by Lisa Chaney
In tough mode, Gabrielle said, “When I took smart friends on a trip, I always paid, because society people become amusing and delightful when they are certain they won’t have to pay for their pleasure. I purchased, in short, their good humor.” At the same time, she said she found them “irresistibly dishonest” and in her idiosyncratic way, had a genuine sympathy for their impoverished gentility. Gabrielle’s bravado act often omitted the fact that she not only helped a number of those with distinguished lineages, but also found them sympathetic.
Although Gabrielle was born a peasant, her own nature was in many ways a patrician one, and she identified with certain traits associated with the upper classes: “Yes, society people amuse me more than the others. They have wit, tact, a charming disloyalty, a well-bred nonchalance, and an arrogance that is very specific, very caustic, always on the alert; they know how to arrive at the right time and to leave when necessary.”18 (Whatever ambivalence Gabrielle might have felt about this section of society was far outweighed by her deep antipathy to the bourgeoisie. She regarded their traditional small-mindedness as loathsome.)
The many aristocratic Russian émigrés as well as eastern Europeans and the odd upper-class French and Anglo-Saxon employed by Gabrielle were people virtually unemployable elsewhere, and the Chanel salons became a refuge for a good number of them. Here, if the well born were prepared to turn their hand to commerce, they could also maintain their dignity. In Gabrielle’s own way, she esteemed them, in particular, the Russians. The pianist Arthur Rubinstein recalled the sad story of a grand Russian woman fallen on hard times; part of her family had been shot by the Bolsheviks. She desperately needed work, and Gabrielle employed her.19 An old retainer at Gabrielle’s nephew’s château remembered Gabrielle taking in a bankrupt elderly Russian countess: “Mademoiselle had told us to . . . put back in the old lady’s little box the cents she had saved with great effort, and which she would give to us as tips. We had been ordered to let the countess believe that we kept the money in order not to hurt her feelings.”20
Now that some of the most distinguished and trendsetting European and American women were Gabrielle’s clients, the socially prominent, utterly fashionable and supremely self-important writer Princess Marthe Bibesco was regularly to be seen wearing Chanel couture. She even had Gabrielle design a wardrobe especially for her airplane travel. Gabrielle may have “worked” for Marthe Bibesco, but her own renown was now such that Bibesco gave a thinly veiled portrait of Gabrielle—albeit ironic and patronizing—in one of her fashionable novels. The couturier became Tote, an autocrat of fashion whodrains the wealth of about ten capitals and of at least three continents . . . All the women who wear Tote sweaters, her flower [the gardenia], her dress or her striped scarf, have twins and would recognize their lookalikes in New York, London, Rome or Buenos Aires . . . Tote’s bicolor scarf had made them coreligionists . . .
One could say that civilization starts and ends with Tote’s customers. Isn’t the product that she exchanges for the most solid currencies in the world quite simply her intelligence? The precious matter, the imponderable, inexhaustible, and forever renewed, with which she floods the world’s markets every six months .21
Gabrielle was a master of the developing art of advertising, and she capitalized on an updated form of self-promotion initiated by the sharper couturiers before the war. The great courtesans and actresses, then the leaders of fashion, had sported both their charms and the couturiers’ new clothes at the races, that most prominent of social platforms. But with the demise of the great courtesans, society women were now fashion’s foremost promoters.
Once again bearing in mind the inordinate vanity of most of her clients, Gabrielle presented a dress here, another one there, to a financially reduced young woman of good family. This publicity was multiplied when Gabrielle invited some of these same young women to act as her mannequins. At one time or another, a number of Gabrielle’s friends—for example, Misia Sert—were also to be found on the list of employees at the rue Cambon. Among her other duties, Misia was a saleswoman—Gabrielle had often witnessed her formidable efforts as agent on her husband’s behalf. Misia was also sometimes a Chanel model, her name good for publicity.
While Cocteau’s con man friend Maurice Sachs would never work in Gabrielle’s salon, she gave him ample funds to assemble her a library at the Hôtel de Lauzan. Sachs misused the large monthly sum she paid him, took a hotel suite, a secretary, a chauffeur, and launched himself on a spree of dissipation. At the same time, he bought less than first-class examples of all that Gabrielle should read. For someone as astute as Gabrielle was, she had allowed herself, untypically, to be duped by this charming and insinuating young parasite.
