In relating this tale to Delay, Chanel said that she had known that her invitation to the ball had been gossiped about for weeks previously, with mounting speculation as to whether the Duke’s mistress would arrive alongside his first wife and take her place amidst members of the Royal family and eminent politicians. In the event, her absence caused as much conversation at the ball as her presence would have done; but the Duke was apparently amused, and when Shelagh sent a message offering to visit the invalid in her sickbed, Chanel replied that this would not be necessary, and dispatched a large bouquet of flowers to the Duchess the following day.
Thus Chanel, as a mistress, would not appear in bridal white at the coming-out ball for her lover’s daughter, but she nevertheless used white in her designs to create the same sense of purity as was evident in the nuns’ wimples and collars at Aubazine. Those closest to her at the end of her life – Claude Delay and Gabrielle Labrunie – recall that her sheets were always of plain white cotton (‘as simple and unadorned as the white cuffs of her convent uniform,’ says Delay). In old age, Chanel reminisced about the white sheets and petticoats that were washed by maids at the house of her aunts; everything boiled clean, in the blue steam-filled air. But it was in the same laundry-room that Chanel learned about the facts of life; in her account to Delay, she said that one of the laundry-maids hid her growing pregnancy under a white apron, but eventually explained it to young Gabrielle, as she folded the pristine linen.
If white was the colour of innocence and purity, it was also used by Chanel for seductive evening dresses, albeit with an ethereal quality. Her friend Colette – a writer with an even more scandalous past than Chanel’s own – described the couturière at work on a white dress, in a portrait of Chanel published in Prison et paradis in 1932. She saw Chanel as ‘a little black bull … in her butting energy, in her way of facing up to things’; and her description also suggests the conflicting impulses between the earthy and the unearthly in the creation of a delicate white dress. ‘Mademoiselle Chanel is engaged in sculpting an angel six feet tall. A golden-blond angel, impersonal, seraphically beautiful, providing one disregards the rudimentary carving, the paucity of flesh, and the cheerlessness – one of those angels who brought the devil to earth.
‘The angel – still incomplete – totters occasionally under the two creative, severe, kneading arms that press against it. Chanel works with ten fingers, nails, the edge of the hand, the palms, with pins and scissors right on the garment, which is a white vapour with long pleats, splashed with crushed crystal. Sometimes she falls to her knees before her work and grasps it, not to worship but to punish it again, to tighten over the angel’s long legs – to constrain – some expansion of tulle … With her loins taut and her legs under her thighs, Chanel is like a prostrated laundress beating her linens … [her movements] like the quick genuflections of nuns …’
Clearly, Chanel had a sense for the visual impact of white, enjoying the contrast it provided with the bronzed skin that she had made so fashionable since her earlier holidays on the Riviera. ‘A very white earring on the lobe of a well-tanned ear delights me,’ she remarked to Paul Morand, and then described to him how she had watched a group of American girls swimming in the sea at the Venice Lido. ‘How much more beautiful these young women would be … if they had dipped their pearls into the waves, into the sea from which they first came; and how brightly their jewellery would glitter if worn on a skin bronzed by the sun In her hands, white was never pallid, and she used it with absolute precision (‘It mustn’t look like whipped cream,’ she told Claude Delay). Reporting on Chanel’s innovative all-white spring collection in 1933, French Vogue was suitably dazzled: ‘A new way of presenting dresses adds to this powerful and palpable springtime feeling that reigns at Rue Cambon. Chanel, for the first time, showed all her white dresses in one sitting. It was as if the place had suddenly been transformed into an orchard in Normandy.’
Yet after her years in Aubazine, Chanel could not fail to be equally aware of the spiritual symbolism of white, which may be why she had used it to such powerful effect in the winter funeral of a young friend, the poet Raymond Radiguet, who had died of typhoid fever in December 1923. Chanel had taken charge of all the arrangements, directing that his body be placed in a white coffin, then carried by a white hearse pulled by white horses, to a church filled with white flowers.
