Ten days later, Chanel and Misia departed by train from New York to Los Angeles. Goldwyn had arranged everything for maximum effect. The train was entirely white, and stocked with large quantities of French champagne, Russian caviar and American journalists, who reported on Chanel’s triumphant arrival in Hollywood. Greta Garbo was there to greet Chanel when the white train pulled into the platform – ‘TWO QUEENS MEET’ trumpeted the headlines – and together with Misia, they were whisked off to a party at Goldwyn’s house. There Chanel met more Hollywood royalty: Marlene Dietrich, Claudette Colbert and the directors George Cukor and Erich von Stroheim, who allegedly kissed her hand and asked, ‘You are a seamstress, I believe?’ Chanel, somewhat uncharacteristically, did not take offence, although she later remarked, ‘What a ham, but he really had style.’
Soon afterwards, the seamstress set to work on her first Goldwyn film, a musical called Palmy Days starring Eddie Cantor as an assistant to a fraudulent psychic, with dance routines by Busby Berkeley. The film was notable more for its flimsily clad girls than its implausible plot, and Chanel had insufficient time to supervise all the costume design. However, her instinct for fluidity and movement manifested itself in her decision to make four versions of a dress for the ingénue Barbara Weeks; each looked identical but was cut with minute yet precise variations, to be seen at its most flattering in different scenes, whether the actress was standing, sitting or dancing.
Chanel’s next job was on The Greeks Had A Word For Them, released in February 1932. The title (and some of the storyline) had been changed from the original stage comedy, The Greeks Had A Word For It, in order to satisfy the censors; although, as Time magazine noted in its review, ‘Goldwyn was guided less by a sense of decency than a sense of decoration,’ expressly crediting Chanel’s involvement. She dressed the three leads – Ina Claire, Joan Blondell and Madge Evans – who were playing glamorous showgirls-turned-gold-diggers. Thirty complete outfits were designed for the actresses, a process that began in Hollywood, although they were completed to Chanel’s instructions after she returned to Paris.
Chanel’s third and final Goldwyn project was to dress Gloria Swanson as a prima donna opera singer in Tonight or Never, and this time, the entire process was undertaken in Paris. The film star, who was herself something of a diva, described her encounter with Chanel in her memoir, Swanson on Swanson. After a week of fittings in Paris, there had been a pause in the proceedings, when it dawned upon Swanson that she was unexpectedly pregnant. ‘The following day Coco Chanel, tiny and fierce, approaching fifty, wearing a hat, as she always did at work, glared furiously at me when I had trouble squeezing into one of the gowns she had measured for me six weeks earlier. It was black satin to the floor, cut on the bias, a great work of art in the eyes of both of us. I said I would try it with a girdle, but when I stepped before her again, she snorted with contempt and said anyone a block away could see the line where the girdle ended halfway down my thigh.
‘“Take off the girdle and lose five pounds,” she snapped briskly. “You have no right to fluctuate in the middle of fittings. Come back tomorrow and we’ll finish the evening coat with the sable collar. Five pounds!” she cried again, unable to restrain herself. “No less!”’
The following day, Swanson returned to Rue Cambon with a large roll of surgical elastic, and requested that it be made into ‘a rubberized undergarment to the knees, or rather, two or three dozen of them’. Chanel was horrified, but Swanson prevailed, citing ‘reasons of health’; and eventually, couture corsets were provided, constructed with as much attention to detail as every other garment in the atelier. ‘With evident displeasure, the corset maker ran up the panty girdle in muslin first. It worked. Then she made it in snug elastic. It worked even better, although it took three people to get me into it. With the lavish confidence of Harry Houdini hearing twenty padlocks snap shut, I then raised my arms to receive the black satin cut on the bias over my head. It fit like a glove.’ By the time Swanson sailed for New York in the summer of 1931, she had ‘a whole wardrobe designed for me by Chanel, including a stack of sturdy elastic panties’. And when filming commenced in California, the corsets were sufficiently robust for Swanson to conceal her growing pregnancy. ‘I did scrutinize the rushes with thin lips and a nervous eye, but I continued to look all right up there on the screen as the weeks passed. Every one of Coco’s seams held.’
