Eventually, his obsession with Misia burnt itself out, and he fell in love with another woman, a bisexual demimondaine-turned-actress named Genevieve Lantelme, who had embarked upon her career in her mother’s brothel at the age of 14. Edwards and Misia were divorced in February 1909, four years after their wedding; he promptly married his quarrelsome, cocaine-snorting mistress, who drowned in the Rhine in 1911 after falling overboard (some say she was pushed) from Edwards’ yacht. He died of influenza in 1914, by which time Misia was already involved with Jose-Maria Sert, another larger-than-life figure, whose ambitions were evident in the gigantic, elephantine frescos and Rococo murals that he made for the ballroom of the Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York, and subsequently for the Rockefeller Center.
This, then, was the couple that Coco met in 1917, and after Capel’s death, she was swept further into their tempestuous emotional life. ‘Misia has been my only woman friend,’ recalled Chanel to Paul Morand 30 years later, in an occasionally sour reminiscence that seems to suggest something other than friendship. Thus she ascribed the catalyst for their relationship – or rather, for Misia’s intensifying attachment to her – as being the death of Boy Capel: ‘I have seen her appear at the moment of my greatest grieving; other people’s grief lures her, just as certain fragrances lure the bee.’
Chanel professed herself to be unimpressed by Misia. To others, she was the Divine Misia, but apparently not to Chanel. ‘We only like people because of their failings,’ she said to Morand. ‘Misia gave me ample and countless reasons for liking her.’ Chanel then proceeded to eviscerate her friend, at some length and with apparent relish. ‘Misia is to Paris what the goddess Kali is to the Hindu pantheon. She is simultaneously the goddess of destruction and of creation. She kills and scatters her germs, without realising … She is like the St Bernard who brings you back to shore with your head under water.’ Clearly, Misia got under Chanel’s skin, although Chanel preferred to see herself as tough enough to resist penetration, and Misia as a parasite that could not gain entry. ‘She was never able to find the chink in the armour, which nevertheless exists. For a quarter-of-a-century, the worm has made its way around the fruit without ever being able to get inside it.’
But before the rivalry, there was sympathy and affection. As Chanel (somewhat grudgingly) admitted to Morand, she turned to Misia and Sert (nicknamed Jojo by Misia) after Capel’s death, for they ‘were moved to see a young woman weeping her heart out in grief … So began a close relationship which would last until Sert’s death, with all the ripples that a clash of characters as entrenched as ours can stir up.’ Such was the intensity that after the Serts’ wedding in August 1920, they took Chanel with them on their honeymoon to Italy; if not a sexual ménage-à-trois, it nevertheless seemed to enthral all of them.
In her subsequent description of the episode to Paul Morand, some of this mutual bewitchment emerges, as well as the strangeness (and occasional estrangement). Both women were captivated by Sert; indeed, Misia had fallen in love with him on a previous trip to Italy, where by day he had brought alive for her the paintings of Caravaggio and Tintoretto, and by night had seduced her with more conversation, as well as by other means. When Sert talked to Misia, as she later recalled in her memoir, his words were ‘punctuated by hands so eloquent that I was hypnotised by his thumbs, which turned into the air like question marks – thumbs that were animated, rough, ferocious, inquisitorial, caressing and domineering: the thumbs of an artist and, at the same time, a conqueror.’
Chanel gave an equally visceral description of Sert to Paul Morand, but her fascination was tinged with disgust: ‘This huge, hairy monkey, with his tinted beard, his humped back … loved everything colossal. He slept in black pyjamas, never washed, and, even naked, looked as though he was wearing a fur coat, so hirsute was he … He had hair everywhere, except on his head.’ Nevertheless, something of his extraordinary physicality appealed to her, as did his erudition; Sert, she said, ‘guided me through museums like a faun through a familiar forest’. He was ‘the ideal travelling companion’, she continued, ‘always good humoured’, leading Misia and Chanel on rambling expeditions across Italy ‘in search of some osteria where you could eat birds rolled in vine leaves’. When they got lost, he bought a pig and roasted it by the side of the road; and although both Misia and Chanel ate very little, ‘Sert, who was lavish by nature, ordered rare wines, and meals that made our table look like a painting by Veronese or Parmigiano.’ If Chanel told him not to order any more food, as she could not – would not – eat it, he replied, ‘I shall order another three zabagliones with maraschino cherries! Whether you want it or not!’
