Coco Chanel

by Justine Picardie

  What Chanel got, after a meeting that went on into the early hours of the morning, was a deal that made her unassailably rich: ‘After May 1947, Coco received 2 per cent on the gross royalties of perfume sales throughout the world, in the region of $1 million a year. She also received a sum calculated to cover past royalties.’ In addition, the settlement gave Chanel the right to produce and sell Mademoiselle Chanel perfumes, but she never did so. Indeed, she was now wealthy enough to need never work again.

  Yet without the defining schedule of her business – the regular couture collections that marked the passing of the seasons – Coco Chanel’s post-war years seemed to slip and slide away from the grasp of commentators in any account of her history; an episode consigned to oblivion, an icy exile from the heart of fashion. Marcel Haedrich described her as ‘entrenched in her Fortress Chanel’; Pierre Galante observed ‘her retirement on the edge of oblivion and of history, cut off from the kind of life that had nourished her celebrity’.

  But if time seemed to slow around her, she did not stay still, travelling constantly from La Pausa to the palace hotels of Lausanne, from Monte Carlo to Alpine ski resorts, occasionally alighting in London, New York and Paris (where her great-niece Hélène Palasse was temporarily installed with a governess in the apartment at Rue Cambon). In Switzerland she was reunited with Spatz, otherwise known as the Baron, who had found refuge there following the German retreat from Paris, and her nephew (and Hélène’s father) André Palasse, whose health had never fully recovered after his wartime imprisonment by the Nazis. Chanel’s loyalty to both her lover and her nephew in the aftermath of the war give some indication of her ability (or possibly her need) to seek out a place of neutrality; and where better than Switzerland, with its pristine snows and glacial cleanliness, the purity of its air and crisp, clear skies? Chanel bought her nephew a villa, hidden amongst the woods above Lake Geneva; and continued to conduct a discreet affair with Spatz for several years. When their relationship ended, he moved to a Balearic island, although Chanel continued to send him a monthly allowance. According to Pierre Galante, ‘Those who knew the Baron remember him as an impoverished, ageing playboy who nevertheless managed to keep up the pretence of wealth and fun-loving youth.’

  Switzerland had also provided a refuge for Walter Schellenberg, who was seriously ill with liver disease. After his interrogation in London, Hitler’s chief of foreign intelligence had returned to Germany for the Nuremberg Tribunals. Schellenberg later described his interrogation as harsh, telling a lawyer in Nuremberg that after the sessions in London, ‘I was finished. Eight weeks in a lightless cell. I wanted to kill myself …’The final report into Schellenberg’s testimony, written by MI5 officers, revealed something of his interrogators’ frustrations: ‘his incoherence and incapability of producing lucid verbal or written statements have rendered him a more difficult subject to interrogate than other subjects of inferior education and of humbler status.’

  His wartime record was equally difficult to interpret; for Schellenberg had not only tried to initiate peace negotiations with the Allies (as was evident in the ill-fated Operation Modellhut) and thereby signal his disaffection with Hitler, but he had also been involved in the successful attempts to save thousands from concentration camps in the final months of the war. There were those who saw this as an act of pure self-interest, an attempt to rehabilitate his reputation in the certain knowledge of German defeat; others were more sympathetic, such as Count Folke Bernadotte, a Swedish diplomat who had negotiated the release of over 20,000 prisoners from German camps and who testified on Schellenberg’s behalf at the Nuremberg Trials.

  Schellenberg himself seemed confident that he would not be judged harshly by the Allies, at least when he was first interrogated in July 1945. An early intelligence report observed that he was ‘facing his present plight as a prisoner in Allied hands in a spirit of complete realism. This does not mean at the thought of the fate that may befall [him] …The fact that Schellenberg seems to be possessed by a certain amount of good faith in Allied goodwill is due to his conviction that he has, ever since becoming conscious in 1940 that Germany had lost the war, been striving for a settlement with the Western powers and for an improvement of the lot of Allied nationals, soldiers and civilians in German hands …’

