Coco Chanel

by Justine Picardie

  Fishing records from Lochmore, 1927.

  It was in Mimizan that Chanel had a riding accident, when one of the hunting party let a tree-branch spring back at her, which split open her upper lip. Her face was covered in blood, staining her white riding stock; Bendor shouted out, ‘Who was the idiot who did that?’ and stopped the hunt immediately. Years later, the story was still fresh in her mind as she recounted to Claude Delay: the Duke had sent for a doctor, but when the man arrived, he turned out to be a vet, who sewed her up with pig’s bristle: ‘His thread was too thick – provincial.’ Chanel took the train back to Paris to see her own doctor, accompanied by a monkey and a parrot that she had bought as pets the previous day, screeching at each other in an unintelligible language (‘Brazilian, I think’) all through the night journey. She told Delay that she had wept while the monkey clung to her skirt, that it was her ‘first breakdown’; which was perhaps an allusion to her realisation that the Duke’s protection of her was not complete; or maybe at that moment, badly stitched up and as frightened as the monkey beside her, she really did feel close to the edge.

  It was a constant juggling act, of course, for Chanel to maintain her business, and be at Bendor’s side. ‘He was simplicity itself, simple as a tramp,’ she said to Delay; but his demands were nevertheless considerable, and often at odds with her commitment to her business. There was an episode when he shipped over her seamstresses to Eaton, so that she could work on a collection at the same time as being with him; and while he joined her in Paris for her biannual shows – generally held on 5th February and 5th August – he could never hide his restlessness at being with her in Rue Cambon. ‘The tiger paced up and down,’ she told Delay, even when Bendor knew that she would leave with him in the evening. For more often than not, she organised her schedule in order to travel with him, to places and in the manner of his choosing. ‘Westminster has houses everywhere,’ she said to Paul Morand. ‘On every new trip, I discovered them … in Ireland, in Dalmatia, or in the Carpathians, there is a house belonging to Westminster, a house where everything is set up, where you can dine and go to bed on your arrival, with polished silverware, motor cars (I can still see the seventeen ancient Rolls in the garage at Eaton Hall!) with their batteries charged, small tankers in the harbour, fully laden with petrol, servants in livery …On the moors of Scotland, the grouse are ready to be shot, or the salmon to be fished; at the same moment, in the forest of Villers-Cotterets or in the Landes, the stalkers who track the wild boar or stags have only to saddle their horses to prepare the way and pick up the right scents; you have to wonder whether they sleep in their red clothes, or whether the captains of the yachts, which are always under sail … are not in reality painted onto their poop-decks, and, in short, whether this absurd fairyland (which isn’t even intentional, but which exists because that’s the way it has been, for generations) is not a bad dream, a tramp’s dream.’

  It might have been her father’s dream – the peddler tramp, who criss-crossed a country but never found what he was looking for – or her childhood fantasy that she would be rescued from the nuns, and live happily ever after as a fairy-tale princess. In reality – if such a thing could be felt, and relied upon, in the dizzying whirlwind of life with Bendor – Chanel was a 40-year-old woman, and as the years passed with him, it became clear that she was not going to become pregnant, despite the doctors she consulted. She entertained his friends – Churchill, the Duke of Marlborough, Lord Lonsdale – and hunted three times a week at Eaton during the season; but her life in Paris had less appeal for him.

  Aside from Vera Bate, a frequent guest at Eaton and Lochmore (where her name sometimes appears alongside Chanel’s in the fishing records), Bendor had little in common with those she was closest to. ‘My friends bored him,’ she said to Morand. ‘He couldn’t understand Misia at all, and she couldn’t understand England at all. He was appalled by Sert, who sawed off swans’ beaks so that they would die of hunger, and who pushed dogs into the Grand Canal in Venice.’

  But still, her relationship with Bendor’s country strengthened, and whatever her ambivalence towards Englishwomen, she dressed them, and impressed them. In the early June 1927 issue of British Vogue, a headline announced the biggest fashion news of the summer: ‘Chanel Opens Her London House’. The illustrations showed four models in Chanel pieces, all of them designed for outings in British high society: two white taffeta gowns, ‘simple and unadorned’, for debutantes to wear to court; and two afternoon frocks for Ascot, one a little black dress in lace, the other in blue silk polka dots.

