Mademoiselle Page 12

  Dear General

  Mahomet has, I believe, plenty of relations & descendants. Could we not raise one of them to the Caliphate in Bagdad & make an ally of him? To regain “prestige in the East,” “annoy” the Young Turks, and upset the “Drang nach Osten” [Germany’s “push toward the East”]. The history of the Arabs is a proof that all similar ventures in the past have found plenty of followers. Seduce Wilhelmina [Holland] & flirt with Fatimah.

  Boy’s choice of metaphor here reminds us of his vast experience in seducing and flirting on multiple fronts at once. In another letter, Capel offers more details on how the British might “seduce Wilhelmina”—secure Holland’s entry into the war—proposing himself as chief seducer:

  Re Wilhelmina, I am not looking for a “job,” but to the result, so you can use me unofficially, if that is needed. I can open a house in Amsterdam and entertain lavishly at my own expense or take on a delicate negotiation which will be disavowed if unsuccessful. Freedom from responsibility often hastens conclusions.

  Capel’s assertion that he is not looking for a “job” would be more convincing were it not coupled so often with blatant attempts to angle for a specific, high-level diplomatic position.

  In collaboration with Sir Henry, Capel had been devising a plan for a “War Council” of Allied nations, to be created independent of individual governments, with the goal of “balanc[ing] political and military elements,” and remedying the “complete absence of cordiality or even understanding between our mixed bag of rulers.”

  Capel had been spending time in Paris and London, trying to win support for the concept. His letters mention meetings with French diplomat Jules Cambon, Georges Clemenceau, and Winston Churchill. Capel did not conceal his wish to be appointed the British representative to such a council, and never hesitated to tout his own expertise: “I think I know the political situation on this side … probably better than any other Englishman except you,” he wrote to Sir Henry.

  Initial attempts to form the war council met with resistance from many quarters, and it took months of negotiations to achieve any kind of consensus. Finally, in early 1916, a version of Capel’s and Wilson’s council received the green light. The new “Allied War Council” lacked many of the features Capel had hoped for, but was a success for him nonetheless. Two years later, in November 1917, a Supreme War Council was formed, which adhered more closely to the original plans. Boy continued on the Anglo-French coal commission, while serving as Wilson’s unofficial representative in Paris, working with Clemenceau and Lloyd George. Ultimately, in 1918, when Clemenceau was once more prime minister, Capel was appointed political secretary of the British section to the Supreme War Council held at Versailles.

  In his correspondence, Capel can sound callow and petulant. In one letter, he grouses about having to prepare a report, implying that such tasks were beneath him:

  I am now a clerk copying extracts.… Somebody must do that I suppose but it is a pity the supply of ammunition in France should suffer it, but there it is, I can’t be a coal magnate & a 3rd class agent at the same time & unless somebody shouts for me I must go on being a 3rd class agent.

  But Capel’s concern over status cannot be separated from his diplomatic effectiveness—in fact, the two elements of his personality are intertwined. His genius for public relations enabled him to sway heads of state on topics of world affairs, even while convincing those leaders to reward him personally. In myriad ways, Capel’s letters reveal his nuanced understanding of the techniques of communication. He wrote about how to use the press to affect public opinion, about the importance of “prestige” (“The British have lost their initial ‘prestige’—[we] need to ‘counter-act’ this”), and about how to influence high-ranking officers by appealing to their elitism (“Do not put Dukes in a troop with their butlers”).

  In his diplomatic correspondence, Capel is not the visionary, progressive intellectual of his published writings, but a crasser character, self-centered, and desperate for rank and status. Boy’s erudition and sensitivity were genuine, but such attributes alone do not produce multimillionaire industrialists. He needed both sides of his personality to sustain his multifaceted, meteoric career—and to help Coco sustain hers.

