Mademoiselle Read online

  Pierre paid his most extended visit to Paris in 1938, when he accepted Coco’s offer of a room at the Ritz. The late 1930s would be a difficult time for Chanel, who would lose another major lover in 1935, and then encounter a number of business challenges shortly thereafter. As always, when in pain or feeling lost, Coco turned to the ever-available Reverdy. When Pierre took up his brief residence at the Ritz, Coco had another lover, and Pierre and Coco might have kept their relationship platonic during this period, even while falling back into every other aspect of their former intimacy—talking for hours and seeing each other daily. The only hint that they may have strayed into bed during this time comes from a single remark about the 1938 visit from a friend of Reverdy’s, the journalist Stanislas Fumet: “Pierre let himself be strangely seduced, a lot, it’s true, a reaction to his overly austere life.”

  Shortly after Reverdy’s return home from the Ritz, the Germans marched into France and established their occupation of the northern half of the country, which included Solesmes. Disgusted, Pierre sold his house and moved with his wife into a much smaller pavilion near the abbey. But the war galvanized Reverdy, and prompted him to join the French Resistance. He later learned of Chanel’s involvement with the Nazis, but he seems to have forgiven her, believing that women in general were often weak and misguided in their political convictions.

  After the war, Chanel and Reverdy maintained their correspondence and friendship. For Coco, Pierre felt like a “corrected” mirror image of herself, a shadow version of what her own life might have been had she turned away from fame and fortune and pursued instead only spirituality, art, and literature. Pierre even inspired Coco to try her hand at writing. Although she had no particular literary talent, from the late 1930s onward, she experimented with a series of aphoristic maxims—short, philosophical fragments contemplating morality and human nature, of exactly the sort Pierre often composed, following the grand French tradition begun in the seventeenth century by François de La Rochefoucauld, whom Reverdy instructed her to read. She would send these musings to Pierre, who would critique them and send them back to her. “I congratulate you on the three maxims you have sent me. They are very good,” he wrote to her after one such exchange. That Chanel accepted—even pursued—this kind of interaction with Reverdy proves how completely she trusted him. Coco did not typically make herself this vulnerable to anyone.

  Some of Chanel’s writings were published in various women’s or fashion magazines. Their wry, bemused tone reveals the unmistakable stamp of Reverdy’s influence:

  Lie if you must, but never in detail, or to yourself.

  True generosity is to accept ingratitude.

  Elegance is not the opposite of poverty. It is the opposite of vulgarity—and negligence.

  Here, for comparison, are a few of Reverdy’s versions of the genre, from his 1927 Le Gant de crin (Horsehair glove):

  He who knows weakness is truly stronger than he who blindly believes in force.

  We call traits that displease us in others “faults,” and traits that flatter us, “virtues.”

  An opinion is a strictly personal sentiment to which we grant the importance of a universal truth.

  Reverdy passed away in Solesmes on June 17, 1960, at the age of seventy. Chanel, along with most of his friends, learned of his death in the newspaper—he had confided in no one about his illness. Although most of their forty-year friendship took place only epistolarily and over a great distance, Pierre had served, in many ways, as Coco’s conscience, her most constant guiding light. When asked why she thought he had faced death alone, contacting none of those closest to him, Chanel responded, “He never wanted to cede to anecdote.” Her remark was apt, but also oddly reminiscent of Reverdy’s dense, poetic style—a eulogy in a single sentence, itself resisting all anecdote.

  In 1923, as Chanel’s relationship with Reverdy continued in fits and starts, the affair with Dmitri petered out naturally, without acrimony. Nearing forty, Chanel had simply grown weary of supporting him. “Those Grand Dukes … looked marvelous, but there was nothing there,” she told Claude Delay. As was her custom with former lovers, though, Chanel remained in friendly touch with Dmitri, after his marriage in 1926 to Audrey Emery, and up to his untimely death from tuberculosis in a Swiss sanitarium in 1942, at the age of fifty.

