Coco Chanel: An Intimate Life

by Lisa Chaney

  Gabrielle always understood fundamentals and would say, “Eccentricity was dying out; I hope… that I helped kill it off. Paul Poiret, a most inventive couturier, dressed women in costumes.” And she went on to describe the varieties of make-believe she thought that people indulged in, so that “the most modest tea party looked like something from the Baghdad of the Caliphs. The last courtesans… would come by, to the sound of the tango, wearing bell-shaped dresses, with greyhounds and cheetahs at their side.” She said this was all very pleasant but warned against “originality in dressmaking, you immediately descend to disguise and decoration, you lapse into stage design.”2

  She concentrated on the silhouette, the structure and architecture of clothes. In making it clear that she believed simplicity of line counted above all and that decoration and ornamentation were the secondary elements of what one wore, Gabrielle had a more accurate finger on the pulse of her times than many of her competitors. Understanding better than most what those times were about — Poiret had very daringly revealed the foot! — it was Gabrielle more than anyone else who was responsible for lifting the hemline above the ankle. Already she was loosening the waistline; in time, she would drop it below the waist.

  She had done away with the decoration that life in the past could support, the details that had become obsolete. But in doing this, as in her own life, Gabrielle was also attempting to clear away the games and the pretenses about women. In making clothes fit for the women of a new and mechanical age, she declared, “I had rediscovered honesty, and in my own way, I made fashion honest.”3

  Meanwhile, in that summer of 1915, with some reservations, Antoinette arrived in Biarritz to help her prospering sister. She was now twenty-eight, and unmarried, and worried that living and working far from Paris would make finding a husband even more difficult. As for Adrienne, Gabrielle’s stalwart, this time, she remained obdurate: she could not come to Gabrielle’s aid just yet. She was on tenterhooks, awaiting permission to visit her lover at the front. When that permission finally came, the demure Adrienne was shocked, apparently at being asked by the soldier checking her visitor’s pass if she was Baron de Nexon’s wife. Embarrassed, she admitted that she wasn’t, upon which the soldier waved her through, telling her that the colonel didn’t like wives; they made a man soft. Girlfriends, they were a different matter!

  In Biarritz, where the balmy weather made the season pretty well continual, and where sports and youthful activities had not long since become the order of the day, Gabrielle saw her clothes fulfilling a hitherto unrecognized need. She also sensed that time was of the essence and, for the first time, pushed on without Adrienne.

  When the frantic preparations were at an end and Gabrielle threw open her sumptuous maison de couture, she was taken aback at the enthusiasm that greeted her new business. The highly priced accessories and chic day clothes for tennis, golf or swimming; the ensembles for the casino or the races; and the new evening dresses she had designed for the resort’s hectic nightlife, all dazzled her excited clients.

  What Gabrielle offered was quite different from the overt luxury and opulence hitherto expected of an upmarket boutique. What her clients now found was what Gabrielle’s head of workrooms, Marie-Louise Delay, later described as the “sensational quality of unparalleled simplicity and chic.” This, Marie-Louise said, was “so different from Poiret and Madeleine Vionnet.” The Maison Chanel, with Antoinette greeting the clients, was overwhelmed by orders. They came from Bilbao, San Sebastián, Biarritz, Madrid, Paris, other French cities and also farther afield. Europeans, bored by the dullness of war, could afford to ease their tedium in one of the last outposts where luxury remained the highest priority.

