Mademoiselle Page 16

  To Dmitri, the Jews represented an orphaned people, a group with no parent country—an analogy that resonated politically for both him and Coco. These two—severed from home and family, eager for power and pedigree—both naturally gravitated toward theories that confirmed their own racial superiority while distancing them from such reviled orphans of history. With her new double-C insignia Chanel responded—consciously or not—to the heavy royalist nostalgia, militarism, and early fascism that saturated Dmitri’s world, effectively inventing a new crest for herself—an emblem suggesting her command of a private fashion regiment of her own, or an alternative line of “family” descent through style.

  Immersed in Romanov nostalgia and the symbology of a lost dynasty, this Auvergnat had found—or perhaps invented—the “Oriental” hidden within her after all. She had constructed her own personalized version of a dynasty, complete with its own tokens of power and prestige—all referring ultimately to her own re-created identity—a nonhistorical, nongenealogical form of royalty via fashion. The Romanov dynasty had begun its precipitous decline partly in response to the menace posed by Rasputin. While Dmitri had a hand in eliminating that one upstart peasant, he wound up abetting the imperial dreams of another. Through her liaison with Dmitri, Chanel gathered up the glittering remnants of Russia’s defunct aristocracy and recycled them into the iconography of her own private empire. The Romanov dynasty had ended, but the House of Chanel had only just begun.

  A glass of papaya juice

  and back to work. My heart is in my

  pocket, it is Poems by Pierre Reverdy.

  —FRANK O’HARA, FROM “A STEP AWAY FROM THEM,” 1956

  Only very few among Chanel’s intimates maintained close, unbroken relationships with her throughout her life. While she enjoyed a wide and diverse social circle, Coco tended to disconnect herself from or simply lose those closest to her. She severed ties with most remaining members of her family; she had bitter feuds or out-and-out partings with many friends and associates; and she would suffer many abandonments and some real tragedies in her romantic life. She did stay on amicable terms with a number of former lovers, yet only one became a lifetime confidant and truly unwavering friend: French poet Pierre Reverdy, who loved her—largely from afar—for forty years.

  Coco and Pierre met in 1919, when they were introduced by Misia Sert, who let no genius in Paris pass unnoticed (and was likely Reverdy’s lover at some point). They began a romance the following year, when Chanel was probably also slightly involved with married playwright Henry Bernstein and shortly before her love affairs with Grand Duke Dmitri Romanov and—briefly—Igor Stravinsky. Busying herself thus with amorous activity, Coco seemed to be trying to push away her sorrow over Boy Capel, pursuing multiple erotic conquests in a manner we tend to associate with powerful men more often than with women.

  Poet Pierre Reverdy (illustration credit 5.1)

  Coco’s two primary romances of the early 1920s could not have been more different. Chanel had fun with Dmitri but was well aware of his limitations. For her, the Duke’s appeal lay in the glittering, external elements of his life. With Reverdy, she experienced just the reverse. Intense, passionate, spiritual, and brilliantly talented, Pierre spoke to the other side of Chanel—her country origins, her convent upbringing, her keen intelligence, and her intuitive interest in art. But Reverdy was also married and deeply conflicted—about his adulterous affair with Coco, about pursuing worldly success, and about anything that distracted him from his increasing religious devotion.

  Born in 1889 (making him six years Coco’s junior), Reverdy arrived in Paris at the age of twenty-one in 1910, having left his native Narbonne, a small, rural town in France’s Languedoc region, near the Spanish border, just a few miles from the Mediterranean. In matters of family, Coco and Pierre had suffered similar trials, which left both with a lingering vulnerability. Like Coco, Pierre was born under the cloud of illegitimacy, the product of his mother’s adulterous affair. His mother eventually divorced her first husband and married Pierre’s father, but that marriage ended in divorce as well. Pierre’s mother took his sister and moved away, leaving Pierre with his father. He never got over the loss. “I have always felt this sense of cosmic instability,” he wrote.