  Capel’s ideas and guiding hand are clearly visible in Coco’s own rapid and dramatic success during these years. Beyond the money he’d lent her, Capel offered Chanel something perhaps even more valuable: his intuitive sense of what today we call “branding”—the art of creating an ongoing, recognizable look and narrative around a product, person, or cause. Capel positioned himself as a key adviser to both France and England during the war, advising both governments on how to strengthen alliances, cultivate strategic friendships, and package their message attractively. Chanel shared many of his talents, and he encouraged her to use them in her own realm.

  In truth, Chanel’s and Capel’s professions—fashion and backstage diplomacy—have much in common. Capel proved useful diplomatically because of his unique Anglo-French cultural fluency. Chanel, too, was a natural translator, a cultural hybrid. As someone so often uprooted and forced to remake her life in radically changing circumstances, Coco had finely honed her observational skills. Like a good diplomat, she carefully watched for cultural cues, and was adept at fitting into new environments quickly. She had not yet learned English (which she would later speak well), but in a mere few years, she had taught herself the language and habits of the upper classes, slipping into an entirely new world and making it her own (even forcing herself to eat oysters—which she found repugnant—after observing their popularity among the rich). She took those differences she could not hide and turned them to her advantage professionally, inventing a way of dressing that reflected her own modest background, the design elements she found around her, and her unusual tomboyish beauty. The result was sartorial diplomacy: She blended wealthy English schoolboy clothes with low-ranking French naval uniforms; she mixed masculine and feminine touches, cinching oversize menswear sweaters to show off dainty waists, adding bows or ribbons to schoolboy blouses. Chanel also recognized—as Capel did—the power of young people, and emphasized youth in all her creations.

  As a couple, these two felt inevitable—even their names resembled each other. According to one theory, Chanel later created her famous double-C logo to interlock their two surnames. But Boy had ambitious plans that did not include Coco.

  The Honorable Diana Lister Wyndham was the beautiful, tall, blond, blue-eyed daughter of Thomas Lister, the 4th Baron Ribblesdale (whose portrait by John Singer Sargent hangs in London’s National Gallery). In 1913, at the age of twenty, Diana had married Percy Wyndham, a member of the British Expeditionary Force. By 1914, she was a war widow. Reserved, delicate, aristocratic, and—on her mother’s side—the niece of Herbert Asquith, Britain’s prime minister from 1908 to 1916, Diana was everything Coco Chanel was not. Born in 1893, she was also a decade younger than Coco. Capel had met Diana at the front, where she had volunteered as an army nurse and ambulance driver, like so many other wellborn women. When Boy began to court her, in 1918, Diana was just twenty-five, and few young women could have looked like more suitable wife material for a rising diplomat.

  Chanel had long known of Capel’s dalliances, and even claimed to accept them. But this one was different. Noting his increasing absences and his distracted air, Coco felt they were growing apart. Boy no longer spent all his military leaves with her.

  But Boy and Diana’s relationship was hardly smooth. Letters from Boy to Diana, recently uncovered, reveal his vacillating feelings toward her. Less than two months before Boy’s wedding, even the Prince of Wales still knew that “Coco Chanel” was Capel’s companion, mentioning their relationship in a letter to his own (married) mistress, Freda Dudley Ward:

  All you tell me about Capel is very interesting, no I’ve never met Gabrielle Chanel or “Coco” though she sounds as if she is worth meeting darling, another divine woman.

  Those who knew Boy and Diana as a couple
found them incompatible. In a diary entry of August 3, 1918, the British ambassador to France, Edward George Villiers-Stanley, who worked closely with Boy, refers to the rocky state of the couple’s engagement: “Much amused to hear that the Capel-Wyndham marriage has still not come off although he telegraphed me to say he was being married on Wednesday.… I shall only believe it when I know the ceremony has actually taken place.”

  Diana, too, in a letter to her friend and former beau, Lord Alfred “Duff” Cooper, refers to the uncertainty of her future marriage and to the disapproval of her intimates, even while expressing delighted affection for Capel and his fortune:

  I think I’m going to marry Capel after all—so next time I see you, you’ll be staying with me in my luxurious apartment, in the Avenue du Bois.

