of Cuir de Russie.

  And Marie herself could not forget what had gone before, as she browsed through warehouses in search of reels of embroidery silk for her work for Chanel, on expeditions that took her into ‘a world still full of its own peculiar poetry’. Here she found the materials of her past, ready to be reassembled again into something new. ‘I came across a pale yellowish twist like the one used in the convents in Moscow where I learned from the nuns the ancient art of embroidering faces of saints with one colour of silk, shading the emaciated cheeks by changing the direction of the stitches. There was also the real gold and silver thread which never tarnished and with which were embroidered the crowns and halos …’

  And she also discovered French silks from Lyon, some of them made to patterns that were centuries old; patterns that she ‘recognised as old friends; I had seen them on the brocaded curtains and furniture coverings in the palaces at Tsarskoie-Selo and Peterhof. Piece after piece of brocade and silk both plain and fancy was unrolled for me to admire, a wealth of taste, artistic wisdom, and experience accumulated for generations Marie found comfort in the familiar patterns, and drew on them in her embroidery for Chanel. And as the elements of fashion reassembled themselves – old materials transformed into apparently new designs – the collaboration between an exiled Grand Duchess and a peasant-girl-turned-autocrat served, amongst other things, as a reminder both of transformation and of tradition; of survival, amidst the seismic shifts and aftershocks of revolutions great and small.

  Chanel and the Duke of Westminster.

  THE DUKE OF WESTMINSTER

  On the wild western edge of Scotland, not far from Cape Wrath, a river runs through heather-covered hillsides, towards the dark waters of Loch Stack. It is as remote a place as any in Europe – there are no crofts, no crops – and golden eagles still fly above the high mountains, and deer inhabit the glens. But this landscape is a cherished wilderness, its severe grandeur protected from encroachments, and has been so for more than a century. Comprising over 100,000 acres, the Reay Forest estate was leased by the 1 st Duke of Westminster in 1866 from his father-in-law, the Duke of Sutherland, and bought outright in 1920 by his heir, the 2nd Duke of Westminster (known to his family and friends as Bendor, after his grandfather’s Derby-winning stallion).

  On a summer’s afternoon, the pale-grey sky reflected in the quiet pools of the River Laxford, it seems unassailably distant from Paris; a Highland sanctuary, hidden by ramparts of cliffs and sheer granite crags, beyond the reach of fashionable chatter or couture collections. But in the beautifully preserved fishing records of the Reay estate office, there are leather-bound volumes containing pages that mark the visits of Mademoiselle Chanel to the river, and her considerable success as a fisherwoman. The first date her name appears is 27th May 1925; according to the records, she caught a 9lb salmon in the Duke’s pool. A few days later, on 1st June, Mademoiselle Chanel had landed a bigger fish – over 12lb, and half a pound heavier than the salmon caught that day by her host, the Duke of Westminster. As the summer progressed, so did Mademoiselle’s fishing skills; she was on the River Laxford and Loch Stack throughout June, July and August, reeling in salmon and sea trout. On 30th September 1925, she caught her biggest one yet, a 17lb salmon, and landed another of the same size the following day.

  Chanel salmon-fishing at Lochmore, the Duke of Westminster’s estate in Scotland, 1928.

  Two years later, in 1927, after Chanel had enjoyed a third summer of fishing with the Duke of Westminster on the Laxford, Winston Churchill joined them for a week at the end of September. Churchill’s friendship with Bendor (whom he affectionately dubbed Bennie) was long-standing, and they had remained close throughout the Duke’s two marriages (to Shelagh Cornwallis-West, from whom he had separated in 1913, and then to Violet Nelson, his wife from 1920 to 1924). Indeed, Churchill and the Duke were related through marriage, for after the death of Winston’s father, Lord Randolph Churchill, his mother had married Bendor’s brother-in-law, George Cornwallis-West, in 1900. Thus Churchill had been a frequent visitor to Bendor’s houses on the Sutherland estate – Stack Lodge, beside the River Laxford, and Lochmore, a turreted granite Victorian mansion overlooking the loch – and it was from Stack that he wrote to his wife, Clemmie, in early October 1927:

  ‘Coco is here in place of Violet. She fishes from morn till night, & in 2 months has killed 50 salmon. She is vy agreeable – really a gt & strong being fit to rule a man or an Empire. Bennie vy well & I think extremely happy to be mated with an equal – her ability balancing his power. We are only 3 on the river & have all the plums.’

