Coco Chanel

by Justine Picardie

  Streitz remembered Chanel as remarkably generous in her dealings with him – after his car broke down, and he was forced to travel by bus to La Pausa, she gave him one of her cars, and insisted that he keep it. But she could also be ferociously intimidating. ‘She was certainly intelligent,’ Streitz told Galante. ‘In discussions one always had a feeling of one’s own inferiority.’ And he quickly learned to avoid lingering after their conversations, having discovered to his cost that he might overhear her calling him a complete idiot. The project’s chief building contractor, Edgar Maggiore, felt a similar mixture of respect and anxiety when dealing with his demanding client. ‘Mademoiselle knew what she wanted,’ he told Galante, remembering her orders that the pristine villa should have the patina of age, with handmade roof-tiles – over 20,000 of them – and that the brand-new shutters should be made to look weathered. She visited the site at least once a month during its construction, sometimes returning to Paris on the same day; but on one occasion, when she was too busy to leave Rue Cambon, Maggiore sent one of his workers to Paris, so that she could choose the exact colour of the plaster to be used on the façade.

  Despite her exactitude, Maggiore also remembered Chanel’s forbearance, and her laughter when she sank to her knees in mud while inspecting the villa’s massive foundations. ‘She was always very cheerful when she visited Roquebrune,’ he said; and perhaps as a consequence the villa rose from the ground with remarkable speed, taking less than a year to complete. When it was finished, La Pausa consisted of three wings, each facing inward towards a spacious courtyard, with cloisters reminiscent of Aubazine. Its grace and beauty launched Streitz’s distinguished career, and in later life he remembered La Pausa as his ‘good luck building’. The construction costs had been immense-6 million francs – and Chanel’s expenditure on the interiors was equally lavish. Yet in the end, La Pausa gave the impression of serenity and simplicity.

  To Chanel’s great-niece Gabrielle Labrunie, it was a magical landscape; remaining vivid in her earliest memories as the place where she visited ‘Auntie Coco’ and her godfather, Bennie. In the same way that Boy Capel had assumed some parental responsibility for her father, André Palasse, so Westminster became Gabrielle’s godfather soon after her birth in 1926. Gabrielle was fluent in English, having spent much of her early childhood living with her parents and younger sister in Mayfair, where her father was employed to oversee Chanel’s London business, and in Huddersfield, where a British Chanel factory had been established. She remembered the soot in their garden in Huddersfield (the green leaves coated in powdery black), and her visits to the Duke’s London residence, Bourdon House, where she was invited to children’s tea parties and birthday celebrations. But it was La Pausa that seemed to her to be enchanted: ‘I was certain that there were fairies in the garden in Roquebrune. They were in the trees, and there were stars entwined in Auntie Coco’s bed…’

  The surviving pictures of Chanel’s bedroom at La Pausa still show the stars that her great-niece remembers so well. They were carved in wrought iron to Coco’s design, surrounding the bed in which the Duke was her guest; the emblem of her own domain (and perhaps also a subtle reminder of the stars she walked upon as a child, decorating the mosaic floor at Aubazine).

  That La Pausa was entirely hers was made clear in the description of it that appeared in the March 1930 issue of American Vogue, under the headline ‘Mlle Chanel’s House’. ‘There is no doubt that Mademoiselle Gabrielle Chanel is a person with very rare taste,’ declared Vogue, ‘and it is therefore not in the least surprising that she has built for herself one of the most enchanting villas that ever materialised on the shores of the Mediterranean … To begin with, she chose the site very carefully … On the left is all the lovely sweep of the Italian coastline, and, on the right, the Rock of Monaco and the town of Monte Carlo form one of the most breathtaking views in the whole Riviera while in one huge semicircle in front of the house stretches the blue of the Mediterranean.’

  The garden was planted according to Mademoiselle’s wishes – ‘groves of orange trees, great slopes of lavender, masses of purple iris, and huge clusters of climbing roses’. Not content with the existing olive grove at La Pausa, she had also instructed Maggiore to transplant 20 ancient olive trees from Antibes, one of which grew in the centre of the courtyard (another echo, perhaps, of Aubazine). The villa’s monastic quality was apparent in its cloisters, as well as in the central staircase and the cleanliness of its interiors; but for all this, it was a place in which to luxuriate. ‘The house itself is long and Provençal,’ reported Vogue, ‘the grey of its walls melting into the soft tint of the wood of the olive trees.’ The cloisters were built along three sides of the patio, providing shade ‘where one may coolly doze away the hottest hours of the summer afternoons’. Inside, the villa was decorated in a manner completely dissimilar to Chanel’s Baroque apartment at Rue Cambon or the Victorian Gothic of Eaton Hall. ‘The motif seems to be an entire absence of knickknacks or unnecessary items. Everything one needs is there – and the most perfect of its kind – but there is nothing superfluous.’