  The Reverdy side of the family consisted of artists and thinkers. Pierre’s father was a progressive and refined man who encouraged his son’s literary pursuits. The elder Reverdy’s main occupation had been viniculture—working the rich soil of his vineyard in a part of France where wine was practically a religion. The Reverdy family also boasted a number of sculptors, men who shaped wood and marble into the edifices of many churches in the region. Pierre inherited his forebears’ love of objects and woodworking and later imbued his poetry with a rich tactility resembling a sculptor’s.

  While not prosperous, the Reverdys enjoyed relative comfort until a catastrophic depression hit the wine growing industry in the early 1900s, which led to the “Winegrowers’ Revolt” of 1907, when thousands staged mass protests against the policies that were slowly starving their region. The rallies led to violent showdowns with police, including the most notorious episode, which occurred in Narbonne. Angered over the arrest of one of their representatives, protesters attacked the police with stones. Police fired back. Soon the incident escalated and military troops fired on the crowds, killing five and wounding ten.

  The killings devastated the community, raising specters of the 1871 Paris Commune when the government had also unleashed military violence against its own people. For the teenaged Reverdy, the violence resulting from the winegrowers’ crisis signaled the end of his youth. He had participated in the protests and been horrified seeing friends and neighbors cowering in doorways, trying to dodge police bullets. His family lost its vineyard and sank into financial ruin. Pierre was left permanently disillusioned with life, government, and anything related to business, profits, or capitalism. He became a lifelong socialist.

  After a brief stint in the army, Reverdy moved to Montmartre, where he quickly fell in with the leading lights of the cubist and surrealist movements: Picasso, Braque, Juan Gris, Apollinaire, André Breton, Cocteau, and Max Jacob. That same year, Pierre suffered the premature death of his father, a loss that devastated him.

  Between 1915 and 1926, Reverdy wrote prolifically, producing at least twelve collections of poems and prose pieces, in addition to founding a highly regarded literary journal, Nord-Sud (North-South). But poetry didn’t pay the rent. Pierre’s wife, Henriette (a lovely seamstress he’d met in Paris and married secretly), was obliged to take in sewing. Pierre found a night job as a proofreader.

  According to those who knew them both, Coco and Pierre fell hard and fast for each other. “Between Mademoiselle and the poet, it was love at first sight,” wrote Maurice Sachs. He had a “devastating love” for Chanel, according to Jean-Baptiste Para. On her side, Chanel gravitated toward all the familiar traits she saw in Pierre. Although not classically handsome, his Mediterranean coloring—black hair and eyes, tan skin setting off unusually white teeth—recalled her own and that of her father and brothers. Reverdy also had an aura of rugged, peasant masculinity that appealed to Chanel, with a solid physique, expressive hands, and a very deep voice. A lover of beautiful women and good food and drink, Pierre exuded life and vitality. At the same time, sadness and existential despair were already eating away at him—caused in part by his very joie de vivre. His pleasure in life was, paradoxically, what tormented him. For Reverdy, vitality impeded the spiritual development he craved: “What encumbers me … is the health and robustness of my spirit, and it is in order to manage and control this health and this strength that I write.”

  Pierre cared little for restaurants, parties, and the glad-handing necessary for aspiring artists in Parisian society. “Life in society is a vast enterprise of thievery. One cannot get through it without becoming complicit.”

  And while Coco indulged in all of society’s pleasures with gusto, she remained perfectly clear-ey
ed about that particular world. She told Paul Morand: “I employed society people … because they were useful to me.… [But] they are irresistibly dishonest.” Coco certainly admired high society and its alluring trappings, but the peasant girl within her longed to counter all the excess that surrounded her with simplicity, humbleness, and even austerity—the same qualities that Chanel imparted to her designs. She recognized a similarly controlled and restrained nature in Reverdy. “He was … severe with himself,” she told Claude Delay. “He was an elevated soul.”

  We don’t know if Coco and Pierre talked about their similar childhoods, their pain at losing their parents, or their shared experience as outsiders in Paris. We do know that Chanel took particular interest in Reverdy’s stories of the winegrowers’ revolt, since even decades later she would speak passionately of the young Pierre’s participation in the protests, almost as if adopting his teenage memories as her own.