Europe appeared as if it was moving toward ever more frenzied escape, and the voices of protest were drowned out by those intent on experiencing, at all costs, every possible personal “adventure.” In the vanguard, Paris had the first black jazz musicians; it was in Paris that the blues first became the rage; impromptu parties and clubs were the vogue, and revelers energetically flung themselves into narcotic euphoria and the ecstasy of vigorous dancing until they could barely stand up. And at the heart of Paris was the shimmering Coco Chanel. Georges Auric, of Les Six, recalled that “of course she led a luxurious life, the kind it is difficult to imagine today. There was nothing but the best with her. She received a great deal and lavishly, and went out much, too. She liked to surround herself with brilliant people.”22 Maurice Sachs described her as “holding court and open table and dispensing privileges and pensions”—“the pensions of the Grande Mademoiselle,” the publisher Bernard Grasset called them. Sachs would write that “the pulse of the world was beating perceptibly in Paris,” and add that Gabrielle was close to its center.
Yet while Gabrielle now lived on a grand scale, she was about to meet someone who lived on one almost unimaginably more so.
22
Bend’Or
In the summer of 1924, Gabrielle had been holidaying in southern France with Dmitri Pavlovich, her impoverished on-off lover of the past three years. (Like several others, the painter Marie Laurencin was convinced that she had secretly married him.) Meanwhile, the Duke of Westminster, known as Bend’Or, possibly the richest man in England, had recently separated from his wife.
Gabrielle’s social prestige was now unquestioned. She was assiduously promoted in both the fashion press and the society pages; she was interviewed and photographed for Harper’s Bazaar by the all-powerful society photographer Baron Aldolphe de Meyer. Meyer had married Olga Caracciolo, reputedly the illegitimate daughter of King Edward VII. Despite Meyer’s Jewish heritage, his wife’s connections and his own artistry and social finesse had enabled him to move into society. In London, he and Olga hosted one of the city’s most powerful salons. (The Meyers’ union, a long and happy one, was a mariage blanc; each of them preferred partners of their own sex. One of Olga’s most famous affairs was with the music patroness Winnaretta Singer.) Meyer’s article on Gabrielle was titled “Mlle Chanel tells Baron de Meyer her Opinions on Good Taste.”
Meanwhile, the American magazine Women’s Wear Daily reported that “the Prince of Wales terminated a delightfully informal visit to Paris by lunching quietly with some friends . . . at the Ritz . . . In his party was Mrs. Vera Bate, who is . . . well known in English hunting circles. She was wearing one of Chanel’s attractive [knitted] coats in a length that came half-way to the knee.” It was possibly Vera Bate’s great friend Comte Léon de Laborde, Gabrielle’s admirer from Royallieu days, who introduced Vera Bate and Gabrielle. (The English woman’s origins were mysterious. It was rumored she was the illegitimate daughter of the German Duke of Teck, who had renounced his German titles during the war and been given an English one, Earl of Athlone.)
Vera Bate’s connection to royalty apparently explained her easy familiarity with members of the set around the raffish Prince of Wales. Vera was repeatedly described as having a “great appetite for life,” which she coupled wit
h a keen sense of dress. She also appears to have been regularly short of cash. Thus, in a newly discovered list of employees at Chanel at rue Cambon, we find that Vera Bate had been employed by Gabrielle in the “advertising department” since 1921; her social contacts made her invaluable for Chanel public relations. Her hasty marriage to Frederick Bate, at the end of the war, had resulted in a baby girl and a divorce not long afterward. Whatever Vera’s true background, she moved in some of the most fashionable circles in England. Wearing clothes as well as she did, she was given the run of Gabrielle’s salon. Dressed only in Chanel, she was an important ambassador for Gabrielle with the British. Among Vera’s friends she included Winston Churchill, and Churchill’s great friend the Duke of Westminster.
