“Don’t forget von Dincklage,” Bettina muttered.
“What about von Dincklage?” I asked.
“He came into the salon once with one of his women and Schiap snubbed him.”
“He’s a Nazi. Why should I pretend to be his friend?” Schiap waved her manicured hands as if bothered by a plague of flies.
“Sometimes one must be diplomatic,” Bettina said.
“Sometimes one must stick to one’s beliefs,” Schiap countered. “Don’t you have something you should be doing? Go check the sewing room, make sure those girls are sewing and not just chatting. You, come with me.” Schiap beckoned with her forefinger. There was a determined look on her face, a slight vertical line appearing between her dark brows. “We are going to have a talk. You work for me now.”
• NINE •
“Me? Spy?” I protested when Schiap and I were behind her closed office door.
She was standing at her window, looking at the colonnade and the statue of Napoleon on top.
“Not spy, actually,” she said, turning and giving me the full intensity of her dark gaze, a look that sent shopgirls scurrying and customers bobbing in obedience. “Just listen. Look. Pay attention. Visit that Chanel woman once in a while. It is for Madame Bouchard as well as me. And Gogo. She must come back to Paris soon; she can’t stay away forever. And I need to keep her safe.”
There was hurt in Schiap’s voice, the mother’s pain of knowing her daughter preferred to be elsewhere, not with her. From what I could remember of Gogo when she’d been at the English school where Allen and I had been, she was shy, very self-contained, easily overwhelmed. And Schiap could be very overwhelming.
“How does my keeping tabs on Coco and von Dincklage help you and Gogo?”
Schiap looked at me as if I were a little slow-witted. “Von Dincklage is head of propaganda. He knows everything the German army is going to do almost as soon as Hitler has planned it. It would be good to know what Germany plans for Paris, don’t you think? They say that von Dincklage will be Chanel’s next lover. And you are already friends with his driver.”
“Not really,” I protested.
“Yes, really, I think.”
Schiap studied a ragged fingernail she’d torn that afternoon and hadn’t had time to repair. “You . . .” She gave me that appraising glance once again. “You, I will dress in my sportswear. Culottes, a long split skirt with a tight jacket. And a hat. You must always wear a hat, with a brooch or feather pinned to it. It will add some sparkle. One of these.” She rifled through a basket of samples next to the ebony screen and brought out a deep-scarlet knitted cap, the kind of grandmother-knitted whimsy you’d put on a child for a day playing out in the snow, but this was knitted of cotton string, for warm weather, with a tawny pheasant feather tucked into it. When she pulled it onto my head, very low over one eye, it became chic, whimsical, and a little mysterious. What is it about a woman’s face when only one eye is showing?
“I will have one made for you in forest green, with navy sequins and a little corsage of feathers on one side. For evening. But this one”—she gave the scarlet cap a little tap—“this one you must wear every time you go to Coco Chanel. She will know it’s mine, and it will drive her mad.”
Schiap laughed gleefully. “So?” she asked.
I was still studying my reflection in the mirror. Short hair, a frisky little hat, the red lipstick Ania had convinced me to use. I didn’t know what Gerald and the schoolgirls would have made of their art teacher. Or Allen. This was another step away from him in the long, eternal parting.
“Okay,” I agreed.
“And maybe you should thin your eyebrows a little. Arch them,” Schiap said. “Open your eyes.”
* * *
• • •
That same day I climbed the glamorous and intimidating mirrored staircase to Chanel’s salon. It was a sun-high early afternoon, and the streets felt like all the ovens of Paris had been opened, it was so hot. July hot, with shimmering sidewalks and the leaves of the chestnut trees curling at the edges in self-defense. My steps dragged with lethargy and second thoughts.
When a woman went to Chanel she had no choice but to glimpse herself all the way up that stairwell and notice everything. Perhaps Coco had taken the Delphic oracle’s advice—“know thyself”—as a business motto, thereby forcing her clients to have a long look at themselves before entering her salon.
