But whatever she chose to wear, she was also kept in her place. And for all the freedoms of Royallieu – a house where social conventions seemed not to apply; where courtesans and aristocrats drank champagne together, and men were free to enjoy more than one girl at a time – it was also a form of imprisonment. To Morand, Chanel described herself as having been a minor, below the age of consent; too young to be away from home, and desperately homesick. ‘I was constantly weeping,’ she said to Morand, and then gave him a curious blend of truth and falsehood about the lies that she had previously invented for Balsan. ‘I had told him lies about my miserable childhood. I had to disabuse him. I wept for an entire year. The only happy times were those I spent on horseback, in the forest. I learned to ride, for up until then I hadn’t the first idea about riding horses. I was never a horsewoman, but at that time I couldn’t even ride side-saddle.
The fairy tale was over. I was nothing but a lost child. I didn’t dare to write to anyone. MB was frightened of the police. His friends told him: “Coco is too young, send her back home.” MB would have been delighted to see me go, but I had no home any more.’
Thus she cast herself and Balsan as caught in a trap of their own making; but as she elaborated on her story to Morand, emphasising Balsan’s fear of the authorities, Chanel remade herself into a helpless girl with no control over her destiny (which may well be how she felt at the time), while also acknowledging the damage done by her lies (even as she told lies about her lying). ‘MB was afraid of the police, and I was afraid of the servants. I had lied to MB. I had kept my age a secret, telling him that I was nearly twenty: in actual fact I was sixteen.’ In actual fact, she was over 21 when she arrived at Royallieu, and she continued to live there well into her twenties.
But the biggest secret of all was whether or not Coco became pregnant during the course of her relationship with Etienne Balsan. Several of her friends believed that she did: some speculated that she had an abortion that left her infertile, others that she had the baby boy who she claimed was her nephew rather than her son. Balsan ended up in later life as a neighbour to Chanel’s nephew, Andre, and to Andre’s daughters, Gabrielle and Helene, and was certainly close to the family. Beyond that, it is impossible to establish the truth of the rumours. Chanel told Delay that her sister Julia had married at 16, given birth to a son, and then killed herself because of her husband’s infidelity. But even if this were a veiled clue to a possible pregnancy of her own, the date would be as blurred as the rest of the dates that she shifted and erased. Julia was born in September 1882, and would therefore have been 22 when her son Andre was born in 1904; a year older than Gabrielle, who was by then already involved with Balsan. Nevertheless, the idea of being a frightened 16-year-old seems to have been in some sense real to Chanel, however unreliable her stories appear in retrospect. Hence her description to Morand of herself at 16, venturing out to the races at Compiègne while she was still living with Balsan (a man supposedly so scared of the authorities that he had to hide her away, like a timid Bluebeard, to keep her out of view of the police). ‘I wore a straw boater, set very low on the head, and a little country suit, and I followed events from the end of my lorgnette. I was convinced that no one was taking any notice of me, which shows how little I knew about life in the provinces. In reality, this ridiculous, badly dressed, shy little creature, with her three big plaits and a ribbon in her hair, intrigued everybody.’
Perhaps this was the consoling story that Coco told herself when it appeared that no one cared (not the police, nor her family, nor anyone else, for that matter): that she was intriguing, even when it seemed that she was never the centre of attention. At least Emilienne d’Alençon took a certain interest in Coco, while apparently unperturbed by her presence, if Chanel’s description of her to Claude Delay is to be believed. ‘Emilienne d’Alençon used to ask me, “Well, are you happy?” I answered, “I’m neither happy nor unhappy – I’m hiding. It’s like home here, only better.”’