And in the procession of white dresses that Chanel created for herself and others, perhaps the most significant were those associated with grief or mourning; as if honouring the medieval tradition of French queens and European royalty, for whom the fitting colour for deepest mourning was deemed to be white rather than black. Hence the famous portrayal of Mary Queen of Scots by François Clouet in 1559 as a young widow dressed ‘en deuil blanc’; the same costume of white mourning that she wore for her doomed second marriage to Lord Darnley.
Chanel seldom designed wedding gowns – just a handful during the Thirties – and she always scorned the custom whereby they were shown as the finale of a Paris collection, declaring that she wanted no such ‘circus’ in her own shows. One of the very few that she did make was for her younger sister, Antoinette, who had worked for Chanel since the start (hers is the first name listed on the opening page of the employee records, as a vendeuse at 21 Rue Cambon, beginning on 1st January 1910). On 11th November 1919, the first anniversary of the Armistice, Antoinette married a Canadian airman whom she had met the previous year. The bride wore white, and the witnesses to the wedding were Boy Capel – by then a husband himself – and Maurice de Nexon (her aunt Adrienne’s long standing ‘fiancé’, who was not able to marry Adrienne until his disapproving father died). Antoinette departed for Canada with 17 trunks of luggage, and never saw her sister again. Having run away from her husband after a few months of marriage, the errant bride ended up in Buenos Aires, where she died of influenza, not long after the death of Boy Capel.
Chanel never discussed the death of her younger sister; nor did she give anything away about her feelings on the day of Adrienne’s wedding, on 29th April 1930, when she finally became the wife of Baron de Nexon, having waited for over 20 years. Chanel was there as Adrienne’s witness, as Adrienne had been witness to Chanel; all the way back to their early days as seamstresses bent over the white wedding trousseaux of wealthier women, and their obscure nights as demimondaines in a garrison town.
Her past remained shrouded, and when it emerged, it was often in the form of Gothic myth. As a girl, she had read romances where women in white were runaway brides or abandoned lovers; in later years, she told her confidante Claude Delay that Wuthering Heights was her favourite novel. There had been a time when she had cried over Emily Brontë’s story of passion and loss, as if Cathy – a heroine finally driven mad by love, approaching death in a white dress – echoed her own lament. ‘But I’ve wept so much,’ she said to Delay. ‘Now I don’t cry any more. When you don’t cry it’s because you no longer believe in happiness.’
Even so, Chanel still revisited the scenes of her past, remaking them while she was replaying them. And the white dress that she most often alluded to was the one that her father sent for her to wear to her First Communion; the hallowed dress of billowing organdie petticoats, and a long white veil. ‘It was the first dress, the most important dress, the dress that made her a couturière,’ says Claude Delay, when I ask her what might have made it so meaningful; yet its symbolic purity as a dress for the Bride of Christ was also tainted by Chanel’s subsequent belief that it had been chosen for her by her father’s ‘tart’.
If the First Communion dress loomed large in Chanel’s memory, then another of her white dresses was to be forever associated with the last rites. In August 1929, she accompanied Bendor on a Mediterranean cruise aboard the Flying Cloud. Misia Sert came with them, in mourning for the end of her marriage. (José-Maria Sert had left Misia for a beautiful young Russian girl, Roussy Mdivani, for whom Chanel designed a trousseau. Soon after the wedding the previous summer, in one of the
more bizarre convolutions of Misia’s love-life, she joined her ex-husband and his new wife on their honeymoon cruise, sharing the marital suite with the bride, while Sert slept in another cabin.)
Midway through the cruise, a radiogram was received aboard the Flying Cloud, which the ship’s wireless operator handed to Misia. The message came from Diaghilev in Venice: ‘Am sick; come quickly. Serge.’ The yacht was immediately diverted to Venice, and as soon as it docked, on 17th August, Misia and Chanel rushed to see Diaghilev at the Grand Hotel des Bains on the Lido. They found him in a small bedroom, watched over by his secretary and collaborator, Boris Kochno, and the dancer Serge Lifar (both of whom had been rivals for his affection); he lay racked with pain and in the final stages of diabetes. In the heat of the Venice summer, he was wearing his dinner jacket in bed, drenched in sweat, yet shivering. But as soon as he saw Misia and Coco, Diaghilev’s eyes lit up. ‘Oh, how happy I am to see you,’ he whispered to the two women. ‘I love you in white. Promise me you will always wear white.’
