Coco Chanel

by Justine Picardie

  Despite his nervous anxiety, Stravinsky’s work appeared to flourish in Garches. During his time at Bel Respiro, he completed his Symphonies pour instruments a vent (originally commissioned as a memorial to Claude Debussy, who had died in 1918, and later regarded by admirers as a masterpiece of Twenties Modernism); and also composed a series based around the number five. If the Symphonies would become recognised as a significant piece of musical radicalism, notwithstanding its roots in a traditional Russian past, his simpler compositions for the piano, Les cinq doigts, were equally intriguing to those who suspected that Stravinsky was in love with the woman behind Chanel N°5. His memoir gives no clue as to whether there was a direct link. But it nevertheless offers some insight into the composer’s understanding of the appeal of simplicity, in ways that might have found a parallel with Chanel’s own manner of working, whereby her hands sought to form pleasingly unfussy designs. Stravinsky himself identified the unembellished quality that characterised Les cinq doigts: ‘In these eight pieces, which are very easy, the five fingers of the right hand, once on the keys, remain in the same place sometimes even for the whole length of the piece, while the left hand, which is destined to accompany the melody, executes a pattern, either harmonic or contrapuntal, of the utmost simplicity.’

  It would be too glib to suggest that their fingers were doing the talking; but nevertheless, gossip began to spread that Chanel and Stravinsky were having an affair, while his wife Catherine was ailing with consumption in an upstairs bedroom in Bel Respiro. There is no evidence that their flirtation was consummated at Garches, but whatever the circumstances, they were venturing onto territory as volcanic as Le Sacre du printemps, a scandal sufficiently enthralling to occupy popular imagination. The ballet’s explosive premiere in May 1913 had changed the musical landscape, not only because of Stravinsky’s revolutionary dissonant score and Nijinsky’s overtly sexual choreography, but also because of the audience’s response. Brawls had broken out in the aisles of the Paris theatre, while Diaghilev switched the lights on and off in a vain attempt to quieten the clamour, and Nijinsky stood in the wings, shouting out the beats to the dancers as the music was drowned out by catcalls and cheers. Debussy had witnessed the original performance, and described Le Sacre as ‘an extraordinary, ferocious thing’, and its composer as ‘a young savage who wears tumultuous ties and kisses ladies’ hands while treading on their feet. When he’s old, he’ll be unbearable.’

  Seven years later, when Chanel met Stravinsky, she appeared equally dismissive; or at least she was in her recollection of him to Paul Morand. ‘He was still not very cosmopolitan, and he was very Russian in his ways, with the look of a clerk in a Chekhov short story. A small moustache beneath a large rat-like nose. He was young and shy; he found me attractive.’ Stravinsky maintained his silence on the subject (although his second wife was to dismiss the idea that he and Chanel had had an affair); while Chanel claimed that she refused to respond to Stravinsky’s advances when he embarked upon a pursuit of her. Not that this prevented an ensuing drama, at least according to Chanel in her account of the story to Morand: ‘“You’re married, Igor,” I told him, “when Catherine, your wife, gets to know …”

  ‘And he, very Russian: “She knows I love you. To whom else, if not to her, could I confide something so important?”

  ‘Without being jealous, Misia began to spread gossip. She had sensed that something was happening without her knowing: “What are you doing? Where are you going? People tell me that Igor walks your dog, explain yourself!”’

  Chanel provided no further explanation of the dog-walking episode to Morand, nor to anyone else for that matter; and somewhat disappointingly Misia’s own memoir casts no more light on the affair, although she did refer to Chanel penetrating ‘the famous, carefully guarded game preserve’ that constituted smart Parisian society at the time (thanks to Misia’s introductions, of course). ‘Coco came to know Diaghilev at my house, as well as the whole group of artists that gravitated around the Ballets Russes. And they found in her a faithful, very generous friend. Stravinsky in particular fell desperately in love with her! Afterward she was to give him a house in Garches and, frequently, financial help too.’

