Here she lay, night after night, alone as she grew older, albeit beneath the same roof as others; the Ritz a kind of secular monastery where the rich found refuge in the consolations of its quiet order; although Chanel’s rest was often disturbed. As a winter’s afternoon turned to dusk, not so long ago, I sat in this bedroom and listened while Claude Delay talked to me of what had taken place within these walls. Mademoiselle had occupied the room, and another alongside linked by an inner door, with her bathroom en suite, just as it is now. The wallpaper and upholstery are new, and the taps in the bathroom have been changed into faucets in the shape of gold swans. But the view from the window is the same as it was when Chanel was here, black crows and gulls circling above the rooftops, flying towards the Jardin des Tuileries and the river Seine, as the pale winter sunlight dwindles into darkness, the sky turning from blue to rose to grey. ‘I often found her alone here,’ said Delay, ‘sitting at her dressing table, gazing down into the garden, looking at the chestnut trees. She was still so slender, thin as a girl in her white pyjamas, her eyebrows washed clean of their black makeup, her jewels put away beneath a chamois cloth, a silk scarf tied around her hair. “One shouldn’t live alone,” she’d say. “It’s a mistake. I used to think I had to make my life on my own, but I was wrong.” ‘
Mademoiselle Chanel – la Grande Mademoiselle, as she became known by the press, like a granddaughter of the King of France – was still attended by a retinue: a butler, François Mironnet; a maid, Céline, whom she called Jeanne (the name of a previous maid and also of her mother); her secretary, Lilou Grumbach. Sometimes François took off his white gloves and sat down beside her to eat, to keep her company; or played cards with Lilou in the room adjacent to Mademoiselle, while she was falling asleep. She gave François the key to her safe, told him that he could be a jewellery designer, as Paul lribe had been. On Sundays, when she was often melancholy, Chanel asked her chauffeur to drive her to the cemetery, Père Lachaise. None of those she had loved were buried there, but still she walked among the graves, just as she had done as a child in another time, another place.
But she always came back to her quiet white bedroom at the Ritz; and when the day ended, when there was no one left for her to talk to, she would take her scissors from their place on the bedside table, cut her pills from their foil covering, and then give herself her nightly injection of Sedol, a form of morphine that she had relied upon for many years to help her sleep, ever since she had witnessed the death of her lover lribe. The ritual was not a secret: Claude Delay witnessed it, the phial of drugs taken out of a small metal box in the bedside drawer, the syringe carefully sterilised in surgical spirit. ‘I never saw her do the injection in haste,’ says Delay, ‘except when she was in the last stages of fatigue, or it was very late.’ Eventually, the young woman came to believe that Chanel’s dependency on the drug was more complicated than a physical addiction: ‘her injection was a substitute for love … Sedol was her last defence against the night – the ultimate and solitary penetration.’
Yet the sleep it brought was not that of dreamless oblivion. In the darkness Chanel was troubled by nightmares, unbidden terrors, sleepwalking; sometimes she would rise from her bed, take her scissors from the bedside table, and sit in front of the mirror of her dressing table, cutting at her pyjamas, jabbing and slashing at the cloth. She would awake suddenly, scissors in hand, shocked and frightened at what she had done to herself; or sleepwalk into the bathroom, turning on the taps to wash her hands, over and over again. Her maid was instructed to lock the doors to the bedroom, in case Chanel’s somnambulism sent her out into the hotel corridor, but she did not want her scissors to be kept from her, whatever the risk to herself.
There were nights when she slipped in the bathroom or fell from her bed. She told her friends that she preferred not to call a doctor – that would be too undignified – and so she tended to treat her wounds herself. Marcel Haedrich remembered seeing her cuts and bruises, and her explanations of how she was able to mend these injuries, without any help: ‘She had brought together the fragments of broken skin on her nose to join them again. “With precision,” she said, making the same movements: “like this, one bit against the other, almost to the millimetre.”’ Very occasionally, after a fall or another unsettled night, she mentioned her father to Haedrich, in connection with her childhood sleepwalking; the briefest of references, which nevertheless seemed designed to reassure her of past tenderness. ‘Her sleepwalking came up again,’ noted Haedrich, who had come to regard Chanel with a mixture of sympathy and frustration. ‘When she was only six, her father used to put her back into bed when she got out. “Very gently, in order not to waken me,” Coco said. “I was very scared. I would stretch out my hand and cry: ‘He’s there! In the dark!’ My father would say: ‘No, no, don’t be afraid, he isn’t bad, he won’t do anything to you.’”’
Lying awake in the darkness of Chanel’s bedroom at the Ritz, I remember this story, and wonder who ‘he’ was, and whether she still feared him, three-quarters of a century after her father had gone. I reach out to turn on the bedside lamp, but there is an electrical quirk, the lights seem not to be working, and the hairs on the back of my neck are prickling, as if there is crackling static in the room. I close my eyes, and see an image of Chanel within these walls, her sanctuary, as Delay had described her to me earlier today: red lipstick wiped away with a clean cloth, white face-cream, but eyes still black and glittering, like dark pools. I think of the scissors that glinted beside her bed, and the sterilised syringe of morphine, and of the surgeon’s knife that remade her face in Switzerland, before her comeback, after the shadow of the war. I imagine Chanel closing her eyes at night, after she had injected herself with Sedol, seeing the white ceiling and the white walls turning to black, as the drug soothed her into brief oblivion. As I drift towards sleep myself, the walls dissolve into shadows, the dividing door between this room and the next gently rattles; I hear a murmur of voices, and the sound of footsteps in the corridor, or is it inside my room?