  Global forces also intruded upon Boy’s wedding plans. He had to put off his planned “marriage furlough” to contend with the grim realities of a war the Allies seemed on the brink of losing. Despite the hope offered by the entrance of the United States in April 1917, losses grew increasingly catastrophic for France and Britain in 1917 and 1918, as crushing defeats mounted. By March 1918, as Germany stepped up its attacks in what came to be called the Ludendorff Offensive, the Western Front was bombarded more heavily than it had been since 1914. Even Paris fell under siege from the massive German cannons that could fire from up to seventy-five miles away, sending Parisians diving for shelter.

  An ancillary consequence of these bombings is worth noting here: Parisians were instructed to take cover in basements during shelling, and this led, curiously, to a business boon for Chanel. Finding that unexpected night bombings presented a fashion challenge, women guests at the Ritz hotel descended on the rue Cambon looking for chic but appropriate bomb shelter outfits. Chanel responded with a cache of men’s jersey pajamas she’d recently purchased, which the women loved and snapped up at the usual high Chanel prices. A few years later, Chanel was re-creating these pajamas in raw silk and selling them as “resort wear.” Thus did the emergency bomb shelter attire become Coco’s famous “beach pajamas.”

  In late summer, once the Americans had helped push back the Germans, Capel was finally able to take his deferred leave from the war. He married Diana Lister Wyndham, who’d converted to Roman Catholicism for him, on August 10, 1918, at Beaufort Castle in Inverness, Scotland—the home of Diana’s sister, Laura, who had married into Scottish nobility. The wedding announcement in Le Gaulois described Captain Capel as “descended of one of England’s most ancient aristocratic families”—a misperception (or successful obfuscation) that suggests just how quickly Boy was benefiting from “nobility by association.” The couple returned to Paris and settled into Boy’s apartment on the avenue du Bois (now known as avenue Foch), bordering the Bois de Boulogne.

  And where was Coco? Just blocks away in a new apartment, sick with grief. Although he had kept his wedding plans secret for several months, Coco had guessed the worst. “I knew before he told me,” Coco told Claude Delay. Although she and Boy continued to see each other after his marriage, she could obviously no longer share his apartment. With the help of her new best friend, Misia Edwards, she found one at 45, Quai Debilly (now the avenue de New-York) in the sixteenth arrondissement, overlooking the Seine. Since Misia, about to marry her third husband, painter José-Maria Sert, wanted to hire new household staff, she encouraged Chanel to take on two of her former employees, butler Joseph LeClerc and his wife, Marie, a trained parlor maid. The LeClercs (along with their young daughter, Suzanne) moved into the Quai Debilly apartment with Chanel, and remained in her employ for many years.

  With a heavy heart, Chanel accepted her new status. She would be Boy’s irrégulière, forfeiting all hope of a more legitimate future together. Coco had beaten astronomical odds, crashing through countless social barriers to become the unusual creature she now was—rich, famous, successful, and moving in ever-higher circles. But Capel’s marriage to Diana proved that some barriers remained insurmountable. Boy had, after all, met Coco when she was one of the cocottes in Balsan’s stable at Royallieu. If Coco had not told him everything about her past, it is possible that Balsan filled in some details (including, perhaps, the abortion Etienne had helped her obtain). As progressive as he was, and despite his stirring essay on women’s unequal marital rights, Arthur Edward Capel could not see his way clear to marrying a woman like Chanel. Keeping in mind that Boy’s own pedigree remained somewhat overshadowed by mystery if not scandal, we can imagine why his ambitions ultimately trumped his principles, and, perhaps, even his feelings.

  For a time, Coco fell into a paralysis of grief. In a letter to a friend and client, decorator Antoinette Bernstein, Chanel explains obliquely her inability to socialize, imploring, “pity me for I have just spent three very bad weeks.”

  The actual event of Boy’s wedding galvanized Coco, though, driving her out of her lethargy and into what looks like revenge. Just one week after the Capel-Wyndham nuptials were announced, Chanel left Paris for the Alpine spa town of Uriage-les-Bains, in southeastern France. There, she openly conducted an affair with eminent playwright Henry Bernstein, the husband of the very friend in whom she had confided her worst sorrows, Antoinette. Beginning her career as a patron of the arts, Chanel even gave Henry a generous sum of money with which to purchase his own theater, the Théâtre du Gymnase.