  For a while, she also remained close with Dmitri’s confidante, his sister, Princess Marie. This was typical for Coco, who often befriended couples and paid special attention to the women of the pairs. Sometimes, these couples consisted of her married lovers and their wives. Such was the case in 1918 when Chanel befriended Antoinette Bernstein, wife of her lover Henry Bernstein; when in 1921 she housed Stravinsky’s ailing wife, Madame Yekaterina Stravinsky, and her children at Bel Respiro while dallying with Igor; and again in 1937 when she dressed socialite Mona Williams while conducting a flirtation (some say affair) with Mona’s husband, Harrison Williams.

  It is not clear whether the women always knew of Coco’s involvement with their husbands. What is certain is that couples held a kind of negative fascination for Coco. “The worst is the couple,” she told Paul Morand. “You might like them separately, but together, they are horrible.”

  By engaging both halves of a couple, Chanel could partake of the exclusionary solidarity she found so threatening; she could slip into the couple’s sanctuary—just as she wished to gain entry into all clubs that excluded her. This pattern might have emerged in the aftermath of Boy Capel’s marriage to Diana Wyndham, as Chanel’s attempt to keep all potential “other women” safely within her grasp. It is also likely that Chanel found comfort in the familial trio she could form with couples, enjoying with them some faint shadow of that long-lost, most important couple in her life, her parents.

  Giving the lie to her proclaimed disdain for couples, Chanel—like many children of absent parents—evinced great interest in reconciling separated couples. She delighted in advising her staff, for example, on their romantic woes and “always knew exactly what to do and what to say,” according to her longtime assistant Lilou Marquand. “Mademoiselle adored repairing separated couples and was very good at it. She was like a fortune teller, a tarot card reader,” says Marquand. (In her apartment, Chanel kept multiple figurines and sculptures of animals in pairs, as if surrounding herself with totemic figures of intact couples.)

  Grand Duke Dmitri was unmarried when Chanel dated him, but he was very much half of a couple: His sister was closer to him than any wife could have been. (Claude Delay referred to the pair as “un petit couple.”) Their early tragedies had bonded Dmitri and Marie, and their relationship had struck others as peculiarly entwined and mutually dependent, even when they were still living in Russia. According to a famous anecdote, during a formal ball at the imperial palace, Tsar Nicholas felt compelled to send a courtier to separate the siblings who danced conspicuously with only each other all night, refusing all other partners. Some believe Marie was pressured to marry Prince Wilhelm in order to detach her from her brother. Years later, when Chanel and Dmitri parted ways, he turned immediately to his sister for aid and comfort. And when he decided it was time for marriage, Dmitri chose Audrey Emery as his bride in close consultation with his sister. Upon Marie’s death, she was buried, as she had requested, in a grave next to her brother.

  Soon after Dmitri began seeing Coco, Princess Marie entered into a thriving business relationship with the House of Chanel. Even after Coco’s rupture with Dmitri, Marie’s atelier continued to furnish Chanel with embroidered and specially woven fabrics, until a dispute ended the friendship as well as the business partnership. They quarreled over Marie’s breaking her exclusive arrangement with Chanel and acquiring other designer clients. Chanel feared that Marie would leak professional secrets to competitors.

  Princess Marie in one of her own embroidered blouses (illustration credit 6.1)

  Until their falling-out, though, Chanel and Marie enjoyed an honest and intimate friendship. Unlike her brother, Marie adapted well to
life in exile and harbored no monarchical aspirations of her own. Trading on the delicate hand embroidery skills she’d learned as a child from Russian nuns, Marie decided to launch a fashion career. Chanel was using a great deal of embroidery in her Russian-inflected collections at the time, and after Dmitri introduced the two women, Marie resolved to become Chanel’s main purveyor of high-quality, low-cost piecework. It was an ambitious goal for a woman who had never been near a sewing machine, but Marie managed to succeed—even disguising her royal identity to take sewing machine lessons at the Singer store in Paris.

