by Lisa Chaney
Arthur Edward Capel was born in Brighton, on the southern English coast, in September 1881. This made him two years older than Gabrielle Chanel. His parents, Arthur Joseph (so as not to confuse father and son, I will refer to him as Joseph) and Berthe already had three small daughters, Bertha (English spelling), Edith and Marie-Henriette. Their mother, a Parisian, had met Joseph while she was a boarder at a London school (most probably through Joseph’s brother, Thomas, a prominent socialite Catholic priest). While Berthe’s family, the Lorins, remain frustratingly mysterious (the relevant archives in Paris went up in flames in 1983), enough has come to light about Joseph to make some of the forces that drove his son, Arthur, more comprehensible.3
Joseph Capel’s family was of very modest means—his father was a poor coastguardsman, his Roman Catholic mother, from Ireland, had been in service—but Joseph was industrious and ambitious and had quickly risen from a position as a clerk to prosper as a man of business. His talent as an entrepreneur then enabled him to move his family from London to a pretty house on Brighton’s Marine Parade, where his only son, Arthur, was born.4 Joseph commuted to London’s hub of commerce, the Royal Exchange, while expanding his business portfolio still further. This included extending, for example, his contact with Europe by becoming the agent for several railway and shipping companies in France and Spain.5 Work often took him abroad, and he now mixed in the upper circles of “society.”6
Enterprising and adaptable, at thirty-seven Joseph was a rich man and moved his family to Paris, where he was now able to live on his investments. While this move might have come about because Berthe wanted to return to her homeland, it might also have been precipitated by Joseph’s priest brother Thomas’s recent and dramatic fall from grace in the British Catholic community. A popular society priest, he had been chamberlain to Pope Pius IX, had lectured at Oxford and was appointed by the distinguished Cardinal Manning as president of Kensington University College, Britain’s first Catholic university since the Reformation. Not only was Thomas Capel responsible for this important venture’s ending in financial collapse, but among other misdemeanors, he was also brought to book over an alleged affair with one of his parishioners. Cardinal Manning exerted his far-reaching influence and Capel was forbidden to act as priest anywhere in the world; his reputation was ruined and he emigrated to America.7
In Paris, the Capels were removed from this shameful scandal. Their home, at 56 avenue d’Iéna, was previously one of the great Rochefoucauld family mansions. Situated in the sixteenth arrondissement, the tree-lined avenue d’Iéna, with its understated wealth and assiduous discretion, was particularly distinguished. The Capels’ haut bourgeois neighbors included politicians and the odd aristocrat. Today, the avenue hosts a number of diplomatic missions; the Capels’ mansion has become the Egyptian embassy.
After Arthur’s junior period at the elite Saint Mary’s in Paris, his parents chose for their son a distinguished English school. Beaumont College was at Old Windsor, in Berkshire, and was dubbed “the Catholic Eton.”8 And it was from here, throughout his adolescence, that Arthur traveled back and forth across the Channel to holiday with his parents at avenue d’Iéna and fashionable French resorts. In 1897, at sixteen, his ordinary school studies over, Arthur moved to complete his education with an advanced course of study.
It has always been said, mistakenly, that he went on to Downside School, in the county of Somerset. However, a move from a Jesuit college (Beaumont) to a Benedictine one (Downside) would have been highly unlikely. Arthur in fact went on to one of England’s most venerable Jesuit institutions, the college of Stonyhurst, in Lancashire.9
It was only recently that Catholics in England had been permitted to obtain degrees, in a handful of Catholic colleges such as Stonyhurst. In 1897, some years after Arthur’s uncle’s failure to make the London Catholic university prosper, Stonyhurst was the most important place of Catholic higher learning in Britain. And Arthur was duly welcomed into its small senior group, holding the illustrious title of “Gentlemen Philosophers.” These young grandees’ college lives were part country-house living, part finishing school and part Oxbridge college. They played much sport, rode, hunted and shot (keeping their own horses and dogs at the college); they also wore extravagant clothes “and bore themselves with a careless dignity.”10 The Gentlemen Philosophers were ferociously sociable; they acted, made music, debated fiercely and conscientiously smoked and drank their way through their privileged college years.