  Henry Bernstein had a long-standing reputation as a philanderer, and Antoinette seems to have accepted—or at least tolerated—his dalliance with her friend. When she and the Bernsteins’ young daughter, Georges, visited Henry in Uriage, Coco was included in the family outings. And Chanel developed a great fondness for little Georges. The affair seems not to have put a crimp in Chanel’s ongoing friendship with Antoinette, and their correspondence continued for years thereafter. During the affair, Coco wrote to Antoinette in flattering, solicitous if somewhat saccharine tones.

  Chanel had known Antoinette Bernstein for years. They had met in Deauville when Antoinette and her mother had begun frequenting Coco’s shop. Chanel had designed the blue jersey suit that Antoinette wore on the day she married Henry. Chanel also designed costumes for at least one of Henry’s plays, the 1919 production of The Secret—about a vicious woman named Gabrielle who destroys other people’s relationships by seeding mistrust between couples. And through it all, Antoinette continued to dress in Chanel couture. The two women “seem[ed] … the best of friends … wearing the same silk pajamas,” as Georges remembered. (Apparently, Antoinette Bernstein was also abiding by Chanel’s physical requirements for fashion. Georges describes her mother and Coco as “equally emaciated.”)

  Photographs from this period show Henry Bernstein walking with a radiant Coco who is holding the hand of little Georges, the trio looking for all the world like a happy family—with Coco standing in for the child’s real mother. And that might have been the point. Having just lost her dream of becoming Boy’s wife, perhaps of bearing his child, Chanel seems to have wanted to step into that fantasy some other way. By “borrowing” someone else’s husband and child, she temporarily lived out this tableau. Coco would have a long pattern of inserting herself between couples in this way, most often while continuing to dress the wives of her paramours, creating odd little love triangles in which the two female “rivals” dressed alike. Even Diana Capel wore Chanel, both before and after her marriage to Boy.

  After Uriage, Coco still felt the need to escape Paris, and rented a villa, known as “La Milanese,” just west of Paris in the town of Garches. She went there to avoid the city, but not to avoid Boy Capel. Although wounded and angry, she remained as attached to him as ever (and he to her), and La Milanese provided a more discreet location for their ongoing affair. Coco and Boy still loved each other, but things were not the same. Although she never admitted it to anyone (and indeed never even spoke of Capel’s marriage), Chanel had grown bitter. Capel—the man she’d thought of as her family, the first man she’d trusted since her father’s abandonment—had pledged himself to someone els
e. The betrayal hit her to the core.

  Diana Capel knew the reason for her husband’s frequent absences, and started spending more time away from Paris herself, retreating to her native England. It was not uncommon for a wealthy man like Capel to have a mistress, but Diana found it hard to bear, perhaps because of all the sorrows she had already endured in her life—a tally that rivaled even Chanel’s. In addition to the death of her young first husband, Percy, Diana had suffered the loss of two brothers and her mother, all by the time she was twenty-two. Now, her second husband seemed to be slipping away. Diana told friends that Boy spent hardly any time with her anymore, and barely spoke to her. She likely felt all the more vulnerable given that she became pregnant immediately after (or just before) her marriage. The Capels’ daughter, Ann, was born on April 28, 1918. Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau graciously agreed to serve as the child’s godfather. Boy and Diana’s marriage may have begun to tarnish, but their social standing remained pure gold.

  In the second half of 1918, the tide finally turned for the Allied powers, with Germany signing the armistice at Compiègne on November 11. After six long additional months of negotiations, on June 28, 1919, the Treaty of Versailles put an official end to France and England’s war with Germany (other treaties dealt with other Central Powers). The same day saw forty-four countries sign the Covenant of the League of Nations, thus setting in motion the very sort of “Federation of Governments” proposed by Boy Capel in Reflections on Victory.