  There were white taffeta curtains to match the white walls of the dining room, and beige silk curtains in the living room and bedrooms, all of it the perfect backdrop for its owner. Bettina Ballard set the scene in a subsequent piece for Vogue describing a house party at La Pausa. ‘About one o’clock everyone appears in the great hall – mornings don’t exist in the South, and you see no one before lunch. Mademoiselle Chanel is generally the last, and her appearance on the high white balcony above the hall starts the day’s animation. She wears navy jersey slacks with a slip-on sweater and a bright red quilted bolero … Her red canvas espadrilles have thick cork soles – excellent for walking.’ Chanel rarely left the property, according to Ballard, except for her long afternoon rambles over narrow rocky paths. Meanwhile, the villa was run with immaculate efficiency by her Italian majordomo, Ugo. ‘The comfort of the house is phenomenal … Each bathroom, for example, has a servants’ entrance, so that your bath can be drawn, your shoes and clothes taken away to be pressed or cleaned, without your being disturbed. You press a button and breakfast appears in two minutes – your coffee and milk in thermos pitchers to keep hot all morning.’

  Meal times were informal buffets, where people could sit where they pleased, and eat what they wanted, in whatever order they chose (the very opposite of dining at Eaton, where footmen hovered throughout numerous courses). Ballard observed her fellow guest, Misia Sert, eating ‘one dish of salad after another’, while the men piled ‘chops and steak and chicken all on the same plate’. The dress code was equally relaxed: ‘You dress or not as you choose for dinner. Chanel herself wears black velvet slacks with the pink satin pyjamas showing about two inches round the ankles. With them she clings to her fine woollen slip-on sweaters brightened by strings of emeralds and pearls.’ Thus she held court, generally without sitting down at the table: ‘Mademoiselle Chanel, who eats very little anyway, is the prize entertainment, standing in front of the huge fireplace, making superb conversation Later, writing in her memoir, Ballard also recalled Chanel’s stories about her childhood tribulations; of how she was shut up indoors after her mother’s death by her two old aunts in the Auvergne: ‘The aunts’ stone house had small windows that were always kept closed, and they sat primly in their rusty black dresses in the dark parlour sewing or reading, their eyes on the small dark girl who was supposed to be studying or sewing but who kept looking out of the windows.’ Over lunch at La Pausa, Chanel told Ballard that years after escaping from the aunts, she had terrible nightmares that they would find her: ‘She still had recurrent dreams that a door would open and there they would be, the two tight-lipped, black-clad women, come to take her away.’

  The aunts never came, despite Chanel’s mysterious hints that they knew where to find her; and she was safe in her realm, ‘designed to give her the maximum of privacy and her guests the maximum of liberty’. Yet for all its freedoms and desirability – and
that of its hostess – La Pausa did not keep the Duke from straying. The Flying Cloud continued to carry its master on his ceaseless travels; its presence so ubiquitous that it even appeared in the opening scene of Noël Coward’s Private Lives, when Amanda and Elyot stand on a hotel balcony in a fashionable French resort, looking out to sea:

  Amanda: Whose yacht is that?

  Elyot: The Duke of Westminster’s I expect. It always is.

  Amanda: I wish I were on it.

  Elyot: I wish you were too.

  But the restless Duke still alighted at La Pausa in the summer of 1929, in-between outings to the Monte Carlo casino, as did Winston Churchill (a regular guest at Lord Rothermere’s nearby villa at Cap Martin, along with the Prince of Wales). Salvador Dalí and his wife were frequent visitors; indeed, Dalí was inspired to paint there, including a still life entitled L’Instant sublime, which depicted a snail, a telephone receiver, and a drop of water about to fall on a frying egg. Bendor was also seized by the desire to capture La Pausa on canvas, albeit in rather more conventional watercolours; as was Churchill, although he holidayed at the villa more often after its sale to Emery Reeves, his literary agent, in 1953.