  While Gabrielle and Marie-Louise Delay were organizing the seamstresses to work as fast as they could, Antoinette returned from Paris with several others she had brought back from the boutique in rue Cambon, itself already busy. From the outset, Gabrielle used as much cotton and jersey in Biarritz as she was now using at the salon in Paris. While her lease on rue Cambon forbade her to make dresses, jersey was considered such a lowly material, not previously used for them, that, apparently, it didn’t count.4

  Gabrielle called in her acquaintances and friends: Marthe Davelli became a devoted client and brought along other singers and actresses, while the powerful socialite Kitty Rothschild kept up her influence on French women staying at Biarritz. Some of the most significant clients for Gabrielle’s luxurious new shop came, however, from just across the border in Spain. Both the Spanish aristocracy and several members of the royal family were much taken with her stylish clothes. Indeed, in that year, 1915, the American magazine Harper’s Bazaar stated that “the woman who doesn’t have at least one Chanel is hopelessly out of the running.”5 In February 1916, the authoritative Women’s Wear Daily reported that in France, “It is not unusual for smart women to place orders for three or four [Chanel] jersey costumes in different colors at one time.”

  While Gabrielle was kept tremendously busy with her most ambitious undertaking so far, Arthur was once again back at Baroness de la Grange’s château, experiencing the vicissitudes of war. In the first days of August 1915, a wretched experience badly unsettled him, giving a small insight into the strain of life near the front. The baroness would record that

  A car driven by Captain Capel skidded… and was hurled against a peasant’s cart. The shaft struck poor Hamilton-Grace full in the chest and flung him out on the road. [It] was not fully realized for a moment, and when they ran back to help him he was already dying. Captain Capel was nearly out of his mind with despair. Luckily, my nephew, Odon de Lubersac, his friend… prevented another misfortune…

  The coffin was borne by the men… and the heavy tread of spurred boots rang like a knell on the paved road… That same evening the Cavalry Corps left here. After nine months together, we have become great friends… and my adieux were full of regret.6

  When the baroness wrote that her nephew had “prevented another misfortune,” she meant that Arthur was in such distress that if, at that moment, he hadn’t been prevented, he might well have shot himself. One wonders whether he confided this sad episode to Gabrielle. Or had the war, which kept so many couples apart, already inculcated the need for a new kind of emotional self-sufficiency? While we will never know how much Arthur confided his troubles to Gabrielle, we do know that, notwithstanding their separation, she gained immeasurably from Arthur’s support and confidence in her abilities.

  In spite of Arthur’s inherited wealth, as we saw, he chose to make money. He told Gabrielle that it wasn’t out of greed. At first he had been driven to do it for personal reasons, but in these times, it was becoming something he did for his country. At the same time, his own instinct for business was remarkable, and in the previous couple of years, Arthur had shown himself to be an entrepreneur of genius. (This included his advice to Gabrielle.) His fleet of ships carried coal to France at such a rate for vital manufacture and heating that soon he was dubbed King Coal.

  Distance, perforce, may have made conversations rare between Arthur and Gabrielle about how and where to proceed next, but those conversations they were able to have were of great import. Gabrielle’s lover encouraged her entrepreneurial spirit and confirmed his faith in her by continuing to contribute to the large finances necessary to make that spirit flourish.

  Gabrielle was fully conscious that Etienne Balsan had enabled her to leave behind her background and make the first significant steps toward her redefinition. She also knew perfectly well that without Arthur’s backing and connections, she could have achieved little more. However, while she never forgot that her great self-belief was fostered in these early years more than anything by the support of a remarkable and powerful man, no amount of support would have helped if she hadn’t possessed exceptional gifts and an extraordinary dedication to work. In years to come, she would say, “To begin with you long for money. Then you develop a liking for work. Work has a much stronger flavor than money. Ultimately, mone
y is nothing more than the symbol of independence.”7

  Meanwhile, the orders flew in and Gabrielle sent her première, Marie-Louise Delay, to Paris, where she was in charge of an atelier in which sixty people worked making Chanel couture for Spain. The Spanish court “bought dresses by the dozen. Soon I was one of five forewomen,” said Marie-Louise.8 With five workrooms working for her, Gabrielle still chose everything herself: “laces, ornaments, colors. She always chose the most beautiful tones among the different pastel shades that the Lyon and Scottish dyers could produce in silk and wool. Our workrooms were like a fairyland, a veritable rainbow.”9

  By late 1916, Gabrielle’s archrival, Poiret, had directed his efforts toward the army and successfully redesigned its greatcoats to reduce their cost. Whatever Poiret’s patriotic labors, Gabrielle had, meanwhile, effectively lost her rival and now appeared unstoppable in the field of wartime fashion. At this point, she had more than three hundred people working under her command.