  ‘Chanel, one of the most popular of great French couturiers, has come to London,’ reported Vogue. ‘In a beautiful Queen Anne house, with panelled walls and parquet floors, mannequins graceful and slender as lilies show us Chanel’s latest collection … ‘The house was close to Westminster’s own Georgian residence in Mayfair, Bourdon House on Davies Street (he had sold the lease of Grosvenor House at the end of 1924, during his divorce from Violet), but no mention was made of the Duke in the Vogue piece, despite previous items that had appeared in the gossip columns of British newspapers speculating on the possibility that he might marry a famous French couturière.

  Nevertheless, the article was an indication of what everyone in smart London society already knew: that Chanel’s love affair with Bendor was reflected in her new collection, not least in its implicit understanding of the clothes that were required for the Season; that her status was assured in the British upper classes, even if she had not married the Duke; and that the new House of Chanel in London was also the house that Westminster had given her.

  According to Vogue, ‘We have seen in her collection a number of frocks designed for Ascot and those private functions for which in England one is always more formally dressed than for similar functions in France. We see also in this designer’s conception of a Court dress a new idea, strikingly successful in the way it reconciles a charming modernism with a traditional formula. We love tradition as we love beautiful old houses, but we love also that element of youth which makes itself felt wherever it might be; like a blossom, ingenuous and frail, which has just opened in the heart of an old garden, the debutante presented at Court appears, flower-like and youthful, made more charming by the striking contrast she presents with the ancient walls of the Royal palace.

  ‘The Chanel workrooms in London employ only English workgirls under the direction of French premières. Only English mannequins show the models. Here in an essentially practical sense, useful to both countries – to Great Britain and to France – is an entente cordiale, French chic adapted to English tastes and traditions.’

  As it happened, Chanel was also incorporating something of Scotland into her new designs. At Lochmore, she borrowed Bendor’s clothes, making his tweeds her own, and wearing them with a panache not usually associated with traditional sporting garb. Having adopted the Duke’s wardrobe, she then started sourcing fabrics from a Scottish tweed mill, and turning them into her characteristically soft little jackets and suits. Something of the same process occurred during her stays in Eaton, where she was inspired by the striped waistcoats of Bendor’s liveried footmen and butlers, transforming them into what became known to readers of Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar as ‘Chanel’s English Look’, which also included the loose woollen cardigans that she herself wore with the yards of real pearls that the Duke gave to her, a new rope for every birthday, and many others besides.

  But for all the gifts of jewels, there was to be no wedding ring. No proof exists that he ever proposed to her, despite the much-repeated story of Chanel refusing to marry Bendor with her famous declaration, ‘There have been many Duchesses of Westminster, but only one Coco Chanel.’ In fact, this is a myth, as apocryphal as the legend about her childhood with the aunts; and in old age, when asked about the anecdote, she denied having anything to do with its origin, declaring it to be far too vulgar for her to have uttered such nonsense to Bendor: ‘He would have laughed in my face if I had ever said it.’ A m
ore likely starting point came from a conversation she had at lunch with a diplomat, Sir Charles Mendl, at the British Embassy in Paris. When he asked why she had turned down Westminster’s proposal, she replied that there were ‘so many duchesses already’, to which he added, chivalrously, ‘and there’s only one Coco Chanel.’

  Although their relationship did not produce a child, the heir that Bendor desperately sought and which would have almost certainly resulted in their marriage, it did create something of significance, of which ghostly traces still remain. The graceful Chanel interiors at Rosehall are crumbling now, ceilings collapsing as dry rot takes hold of the timbers, shards of broken glass on the subsiding floors, the French wallpaper fading and the beige paint peeling away; but white azaleas continue to flower in the garden, as they did when Mademoiselle strolled there. And if you walk along certain streets of Mayfair, you can still see a number of double Cs embossed upon the old lampposts; a final emblem of the Duke’s gesture towards Coco Chanel, a silent mark of their union, and of the melding of British tradition with French couture, in a style all of its own.

