Coco Chanel: An Intimate Life

by Lisa Chaney

  Above all, Bend’Or needed a woman who could “manage” him, who could relieve his boredom with her vivacity, who was sophisticated enough to forgive his infidelities, and, finally, who would provide him with more children than the two girls from his first marriage. He had only partially recovered from the death of his four-year-old son a few years earlier, and very much wanted a male heir. Gabrielle fulfilled all the above criteria: she was independent, strong, a self-made woman of great wealth who was also capable of compliance. Being Gabrielle, she was utterly clear in the maturity, and the Frenchness, of her comment here: “A woman does not humiliate herself by making concessions.” She fascinated the Duke of Westminster and, for now, it seemed that the only stumbling block was whether she could present him with an heir.

  For a time, she forgot her obsession with independence and remembered that, in her heart, she had always wanted the certainty of marriage and, now, children. Despite being wedded to her couture house, Gabrielle may have courted a proposal of marriage. She would quote an eighteenth-century Frenchman’s remark: “The English are the best people in the world at marrying their mistresses and asking them the least about their past.”11 In 1927, Gabrielle was forty-four, and it appears that she did her best to become pregnant, including doing everything the doctors asked of her.

  Meanwhile, Bend’Or was bored by Gabrielle’s friends. She said, “He couldn’t understand Misia at all, and she couldn’t understand the English at all. He was appalled by Sert, who sawed off swan’s beaks so that they would die of hunger, and who pushed dogs into the Grand Canal in Venice.” Thus, when together, they socialized mostly with Bend’Or’s set.

  In an unconscious attempt to cement their relationship, Gabrielle and Bend’Or “made” two houses together. The first was a simple seven-bay classical house in Scotland, never a well-known part of the Chanel-Westminster romance. This was Rosehall House, in Sutherland, bought by Bend’Or as a place in Britain where he and Gabrielle might be more intimately together. Gabrielle didn’t like the decor and so had it redecorated in her now celebrated style. The house has been in a state of great disrepair for years, but its simplicity of decor, with trademark Chanel shades of beige and chimneypieces in painted timber, was significantly radical for the period. It is most unusual as the only house outside France, besides Switzerland, that Gabrielle would ever decorate.

  Several of Bend’Or’s friends had villas on the French Riviera, now a most fashionable place, in which not only the French but also wealthy British and Americans were beginning to take their holidays. Monte Carlo was also the site of one of Gabrielle’s new salons. The second Westminster-Chanel house was to be La Pausa. At the top of a small village called Roquebrune, it was on a site with magnificent views down over Menton and the Italian border on one side and the bay and Monaco on the other. Behind the site, the foothills of the Alps can be seen in the distance. Gabrielle bought the five-acre grove of ancient olive trees in which there were already three buildings, and these became a main house and two smaller villas for guests. Gabrielle’s friend Comte Jean de Segonzac had had his own villa nearby restored by a young local architect, Robert Streitz.

  Streitz was duly invited to meet Gabrielle and Bend’Or at a drinks party on board the Flying Cloud, moored off Cannes; they were there to attend the preview of an exhibition by Gabrielle’s friend Picabia. Streitz swiftly drew up a magnificent plan, which Gabrielle immediately accepted. This involved demolishing the present house and starting over again. It also involved Gabrielle’s revealing to the architect a crucial aspect of her past. She wanted a great central stone staircase just like the one at the convent of Aubazine, worn in the middle from centuries of tramping feet, and Streitz was sent to look at it. There he met the mother superior, who said she remembered Gabrielle.