  In the evenings, the three of them played the card game bezique in the sitting room of the wood-panelled fishing lodge, where stag antlers still hang on either side of the fireplace. Stack Lodge remains much as it was when Chanel stayed here in the Twenties – the upstairs bedrooms snug beneath the eaves; cottage rooms, unlike the ducal splendour of Lochmore – and there is still no other building in sight, its mountain views and isolation maintained by the narrow stone bridge that is the sole way across the river to the lodge. The mansion at Lochmore is equally quiet – empty now, its echoing rooms inhabited only by the sightless heads of stags, their glass eyes gone or clouded, and a cabinet of stuffed birds, kestrel and curlew, jacksnipe and grouse – and its windows overgrown with roses gone wild.

  It was here that Bendor died, in July 1953, after returning from a fishing expedition; and the diarist Chips Channon captured something of the grandeur of his life, as well as a way of life that died with him: ‘… magnificent, courteous, a mixture of Henry the Eighth and Lorenzo il Magnifico, he lived for pleasure – and women – for seventy-four years. His wealth was incalculable; his charm overwhelming; but he was restless, spoilt, irritable, and rather splendid in a very English way.’

  The Duke’s reputation as a playboy had already been established three decades previously, when Coco Chanel first met him in Monte Carlo at the end of 1923. Over six foot tall, heavily set, and weather-beaten from sailing and shooting, but still handsome at 44, Bendor was hugely attractive to women, without being particularly sophisticated. ‘He is a kindly, good-humoured fellow, like a great Newfoundland puppy,’ wrote one of his friends, Wilfrid Blunt, ‘much given to riotous amusements and sports, with horses, motors, and ladies. The fast life clearly suits him, for he looks a model of health and strength.’ Easily bored and constantly on the move, as if he could not bear his own thoughts to catch up with him, Westminster surrounded himself with people; though Chanel later described him to Paul Morand as ‘simplicity made man, the shyest person I’ve ever met. He has the shyness of kings, of people who are isolated through their circumstances and through their wealth.’

  The richest man in Britain, with an income reputed to be a guinea a minute, and an immense property portfolio that included most of Mayfair and Belgravia, Bendor had inherited the Grosvenor family fortune outright from his grandfather, the 1st Duke of Westminster, after his death on 22nd December 1899. Bendor
was just 20 at the time; he had lost his father as a child (Earl Grosvenor, who suffered from epilepsy, died in 1884, when Bendor was four years old). His mother, Lady Sibell, subsequently married a romantic 24-year-old, George Wyndham, who was only 16 years older than Bendor and treated him more like a younger brother than a son. Bendor was thereafter raised in an atmosphere of great affection, but little in the way of Victorian discipline. His mother and stepfather were leading lights in the aristocratic group known as the Souls, a coterie of rich and beautiful people who professed an adoration of literature, art, nature, and each other. Wyndham was a charming and loving companion to his three stepchildren – Bendor had two older sisters, Constance (always known as Cuckoo) and Lettice – and to his son, Percy, who was born when Bendor was eight. But Bendor’s upbringing was a curious mixture of parental absence and indulgence. He always declared he had no memory of his father, Earl Grosvenor, aside from receiving a spanking from him and his mother and stepfather had busy social lives that often took them away from home; yet Wyndham also bestowed a sense of fun upon his stepson’s childhood. Six months after marrying Sibell, Wyndham wrote to his mother about the festivities of his twenty-fifth birthday. ‘Everyone was in the best of spirits at breakfast; Sibell complained that her egg had got a little cold, and I said mine had got a little cough. In the morning we had athletic sports, high jump, long jump, and the jump hand-in-hand over hedges, then swinging till luncheon. In the afternoon, cricket … Then races, handicaps until dinner, after dinner we let off all the fireworks … After the fireworks the children went to swing again until half past ten o’clock.’

