Chanel continued to cut her models’ hair – and her own, as part of the ritual of every new couture collection – but there was one exception to her rules: the ebullient, mercurial Suzy Parker. Bettina Ballard witnessed the designer ‘pounding Suzy with words, which she seems to absorb through some process of osmosis. Suzy for a while worshipped at Chanel’s feet every afternoon at five, learned to stand like Chanel, imitate her gestures, and wear her clothes with ease, but never went so far as to cut off her long, glamorous red hair, which Chanel deplored.’
What was it that Chanel abhorred about long hair? The mere sight of it was enough to make her lunge at a woman with her scissors, as Grand Duke Dmitri’s sister learned to her cost. In her memoir, Marie described the savage cut that she had been given, without any warning: ‘Before I had time to realize what she was doing, she had pulled out my hairpins, snatched up the scissors and was cutting off my hair by the handful.’ The result was so unflattering that even Chanel was dismayed, ‘but the damage was done.’
According to the ever-perceptive Claude Delay, Chanel’s ‘horror of hair was one of the things that survived from her childhood’. She told Delay on several occasions that her father hated the smell of hair; that he always asked when she had last washed hers (a story that seems unlikely, but not impossible). Her own hair had been short since she had cut it off as a young woman, but not hidden; yet from the time of her comeback collection in 1954, Chanel was almost always seen with a hat on her head, the jaunty little straw boater of her youth. Some speculated she wore the hat to hide the thinning of her hair in old age; others that it was a way of concealing the scars of a facelift. But those who remained closest to her – Gabrielle Labrunie and Claude Delay – still saw the dignity with which she carried herself; the unyielding efforts to keep her proud head held high. Both of them were young enough to remain admiring of Chanel, at the same time as being sensitive to the older woman’s vulnerabilities. Both saw her emotional scars, her loneliness, her sense of loss and failure at having never married, never borne children. After Gabrielle married and had her own two sons, Chanel spent time with them; never overly tender, she nevertheless gave them picture books, and took the trouble to talk to them, and to listen to their answers, in ways that she did not always do with adults. (‘My son Guillaume remembers that she always wore a lot of make-up and kept her hat on her head,’ says Gabrielle. ‘One day, when he was at her apartment, a piece of crystal fell from the chandelier in the salon. He put it in the mouth of Auntie Coco’s gold frog – last time I looked, it was still there …’)
Sometimes, says Gabrielle, her aunt would tell her, ‘A simple life, with a husband and children – a life with the people you love – that is the real life.’ And yet Gabrielle could also see the manner in which Chanel had cut her own familial ties, to set herself free. ‘She battled for her freedom, to escape from her childhood, from the suffering of Aubazine – and that was why she designed clothes that made women free. It was all a question of freedom – to be free to drive your car, to ride a bicycle, to walk to work, you had to be able to forget about what you were wearing. Forgetting is part of freedom – and so she was free to forget her past. And even if she did not forget it, she put her memories somewhere where they did not weigh too heavily on her – just like the clothes she made, that were so light that they seemed to weigh nothing at all.’
Claude Delay, her confidante, was similarly aware of what Chanel had cut out of her past; but while others have accused Chanel of lying in order to recreate history (and her own identity), Delay is less judgemental, seeing the revisions as Chanel’s attempt to be true to herself. ‘I remember Coco cutting bits out of a typed page of maxims she’d written and making them into thin strips for me. I watched the remains getting smaller and smaller. “That’s how you arrive at a text.” She exercised the same rigour towards human beings … Her rigour had far-reaching consequences: isolation, solitude.’ There were times when Delay sat with Chanel in the apartment at Rue Cambon, long after everyone else had gone home, sensing the couturière’s spirits sinking as darkness fell, scissors set aside. It was at these moments that Chanel would say that her life was a failure, that she had lost those whom she had adored; that there was nothing worse than being alone; that all that was left to her were dresses and coats. ‘A woman who is not loved is no woman,’ she said to Delay, ‘whatever her age … A woman needs to be looked at by a man who loves her… without that look she dies.’