On the day before her death, 9th January 1971, Mademoiselle Chanel was still working, even though it was a Saturday, furiously racing against the clock to finish her latest couture collection. The following morning, she was forced to remain at rest; even the formidable Chanel could not insist that her employees go to work on a Sunday. Claude Delay came to visit her at the Ritz at one o’clock, where she found her sitting at her dressing table again, applying her make-up, carefully drawing on her dark eyebrows and red lipstick, examining her reflection in the mirror.
They lunched together downstairs at Chanel’s usual table – ‘out of the way’, where the couturière could watch the others in the restaurant, without being watched herself – and then, long after the room had emptied, the two women finally left for an afternoon drive. The car drove them up the Champs-Elysées – ‘crammed with a gloomy crowd’, remembers Delay – and through the streets of Paris, while a wintry sunshine finally emerged through the mist. Chanel told Delay that she hated the setting sun, that she should have worn her dark glasses. By the time the car had brought them back to the Ritz, the sun had disappeared, and a full moon was rising. Delay said goodbye, and as Chanel disappeared through the door of the Ritz, she called out that she would be working again at Rue Cambon, as usual, the next day
Mademoiselle Chanel took the lift back to her bedroom on the sixth floor, where her maid Céline was waiting for her. She was tired, she said to Céline, and lay down on her bed, still fully clothed, not wanting her maid to undress her. At about 8.30 p.m., she suddenly cried out to Céline that she couldn’t breathe, asking her to open the window. The maid rushed to her mistress’s bedside, trying to help her, as Chanel was struggling to give herself her injection. Céline broke the phial of drugs, and then Mademoiselle pushed the syringe into her hip. ‘You see,’ she said to Céline, ‘this is how one dies.’
The next morning, Chanel’s body lay in her white bedroom at the Ritz; her maid had dressed her in a white suit an
d blouse, and tucked her hands beneath the linen sheets. ‘She looked very small,’ says Delay, ‘almost like a little girl taking her first communion.’ The funeral service was at L’Eglise de la Madeleine, the grandest church close to Rue Cambon, famous for its monumental portico of stone colonnades. Her coffin was set beneath the statue of Mary Magdalene, and covered with white flowers – camellias, gardenias, orchids, azaleas; some formed into a cross, others in the shape of scissors – except for a single wreath of red roses. (Diaghilev, the great impresario, would have approved; as would Misia, with her instinct for the making of drama and myth.) Yves Saint-Laurent came to pay his respects, as did his fellow couturiers, Balmain, Balenciaga, Courrèges. So many of her friends and lovers were dead – she had outlived Pierre Reverdy by a decade, and Cocteau had died over seven years previously – but Serge Lifar was at the church, along with Jeanne Moreau, Salvador Dalí and all of her models, a long line of them, wearing immaculate couture. Two weeks later, the same models appeared in Mademoiselle’s last couture show, in ivory tweed suits and white evening dresses; many of those in the audience found their eyes drawn to the steps at the top of the mirrored staircase, where Mademoiselle used to sit, hidden from view; still hidden from them now.
She was not buried in Paris, but in Switzerland, as she had requested, in the cemetery at Lausanne. There is a headstone with five lions carved on it, her name above the dates of her birth and her death, and a simple cross. But the grave itself is covered with white flowers, rather than a heavy tomb. ‘She did not want to be buried beneath a stone monument,’ says Gabrielle Labrunie. ‘She’d said to me, “I want to be able to move, not lie under a stone.”’ Madame Labrunie pauses, and then she says, ‘You know, if you want to be close to a person who has died, you’ll never find them in a graveyard.’
Models from the House of Chanel attending Chanel’s memorial service in Paris.
In Switzerland, in the long winter of 1946, Gabrielle Chanel had told Paul Morand that she was ‘free as a bird’. Thirty years later, as Morand himself approached death, he transcribed her words, in his book L’Allure de Chanel. ‘Nothing was written by me,’ he wrote in the preface, ‘it was all by a ghost, but a ghost who, from beyond the grave, kept up a frantic gallop These then were her last words to him: ‘I would make a very bad dead person, because once I was put under, I would grow restless and would think only of returning to earth and starting all over again.’
On the top floors of 31 Rue Cambon, the lights in the workrooms are still burning bright through a winter’s night, scissors snipping as a new haute-couture collection is being finished for the coming spring. Mademoiselle’s apartment lies undisturbed beneath them; the door closed, the curtains drawn, silent in its darkness. But the moonlight finds a way in and is reflected in the silvery mirrors; so that the pale engravings on the Coromandel screens are visible, a feathered white phoenix clearly distinct on one of the panels in the hall, rearing above the flowering stems of ivory camellias. On the other side of the looking-glass doors, the mirrored staircase is quiet; no one treads its carpeted steps. When the couture collection is completed at last, close before the cold dawn rises above Paris, the lights are turned out, and shadows slip down the stairs. Then, as morning comes, the House of Chanel will open again and set to work once more.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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Charles-Roux, Edmonde, Chanel (tr. Nancy Amphoux), Jonathan Cape, 1976
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Haedrich, Marcel, Coco Chanel: Her Life, Her Secrets (tr. Charles Lam Markmann), Robert Hale & Co., 1972
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—– The Allure of Chanel (tr. Euan Cameron), Pushkin Press, 2008
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&nbs
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—– (intro), Beaton in the Sixties, Phoenix 2004
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Vreeland, Diana, D.V., Da Capo Press, 2003
Walsh, Stephen, Stravinsky, Pimlico, 2002
Wheeler-Bennett, John, The Nemesis of Power, Macmillan, 1954
INDEX
The pagination of this electronic edition does not match the edition from which it was created. To locate a specific passage, please use the search feature of your e-book reader.
Aimé, Anouk, 292
Amiot, Félix, 273
Arden, Elizabeth, 301
Arkwright, Frank, 162
Arkwright, Rosa (née Baring), 162
Coco Chanel Page 28