Coco Chanel

by Justine Picardie

  ‘I don’t like the family,’ she told Delay, in one of a series of revelatory, rambling conversations in her final decade. ‘You’re born in it, not of it. I don’t know anything more terrifying than the family’ And so she circled around and about it, telling and retelling the narrative of her youth, remaking history just as she remade the sleeves of a jacket, unfastening its seams and cutting its threads, and then sewing it back together again. ‘Childhood – you speak of it when you’re very tired, because it’s a time when you had hopes, expectations. I remember my childhood by heart.’

  If Chanel’s memory did survive intact, she nevertheless obscured her past from others, reshaping its heartaches, smoothing away the rough edges. Even her birth certificate is misleading – her father’s surname, and hers, were misspelt due to a clerical error as Chasnel. But she could not keep all the details hidden: her mother’s maiden name was Eugénie Jeanne Dévolles, and despite attempts by Chanel in later life to erase the date, the official record shows that her mother gave birth to Gabrielle on 19th August 1883 in the poorhouse in Saumur, a market town on the river Loire. Eugénie (known as Jeanne) was 20, Henri-Albert (known as Albert) was 28, and listed as a marchand, or merchant, on Gabrielle’s birth certificate. They were not yet married but already had one daughter, Julia, born less than a year previously, on 11th September 1882.

  ‘I was born on a journey’ Chanel told an American reporter in answer to his question about the exact location of her birthplace. Although this was an evasion – she was born in a hospice for the poor, run by an order of nuns, the Sisters of Providence – her parents were generally on the move, itinerant market traders selling buttons and bonnets, aprons and overalls, travelling between towns, just as her paternal grandparents had done. Gabrielle’s father was the son of a peddler, and like her, he had been born in a poorhouse (in Nîmes in 1856); his surname had also been misspelt on his birth certificate, but on this occasion as Henri-Albert Charnet. The mistake was not corrected in official records until over two decades later, in 1878, when a court decree stated that Charnet be replaced on the certificate by Chanel, ‘which is the true name’.

  ‘My father was not there,’ she explained to another journalist, Marcel Haedrich (editor-in-chief of Marie-Claire, and a man who had spent enough time with Chanel to regard himself as her friend, drawing on his conversations with her in a biography he wrote soon after her death). ‘That poor woman, my mother, had to go looking for him. It’s a sad story, and very boring – I’ve heard it so many times.’

  Thus she dismissed the beginning of her story, and never told it with any accuracy herself; never acknowledging that the truth was far from boring, but too troubling to reveal. Gabrielle’s father was not present at her birth, setting a pattern that was to be repeated thereafter. A man who often appeared to be on the run from his family, he had already vanished when Jeanne became pregnant with their first child, and refused to marry her when he was finally tracked down, a month before she gave birth to their daughter Julia. Consequently, both the girls were born illegitimate; it was not until Gabrielle was 15 months old that her parents eventually married, in November 1884. Soon afterwards, her mother was pregnant again, and on the move through the Auvergne in south-central France, an isolated region where Jeanne had been born into a peasant family in the village of Courpière. She would have found little refuge there: both Jeanne’s parents were dead by the time she had met her elusive future husband, and although her brother had done his best to protect her interests when she fell pregnant, her illegitimate babies did nothing to soften the weight of local disapproval. A boy, christened Alphonse, was born in 1885; another daughter, Antoinette, in 1887; a son, Lucien, in 1889; and the final baby, Augustin, who died in infancy, in 1891.

  Chanel rarely talked about the circumstances of her birth, but she did occasionally mention a train journey that her mother had undertaken just beforehand, in search of the elusive Albert. ‘What with the clothes of that time,’ she remarked to Haedrich with her customary, circuitous vagueness, ‘I suppose no one could see that she was about to have a baby. Some people helped her – they were very kind: they took her into their home and sent for a doctor. My mother didn’t want to stay there.

  ‘“You can get another train tomorrow,” the people said, to soothe her. “You’ll find your husband tomorrow.” But the doctor realized that my mother wasn’t ill at all. “She’s about to have a baby,” he said. At that point the people who had been so nice to her were furious. They wanted to throw her out. The doctor insisted that they take care of her. They took her to a hospital, where I was born. One of the hospital nuns was my godmother.’