But she was sufficiently unhappy to write to her aunt Adrienne – who was still the mistress of the Baron de Nexon, though not yet married to him – to ask her to send the money for a train fare. In telling this story to Delay, Chanel did not specify where the train might take her; but in any event, she claimed that Adrienne wrote back to say that Coco should not leave Royallieu: ‘Whatever you do keep out of the way or they’ll put you in a reformatory.’ Who were ‘they’, that could lock up a woman for bad behaviour? Except, of course, as Chanel reiterated to Delay, she was still a little girl; so young that she used to fall asleep at the table and weep, because she was up past her bedtime, and at her aunts’ house she would have been asleep long before. But in this version Bluebeard was transformed into a perfect gentleman: ‘“I’ll take you home,” said Balsan. “I’ll tell them that I’m bringing you back just as I found you and you’re still only a little girl.”’
The idea of herself as a little girl was to permeate the rest of Chanel’s life, and yet, as is evident in Truman Capote’s description of her in 1959, it was also suggestive of a particular blend of innocence and experience that was so profitably displayed in her own appearance, and upon which she went on to make her fortune in couture. Capote observed: ‘Chanel, a spare spruce sparrow voluble and vital as a woodpecker, once, mid-flight in one of her unstoppable monologues, said, referring to the very costly pauvre orphan appearance she has lo these last decades modelled: “Cut off my head, and I’m thirteen.” But her head has always remained attached, definitely she had it perfectly placed way back yonder when she was thirteen, or scarcely more, and a moneyed “kind gentleman”, the first of several grateful and well-wishing patrons, asked petite “Coco”, daughter of a Basque blacksmith who had taught her to help him shoe horses, which she preferred, black pearls or white?’
Capote’s portrait of Chanel was written just a year after Breakfast at Tiffany’s, his glittering depiction of the balancing act undertaken by a beautiful girl dependent on the patronage of rich men; and he was alert to the imaginative possibilities of modern fairy tales. But it would be unkind not to recognise the real pain that Chanel suffered, even as she distanced herself from the past in storytelling (for telling stories is, amongst other things, a way in which to imagine a happy-ever-after, and for the misunderstood to come to an understanding of their tribulations).
So there she was; poor little Coco (‘Qui qu’a vu Coco?’), imprisoned in another abbey, surrounded by the forest of Compiègne. The nuns’ regime had vanished, and in pride of place was a courtesan – the famous Emilienne, a former mistress of the king of Belgium, among others; a cocotte so highly prized that Leopold II had in turn introduced her to King Edward VII, to whom she allegedly declared that French aristocrats were the only men who knew how to make love to a woman. Emilienne had been heaped with diamonds and endearments; men had lost their hearts and their fortunes to her; although some had come up with a more practical arrangement, such as the eight members of the Jockey Club who had pooled their resources in order to procure her attention on a regular basis.
Coco was still the outsider looking in, the girl with no money and no father, just as she had been at school, with all the unease and uncertainty that such a position entailed. Even so, if her years in Aubazine had taught Gabrielle everything she knew about needlework, then her time in Royallieu gave her an equally thorough education in how to stitch the empty hours together, to make something of herself. She spent six years there – a period of apparent idleness, punctuated by fancy dress parties and horseriding; of lengthy boredom and occasional debauchery; of setting herself apart from the courtesans who came and went from Royallieu. But for all her efforts at distancing herself, she was intrigued by the beauties who entertained the men; along with Emilienne, there was another cocotte-turned-actress, Gabrielle Dorziat, a charming young singer named Marthe Davelli, and Suzanne Orlandi, the mistress of Balsan’s friend Baron Foy. Coco watched and waited; she saw the manner in which Emilienne ceased to be Balsan’s lover but remain
ed his friend. And Coco listened to Emilienne’s stories, as well as telling her own, taking heed of the woman who had come from nothing – the daughter of a Parisian concierge in Montmartre, who had made a teenage debut scantily clad in a circus act – and ended up with something more precious than her ample wealth. ‘The only serious person I met in those days was Emilienne d’Alençon,’ Chanel remarked to Haedrich; for Emilienne not only wrote the poetry to prove it but was turned into prose by Marcel Proust. (She was said to have inspired the writer’s portrait of Rachel in A la recherche du temps perdu, a demimondaine who ensnares the heart and jewels of the young aristocrat, Robert de Saint-Loup).