  Marie’s instincts proved excellent. She turned out to be a highly talented seamstress and quickly grew adept enough to impress the great Coco Chanel, who placed her first order with Marie for Russian-style tunics, blouses, and paletots. Soon, the fashionable women of Paris were clamoring for her stunning, intricately patterned designs.

  Marie did not have Coco’s flair for business, but Coco so admired her talent and drive that she helped Marie open her own atelier, Kitmir (named after a dog character of Persian mythology), which began hiring many of the princess’s fellow aristocratic Russian émigrés, employing as many as fifty women at one time. Combining her new sewing skills with her love of fine art, Marie became a true virtuoso of the needle and found joy in such triumphs as seeing a model display her work on the runway or catching sight of a woman at the Ritz wearing a tunic she had embroidered.

  Such were the pleasures of independent womanhood, which no one understood better than Chanel, who turned Marie into something of a protégée. In Marie, Chanel saw a version of herself: a woman deprived of social and financial means but dead set on using her own talents to reverse the situation. That Marie was a true duchess only enhanced Chanel’s pleasure in being able to offer her largesse.

  Coco did more than launch Marie’s business; she transformed her personally. When thirty-one-year-old Marie arrived at rue Cambon, she looked, according to Chanel, “like a refugee … of over 40”—encumbered still by the elaborate coiffure and Old World, heavy-skirted dresses she’d worn in Russia. Chanel explained to her that, for business, Marie needed “to look prosperous.” The princess needed a Chanel-style makeover. Marie was drawn in by Chanel’s magnetism and accepted her transformative influence. “You were swept off your feet by the fierce vitality she exhaled, the quality of which was inspiring and infectious,” she recalled. Smart and self-confident enough to accept even Coco’s harshest criticisms, Marie allowed her new employer to work her magic.

  Advised by Chanel that she was overweight and dowdy, Marie embarked on a diet and submitted to regular sessions with Coco’s Swedish masseuse, who helped her shed pounds. Chanel dressed Marie (in Chanel naturally) and taught her to apply makeup—which Marie had never used. And when Coco informed the princess that her hairstyle resembled “a giant brioche on the top of her head,” Marie did not resist as Chanel grabbed her head, tore all the hairpins out, seized a pair of scissors, and hacked off great fistfuls of Marie’s hair, as if it were just another length of unruly fabric in her workroom. (When in a fever of creation, Coco often confused animate and inanimate objects. Her models complained that she routinely stuck her dressmaker pins right through their flesh during fittings, laughing when they yelped.) Although stunned by the violence of the gesture, and at first unhappy with her shorn locks, Marie kept her hair in a short bob, like Coco’s, for decades thereafter. Dmitri might not have turned Coco into a duchess, but Coco turned a duchess into a “Coco.” Chanel could now look upon this member of the Russian royal family, this once future queen of Sweden, and see … herself.

  This was Coco’s typical modus operandi: She would lure women to her charisma and then stamp them with her own distinctive image. For this reason, scores of photographs of Chanel and her women friends and associates look like pictures of twin sisters. Often, even the bodily postures of the women mimic Coco’s, as if Chanel’s physical attitude and stance were as contagious as her style. While she tended to absorb the men in her life, Chanel tended to be absorbed by the women.

  Chanel owed her extraordinary success precisely to this mimetic contagion, to her power to elicit in women a deep desire to imitate her. Coco had crafted a role, her “wearable personality,” complete with costumes, hair, and makeup, which other women longed to play. Her life was pure theater.

  Chanel confused herself with the female character she had imposed upon all of Paris.

  —IRENE MAURY, FORMER CHANEL EMPLOYEE

  Theatrical creature that she was, Chanel felt a great attraction to the stage. She had taken her first steps toward metamorphosis, after all, on the little stage of a café concert in Moulins. But Chanel’s real theatrical ambitions far exceeded the bounds of those early minor productions; her intention was to costume at least the entire female population of France. “Nations have a style,” she told a journalist in later years. “You have a style when everyone on the street is dressed like you. I achieved this.” She did not overstate. Coco knew that fashion is theater and—like a great playwright—she had invented an indelible character that women the world over longed to play.