Yet still she went on, finding enough in the dresses and coats to continue; always moving on towards the deadline of the next collection, too stubborn to stop working on her own clothes, which were the essence of all those that she designed for other women. John Fairchild described having lunch with Chanel In her apartment (‘veal roast with tiny peas, onions, carrots and potatoes – a spring garden on a silver platter’); but while he ate, she kept her scissors in her hands. ‘Chanel started pulling at the threads on her jacket, snipping away as though she was making herself a new suit.’ And still she kept talking, indomitable, ‘her words shooting out like piercing machine gun bullets.’
Cecil Beaton found her equally animated whenever he visited her in Paris, as he often did, particularly after he began working on the set and costume designs for Coco, a Broadway musical based on her life with lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner and music by André Previn. In April 1965, Beaton was dispatched to Rue Cambon by the stage producer Frederick Brisson (who had first approached Chanel about the musical in 1954). Afterwards he wrote in his diary that the musical ‘will probably never come to anything. But the fact that Chanel is still alive and in full sail is quite wonderful.’ The House of Chanel was humming with energy and activity; more opulent than he had seen it before, entirely undimmed, like its owner. ‘The mirrored palaces below were now heavily populated. The apartment upstairs more than ever filled with glitter of gold lacquer, ormolu and crystal … Chanel in oatmeal with facings of crimson and navy blue, looked thinner, but otherwise of an extraordinary girlishness. She was talking her head off to her staff…’ And her monologue continued – ‘rat-tat-tat’ – as they lunched at the Ritz, her ‘petite auberge’ across the road: ‘… was it to me that she talked? Or was she just talking for talking’s sake? She did not really show much sign of judging whether I was present or not … Our heads became lower on the table and closer. Her eyes like pansies, with dark heavy lashes, her skin very clean and her aura delightfully perfumed, with hands that are like a peasant’s. She kept fluttering a pair of gloves and I noticed that only the hands had become old.’
It took another four years for the musical to be staged, with Katharine Hepburn in the lead, playing Chanel in the run-up to her comeback at 70. According to Time magazine, in a preview of Coco, ‘The plot is as simple as a Chanel suit: Yes, she’ll open; No, she won’t; Yes, she’ll open; No, she won’t; Yes, she’ll open; Yes, she opens. Her collection is a flop with the Paris fashion world, but not (aha!) with the fresh-eyed buyers from across the Atlantic.’ Lerner’s script had Chanel reflecting on liberation (‘A woman needs independence from men, not equality. In most cases equality is a step down’), and her self-determination as a couturière (‘Everything is on sale but me’). Beaton noted some similarities between Hepburn and Chanel – the former talked as much as the latter, and sought company to ‘keep loneliness at bay’ – but thought that this was not reflected on stage. ‘She [Hepburn] does not give any suggestion of Chanel herself, is in fact K.H. as ever, but it is a remarkable tour de force, full of vitality and emotion.’ The final days before the opening were fraught – ‘I find K.H. in her Chanel hat feeling that the stars had stopped in their courses because she had cut her hair’ – and at one point, Hepburn threatened to cast aside Beaton’s costumes in favour of her own original Chanels. Despite his exasperation with the demanding leading lady, Beaton was nevertheless unable to conceal his admiration for Hepburn’s couture garments from Rue Cambon: ‘They are impeccably made. Real works of art.’
Chanel at work with he
r scissors, making alterations to a model’s dress. Shahrokh Hatami.
After a great many arguments, Hepburn agreed to wear Beaton’s costumes, and the two became sufficiently friendly (albeit only temporarily) to have a conversation alluding to Chanel’s supposed lesbianism, and the rumours concerning Hepburn’s friendships with women. On 1st November 1969, Beaton observed in his diary that Hepburn was unhappy about a scene in which a young actress appeared alongside her as a Chanel model and muse, with her hair styled in a similar way to Coco’s. Veering between irritation and amusement, Beaton reported that Hepburn had said to him, ‘she must not have her hair cut in a bang like mine. That would be too lesbian and we can’t introduce that element into the play. As it is there have been rumours about me, because I have some very good friends like Laura Harding [the American Express heiress, to whom Hepburn was close for many years] and we wear trousers. Oh, it’s been said millions of times, and Chanel too, she’s had that reputation.’ Beaton remained unconvinced: ‘I told K. that I did not for a minute believe that C. had those tendencies (lots of women fell for her romantically, passionately, doggedly) but Chanel was far too unrelenting against homosexuality in men to have those feelings about women. She spent her later years inveighing against pederasts, saying that they had ruined fashion by purposefully making women look foolish. “Is that so?” said Kate …and the rattle voice was at it again.’
