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1919, the year I woke up famous and the year I lost everything.

  —COCO CHANEL

  As World War I ended, Boy Capel and Coco Chanel were reaching the first great peaks of their careers. Two gifted, driven, good-looking, and rich people in their midthirties, they had done more than survive the horrific war; they had managed to prosper and succeed through it. Chanel had redrawn the feminine silhouette for a new century; Capel had made himself indispensable to two major governments and seemed poised for a glorious political career. They remained deeply attached emotionally if not legally. In November 1919, when Coco’s sister Antoinette married her much-younger wartime suitor, Canadian pilot Oscar Fleming (the bride in a white lace dress by Coco), Boy accompanied Coco to the wedding and served as a witness—in fine imitation of a dutiful brother-in-law. It seemed possible that Coco and Boy might become one of those enduring extramarital unions—of the sort that coexist for years in uneasy truce with foundering marriages.

  Capel had risen diplomatically by excelling as a go-between, explaining England to France and vice versa. Now, he shuttled back and forth between a French woman and an English one, often driving long distances between cities in France. In December 1919, Boy made one of his hurried visits to Coco in her Garches villa. The next day, Monday, December 22, he left Paris in his chauffeured Rolls-Royce—his driver, Mansfield, at the wheel. His plan was to travel the 563 miles south to Cannes, to meet his favorite sister, Lady Bertha Michelham, for Christmas and later reunite with Diana, who would arrive from England.

  The real reasons behind this trip remain unclear. Why would Capel abandon both Diana and Coco on Christmas? Some accounts suggest Capel intended to look for a secluded Mediterranean villa there, where he and Chanel could be alone; other sources suggest that Capel was planning to ask his wife for a divorce after the new year. In the end, the reasons do not matter, for the Rolls never reached its destination. In early afternoon, as the car rounded a slight turn on Route ND 7, outside the town of Puget-sur-Argens, one of its tires exploded violently, sending the car hurtling into a ditch where it burst into flames. Mansfield escaped with serious injuries; Boy was killed on the spot.

  Capel’s friend Lord Rosslyn, a Scottish polo player, telephoned a number of their intimates in Paris with the shocking news. When Count Léon de Laborde, an old friend from their Royallieu days (and another former lover of Coco’s), heard what had happened he volunteered to tell Chanel immediately and drove out to Garches in the middle of the night. The house was dark and for a long time, no one answered the door. Persistent, Laborde pounded and shouted until her butler, Joseph, awoke and opened the door. Once apprised, Joseph wanted to delay telling Mlle. Chanel until morning. But Coco had heard the loud knocking and had padded down the stairs, still in her white silk pajamas. Seeing her, Laborde stammered to find the right words, but Coco had already grasped the truth. Silently, she went back upstairs, coming down minutes later, fully dressed and carrying a small suitcase. She asked Léon to drive her to Cannes, so she could see Boy one last time. They left at once.

  Coco insisted they drive straight through to the coast, eighteen hours without stopping. She ignored Laborde’s urging that they stop so she could rest during the night. When they arrived in Cannes the next day, Léon located Boy’s sister Bertha—Lady Michelham—who was staying in a local hotel. Bertha invited them to her suite and offered Coco a place to rest. Again, Coco refused to sleep, sitting up all night in a chair, essentially reenacting the Catholic vigil over the dead—a ritual she’d known as a young girl, and likely performed nearly twenty-five years earlier beside the corpse of her young mother. For two days, no one in Cannes saw Coco cry.

  Chanel never got to see Boy again. Burned beyond recognition, he had been placed in a sealed coffin right away. Chanel chose not to attend the funeral service held the next morning in Fréjus. Instead, she asked Bertha’s chauffeur to drive her to the site of the accident. It was easy to find—Capel’s mangled, incinerated Rolls-Royce had not yet been towed away. Coco walked around the wreck, staring at it and running her hands over the twisted metal remains. Finally, she sat down by the side of the road and, according to the chauffeur who observed from a distance, burst into heart-rending sobs that lasted several hours.

