In October of the same year, WWD again reported on Chanel’s fur-trimmed coats, this time noting one that Chanel wore at Biarritz, which appears similar to the one that so impressed Misia: “Gabrielle Chanel passed attired in the long maroon colored charmeuse cloak tipped with lapin dyed to match, which was such a success with American buyers at the Chanel opening in August.” Delange, “One Piece Dress Wins Favor at French Resort,” Women’s Wear Daily, October 6, 1916, 1.
31 “Misia throughout her life”: Gold and Fizdale, 202.
32 “She grabbed hold of me”: Morand, L’Allure de Chanel, 121.
33 “Without Misia, I would have”: Quoted in Haedrich, 86.
34 her still-provincial accent: Frances Kennett, The Life and Loves of Gabrielle Chanel (London: Gollancz Books, 1989), 36.
35 “One felt intelligent”: Quoted in Haedrich, 87; Morand, L’Allure de Chanel, 73.
36 “I tried desperately to think”: Sert, 198.
37 “Rarely have I been so amused”: Quoted in Gold and Fizdale, 198.
38 The Serts had become: In Claude Delay’s interpretation, Misia’s motives in bringing the grief-stricken Chanel along on her honeymoon were less than altruistic: “Coco’s tears held a primal allure … tears and melodrama having spurred Misia’s own development, and formed her sexuality.” Delay, 82.
39 “I’ve been to see the Princess”: Morand, L’Allure de Chanel, 103. In 1920, 200,000 francs equaled approximately $160,000 in U.S. currency today. Some put the figure at 300,000 francs, including Chanel herself, who changes the figure even within Morand’s text.
40 A secret among these three: Gold and Fizdale assume Diaghilev phoned Misia the moment Chanel left. Gold and Fizdale, 229.
41 “a gesture that combined”: Ibid.
42 “Misia never left Diaghilev”: Morand, L’Allure de Chanel, 99.
43 she began attending every rehearsal: In his memoirs, Stravinsky adds that Chanel not only financed the production, but allowed the costumes for it to be fabricated in her studios. Igor Stravinsky, Chroniques de ma vie (Paris: Editions Denoël, 1935), 115.
“Le Sacre could only have been mounted with the aid of friends. I must above all cite Mlle Gabrielle Chanel, who not only came to our aid generously, but also participated herself in the reprisal by allowing the costumes to be executed in her couture workshop, whose reputation is universal.”
44 break off a nascent friendship: Morand, L’Allure de Chanel, 82.
45 albeit married—Stravinsky: For more on Chanel’s relationships with Duke Dmitri and Stravinsky, see chapter 5.
46 “I sometimes bite my friends”: Morand, L’Allure de Chanel, 83–84.
47 some Sapphic experiments: Misia’s primary biographers, Arthur Gold and Robert Fizdale, seem convinced of an at-least-intermittent erotic relationship between the women.
48 seriously dependent on the drug: Former Chanel apprentice and assistant Manon Ligeour suggested in a 2005 interview that Chanel took morphine. Apel-les Fenosa, Chanel’s lover in the late 1930s, claims he broke off with her because of her drug use. Prince Jean-Louis de Faucigny-Lucinge also chronicles Misia’s drug use in Mémoires d’un gentilhomme cosmopolite (Paris: Editions Perrin, 1990).
49 complete with hair pulling: Gold and Fizdale suggest that Coco’s addiction matched Misia’s in intensity and that both women traveled regularly to Switzerland to procure illegal stashes of the drug. Gold and Fizdale, 300. Amy Fine Collins cites Georges Bernstein Gruber’s account of a hair-pulling fight between Misia and Coco. Amy Fine Collins, “Haute Coco,” Vanity Fair, June 1994, 132–48.
7. ANTIGONE IN VOGUE: CHANEL COSTUMES THE MODERNIST STAGE
1 “Diaghilev invented Russia for foreigners”: Morand, 101.
2 accessible, popular references: Lynn Garafola refers to Diaghilev’s productions as “prestige commodities.” Garafola, Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, 357.
3 sensuous tango steps: Afternoon of a Faun was based on a poem by Stéphane Mallarmé—an idea Misia suggested to Diaghilev. Similarly, the Texas Rag is danced in the 1913 ballet Jeux. See Burt Ramsey, Alien Bodies: Representations of Modernity, “Race,” and Nation in Early Modern Dance (New York: Routledge, 1998), 29.