And yet for all his life-loving bonhomie, Chanel was aware of something macabre about Sert; which may have been part of what enchanted her, as it did Misia. Both women told different versions of a story about Sert and a stork: Misia declared that he had seen a stork die of hunger in front of a mound of food because its beak had been sawn off; Chanel passed on Cocteau’s gossip that it was Sert himself who had cut off the stork’s beak. Neither of them appear to have made the association with the stork as mythic emblem of fertility, the white bird that brings a newborn baby to earth; or as a Christian symbol of the Annunciation, the revelation to Mary that she would conceive a child who would be born the Son of God. But the mutilated stork – which occasionally turned into a swan in Chanel’s memory – seemed to be in some sense present in the minds of these two childless women. Not that they alluded to their childlessness on the honeymoon with Sert. Instead, they listened to him talk about the beauty of the dead, and the glamour of decay. When they first arrived in Rome, at night, weary from the journey, Sert coaxed Chanel and Misia out on a tour of the city by moonlight. At the Coliseum, he conjured up for them the parties that might still take place there amidst the ruins, with balloons painted gold, floating light in the darkness. A quarter of a century later, Chanel told Morand that she would never forget ‘the wonderful things’ he said to her in his beguiling Spanish accent, turning French into a language all his own: ‘Architecture is the skeleton of the city. Everything is in the skeleton, Madmachelle; a face without bones doesn’t last: you, for example, Madmachelle, you would make a very beautiful corpse.’
But Chanel also recognised his capacity for cruelty, and his art left her confused and alienated: ‘those swollen muscles, those demented contortions of figures’. In retrospect, Sert seemed to her as grotesque as his paintings, yet still compelling: ‘an enormous gnome who, inside his hump, like a magic sack, carried gold as well as rubbish, extremely poor taste and exquisite judgement, the priceless and the disgusting, diamonds and crap, kindness and sadism And it was Sert – the man who cut off a stork’s beak – along with Misia, ‘a parasite of the heart’, who were to rescue Chanel from her consuming grief over Boy Capel. On that strange honeymoon trip to Italy – the Serts’ nuptial celebrations, when Chanel was still in funereal mourning for Capel – she found herself in a church. ‘One day I went to ask St Anthony of Padua to help me to stop mourning,’ she told Paul Morand.
‘I can still see myself in the church, before the statue of the saint, to the left, among the fine sarcophagi of Venetian admirals. A man in front of me was resting his forehead against the stone slab; 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. I’m a wretch, I told myself; how shameful! How could I dare compare my sorrow of a lost child, for whom life has scarcely begun, with someone in this distress? An energy immediately flowed through me. I took new heart and decided to live.’
Her allusive reference to a lost child might seem to have no place in the triangle of Misia and Sert and Chanel; although she often referred to herself as a child in her narrative to Morand – a naive girl with Etienne Balsan and Boy Capel, too young to know what she was doing. She still had an air of youthfulness, as the embodiment of the chic garçonne look that was the prevailing fashion of the time. Vogu
e acclaimed Chanel as possessing ‘the secret of eternal youth’; yet in 1920, on her journey to Italy, she turned 37; a birthday that she may or may not have acknowledged, for she had already obscured the year of her birth. Capel was dead, and her nephew, who had almost – but not quite – come to represent their son, was far away, being educated at boarding school as an English gentleman. (As for Capel’s own daughters: Diana Capel had returned to England with their little girl, Ann, before giving birth to his second and posthumous baby, in June 1920, just a few weeks before Chanel went on honeymoon with Misia.) But if Chanel had claimed the role as lost child, she nevertheless behaved with adult guile.