  In fact, the house was never Stravinsky’s to keep, although it provided a refuge for him and his wife and children; just as it had done a few months previously in 1920 for the pregnant Diana Capel and her young daughter, not long after the death of her husband, Chanel’s lover, Boy Capel. In hindsight, a curious pattern seems to emerge, whereby Chanel created, and re-created, complex triangular relationships; far more intricate than her double C logo, even trickier than the choreographed steps of the Ballets Russes, but endlessly repeated, albeit with different components and shifting characters. In this particular version, as described to Morand, Chanel saw herself as betrayed by Misia, rather than being the betrayed lover, or the cause of a husband’s betrayal of his wife. The plot was labyrinthine, and shifted suddenly from dog-walking to divorce. ‘Misia feared catastrophe,’ Chanel told Morand, on the uncertain grounds ‘that Stravinsky might divorce in order to marry me’. At this point, she said, Jose-Maria Sert became involved, allegedly taking Stravinsky to one side and telling him that Boy Capel had entrusted Chanel to his care (an unlikely scenario, given that Capel had no reason to suspect that he would die young).

  The intrigue, according to Chanel, continued thus: while Sert was warning off Stravinsky, Misia acted as chorus and messenger: ‘Misia came back to me, stirring up the drama: “Stravinsky is in the room next door. He wants to know whether or not you will marry him. He is wringing his hands.”’

  After the hand-wringing and the room-hopping came the music; or so Chanel claimed to Morand. ‘Stravinsky came back,’ she said, although it was not clear where he was coming back from (the edge of despair, perhaps?). ‘He came back every day and taught me about music; the little I know about it, I owe to him. He talked to me about Wagner, about Beethoven, his bugbear, about Russia.’ Eventually, he talked to her about going to a different place. ‘“The Ballets [Russes] are leaving for Spain,” Stravinsky said to me. “Come with us.”’ Chanel’s reply was worthy of a romantic novel: ‘I will go and find you.’

  Instead, she promptly went to Monte Carlo instead, with Dmitri by her side, in her new Rolls Royce. ‘We set off,’ she told Morand. ‘Misia was watching. She immediately sent a telegram to Stravinsky, in Spain: “Coco is a little seamstress who prefers grand-dukes to artists.” Stravinsky almost exploded. Diaghilev sent me a telegram: “Don’t come, Stravinsky wants to kill you.”’

  Chanel was furious with Misia, who denied any involvement in the affair. ‘I fell out with Misia for weeks, following this treacherous telegram. She swore to me that she had sent no such thing. Once again, I forgave her. In any case, Misia turned the wheel of fate, she also turned its page; she intervened, and from that day forth Stravinsky and I never saw each other again.’

  Yet she continued to support him, and Misia acted as a go-between in this matter, as in so many others. Whatever the truth of Chanel’s version of events, by February 1921 Stravinsky had fallen in love with a ballet dancer who was to become his second wife, Vera de Bosset. The composer subsequently divided his time between Vera and his wife, Catherine – whose tuberculosis was worsening – until Catherine’s death in 1939 (a year after their eldest daughter had also died of TB). Notwithstanding the complications of this unhappy triangle – the dying wife, the guilty husband, the other woman – Chanel’s involvement remained essential, for her money was required to keep the show going. If she was late in a payment, the uneasy structure came close to cracking; hence Stravinsky’s anxious letter to Misia, written on 6th February 1933:

  ‘I’m dreadfully sorry always to be asking you for something or bothering you with my petty affairs, but you know Chanel has not sent us anything since the 1st and so we are without a radish to live on this month; therefore I ask you to be kind enough to mention it to her … I thank you in advance for all your kindness, which i
s so great that one easily gets into the habit of counting on it, and I embrace you thousands and thousands of times, very warmly …’

  Such was the intensity of the intrigue – and the convolutions of the plot – that work might have seemed impossible or irrelevant; but Chanel’s career continued, unabated, and by doing so, kept a great many others afloat. Indeed, her complex web of relationships with the various Russians – Stravinsky, Diaghilev, Dmitri – found a profitable means of expression in her burgeoning business. Having successfully bottled the essence of her romance with the Grand Duke in Cuir de Russie, the perfume she produced with Ernest Beaux in 1927, Chanel employed exiled Russian aristocrats as sales assistants and models at Rue Cambon; not necessarily as an act of charity, but as the living embodiment of the fashion and scent she was selling to her customers, who had followed her lead in embracing Slavic charm.