  Clearheaded and decisive, Gabrielle had already arrived at her own working methods. Marie-Louise recalled how she “never set foot in the workrooms. She would call us together to tell us what she wanted after she had chosen the fabrics.” While admiring Gabrielle’s ability to evoke and describe what she wanted, her première also believed that her lack of technique sometimes created misunderstandings. When this happened and they made something Gabrielle didn’t like, she didn’t hide her frustration.

  Although Marie-Louise believed that Gabrielle’s lack of technique led her to compensate with an unsettling need to demonstrate her authority, Marie-Louise was in awe of what she described as “her innate taste.” Whatever the première’s criticisms, she remained impressed by her employer’s “audacity and incredible nerve, especially since she was a milliner and knew little about dressmaking.”10 She would add that Gabrielle’s method “must have had something good in it, since we made such admirable things.” As for Gabrielle herself, Marie-Louise found her “extraordinarily chic. You should have seen her, getting out of her Rolls-Royce in front of the firm on the stroke of noon, for she had… acquired a Rolls with a chauffeur and footman. She was a queen!”11

  This “queen” remained at the salon until two or three o’clock, depending upon the importance of her customers. And then “she retired to her drawing room, where she entertained a great deal.”12 The impression this gives — that Gabrielle didn’t work hard — was just what she intended, and is also entirely inaccurate. And one remembers her famous remark, made years later: “It is through work that one achieves. Manna didn’t fall on me from heaven; I molded it with my own hands… The secret of this success is that I have worked terribly hard… Nothing can replace work; not securities, or nerve, or luck.”13

  At the same time, as we have seen, Gabrielle had insisted on remaining in the background when she sold hats from Etienne Balsan’s garçonnière, sending her assistants out to deal with the customers rather than meeting them herself. And over the preceding few years, as she had become familiar with people and surroundings of the highest sophistication, the impression that would sometimes be given, that Gabrielle didn’t do much work, signaled something significant in her present thinking. She had recognized that in order to acquire a greater reputation than her fellow designers, she would be wise to cultivate the impression that she didn’t need to work hard; that, by implication, she was the equal of her clients. Having had her nose rubbed in her social inferiority throughout her life, as Gabrielle grew more successful, she felt less and less a sense of personal inadequacy before those more socially exalted than herself.

  Under Arthur’s watchful eye, at first using her contacts and the press to promote her hats, Gabrielle’s keen instincts had begun telling her she needed something more all-encompassing than the old-fashioned virtue of a well-known name. However consciously, we will never know, Gabrielle began fostering something on a grander scale.

  Even her première, who knew Gabrielle’s working methods and something of her complex personality, was persuaded enough by her projection of status to call Gabrielle “a queen,” and misinterpreted her entertaining as no more than that — entertainment. As Gabrielle’s innate self-belief began to flourish, she was also drawing the outlines of a persona. She was cultivating around her name something that can thrive on any real scale in the modern world only through an ongoing relationship with the press: a public image.

  12. The War Bans the Bizarre

  Even during the war, the upper echelons of French society, with whom Arthur had always passed his time, still dedicated much of theirs to leisure. The nobility was no different from other classes in being made up of various elements — including from intermarriage with the grande bourgeoisie—and was neither an assimilated nor a homogenous group. Yet while no longer retaining much power, they nonetheless retained much of their old sense of exclusiveness and still enjoyed great status. Conferring prestige and receiving deference from those around them, they confirmed the existence of a social hierarchy at whose apex they had remained.

