Mademoiselle Chanel

by C. W. Gortner

  Sheet music drifted in her wake, her piano heaped with annotated scores by Stravinsky, Ravel, and Debussy, all of whom, Misia airily informed us, she knew and had nurtured personally.

  She was a rotund, bustling figure with a pompadour hairstyle that couldn’t restrain its natural frizz. Her round, gleaming eyes seemed to gauge everything at once, her exaggerated gestures strewing potpourri cushions from her divans. Her house suffocated me. It smelled of old perfume and dust, damp soil from the jungle of plants in Chinese pots, and too many books, but she proved as fascinating as she was repellent. Her staccato voice rang with authority as she sat her guests at the overcrowded table and between courses of fowl and legumes, pontificated on a variety of topics ranging from music to the outrageous backlash in Paris against Cubist artists.

  “Pablo himself told me he almost returned to Catalonia, though he detests it,” she proclaimed, jabbing her fork at no one in particular. “I insisted he not let his quarrel with Braque get the best of him or his considerable talent; after all, why should he enlist when Spain has no interest in the war? He must stay here and paint, which is what he does best, and what the world will one day appreciate him for.”

  Before anyone at the table could respond—there were nine of us, including Cécile; myself and Boy; and Misia’s burly Catalan lover, the sculptor and painter, José María Sert, who grunted and guzzled food as if he were at a trough—Misia continued, “Which is why I insisted Pablo decorate the sets for Diaghilev’s new season. Poor Diag is beside himself that the Ballets Russes hasn’t had a single opening here since the apocalypse that was Rite of Spring. He’s had a fantastically successful tour in America and Spain, but he needs to return to his roots. Of course,” she added, with a tragic clasp of her hands to the very bosom she had refused to show Renoir, “Nijinsky’s betrayal was a dagger in his heart. After all those years of nurturing that ingrate’s temper and talent, the moment Diag turns his back, the scoundrel absconds to marry the first woman who can turn a blind eye to his penchant for cock.”

  A thick-haired, gimlet-faced youth next to me giggled. “I wonder how that wedding night went?” and as Misia gave a mock gasp, saying, “Jean Cocteau, honestly!” Sert rumbled, “How else could it go? ‘Darling, it seems you’re having some trouble down there. Shall I stick my fist up your ass like Diag used to do?’ ”

  As Misia cackled in delight, I felt Boy go rigid at my side. Cécile arched her brow at me, as if to say she had no idea the evening would be so raucous. I wasn’t offended. I had heard similar coarseness in my days of friendship with Émilienne and her courtesan friends, but Boy’s jaw clenched as Cocteau mimed the aforementioned fist and declared, “Nijinsky will regret it. This new ballet Parade that we plan with Diag will turn Paris on its ear. A carnival spoof, with something for everyone, and enough subversion to please the rest of us. And Diag has that exquisite new dancer of his—I forget his name?” He turned to Misia, with an overt lewdness that made Boy glance sharply at him. A homosexual and open about it, too. Boy detested them.

  “Who knows?” Misia shrugged. “There have been, and will be, so many men who love Diag. The important thing is, he’s willing to try it again. And with Pablo painting the sets, you, dearest Jean, writing the scenario, and Satie composing the score—well, darlings, it simply cannot be anything but extraordinary.”

  I did not mention that I had seen the catastrophe that was Rite of Spring. The conversation, dominated by Misia, turned to politics and whether or not the Americans would see fit to assist us before the entire continent was doomed to eating sauerkraut. Boy said President Wilson would have no choice but to get involved, since Germany had begun to employ submarine attacks and poison gas. In fact, he assured us with a confidence that silenced the table, he had it on excellent authority that Wilson was preparing to legislate a selective draft service that would bring over a million American soldiers to fight in the war.

  “We can only hope,” blared Misia. “The Germans are detestable. We should build a wall around their country that will keep them inside permanently like hogs.”

  Speaking of which, her lover Sert had just pushed back his plate, belched without apology, and lit a noxious cigar that was making my eyes water. He leered at me, giving me a lascivious wink.