  From the beginning, Gabrielle was thoroughly involved, coming down from Paris on the Train Bleu at least once a month to scrutinize La Pausa’s progress. She was a testing client, discussing every single detail, from the precise color of the plaster to insisting on the old handmade roof tiles, of which twenty thousand were required. The materials for the rest of the house were all new and costly, but Gabrielle was determined that La Pausa should give the impression of maturity, of having been there for a long time; this included the carpenter “aging” his carefully made shutters. Gabrielle signed Streitz’s plans, “the only signature between us. We never had a contract or any kind of correspondence. For me Mademoiselle’s word was as good as gold. Nine months after the completion of La Pausa every bill had been paid on the nail.”12

  When the house was finished, three wings each faced inward toward a beautifully shaded courtyard, onto which opened graceful Roman-style vaulting. La Pausa was a classic Mediterranean villa functioning as a modern house. Large fireplaces were built into the rooms — Gabrielle disliked central heating — and eighteenth-century English oak was used for floors and paneling. Under Bend’Or’s influence, much of the furniture was from England. Before the costly interior fittings, decoration and exterior landscaping — highly original at the time, with lavender, masses of purple iris and lawns starred with crocus and hyacinth — the building costs were six million francs, four times the initial purchase. Everything was done as the duke had instructed, “with the best materials and under the best working conditions.” Which of the two bore the costs for it all is not clear, but the signature of ownership is in Gabrielle’s hand, and dated February 9, 1929. La Pausa’s beauty was to establish the architect’s name, and he would always feel it had brought him luck.

  Over the years, La Pausa was to gain a reputation with Gabrielle’s friends as a remarkable place. The perceptive future American Vogue editor in Paris, Bettina Ballard, who came to know Gabrielle well in the thirties, would say that it was “the most comfortable, relaxing place I have ever stayed in,” and indeed the building’s design, combined with Gabrielle’s style of hospitality, was then most unusual. In those days, when the Côte d’Azur was just coming into its own, Gabrielle led the way in creating a new style of living for the holidaying rich. Bettina Ballard continued:

  In her own home she wanted to be left alone unless she wanted to be seen, and her guests had the same privilege… the house was blissfully silent in the morning…

  If and when you came down, there were small unostentatious cars with drivers to run you down the mountain to swim or shop in Monte Carlo. No life was encouraged around the villa in the morning. Lunch was the moment of the day when guests met in a group and no one missed lunch — it was far too entertaining. The long dining room had a buffet at one end with hot Italian pasta, cold English roast beef, French dishes, a little of everything… Chanel hated having servants under foot, and Ugo somehow managed to run the house superbly and still keep everyone out of sight but himself.13

  The first majordomo at La Pausa was a Russian refugee, Admiral Castelain, who gave the relaxed impression that there were no other servants, and whom Gabrielle treated as a friend.

  During 1929, as La Pausa was being painstakingly erected for Gabrielle and Bend’Or, their affair, however, was to founder. Gabrielle’s bid to become pregnant may well have been the trigger for Bend’Or’s return to his old routine of dalliance with pretty women. Gabrielle was a most un-jealous woman, but Bend’Or’s fling at this juncture provoked in her feelings of real insecurity. Failure to conceive was a grim reminder to this commanding woman of her ultimate inability to control life. We don’t know the details, but it seems most likely that a botched abortion during her affair with Etienne Balsan had left her unable to conceive. (One wonders if Arthur Capel would have married Gabrielle if she had become pregnant.) Gabrielle was miserable and frustrated, and her feelings sometimes turned to anger, which she would vent upon Bend’Or. This was a very bad idea. Nevertheless, for some time to come, the man whom few dared to cross would recall why he wanted Gabrielle, and he would return, bringing her gifts and his old enthusiasm and affection.

  Meanwhile, another problem had rumbled on beneath Gabriell
e’s determination to become pregnant: her devotion to her work. Inextricably interwoven with her life and who she had become, her need for work was ineluctable. She longed for a child, but every time she succumbed to a man, eventually Gabrielle began to hanker after work and its beloved companion, independence. In reality, she found equality with a man — perhaps with anyone — deeply challenging, which was why a man as powerful as Westminster had appeared such a good proposition.

  While Gabrielle’s predicament as a woman was a reflection of her times, she also found that inescapable element of any relationship, the weighing scales of power, impossible, really, to balance for more than a few years. The deeply feminine part of her would make the poignant comment, “I never wanted to weigh more heavily on a man than a bird,” yet the other Gabrielle had an extraordinary drive to create, to organize and to lead. And she would voice her dilemma with tragic accuracy: “It would be very difficult for a man, unless he were strong, to live with me. And it would be impossible for me, were he stronger than me, to live with him.”14

  No matter what she did to avoid it, Gabrielle’s work in the end was preeminent. The unresolved motives that drove her always proved stronger than the conflicting wish for emotional fulfillment and tranquility. Yet while Westminster tried to draw her back to him, at the same time, he himself had begun to drift away.

