Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for and may be obtained from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-1-4197-2544-9
eISBN 978-1-68335-291-4
Text copyright © 2018 Susan Goldman Rubin
Book design by Erich Lazar
Published in 2018 by Abrams Books for Young Readers, an imprint of ABRAMS. All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher.
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CONTENTS
Introduction: Who Was Coco Chanel?
Sell Her to the Gypsies
I Am Not an Orphan!
Who Has Seen Coco?
I Was My Own Master
Black Wipes Out Everything
Lead Them by the Nose
Go and Fetch My Pearls
Take Off the Girdle!
That Italian
I Detest Giving In
A Mistake
He Isn’t a German!
What a Horror!
I Will Show Them
Epilogue: A Very Bad Dead Person
Where to See the Work of Coco Chanel
Chanel’s Fashion Firsts
Source Notes
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Index of Searchable Terms
Coco wearing a knit jersey suit with a pocketed cardigan and her trademark strings of pearls, 1929
INTRODUCTION
Who Was Coco Chanel?
Her name stands for style. The little black dress. Strings of pearls tossed casually over a sweater. Quilted shoulder bags on chain straps. The perfume Chanel No 5.
I make fashions women can live in, feel comfortable in.
“Chanel is France’s greatest figure,” wrote her friend the novelist Paul Morand. Yet he noted her temper and sarcasm as well as her brilliance. She was a controversial celebrity, an innovator with an eye for fashion and a talent for business that made her enormously successful. At the same time, many regarded Chanel as an opportunist, a tyrant, a chronic liar, and a snob. Some even suspected her of being a Nazi sympathizer during World War II. Still, women everywhere were in awe of the Chanel brand and the products that bore her distinctive label. Coco designed clothes that she wore herself, and she was her own best model. Her friend surrealist artist Salvador Dalí said,
All her life, all she did was change men’s clothing into women’s.
The marketplace in Saumur, Maine-et-Loire, the town where Coco was born
SELL HER TO THE GYPSIES
Coco was born in a poorhouse, a place for homeless people, in the town of Saumur, France, on August 19, 1883. Later, she invented a different version of her beginnings, but biographers have pieced together the true account. Coco’s childhood colored her whole life.
Since her father, a peddler, was on the road when she was born, two workers from the charity hospital went to the city hall to record her birth. Coco’s mother was still too weak to attend. When the mayor asked for the baby’s last name, no one knew how to spell it, so he incorrectly wrote “Chasnel.” Chanel never changed her birth certificate for fear of revealing the truth about her poor family.
At her baptism, a day after she was born, she was named Gabrielle. Later Coco lied and said that the nun who’d held her also gave her the middle name “Bonheur,” meaning “happiness,” as a good-luck charm. Coco disliked the name Gabrielle because her mother hadn’t chosen it, and she claimed that her father didn’t like it either. She later told friends that he had called her “Little Coco,” a nickname she really acquired as a young woman.
Her parents were not married, and therefore Coco and her older sister, Julia, were illegitimate, a mark of disgrace in those days. Their parents finally married in November 1884. The family traveled from town to town in south-central France in a horse-drawn buggy. At markets and fairs, Coco’s father sold bonnets that he had bought from a hatter. Her mother helped him and sold things at her own stall. More babies quickly came along: a son, Alphonse, and another daughter, Antoinette. By the time Coco was six, her exhausted mother was suffering terribly from asthma. Her great-uncle Augustin invited the family to stay at his house in the country, but Coco’s restless father did not stay long, instead wandering off to drink at taverns and chase the ladies. After a while Coco’s mother went in search of him, leaving the children behind.
“No childhood was less gentle,” said Coco. “All too soon I realized that life was a serious matter.” One night she and her siblings were put to bed in their great-uncle’s workroom. Bunches of grapes stored for the winter in paper bags hung from the rafters. Coco threw a pillow at a bag and it fell down. Delighted, she kept throwing pillows until she had burst all the bags and grapes covered the wooden floor. “For the first time in my life I was whipped,” she recalled. “The humiliation was something I would never forget.” One of her aunts predicted she would “turn out badly.” Another said, “We’ll have to sell her to the gypsies.” At that time, Gypsies, or Roma, had come to France from Bohemia. They were wanderers, and Coco most likely saw them at the markets and fairs where her parents peddled their goods.
All too soon I realized that life was a serious matter.
Coco at age nine spent hours playing by herself in the churchyard cemetery. “I was the queen of this secret garden,” she remembered. She talked to the dead and sometimes brought rag dolls that she had made to decorate the tombstones.
Meanwhile, her mother caught up with her father, and they had two more babies: a son, Lucien, and then another boy, Augustin, who died in infancy. When Coco was ten, her mother left her other children with Great-Uncle Augustin and took Coco and Julia with her to join their father at an inn where he worked as a waiter. During the cold winter, Coco’s frail mother came down with bronchitis and ran a high fever. She died on February 16, 1895. Coco was eleven.