  Chanel also took a deep interest in Reverdy’s poetry and championed his cause in Paris. Knowing him too proud to accept her help, she secretly bought his manuscripts through intermediaries and then paid publishers to produce them, giving them extra money that she arranged to be paid to Reverdy in the guise of a “publishing stipend,” without mentioning her name. She even gave Pierre marketing advice clearly based on her own experience: “If you write your poems on separate sheets of paper and sign each one, just as your artist friends do with their paintings, you will become as rich as they are, if snobbism has anything to do with it.”

  Although they spent many passionate moments together, Reverdy remained ambivalent about his affair with Coco and about his life in the world in general. Guilt about his infidelity to Henriette tormented him, as did his feeling that life in Paris was superficial and destructive. Typically, he would spend time with Chanel down in her elegant part of town and then rush off abruptly to Montmartre, disappearing for days at a time. Occasionally, he felt compelled to demonstrate the contempt he felt for Coco’s decadent life, as he did memorably once during a reception at her home. As guests milled about in Chanel’s beautiful garden, sipping cocktails, Pierre appeared with a straw basket on his arm. Greeting no one, he walked past the assembled company and knelt in the grass, clearly searching for something. Eyes strained to see what Pierre had begun dropping into his basket. Snails, as it turned out. Making great show of his indifference to the party, Reverdy had decided to go snail hunting at Chanel’s reception, theatrically insisting upon his self-styled “country bumpkin” persona.

  In May 1921, at the very height of his love affair with Chanel, Pierre took the dramatic step of converting to Catholicism. Max Jacob, himself a convert from Judaism, served as his baptismal godfather. Conversion turned out to be an imperfect path to virtue, however. The love affair between Pierre and Coco continued fitfully, even as Chanel pursued other men. He sent her every manuscript he wrote, and penned dedications to her in each volume.

  The inscriptions’ wide variation in tone testifies to Reverdy’s ambivalence. In 1922, he produced his collection Cravates de chanvre (Cravats of Hemp—a reference to the ropes used in hangings). Chanel had subsidized the book’s publication (albeit without Pierre’s knowledge), and Picasso had provided the illustrations, making the volume a collector’s item. In a handwritten dedication, Reverdy implies that he will back away from their romance: “Homage from the author, that imbecile, Pierre Reverdy.… Dear Coco I am your friend and have no other ambition than to be your best friend. Pierre.” When Pierre inscribed his 1924 Epaves du ciel (Shipwrecks from heaven), though, he exercised far less restraint: “To my very great and dear Coco with all my heart until it beats its last.” In the 1926 volume La Peau de l’homme (The skin of man) Pierre again reins in his emotions: “You do not know, dear Coco, shadow is the most beautiful setting for light. And it is there that I have never ceased nurturing for you the most tender friendship.” Such vacillation defined their early relationship, a fact obvious to their friends. In a letter dated July 4, 1925, Max Jacob wrote to Jean Cocteau: “Reverdy converted on May 2, 1921. But ever since, he has been hesitating between uncertainty and disbelief, and between his wife and his stormy relationship with Coco Chanel.”

  For five years, Reverdy wrestled with his own uncertainty and inner anguish, sequestering himself for increasing periods in his Montmartre home, with the windows shuttered against the light, praying on his knees. He would even stop his clocks to silence his house completely and detach himself from the passage of earthly time. He continued to write, though, and beautifully, refining a spare, cinematic style tinged with an air of mystery that recalled his surrealist roots. The poems return frequently to images of windows, rooftops, or holes in walls—escape hatches to the natural world. Travel—another mode of escape or transcendence—also appears often in his poems, as in the very brief yet evocative “Departure”:

  The horizon leans down

  The days are longer

  Travelling

  A heart leaps up in its cage

  A bird sings

  It is going to die

  Another door will open

  At the end of the corridor

  Lights up

  A star

  A dark-haired woman

  The lantern of the departing train

  Reverdy was straining increasingly for escape—from Paris, from self-doubt, and perhaps from Chanel (the dark-haired woman?) as well. Through it all, Henriette seems to have maintained her composure and devotion, although she could hardly have been unaware of her husband’s infidelity—of which all his closest friends were apprised. Finally, he could tolerate no more. In 1925, with a dramatic (some might say melodramatic) burst of self-abnegation, before a group of friends, Pierre set fire to a pile of his manuscripts and declared his imminent retreat from the world. He and Henriette would be moving to the village of Solesmes in Nord-Pas-de-Calais, a gray and chilly corner of northwestern France about one hundred miles from Paris. At thirty-seven, Pierre would enter life as a lay associate of the ancient Benedictine monastery there, the Abbaye de Solesmes, founded at the beginning of the eleventh century—a place not unlike Aubazine, Chanel’s childhood home.