Arthur was one of the youngest of the Gentlemen Philosophers, but more focused than many seventeen-year-olds, he flourished in this climate and took several academic prizes. Armed with Stonyhurst’s excellent intellectual training and his battery of awards, at the end of 1899, following his eighteenth birthday, he left behind the safety of academia and went out into the world.
With the exception of a few tantalizingly brief references, after Stonyhurst, his trail all but disappears. Three years later, we find him bound for France on board a ship from America.11 Almost certainly this was to see his ailing mother. Two months later, at only forty-six, she would die. It was 1902. Arthur was twenty-one. And then there is silence.
We know that Arthur completed a roving apprenticeship in his father’s businesses, in London, Paris and America. Quite probably, he traveled farther afield, to North Africa, Arabia and Persia, where other Capel interests were flourishing. Having progressed to fully fledged membership in his father’s firm, Arthur reappears in 1909.12 Now twenty-seven, he had bridged the complex social divides between the superwealthy bourgeois of his father’s acquaintance and the haut monde of ancient titles, great houses and estates, and had become a young Parisian of note.
Arthur Capel has often been described as a self-made man, but as we see, it was not Arthur but his father who rose so far above his origins to become a figure of considerable social standing. Compared to Gabrielle’s upbringing, Arthur’s was one of unimaginable privilege. Without the need to strive for more, once he had learned the arcane rules of business, he turned it into a kind of sport—the sport of making money. Thus, in Morand’s Lewis et Irène, Morand would have his hero, Lewis, say: “I work for fun. Negotiating a loan entertains me more than sailing does; drawing up a company act more than playing poker. That is all.”13
Yet for all the suavity his upbringing had conferred upon him, Arthur also concealed a seriousness beneath the amusement, and was motivated by an urgent ambition. This revealed itself in his transformation of moneymaking into a game, his love of competitive sport, at which he regularly beat his friends, and his serial conquest of women—sometimes their women. (Did this come about in part because he was the favored only son with several sisters?) Whatever its source, within Arthur there existed a tension that women found compellingly attractive.
There were several, including Paul Morand, who explained Arthur’s slightly mysterious past with a rumor. While never mentioning his mother, apparently, he was the bastard son of a descendant of Portuguese Jews, the great banker Jacob Emile Pereire. Pereire died, it was said, shortly before Arthur had finished his studies. No one ever bothered to calculate that in fact he was dead before Arthur was even born. Meanwhile, it was said that the stigma of this illegitimacy was the clue to his ambition. Morand was, however, mistaken, though not entirely.
Arthur’s ambition did arise out of his sense of inadequacy. However, it wasn’t because of any illegitimacy but because his parentage was undistinguished. As much as anything, he was driven by the desire to move—as was Gabrielle, and his own father before him—beyond his origins. This brought about the urge to reach a still higher social position than the haut bourgeois one his father had created for his children to inhabit. The Capels had considerable riches but neither a great name nor the land traditionally accompanying one. Later, we will see the tragic consequences for Gabrielle, and Arthur, to which this urge would eventually drive him.
In the meantime, Arthur played polo and socialized with society.14 A close friend was Duc Armand de
Gramont, Comte de Guiche, one of the most gifted and sympathetic personalities of his generation. Armand was a tall, dazzlingly handsome polo player whose family had managed to divert him from becoming a painter and to steer him toward what they saw as the more serious pursuit of science. Here Armand’s considerable gifts would eventually help make his name far beyond the self-absorbed confines of the disintegrating haut monde from which he sprang. His and Arthur’s impeccable connections had permitted them entry to the Jockey Club, that luxurious male preserve and organ of the ruling elite. In 1908, Marcel Proust was elated to be put forward as a member. The sponsors for Proust’s promotion to another of the city’s most distinguished clubs, the Paris Polo, were none other than the two young heartthrobs, Arthur Capel and Armand de Gramont. On April 30, Le Figaro announced, “Marcel Proust, presented by the Comte de Guiche and M. Arthur Capel, is received as permanent member of the Polo de Paris.”