  RIVIERA CHIC

  If the Duke of Westminster reigned over Eaton and Lochmore, and set the course of journeys aboard his yachts, there was one place that Chanel could call her own, where he would be her guest. La Pausa was entirely her creation, a graceful villa on the French Riviera at Roquebrune, high above the wooded promontory of Cap Martin, with a commanding view of the Mediterranean. It took its name from the legend that Mary Magdalene had rested beneath the olive trees there on her flight from Jerusalem after the Crucifixion, and a chapel dedicated to Our Lady of la Pausa lay close by. In February 1929, Coco Chanel signed the deed of sale for the five acres of land upon which La Pausa was to be built. The general assumption has tended to be that Bendor bought the plot of land and financed the construction of La Pausa, but it was Chanel’s name on the deed, and the 1.8 million francs in payment came from her bank account, rather than the Duke’s.

  Chanel’s financial independence was already well established by the time she bought La Pausa; she had a boutique in nearby Cannes, which had opened in 1923, along with a substantial and expanding share of Rue Cambon in Paris. (After buying number 31 Rue Cambon in February 1918, she had added number 29 in April 1923, number 25 in April 1926, and 27 and 23 in October 1927.) Even so, the house that Chanel built in Roquebrune was not simply a splendid outpost to her Paris empire, but was itself central to the high society that flourished on the Côte d’Azur.

  Chanel was by no means the first to arrive in the Riviera colony of bohemian Americans and Europeans, nor did she invent its associated fashions. But as was often the case in her career as a designer, she was quick to distil its essence, absorbing it into her own style, and selling it to customers eager for her clothes.

  She had already proved her understanding of Riviera chic in her costume designs for Diaghilev’s Le Train bleu in 1924, a ballet that had a scenario by Cocteau and which took its name from the luxury overnight express train from Paris to the south of France. The Ballets Russes production also reflected an existing creative connection between Paris and the Riviera; notably in Picasso’s stage curtain, which was based on his famous painting of two women running along a beach, their white tunics falling away to reveal bare breasts, the sky blue behind their ecstatic, monumental figures. In turn, Chanel’s costumes were inspired by the sports clothes that she had popularised in the resorts of Cannes, Deauville and Biarritz: striped tricots and bathing suits, beach sandals and golf shoes, tennis dresses and shorts; and perhaps by the crews’ uniforms on the Duke’s yachts (‘navy and white are the only possible colours,’ she remarked, after her first trip aboard the Flying Cloud. ‘The Navy’s colours.’)

  Nevertheless, Chanel’s deft designs were not without precedents on the Riviera. By 1923, a wealthy young American couple, Gerald and Sara Murphy, were in situ, having previously been introduced to the pleasures of Antibes by their friend, the composer Cole Porter. They drew their fashionable friends from Paris to stay with them during the summer months, thus transforming the traditional Riviera season, which had previously been at its height over Christmas. The Murphys were fans of jazz and art and sunbathing and parties, and their seaside house, Villa America, was the backdrop to all these, as a coterie of socialites, musicians, writers and artists spilled in and out of its doors. Picasso visited, along with Stravinsky, Fernand Léger, Man Ray, Dorothy Parker, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda; all of them united by their sense of being in a vanguard, yet often disunited by quarrels and sexual jealousies and too many cocktails. Several of these dramas were portrayed by Fitzgerald in his novel Tender is the Night, where parties become the set-pieces for the narrative. ‘I want to give a really bad party,’ announces the hero, Dick Diver, at one point, as his wife surveys the calm view of the Mediterranean sea, several hundred feet below their villa. ‘I mean it. I want to give a party where there’s a brawl and seductions and people going home with their feelings hurt and women passed out in the cabinet de toilette. You wait and see.’ Other fragments emerged in the letters that Zelda wrote to Scott after her mental breakdown, when she remembered the wildness of summers past, from her locked room in a Swiss sanatorium. (‘I would like to be walking alone in a Sirocco at Cannes at night passing under the dim lamps and imagining myself mysterious and unafraid like last summer …’)