Others in Hollywood were less appreciative, however, and Tonight or Never proved to be Chanel’s last job for Goldwyn. The film – United Artists’ big Christmas release – opened to polite reviews (The New York Times described it as an ‘unusually striking production’, partly thanks to Chanel’s sartorial creations), but it flopped at the box office. After the fanfare and razzmatazz of Chanel’s arrival in Hollywood, she departed, according to The New Yorker, ‘in a huff’, having been told by the movie moguls that her dresses weren’t sensational enough. She made a lady look like a lady. Hollywood wants a lady to look like two ladies.’
Still, she had made her million dollars – Goldwyn paid up without an argument – and Vanity Fair, at least, was sufficiently impressed to nominate Chanel to its 1931 Hall of Fame. The magazine declared its reasons for doing so in a brief yet trenchant paragraph: ‘Because she was the first to apply the principles of modernism to dressmaking; because she numbers among her friends the most famous men of France; because she combines a shrewd business sense with enormous personal prodigality and a genuine if erratic enthusiasm for the arts; and finally because she came to America to make a laudable attempt to introduce chic to Hollywood.’
If Hollywood did not take to Chanel, then neither was she impressed by the might of the movies. In Paris, she had already collaborated as a costume designer with the most celebrated of modern artists: with Picasso and Cocteau on Antigone and Le Train bleu; with Cocteau again in 1926 for his play Orphée (in which he described the character of Death appearing as ‘a very beautiful young woman in a bright pink ball-gown and fur coat’); and the Ballets Russes production of Apollon musagète in 1929, composed by Stravinsky and choreographed by George Balanchine. Such triumphs counted for nothing in Hollywood, although Chanel was swift in returning the snub. In later years, when questioned about her trip into the heart of the film business, she was dismissive: ‘It was the Mont St Michel of tit and tail.’ And to Claude Delay, she emphasised her independence from the monolithic power of the studios: ‘The Americans wanted to tie me down, you see, because I out-fashion fashion. But I’m not for sale or hire. In Hollywood the stars are just the producers’ servants.’ Thus Chanel declared she would not submit to anyone, nor to the dogma that American culture would lead fashion, as well as everything else in the world; and was at pains to make this clear to Paul Morand in 1946, even at a time when she had ceased designing at Rue Cambon. ‘“Paris will no longer create fashion,” I hear people say. New York will invent it, Hollywood will propagate it and Paris will be subjected to it. I don’t believe that. Of course, cinema has the same effect on fashion as the atomic bomb; the ratio of the explosion of the moving image throughout cinemas knows no bounds on Earth, but I, who admire American films, am still waiting for studios to impose a figure, a colour, a style of clothing. Hollywood can deal successfully with the face, with the outline, the hairstyle, the hands, the toenails, with portable bars, refrigerators in the drawing-room, clock-radios … but it doesn’t deal any more successfully with the central problem of the body, which it has not managed to dissociate from man’s inner drama, and which remains the prerogative of the great designers and ancient civilisations.’ And if she had not made herself quite clear with this somewhat complicated theory, Chanel then delivered a more direct parting shot. ‘Greta Garbo, the greatest actress the screen has given us, was the worst dressed woman in the world.’
But whatever the disappointments of Chanel’s encounter with Hollywood, her journey to America was nonetheless a significant one. For this was the place that she had conjured up for herself in childhood as her father’s prom
ised land, the New World where he would make his fortune, having left his daughters behind with the nuns. Claude Delay remembers Chanel’s wistful story of finding herself lost in Beverley Hills with Misia one day, searching for an address that they could not find. Eventually, Misia noticed the name Chanel written on one of the gateposts. Still believing in Coco’s story of her childhood, Misia cried out in astonishment, ‘It’s your father. We’ll find him and take him back with us. I’ll leave Sert.’ Chanel’s only response was a tart comment that Sert had already left Misia. The rest was left unsaid, although Chanel’s ambivalence about America was to crop up again in her conversations with Delay. On the one hand, it was a continent that had made her rich, through the vast sales of her perfumes, for which Americans seemed to have an insatiable appetite. (‘They’ll buy every luxury,’ she said to Delay, ‘and the first of all luxuries is perfume.’) And yet part of her, austere as a nun, resisted the seductions offered to her by America. Describing her hotel suite in Hollywood to Delay, Chanel listed its comforts with a certain amount of contempt: two bedrooms and four television sets, including one that could be watched in the bathroom. ‘All that’s for people who have gone soft. The English hide everything, the Americans show everything! America is dying of comfort.’