In spite of Arthur’s great worldly success, his drive and ambition were shot through with ambivalence. Although he liked the luster of his friends’ privileged lineages, an important aspect of his close friendship with men such as Armand de Gramont and Etienne Balsan was not their joining with him in the leisured man’s love of high living, but their notable strength of purpose. While increasing his wealth and socializing with the beau monde, the young playboy was not fulfilled by money and power alone. Laboring under the philosophical and spiritual disquiet of many sophisticates at the dawn of the twentieth century, he questioned the Jesuit ethos under which he had been schooled. Searching, he had taken up one of the routes followed by a number of his contemporaries who felt restricted by the old religions. Maintaining a friendship with the popular spiritual guru Rabindranath Tagore, Arthur also joined the Theosophists, the recent religious movement whose declared objects chimed with his own leanings.15
Somehow, between his hectic schedule of work, socializing and grand sporting events, Arthur also found time to cultivate his affair with Gabrielle. Indeed, it was over the winter of 1909–10 that the problems regarding her relations with her two most significant lovers, Etienne and Arthur, reached a resolution: she moved into Arthur’s apartment on the avenue Gabriel. This was where we first met them, on that evening when Arthur shocked Gabrielle out of her fantasy by telling her she wasn’t making any money.
In deciding to work at all, Gabrielle had made her position socially ambiguous. While in some ways resembling a courtesan who made money, Gabrielle was now an untypical rich man’s mistress who did not. Part grisette, again, Gabrielle wasn’t typical, in that the grisette was more often a man’s lover than his live-in mistress.
Popularly seen as charming and “all-powerful interpreters of fashion,” grisettes were often highly artistic craftswomen. It had always been convenient to see their traditional poverty and appallingly long hours as “dignified for wanting little,” something Gabrielle had experienced and left behind. Although the sporadic prostitution to which many of these “all-powerful” women were forced to turn meant that they were seen as girls of easy virtue, their clients romanticized their hardworking lives and applauded their “charming respectability.” Noted for frequenting bohemian artistic venues and forming relationships with artists or poets, the grisettes were glamorized by men as pretty, lighthearted things with hearts made of gold.16
When hats were still an indispensable element of any fashionable ensemble, preeminent among the grisettes were the milliners. With their clever modification of old styles and constant invention of new ones, they had always been seen as the acme of the working girls. The indefatigable commentator on Parisian women Octave Uzanne lovingly described them as “the aristocracy of the work-women of Paris; the most elegant and distinguished. They are artists. Their ingenuity in design seems limitless.”17 A remarkably accurate description of Gabrielle’s own credentials characterizes the grisette as “a poor girl, perhaps an orphan too well raised to be a simple worker and too little instructed to be a teacher.”18
Meanwhile, in order to achieve real success in the fiercely competitive Parisian millinery trade, Gabrielle was going to need all her doggedness and determination. As she labored, and slowly began to comprehend some of the essentials of running a business, her work began to satisfy her and feed her pride. The actresses and courtesans whom she knew from Royallieu had sometimes brought others to take a look at Gabrielle’s hats at Etienne Balsan’s garçonnière on the boulevard Malesherbes. The demimonde and the stage had been curious to take a look at Etienne’s mistress at work, but now that she lived with Arthur Capel, overcoming their prejudices, some of the more daring young society women, who were dressed by the great couturiers of the day, began to drop in too.
Whatever has been written about Gabrielle’s meteoric rise to fame, in fact, she neither took Paris by storm once launched nor was she a born socialite only waiting to be scooped up and “brought out” by someone sympathetic to her, such as Arthur Capel. Notwithstanding Gabrielle’s precociously advanced character, she did not possess a precocious ability for self-expression, nor was she quick to develop her innate abilities. Indeed, the period in which she learned how to become a designer, a businesswoman and the person she wanted to be had a lengthy gestation. While her life at Royallieu had been her first major step, the time Gabrielle spent working in boulevard Malesherbes and her move to live with Arthur Capel were two of the crucial periods in which she was, effectively, serving her apprenticeship. Through Etienne Balsan and his friends at Royallieu, and then Arthur Capel and his connections, she was growing beyond the limitations of her background and assimilating much about the art of self-presentation. In keeping with the most renowned courtesans, however, Gabrielle would travel beyond these ideas and experiment with the more complex art of reinvention.