  Thus the landscape of the glamorous Riviera – or at least that semi-imaginary place where the Lost Generation danced and wept and drank its way through the Jazz Age – existed before Chanel built her palace there. And some of what came to be seen as her trademark Riviera style was already in evidence on the beaches where the Murphys swam and laughed with their friends, and in Villa America itself, with its interiors of white walls and black satin. Striped sailor tops had been seen on Picasso and Gerald Murphy (himself an artist, whose career had begun when he assisted on sets for the Ballets Russes soon after his arrival in Paris in 1921); and Sara Murphy was famous for wearing her pearls to the beach because, she explained, they wanted sunning. Hence the scene in Tender is the Night where the beautiful heroine – Nicole Diver, an evocative portrait inspired by Sara and Zelda; the ultimate incarnation of the Beautiful and the Damned – reclines on a dazzling beach: ‘Her bathing suit was pulled off her shoulders and her back, a ruddy, orange brown, set off by a string of creamy pearls, shone in the sun. Her face was hard and lovely and pitiful.’

  In Fitzgerald’s Riviera, Chanel played only a minor role, providing the scent for Nicole Diver towards the conclusion of the novel, which also suggests the end of an era: ‘She put on the first ankle-length day dress that she had owned for many years and crossed herself reverently with Chanel Sixteen.’ In fact, Chanel was on her way to becoming far more central to the seductive image of the Côte d’Azur than as the mere purveyor of perfume; and Fitzgerald’s failure to pay much attention to her was perhaps as much a symptom of his alcoholic malaise as it was a reflection of her precise status in the shifting sands of what constituted smart society. ‘One could get away with more on the summer Riviera, and whatever happened seemed to have something to do with art,’ he wrote in Echoes of the Jazz Age; an observation that could equally well have been applied to Chanel’s life at La Pausa; indeed, to the villa itself.

  For if Villa America represented the Murphys’ motto – ‘Living well is the best revenge’ – then La Pausa was similarly beguiling, the epitome of a particular style of life which later became known as a lifestyle. It was fashionable, but also encompassed French tradition, in a manner as attractive to the British upper classes as it was to Parisian bohemians. Most important of all, La Pausa was built on Chanel’s own past, as well as marking out her territory for the future.

  Hence the fact that the villa was bought in her name, rather than Westminster’s. And while the Duke’s influence and presence were evident in La Pausa – inevitably, given the regularity of his yachting trips along the Riviera – Chanel made all the important de
cisions about how the villa was to take shape. Her original meeting with La Pausa’s architect, Robert Streitz, was held aboard the Flying Cloud, moored offshore from Cannes; thereafter, she would take the Blue Train from Paris to Monaco on her lightning visits to the site. Streitz was only 28 at the time, and the building was his first substantial commission, but his ambition to build ‘the ideal Mediterranean villa’ was readily accepted by Chanel. Four decades later, in conversation with the French journalist Pierre Galante, Streitz recalled that the Duke’s sole instruction was simple: ‘I want everything to be built with the best materials and under the best working conditions.’

  Chanel’s first request to the architect was significantly more personal: she told Streitz that she wanted him to re-create a large stone staircase in the villa’s entrance hall from the original that she remembered from her childhood at Aubazine. So as to be sure that the details were exact, she dispatched him to visit the abbey; an extraordinary request, given Chanel’s obliteration of the orphanage from her previous accounts of her past. In Aubazine, Streitz found the staircase just as she had described it – its steps worn from centuries of footfalls, rising out of the darkness of the abbey to the first floor, where generations of monks had walked, followed by the orphans behind them. He was sufficiently discreet never to repeat the exact details of his conversation with the Mother Superior of the convent, who still recalled Gabrielle Chanel from her days in the orphanage. But having studied and photographed the staircase in the abbey, he designed a precise replica for La Pausa, which became the centrepiece of the house.