Mademoiselle

by Rhonda K. Garelick

10 known for his ruthlessness: Thiers planned to abolish the Commune, by “us[ing] the conservatism of the country to crush the radicalism of the city,” in the words of historian David Harvey, harnessing the resentments of rural Frenchmen to incite their participation in raids against their own city-dwelling compatriots. Adolphe Thiers even negotiated with Otto von Bismarck to win the release of French prisoners of war, who were then inducted directly into the Versailles army and sent to Paris to attack their own compatriots. Thiers had been especially cruel in his suppression of the worker movement during his years as minister of the interior under Louis-Philippe. Harvey, 370.

  11 Communards were depicted as dangerous: Novelist Alphonse Daudet described his city under the commune as “Paris controlled by the blacks.” Edmond de Goncourt compared the workers to “barbarians.” See Kristin Ross, “Commune Culture,” in A New History of French Literature, ed. Denis Hollier (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 751–58.

  12 imperial conquests were actually benevolent: To the Communards, the column stood as “a symbol of chauvinism and incitement to national hatred,” as Frederick Engels wrote. Frederick Engels, “Introduction,” 9–22, in Karl Marx, The Civil War in France: The Paris Commune (New York: International Publishers, Co., Inc, 1968), 15. Originally published in 1891.

  13 They even hired musicians: Special permits were issued, printed like invitations, and stamped with a Phrygian cap, in keeping with the commune’s extensive borrowing of iconography of the French Revolution. They also borrowed the revolutionary calendar, referring to “Floréal,” and so forth.

  14 his fractured stone body: See Sir Alistair Horne, The Fall of Paris: The Siege and the Commune (1965; repr., New York: Penguin, 2007), esp. 350–51.

  15 Liberty atop the globe: We don’t know when Iribe shortened and Gallicized his Basque name, but he is listed as “Iribe” in contemporary accounts of the Commune. Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society and Monthly Record of Geography, n.s., 10, no. 12 (December 1888): 813–48. Accessed online.

  16 the palm of Napoléon’s hand: Some sources suggest that financial need and a desire to impress his girlfriend at that time, actress Mary Magnier, motivated Jules Iribe to help demolish the Colonne Vendôme. Lelieur and Bachollot, 19.

  17 one of the bloodiest massacres: Marx wrote:

  To find a parallel for the conduct of Thiers and his bloodhounds we must go back to the times of Sulla and the two Triumvirates of Rome. The same wholesale slaughter in cold blood; the same disregard, in massacre, of age and sex, the same system of torturing prisoners; the same proscriptions, but this time of a whole class; the same savage hunt after concealed leaders, lest one might escape; the same denunciations of political and private enemies; the same indifference for the butchery of entire strangers to the feud. There is but this difference: that the Romans had no mitrailleuses [machine guns].

  Marx, The Civil War in France, 75.

  18 ten years in Spain: Maria Teresa Sanchez de la Campa, an Andalusian girl twenty years his junior, became—eventually—his wife. Jules would go on to pursue his itinerant career, as a superintendent working on the Panama Canal and also living for a time, with his family, in Madagascar, training colonists. “M. Iribe Has Been Appointed General Superintendent of the Panama R.R.,” Engineering News and American Contract Journal, February 9, 1884, 67.

  19 joining the Freemasons: Delay, 154.

  20 not unlike Boy Capel: He was even a member of the Positivist Club of Paris, a group devoted to scientific inquiry that followed the philosophies of August Comte. Other adherents included Georges Clemenceau. “The Decline of French Positivism,” Sewanee Review 33, no. 4 (October 1925): 484–87. His membership is mentioned in one of those old journals.

  21 mention of his itinerant youth: Although he claimed to have attended Paris’s L’Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paul had likely not even completed secondary school. “Nothing about him is certain,” writes art historian Anne-Claude Lelieur, “since throughout his entire life, Iribe made sure to divulge nothing whatsoever about his education and his origins.” Lelieur and Bachollot, 32.

  22 particular pride of place: Twenty different French fashion houses exhibited at the Fair; and La Parisienne, in her Paquin gown, stood above it all, welcoming visitors at the gate. Vincent Soulier, Presse Féminine: La Puissance Frivole (Montreal: Editions Archipel), 40. See also Debora Silverman, Art Nouveau in Fin-de-Siècle France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 291.

  23 an amalgam of fashion, design: Iribe worked for L’Assiette au Beurre, owned by Thadée Natanson, husband of Misia, as well as Le Rire and Le Cri de Paris. His sophisticated political caricatures won him acclaim early on. L’Assiette au Beurre sent him to Madrid in 1902, when he was just nineteen, to cover the coronation of Alphonse XIII.