  While Pierre did earn some money through his poetry, Misia Sert had helped finance the couple’s move. (“You are a good fairy,” he wrote to her.) He and Henriette settled into a small house on the grounds of the abbey, where they lived largely in solitude, amid a silence broken only by vesper bells. For the next thirty years, until the end of his life, Reverdy remained in Solesmes—the “horrific little village” as he called it—performing a self-imposed penance.

  Pierre did permit himself some reprieves from his monastic regime and returned occasionally to Paris. No evidence suggests that Chanel ever visited Solesmes, but she did write and ask him to visit her at least once. His note of reply suggests his own desire to rein in his feelings: “I will come see you soon, but I will not stay long.”

  Reverdy continued to write voluminously and would send all his work to Chanel, each book or manuscript still bearing a handwritten dedication. His 1929 collection, Sources du vent (Sources of the wind), arrived with a note reading,

  Dear and admirable Coco …

  Since you give me the joy of liking something about these poems, I give you this book and hope it serves you as a soft and gentle bedside light.

  In 1941 on a visit to Paris, Reverdy added a new inscription to Chanel’s copy of his 1918 Les Ardoises du toit (Roof slates). In French, it was a rhyming verse:

  I add a word to these words so hard to reread.

  Since what is written is nothing

  But what I knew not how to say

  About a heart that loves you so much.

  Chanel’s personal library would eventually contain the complete published works of Reverdy, many in first editions, and virtually every manuscript. She read and reread these volumes, as evidenced by her handwritten pencil marks throughout. Chanel recognized Reverdy’s genius and remained in contact with him throughout their lives. Whil
e she tended to be private about many of her lovers, she spoke openly about Pierre to friends, but usually only to praise his talent and lament his limited success.

  Edmonde Charles-Roux recounts Chanel’s frustration at Reverdy’s obscurity: “Until her final years, Chanel would compare Reverdy, poor and little known, to other poets of his generation whose fame and fortune she felt were undeserved. ‘Who were they? Who was Cocteau? A scribbler!’ she would say, her voice choking with anger. ‘A mere phrase-maker, a nothing. Reverdy, he was a poet! A visionary.’ ” Although Cocteau was also her good friend, Chanel here shows herself an excellent judge of literature. Reverdy’s poetry was far richer and more sophisticated than Cocteau’s. Her rage, though, was misplaced. Reverdy did not wish for fame and fortune, only for peace. But even peace eluded him. By 1928, after only two years at Solesmes, he felt he’d lost his connection to Catholicism and his faith. Yet he chose not to abandon his secluded life.

  When Pierre made his infrequent excursions back to Paris, he reverted to his old, pleasure-seeking ways, visiting jazz clubs, staying out late, and drinking with old friends. But soon, inevitably, disgusted by his own pleasure, Reverdy would rush back to Henriette and his monastic world.

  Chanel found something about Reverdy comforting and reassuring, and she turned to him whenever she encountered sorrow, even when that sorrow involved rejection by another man. In mid-1930, Coco would experience yet another rupture with a highborn lover, and reached out to Reverdy, who needed little coaxing to travel down to Paris for nights of dancing with Coco in Montparnasse. He even took the train all the way down to the Mediterranean, to stay with Chanel at her vacation villa, La Pausa. Neither Pierre nor Coco gave a thought to being discreet about their affair. Chanel even took Pierre on overnight visits to the home of her nephew André Palasse and his new family. (Palasse had married Catharina van der Zee in 1925 and lived, with their two young daughters, in a château Chanel had bought for them in Corbères, France.) This cozy phase of Coco and Pierre’s relationship proved short-lived, though. Pierre returned to Solesmes, and Coco soon left for her stint in America as a Hollywood costume designer.