Coco Chanel

by Lisa Chaney

  Two days before Christmas 1919, Diana telephoned Duff Cooper to say she had just arrived in London. Arthur had, meanwhile, started for the south of France, and she was to join him in a fortnight.20

  Diana lunched with Duff Cooper and her friend Lady Rosslyn, then flirted with Cooper as their taxi crawled through the London traffic. Cooper had dropped Diana back at Asprey’s for tea with Lady Rosslyn, but noticed that Diana had forgotten her book. Turning back and finding her still standing outside Asprey’s with her friend, Cooper returned the book and drove off. Reading the paper the following morning, he realized why, standing there on the pavement, Lady Rosslyn had looked so awful. She was about to give Diana a terrible piece of news that Lord Rosslyn had cabled her, and for which there was no good way to prepare Diana.

  The details were sketchy, but a few hours earlier, as Arthur was driving to the south of France, it appeared that one of his tires had burst. The car was flung upside down, it exploded into flames, and he had died in the blaze. While the car was burned, almost to a shell, Arthur’s mechanic, Mansfield, was badly injured but had managed to escape. Duff Cooper wrote: “December 24, 1919. The first thing I saw in the Daily Express this morning was the death of Boy Capel, Diana’s husband, who was killed in a motor accident in the south of France on Monday [22 December]. I was very shocked.” Arthur had almost certainly spent the night before that fateful day with Gabrielle.21 Then he had set out with Mansfield to make the 620-mile journey south.

  Some weeks later, when Lady Rosslyn told Duff Cooper how dreadful it had been breaking the news of Arthur’s death to Diana, she added a bleak insight into the workings of their marriage. She said “how impossible Diana’s relations with Capel were becoming, how he had entirely ceased to live with her and hardly ever spoke to her. That he confessed she had got on his nerves and he could barely stand her presence.”22

  It seems odd, under these circumstances, that Arthur and Diana had been planning to meet up in a fortnight. Was he going to attempt another beginning with his wife, in which case he may well have formally broken off his affair with Gabrielle before driving south? Or had Arthur simply said good-bye to Gabrielle at Garches with the intention of ending his marriage when he met up with his wife in the south of France after Christmas? Whichever of these conclusions Arthur had made, one is left with the mournful understanding that while the resolution of this state of affairs had to end sadly for at least one of these three, instead it became a tragedy.

  Whatever confused thoughts had filled Arthur’s head as he sped south to Cannes for Christmas with his sister Bertha—rather than spending it with his wife and baby girl—we will never know. But in the very early hours of the following morning, Arthur and Gabrielle’s companion from Royallieu days, Comte Léon de Laborde, at one time most likely Gabrielle’s lover, was ringing at the door. He knocked, he broke the silence of the quiet enclave and shouted. No one came. Laborde refused to give up and, finally, Gabrielle’s butler, Joseph, was there at the door. He was very reluctant to tell Mademoiselle and wanted to wait until morning. But Léon insisted that Gabrielle must know. At last she came down the stairs. In white pajamas, her short hair tousled, she looked to him “the silhouette of a youth in white satin.”23

  Léon told Gabrielle all that he knew. It had been late last evening, on the road between Saint-Raphaël and Cannes, when Arthur and Mansfield had almost reached their destination. Léon said that Arthur must have been very tired.

  As he spoke, Gabrielle’s face was tortured, but she did not cry; only sat there, utterly still.

  After a few minutes, still without a word, she walked back up the stairs. Returning, she had dressed and now carried an overnight bag. No, she would not wait; she wanted Léon to take her south, immediately. As they set off in his car, the dawn light was spreading over Paris.

  Gabrielle refused Léon’s pleas with her to rest on the arduous journey south, and they reached Cannes the following evening.

  Although it was late, Léon went from hotel to hotel asking if Lady Michelham, Arthur’s sister, was staying there with them. He made some calls. At last, he found her. Bertha was distraught. Gabrielle’s bid to see Arthur before he was buried made her refuse rest on the journey, but her wish was not to be granted. Apparently, Arthur had been so badly burned that the coffin had already been sealed.