  24 Jean Cocteau also collaborated: This patron was Norwegian socialite Dagny Bjornson. Le Témoin ran for four years and showcased work by Iribe and the coterie of talented friends he had already amassed, among them Sacha Guitry, Juan Gris, Marcel Duchamp, and Jean Cocteau (who convinced him to devote an entire issue to the Ballets Russes).

  25 the delicate “Iribe rose”: “Let us recall the way that [Iribe] proved that commercial art is not necessarily a minor art.” André Warnod, obituary for Paul Iribe, Le Figaro, September 29, 1935.

  26 rabid xenophobia and racism: “The ‘foreigner’ cannot love our journal,” declared one issue, using the French word métèque for foreigner, a strong racial slur indicating someone of Middle Eastern or Mediterranean descent. The journal aimed, it said, to rescue “modernism and imaginative creative endeavor from German affiliation.” See Jane Fulcher, “The Preparation for Vichy: Anti-Semitism in French Musical Culture Between the Two World Wars,” The Musical Quarterly, Autumn 1995, 458–75.

  27 Iribe’s career reached its apex: After his fashion drawings for American Vogue caught the attention of Jesse Lasky, one of the founders of Paramount Studios, Iribe was introduced to Cecil B. DeMille, who hired him in 1920.

  28 Cadillac that he christened “Fifi”: Delay, 159.

  29 He hired a Japanese valet: See George C. Pratt, Herbert Reynolds, and Cecil B. DeMille, “Forty-Five Years of Picture-Making, an Interview with Cecil B. DeMille,” Film History 3, no. 2, 1989: 133–45. Iribe’s film credits as costume designer include DeMille’s Don’t Change Your Husband (1919); The Affairs of Anatol (1921), starring Gloria Swanson (whom Chanel would dress for films ten years later); Manslaughter (1922); Adam’s Rib (1923); and Feet of Clay (1924).

  30 lavish ancient Egyptian settings: See Robert S. Birchard, Cecil B. DeMille’s Hollywood (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2004), 179ff.

  31 she was costuming Sophocles: “There is no question that it will be seen by more people than any picture the world has ever had,” said director DeMille about The Ten Commandments. See George C. Pratt, Reynolds, and DeMille, especially 140. See also Simon Louvish, Cecil B. DeMille: A Life (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2008).

  32 obliged to return to France: See Louvish, 262.

  33 “My growing celebrity”: Morand, L’Allure de Chanel, 129.

  34 “I think that in engaging Mademoiselle”: “Madame Chanel to Design Fashions for Films,” The New York Times, January 25, 1931.

  35 apprised of her prejudices: Delay, 149.

  36 “With him at least the extravagance”: Charles-Roux, 475.

  37 both gifted poseurs: For details on the life of Erich von Stroheim, see Richard Koszarski, Von: The Life and Films of Erich von Stroheim (New York: Limelight, 2004).

  38 chafed at being an employee: See Delay, 149.

  39 “sartorial anarchy”: Quoted in Emma Cabire, “Le Cinéma et la mode,” La Revue du Cinéma, no. 26 (September 1, 1931): 25–26.

  40 “When you strip color”: Quoted in Dale McConathy and Diana Vreeland, Hollywood Costume (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1977), 28.

  41 “[Chanel] made a lady”: The New Yorker, December 22, 1931.

  42 starring in A Bill of Divorcement
: Celia Berton, Paris à La Mode: A Voyage of Discovery (London: Gollancz, 1956), 166.

  43 “I prefer copying to stealing”: “Interview with Mademoiselle Chanel,” McCall’s, November 1965, 172.

  44 “Mademoiselle Chanel has authorized being copied”: See Madsen, 192. See also “Chanel’s Exhibition Opened at 39 Grosvenor Square,” Harper’s Bazaar, 1932, 67. “The public will be admitted on payment of a small entrance fee which will be devoted to a charity connected with the textile industry.… [Exhibit features] more than a hundred models, created exclusively in British materials, and are not for sale. Range from dresses for Ascot to suits for the Scottish moors.”

  45 “when all the people”: “Chanel Is 75,” 1959 BBC interview.

  46 “My past tortured him”: Morand, L’Allure de Chanel, 129.

  47 “wear[ing] your checkbook”: Morand, L’Allure de Chanel, 145.

  48 “During times when luxury”: Delay, 153–54.

  49 Never before had Coco attributed: Quoted in Charles-Roux, 499. Interview originally in L’Illustration, November 12, 1932, no. 4680.