Nuns in prayer at the Aubazine convent-orphanage
None of their relatives wanted to take care of Coco and her siblings. Her brothers were placed at a farm to earn their keep. And Coco, Julia, and Antoinette went to an orphanage in Aubazine run by the sisters of the Congregation of the Sacred Heart of Mary.
I AM NOT AN ORPHAN!
Later in life Coco never used the word “orphanage.” Instead, she said her father took her to stay with unmarried “aunts” who always dressed in gray and black. “My aunts were good people, but absolutely without tenderness,” she would say. “I was not loved in their house.” She told the girls at the orphanage that her father had gone to America to seek his fortune and would come to get her as soon as he was rich. But in reality, after he dropped her off, Coco never saw him again.
Aubazine had been a monastery. The steep-roofed stone building stood on a plateau, surrounded by a forest. Inside, the walls were whitewashed, and the doors to the dormitories were painted black. Coco and the orphans wore white blouses and black skirts. The nuns had white wimples and black skirts.
The nuns’ cleanliness and stark simplicity pleased Coco. Fresh linens piled in high cupboards and the smell of the yellow soap the girls used to scrub their faces left lasting impressions. The geometric loops in the stained glass windows suggested interlocking Cs.
The western
façade and belfry of the abbey that housed the orphanage where Coco lived as a young girl
The orphans followed a strict routine from early Mass to bedtime prayers. Six days a week they went to classes. In the evenings, they learned to sew simple things such as hems on sheets for their trousseaux, collections of household linens assembled for when they married. Every Sunday they hiked through the woods after church. Coco detested the regimen: Prayers. Silence. Prayers. She hated to kneel in the abbey, and she made up stories to tell the priest in confession. She pretended that she didn’t understand a word of the catechism, but she did. Coco learned and remembered the nuns’ lessons about how the Jews had crucified Jesus. At that time, the beginning of the twentieth century, Catholic institutions such as Aubazine instructed children to hate Jews. A friend later wrote, “Chanel’s anti-Semitism was not only verbal; but passionate . . . and often embarrassing.”
Coco stayed at Aubazine for almost seven years. During holidays, she and her sisters visited their paternal grandparents in Moulins and their aunts Louise and Adrienne in Varennes. Louise, the oldest of nineteen children, was married to a railroad stationmaster. Aunt Adrienne was just a year older than Coco. Coco adored her. They looked like sisters and pretended they were. At night they shared an attic bedroom in Varennes and talked till dawn. As teenagers, they secretly read romance novels that were published in installments in the paper. “We cut out the serial from the newspaper and sewed them all together,” remembered Coco.
The stories, such as Two Little Vagrants, told of poor girls who became rich, elegant ladies. “Those novels taught me about life,” Coco said. “They nourished my sensibility and my pride.” She smuggled the romances back to Aubazine, where pulp fiction was absolutely forbidden, and hid them in the attic. Once, she slipped pages into her notebook and copied excerpts during a creative-writing test. After her teacher read her essay, she made Coco confess about her private library and took the romances away.
Coco longed for beautiful clothes and was captivated by a description of a heroine’s lavender dress with ruffles. While visiting her aunts, she asked for permission to have the local seamstress make a dress for her. Unbeknownst to her aunts, Coco gave the seamstress detailed instructions for whipping up a dress like the one in the novel. “It had a high neck with flying ribbons and matching slip, purple, and underneath a ruffle,” recalled Coco. “I was perhaps fifteen or sixteen.”
On a Sunday morning Coco put on the formfitting dress and came downstairs to go to Mass. Her aunt Louise took one look at her and ordered her to go upstairs and change into proper clothing. Girls of her age were to wear modest tailored suits without ribbons, ruffles, or saucy purple slips. Despite Coco’s tears, the lavender creation went back to the dressmaker. But the allure of ruffles stayed with Coco.
Aunt Louise was a skilled seamstress, too, and she taught Coco and Adrienne how to stitch beautiful tablecloths, start a pleat by breaking the cloth with a thumb, and make a complicated sleeve. When Louise bought new hats in the resort town of Vichy, she showed them off to Coco and Adrienne. Armed with scissors, she reshaped the brims and trimmed the hats with streamers and braid. The girls helped her transform ordinary bonnets into marvels. Coco was impressed and inspired.
In 1901, Coco turned eighteen. She and her sister Julia were too old to stay at Aubazine, unless they wanted to become nuns. So their grandmother enrolled them at Notre-Dame, a finishing school for young ladies in Moulins. It was a time when the French were hotly debating what was known as the Dreyfus Affair, which involved the arrest and wrongful conviction for treason of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a French officer of Alsatian Jewish descent. The scandal stirred up anti-Semitism in the Catholic community in Moulins, including in Coco.