  In the event, although Schellenberg first appeared at the Nuremberg Trials as a witness for the prosecution, he was later indicted for war crimes and found guilty. On 14th April 1949, he was sentenced to six years’ imprisonment, but his time spent in custody from June 1945 was taken into account and set against his sentence. By this point, Schellenberg was judged too ill with liver and gallbladder problems to be kept in prison, and was held instead in Nuremberg City Hospital. In March 1950 he was released under a medical pardon. As his health continued to deteriorate, so did his precarious finances. When he was well enough to write, Schellenberg worked on his memoirs (entitled, appropriately, The Labyrinth). The following year, in May 1951, one of his wartime contacts, Roger Masson, the head of Swiss military intelligence, arranged for him to come under the care of a local doctor in Switzerland (a Dr Francis Lang, who later wrote about his association with Schellenberg in his Mémorres d’un médecin de campagne). Lang covered his medical expenses for several months, but eventually, as these mounted, Schellenberg was forced to look elsewhere for financial help. Professor Reinhard R. Doerries – a leading authority on German intelligence and an expert on Schellenberg’s activities – has recounted the subsequent events: ‘Schellenberg contacted Coco Chanel and explained his dire financial problems. If the doctor remembered correctly, the lady of haute couture … arrived in a black Mercedes, curtains drawn, and gave Schellenberg about 30,000 Swiss francs. There are no other explanations from the doctor, other than the fact that during the war Schellenberg had been helpful to her and to others in the fashion world.’

  Schellenberg died in March 1952, at the age of 42, and his posthumously published memoir made no mention of Coco Chanel. By then, Chanel had obliterated him from her own version of history, although Schellenberg was not the only omission. In the years following the war she had embarked on a number of attempts to write her memoirs, but none came to fruition. She had collaborated first with Louise de Vilmorin – an elegant novelist and Duff Cooper’s lover when he was the British ambassador in Paris immediately after the war – and then with Michel Déon, who spent a month with Chanel at La Pausa towards the end of 1952. His task as her ghost writer continued during her sojourn at the Beau Rivage Hotel in Lausanne, but when he produced his manuscript based on her reminiscences, Chanel (who had employed Déon in the first place) decided against its publication.

  Perhaps the most successful of the authors whom Chanel approached to write her memoirs was Paul Morand, a friend and fellow exile in Switzerland, who had served in the Vichy government. They had known each other for over a quarter of a century, since 1921, when Misia Sert had invited Morand to Chanel’s New Year’s Eve party at Rue Cambon, and the young writer had been so taken by the story of her romance with Boy Capel that he had used it as the inspiration for his first novel, Lewis et Irène, published in 1924. It remains unclear whether Chanel ever read his notes of their encounters at the Badrutt’s Palace hotel in St Moritz; and the resultant book, L’Allure de Chanel (as slim yet pungent as its subject) was not published until the year of Morand’s death, in 1976. But for all that Chanel chose to exclude from her conversations with Morand, his memory of her in 1946 gives a tantalising insight into her brooding fury and barely suppressed energies during her years away from the fashion business that had shaped her life, and bore her name.

  ‘Chanel was Nemesis,’ wrote Morand in his introduction to L’Allure de Chanel. ‘The voice that gushed forth from her mouth like lava, those words that crackled like dried vines, her rejoinders, simultaneously crisp and snappy, a tone that grew more and more peremptory as age took its toll, a tone that was increasingly dismissive, increasingly contradictory, laying irrevocable blame …She felt both trappe
d by the past and gripped by time regained … [in an] age that was suddenly foreign to her, the de Gaulle years, and black bile flowed from eyes that still sparkled, beneath arched eyebrows increasingly accentuated by eyeliner, like sculpted basalt; Chanel, the volcano from the Auvergne which Paris was mistaken in believing was extinct.’