  50 hired security guards: Ibid., 499.

  51 accusing her of extravagance: Morand, L’Allure de Chanel, 127.

  52 The Ritz would remain: Delay, 163.

  53 “He dominated her,” recalled Serge: Quoted in Galante, 140.

  54 quite the opposite was true: Haedrich, 122.

  55 “There is more authentic French”: Iribe laid out his new political philosophy in two manifesto-like essays: “In Defense of Luxury” (May 1932), published as a freestanding booklet, and “The ‘France’ Brand” (July 1932), published as a special issue of the journal L’Animateur du Temps Nouveau. The essays announce the argument that Iribe would develop through all sixty-nine issues of Le Témoin: France was under attack by pernicious foreigners and racial inferiors who had targeted its very soul—that is, its luxury goods industry.

  56 Gabrielle Palasse-Labrunie put it simply: Gabrielle Palasse-Labrunie, personal conversation with author, March 2011.

  57 “ubiquitous name of French chic”: John Updike, “Qui Qu’a Vu Coco,” The New Yorker, September 21, 1998, 132–36.

  58 “He wanted to see me vanquished”: Morand, L’Allure de Chanel, 129.

  59 “leprosy on the clear complexion”: Paul Iribe, “Le Dernier Luxe,” Le Témoin, November 4, 1934.

  60 the so-called Stavisky affair: As historian William Wiser has written, “1933 was Year One of a sobering European malaise.” William Wiser, The Twilight Years: Paris in the 1930s (New York: Carroll and Graf), 98.

  Serge Stavisky, a Russian Jew living in Paris, was a known embezzler and pyramid scheme artist with ties to a number of highly placed members of the Radical Party of Parliament. Despite his long and public criminal record, Stavisky continued to live lavishly and evade prosecution, enjoying what everyone assumed was government protection. (Officials postponed his trial nineteen times over a period of sixteen years.) On January 8, 1934, when Stavisky was found shot dead in Chamonix, virtually no one believed the official explanation of suicide. The prevailing opinion, especially on the right, was that Stavisky had been murdered by the government in an attempt to cover up its involvement in his corrupt enterprises. Throughout January and early February, a series of related scandals broke out, involving the dismissal of the Paris police commissioner, Jean Chiappe, and a kerfuffle over a production of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus at the Comédie-Française (the choice of this play had inflamed everyone, appearing pro-communist to the Right, and pro-fascist to the Left). Prime Minister Edouard Daladier only aggravated matters when, in a misguided attempt to quell the discord, he fired Emile Fabre, director of the Comédie-Française, and replaced him with M. Thome, head of the French secret service.

  While Iribe was ardently anti-German, and staunchly nationalist, his politics had much in common with the Fascists. This blend of xenophobia with Fascist sympathies was common among the French right wing in the 1930s. With the approach of World War II, many of those on the French Right made common cause with the occupying Germans and supported the collaborationist Vichy regime.

  61 Hundreds of such uprisings: See Wiser, and also Eugen Weber, The Hollow Years: France in the 1930s (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994), 141. “February 6th … aggravated and confirmed political polarization: the politics of either/or. For the next few years there would be no more constructive debate between people of different political stripe. Only clashes.”

  62 much of the political drama: In 1934, over two-thirds of all published journals supported conservative, often anti-parliamentarian causes; these right-leaning (and usually anti-Semitic) papers enjoyed eight times the circulation of those on the left.

  63 in August 1934: Chanel, “Préface à ma collection d’hiver,” August 6, 1934, typescript at Conservatoire Chanel.

  64 layers of starched crinolines: See Prince Jean-Louis de Faucigny-Lucinge, Fêtes Mémorables, bals costumés 1922–1972 (Paris: Herscher Publishing, 1986).

  65 “The masked ball unmasks”: Quoted in Prince Jean-Louis de Faucigny-Lucinge, Mémoires d’un gentilhomme cosmopolite, 113.

  66 “Aren’t you appalled”: Colette, Lettres à Marguerite Moreno (Paris: Flammarion, 1994), 232.

  67 “Last night I was at dinner”: Delay, 169. Morand on September 14, 1934.

  68 help Iribe slim down: Delay mentions Chanel’s open dislike of overweight people. Delay, 233.

  69 “my father thought a marriage”: Gabrielle Palasse-Labrunie, personal conversation with author, March 2011.

  70 “She … was … so attached”: Fiemeyer and Palasse-Labrunie, 157.

  71 “He died at her feet”: Personal conversation with author.