  Arthur was a haut bourgeois imbued with the idea that work was commendable. However, with no need of money, and having transformed his work ethic into an almost existential need for experience, he was also one of the few from the upper classes unconventional enough to live with his mistress. In addition, he was sufficiently forward thinking that he found subservience in a lover ultimately unrewarding. Gabrielle was compellingly unsubservient. And despite her lack of education (perhaps “cultivation” is a better word, as there were so few women in this period who had much of a formal education to speak of), her outstanding natural intelligence was clearly a match for Arthur’s. Gabrielle was the only woman he had ever met who appeared to be his equal. And yet, however strong his love and admiration for her, these feelings had done little to curb his prodigious appetite for women.

  In the first flush of their affair, Arthur’s need for conquest was temporarily held in check, but it wasn’t long before his compulsion had asserted itself once again. As for Gabrielle, she apparently felt reassured in the belief that she was Arthur’s only real love. Saying she felt no jealousy, she even asked him who his other lovers might be. But Arthur’s tastes ranged wide, and he laughed and told Gabrielle that her knowing would only make his life more complicated than he had already made it.1

  In addition to these private “complications,” Gabrielle’s lover managed his fleet of ships and his now enormous coal interests and ceaselessly shuttled between the front, Paris and London. Yet whatever his work-related absences or the brief spells in other women’s arms, Arthur always returned to Gabrielle, his most significant companion.

  By the beginning of 1916, when the war showed no sign of ending, Arthur’s experiences had stimulated his interest in a more political role. Accordingly, in March, he requested permission to resign his intelligence service commission in the hope of being taken on as a liaison officer instead. He had made it his business to become acquainted with both politicians and senior commanders in the French and British armies. Perhaps with a nudge from someone high up, the British War Office wrote to the commander in chief of the British army in France saying that Arthur wished “to go to Paris in order to carry out his ordinary business. It is probable that this… may involve his participation in French political affairs. In these circumstances it would be very inadvisable for him to retain his… commission and the status of a ‘British Officer on leave.’”2 It appears that there were also more personal reasons for Arthur’s resignation of his commission. Working in such a stressful occupation near the battlefields of the front — and the death of his friend Hamilton-Grace, for which he held himself responsible — had reduced him to a state of emotional exhaustion. “His health broke down and he had to resign his inter-pretership in the field” was how a commentator would put it.3 Either Arthur himself, or a doctor, had recognized that in order to recover, he must take a job away from the front.

  Arthur’s chaotic times and privileged background had made him a worldly
skeptic who, until the war, had pretty much done what he wanted. He had, after all, described himself to Gabrielle as a cheerful pessimist whose dictum “One does not have to hope in order to undertake” had enabled him to sign up for active service without much conviction. Yet the appalling suffering and loss of life he had witnessed had not reduced Arthur to a state of bitterness and demoralization. Instead, his religious faith had provoked in him a renewed sense of hope. Ironically, this change was to set in motion a series of grievous results.

  For the moment, however, Arthur did believe in a future, and in a utopian spirit away from the front, he set out to write a book. He often showed Gabrielle what he was writing.

  By the end of that year, 1916, Gabrielle was becoming more self-reliant. Her business was so prosperous she chose to return all of the three hundred thousand francs Arthur had invested in her salon at Biarritz. And if his frequent absences were not only on war business, Gabrielle by no means languished at home. If her comment “I was my own master, and I depended on myself alone,” made later in conversation with Morand, was made with some defensiveness in relation to Arthur’s absences, it was also increasingly the case. There was no question of Gabrielle’s sincerity when she declared that Arthur “was well aware that he didn’t control me.” This, of course, was part of her attraction for him. And yet with regard to supporting her ventures, this was the point at which Arthur made that melancholy statement to Gabrielle referred to in the prologue to this book. Characterizing the problems men and women faced when trying to devise new ways of relating to one another, he said: “I thought I’d given you a plaything, I gave you your freedom.”4