  Bertha insisted that the travelers must stay in her suite of rooms. They did, but Gabrielle refused a bedroom, sitting up on a chaise for the remainder of that night. The next day, she would not accompany Bertha and Léon to the first office in Arthur’s honor, at which he was given military honors, nearby at Fréjus cathedral. Instead, Gabrielle requested that Bertha’s chauffeur take her to the place where Arthur had died.

  This man later told Bertha that at the spot where the captain’s car still lay, burned out like a blackened skeleton on the edge of the road, he stood back. He watched as Gabrielle walked around the car, touching it as if she were blind. Then she sat down on a milestone beside it. And at last, the heartbroken woman bent her head and sobbed. When Arthur had married, Gabrielle had “lost” him. Yet while he was alive there had always been hope, and he had returned. Each time he left her, there was the possibility he would come back. This time, there was none. To the chauffeur, standing discreetly at a distance, it seemed as if Gabrielle wept for hours.

  On December 28, 1919, Le Gaulois reported that “the body of Captain Arthur Capel, Knight of the Légion d’Honneur, Mons Star, killed in a car accident, arrived yesterday morning [in Paris] and was laid in S.-Honoré d’Eylau, in the church’s vaults.” On January 2, the newspaper announced that “the funeral of Captain Arthur Capel, Companion British Empire . . . will take place tomorrow, Saturday 3 January at midday.”

  A good portion of Parisian society congregated in the church filled to capacity that day.24 So, too, did a large English contingent, led by the British ambassador, Lord Derby, as well as a deputation of Arthur’s fellow British officers. Diana’s sisters and husbands were present, but Diana herself, and Arthur’s mistress, Gabrielle Chanel, were both absent. Afterward, Arthur was laid to rest in the cemetery of Montmartre, where a large tomb was later raised. In keeping with the ultimate elusiveness of this extraordinary man, it was marked with neither name, date, nor epitaph. It reads simply:FAMILLE CAPEL

  In letters of condolence to Diana, friends described Arthur’s importance to them, and how much he was loved.25 One of Diana’s sisters talked of his “pilgrim’s soul,” saying that “he never seemed to be very securely anchored” to this world. “His country was unexplored, don’t you agree?” One friend wrote: “He was such a strange, exceptional, attractive human being. And for you this must seem like the end of the world . . . Everyone here [in Paris] is shocked beyond words and I hear on all sides appreciation and regret.”26 Clemenceau said, “He was much too good to remain among us,” while a friend wrote that “Boy was the best, the most loyal, and the most devoted friend one could have, and we loved him like a brother . . . Every day will make us realize more the huge loss.”27

  Many years later, Gabrielle would add her own mournful and definitive elegy: “His death was a terrible blow to me . . . I lost everything when I lost Capel. He left a void in me that the years have not filled.”28 For Gabrielle, Arthur’s death did indeed “seem like the end of the world,” and for the moment she struggled to survive.

  If she took any time away from her work, it can have been only a few days, for she had discovered what distracted her better than anything else: this was work. It was fortunate that Gabrielle’s reputation was in the ascendant and that her salon in rue Cambon was rarely still.

  15

  Beginning Again

  Three months before Arthur’s death, Gabrielle had signed a contract. While keeping number 21 rue Cambon, she was to move her salon and personal apartment to much larger premises, just down the street at number 31. At this address, she was registered for the first time in Paris as a couturier. The five floors of 31 rue Cambon were where Gabrielle w
as to design, meet clients, and promote her business. By no means the largest Chanel salon, to this day, number 31 has remained the most important in the Chanel empire.

  During the first months after Arthur’s death, on Saturdays, Gabrielle’s chauffeur drove her back to her villa retreat out at Garches. There, relieved of the need to pretend, she gave herself up to grief. At times, her faithful butler and housekeeper, Joseph and Marie Leclerc, became concerned. Gabrielle had her bedroom and everything in it done out in black. Grief had not, however, entirely obscured her good sense and robust physical and mental health. Having retired for her first night in her tomblike black bedroom, Gabrielle was overcome by its melancholy and reappeared, begging Marie to make her up a bed somewhere else.

  In February 1920, Arthur’s will was published in The Times of London. The executors in Britain were Diana’s father and brother-in-law, the lords Ribblesdale and Lovat, respectively. In Paris, Arthur had chosen his friends the banker Evelyn Toulmin and Armand de Gramont, Duc de Guiche.