  Gabrielle’s pride was at stake here, and she was edging toward disillusionment. No longer young, she had lived too much of her life in the glare of publicity for her to support a public slighting. And while her disappointment at failing to bear a child was secretly causing her such misery, as was her way, the woman perceived as so resilient, even heartless, hid her anguish from all but one or two.

  One of those always there in times of need since Arthur’s death was Misia Sert. Gabrielle would say dreadful things of Misia, most of which were true. Describing her as having no sense of moderation or rationality, she said she was like a nomad from the steppes:

  She has an acute thirst for success and a deep and sacrilegious passion for failure. For herself, whom she loathes, for the man she serves… She aspires to greatness, she loves to mingle with it, to sniff it, to control it and reduce it…

  She had absolutely no shame, no sense of honesty, but she had a grandeur and an innocence about her that surpassed everything one usually observes in women… it’s because of this I adored her… In woman there is everything, and in Misia there was every sort of woman.15

  Whatever Misia’s faults, Gabrielle would, nonetheless, continue to love her. Indeed, she would claim that she was the only woman who remained her true friend.

  For the moment, however, Misia suffered, too, and Gabrielle came to her rescue. At her insistence, Misia had joined the Cutty Sark with a party sailing along the Dalmatian coast. While there was intermittent tension between Gabrielle and Bend’Or, Misia’s situation was more acute: her marriage was in ruins.

  Sert had become besotted with a tall, narcissistic and self-destructive Russian princess, Roussadana Mdivani. Finding her beauty luminous, half of the Parisian haut monde appeared besotted, too. Roussadana’s brothers’ indigence led them to use their exotic charm and titles to make marriages with a series of American film stars and heiresses, acquiring for them a moniker, “the marrying Mdivanis.”

  Meanwhile, Misia had worked her way through the repertoire of attitudes for the long-suffering wife. But her accustomed open-mindedness, as she waited for another of her middle-aged husband’s infatuations to subside, had, this time, been to no avail. And foolish Misia had herself also grown to love this self-absorbed and high-spirited young woman who was destroying Misia’s marriage.

  When Misia had first met Gabrielle, Sert had been taken aback at her passion for yet another woman. Now his wife’s ardor for another woman only heightened his own desire for Roussadana, who so intertwined herself with their lives that the three of them no longer understood their motivation or their emotions. Geared as Sert was to the world of “fashion, the rich and the vaguely talented, he had moved from Misia’s lightness, with its solid basis of art, to Roussy’s frivolity, with its nihilistic base of chic.”16 In time, Gabrielle became more than a little besotted herself with the captivating creature, but for now, in hour-long conversations on the phone, she admonished Misia for involving herself with the girl, telling her she was playing a dangerous game. Misia replied that the forces that drew people toward calamity had her in their clutches and that she was powerless to do anything but try to subdue disaster.

  Gradually, her increasing doses of morphine failed to keep her far enough removed from her emotions, and she was faced with the despair she really felt. Paul Morand would recall his admiration for Misia’s “joie de vivre, always concealed beneath a mask of ill-humor; that perfect poise even in moments of despair.” It must have been hard work indeed for Misia and Gabrielle to retain their legendary poise while concealing their real feelings from everyone — except each other — on board Bend’Or’s pleasure ship.

  One day, Gabrielle and Misia received a telegram onboard the Cutty Sark from Diaghilev’s assistant, Boris Kochno, in Venice: Diaghilev was very ill; they must come at once. Gabrielle had Bend’Or sail the ship to Venice, and the two women went in search of their friend Diaghilev. There, in the Hôtel des Bains on the Lido, with sunlight shimmering off that endlessly lapping water, the beautiful young Boris Kochno and Serge Lifar, each at various times Diaghilev’s lover, were beside him: he was dying. The diabetes that Diaghilev had refused to attend to with any discipline was in its final stage. As his temperature rose steadily, he passed in and out of consciousness. He was moved when he saw that Misia and Gabrielle had arrived. His temperature reduced, he grew more cheerful, talked of plans, of new trips. Two nights later, there was a call to the women’s hotel and they rushed to his bedside. In the early dawn, just before the sun rose again on that watery paradise he had loved so much, the great Sergei Diaghilev quietly died.