  For if Diaghilev had taught her anything, it was that there was an eager market for the romance of Russia, in which the lines between art and fashion and ballet and entertainment had been redrawn. Chanel looked, and Chanel saw: the designs by Picasso and Cocteau for the Ballets Russes, the leaps of imagination as great as those made on stage by Nijinksy. She had experienced the emotional potency of the Ballets Russes – hence her declaration to Claude Delay: ‘It was when I saw the Diaghilev ballet that I decided I was going to live in what I loved’ – but she also sensed its commercial potential. For whatever her impetuous feelings for Stravinsky or Dmitri, Chanel recognised something of her own pragmatism in Diaghilev’s work ethic. ‘From the day I first met him, until the day I closed his eyelids, I have never seen Serge take a rest,’ she said to Morand. And while the Parisian beau monde applauded the Ballets (‘all were in raptures about the essential colours and about harmonies of tones’), Chanel watched Diaghilev’s machinations behind the scenes. ‘He got straight down to business … he invented a Russia for abroad, and, naturally, abroad was taken in … Since everything in the theatre was only trompe l’oeil, false perspectives were necessary: the Russia of the Ballets Russes succeeded in the theatre precisely because it was built on fictional material.’

  Chanel grasped this, and then turned it into her own material; literally, by commissioning Dmitri’s older sister, Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna, to make embroidered fabric. Although they had been brought up under very different circumstances, they shared something in common. Both women had learned needlework from nuns in their childhood; both had lost their mothers (Maria’s had died just after giving birth to Dmitri); and Maria was raised by her aunt, Grand Duchess Elizabeth Feodorovna, a woman who combined day-to-day practicality with a certain emotional distance, in the manner of Chanel’s ‘aunts’, the nuns. (After the assassination of her husband, Elizabeth sold her jewels and luxurious possessions and became a nun, founding a convent in Moscow; she herself was murdered by the Bolsheviks in 1918 – a grotesque killing, whereby she was thrown down a mineshaft, then stoned and set on fire – and subsequently canonised by the Russian Orthodox Church).

  Maria – or Marie, as she referred to herself – had first met Chanel in the autumn of 1921 in Paris, where she was living in impoverished exile with her second husband, Prince Sergei Putiatin. Marie’s memoir, published in 1932, draws an unusually clear-sighted portrait of Chanel, cutting through the sulphurous clouds of gossip and scandal to see the woman at work. ‘At the time I met her she was not much older than I was,’ wrote Marie (at 31, she was seven years younger than Chanel), ‘but somehow, you did not think of her age, nor did you particularly notice her looks. It was the firmness of her jaw, the determined carriage of her neck that struck you. You were swept off your feet by the fierce vitality she exhaled, the quality of which was inspiring and infectious. Mlle Chanel was an innovator and a revolutionary in her particular line. Until her time Parisian dressmaking was an art exercised by very few initiates and jealously guarded by them. They studied and dealt with the tastes of a comparatively small group of fastidious and smart women; the fashions would therefore take a long time to reach the multitude and, when they reached it, would be disfigured beyond recognition. There would be no such thing as a season for one article or a vogue for another. The mode was created by what was designed for the lovely Countess of So-and-So or the Princess of This-and-That and what was becoming to them. Individualism reigned supreme, to the detriment of business. Mlle Chanel was the first to cater to the public in its broader sense and to produce a standard which appealed to every taste, the first to democratise the art of dress-making for purely economic reasons. The post-war trend was for simplicity and informality. Chanel adapted it to clothes and she struck the right note.’

  The Grand Duchess – like her brother – needed Chanel, but unlike Dmitri, she wanted to earn her own living, and pay her own way. Her first husband was the second son of the Swedish king; she had seen the splendour of pre-revolutionary Tsarist Russia, and lived amidst the riches and royalty of European courts. But Marie also witnessed the changes that had overtaken them, and the speed with which the rules had shifted; and she knew, through bitter experience, that no one was insulated from the masses; that the Revolution was here to stay. ‘We had been torn out of our brilliant setting,’ she wrote of herself and her extended family, ‘we had been driven off the stage still dressed in our fantastic costumes. We had to take them off now, make ourselves others, more everyday clothes, and above all learn how to wear them.’ As Marie gave up her past – selling her jewels to support her husband and brother – she also recognised the future, and the woman who would be central to its fashions. ‘Chanel personified her time and, although affecting an attitude of sublime contempt for public taste, she catered to it assiduously.’