“An evening frock,” I told the vendeuse, who eyed me warily when I was upstairs in the gleaming crystal-and-gilt salon. “Something in satin, low neck. Then maybe a cocktail dress?”
“Certainly.”
Champagne was offered. I declined. Coffee was brought instead. Feeling more than a little foolish, I eyed every corner of the salon, taking mental notes of the glamorous, expensive furnishings, the displays, the people.
“Is this the gown you wanted to see?” A mannequin strutted out and turned in a circle, showing how the bias-cut gown swirled with movement. “The Duchess of Windsor recently purchased one very like this.”
The dress was of black satin, shiny as lacquer, liquid as water, completely formfitting except for a low cowl neck that draped over the bustline, adding dimension.
“Very nice.” I sipped my coffee so that she wouldn’t see the envy in my face. Schiap’s clothes were beautiful and whimsical and suggestive of Oriental luxury, with their embroideries in gold and silver threads, and feathers from rare birds. Chanel designed clothes for women who preferred reality to fantasy, women who believed so strongly in their own beauty that embellishment was not needed, just a good cut and the right fabric. I already had a preference for Schiap’s designs, her insistence that clothing was art, not just fashion.
“No, that won’t do. Bring out the black jersey smocked gown,” a smoky rasped voice said from behind me. I looked over my shoulder, and there was Coco Chanel. “No. Something . . . the gown Diana Vreeland ordered. Show her that model.”
Coco sat next to me on the sofa and stared hard into my face, keeping silent until the mannequin returned in a different gown. It had a huge skirt of silver lamé quilted with faux pearls, topped with a lace bolero also embroidered with pearls. It had to weigh at least thirty pounds, but it was beautiful.
“Gorgeous,” I agreed.
“I thought you might prefer something a little outré, rather than subtle,” she said. “But what a silly hat you are wearing. Doesn’t suit you at all. In fact, doesn’t suit anybody.” She was wearing one of her jersey dresses, short and close to the body, cinched at the waist with a wide belt. “How is my dear friend Schiap?”
“No lingering sunburn,” I said, and Coco flinched.
Recovering immediately, she leaned into the sofa, one arm resting on the back of it. “You don’t look like him at all. Your brother. Pity.” She patted my knee. “You enjoy yourself, my dear. Jeannette, show her as many gowns as she wishes. But not the new collection, of course. Only what is already being worn. And no discounts, no credit. She is getting those elsewhere, I think.”
Coco rose and gave me a cool smile over her shoulder. She walked away, slightly turned, showing to best advantage her narrow, elegant figure.
“On second thought,” she said over her shoulder, “come with me. Let’s have lunch together. I can’t have you distracting my salesgirls like this.”
We left the salon on rue Cambon, the mannequin sighing heavily with relief, and crossed the street to the Ritz, Coco leading the way. A side entrance led to her apartment, suite 302.
“I keep an apartment here. So convenient,” she said over her shoulder as we went down a hall, up a stairway, and down another hall, our steps making no noise on the heavily carpeted floor.
“Convenient to your salon?” I asked.
“That, of course. But also, when the Germans come into Paris, a good hotel will be safer than a private home or apartment. They will sta
y here, don’t you think? The German officers? There is no finer hotel in Paris, or in France.”
“They may not come,” I said. “It is not certain there will be war.”
“Of course. I misspoke.” But there was a tone in her voice, that of an adult reassuring a child.
I had already seen some of Coco’s suite at the Ritz two years before, in Harper’s Bazaar, in an advertisement for her perfume, Chanel No. 5. Coco had posed for the ad herself rather than use a model. It hadn’t been her fabulous black evening gown and jewels that caught the eye, but her gaze. She looked away from the camera off to the side, slightly bored, a little challenging, her long, lean arm resting of the mantelpiece of her fireplace. A queen would have posed in this fashion, except for that sideways gaze.