  As so often before, there apparently weren’t enough funds in the Ballets Russes coffers, and it was Gabrielle who paid for her friend for the last time: she saw to all the details of his funeral. As the small procession left the hotel in the early hours of the following morning — so as not to upset the tourists — it is said that Kochno and Lifar fell to their knees, and began to walk like that. Gabrielle was heard to say curtly under her breath, “Get up!” and they immediately obeyed. When the white gondola had “ferried the magician’s mortal remains” to San Michele, that lonely Venetian island of the dead, and the mourners watched as the coffin was lowered into its grave, they had to restrain Lifar, who tried to fling himself in after it.

  Forty-two years later, Igor Stravinsky, arguably the twentieth century’s greatest composer, died in New York. His request to be buried near Diaghilev was duly honored.

  Gabrielle’s disillusion at Bend’Or’s philandering had sent her back to spend more time with her own friends. Concerned for Misia, she also had a room made permanently available for her at the Faubourg Saint-Honoré. Cocteau had already been there under Gabrielle’s wing for some time, with his new lover, the writer Jean Desbordes.

  Cocteau’s mother had told Abbé Mugnier that Jean was “living at Mademoiselle Chanel’s, in the gardens of the avenue Gabriele.” Abbé Mugnier wrote:

  After having accompanied the Princess Bibesco here and there… went to Mlle Chanel who was expecting us. The Serts, Jean Cocteau, a young English woman [Vera Bate], who works with Coco Chanel, were there… In Mlle Chanel’s garden… a vast fountain unfolds… back in the salon, heard Wagner on the gramophone, chatted with various people. I thought Mlle Chanel had a more charming face. Very kind by the way.17

  Gabrielle’s socializing was not only for friendship’s sake. Maintaining her image in the face of society, often secretly awaiting her downfall, she gave particularly sumptuous entertainments and was much seen abroad. Not long before Diaghilev’s death, she celebrated a Ballets Russes performance with Misia, Diaghilev and their entourage, the artists P
icasso, Cocteau and Rouault, and the composers Stravinsky and Prokofiev. She gave another of her magnificent balls to celebrate the end of another Ballets Russes season. The Hôtel de Lauzan was awash with the best champagne, caviar spilled from soup tureens, the gardens were lit by lanterns, a black jazz band offered up the most fashionable contemporary music. Serge Lifar, now the Ballets Russes’s principal dancer, and who would in time describe Gabrielle as his “godmother,” recalled the evening:

  We drank rivers of champagne and vodka… Coco drank as much as anyone else. As always she flirted with the men. She was very kittenish, even purring, pretending she was completely captivated, when suddenly pfft! Nobody there! She was like a little Cinderella. She disappeared around two in the morning, so as not to miss her beauty sleep. She allowed men to think that everything was possible.18

  In 1929, Henri Bernstein would record the sense of grandeur at her parties “in the white violence of the multitude of peonies — subtle, gay, moving parties which made several people envious (all those who could not be invited in spite of the dimensions of the beautiful lounges of the Faubourg St.-Honoré).”19

  By February of 1930, Bend’Or had found himself a new wife, Loelia Ponsonby, one of the “Bright Young Things” and daughter of the first Lord Sysonby. Bend’Or had brought Loelia to Paris for an excruciating session, in which she met her future husband’s ex-lover. Understandably, Loelia found Gabrielle unsympathetic, describing her as “small, dark and simian… She was hung with every sort of necklace and bracelet, which rattled as she moved… I perched, rather at a disadvantage, at her feet, feeling that I was being looked over to see if I was a suitable bride… I very much doubted whether I or my tweed suit passed the test.”20