4 sumptuous onstage creations: Mary E. Davis, Classic Chic: Music, Fashion, and Modernism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 22.
5 sharing some stage-star glamour: Diaghilev also knew how to use his dancers as “brand ambassadors.” In 1924, for example, when the women’s magazine Femina sponsored a series of fashion galas, Diaghilev sent Ballets Russes soloists to perform as part of the program. When a new branch of the Galeries Lafayette department store opened, Diaghilev’s dancers once again appeared to perform on site.
6 he lured the glitterati: As Garafola observes, “The commercial setting in which performances took place added luster to their component parts: the artwork itself became a prestige commodity.… The new art promoted by Cocteau and his group was a look, a style, a tone that could be adapted with equal ease to the walls of a nightclub, costumes for a fancy dress ball, and score of a ballet.” Garafola, Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, 357.
7 Cocteau, who was the first: Quoted in Nathalie Mont-Servant, “La mort de Mlle Chanel,” Le Monde, January 12, 1971.
8 “And I cannot imagine”: Jean Cocteau, “A Propos d’Antigone,” Gazette des 7 Arts, February, 10, 1923.
9 drama for their own ends: Ancient Greece entered the cultural atmosphere once more in France with the work of Freud, the surrealists—who made use of Greek myth—and with the 1921 publication of the French translation of James Joyce’s Ulysses. French dramatists who returned to the Greeks, in the tradition of seventeenth-century authors such as Corneille and Racine, included Jean Anouilh, Jean Giraudoux, and Jean-Paul Sartre.
10 adherence to its law: Interest has never waned in Antigone’s levels of meaning. Philosophers from Hegel onward have turned to this play as a foundational text on the subject of law and the individual, sexuality, and the state. See G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of the Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979); George Steiner, Antigones (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1996); Judith Butler, Antigone’s Claim (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000); Françoise Meltzer, “Antigone, Again,” Critical Inquiry 37, no. 2 (Winter 2011): 169–86; Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire de Jacques Lacan, Livre VII (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1996), chaps. 19–21.
11 Antigone has decided: Cocteau, “A Propos d’Antigone.”
12 frivolous theatrical excess: See François Mauriac, Les Nouvelles Littéraires, January 6, 1923, quoted in Sylvie Humbert-Mougin, Dionysos revisité: Les Tragiques grecs en France de Leconte de Lisle à Claudel (Paris: Belin, 2003), 229–30.
Ezra Pound devoted a long—largely laudatory—essay to the production in the English modernist journal The Dial. Ezra Pound, “Paris Letter,” The Dial, March 13, 1923, 13.
13 “fiddle faddle”: Brooks J. Atkinson, “The Play: Lunations of Jean Cocteau,” trans. Francis Fergusson, The New York Times, April 25, 1930. For more on the production, see Denise Tual, Le Temps dévoré (Paris: Editions Brochés: 1980).
14 “Special attention must be called”: S. H., “M. Jean Cocteau’s Modernist Antigone,” The Christian Science Monitor, January 29, 1923.
15 racial tainting and moral laxity: See Peter Rudnytsky, Oedipus and Freud (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), on the history of German fascination with Hellenic painting and sculpture, beginning with Johann Joachim Winckelmann.
16 of a fallen cultural elite: “Athenian society … as an aesthetic ideal was wed to the modern pseudoscience of eugenics; Greece functioned as a mythic prototype for the fascist ‘new man’ who was destined to inhabit an industrialized Third Reich, devoid of degenerate races.” Roger Griffin, The Nature of Fascism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 25–31.
17 Writers such as: Robert Brasillach—who was eventually executed for collaboration—translated Sophocles’ Antigone and devoted a poem to it. Ch
arles Maurras, founder of the anti-Semitic Royalist collaborationist group Action Française, saw in Antigone the embodiment of “the very concordant laws of man, the gods, and the city,” and devoted a poem to “Antigone vièrge mère de l’ordre” (Antigone, virgin mother of order). And Jean Anouilh’s Antigone has inspired many conflicting interpretations, with some critics seeing it as a veiled attack on the Vichy government, others seeing in it a pro-fascist subtext. See Katie Fleming, “Fascism on Stage: Jean Anouilh’s Antigone,” in Laughing with the Medusa, ed. Miriam Leonard and Vada Zajko (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 163–188. See also Mary Ann Frese Witt, The Search for Modern Tragedy: Aesthetic Fascism in Italy and France (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001).