By then, Chanel was already becoming entangled in a power struggle with Misia – not for Misia’s husband, but to supplant her in some other, less clear-cut way. It was in the course of that summer in Italy that Chanel became a silent witness to Misia’s intense friendship with Diaghilev; and in Venice that she listened to their discussions about how he was to raise enough money to revive Le Sacre du printemps, the ballet that had caused uproar in Paris when it was first performed in 1913. Money, or the lack of it, was always an issue for Diaghilev, and therefore for his creation, the Ballets Russes, which he loved as dearly, and ferociously, as if it were his only child (although if it were, then his impulses were also incestuous, given his passionate relationships with a sequence of the ballet’s leading men, from Nijinsky to Serge Lifar). Perhaps Chanel felt excluded at first; certainly, there is a hint of jealousy in her description to Paul Morand of Misia’s relationship with Diaghilev: ‘Misia never left Diaghilev’s side; between them it was one of those whispered, doting relationships, spiteful, affectionate, riddled with snares …’
The snares were evident to Chanel, possibly because she had set at least one of them. After she returned to Paris from Italy, she made an unannounced visit to Diaghilev and told him that she was prepared to help him finance a revival of Le Sacre du printemps, on the condition that he did not mention this to anyone. Given the closeness of his relationship with Misia, one might assume that Chanel could not have expected Diaghilev to remain silent; and yet, in asking him to keep this secret in return for the 300,000 francs he desperately needed from her, she was creating a bond between them. Her motives may have been purely artistic; certainly she told Paul Morand that while bankrolling Diaghilev, she preferred not to take any credit in return. ‘I did not prevent Diaghilev’s ballets from collapsing, as people have said,’ she remarked to Morand. ‘I had never seen Le Sacre du printemps before 1914. Serge spoke about it as if it had caused a scandal and been a great historical moment. I wanted to hear it and to offer to subsidise it. I don’t regret the 300,000 francs that it cost me.’
One wonders what it cost Misia to discover that her protégée had pre-empted her; the younger woman going behind her back, straight to the great Diaghilev, and thereby becoming a patron, if not quite a muse. An even clearer signal of Chanel’s arrival in the world of avant-garde art came in 1922, when Jean Cocteau asked her to design the costumes for his stage adaptation of Antigone. The production opened in Paris at the fashionably experimental Theatre de l’Atelier in December 1922, with sets by Picasso (a vast blue seaside sky and white Greek columns); music composed by Arthur Honegger; and costumes by Chanel, ‘because she is the greatest couturière of our age,’ according to Cocteau, ‘and it is impossible to imagine the daughters of Oedipus poorly dressed.’ Vogue agreed: the February 1923 issue of the American and French editions of the magazine ran extensive coverage of her designs under the headline ‘Chanel Goes Greek While Remaining French’, and praised her sensitive approach. Antigone’s ‘heavy white wool robe … is exactly the robe we see on Delphic vases; it is a beautiful recreation of something archaic that has been intelligently illuminated.’
Chanel’s position as a participant in art, rather than simply a patron, was further consolidated when she designed the costumes for the Ballets Russes production of Le Train bleu in 1924, working alongside Picasso, who created the stage curtain and programme. It was at this crucial point that Misia, whether motivated by real concern or mounting envy, declared that she must protect Chanel from Picasso – as if his magnetism needed her intervention – which caused Chanel such irritation that she was still complaining about it over 20 years later to Paul Morand. ‘I had no need of being protected from anyone except from Misia. For where Misia has once loved, the grass doesn’t grow any more.’