  While her brother continued his affair with Chanel, Marie came often to visit her studio in Rue Cambon, sitting quietly in a corner, and seeing how the designer was both a copyist, and much copied. The Grand Duchess also observed Chanel’s ability to combine creativity with hard-headed business sense (unlike her former rival, Paul Poiret, who made and lost his fortunes); and to do so on a daily basis. In the autumn of 1921, for example, ‘She had just then imported some multi-coloured Faro Island sweaters and had conceived the idea of using their design for embroidery on silk blouses. One day as I came in I found Mlle Chanel engrossed in an argument with Mme Bataille, the woman who did the embroidery for the house. They were both examining the finished pieces of a crimson crepe de Chine blouse. Chanel was beating down the price and she was speaking so quickly and volubly and had so many arguments at her disposal that Mme Bataille was staggered.’

  The Grand Duchess listened as the haggling continued; not that Chanel was prepared to barter or give an inch. ‘The end of this very one-sided conversation I remember as follows: “I am telling you, Mme Bataille, that I cannot pay six hundred francs for this work!” said Mlle Chanel.

  ‘Mme Bataille, a stout person in a tight-fitting black dress, the perspiration standing out on her forehead, endeavoured in vain to interpose a word in the torrent of Mlle Chanel’s arguments.

  ‘“Mademoiselle will allow me to call her attention …” panted Mme Bataille.

  ‘“To what, Mme Bataille?” interrupted Chanel immediately. “I wish you would tell me the reasons for charging me this ridiculous price; as I have told you already I can’t see them at all, myself.”

  ‘“The blouse is embroidered with real Chinese silk, one kilo of which costs at present …”

  ‘“I don’t care what kind of silk you use – real or artificial,” continued Mlle Chanel; “it is none of my business. What I want is to sell the blouse. As it is, it is too expensive; therefore you must charge less for it. That’s all.”’

  Chanel had, as Marie observed, made a judgement on costs ‘in one shrewd glance’, and would brook no further argument, while Bataille stammered and reddened in her formidable presence. Finally, the interview was drawn to a close: ‘“My chère,” Chanel again interrupted firmly, “it is, it seems to me, quite as much in your own interests as in mine to produc
e these blouses in larger quantities; you must understand this and be reasonable. Come down in your price. You’re not the only one to make embroidery in Paris, and anybody would be only too delighted to do the work for me. You can take it or leave it as you please.”’

  Chanel waved her hand, indicating that the interview was at an end, and Mme Bataille disappeared through the door, whereupon Marie stepped forward, offering to do the embroidery for 450 francs per blouse. Chanel looked dubious, but said she could try; thus the Grand Duchess came to be a seamstress. She bought herself a sewing machine, and spent a month on a factory floor in one of the poorest districts of Paris, learning how to operate it; for Chanel needed machine embroidery in relatively large quantities to meet her burgeoning orders. ‘It took me about a month to master the intricacies of an embroidery machine,’ wrote the Grand Duchess in her memoir, ‘to acquire a certain amount of technical ability and speed. And then I had the machine sent to my apartment. When it arrived, I placed it right in the middle of the drawing room and, seating myself on the sofa, I looked at it from a distance. It stood there on the carpet between two armchairs and a table littered with knick-knacks and photographs – hard, sturdy, and aloof, with the light gleaming coldly on the polish of its steel parts … Just once or twice in my life, my past with all its antecedents has appeared to me not in separate scenes but as one whole, a map with all the incidents fitting into one vast picture, but seen from a new angle, like the impression one gets in looking at a familiar landscape from an aeroplane. This was such a moment, and it made me feel small and helpless. I was now going to walk out of that landscape and create an absolutely fresh pattern for myself.’