In her heart, she must have known that her father was not waiting for her in America, although it might have suited her to believe that it had swallowed him up. Many years later, in her solitary white-walled bedroom at the Ritz, Chanel was beset by nightmares, despite the opiates that she used to keep dreams at bay. There was one image that haunted her most, repeating itself over and over again in her restless nights, and which she repeated to Claude Delay. As Delay describes it to me, her eyes fill with tears, this eminent psychoanalyst suddenly overcome with sympathy for her long-dead friend. ‘Out of the darkness of sleep, there would appear a white train, with a scented coach full of flowers and COCO CHANEL written on the side. It was carrying a corpse inside – her own body.’
When I ask her if she ever interpreted the dream for Chanel, she shakes her head. ‘It was her dream,’ she says. ‘It was not for me to tell her its meaning. But something tremendously important was contained within that white train. You understand that, don’t you?’
I’m not sure that I do entirely understand; for so much of Chanel remains enigmatic – the more you run after her, the more elusive her ghost becomes. Perhaps her spirit is to be found not in the flickering images of her designs for the silver screen, nor in the continuing attempts to portray her on film, but in that fragment of her own dream, in the white train that crossed America, bearing her dead body and carrying her name. Her father was gone, and with him something of her self had died; but all the while Coco Chanel was turning into a myth in her own lifetime, a living legend, gathering speed as she left what she had lost behind.
DIAMONDS AS BIG AS THE RITZ
1st November 1932: All Saints’ Day, and a leaden grey sky hung over Paris, a city already in the shadow of the darkening Depression. At this low point in a grim season, Mademoiselle Chanel issued an invitation to an exhibition of diamond jewellery of her own design. The venue was 29 Faubourg Saint-Honoré, a magnificent eighteenth-century Parisian mansion where Chanel was residing at the time. Although she still entertained at her apartment in Rue Cambon (and retreated there, when necessary), Chanel had moved into one of the most prestigious streets in Paris, after a prolonged sojourn at the Ritz Hotel (where she would later return). Her Faubourg Saint-Honoré neighbours included the British Embassy and the Palais de l’Elysée, and her vast ground-floor suite opened out onto even larger formal gardens that stretched as far as Avenue Gabriel. Chanel decorated with suitable splendour: her favourite Coromandel screens and mirrors, a grand piano, and sumptuous carpets and curtains. ‘Plush carpet everywhere,’ she recalled to Paul Morand, ‘colorado claro in colour, with silky tints, like good cigars, woven to my specifications, and brown velvet curtains with gold braiding that looked like coronets girdled in yellow silk.’
Princesses, duchesses and ambassadors came to the opening party of Chanel’s exhibition, and thousands of visitors flocked to see the spectacular jewellery in the subsequent fortnight, paying 20 francs apiece. No obvious profit was made from the show – the gemstones were on loan from the Union of Diamond Merchants, who had sent a delegation to Chanel a few months previously, asking her to publicise their jewels during the economic slump – and the admission fees were donated to charitable foundations (including La Société de la Charité Maternelle, which happened to have had Marie Antoinette as one of its original patrons). Yet for all its splendour and success, the diamond exhibition also had its puzzling aspects. It wasn’t simply the odd juxtaposition of this radiant treasure trove with the gloom of the Crash, although that was notable, in a hardening winter when increasing numbers of unemployed were homeless on the streets of Paris.