After a time, Coco realised that she preferred the courtesans to the sneering society women. At least Emilienne was clean, she said; unlike the supposedly respectable wives and mothers, who smelled dirty to Coco. ‘I thought the cocottes were ravishing with their hats that were too big and their heavy makeup,’ she observed to Haedrich. ‘They were so appetising!’ Not that she wanted to dress like them – all her efforts went into creating herself as a gamine, choosing sober androgyny over their crinolines and whalebone corsets, their feathers and lace and chinchilla. She wore softly knotted schoolboy ties, and simple white shirts with Peter Pan collars; and little straw boaters, as plain as a convent uniform.
But her taste for romance did not leave her, and neither did her sense of loss. Perhaps this is why she responded with such heightened emotion to Alexandre Dumas’s novel La Dame aux camélias, and its stage version starring Sarah Bernhardt as Marguerite Gautier, a courtesan who nevertheless remained the embodiment of purity, a tragic lover who dies of consumption, having stayed untainted by the vice all around. ‘La Dame aux camélias was my life, all the trashy novels I’d fed on,’ she said to Delay, who recognised the link between Marguerite and Chanel’s story of her mother’s deathbed – the drops of red blood coughed onto white sheets and a snowy handkerchief. But in this particular narrative, Chanel placed herself centre-stage, as a provincial 13-year-old on a trip to the theatre in Paris with her aunts. She sobbed her way through the entire performance of La Dame aux camélias, she told Delay; and her grief was so noisy that the rest of the audience complained. Nevertheless, she was dressed for the part that she had assigned herself: ‘I was in black. It looked nice, with my white collar. In the provinces, you wear your mourning until it falls off you in pieces! People told my aunts I ought to have another dress. “But she’s an orphan,” they said. “When she’s 16 we’ll see.”’
On other occasions, however, Chanel said that she was already living at Royallieu when she went to see La Dame aux camélias, accompanying her aunt Adrienne and the Baron de Nexon; and her account veered between disdain and distress: either she wept so loudly that the rest of the audience hissed at her, or she declared her disgust for Bernhardt as grotesque, like ‘an old clown’. Something of that abhorrence and fascination remained: when Sarah Bernhardt died, Chanel joined the lines of other sightseers, then found herself troubled by the difference between the staged beauty of Marguerite’s death in La Dame aux camélias and the grim reality of the cadaver before her. ‘It was terrible,’ she told Delay, ‘they were queuing up. Sarah was dead and all I saw was a poor little lifeless ruin with a scrap of tulle … I was pale as death. The sordidness of it all …’
In Delay’s sympathetic interpretation, the inconsistencies of Chanel’s response to La Dame aux camélias suggested ambivalence, rather than an aversion to the truth; not least because of her proximity to her mother’s deathbed, and the unavoidable sight of the pale corpse lying beside the children as they waited for their father to return. But if Chanel was haunted by the memory, she was also aware of its potency, an archetypal scene for others as well as herself.
Later, many years later, when Chanel had slipped away from her life as a kept girl, replacing its shadowy uncertainties with what looked like the security of a self-made woman, the white camellia would appear in her work: in fabric prints, or shaped into diamonds and pearls; embossed on buttons, preserved in corsages. And in her salon, they glittered as crystals from her chandelier, and were carved into her Coromandel screens. These replications were in some sense true to life, in that they had no scent – for the camellia is without fragrance, and therefore does not decompose from sweet-smelling purity to the odour of decay. It is, perhaps, the perfect symbol of death as portrayed on stage in its least brutal way; the death of a courtesan or an abandoned woman, tragic yet compelling for an audience; stripped of the horror of visceral pain and fear and animal smell.
After her mother died, Chanel told Delay, she had been instructed to kiss her dead body, to kiss the corpse on the lips. For ever afterwards, she was possessed of a very developed sense of smell, and was revolted by anything redolent of dirt. The courtesans smelled good, she said, but the society women were filthy. And Coco always kept herself clean.