  The name of this nun was Gabrielle Bonheur, according to Chanel, ‘so I was baptized Gabrielle Bonheur Chanel. I knew nothing of this for a long time. There was never any occasion to check my baptismal certificate. During the war I sent for all my documents because one was always afraid of the worst…’ In fact, the name Bonheur does not appear on her baptismal certificate, but perhaps Gabrielle felt the right to make it her own in later life; to lay claim to its meaning, which is happiness.

  In yet another version of her birth, told to a different friend, André-Louis Dubois, Gabrielle mentioned a train again, suggesting that her mother went into labour while travelling on the railway. ‘She talked constantly about trains, sometimes even claiming to have been born on a train,’ said Dubois, remembering Chanel to a French journalist soon after her death. ‘Why this obsession with trains?’ One possible answer is that she had an uncle who was a railway employee, but even so, trains seemed to have a deeper significance for Chanel than that; as if they were a connection to a past that was always on the move, yet ran along fixed lines, to a destination of her own choosing.

  Whatever her association with train travel, she was also a child of the poorhouse, plain Gabrielle Chasnel. And Gabrielle she stayed throughout her childhood – Coco was a creation that came later – although she invented a story that is revealing in its untruths: ‘My father used to call me “Little Coco” until something better should come along,’ she told Haedrich. ‘He didn’t like [the name] “Gabrielle” at all; it hadn’t been his choice. And he was right. Soon the “Little” drifted away and I was simply Coco.’ It may be that her father was complaining that he didn’t like Gabrielle herself; that he had not chosen to have children; for soon he left them, discontented with marriage and fatherhood, always on the lookout for something better.

  At times, Gabrielle declared Coco to be an ‘awful’ name; and yet she was proud of its recognition throughout the world, evidence of her indisputable presence, despite the lack of acknowledgement or recognition by her father. But still it was a cipher, a name that her father had never known, even though she declared otherwise. ‘If anyone had told me before the war that I’d be Coco Chanel to the whole world, I’d have laughed,’ she said to Haedrich. ‘Mademoiselle Chanel had four thousand employees and the richest man in England loved her. And now I’m Coco Chanel! Nevertheless, it isn’t my name … People stop me in the street: “Are you really Coco Chanel?” When I give autographs, I write “Coco Chanel”. On a train to Lausanne a couple of weeks ago, the whole carriage paraded past me. In my own premises I’m called “Mademoiselle”; that goes without saying. I certainly don’t want to be called Coco in the House of Chanel.’ (These seemingly disconnected sentences are as Haedrich transcribed them; the fleeting references to her name and the train exactly as he recorded them.)

  In truth, no one knew for certain what name Gabrielle answered to in childhood, nor where exactly Coco came from. In old age, Chanel told Claude Delay that her father spoke English – ‘that was considered something diabolical in the provinces’ – which seems highly unlikely, but it is possible that the story formed a link in her mind with the English-speaking men that she loved in adulthood (Boy Capel and the Duke of Westminster, both of whom were to prove unfaithful to her). She also told Delay that her father gave her a present when he returned from one of his numerous trips away: a p
enholder made of a knucklebone, with Notre-Dame depicted on one side, and the Eiffel Tower on the other; and that she had dug a hole for this re-tooled bone in a cemetery, and buried the gift, as an offering to the dead.

  If Chanel’s own account is to be believed, by the age of six she was spending as much time as possible in a graveyard. ‘Every child has a special place, where he or she likes to hide, play and dream,’ she said to Paul Morand (who set down her memories in his book, L’Allure de Chanel). ‘Mine was an Auvergne cemetery. I knew no one there, not even the dead.’ And yet the dead seemed to become alive for her there, although they remained as silent as their graves. ‘I was the queen of this secret garden. I loved its subterranean dwellers. “The dead are not dead as long as we think of them,” I would tell myself.’