  The evening was a disaster as far as Boy was concerned. He found the company crass and uninformed, wallowing in frivolity while outside their door Europe struggled for survival. But I was intrigued. I had never met such people before, teeming with rebellion and insouciance. They appealed to me; and evidently I appealed to them, or rather to their lead hostess, for as we said good night and I slipped on my skunk-trimmed red velvet coat, Misia looked me up and down and said, “Why, you are bewitching, my dear. Such style. What is your name again?”

  I smiled. She probably hadn’t heard me say it when we were introduced, or if she had, she’d forgotten it in the heat of her own bombast.

  “Coco,” I said as Boy stood at my side, his hat clenched in his hand.

  “Coco?” She frowned. “Such a silly name for such an exceptional person, as if it were somebody’s pet. Are you someone’s pet, my dear? I don’t see a collar or lead anywhere.”

  As I struggled for a response, Boy said tersely, “If you don’t like Coco, madame, you can call her Gabrielle. Gabrielle Chanel. She owns a millinery shop on rue Cambon.”

  “A shop,” Misia exclaimed. “How delightful! I adore hats. I’ll come visit you tomorrow, my dear. We can have lunch together. I want to hear all about you.” She planted two wet kisses on my cheeks, saturating me with her sandalwood scent. As my gaze drifted over her shoulder to a teetering pile of books in the corner, she cast a malicious little smile at Boy. “Do let us know when your political book is published, Monsieur Capel. We love to read in this house.”

  She flounced off in her kimonolike attire. As we descended the stairs into the Tuileries, little Cocteau came running up beside us, clamping a beret to his briar thatch of hair and saying with a lopsided smile, “I’ll send you free tickets to our ballet next month. You must come. Diaghilev will want to meet you, mademoiselle.” He narrowed his elfin eyes. “Be careful of Misia. She’s a back-street abortionist with her friends.” He nodded to Boy, who ignored him. “And don’t believe a word she says about books. She’s never read one in her life.”

  “Now that,” muttered Boy as Cocteau scampered into the dusk, “I can believe.”

  I took his hand and squeezed it. It was the first time in our eight years together that I pitied him for his inability to understand that we had just spent an evening with the future.

  III

  As promised, Misia showed up the next morning at my shop, dressed in a makeshift assemblage that would have been grotesque on anyone else. I sold her three hats, four sweaters, and five skirts; she resisted with every breath, huffing that she was too old for “eccentricities.” In fact, she was forty-two, eleven years older than I was, and more voluble than anyone else I had met. She had no restraint. Over lunch at the Ritz, she regaled me with the story of her privileged but lonely childhood. Her mother had died giving birth to her in St. Petersburg—“She’d gone there chasing after my father, who was a sculptor and wanted nothing to do with her”—after which her grandparents in Brussels took charge of her and Liszt gave concerts at their house. Then her philandering father reclaimed her and enrolled her in the Sacré-Coeur boarding school in Paris—“Oh, how I loathed it! Those nuns were all lesbians who watched us when we bathed”—until she fled to teach piano and pose for artists before the first of her two marriages took place.

  “My first husband was my Polish cousin, Thadée Natanson. He founded La Revue blanche, dedicated to promoting new artists. I met him when Lautrec painted me for a poster for the revue, the dear gnome. Oh, the marriage was a catastrophe! Thadée was awful in bed. Just terrible, so I began an affair with Alfred Edwards, owner of Le Figaro. Thadée needed a benefactor for his revue and Alfred agreed on the condition that he divorce me so we could marry. That is h
ow I moved into my home on the rue de Rivoli and where I met Ravel and Enrico Caruso. I used to sing Neapolitan duets with Caruso while Ravel played the piano. Such delight!” She barely paused to take a breath yet she managed to consume her croque-monsieur without any difficulty, and down endless cups of tea, which explained the stains on her teeth.

  “Alfred was a boor. A tiger between the sheets, but a boor outside. He slept with everyone. Men or women, he didn’t care. I divorced him in ’09. I made a stink so he would leave me the house. It was the least he could do, considering I had decorated it and nurtured all the talent that came through its doors. I met Sert five years later. I adore his work. He is going to be very famous. He’s done a mural at the Hôtel de Ville and several American millionaires are vying to have him decorate their buildings in New York. I would love to see New York, wouldn’t you, my dear? Americans can be so conventional but they do love modern art, and unlike many here, they have the money for it. I keep telling Sert to accept one of their commissions, but he’s Catalan, you see, lazy and too vested in his food. He says all people in America eat is white bread, so he refuses to go.”