Whatever the harsh realities outside the gilt and looking-glass walls of Faubourg Saint-Honoré, inside, Mademoiselle Chanel was giving an unexpected twist to her jewellery designs. She had become famous for her costume jewellery in the Twenties by championing the combination of fake gems with real ones. Indeed, she had made it one of her signature looks, mixing precious stones and glass copies with a supreme confidence not dissimilar to the manner in which she blurred truth and lies. But now here she was, declaring in her introduction to the exhibition catalogue that priceless diamonds were the only way forward ‘during a period of financial crisis when an instinctive desire for authenticity is reawakened in every domain’. Which made it all the more mystifying to see her astonishing jewellery designs – a glittering constellation of stars and comets – displayed on eerie wax mannequins, their heads so lifelike that it was difficult to tell whether their eyelashes and hair were real or false. The temptation to reach out and touch them was palpable; but they were enclosed in glass vitrines, locked away like waxen Sleeping Beauties, although their eyes were open, unblinking in the dazzle of diamonds reflected against a backdrop of mirrors. And as the lines of visitors made their way past the policemen on guard, none of them knew the secret that Chanel kept close to her heart: that the diamond stars were mirror images of the mosaics on the floor of the orphanage at Aubazine, themselves a reflection of the night sky that the medieval monks had observed when they fashioned their stone corridor.
Something of the mysterious potency of Chanel’s alchemical blend was captured by the sharp-eyed Janet Flanner in The New Yorker. The reporter had no clue as to the possible provenance of this constellation of diamonds in the salon at Faubourg Saint-Honoré, but she did note the peculiar manner in which Chanel signed her name in the brochure. ‘It is not undescriptive that, owing to an odd caesura in her signature, Gabrielle Chanel’s name, as she signs it, reads “Gabri elleChanel”. In her long, dramatic career as a dressmaker, she has never been more elleChanel, or herself, than in this curious exhibition of diamonds just opened in the interests of charity (and diamond merchants) in her sumptuous private hôtel in the Faubourg St-Honoré. With that aggravating instinct to strike when everyone else thinks the iron is cold that has, up till now, made her success, she has, at the height of the depression, returned to precious stones “as having the greatest value in the smallest volume”; just as, during the boom, she launched glass gewgaws “because they were devoid of arrogance in an epoch of too easy luxe.” As a result, what is regarded by underwriters as fifty million francs’ worth of borrowed brilliants, and by the pairs of private policemen at every drawing-room door as a terrible responsibility, judging by their miens, has just been put on display among the Coromandel screens and rose-quartz chandeliers which have made Chanel’s home notable, if not for its simplicity.’
Flanner, like many other commentators, was struck by the beauty of Chanel’s diamond jewellery, and also its ingenuity, whereby ‘in the interests of further economy, all of the more elaborate pieces come to pieces: the tiaras turn into bracelets, the ear-drops into brooches; the stars into garters.’ This display of v
ersatility had a certain wit to it, but the overall effect was nevertheless one of rich confidence; and if the exhibition was only temporary, it was also suggestive of the permanence of the constellations. As such, it was yet another measure of Chanel’s marvellous inventiveness, of her apparently natural instinct for providing fantastical illusion with a gloss of verisimilitude.
News of the incredible Chanel diamonds spread fast – the Paris exhibition was reported in dozens of newspapers across the United States, in what appeared to be a welcome distraction from the worsening economy – and readers from Manhattan to Milwaukee were given a wealth of enthusiastic detail. (The Philadelphia Record, for example, deemed the remarkable diamond fringed head-dresses ‘startlingly original’ and ‘singularly unpretentious’.) As was often the case, Janet Flanner gave the most polished first-hand account: ‘Mlle Chanel’s mountings for the jewels are in design dominantly and delicately astronomical. Magnificent lopsided stars for earrings; as a necklace, a superb comet whose nape-encircling tail is all that attaches it to a lady’s throat; bracelets that are flexible rays; crescents for hats and hair; and, as a unique set piece mounted in yellow gold, a splendid sun of yellow diamonds from a unique collection of matched stones unmatched in the world.
Coco Chanel Page 18