  These were the years when her friends, as well as her enemies (who were sometimes one and the same), were passing away. Vera Lombardi died in Rome in 1948. Grand Duke Dmitri had finally succumbed to complications of his chronic tuberculosis in Switzerland in 1941; Chanel’s other former lovers to whom she had remained equally close, Etienne Balsan and the Duke of Westminster, both died in 1953. As for Misia Sert, she and Chanel remained as inextricably linked as always, for better and for worse, throughout Misia’s slow decline into blindness and drug addiction, which had accelerated after the death of her beloved ex-husband in 1945. According to Misia’s biographers, Arthur Gold and Robert Fizdale, Chanel also used opiates – as had José-Maria Sert, Cocteau and many others in the gilded circle of Paris artistic society. But there were important differences: ‘For Chanel drugs were harmless sedatives; for Misia their purpose was forgetfulness.’ And in this pursuit, Misia became dangerously reckless, injecting morphine at dinner parties or while wandering through a street market. ‘Once in Monte Carlo she walked into a pharmacy and asked for morphine while a terrified Chanel pleaded with her to be more careful. But carefulness was not in Misia’s nature.’ Eventually, she was arrested by the police and held overnight in a filthy police cell, before powerful friends intervened on her behalf. Thereafter, she travelled to Switzerland with Chanel to buy supplies; and it was after one such trip, on her return to Paris, that Misia died, on 15th October 1950.

  Chanel sat beside Misia as she slipped towards death that night, and then returned the following morning, to prepare her friend’s body for burial. She arranged Misia’s hair, put on her make-up and her jewels, dressed her in a white dress, and surrounded her with white flowers; le deuil blanc for a dead queen or a long-lost girl; just as Diaghilev had wished for on his deathbed in Venice, 21 years before.

  There were those at Misia’s funeral who were dismissive of Chanel; who said that she had put too much rouge on Misia, that she had made her corpse look absurd; that Coco herself was skeletal. Yet Chanel remained indomitable; refusing to grow old and invisible or to wrap herself in a shroud of obscurity or penitence. She painted her lips crimson – a slash of blood red, like a wound or a challenge – and exaggerated her eyebrows in black, as if drawing her own portrait of her face. Some whispered she had undergone plastic surgery in Switzerland; that her features had been renewed, or distorted. But she still looked like a little black bull, unafraid and obstinate, challenging the lens of the camera. She was always photographed with a cigarette in her fingers or dangling from her lips; playing with fire, perhaps, or signifying that she possessed a light that would never go out.

  ‘I have been a couturière, by chance,’ she had declared to Paul Morand. ‘I have made perfumes, by chance. I am now going to tackle something else. What? I don’t know. Here again, chance will decide. But I am quite ready. I am not saying goodbye for long. I am not thinking of anything, but when the moment comes, I feel I will pounce on something that will be within my reach.’

  As it turned out, Chanel swooped again on fashion, rather than anything else, whether by chance or intuition. Yet as was so often the case in her career, her timing was right. She had watched with barely suppressed contempt as Christian Dior launched his New Look in 1947; although her distaste was not motivated by the same impulse that had enraged some, who found the extravagance of Dior’s fashion offensive after the strictures and suffering of the Occupation. ‘People shout ordures at you from vans,’ wrote Nancy Mitford to one of her friends, having ventured out in Dior finery onto the streets of Paris, ‘because for some reason it creates class feeling in a way no sables could.’ This was soon after a photographic shoot featuring Dior clothes had been brought to an abrupt ending, when outraged women shouted insults at the models, then attacked one of them, tearing at her outfit. In the wake of this assault, Mitford was only half-joking when she remarked, ‘I know mine will soon be the same fate … Between the Communists and the ménagères one’s life is one long risk.’

  Chanel was neither Communist nor housewife, but she was infuriated by Dior’s success in reintroducing the constrictive corsets that she had swept away in the First World War. ‘I make fashions women can live in, breathe in, feel comfortable in, and look young in,’ she had declared to Bettina Ballard in the Thirties, and 20 years later, Ballard witnessed her return to this manifesto. Ballard believed that Chanel ‘went back to designing to escape boredom and to keep young’. Not that Chanel was ever going to look young again; for she was 70 when she launched her comeback collection on 5th February 1954. Nor did the choice of the fifth day of the month – her lucky number – do anything to soften the harshness with which she was judged by the French press.