He died at dawn on 19th August, Chanel’s forty-sixth birthday. Chanel had returned to the Flying Cloud the previous night, but was seized by a strong premonition of Diaghilev’s death and asked Bendor to turn back to Venice. She arrived that morning to find Misia trying to pawn her diamond necklace in order to meet Diaghilev’s debts, for the great maestro had died penniless. Chanel took over and paid all the outstanding bills, as she so often did; then she organised his funeral. ‘The next day,’ she told Paul Morand, ‘a long procession of gondolas leaves the Orthodox dei Grecchi church and makes its way towards the San Michele cemetery, where the cypresses rise above the pink walls bordered in white.’
Morand, who was himself a friend of Diaghilev’s, reached Venice several days after his death, too late to attend the funeral. Chanel and Misia both described to him what had happened: they sat with his body in the hotel bedroom, waiting for the coffin to arrive under the cover of darkness, so as not to disturb the other guests. At dawn the following morning, a black gondola had taken Diaghilev in his coffin from the Lido to the Greek Orthodox Church, and from there across the lagoon to the cemetery. Afterwards, Morand wrote his own account of the funeral, published in his book Vences: ‘… the ceremonial floating bier that is used for funeral processions in Venice ferried the magician’s mortal remains to the funeral island of San Michele … Whenever I see a funeral procession on its way to San Michele, with the priest in charge of the ceremony standing behind the gondolier at the stern, the funeral director at the prow, and with the silver lion of St Mark concealing its affliction beneath folded wings, I think of Diaghilev, that indefatigable man, lying at rest.’
Diaghilev’s grave lies in the Orthodox section of the cemetery on the Venetian isle of the dead, close to the headstone for Stravinsky, who was buried there over 40 years later. The cypresses still rise above the white-bordered walls, just as Chanel described them, and if you close your eyes while the seagulls scream, you can imagine her there, side by side with Misia. Both women wore white dresses to the funeral, bridesmaids to the body in the black coffin; honouring the wish of the great impresario, whose instinct for choreography was with him until the end.
THE PROMISED LAND
On 19th January 1931, the film producer Samuel Goldwyn announced in Paris that Coco Chanel was going to Hollywood, but only after Hollywood had begged her to do so. In a statement reported in The New York Times, he declared, ‘After more than three years of constant effort, I have at last persuaded Madame [sic] Gabrielle Chanel, fashion dictator, to go to Hollywood to co-operate with me on the vexing question of film fashions.’
Goldwyn’s plan was a bold one. As the Great Depression tightened its grip on America and unemployment spread to a quarter of the workforce, he believed that millions of people would want Hollywood entertainment at its most escapist and alluring. Hence Goldwyn’s determination to sign up Chanel and ensure that his film stars were dressed in cutting-edge Paris fashion, both on screen and off. It was not the first time that her designs had been seen on a Hollywood actress – Ina Claire wore a striking Chanel black suit trimmed with red fox fur in The Royal Family of Broadway released by Paramount in 1930 – but the deal with Goldwyn represented a far more significant role for Chanel. According to The New York Times, ‘She will reorganize the dressmaking department of United Artists studios and anticipate fashions six months ahead, solving thereby the eternal problem of keeping gowns up to date … Thus, Madame Chanel may reveal the secret of all impending changes and the American women will be enabled to see the latest Paris fashions, perhaps, at times, before Paris itself knows them.’
It was an ambitious, costly and time-consuming project. Goldwyn had been wooing Chanel ever since meeting her with the Grand Duke Dmitri in 1929. Dmitri had married an American heiress, Audrey Emery, three years previously, but remained on good terms with Chanel (as tended to be the case with all her former lovers; she had a talent for friendship, in spite of her occasional flashes of malice). According to an American journalist, who had interviewed Goldwyn for Colliers magazine in 1931, ‘It all started in Monte Carlo. The Grand Duke Dmitri, of the Romanovs, quite casually introduced Samuel Goldwyn, of the movies, to Mlle Gabrielle Chanel of Chanel. Pleasant talk, pleasant compliments, big inspiration, big contract – and the great Chanel had agreed to come to Hollywood to design clothes for the movies. Admittedly, it’s an experiment, a gamble, but on a million-dollar scale.’