  Captain Arthur Edward Capel received full military honors at the Cathedral of Fréjus, the Riviera town just near the site of his accident. Several days later, on January 2, 1920, his body was transferred to Paris, where a second funeral was held at Saint-Honoré d’Eylau, on the Place Victor Hugo. Neither Chanel nor Diana Capel attended that funeral. Captain Arthur Edward Capel, recipient of the Légion d’honneur (awarded to him on July 6, 1918, for service as a foreigner in France), was laid to rest in Paris’s Montmartre Cemetery.

  The newspaper obituaries for Capel described him as one of the most famous Englishmen in France. They noted his diplomacy career, his excellence at polo, his marriage to Diana, and, not least, his great fortune. No mention appeared, naturally, of Coco Chanel—she lived in the background of his life. But in February 1920, when the London Times—as was customary—published the terms of Capel’s will, Chanel emerged from the background. Of the 700,000 pounds totaling his estate (making him the equivalent of a multimillionaire today), 40,000 pounds were bequeathed to Gabrielle Chanel—a sign that Boy felt no need to conceal their relationship after his death.

  If Chanel was surprised to find herself thus acknowledged by Boy, she was probably more surprised to learn that he’d left exactly the same sum—40,000 pounds—to another woman: twenty-seven-year-old Italian war widow Yvonne Viggiano, known also by her royal title, Princess Yvonne Giovanna Sanfelice. Somehow Boy might have managed to conduct not a double life, but perhaps a triple one. The rest of Capel’s considerable fortune went to Diana and baby Ann.

  At the time of his death, Boy did not know that Diana was pregnant again. The Capels’ second daughter was born in June 1920, and christened June Capel, after her springtime birth month.

  Chanel never breathed a word about the Princess Yvonne revelation, just as she never acknowledged Diana Capel to anyone. But Diana was clearly on her mind. Shortly after Boy’s death, Coco moved from La Milanese to another rented villa close by in Garches, a house known as “Bel Respiro,” which would remain one of her primary retreats for years. She brought with her Joseph, Marie, and Suzanne LeClerc, along with four dogs: two wolfhounds, Soleil and Lune, and the two dogs Boy had given her, Pita and Poppee. As soon as she moved in, Coco painted the exterior of the house beige and—in a gesture of mourning—had all the shutters lacquered in deepest black—a color scheme unusual for the neighborhood, and which later became a Chanel trademark combination.

  From the outside, it looked as though Chanel had moved to flee her memories of Boy. On the contrary, she moved to be closer to Capel—but in a most curious way. The owner from whom Chanel rented Bel Respiro was none other than Diana Capel. Boy had purchased the house for himself and his wife shortly before his death, but when a bereaved Diana fled France afterward, she leased her house to Coco, for reasons unknown. Perhaps the unhappiness of Diana’s brief marriage to Boy kept her from waxing sentimental about a house. Perhaps she was angry and wished to divest herself of the house, assuming that Boy had chosen a villa in Garches expressly to remain close to Coco. In any case, within a year, Chanel had bought Bel Respiro outright from Diana, using the money Capel had left her.

  Coco’s motivations for this transaction are a bit easier to fathom than Diana’s. By inhabiting Bel Respiro, Chanel was absorbing the last traces of Boy Capel, while at the same time usurping one of his marital households. Coco had already long “inhabited” Boy in a metaphoric sense: She had worn his clothes, studied his philosophies, and launched an entire business empire under his guidance. Now she literalized the metaphor and moved into his home, occupying his space—and using his money to do so.

  Capel’s death devastated Coco, leaving her with a sense of emptiness comparable to what she’d felt upon the loss of her parents. “I won’t prettif
y this memory,” she told Paul Morand, nearly thirty years later. “The death was a terrible blow for me. I lost everything losing Capel. He left in me a void that the years have not filled.” Chanel was mourning another, secret void as well—the child she’d never been able to have with him. Although Coco told virtually no one about it, shortly before Boy’s death, she suffered a miscarriage that required surgery and a brief hospital stay in Paris. The doctors told her she would never be able to have children—likely because of damage caused by her early abortion. Only in her later years did Chanel tell this story—to her friend Claude Delay.

  But even in the depth of her despair and mourning, Chanel did not stop working. From Garches, she had her chauffeur, Raoul, drive her every day into the city, where she spent long days at her studio—which she had recently moved from 21, rue Cambon to more spacious quarters next door at 31, rue Cambon, where it stands to this day.