But while this young milliner was never short of ideas, as business grew, her ignorance of technique was beginning to hold her back, and when told by Etienne of someone who might help, she quickly made an approach. Young Lucienne Rabaté was a rising star who worked for one of Paris’s most prestigious milliners, Maison Lewis. Seduced by the liveliness of the little Chanel salon, Lucienne brought with her two more of the Maison Lewis’s best assistants. 19 Gabrielle’s designs, her assistants’ skill, and their word-of-mouth promotion meant that business continued gaining pace.
Gabrielle had remained close to her aunt Adrienne, who was still living quietly in Vichy with her lover, the Baron de Nexon. Adrienne was inclusive and generous spirited in her concerns for her family, and she now suggested the employment of Gabrielle’s younger sister Antoinette to receive customers and look after the salon.
Antoinette had been first at Aubazine, then followed Julia-Berthe and Gabrielle to the convent at Moulins, and was now emulating her sister in trying her hand as a singer in Vichy. She was pretty and vivacious but had no voice, and like Gabrielle before her, was failing to find any work. As a result, Adrienne was supporting her. With some of her sister Gabrielle’s boldness, and a genuine charm, Antoinette became a decorative ambassador for Chanel Modes. With nothing like Gabrielle’s intelligence or initiative, however, she was biddable and worked hard. Meanwhile, Gabrielle’s salon had begun to outgrow its cramped quarters on the boulevard Malesherbes, and she turned to her lover for assistance. Would Arthur give her the finances to expand?
Arthur was businessman enough to recognize his mistress’s intelligence and energy, and although she wasn’t making great sums of money, he believed she had potential. As the entrepreneur in him thrived on risk, he agreed to fund the opening of Gabrielle’s own shop. In this way, at the beginning of 1911, she took on the leasehold of some first-floor rooms on the rue Cambon, just off the fashionable rue de Rivoli.
The perceptive and witty diarist Elisabeth de Gramont, Duchesse de Clermont-Tonnerre, shines some light on the situation while also giving the impression that Gabrielle was at a loose end and without many ideas. Elisabeth de Gramont recalled an evening at her half brother Armand de Gramont’s house. Arthur was also present, and he and
Elisabeth fell into conversation on the subject of his mistress, Gabrielle. He said, “I am very attached to Coco and I am looking for an occupation for her.” Perhaps Arthur wished, here, to boost his own importance when implying that she didn’t already have something to do:I am a very busy man and I am not free in the afternoon; she is on her own, she gets bored, and this irritates me . . . Idleness can hang heavily on some women, especially when they are intelligent, and Coco is intelligent. You’ve got family, relatives, social obligations . . . She’s got nothing; when she’s through with polishing her nails, the time between two and eight is void . . . We don’t always realize how important schedules are in people’s emotional lives; we always speak of the heart, it is not that difficult to attune two hearts, but to synchronize two watches is a problem. I set her up in a little millinery shop, but it hasn’t worked very well. However, she’s energetic, she has the qualities of a businesswoman, and she is from Auvergne [meaning that she was determined and hardworking] . . . she would like to open a shop that sells knitwear and jerseys. Well, we will see.20
With a dressmaker already working at 21 rue Cambon, the law forbade Gabrielle to do the same thing. (Manufacturing knitwear and jerseys would get around this prohibition because they were not counted as dresses.) It is said that Gabrielle merely chanced upon this site, but our little milliner had in fact chosen it with great care, fully aware of its prime position. It was at the heart of that quarter encompassing the rue de la Paix, rue Royale, rue Saint-Honoré and the streets leading off and around the magnificent place Vendôme. For many years, this Parisian district had been the one where the most costly silks, jewels, furs, hats, perfumes and fashions were to be found.