  At Eton, Bendor was a natural athlete, a golden-haired boy who was popular with his contemporaries. Never more than academically average, he joined the Royal House Guards (‘The Blues’) in 1899 and was posted to South Africa as aide-de-camp to Sir Alfred Milner, the Governor General. When the Boer War was declared later that year, on 11th October, Bendor became ADC to Field Marshal Lord Roberts, Commander-in-Chief of the South African Forces, and thrived on the danger and camaraderie of battle. It was there that he met Winston Churchill, their friendship deepened by the shared experience of a mounted Afrikaaner ambush while they were travelling by train from Pretoria; and subsequently sealed by a day spent fox-hunting together near Cape Town. Two months after his return to England, Bendor was engaged to be married to his childhood sweetheart Shelagh Cornwallis-West; their wedding took place seven weeks later, on 16th February 1901, and Churchill, by then an MP, was amongst the guests. The young couple moved into the London mansion that Bendor had inherited from his grandfather, Grosvenor House on Park Lane, which contained a priceless art collection (including Gainsborough’s The Blue Boy, Sir Joshua Reynolds’ portrait of Mrs Siddons as the Tragic Muse, five Rembrandts and a Rubens room); and Eaton Hall, the Duke of Westminster’s vast Gothic country house in Cheshire.

  The imposing interior of Eaton remained much as it had done in the 1st Duke’s lifetime – The Adoration of the Magi by Rubens hung at the top of the staircase, the steps of which were flanked by medieval suits of armour; the panelled dining room, large enough to seat 60 people, was lined with family portraits by Gainsborough and Reynolds – but Bendor introduced new amusements to the estate. Aside from the traditional diversions of hunting and shooting, there was cricket, croquet, tennis, boating, a nine-hole golf course, and a regular polo tournament, where 10 teams and 92 ponies would be put up for a week. George Wyndham, by then a Conservative MP and Chief Secretary for Ireland, observed approvingly: ‘I welcome keenness at his age in anything and he is delightfully keen. The whole place has been turned into the embodiment of a boy’s holidays … He has constructed a steeple-chase course and a mile-and-a-half of high tarred rails … The old Deer-house is now the home of badgers whose lives have been spared after digging out to assist fox-hunting. The stables are crammed with hunters, chase-horses, polo ponies, Basutos, carriage horses, American Trotters and two motor cars. He enjoys it all from morning to night … But it’s all very boyish and delightful: no luxury.’

  Previously unseen pictures from a private album. Top left: Chanel with Vera Bate at Lochmore. Top right: Chanel at Mimizan, the Duke of Westminster’s hunting lodge in France. Centre: Chanel in Scotland. Centre right: Chanel at Eaton Hall. Bottom left: Chanel with the Duke of Westminster at Eaton Hall. Bottom right: Chanel on the terrace at Eaton Hall.

  Top left: Chanel at Eaton Hall. Centre left: Chanel at Mimizan. Centre right: Chanel (left) in the drawing room at Eaton Hall, photographed by the Duchess of Marlborough. Lower centre right: Chanel (in sapphire) entertaining the Duke of Westminster’s house party in the drawing room at Eaton Hall. Bottom: The grounds of Eaton Hall.

  Chanel with friends and the Duke of Westminster aboard the Flying Cloud.

  And in some sense, Bendor did seem to have brought a youthful informality to Eaton; a not inconsiderable feat, given the grand scale of the house, after his grandfather had commissioned Alfred Waterhouse, the architect of the Natural History Museum in London, to remodel it into a Victorian palace which sceptics compared to St Pancras station. The Gothic style was ‘perfectly suited to modern needs’, Waterhouse had declared, in defence of his redesign of Eaton in the 1870s (a process that took 12 years, at a cost of over £600,000); but the sheer size of Eaton was daunting, for as one visitor commented, it was ‘a huge pile, like a small town’. By the time the house was completed, the 1st Duke had already begun to have grave doubts about it. ‘Now that I have built a Palace,’ he wrote to his daughter-in-law Lady Sibell, ‘I wish I lived in a cottage.’