18 the Antigones to come: Cocteau cited as inspiration one of France’s most zealous anti-Semites and champions of so-called ethnic nationalism (the xenophobic concept of “France for the French”), writer Maurice Barrès. Handwritten document, undated, at Fonds Cocteau (Bibliothèque de la Ville de Paris).
19 becoming a kind of emblem: Her close friend Paul Morand, for example, was an avowed proponent of eugenics; see chapter 10. See also Andrea Loselle, “The Historical Nullification of Paul Morand’s Gendered Eugenics,” in Gender and Fascism in Modern France, ed. Melanie Hawthorne and Richard Golsan (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1997), 101–18.
20 “These woolen dresses”: “Chanel devient grecque,” Vogue, February 1, 1923, 28–29.
21 “Today if you opened a book”: Roland Barthes, “The Contest Between Chanel and Courrèges,” in The Language of Fashion, ed. Andy Stafford and Michael Carter, trans. Andy Stafford (Oxford: Berg, 2006), 105. Originally published as “Le Match Chanel-Courrèges,” Marie-Claire, September 1967.
22 “Society people came”: Dullin, quoted in Francis Steegmuller, “Cocteau: A Brief Biography,” in Alexandra Anderson and Carol Saltus, Jean Cocteau and the French Scene (New York: Abbeville Press, 1984), 298.
23 “Text? What text?”: Quoted in Tual, 354.
24 induction into the French avant-garde: Critic Rose Fortassier suggests that Chanel exerted tremendous influence upon Cocteau’s theatrical imagination, and that he viewed her as his most important collaborator. Cocteau “worked through Chanel,” she writes. Rose Fortassier, Les Ecrivains français et la mode (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1988), 182.
25 shadow of Antigone lived: Sophocles, Antigone, trans. Elizabeth Wyckoff, in Sophocles I, ed. David Grene and Richmond Lattimore (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954, repr., 1973), lines 813, 899–912. Critic Françoise Meltzer writes, “[Antigone] does not … belong, hence her foreignness.” Françoise Meltzer, “Theories of Desire: Antigone Again,” Critical Inquiry, 37 (Winter 2011): 176. “[Antigone],” writes classicist Valerie Reed “is … a migrant … always moving toward a home which itself is perpetually displaced or receding.” Valerie Reed, “Bringing Antigone Home?” Comparative Literature 45, no. 3 (2008): 325.
26 unraveling it so badly: In an oral interview, longtime Chanel employee Marie Hélène Marouzé recounted a nearly identical story that took place more than thirty years later. Romy Schneider (who was costumed by Chanel in films such as Luchino Visconti’s 1962 Boccaccio ’70) stopped by Cambon, wearing a Chanel suit. After talking for a while, Schneider was about to leave when Chanel decided that the shoulder of Schneider’s jacket was not quite perfect. Ignoring Schneider’s protests that she was late and had to leave, Chanel set about destroying the sleeve and refashioning it completely, saying, “I cannot let you leave with a shoulder like that!”
27 “I threw my own coat”: Quoted in Madsen, 124.
28 Georges Braque into garments: See Alexander Schouvaloff, The Art of the Ballets Russes: Serge Lifar Collection of Theater Designs, Costumes, and Paintings at the Wadsworth Atheneum (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998).
29 haberdashery on the Place: From Conservatoire Chanel, Chanel and Stravinsky file.
30 Chanel’s fur and velvet fantasies: The October 1937 review in Marianne magazine praised the costumes lavishly: “Mlle Chanel dressed [the actors] with the simplicity and sumptuousness of poetry, the realism of playing cards, and the splendor of the velvets of Van Eyck.” Playing card characters, fictional yet immutable, are not unlike the kind of “stock” character that Chanel herself invented: the “Coco” character.
31 “These are not … the costumes”: Interview with Cocteau, Ce Soir, October 9, 1937.
32 “beautiful illuminated manuscripts”: “Sur la scène et l’écran,” Vogue, December 1937, 49.
33 “one slightly monastic dress”: Colette, “Spectacles de Paris,” Journal, October 24, 1937.
34 “Mme Abdy’s costume consists”: Montboron, “Oedipe-Macbeth au Théâtre Antoine,” L’Intransigeant, July 17, 1937.
35 casual clothes of Chanel’s lover: “We must adopt the costumes of the era in which the tragedy is being presented,” wrote Cocteau in the preface to the play. Jean Cocteau, “Préface,” Orphée (Paris: Editions Bordas, 1973), 38.