  Since virtually everything about her work reflected his abiding influence, in some ways, Chanel’s work was her memorial to Boy Capel—her ongoing tribute to him and to their time together. Coco also took comfort, or claimed to at least, in some of the spiritual beliefs she had acquired through Boy, particularly the theosophy-inspired concept of eternal life for all things. “I knew he had not really left me, and that he was simply on the other side,” she told Marcel Haedrich. “This is how theosophy is indispensable. I just kept telling myself, ‘He’s there, he is waiting for me. We no longer exist on the same plane, but he is not leaving me. He wants my happiness.’ ” Chanel preferred to attribute such beliefs to the Eastern views she’d studied with Capel, but they owe at least as much to the tradition of the Catholic church in which she was raised.

  Along Route ND 7 on the Riviera coast, between the towns of Fréjus and Puget-sur-Argens, just outside of Saint-Raphaël, stands a large cross in red stone. The inscription reads “In memory of Captain Arthur Capel, holder of the Légion d’Honneur, member of the [British] Army, who died accidentally on this spot, December 22, 1919.” This seems to be another memorial created by Coco in honor of the love of her life. Although it was erected anonymously, locals believe Chanel arranged to have it built. Given the discreet nature of their relationship and her later longtime residence in the area (she built her main vacation home in nearby Roquebrune), they are likely correct. For many years, during Chanel’s lifetime, residents of Fréjus reported seeing bouquets of fresh flowers at the foot of this cross—but no one ever saw who left them there.

  Memorial to Boy Capel, Fréjus, France (illustration credit 3.8)

  Chanel’s grief and sense of bone-deep loneliness were compounded in 1920 when news came of her younger sister Antoinette’s death. Antoinette’s brief marriage to Oscar Fleming had not been happy, and after a few awkward months with the Fleming family in Ontario, a distraught Antoinette had pleaded with Coco to pay her way home to France. Coco stalled, encouraging Antoinette to be patient, to try harder, and to work at promoting Chanel couture in Canada. But lacking Coco’s inner steel and adaptability, Antoinette simply ran off with the first available man. She took up with a young Argentine, traveling with him to South America. There, it seems that, desolate over the failure of her new romance, Antoinette took her own life, though the Fleming family attributed her death to Spanish flu. She was thirty-three.

  Antoinette was the second of Chanel’s sisters to commit suicide after a failed love affair and the attendant social disgrace. In both cases, Coco was implicated in some way. If Chanel blamed herself at all for either death, she never admitted it, and she rarely spoke of the tragically short lives of the Chanel women. By 1920, Coco was the only female survivor of her family of origin, and determined to resist the sorrowful fates that had claimed Jeanne, Julia, and Antoinette. No man would rob her of her life. Work would save her. She told Vilmorin, “When I realized that my business had a life, my life, and a face, my face, a voice, my own, and when I realized that my work loved me, obeyed me, and responded to me, I gave myself over to it completely and I have had since then no greater love.” Essentially, Chanel would marry her only faithful partner: work.

  Along with love of work, Chanel remained more driven than ever by other desires: for stature, for influence, and for a place in the broad sweep of history. If anything, her growing cynicism about romantic love intensified her pursuit of these other, compensatory aspirations. The more unsatisfactory she found her own personal history, the more she sought a role in an abstracted, impersonal narrative, in History with a capital H. In 1921, History seemed to open its arms to her.

  Chanel would later play down her two-year love affair with Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich Romanov, chalking it up to a kind of temporary exoticism: “The Russians revealed the Orient to me.… Every Westerner should get to know Slavic charm, to see what it’s about.… I laugh about this adventure now.” But Dmitri entered Chanel’s life at a critical moment and exerted considerable influence over her. Through him, she encountered for the first time a certain stratum of European royal life—its design aesthetic, its powerful sense of history and capacity for nostalgic longing, and its reactionary political sympathies—all of which spoke deeply to Coco’s own sensibilities and proved fundamental to her life and career. If she’d ever been drawn to Boy Capel’s brand of progressivism, she turned firmly away from it now. Through Dmitri, Coco also grew acquainted with the Russian expatriate community of Paris—the aristocracy exiled by the Bolshevik Revolution—with which she would develop deep artistic ties.