In fact, the gamble cost far more than that. Goldwyn had finally secured Chanel’s agreement to the deal, after some lengthy hesitation on her part, by guaranteeing her a contract of $1 million. But further outlay was necessary, not least for the special costume department that he set up for her at his studios, employing over a hundred workers, with facilities for cutting, fitting and dyeing fabrics. It was a bold declaration of confidence, both on Goldwyn’s part, and on Chanel’s. ‘This is the first time a couturière of such importance, or indeed any, has left the native heath,’ observed Janet Flanner in a wry report for The New Yorker. ‘Considering what universal style-setting means to Paris for the maintenance of its financial and artistic pulse, the departure of Chanel for California must be more important than that of Van Dyck for the English Court of Charles I. But in a hundred years, the results will probably photograph less well.’ As it happened, there had already been an ill-starred precedent in 1925, when Goldwyn’s rival, Louis B. Mayer, hired Erté (the Russian-born designer and illustrator who worked in Paris for Paul Poiret). Erté hated his time in Hollywood, and declared upon his return to Paris that ‘film stars for the most part are illiterate, crotchety, unshapely,’ and that American producers lacked ‘the slightest conception of elegance, beauty, or taste’.
Chanel was undoubtedly a bigger catch than Erté, and Goldwyn’s investment was more substantial than Mayer’s had been. But for all Goldwyn’s bullish confidence, many of his competitors and contemporaries remained sceptical about his strategy, as was noted by Colliers: ‘The world of fashion is watching it, and the world of celluloid … the one thing they all seem to agree on: Chanel has picked herself the hardest job she has ever tackled. The world-famous fashion dictator now tells the duchesses and countesses and queens of the talkies what is chic. And it is just possible that in the talkies they’ll talk back! In fact, at least 95 per cent of the people who know all about movie stars and their ways with clothes think they will. Their general attitude is an eyebrow raised way up to here, and something gloomy about, “It isn’t what Chanel is going to do to Hollywood – it’s what Hollywood is going to do to Chanel.”’
Nevertheless, whatever the potential pitfalls, Goldwyn had come up with an offer for Chanel that looked too good to refuse. The million-dollar deal was done at a time when the deepening Depression had hit Paris couture. Previously wealthy American clients whose fortunes had been wiped out were making hurried departures, and even Chanel was forced to cut her prices in half as a consequence. As Janet Flanner reported from Paris, ‘The Wall Street Crash has ha
d its effect here. In the Rue de la Paix the jewellers are reported to be losing fortunes in sudden cancellations of orders, and at the Ritz bar the pretty ladies are having to pay for their cocktails themselves …In real-estate circles certain advertisements have been illuminating: “For Sale, Cheap, Nice Old Chateau, 1 Hr. frm Paris; Original Boiserie, 6 New Baths; Owner Forced Return New York Wednesday; Must Have IMMEDIATE CASH; Will Sacrifice.”’
And so it was that on 25th February 1931, the woman now deemed a fashion dictator – regardless of her past successes in freeing other women from the tyranny of corsets and hobble skirts – set off for the New World aboard the steamship Europa. Chanel took Misia as her travelling companion; unfortunately, by the time they arrived in New York on 4th March, both women had contracted flu. They checked into the Hotel Pierre, planning to recover there, but Chanel was immediately overwhelmed by Goldwyn’s publicity machine. A reporter from The New York Times was one of many who mobbed her hotel suite, where Chanel appeared to be ‘rather bewildered at the scores of interviewers and reception committee members’. Despite the crowd and the flu, Chanel held her own, wearing ‘a simple red jersey gown with a short skirt of the severe kind which she first made popular in wartime France’, and issuing some suitably strict diktats: a chic woman should dress well but not eccentrically; long hair would soon be back in fashion; and men who used scent were disgusting.
Coco Chanel Page 17