  Yet Bendor seemed happy at Eaton in the early years of his marriage, occupying a private wing with Shelagh, along with his large pack of dachshunds, who accompanied him everywhere but proved so impossible to house-train that several maids had to follow in their trail, mopping up behind them. The birth, in 1902, of the Westminsters’ first child, a baby girl named Ursula, did not supplant Bendor’s beloved dogs from his affections; and life went on much as before, with regular house parties at Eaton of up to 60 guests, and an army of liveried staff to cater to them. Even more lavish entertaining took place at Grosvenor House; such was the splendour of the parties that Marie, Crown Princess of Romania (herself a granddaughter of Queen Victoria), described a ball there in July 1902 as ‘the finished perfection’ of a season of ‘peace and plenty’. In her memoirs she noted the beauty of the young Duchess of Westminster, ‘a tall, brilliantly effective woman, covered with jewels’, and of Shelagh’s sister, Daisy, by then the Princess of Pless, ‘gold-clad, with a high diamond tiara on her honey-coloured hair’. There was dancing in the ballroom and an ‘exquisite supper-hall’: ‘This enormous blue-and-silver flower-filled room was a feast for the eye … Perfectly liveried footmen with that stately deportment peculiar to English servants, every one of them picked out for their fine figures and good looks, prodigious flowers, exquisite china, glass and silver, clever lighting, flattering to the complexion; in the distance soft music. I sat there drinking in all this beauty rendered possible only by generations of civilisation and wealth. This was perfection: no doubt it had meant much thought, effort also, but the effort was not felt, there was neither hustle, haste nor confusion; it was all as though it could not be otherwise, and therein lay that exquisite feeling of peace and content.’

  Yet for all the polished surfaces, the gleam of serenity and the security of wealth, the Duke and his wife were not quite at peace together. In March 1903, after one of the many house parties at Eaton – the guests this time included the Prince and Princess of Wales – Daisy was sufficiently concerned about her sister to record in her diary, ‘Poor little girl, she cried yesterday; but I told her every woman gets more and more disappointed as she gets older, and no husband turns out to be as one expected.’ The following year, in November 1904, Shelagh gave birth to a baby son, Edward George Hugh Grosvenor; but despite Bendor’s delight at gaining an heir, the couple began to spend more time apart. They still entertained on a lavish scale, but often t
ravelled abroad separately, each in their own yacht, and with their own retinues of servants. Rumour had it that Shelagh was involved in a romance with the Duke of Alba, one of the most dashing of the so-called ‘Eaton set’ who socialised with the Westminsters; and Bendor enjoyed his own liaisons, or what he described as ‘nocturnal adventures’, which were amongst the many diversions on offer at house parties, as long as a façade of decorum was observed. (The most important thing to remember on a surreptitious night-time excursion, according to Bendor, was to walk on the side of the staircase, as it creaked less.)

  The marriage remained intact, however, until a tragedy exposed the painful cracks and splinters. In February 1909, the Westminsters’ 4-year-old son, Edward, died of appendicitis at Eaton, following an operation that had been delayed for several days after the boy had first fallen ill. Bendor blamed Shelagh, accusing her of neglect and carelessness; Shelagh, as consumed with grief as her husband, did not attend Edward’s funeral. ‘Oh! what a big blank he has left in my life,’ she wrote to Daisy a fortnight later. ‘I feel as if the world had grown suddenly dark, and I am groping to see and touch a little light.’

  A few days afterwards, Bendor and Shelagh sailed for Monte Carlo with their daughter, Ursula, to stay with Princess Daisy and her husband, but the darkness still lay upon them. ‘The weather has been awful, snow storms, rain and thunder,’ reported Daisy in her diary on 7th March, the sea was dreadful, enormous waves breaking on the shore and a swell on, just as if a great tidal wave was running over us … We walked afterwards to the stone pier (not very high) – really a sort of breakwater – in Cannes. A lot of children were playing about and as we turned to go home they shouted that a child had fallen in and was drowned. We ran back, but there was nothing to be done. Shelagh turned and said: “Bendor will go in, for God’s Sake, stop him …” and as I climbed down to the rocks to hold him, I heard him groan. He would have gone in, in a moment, if there had been the slightest chance, but the waves were enormous and there was nothing to be seen.’