Gabrielle had invited Vera to stay with her at the Hôtel de Paris, in Monte Carlo, for the Christmas–New Year holiday. The Duke of Westminster’s vast yacht Flying Cloud was moored in the harbor, and he had begged Vera to persuade Gabrielle to join him for supper on board. Apparently, Gabrielle was reluctant, but after considerable persuasion from Vera, she agreed. Then Dmitri Pavlovich telegrammed, announcing his arrival in Monte Carlo, and Gabrielle promptly canceled her dinner engagement with Westminster. Dmitri said that he would rather like to see the famous yacht, so Bend’Or telephoned and asked the young Russian duke to come along too. Gabrielle told Dmitri this wasn’t right: “Fate shouldn’t be forced.” But the evening aboard ship went well, and the conversation flowed. They all went ashore after supper to dance and play at the casino. In years to come, Cocteau would say of Bend’Or, “I saw him put down stakes on every table, where he would have forgotten them were it not for the respectful fear croupiers feel toward dukes and billionaires.”1
Bend’Or asked to see Gabrielle again. Again she hesitated. Her hotel suite was then swamped with flowers, which continued arriving on her return to Paris. A stream of letters, orchids and baskets of fruit was delivered all the way from Bend’Or’s home in England, Eaton Hall, in Cheshire. Salmon caught by his own hand arrived in Paris by plane. The duke was in Paris at Easter, apparently to accompany his friend the Prince of Wales. He enlisted Vera Bate and the prince to help him charm Gabrielle, and then he personally delivered a huge bouquet of flowers to her at the Hôtel de Lauzan. Finally she weakened and accepted an invitation to another dinner aboard ship, this time for a hundred guests in the harbor at Bayonne, near Biarritz. As the evening ended and the guests all left, Bend’Or performed one of his habitual tricks: he had his crew weigh anchor and set sail along the coast. His incredible persistence and particular brand of romance had finally paid off. He had won over Gabrielle.
A friend’s commentary on this relationship is interesting, but how accurate it is we don’t know: “With Westminster Coco behaved like a little girl, timid and docile. She followed him everywhere. Her life was a fairy tale. Their love was not sensual.” Meanwhile, Gabrielle would say, “If I hadn’t met Westminster I’d have gone crazy. I had too much emotion, too much excitement. I lived out my novels but so badly! With too much intensity, always torn between this and that, between this man and that, with that business [the House of Chanel] on my back . . . I left for England in a daze.”2
Although the undercurrents of change were already at work in England, after the First World War, life for a number of aristocrats appeared to go on as before. The Duke of Westminster was a man even richer than his monarch, and Eaton Hall, an enormous country house—he liked to describe it as “St Pancras station”—continued functioning along much the same lines it had in the previous century. With a huge number of staff, as late as 1931 there were still ten housemaids and thirty-eight gardeners, with other offices in the house retaining a similar quota of staff. In that year, 1924, Bend’Or’s second marriage, to Violet Rowley, had ended after only four years. While Violet was a woman of great personality and energy, she had failed to provide the male heir the duke so desperately wanted, and her “decided character made life difficult. It was a marriage that needed at least one emollient partner.”3 The duke’s first wife, Shelagh West, and her relations had spent years bleeding him of funds. This experience had gradually turned him from being a trusting and generous man into one very wary of being used.
In the present day, when many find large assets and great privilege distasteful, Bend’Or is usually portrayed as unrelentingly monstrous and is caricatured by his vast wealth, yachts, houses, affairs and the number of his wives (there would be four). Yet we frequently make the mistake of judging the past by the same standards as our own. L. P. Hartley’s statement in The Go-Between is apt here: “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”
Undoubtedly, the Duke of Westminster had many limitations and faults, but it is difficult to view this man and his strange life with real perspective without taking his times into account. In paying Bend’Or tribute, one of his most distinguished employees wrote of those who worked for him at Eaton Hall:Everyone enjoyed the distinction of working in one of the greatest of great houses, where everything was of the best and the standards were of the highest. The long hours were repaid by the highest conditions of service and the excitement of the great occasions . . . Times have changed and much of the traditions of service have changed and become commercialized. While they were still maintained they were, at their best, a dignified and rewarding framework of human relations.4
This same man insisted that Bend’Or was “uniformly loved and admired by all of those who worked for him.”5
The duke’s parents had both conducted extramarital relationships but had stuck to the conventions of their day and remained partners in marriage. Although in many ways a Victorian, their son loathed private dishonesty and public hypocrisy and was less prepared to compromise. In his private life, this combination was unfortunate. Bend’Or’s undoubted qualities of decisiveness, courage and leadership, admirably displayed in war, were not qualities he understood how to demonstrate with much efficacy in peacetime. His other great handicap, which has led to his being described, in effect, as a dumb ox, was Bend’Or’s difficulty in explaining himself with much fluency.