THE DOUBLE C
His name was Arthur Capel, but his friends called him Boy, in an Edwardian era when English gentlemen were still able to celebrate their continuing freedoms long after they had turned from boys to men. Boy’s origins were swathed in romance, and he came to Paris amidst murmured speculation that he was connected in some mysterious way to the British aristocracy through the Capell family, who were descended from the Earls of Essex; or that he was the illegitimate son of a rich French father, possibly a Jewish financier. But there has never been any conclusive proof of either tale, and the more prosaic version is that he was exactly who he said he was: the son of Arthur and Bertha Capel, raised with two sisters in comfortable circumstances in a prosperous Catholic family whose money came from coalmines in the north of England. Born in 1881, educated at Beaumont (under the instruction of Jesuit priests) and Downside (a Catholic boarding school attached to a Benedictine abbey and monastery in Somerset), Capel subsequently went into the family business, expanding his father’s holdings with energetic determination.
But for all his Catholic education and hard-headed work ethic, Capel was also an accomplished playboy and polo player, sharing an enthusiasm for fast horses and pretty women with his friend Etienne Balsan. It was at Royallieu that Coco came across Capel, and there that a curious triangular relationship developed between Boy and Balsan and the girl who was mistress to no one. Nevertheless, what was in reality a lengthy and convoluted process became, in Chanel’s retelling of it, an instant and dramatic incident that began on a trip away from Royallieu. ‘MB took me to Pau,’ she told Paul Morand, and conjured up for him a vivid scene set against the blue sky and snow-capped Pyrenees: ‘the babbling mountain streams that flow down to the plains; the fields that are green in every season … the red coats in the rain, and the best foxhunting land in Europe …’
In this verdant landscape – the fertile territory of Chanel’s half-imaginary past – there was a fairy-tale castle with six towers, and galloping horses, and the sound of their hooves on cobblestones. And there, too, centre-stage in this glorious place, was Boy Capel. ‘In Pau I met an Englishman,’ she said to Morand. ‘We made each other’s acquaintance when we were out horse-trekking one day; we all lived on horseback.’ They drank wine together; it was ‘young, intoxicating and quite unusual’, and so was the Englishman. ‘The young man was handsome, very tanned and attractive. More than handsome, he was magnificent. I admired his nonchalance, and his green eyes. He rode bold and very powerful horses. I fell in love with him. I had never loved MB.’ Yet at first, she and Capel did not speak. ‘Not a word was exchanged between this Englishman and me. One day I heard he was leaving Pau.’ She asked him to tell her the time he was travelling to Paris; no other conversation was necessary. ‘The following day, I was at the station. I climbed onto the train.’
It was 1909, and Chanel was 26 by then, just under two years younger than Capel; though she told Claude Delay that Boy called her ‘my dear child’ when she declared that she was leaving Balsan for him. She held out the letter she had written to Balsan to explain her decision – ‘My dear Etienne, I shall
never be able to repay the kindness and comfort you’ve given me while I’ve been with you.’ Boy wouldn’t listen to her, wouldn’t allow her to leave, in this retelling of a story that Chanel often told (always a variation on a theme); but she followed him, and dashed onto the train with her suitcase. Three days later, Balsan arrived in Paris, having pursued her there from Pau; jealousy had made him realise that he loved her after all.
Boy Capel in the apartment in Boulevard Malesherbes.
This version of the love affair with Capel – Coco’s most romantic love story and a defining episode of her life – cast her as a girl who was not yet a woman. Indeed, she suggested that she was a virgin, and needed to consult a doctor in Paris before the love between a girl and Boy could be consummated. By then, she told Delay, Balsan had taken himself off to Argentina to mend his broken heart, and Capel had asked a doctor in Paris to take care of her. At this point, her narrative becomes unusually physical in its details, as if flesh and blood had overtaken whimsical romance. Boy was a man with a string of women, as well as polo ponies, and his mistresses would ask him when he was going to leave little Coco, but his reply was certain: ‘I’d rather cut my leg off.’
Coco Chanel Page 5