36 “Cocteau has supplanted Thanatos”: André Levinson. Review of Cocteau’s Orphée in Art Vivant, August 1, 1926, 594. “A week ago you still thought I was a skeleton wrapped in a shroud, carrying a scythe,” says Death ironically to one of her attendants. Jean Cocteau, Orpheus, trans. John Savacool, in The Infernal Machine and Other Plays (New York: New Directions Books, 1963, repr., 1967), 122.
37 These are not “real” people: “Jean Cocteau’s characters are given, not organic. He sets them before us as recognizable modern types who will reenact the ancient myth as required,” writes Neal Oxenhandler in Scandal and Parade: The Theater of Jean Cocteau (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1957), 101.
38 realm of timeless inevitability: “In no sense is … the uniqueness of character important [in myth].” David Grene, introduction to Sophocles I, in The Complete Greek Tragedies, ed. David Grene and Richmond Lattimore (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 7.
39 showcasing inward, intimate stories: These French modernists differed markedly from many of their contemporaries in twentieth-century Western drama. While the Scandinavian modernists, such as Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg, and the later Americans such as Eugene O’Neill, Lillian Hellman, and Arthur Miller, reveled in the nuances of individual story and character, French modernist playwrights looked outward instead of inward, forgoing individual contemplation in favor of far broader themes.
40 ready-made plots and stock characters: See Hugh Dickinson, Myth on the Modern Stage (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1969), 76ff for a discussion of Cocteau’s use of myth and the absence of psychology in his work.
41 “a kind of strange goddess”: Maurice Sachs, Au Temps du boeuf sur le toit (Paris: Editions de la Nouvelle Revue Critique, 1939), 123. Turning death into this couture-clad woman, Cocteau slipped in a tart commentary on the seductive decadence of fashion, and its proximity to death. “Fashion prostitutes the body to the inorganic world and represents the rights of the corpse,” philosopher Walter Benjamin observed. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), 82.
42 Picasso painted the stage curtain: Picasso’s curtain was an enlargement of a painting he had done of Amazonian women running on the beach.
43 Cocteau were also regular passengers: The romance of the Blue Train attracted other artists, too. The train figured in Agatha Christie’s 1928 novel, The Mystery of the Blue Train, as well as in Georges Simenon’s Mon Ami Maigret, 1949.
44 and gossip columns: During the winter of 1922–23, Le Figaro devoted a half page nearly every day to a section called “Le Figaro aux pays du soleil” (Le Figaro in the land of sunshine), which detailed the galas and sporting events of vacationing luminaries. See Garafola, Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, 379.
45 the wear and tear of dancing: The dancers complained that the jersey fabric was too flimsy to withstand balletic exertions—seams split and hems frayed. Fina
lly Chanel had her staff sew two complete sets of costumes in order to have replacements always at the ready.
46 fitted shorts and tank-style top: Despite his French name, Dolin was an Irishman born Patrick Kay, who had become Cocteau’s new lover after the death of Raymond Radiguet. Sokolova was British, born Hilda Munnings, who also adopted a more European-sounding stage name as was the custom for many in Diaghilev’s troupe. See Madsen, 143.
47 trademark little cloche hats: Chanel’s 1924 sportswear couture line was described by Women’s Wear Daily thus on February 4, 1924: “The characteristic, youthful line is again predominant in the opening models shown by Chanel, who features many boyish tailored suits … straight in silhouette.
48 not overtly depicted: For some, Chanel’s dominating presence rendered the production too commercial. The New Statesman wrote, “[The Blue Train is just] … an elaborate mannequin parade of bathing and other fashionable seaside costumes by the House of Chanel.” Quoted in Garafola, Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, 99.
8. BENDOR: THE RICHEST MAN IN EUROPE
1 “Whose yacht is that?: Noël Coward, Private Lives: An Intimate Comedy in Three Acts (London: Samuel French, 1930), 21.
2 “Boy sent Westminster to me”: Delay, 125.
3 as well as the Eaton Railway: The duke had inherited at least six hundred prime acres of some of the world’s most valuable real estate, in the heart of London’s Mayfair and Belgravia districts, as well as approximately thirty thousand beyond it. Rents paid him by tenants on his lands in the United Kingdom alone (he owned property all over the world) were estimated at $1.2 million a year in 1934. “The Duke of Westminster Sues for Libel,” Gettysburg Times, January 6, 1934.
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