By the time the musical opened in December, Beaton was alternating between black depression, rage with Hepburn (‘a rotten, ingrained viper’), and bursts of malice about various others. (After having dinner with Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, he wrote in his diary that ‘Jackie looked quite hideous, square-faced, fat-cheeked, double-chinned, with old hands, her hair worn in straggles and her body disguised in a sort of Barbarella cowboy suit.) His fears that the musical would be badly reviewed proved to be true – and his designs came in for particular criticism – but it nevertheless proved reasonably popular, and ran for 329 performances.
As for Coco Chanel herself: she was suffering even more than Beaton. Having agreed to go to New York as guest of honour for the first night of the musical, she had designed a white sequin gown to wear. She told Delay that she was touched by the reverence and affection she received from Americans: ‘When you’re badly treated, America comes to your defence.’ But she was also terrified about the prospect of the trip, and of seeing a version of herself on stage. Interviewed in Paris by Time just before Coco began previews, she said that she had loved Lerner’s My Fair Lady, and therefore had confidence in him: ‘I was convinced that Lerner was incapable of doing anything vulgar.’ Even so, she expressed some doubt that audiences would find anything very interesting in her story: ‘My life is rather boring, I would say. But we’ll see.’ Chanel’s uncharacteristic note of uncertainty was evident too when she talked about the casting of Katharine Hepburn in the lead. ‘She’s very very expensive, you know,’ she remarked to Time, as if that might be sufficient to confirm Hepburn’s impersonation of her; but then added, ‘I’d always thought of her as such a gendarme type – so sure of herself.’ Time noted that ‘Hepburn had characterized herself as “the stevedore type”,’ and then quoted Lerner’s conviction that the actress and couturière were very much alike: ‘In essence, they’re similar. Both women are extraordinarily independent and vulnerable and feminine.’ And both were consumed by a fierce work ethic: ‘Look at Chanel at 86,’ Lerner points out, ‘still pinning and ripping’; while Hepburn was equally committed, ‘totally immersed’ in her role, the first to arrive in the morning for rehearsals and the last to leave at night. ‘The only time she panics is when she’s left with nothing to do.’
A week before Chanel’s departure from Paris, disaster struck, when her right hand was paralysed in what appeared to be sudden, inexplicable nerve damage. Her triumphant return to New York was cancelled, and she was rushed instead to the American Hospital in Neuilly. Delay found her there in bed, ‘her hand hanging down inert’. A priest had arrived earlier, Chanel said; she had woken up to discover him looming at her bedside. ‘Too soon,’ she snapped, and sent him away. The January collection was awaiting completion at Rue Cambon, and even with her right hand limp, unable to hold her scissors, nothing was going to stop Mademoiselle Chanel from returning to her studio. Her white sequinned evening dress was put aside unworn, but still, there was more work to be done.
LA GRANDE MADEMOISELLE
You could search forever for the whole truth about Gabrielle Chanel, and never find the last of the missing pieces; for when she cut up her history, she scattered it all around, losing some details, hiding others, covering her trail. Sometimes, you feel you might just catch up with her: in the apartment at Rue Cambon; or in her upstairs studio, where Karl Lagerfeld now reigns, although her name still remains on the door, as if barring anyone else from entering. The sign is just as she left it: ‘Mademoiselle Prívé’.