  To Arthur’s sisters, Henriette and Edith, he bequeathed twenty thousand pounds. To his favorite, Bertha, he left nothing, knowing that she was well taken care of. (In early 1919, Bertha had entered into an arranged marriage with Herman Stern, son of the extremely wealthy art collector Lord Michelham. Herman was rather retarded, and he and his wife never lived together. But this had apparently been the deal with Bertha and her scheming mother-in-law, who wanted her son to inherit the majority of the family fortune. Bertha kept her promise to have no children by Herman and in return was made financially independent for life. It appears that Arthur was an integral part of the negotiations, which had ensured his rather dotty sister’s future.)1

  For Gabrielle Chanel, and someone called Yvonne Viggiano, Comtesse de Beauchamp, there was forty thousand pounds. Having dispensed his fortune with the freedom from constraint sometimes accompanying thoughts of death, Arthur had made no attempt to hide this hitherto unknown aspect of his life. Yvonne Viggiano was a young, recently widowed Italian countess with whom he must have had an important relationship. We know nothing more, except that she had a son.

  For the remainder, Arthur left his estate in trust for Diana “for life, and then for our child.” Before the other bequests were taken out, the total sum was well over seven hundred thousand pounds (equivalent to approximately ten million pounds or sixteen million dollars in today’s currency). The Times noted that Arthur had disposed of his great assets in a mere one hundred words.

  Regarding the emotional complications of Arthur’s short life—he was thirty-seven when he died—and his regret at having given up Gabrielle, his comment to Elisabeth de Gramont springs to mind: “It is easier . . . to organize the trade of coal than one’s private life.”2

  The few who cared to look behind Gabrielle’s professional demeanor would see that three months after Arthur’s death, she had not begun to pull herself out of the misery into which it had plunged her. Her mourning was now to play itself out in a dark and complex fashion.

  Early that spring, she would move with her two German shepherd dogs, Soleil and Lune; their three puppies; the two terriers, Pepita and Popee (her last present from Arthur); Joseph and Marie Leclerc and their little daughter, Suzanne, to a large art nouveau villa, Bel Respiro, just a short walk from La Milanaise, the one Gabrielle had rented for the previous year. It has always been said that she bought Bel Respiro.3 Gabrielle did indeed buy Bel Respiro, but not for a whole year after her move there. This was because, at first, the owner permitted her only to rent it. To all intents and purposes, this move was to help Gabrielle make a fresh start, with her friends Henri and Antoinette Bernstein as next-but-one neighbors. The real story of Gabrielle’s move was, however, much stranger than that, and until now has not been known.

  On moving to Bel Respiro, she had the shutters painted an intense black. This was strongly disapproved of by her neighbors, but Gabrielle was not in a fit state to care. Indeed, those black shutters were the first indication that Bel Respiro was to be both her refuge and a kind of mausoleum for her memories. And in fact, it wasn’t the proximity of her friends but her memories that were the most significant reason for Gabrielle’s move here.

  Extraordinarily, it turns out that Bel Respiro belonged to Arthur—it was the very house he had bought for himself and Diana the previous year.4

  This explains the mystery of a letter from Diana to Duff Cooper, written not long after Arthur’s death and headed “Bel Respiro.” Diana had told Cooper that “I have been and still am, & I suppose I shall go on being, so terribly, desperately unhappy . . . I can’t write more because there is nothing to say . . . I have to lead the life of a recluse, otherwise I can’t sleep . . . I suppose I shall leave here soon and return to England.”5

  Diana did indeed soon leave France, and almost never visited it again.

  Meanwhile, Gabrielle was not only aware that Bel Respiro was Arthur and Diana’s house, this was exactly why she wanted it. How better to immerse herself in Arthur than by living in his home? It didn’t concern Gabrielle that Diana had only recently left, or that she knew it was Gabrielle who took up the lease. (Diana must have been beyond caring that the new tenant was toto be her husband’s old lover.) Gabrielle cared only that by being there, in some strange way she would be “living” with Arthur. In addition, her presence in his house would erase Diana from his life, and Gabrielle would gradually “replace” her.