View of Place d’Allier, Moulins, the town where Coco and her aunt Adrienne went to Notre-Dame finishing school and then worked as seamstresses
Her younger sister, Antoinette, remained at Aubazine. Coco and Julia were charity cases at Notre-Dame and earned their keep by doing such chores as peeling vegetables, scrubbing floors, and making beds. They wore special black outfits to distinguish them from the others. All the girls were strictly chaperoned, and their outings consisted of going to Mass on Sundays. Occasionally Coco was allowed to take the train to Vichy to visit her sick grandfather at the spa there. “Vichy was a fairyland,” she said. The elegant hotels, gardens, and orchestra playing in the bandstand enchanted her. “I watched the eccentric people parade past,” she recalled, “and I said to myself, ‘I would become one of them.’”
WHO HAS SEEN COCO?
By the time Coco was twenty, she had left Notre-Dame and gone to work with her aunt Adrienne at a lingerie shop in Moulins. At first the young women shared an attic bedroom above the store. Soon after they arrived, however, Coco moved to a cheap room in town. During the week Coco continued in her job at the lingerie shop, and on Sundays she and Adrienne worked in a tailor’s shop. Officers came in to have their uniforms mended and altered, and they flirted with the young women. Although Coco was too short and thin to be considered beautiful by the day’s standards, she charmed the men.
One afternoon some lieutenants invited Coco and Adrienne to go out for sherbet. Another time the soldiers took them to a café concert at La Rotonde. During intermissions, amateur girls stood up to sing and keep the audience entertained. The officers dared Coco to sing. She leaped onstage and sang a popular song about a Parisian young lady who has lost her dog at the amusement park.
“I’ve lost my poor Coco. Coco, my lovable dog. Who has seen Coco?”
The audience loved it and shouted, “Coco! Coco!” demanding an encore. From then on, she was dubbed “la petite Coco”—“little Coco.”
One of her admirers was Étienne Balsan, a young cavalry officer from the Tenth Light Horse Brigade, a regiment of aristocratic gentlemen. Étienne asked Coco out and became her boyfriend.
Around that time, she decided to leave Moulins and move to Vichy to pursue her dream of becoming a singer. “You won’t get anywhere,” said Étienne. “You don’t have a voice, and you sing like a trombone.”
Nevertheless, he helped her. Adrienne had agreed to go with Coco, and Étienne paid for material that the young women used to make new dresses and hats. After they arrived in Vichy, they posed for a photograph sporting their homemade outfits. Coco took singing lessons and rented a sparkly black sequined gown for auditions at the casino and theaters. No one hired her. The gown was returned, but she never forgot its glamour.
Adrienne finally went back to Moulins. Meanwhile, Étienne visited Coco in Vichy. He was now out of the army and had bought a country estate called Royallieu with a small château, stables, and paddocks. Coco said, “How lucky you are to have racehorses!” Étienne invited her to come see the horses train. She did and wound up staying at Royallieu. According to Coco, she was only sixteen at the time, “too young to be away from home.” But she really was twenty-one and had no home. She invented stories about her background for Étienne and said she had run away. “I had told him lies about my miserable childhood,” she later admitted. Coco did not expect Étienne to propose marriage, since she was a seamstress without a dowry. She knew he would marry a society woman of his own class. So Coco just enjoyed life as a guest at the luxurious château.
At Royallieu she learned to ride horses and spent days galloping through the forests. A local tailor made her jodhpurs, snug riding pants, from a stable boy’s pattern even though most women at that time wore long skirts and rode sidesaddle. If a woman dared to wear trousers on a Paris street in those days, she risked being arrested. Coco liked dressing in men’s riding trousers, and not just when she was riding. She also decked herself out in mannish high collars, knitted ties, and a soft felt hat worn over her pigtail.
A friend visiting the estate described her: “She was a tiny little thing, with a pretty, very expressive, roguish face and a strong personality. She amazed us because of her nerve on horseback.”
Étienne took her to the fashion
able Longchamp Race-course in the Bois de Boulogne in Paris. Society ladies wore elaborate dresses and huge feathered hats to the races. Coco, however, appeared in a schoolgirl’s suit and a straw boater and caused a sensation! Inspired by her aunt Louise, she had bought the hat at a department store and trimmed it herself. “Whoever makes your hats?” asked women. An idea began taking shape.
Where do you dig up the things you imagine?
After several years at Royallieu, Coco realized that she didn’t want to spend the rest of her life depending on men. One day she said to Étienne, “I can’t earn my living riding horses. I think I’d like to work.” She told him her idea for making hats and opening a millinery shop. So he offered to let her use his apartment on Boulevard Malesherbes in Paris.
Around that time, he invited Coco to go to a foxhunt at a château in Pau, near the Pyrenees mountains. There, she met an English polo player, Arthur Capel, nicknamed “Boy,” and fell deeply in love. Coco was twenty-seven, although she claimed to be eighteen. When Boy returned to Paris, she went with him, leaving Étienne a note: “Forgive me, but I love him.”
Coco’s straw boater, 1954, a design she borrowed from the uniforms of sailors and schoolboys at the start of her career
In Boy’s company she met sophisticated Parisians from high society. To keep up with their conversations, she made up stories. “I lied all the time,” she said, “because I didn’t want to be taken for a country bumpkin.” Boy questioned her about it, but she explained that she was “just rearranging truth a bit.”
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