  But Chanel faced the critics with her lips and nails in brave warpaint, crimson as the dress that she had made the previous year for her friend Marie-Hélène de Rothschild out of a taffeta curtain. It had been an improvised evening gown, according to Marie-Hélène, but nevertheless a dazzling success; so widely admired that Marie-Hélène claimed that it was this red dress that had convinced Chanel to go back into business again. And when she did so, it was with full-blooded conviction, observed Bettina Ballard, who had returned to Paris to report on the show as the fashion editor of American Vogue. ‘The French fashion press lay in wait for her first post-war collection, like cats at a rat hole,’ observed Ballard, who was close enough to Chanel to know that she had worked on it tirelessly, despite being ‘sick with a stoppage in her intestine. She sat at the top of her stairs, with a handful of close friends, watching the faces of the spectators in the mirrors, knowing that they had come with closed minds and venomous pens. The blast in the press the next day was blindly violent, as if the fashion writers could in some way deny the strength of this voice from the past by ranting and raving. Their attack only served to warm her fighting blood …’

  The reviews were savage enough to have felled a woman less sure of herself. Perhaps the French critics would have sneered at whatever it was that Chanel produced, as punishment for her wartime past; but when she revealed a collection that seemed to be a revival of the clothes that had once looked radical – easy, fluid, the very antithesis of Dior’s corseting – they saw it as tired repetition, and therefore a failure to engage with fashion. L’Aurore dismissed the show as a ‘sad retrospective’, a resurrection of past fashions that dated back even further than Chanel’s final collection in 1939, with ‘suits in rather dull wools, in a wan black, matched joylessly with melancholy prints. The models had the figure of 1930-no breasts, no waist, no hips.’ Le Figaro was patronising: ‘It was touching. You had a feeling you were back in 1925.’ But the columnist in Combat was even harsher, hinting at the gossip about Chanel’s facelift, and condemning her collection as the ‘ghosts of 1930 things’, in which the audience ‘saw not the future but a disappointing reflection of the past, into which a pretentious little black figure was disappearing with giant steps’. The British newspapers were no less condemnatory: the Daily Express pronounced it ‘a fiasco’, the Daily Mall called it ‘a flop’.

  Bettina Ballard, however, remained loyal at American Vogue, despite the fact that her colleagues at French Vogue ‘hated the collection, as did most of the press and buyers’. True, the designs were familiar, rather than revolutionary, yet Ballard liked them for that, and stuck to her guns, with the support of her editor in New York. ‘I photographed three full pages of Chanel models and Vogue backed up my fashion judgement by opening the March issue with them. The frontispiece showed Marie-Hélène Arnaud, a completely unknown mannequin, whom Chanel had created in her own image, leaning against the wall in a navy jersey suit with her hands plunged deep in her pockets, her tucked whitelawn blouse buttoned
onto the easy skirt under her loose open jacket, her navy cuffs rolled back to show the white ones, and a navy straw sailor [hat] with ribbon streamers on the back of her head. I had owned practically the identical suit before the war and the whole look was as familiar to me as “Swanee River”. I wanted this costume for myself – I had missed comfortable, reliably young clothes like this, and I was sure that other women would want them, too, if they saw them.’

  But her support was not sufficient to make up for lost orders, and the mood in Rue Cambon was sombre, as it was in the perfume company, which had underwritten half the cost of the comeback collection. According to Pierre Galante, who subsequently interviewed the principal players in the drama, Pierre Wertheimer had taken the decision to back Chanel in her return to fashion, but some in the company were questioning the wisdom of this investment. He remained calm, even as scorn was heaped upon Chanel by the press, and a few days later, went to visit her at Rue Cambon, where she was working in the fitting rooms, although her fingers had seized up with an attack of rheumatism. She told him that she had to go on working, that she would go on; that she was not yet finished. So Wertheimer sat and waited, watching the woman he had known for three decades. At last, hours later, long after night had fallen, when she finally gave up the struggle to make her fingers do as she wanted, Wertheimer walked her back across the road to the Ritz.