  For several months, she lived out this half-cracked existence at Bel Respiro with no one, besides Joseph and Marie, really aware of what she was doing. In her state of semibreakdown, Gabrielle, who could always move from reality to fantasy in one bound, now did so more readily. At the same time, each day, she was driven into Paris to the salon, and business prospered. Although she was a wreck and often close to tears, work really was the only thing that kept her from collapse. One wonders how she responded to the news that Diana Capel had given birth to another baby girl, in June of that year, 1920. Named June, the baby had been conceived only three months before her father’s death.

  It was Misia Edwards’s marriage that August, to José Maria Sert, her lover of twelve years, that would finally initiate Gabrielle’s recovery.

  Misia’s efforts to lift Gabrielle out of her blackness had so far failed. So, after the wedding, she instructed her to get out of Paris and come away with them to Venice. Tempted by the prospect of distraction, of possible relief from a state that had become a kind of madness, Gabrielle accepted Misia’s invitation to leave Paris behind her. From then on, the Serts would become two of her closest friends.

  As a young woman, Misia had acquired a salon and become one of the undeniable queens of Paris. Paul Morand described her then as “a beautiful panther, imperious, bloodthirsty and frivolous.” He also said that she was “brilliant in perfidy, and refined in cruelty.”6

  Misia Godebska had grown up in the world of haute bohème, where artists and society met. Musically gifted, she had married, at twenty-one, Thadée Natanson, founder of the La revue blanche; then, in order to clear her husband’s debts, she divorced him and married a fabulously wealthy newspaper magnate, the monstrous Alfred Edwards. Full of perverse nonchalance, Misia cared little about the scandal her behavior provoked.

  Misia’s stormy friendship with Sergei Diaghilev had been forged at their first meeting when, after hours of talking, Diaghilev recognized the quality of Misia’s musical and artistic appreciation. Diaghilev and his impresario, Gabriel Astruc, knew that in order to succeed on any scale, they needed the patronage of the self-absorbed world of artistic fashion. Astruc called these patrons “mes chers snobs” and cultivated them with great flair. Like these “snobs,” Misia Sert was wealthy. However, her feeling for art ran far deeper than snobbery or fashion. Her generosity to the financially incompetent artistic genius Diaghilev was interspersed with endless disputes, reconciliations and Slavic declarations of affection. Without Misia, much of Diaghilev’s work might never have reached the stage.

  Paul
Morand said that Misia was a “harvester of geniuses, all of them in love with her—Vuillard, Bonnard, Renoir, Picasso”; the list also included Toulouse-Lautrec, Ravel and Debussy as well as poets such as Verlaine, Mallarmé and Apollinaire. Having divorced, Misia began living with José Maria Sert, a master voluptuary who revealed her own as yet unfulfilled sensuality to her. In Sert, Misia had finally discovered her life’s companion. Misia’s impromptu and bohemian entertaining had an infectious and exciting quality, reflecting the newer Paris rather than the “studied grandeur” of the older haut monde. As for Sert’s serial infidelities, the new bride had for long schooled herself to ignore them, even treating them with a “grudging admiration.”

  En route to Venice, the Serts and Gabrielle stopped off at Padua, where Gabrielle went with Misia to the Basilica of Saint Anthony. Misia insisted it would dissolve Gabrielle’s despair, that Saint Anthony would give her peace. Gabrielle was reluctant, but constantly close to tears, she had obliged. Where Donatello’s high-altar masterpiece still stands, Gabrielle found herself before his statue of the saint.

  Asking for help to recover from her ceaseless mourning, she saw before her a man resting his forehead on the stone floor: “He had such a sad and beautiful face, there was so much rigidity and pain in him, and his exhausted head touched the ground with such weariness that a miracle took place within me.” All at once, Gabrielle felt shameful. “How could I compare my sorrow . . . with someone in this distress? Energy flowed through me. I took new heart and decided that I would live.”7 Gabrielle believed she wasn’t alone, that the man she had loved was near her “on the other side, and wouldn’t leave me.” She now told herself that as long as she felt Arthur was waiting for her, she had no right to weep. “It doesn’t matter that you’re alone on this side still, for a while.”8 Gabrielle later told a friend how the woman “who had turned into a shadow, came out of that church transformed.”9