Only on occasion was he moved to put his views forward (vehemently) and then, apparently, his comments were germane. With an aristocratic English lineage, wherein reticence about one’s feelings was a prerequisite of acceptance as a gentleman, Bend’Or’s schooling as well as service in the army had compounded what must have begun as shyness and ended as the tendency to express himself inadequately. Depending upon one’s viewpoint, the Duke of Westminster can be seen either as an inflexible, bombastic prude or a flawed man of honor who was unable to negotiate well with his times, especially when they were peaceful. (In this, he resembled somewhat Winston Churchill.)
By the time Bend’Or met Gabrielle, he had become an edgier, more restless man whose temper could flare up without warning. Although someone whose forte was action, rather than lengthy discourse or theorizing, there was, however, more to him than this. Apart from anything else, the caricature descriptions of Bend’Or the monster are demeaning to Gabrielle. Why would she have associated herself with someone who was utterly obnoxious? As a fiercely independent woman, she had great wealth of her own at her disposal. It was nothing by comparison with Westminster’s, but her aspirations were not of that order. She had no need, really, of Westminster’s incredible riches.
Marie Laurencin told the diarist Abbé Mugnier that “Mlle Chanel and Misia Sert are bored women, the latter out of satiety.” Referring to the emptiness of much of Parisian society, the Abbé wrote that Gabrielle was “a queen in a desert.” Was this in part why she allowed herself to be seduced by the Duke of Westminster, a man whose fabulous riches had made him, like her, a kind of exalted outsider?
Gabrielle now joined Bend’Or whenever she was able. He was a tall bear of a man noted for his inability to do anything on a small scale, and although sixty for a weekend at Eaton Hall was not uncommon, Bend’Or increasingly preferred a smaller number of what he called “real people.” Of an
obdurate stubbornness, he was both easily bored and easily pleased. He was, really, a simple man. Gabrielle often met him at one of his various country estates, where she showed considerable prowess at hunting, fishing and entertaining the duke’s friends. His Scottish estate, Reay Forest, “a wild tract of eight hundred square miles” in the Highlands, included one of the most famous salmon rivers and some of the best deer-stalking country in Scotland. It was from here, in October 1927, that Winston Churchill wrote to his wife, Clementine:Here I am in the North Pole! Last night the fishing was unexpectedly vy good . . . Coco is here in place of Violet [the duchess]. She fishes from morn till night, & in two months has killed 50 salmon. She is vy agreeable—really a gt & strong being fit to rule a man or an Empire. Bennie vy well & I think extremely happy to be mated with an equal—her ability balancing his power. We are only three on the river.6
Gabrielle also traveled frequently to the Landes, to Bend’Or’s other favored spot, Mimizan, in southwest France, where they hunted wild boar. Both the estate in Scotland and Mimizan were difficult to reach by road, so the duke often used his second huge yacht, the Cutty Sark, built originally as a reserve destroyer, as his mode of travel from Scotland to France. This got him there with great speed. But while Gabrielle’s fearlessness as a sailor was another mark in her favor in Bend’Or’s eyes, in truth, she was bored by the sea. Nonetheless, she was often to be found accompanying him in his restless shuttling from one property to another. Aside from Scotland and the Landes, other houses included a château near Deauville and the town house in London. Gabrielle grew accustomed to the ritual of Westminster train travel, when two Pullman cars and four baggage cars were taken up for the luggage and the dogs.