  Despite her protestations, Chanel was quite excited about her young lover, or at least by his role on the world stage and the possibilities he appeared to offer. She would ever after boast of her connection to Dmitri. According to a close friend in later life, Jacques Chazot, even as an old woman, Chanel enjoyed regaling guests with tales of her Romanov lover: “She spoke often to me about the Grand Duke Dmitri with whom she had had a liaison.… Her stories fascinated me.”

  For a woman leery of attachments yet yearning for social advancement, little could have seemed more desirable than a superficial but well-connected nobleman, directly descended from the tsars. Moreover, from the duke’s diaries—which have never been unlocked and read until now—we know that Dmitri thought obsessively about the possibility of a restored Russian monarchy, and about the likelihood of his assuming the throne as tsar. Many in his circle viewed Dmitri as the ideal candidate, and he began planning seriously for this eventuality. He attended meetings in Paris and traveled to other European cities to discuss the matter with supporters, sometimes with Chanel by his side. It required little stretch of the imagination for Coco to foresee the day when, married to Dmitri, she would naturally become empress of all the Russias.

  Dmitri, then, fit perfectly into Chanel’s worldview. She may not have fallen in love, but she did fall under a Romanov spell. In typical fashion, Coco subsumed his universe—in all its obsolescent splendor—and made it her own. She even claimed to discern a hidden ethnic bond between Slavic royalty and her own French country stock: “Inside every Auvergnat, there is an unacknowledged Oriental,” she told Paul Morand, by way of explaining her ease with Dmitri’s foreignness. She might as well have said, “Inside this peasant girl lives a queen.” And she would have been right. While Coco did not, in the end, ascend the throne of Russia, the romance with Grand Duke Dmitri ennobled her in other ways.

  From his earliest youth, a nostalgic melancholia hung over Dmitri Pavlovich Romanov. Born in 1891 to Grand Duke Pavel Alexandrovich and Duchess Alexandra Georgievna of Greece, Dmitri seemed destined for a life of triumph and pleasure. He was strikingly good-looking, tall, and athletic, with deep green eyes and the kind of chiseled profile associated with aristocracy. “Dmitri was extremely attractive,” wrote his cousin and boyhood companion (and possible lover), Prince Felix Youssoupoff. “Tall, elegant, very ‘racé,’ his look recalled the ancient portraits of his ancestors.” Prince Felix grasped something essential here. Dmitri’s role within the Russian nobility was always more abstract and historica
l—more about fitting into a portrait gallery—than it was human or personal. From the day of his birth, he confronted loss and abandonment, which left him with a permanent, nostalgic longing for family and—later—a fervent, somewhat grandiose nationalism.

  Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich Romanov as a cavalry officer (illustration credit 4.1)

  Duchess Alexandra was seven months pregnant with her son when a boating accident sent her into premature labor. Soon after delivering Dmitri, Alexandra died, leaving behind the infant and his toddler sister, Princess Marie, not yet two years old. Alexandra and Pavel’s marriage had been famously happy, and Pavel was too devastated by sudden widowerhood to take any pleasure in his frail new son. Care for Marie and Dmitri was left to a string of servants, including an English nanny who spoke to them only in her native language. The children’s isolation intensified the bond between them, and they remained unusually close siblings all their lives.

  Dmitri and Marie hardly knew their father. Duke Pavel spent most of his time traveling and in 1902, scandalized the Russian court by entering into a morganatic marriage, to Olga Valerianovna Karnovich Paley, a divorced woman. Knowing that such an irregular union would bring swift reprisals, Pavel married in secret, informing his children only after the fact, by letter. The duke’s illegitimate marriage led to his banishment from Russia and permanent exile in France, whereupon his brother, Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich and his wife, Elizabeth (sister of Tsarina Alexandra), who had no children of their own, acquired official guardianship of Dmitri and Marie. Although privately devoted to his family, as the tsar’s appointed governor-general of Moscow, Grand Duke Sergei was a severe, even sadistic, despot. In 1891, for example, under his reign, twenty thousand of Moscow’s Jews were forcibly expelled from their homes during the brutal winter months.