  She became attached to two unnamed tombstones, decorating them with wildflowers – poppies and daisies and cornflowers – bringing her rag dolls to the cemetery; her favourite dolls, because she had made them for herself. ‘I wanted to be sure that I was loved,’ she told Morand, ‘but I lived with people who showed no pity. I like talking to myself and I don’t listen to what I’m told: this is probably due to the fact that the first people to whom I opened my heart were the dead.’

  Her mother figures only as a shadowy invalid in Gabrielle’s memories; though there are a few splashes of crimson that stain the blank pages within Chanel’s shifting narratives – her stories of the blood that a sick woman coughed onto white handkerchiefs, and an interior which bears some resemblance to the sinister red room where Jane Eyre was incarcerated as a child. Chanel, in later life, was a fan of the Brontës, returning repeatedly to Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights (stories of near incestuous passion, of locked doors and unhinged minds). But her description of the red room is also reminiscent of another nineteenth-century novel, The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, in which a woman goes mad after the birth of her child, and peels the paper from the walls of the room that imprisons her. In Chanel’s story (as told to Paul Morand), the wallpaper was red. She was five, and her mother already very ill, when she was taken with her two sisters to stay at the home of an elderly uncle. ‘We were shut away in a room covered in red wallpaper. To begin with, we were very well-behaved; then we noticed that the red wallpaper was very damp and could be peeled off from the walls.’ The girls started by peeling small pieces, then climbed onto chairs, and stripped the entire room down to its bare pink plaster: ‘the pleasure was sublime!’ When their mother came into the room, she was silent, saying nothing to her daughters, simply contemplating the disaster, and weeping without making any sound.

  Chanel was to claim that her mother died of tuberculosis, which was not necessarily an accurate diagnosis of what killed Jeanne; poverty, pregnancy and pneumonia were as likely to blame. In her account to Delay (subsequently published in Chanel solitaire), the family lived in a large enough house for the children to be kept in isolation from their sick mother. In fact, they were crowded with her into one room in the market town of Brive-la-Gaillarde, while their father abandoned them for the road. But the story Chanel told Delay had her father present, kissing her sister Julia and her on the head as they were eating lunch (no mention was made of the other siblings). ‘He hated the smell of hair and always asked how long it was since we’d had ours washed.’ Who knows how often the Chanel children were able to wash their hair, while their mother lay sick in bed, and their father was gone; but in Chanel’s memory, she would answer to her father that her hair was clean, washed ‘three days ago, with yellow soap’.

  She also imagined herself as her father’s favourite. ‘I didn’t so much love as want to be loved,’ she told Delay. ‘So I loved my father because he preferred me to my sister. I couldn’t have borne for him to feel the same about us both.’ But she also claimed to have had a rival, a servant who she believed was poisoning her. ‘I knew she slept with my father – that is, I didn’t know, I didn’t understand anything about that sort of thing, but I guessed, and I used to frighten her by saying I’d tell my mother.’ Once upon a time, in this dark fairytale, her parents went away together, and Gabrielle and her sister set out in search of them, to escape from the evil servant. When they finally reached their parents, Gabrielle fell asleep on her father’s shoulder, and the next day he bought her a blue dress.

  In another of her confessions to Delay (narratives in which the truth may or may not be unravelled from the fictions), Chanel said that as a child she was frightened of ghosts and what lay hidden beneath the bed in the darkness. Gabrielle’s graveyard offerings were not enough to protect her, and in the night the dead seemed more sinister than they did in her daylight games at the cemetery. But in the story as she told it – one of a series that could have been designed more for herself than for her listener – her father came to her; he was there to soothe her fears. ‘Don’t be frightened,’ he said to her, as every good father should. ‘No one is going to hurt you.’ Even so, she was still terrified of a man under her bed, throwing wheat at her. ‘But wheat is very good,’ her father said, taking her into his arms. Ever since then, she explained to Delay, she had always kept a bunch of wheat close to her: in her bedroom at the Ritz, and in each room of her apartment in Rue Cambon.