It gave Coco great satisfaction, I think, when the maid opened the door and I stood there, in the hall, gaping. Here, in this hotel suite, was all the fantasy that Coco would not allow in her clothing. The walls were covered with carved Chinese lacquer screens, except for the walls lined with bookcases. Aubussons covered the floor. Pictures hung over marble fireplaces, and the tabletops were covered with precious objets d’art. It was like a jewel box, that suite.
No one had ever accused Coco Chanel of being a simple, uncomplicated person. Here in these rooms were two of her most dominant aspects: her origins in austerity, the peasant poverty followed by the hard years in a convent school, made visible by Coco herself in her simple black jersey sheath. And here, too, was her love for luxury, the costume jewelry that mocked real jewels, the glitter of make-believe.
“Nice, yes?” she said, waving her beringed hand at the marble fireplace, the gilded screens.
“Very,” I agreed, thinking of my attic hotel room with its washbasin behind a torn linen curtain.
“Sit, please.” And we sat on a comfortingly soft velvet sofa.
“Poor Schiap!” She lit a cigarette and drew on it. “She will never forgive me for ruining her costume. She wasn’t injured, was she? God, how clumsy I was.” Coco sat there, surrounded by her velvet furniture and expensive carpets, the gleaming antique screens and Louis XVI side tables, acting as if she’d merely spilled cigarette ash on Schiap.
I understood what Coco wanted from me, needed to hear, that had been buried under her false sympathy for Schiap. Were people gossiping about her? What was being said? Ego. Both Coco and Schiap were larger than life; they both had the egos of Olympian deities.
“No, she was not injured. The flames were put out before any real damage was done. Except to the dress, of course. It was scorched.”
“I will pay her for the damages.” A peasant’s thoughts. Make everything right by the exchange of coins.
“She won’t expect it. It was an accident, after all,” I goaded.
Coco had the sense to blush because we both knew it had not been an accident.
The maid, her head bowed, announced lunch, and Coco led the way to her dining room. We sat, the two of us, as the maid served a chilled cucumber soup followed by roasted lamb with salad. Coco ate very little, mostly pushing the food around her plate with the heavy silver cutlery.
“That night . . .” she began, and I put down my knife and fork to focus better on what she was about to say. The lamb was delicious, and I’d had nothing but bread and coffee for the past two days, trying to stretch my money.
Coco dabbed her handkerchief at the corners of her mouth. Stains of red lipstick came off on the white cloth, and she frowned at them in disapproval. She twisted her rope of pearls, and her black eyes flickered over the ornate, luxurious dining room as she worried over the words to say.
“It was an accident,” she said finally.
“I don’t believe you.”
“Is that what people are saying? Is that what Schiap thinks?” She couldn’t leave it alone, wouldn’t admit that the more we talked about it, the less able we would be to pretend it had been an accident.
Coco began twisting her pearls again, this time with such force I thought the string might break. She thought better of it and placed both hands flat on the table, next to her crumpled, lipstick-stained napkin and crystal water glass with its own red imprint of her rouged lips.
“You know,” she said, not looking at me, “when I was very young and living with Étienne Balsan—you have heard of him . . . my first love, my great love?—in his chateau, I had to eat with the servants. No one knows that. He picked me up out of the revue I was appearing in—God, the costumes, the cheap, disgusting costumes. He taught me how to use the right forks.” Coco, one of the richest women in the world, picked up her fork and flung it across the room like a petulant child. Her maid, waiting in a corner, wordlessly picked it up, put it on a side table. She disappeared through a doorway and came back out with fresh plates and a bowl of grapes and oranges.
“That Ania,” Coco said, peeling an orange. “Do you know her well?”
“We’ve just only met,” I said, not wanting to discuss Ania or my brother.
“Baron von Dincklage knows her. Very well. In fact, she is his mistress?” She was still uncertain. Of course, she couldn’t ask him such a question. Couldn’t ask anyone that question, without giving herself away. Except for me, who was a nobody in Paris. For a second I let the sense of power I had in that moment thrill me the way a brushstroke of aquamarine thrills. I didn’t answer. I withheld. And I peeled my orange.