Thus Chanel’s relationship with Misia grew murkier, overshadowed by her suspicion that Misia was always scheming; or as she said to Morand, ‘sniffing some dark intrigue’. (It was to Morand, too, that she quoted the musician Erik Satie’s observation about Misia: ‘Here comes the cat, let’s hide our birds …’)
Into this potent, unsettling liaison came a poet: Pierre Reverdy, a man as charismatic as Diaghilev, as close to the heart of the avant-garde as Picasso; and even more passionately committed to the art of Modernism than Misia or Chanel. Later, he wrote, ‘I pity those who, having lived through that marvellous period, failed to participate in it, sharing its often disheartening and painful trials, its incomparably powerful emotions, its spiritual felicity. I doubt that there has ever been so much blue sky or sun in the entire history of art, or so much responsibility heroically assumed.’ Six years younger than Chanel, Reverdy was an ardent advocate of the idea of the artist as mythic hero; he was sensitive, mystic, troubled, impoverished, and married, to a seamstress named Henriette with whom he shared a garret in Montmartre. Misia discovered him first, just as she had discovered so many talented artists, buying his self-published books of poetry (the binding hand-sewn by his devoted wife) when no one else was interested; then helping to finance his short-lived yet influential journal, Nord-Sud, which Reverdy had founded in 1917 alongside his fellow writers Max Jacob and Guillaume Apollinaire. It was named after the Métro line that ran between Montmartre and Montparnasse, the two centres of bohemian Paris where Reverdy’s friends and peers were at the forefront of Surrealism, Cubism and Dadaism; and with Reverdy as editor, Nord-Sud led the way in publishing the early works of Louis Aragon and André Breton, with illustrations by Fernand Léger, Georges Braque, Juan Gris and André Derain.
Reverdy’s companions also included Picasso, who illustrated a book of his poems and drew a portrait of him in 1921, hair cut short, tie neatly knotted; the apparent antithesis of bohemian Paris, yet a fellow inhabitant of the Montmartre tenement where Picasso, Gris and Modigliani lived and painted, ‘with no support other than their own keenness and daring’, according to Reverdy. In fact, Misia did all she could to sustain them, and was swift to introduce the young poet into her salon, where he watched the rich and great at play. Lobster was served on silver platters by a white-suited Polish butler, while Misia’s blue macaw shrieked amidst the barbed chatter of the guests. ‘Life in society is one huge adventure in piracy and cannot be successful without a great deal of conniving,’ observed Reverdy, the son of a Languedoc wine-grower and grandson of a woodcarver and stonemason; a man who saw himself as separate to Misia’s world of chic Parisian society, and yet found himself drawn into it. He was, he said, ‘the one who only came to see, not to be seen’, but Misia liked what she saw in him: his dark hair and darker eyes, and something else, beneath his skin, which she described as ‘the radiant beauty that never dies’.
Reverdy responded to Misia with more than simply gratitude for her patronage: he respected her as a literary judge of his work, and was also sympathetic to her sorrows, as well as her passions. When she wrote to him praising his poetry, he replied, ‘I am happy that it moved you and that the life from which it springs and the sincerity which – in the absence of talent – has given it birth should have found an echo in the life and in the sincerity which are yours … From your letter I see that your life, however blessed with pockets of light, is not without its dark colours and layers of bitterness.’
It was Misia who introduced Reverdy to Chanel after the death of Boy Capel; possibly as a diversionary tactic of s
ome kind, although as was often the case, her precise motives remained unfathomable. But Reverdy seemed to have already fallen for Misia, his wife notwithstanding. ‘I love you so much, I think of you with so much tenderness,’ he declared in an undated letter to Misia, written while he was on a retreat from Paris, in the Benedictine abbey of Solesmes in Normandy. ‘You cannot imagine how much or in what way. Sometimes one of your phrases, a word you have spoken to me, strikes my heart, and then this sweetness is mixed with the bitterness of not being able to embrace you, to put my hand on yours, of not being able to see you.’
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