  Yet all the goodness of the wheat could not keep her mother from dying. Gabrielle maintained that she was 6 years old at the time; in reality, she was 11. Her father was absent again, travelling away from home, when Jeanne was found dead in her bed in a freezing room in Brive, on a bitterly cold February morning in 1895. History does not relate if Gabrielle watched her mother die, or for how long she and her siblings remained alone with the corpse; and Mademoiselle Chanel never revealed the truth, either.

  The stairs of Aubazine Abbey that lead up to the orphanage where Chanel was abandoned at 11.

  IN THE SHADOW OF THE CROSS

  Brive-la-Gaillarde is a traditional railway town, a junction on the main line from Paris to Toulouse, occupying a central position in the vast heartland of France; as good a starting point as any for a pilgrim in search of Chanel. Take the road eastwards from the station; it runs through the centre of the town, then follows the curves of the river across a flat plain, towards forested mountains in the distance. After a few miles there is a narrow turning off the main road, climbing in serpentine twists, apparently coiling in on itself up the steep ascent. But at last it leads to Aubazine, a medieval village dominated by the dark bulk of a twelfth-century Cistercian monastery and abbey, founded by St Etienne in 1135.

  This is the place to which Gabrielle’s father drove her in a cart from Brive, along with her two sisters, Julia and Antoinette, soon after the death of their mother. The boys were left elsewhere – deposited with a peasant family; foundlings used as unpaid labour – and the three girls were handed over to the nuns who ran an orphanage within the abbey walls, the sisters of the Congregation of the Sacred Heart of Mary. The children’s father promptly disappeared. Gabrielle later claimed he had gone to America in search of a fortune in a promised land, the New World, far away from the ascetic cloisters where he had abandoned his daughters. Not that Gabrielle ever described it as abandonment; nor did she use the word ‘orphanage’. Instead, she told a number of embroidered stories about being left with her ‘aunts’, while her sister (she was vague about which one) was sent to a convent. There were two ‘aunts’ in her various narratives: black-clad, cold-eyed, stern and always nameless. ‘Actually, they weren’t my aunts, but my mother’s first cousins,’ she once remarked to Marcel Haedrich, adding that she lived with them in ‘the remotest corner of Auvergne. My aunts were good people, but absolutely without tenderness. I was not loved in their house. I got no affection. Children suffer from such things.’

  Then, in a longer outburst, she gave away something of the misery she had felt, in a denial that also serves as a kind of confession: ‘People say I’m an Auvergnate. There’s nothing of the Auvergnate in me – nothing, nothing. My mother was one. In that part of the world, though, I was thoroughly
unhappy. I fed on sorrow and horror. I wanted to kill myself I don’t know how many times. “That poor Jeanne” -I couldn’t stand hearing my mother talked about in that way anymore. Like all children, I listened at closed doors. I learned that my father had ruined my mother – “poor Jeanne”. All the same, she’d married the man she loved. And having to hear people call me an orphan! They felt sorry for me. I had nothing to be pitied for-I had a father. All this was humiliating. I realized no one loved me and I was being kept out of charity. There were visitors – plenty of visitors. I heard the questions put to my aunts: “Does the little one’s father still send money?”’

  But there were no visits, and no money, and no stern aunts. Gabrielle spent seven years in the orphanage, until she was 18. Her father never returned to see her or her siblings, although she created a version for Marcel Haedrich in which he did visit; but even in that fantasy he did not rescue her: ‘When my father came to visit, my aunts did themselves up for him. He had a great deal of charm, and he told many stories. “Don’t listen to my aunts,” I said to him. “I’m so unhappy-take me away…”’

  Like her father, Gabrielle told many stories, and she used them to protect his memory, identifying herself with him, rather than her sickly mother. It was as if she felt her father had been right to leave his wife and children, and sought to portray his flight as an act of youthful strength. In this version of her past, Gabrielle reinvented him as a far younger man – ‘not yet thirty’ – and the father of only two daughters, rather than a man approaching 40, who had cast off five children, along with a dead wife. ‘He’d made a new life,’ she said to Haedrich. ‘I understand that. He made a new family. His two daughters were in good hands. They were being brought up. He had more children. He was right. I would have done the same thing. No one under thirty could have coped with the situation. Imagine, a widower with two daughters! He really loved me. I represented the good days, fun, happiness …’