  Serge Lifar – Chanel’s favourite among Diaghilev’s ballet dancers, and a star of Le Train bleu – stayed at La Pausa, and the rest of the company was in residence nearby at Monte Carlo for annual seasons there. Jean Cocteau recuperated at the villa during his periodic attempts to give up opium. And Vera Bate – by now remarried to an Italian officer, Colonel Alberto Lombardi – was ensconced in a small house at the bottom of the garden, lent to her by the munificent Chanel. Gabrielle Labrunie remembers playing with Vera’s daughter, Bridget Bate at La Pausa and also the song that Coco used to sing to her in the open-top car that swung along the coastal road, then up into the hills of Roquebrune. She can still hum the tune, and the refrain, which she sings as she shows me the picture of herself as a child in the garden of La Pausa, holding a bunch of white flowers. ‘It goes something like this,’ she says: ‘“I laughed at love, thought it all wrong, but now I sing a new song …” That’s what Auntie Coco sang.’

  But the angry sound of arguments between the Duke and Chanel began to disturb the peace of La Pausa, waking up the other guests in the night; and when she joined him on the Flying Cloud the rows continued, always about his infidelities and her humiliation. Once, when Bendor tried to make amends for an affair that Chanel had discovered by giving her a large emerald, she accepted it from him, and then, without a word, let it slip from her hands overboard into the sea. On another occasion, when they had been cruising along the Riviera for several days, the Duke gave her a pearl necklace as a peace offering for having flirted with a younger woman. Again, Chanel simply threw it into the waves.

  By the end of 1929, it was clear that Bendor was determined to find a new wife who could bear him a son. At 46, Chanel still looked remarkably youthful – and it is likely that the Duke believed her to be younger than she was – and their affair was not yet over (Chanel came to stay with him at Eaton in mid-December 1929, for example, and was photographed at his house party and shoot). But Bendor took little time in proposing to a young Englishwoman, Loelia Ponsonby, less than a month after meeting her in a London nightclub. They were engaged just before Christmas (a day or two after Chanel’s visit to Eaton), and married in February 1930; not that this got in the way of his seasonal visit to the Riviera. Loelia’s subsequent memoir, Grace and Favour, described how he set off for France the morning after their engagement, to spend Christmas in Monte Carlo: ‘I had a dreadful suspicion that a particularly elegant French lady would be meeting him there.’ The following month, Loelia was given no choice but to be presented by the Duke to Chanel in Paris, as if by way of inspection. On their way to her apartment, Bendor stopped to buy a present at Van Cleef et Arpels: ‘when he came out he patted his pocket and said, “Not for you.” Maybe he was joking. Maybe not. I never knew for certain.’

  Loelia had been brought up at St James’s Palace, the daughter of a quintessential courtier. Her father had been an assistant private secretary to Queen Victoria, then to Edward VII, and later Keeper of the Privy Purse under George V. But nothing in her childhood training in etiquette and protocol had prepared her for the frosty encounter with her fiancé’s celebrated mistress. ‘At that time Mademoiselle Chanel was at the height of her fame, her quiet, neat, uncomplicated clothes being considered the epitome of all that was most chic. Small, dark and simian, Coco Chanel was the personification of her own fashions. She was wearing a dark blue suit and a white blouse with very light stockings (light stockings were one of her credos). Described in this way she sounds as if she looked like a high-school girl, but actually the effect was of extreme sophistication.’

  Over 30 years after this alarming introduction, Loelia still recalled the dazzle of Chanel’s jewels, many of which had been given to her by the Duke (for not all had been thrown overboard the Flying Cloud). ‘When I saw her she was hung with every kind of necklace and bracelet, which rattled as she moved. Her sitting-room was luxurious and lavish and she sat in a large armchair, a pair of tall Coromandel screens … making an effective backcloth. I perched, rather at a disadvantage, on a stool at her feet feeling that I was being looked over to see whether I was a suitable bride for her old admirer – and I very much doubted whether I, or my tweed suit, passed the test … Frantically searching around for something to say, I mentioned that Mrs George Keppel had given me a Chanel necklace as a Christmas present. At once I was made to describe it. No, said Mademoiselle Chanel. It had certainly not come from her. She would never dream of having anything like that on sale. And the conversation dropped with a bang.’

  Poor Loelia, whose marriage was doomed from the start, and whose honeymoon on the Flying Cloud was as miserable as her meeting with Chanel. The yacht had been fitted out with the solidity of an English country house – the cabins reached through an ornamental doorway and furnished with Queen Anne furniture, including a four-poster bed for Loelia – but it was nonetheless a boat that rolled with the swell. ‘I think I can claim to be the worst sailor in the world,’ confessed Loelia, ‘and it really was the irony of fate that I should become part owner of two enormous yachts, capable of sailing on any ocean and not to be able to spend a happy moment on either.’