  10. THE PULSE OF HISTORY: CHANEL, FASCISM, AND THE INTERWAR YEARS

  1 “the throbbing pulse of history”: Marie-Pierre Lannelongue, “Coco dans tous ses états,” Elle, May 2, 2005, 115.

  2 “most obscure questions in history”: Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes (New York: Vintage, 1994), 178.

  3 made little secret of her anti-Semitism: Jacques Chazot, who befriended Chanel in her later years, reports that she “spoke of Hitler as a hero,” often horrifying guests. Chazot, Chazot Jacques, 74. He also recounts her penchant for telling anti-Semitic jokes at dinners she hosted. The Comtesse de Noailles recalled Chanel in the 1930s as a figure “throwing Tarot cards and badmouthing the Jews.” Laurence Benaïm, Marie Laure de Noailles: La Vicomtesse du bizarre (Paris: Grasset, 2001), 314.

  4 Some of her favorite billionaires: In one of several similar responses to Vaughan’s book, the Maison Chanel told British Vogue, “Such insinuations cannot go unchallenged.… She would hardly have formed a relationship with the [Wertheimers] or counted Jewish people among her close friends and professional partners such as the Rothschild family … had these really been her views. It is unlikely.” See Lauren Milligan, “Not Coco,” Vogue, August 18, 2011. Justine Picardie repeats this justification in her biography. Picardie, 272.

  5 surprising extent of collaboration: See for example, Barbara Will, Unlikely Collaborations: Gertrude Stein, Bernard Fay, and the Vichy Dilemma (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011). Most recently, such interest in the treacherous affiliations of wealthy and successful individuals may be ascribed to the growing unease in the States about income inequality, the role of banks in the Great Recession, and in 2011, the widespread Occupy Wall Street movement, which singled out the top 1 percent of U.S. taxpayers. See my own interview on this subject in regard to Chanel biographies in Lauren Lipton, “Three Books about Chanel,” The New York Times, December 2, 2011.

  6 Misia was already hopelessly addicted: Misia’s health began to decline seriously in the mid-1930s, perhaps because of her increasing drug dependence. Her eyesight began to deteriorate; she suffered a retinal hemorrhage, and in 1939 she suffered a heart attack, Delay, 181.

  7 the married Henry de Zogheb: Zogheb also dabbled in literature and is the author of Illogismes and Les Maîtres de l’heure. His wife, Odette, née Tréz
el, was known as a very elegant woman whose photograph appeared often in fashion magazines and society columns. Paris police archives.

  8 “to stay at La Pausa”: Quoted in Gaia Servadio, Luchino Visconti: A Biography (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1981), 49.

  9 “[Chanel] would ring”: Quoted in Servadio, 63.

  10 “When I was in Paris”: Ibid., 59. Originally published in Lina Coletti, interview with Visconti, L’Europeo, November 21, 1974.

  11 parades of handsome young soldiers: This comes also from his sister Uberta. Quoted in Servadio, 47.

  12 Fascism also held social appeal: An anonymous friend, quoted by Servadio, 47.

  13 satire of French social class: Chanel would later costume such classic films as Louis Malle’s The Lovers (1958), Roger Vadim’s Dangerous Liaisons (1959), and Alain Resnais’s Last Year at Marienbad (1961).

  14 who played Marie Antoinette: For more on La Marseillaise and its parallels between the fall of Louis XVI and the collapse of the Blum government, see Leger Grindon, “History and the Historians in La Marseillaise,” Film History 4, no. 3 (1990): 227–35. Uberta Visconti recalls that Chanel, oddly, had once escorted Luchino to a meeting of the Popular Front, where Coco seemed distinctly out of place: “[She] was covered in fantastic jewels, and they had mixed with huge sweaty men.” Quoted in Servadio, 59. Such an outing was most out of character for Chanel, who was perhaps curious about this organization or, more likely, simply accompanying a man she found compelling.

  15 “dignified elegance”: Vogue, December 1938, 154.

  16 The birthrate had dropped: During the midthirties, the population of Britain increased by 23 percent, that of Germany by 36 percent, while in France the population increased by just 3 percent, and most of that was due only to immigration from Eastern Europe and elsewhere. See Tony Judt, “France Without Glory,” The New York Review of Books, May 23, 1996.

  17 went through five prime ministers: Léon Blum lost his position in 1937 after only one year. Radical Socialist Party member Camille Chautemps then took over as prime minister for one year, his second stint at the post. Blum resumed control for a single month in 1938, after which Radical Socialist Edouard Daladier took over for two years, followed by Paul Reynaud for less than two months before Pétain took over as Vichy began.