There is a manor house in the French countryside, an hour or so by train beyond Paris, where Gabrielle Palasse-Labrunie lives; a quiet place, hidden behind high stone walls and solid wooden gates. Madame Labrunie is in her eighties now, but her face still contains clear traces of the girl she once was; the young girl carrying a bouquet of white flowers in the photograph that her great aunt kept pinned by her dressing table at the Ritz. In those outlines – the high cheekbones, the arch of her eyebrows – you can see why one of Chanel’s oldest associates (Madame Aubert, who had worked for Coco since the business launched in 1910, and had known her even before then, in Moulins) was so startled by the sight of the young Gabrielle coming down the staircase at Rue Cambon that she told her, ‘You look just like Mademoiselle as a girl, you could be her granddaughter …’
Now, Gabrielle Labrunie lives alone, but Mademoiselle is all around her. In her bedroom, there is a photograph of Chanel as a young woman, before she had cut her hair off; the long dark locks plaited and pinned up on her graceful head, her neck held with such elegance that you can see why Cocteau christened her the Black Swan. In the living room are rows of bookshelves filled with Chanel’s first editions – some signed by the authors, including Paul Morand and Pierre Reverdy – and her furniture still stands solid on the floor: a Coromandel screen, a console table from the entrance to the apartment at Rue Cambon, an eighteenth-century Korean cabinet given to Coco by Boy Capel. Most striking of all is what looks like a hand-carved black sculpture above the fireplace; the same one that Chanel treasured on the mantelpiece in her salon. ‘It’s a meteorite,’ explains Gabrielle, ‘that came down to earth in China. It was given to my aunt, by someone who told her, “You cannot buy that which comes from the sky.”’ As she speaks, she rests her hand on the meteorite, just as Chanel used to do. She pauses, and then continues, ‘Nobody can possess her spirit – she was the embodiment of independence and freedom. Nobody could buy her, and she is not for sale.’
Then Gabrielle leads me along a corridor, to a simple room with a wooden wardrobe on one wall. She opens the door to the wardrobe, gestures inside, and says, ‘These are her clothes. You can try them on if you like.’ There is a coat the colour of autumn leaves, made of the softest tweed I have ever touched, with carved lions on the gilt buttons. I slip it on, and see a reflection of myself in the wardrobe looking-glass; when I turn, the coat swings with an easy fluidity. It feels like wearing something that weighs almost nothing; yet it seems to mean everything now, coming out of its hiding place after so many years in the darkness of the cupboard. I take off the coat, stroke the wool before shutting it away again, and put on a cream jacket trimmed with black braid, its narrowly cut sleeves elongating the arms, flattering the curve of the body, yet comfortable enough for me to raise my hands above my head. Then there is a fur-collared jacket in a pale natural-coloured wool, just as Mademoiselle recommended to others, but lined with a Japanese silk print, its black calligraphy unintelligible to my Western eyes, yet perfectly proportioned, repeated in minute detail over and over again. I slide my hands into the pockets – ‘The pockets a
re meant to be used,’ Gabrielle reminds me, ‘just like the buttonholes, never a button without a buttonhole, everything has its purpose’ – and find a pair of ivory-coloured gloves inside. I take them out, and a faint scent emerges. ‘Chanel N°5,’ says Gabrielle, with a smile. ‘Her gloves, her perfume – still here …’
I wish I could tell you that her scent still lingers in her rooms at the Ritz, but that would not be the truth; although when I stayed there, I could smell it on my own jacket, after spending a day within the perfumed air of Rue Cambon. I was not sleeping in the Coco Chanel suite that overlooks the Place Vendôme – its gilded grandeur a reminder of Chanel’s pre-war years at the hotel, when the Duke of Westminster visited her here, as did Churchill and the Prince of Wales – but in the accommodation that she inhabited after the German invasion of Paris, and where she chose to remain in peacetime. It is a modest bedroom on the sixth floor, with a view of the garden and the rooftops of Rue Cambon, its door just across the corridor from the little lift that rises from a discreet side entrance of the Ritz. Now, the room is decorated in shades of beige and blue, brocade curtains framing the windows, a splendid crystal and turquoise chandelier hanging above the bed. Only the ceiling remains white, but if you lie on the bed looking up at it, you see where it has been painted over many times before, and it is possible to imagine how the bedroom might once have looked, when the walls were plain white, just as Mademoiselle wanted them; white walls to match her white sheets; everything simple and austere as a nun’s cell.
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