  As for Chanel, she kept as hard and lovely a look on her face as a Scott Fitzgerald heroine, displaying a brittle fortitude while she lost her beloved Bendor to another woman. But two days after the Duke’s wedding to Loelia, he came to see Coco in Paris, and then, at last, she cried.

  THE WOMAN IN WHITE

  Coco Chanel was never the bride, but she understood the potency of a white dress, even before the craze for white satin that swept Paris fashions in the wake of the Wall Street Crash. Women had worn white long before Chanel, of course, and before the Crash, but she took credit for a new vogue for white, and in some sense, this was her due. The little black dress did not entirely disappear with the Roaring Twenties; nor were the lengthening hems of gossamer white gowns a direct consequence of the catastrophic collapse of stock values in October 1929. Nevertheless, in one of those curious shifts of fashion that are in part emblematic, and yet also apparently perverse, the black days of the Crash were followed by a style that Chanel characterised as ‘candid innocence and white satin’, which prevailed in the dark shadow of the Depression.

  Later, in her long conversations with Paul Morand in the winter of 1946, exiled from Paris to the snows of St Moritz, Chanel repeated her credo, almost as if she needed to reassure herself that she (and she alone) had the clarity of vision to embrace both black and white. ‘Women think of every colour, except the absence of colours,’ she declared. ‘I have said that black had everything. White too. They have an absolute beauty. It is perfect harmony. Dress women in white or black at a ball: they are the only ones you see.’

  Certainly, when Chanel dressed in white, she was there to be seen, as is evident if you flick through the society pages of fash
ionable magazines from 1929 onwards. Chanel is omnipresent: in early 1931, for example, she is wearing white beach pyjamas and jewelled bracelets on the Venice Lido, alongside her fellow couturier, Lucien Lelong; soon afterwards, she is in immaculate sporting whites, shoes and hat, on her tennis court at La Pausa, escorted by the glamorous Baron Hubert von Pantz. The following year she appears aboard Lieutenant Commander Montague Graham White’s steam yacht in Poole Harbour, looking crisp in a white dress and jacket (despite the dreary weather and the unprepossessing presence of her host’s shaggy dog). There are numerous pictures, too, of Chanel poised in white satin and glistening pearls at parties and balls in Paris and Monte Carlo; and many more of white evening gowns worn by her clients to glittering social occasions. Janet Flanner, the Paris correspondent for The New Yorker, reporting on the frenetic round of June balls in 1930, noted the booming trade that Chanel was doing in the summer after the Wall Street Crash, when Parisian parties were ‘unusually frequent, fantastic, and … remarkable for representing the true spirit of their time’. Most beautiful of all was the White Ball, given by a ‘niece of the late Pope Leo XIII’, where Jean Cocteau concocted white-plaster masks and wigs. Mademoiselle Chanel’s white gowns were much in evidence there, and elsewhere, in a season that seemed to reflect a dazzling defiance to the encroaching economic gloom.

  Sadly, there is no photograph of the magnificent white evening dress that Chanel wore to the ball given by the Duke of Westminster in June 1928 to mark his youngest daughter Mary’s eighteenth birthday and debut into London society. By this point, the Duke’s relationship with Mary’s mother, his first wife, Shelagh, was sufficiently amicable for them to co-operate on the preparations for the party. Moreover, Mary had personally invited Mademoiselle Chanel to the ball. Chanel, who at that time was still very much Bendor’s mistress, not only accepted the invitation, but gave a dinner party for Mary before the ball, attended by the Duke, Shelagh and her second husband, and Mary’s older sister Ursula and her husband. When the dinner was over and the moment came to leave for the ball, which was taking place across the road from Bendor’s house in Mayfair, Chanel said that her guests should go on ahead, as she wanted to change out of her white dress into another one. They duly departed, but when Chanel had still not arrived half an hour later, Bendor sent an aide to fetch her. He returned, with the message that Mademoiselle was unwell. The Duke was sufficiently concerned to leave the party and visit Chanel himself; whereupon he found her in bed, her face as white as the gown she had just taken off. Re-telling the story to Claude Delay, Chanel said that Bendor had wanted to call a doctor, but she simply put her arms around him, and gently rubbed her face against his shoulder. When he saw the traces of white talcum power and face cream on his black jacket, he understood that her illness was faked, in order to avoid any potential embarrassment at the ball. ‘You see,’ she said to the Duke, ‘in the first place I don’t like doing things that bore me. And in the second you wouldn’t really have liked it either.’