“She is attractive in a predictable sort of way, I suppose,” Coco said. “Her family in Warsaw keeps a junkyard, I hear.”
It was an antiques shop, and they specialized in Louis XVI furniture, according to Charlie.
“Such a lot of books,” I remarked, changing the subject. There was one on the table, and I picked it up. Mouchette, by Bernanos, a best-seller in France that year, a misery tale about a young peasant girl.
“Have you read it?” Coco asked.
“Not yet. Are you enjoying it?”
“Bernanos sentences are like Christmas trees, full of decoration. One should know when to stop. Schiaparelli, like Bernanos, never knows when to stop. But the story is good. I’ve read all of these.” Coco gestured at the bookshelves, the piles of titles not yet shelved. “Once I start a book I have to finish it, have to get to the end. Books saved me, when I was a girl. In the orphanage I used to steal up to the attic, at night. There were trunks of books there, mostly cheap romances, but I devoured them. I learned about life from those books, about the life I wanted to live.”
The revelation, that intimacy of what she had said, seemed to surprise her. She stopped in midsentence and smiled her public smile, the Coco Chanel smile, head tilted, lips barely turned up, eyes wide open as if a flash had just gone off.
“Let me guess,” she said. “Your family . . . New York, is it? . . . has a large house and a library filled with leather-bound books that nobody reads anymore. Correct?”
“I’ve read quite a few of them. A little privilege doesn’t guarantee illiteracy.”
She laughed. “Very good! I think we will be friends, you and I. Well, I learned mostly from books, but not all. Étienne taught me how to ride, how to have polite conversation, how to leave behind my childhood of swiping my soup bowl with a piece of bread, sleeping four or five to a bed, bathing once or twice a month in water already used by others. And then he made me eat in the kitchen with his servants.”
“I’m not going to feel sorry for you,” I said. “We’ve all, most of us at least, lived through things that still give us nightmares.”
Coco stared down at her plate in confusion. When she looked back up at me, she was smiling.
“Your husband. Yes, I know. We have that in common. Motor accidents. That is how Boy Capel died. My first great love.”
I rose to leave and my napkin tumbled to the floor. The maid again approached and picked it up for me.
“I’m simply saying, don’t judge. Please sit,” Coco
said. “I know Elsa Schiaparelli laughs at me. She laughs at everybody. Enough. I’m getting bored. It’s too warm today, don’t you think?” She rose. The maid began to clear the table with the unnaturally quiet, precise gestures of a servant trained to be invisible. Coco knew that kind of training.
We went back to her drawing room and sat on the beige sofa. How elegantly Coco moved, so full of charm and confidence and style, yet underneath it all was a little girl abandoned by her father, raised too strictly in a colorless orphanage of bare walls and grim silences.
“Baron von Dincklage wonders how well you actually know Elsa Schiaparelli. She is a communist, you know.”
“That was a long time ago, in New York.”
“She still has sympathies. She’s backing the wrong side. Russia won’t be able to save France when the war comes.”
“Isn’t Hitler about to sign an agreement with Chamberlain and Daladier? That’s what the BBC says.” Like most Parisians, I’d begun listening to the radio, to the nightly news, as well as reading the newspapers.
Coco looked at me with exasperation. “As if that will stop anything. Go now,” she said. “I need to get back to my office.
“Wait!” At the door she stopped me, pulling me back inside and grabbing at the hat I’d been wearing, the strange little scarlet cloche that Schiap had given me.
“That ridiculous thing,” she said. “Wear this. Much more flattering.” She took one of her own hats from the antique carved credenza, a straw hat with a tiny brim that turned up just over the eyebrows.
“Young women don’t need mystery, that is for older women who have lost their freshness. You are what, about twenty-five? Believe me, age comes soon enough. Don’t rush it.”
She stood back, admiring her hat and that precise angle she had achieved.
“Lovely,” I agreed. “But . . .”
The Last Collection Page 14