  She finally rattled to a halt. “And you? How is it that you run a shop and live with the eligible Monsieur Capel? Come now, don’t be shy. You must tell me everything if we’re to be friends.”

  I told her enough to satisfy her, downplaying my success, though she was quick to notice it when I mentioned my shops in Deauville and Biarritz. That same unerring presentiment she had for sniffing out promising artists, she had for money in all its forms; the only thing she reveled in more was failure, because it meant she could pick up the pieces and put it all together again, rendering one in her debt. I had noted this at her house when she was discussing Diaghilev—“A hopeless romantic, too greedy for his own good. He consumes everything: men, chocolates, talent, money. He’d be begging on the streets were it not for me, but I do love him so.” I decided it was better to never fall prey to her destructive instincts.

  Thus we became friends, but only because she persisted more than I did, visiting me regularly and hauling me off to the flea markets in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, where she’d rummage for hours among junk I wouldn’t touch. She was perhaps the only friend of my sex I’d had since Émilienne, with whom I’d lost contact, but I was never sure whether Misia aimed to adore or destroy. A backstreet abortionist with her friends, Cocteau had dubbed her: I never forgot the epithet, though our relationship would become one of the most enduring of my life.

  MEANWHILE, THE WAR ENTERED its fourth and most devastating year, with appalling losses suffered on the front as the Allies waited for the American troops to arrive. In Russia, mass anarchy erupted, giving birth to the revolution that resulted in the execution of the tsar and his family, in addition to the murder or penniless exile of hundreds of Russian aristocrats and nobles.

  At the debut of Diaghilev’s new ballet Parade, which featured all the satirical outrageousness one could expect, Misia blew her nose (she had a cold and should have stayed in bed) before drawling through clogged sinuses, “It’s appropriate, is it not? A spoof here in Paris and a spoof in Moscow. Only here we dance the parts of fools, and there the fools are shot.”

  It was the last straw for Boy. We had invited her and Sert for dinner at our apartment before the ballet, where he presented them with a first edition of his published book. It had received acclaim for its insightful meditations on the conflict but Misia had scarcely glanced at it before she started to cajole me into giving her one of our Coromandel screens, infuriating Boy.

  “She has no room for it,” I assured him as we entered the theater. “She collects everything. You saw her house. If she could fit a stuffed rhinoceros in the parlor, she would.”

  But he detested Misia, and after the ballet, he went home, leaving me to attend the celebratory dinner for the Ballets Russes, where I met portly Diaghilev in his Russian sable hat and wool coat with lavish Slavic motifs. He was drunk, fondling one of his male dancers, but he smiled and told me we must have dinner sometime, for Misia had told him “what a treasure” I was. I was also introduced to the composer Stravinsky, whose thinning blond hair and myopic gaze stirred something tender in me; and to the artist responsible for the ballet’s Cubist sets, Pablo Picasso, who disconcerted me with his intense stare and tangible air of virility. He was already involved with one of Diaghilev’s lead ballerinas, Olga Khokhlova, whom he would marry, but he struck me as a man possessed of a voracious appetite for everything and everyone.

  When I returned to the apartment on rue Gabriel long after midnight, it was empty. Boy had left a note on the entry table. He’d been unexpectedly called to England.

  Crushing the note in my hand, I took up a pair of scissors and went into the bathroom. Before the mirror, with deliberate defiance that incinerated the tears behind my eyes, I cut my shoulder-length hair to just below my chin—a final act of nonconformity before reality set in.

  IV

  I sensed the calamity before it materialized.

  As the war shuddered into 1918, its bloody finale sending thousands more to their graves, I bought out my lease at 21 rue Cambon, evicted the troublesome modiste, and began to seek additional space in the nearby six-story building at number 31.