  At times, Chanel openly acknowledged her sense of herself as a dramatist, as when she turned her Cambon showroom into a theater with an actual stage, prompting Vogue magazine to title its review “Curtain Up, Fashion Appears.” Occasionally, she compared herself overtly to a playwright, explaining to an interviewer: “The top of a dress is easy to create, like the first act of a play. The difficulty comes in the final act, and I alone know how to construct the skirt.” Princess Marie likened Chanel’s private fashion shows—held the day before a formal public show—to “dress rehearsal[s] of a play … The models were the actresses and the gowns the parts.”

  For Chanel, the 1920s brought confirmation that she indeed stood upon the world’s stage. Her career success and her carefully crafted social persona had had their desired effect. Wealthy and prominent women wore her designs all over Europe and in America; many more wore copies of her work. Coco had established herself as an icon of privileged chic in Paris, as close to self-made royalty as anyone could get. She sold Bel Respiro in Garches and took out a long-term lease on a historic town house, the Hôtel Montbazon-Chabot, 29, rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, a property with a vast garden.

  Mimetic friendships: Chanel in her signature jersey and pearls, with lya Abdy, 1929 (top). Chanel and the Duchesse de Gramont, St. Moritz, 1931 (bottom) (illustration credit 6.2)

  Chanel’s new neighbors included the Rothschilds and the president of France. In keeping with her penchant for pedigree, even Coco’s house now boasted a royal lineage. The press reported that Mademoiselle’s new home was “a famous old mansion whose history stretches far back into the eighteenth century.” It had been constructed in 1719 for the Duchess Rohan-Montbazon of Brittany, and had subsequently housed many generations of French noblemen, including the nineteenth-century Count Antoine de la Panouse. Chanel furnished her new home lavishly, with crystal, velvet draperies, mirrors, the hand-painted Coromandel screens she loved, and carpets woven to her specifications. One of these carpets cost at least 100,000 francs (or about five times the price of a luxury automobile at the time), but Coco had no financial concerns. “I never discussed prices,” she said.

  This was to be the perfect backdrop for Coco’s new, more prominent role on the cultural scene. To enhance her stature further, she hired a young writer, Maurice Sachs, a close friend and secretary of Jean Cocteau’s, to fill her home with books she should read, paying him a generous monthly retainer to select just the right leather-bound classics. Some of these beautiful, gilded books can still be seen on the shelves of her apartment to this day, and just like the tomes in the study of Jay Gatsby, another mythic striver of the 1920s, many look virtually untouched. Later, when Pierre Reverdy inspected the book collection, he felt compelled to tell Coco how misled she had been. With all the money Chanel had paid him, Sachs had procured only poor-quality books of middling literary value. Chanel was furious and fired Sachs
at once.

  At the center of her outsized drawing room, Coco positioned two black grand pianos, suitable fixtures for the new social world she set out to conquer: Paris’s theatrical avant-garde. For several years, she had been forging a tight friendship with the single best-positioned person in the world to guide her in this new endeavor: the Polish-born classically trained pianist—and famous beauty—Misia Sert.

  Misia was doyenne of France’s artistic elite and a true salonnière in the grand eighteenth-century tradition. She would provide the tutelage and all social introductions necessary to help Chanel transform herself yet again, this time from arriviste couturière into modernist artist. “It was about the music,” Chanel told Delay years later, describing the atmosphere of that drawing room. “We would sit on the sofas, and I discovered the world of art.”

  One should render homage to the profound and sparkling women who live in the shadow of the men of their epoch and who, within the artists’ world … exert an occult influence. It is impossible to imagine the gold of José-Maria Sert ceilings, the sunlit universe of Renoir, of Bonnard, of Vuillard, of Roussel, of Debussy, of Ravel,… the Mallarmean prism … and the radiant dawn of Stravinsky, without seeing rise up the silhouette of the young, beribboned tiger, the soft and cruel face, like a pink cat, that belongs to Misia.