  I also repaid every centime of my debt to Boy with interest, including the 300,000 francs he had put up for my maison in Biarritz. I saw him whenever his new duties as a liaison officer brought him to Paris; he had been with me, in fact, during the presentation of my spring collection at rue Cambon, on the very day of the Germans’ final rally of bombing outside the city. The shattering of windows sent everyone racing for cover across the place Vendôme to the basements of the Ritz, which were equipped with a fully stocked bar, gas masks, and Hermès sleeping bags. In the following days, I reaped a surge of sales in raw silk pajamas, as the women required more coverage than nightgowns to pass their evenings underground.

  But Boy was preoccupied and distant. When I ventured to ask what troubled him, expecting him to cite his concern over this latest thrust against Germany, he replied quietly, “I’m afraid of losing you,” striking unease in my heart. Why would he fear such a thing, after the world had exploded and we managed to not only survive, but also, as he intended, become richer than when we started? Then I began to notice small items missing from our apartment: a bottle of the aftershave he favored, a robe, a few books, his nail clippers. Nothing substantial, certainly nothing I could use to accuse him of betrayal.

  “He’s found someone else,” Misia deduced, not without a certain gloating. “He has aristocratic pretensions. Everyone knows it. He’ll never marry a tradeswoman, no matter how successful or famous you are, because it’s not respectable.”

  It was one of her carelessly wounding pronouncements and I shot a glare at her. “I never intended for us to be respectable. And if Sert might one day see fit to marry you, a woman twice divorced, I don’t see why Boy shouldn’t marry me.”

  She shrugged. She was immune to insults, much as she doled them out. “I know of a fabulous apartment on the avenue de Tokio, across from the Trocadéro and overlooking the Seine. An acquaintance of mine has abandoned it without finishing out his lease. It’s simply stunning, and you can move in whenever you want. Tomorrow, if you like.”

  “I don’t want another apartment,” I said, but I let her take me to see it anyway. It was indeed stunning, with walls of mirrors, a black lacquered ceiling, and silk-papered walls, despite the pervasive smell of cocoa in the air—“Opium,” explained Misia. “My acquaintance was an aficionado. He left because he couldn’t obtain it in Paris anymore”—and the enormous statue of Buddha posed in the entryway. I signed the lease, pocketing the keys without any intention of moving in. I told Misia as much and she patted my hand. “Of course not, darling, but it’s good to have the option nevertheless.”

  Her words reminded me of Émilienne—Choices, remember? We all must have them—and the very next time Boy appeared, unannounced, as was his habit these days
, I confronted him.

  “What is the matter?” I said, standing with my hand on my hip and my cigarette smoldering as he went wearily to his closet, avoiding my eyes. “Is it my hair? Do you not like it? You told me you thought I’d look exquisite with short hair.” When he failed to reply, I charged on, terrified of what he was refusing to say. “Or is it Misia? I know you don’t like her or her friends, but they’ve brought me clients between them, and you really don’t need to see them—”

  “Coco.” He turned to me. I froze, feeling my cigarette singe my fingers. “I’m getting married.”

  I must have looked as if he had hit me on the head with one of his polo mallets. He didn’t attempt to justify it, only continued in that emotionless tone: “Her name is Diana Lyster Wyndham, daughter of Lord Ribblesdale. I met her in Arras when I visited the front; she was working with the Red Cross. She lost her husband and brother in the war. Our families approve.”

  That simple. He had met her on the front. Their families approved. I tried to bring my cigarette to my lips but it scattered in ash over the front of my pajamas. Affecting an ironic smile, though my heart was breaking apart, I said, “Why is it, I wonder, that these ladies of the aristocracy always have three names? Do you think if I used my full name, Gabrielle Bonheur Chanel, I’d be even more successful than I already am?”

  He regarded me helplessly, making me want to fly across the room and gouge his cheeks with my nails. “She’s very nice, Coco. I think . . . you would like her.”

  “I’m sure I would. Perhaps I can design her wedding gown. I’ve never done one before. But no”—I flipped my cigarette butt into a Lalique ashtray, thinking as I did that hurling the ashtray at him would do the job perfectly—“that would be awkward. And she no doubt wants an English designer for her dress, to do her patriotic duty, as apparently you have done.”