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  Iya Abdy as Jocasta, with Jean Marais (far left) (illustration credit 7.2)

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  For Oedipus Rex, Chanel dressed Jocasta (played by Iya Abdy) in a felt gown divided into geometric colored sections, flowing into a full skirt of multicolored accordion pleats. The bodice, with its diagonal V-shaped crossband, recalled an artillery magazine or the satin sash of Grand Duke Dmitri’s army uniform. At least one critic espied this costume’s Russian and eastern European influence: “Mme Abdy’s costume consists of a Cossack’s tunic over a skirt draped in the gypsy style, a ravishing picture.”

  Around her neck, Jocasta wore a long necklace that suggested an exaggerated version of Chanel’s costume jewelry, made of wooden spools of thread swiped from a seamstress’s worktable. (The spools also recalled the spinning threads of the three Fates of classical mythology.) Oedipus, played by Cocteau’s strikingly handsome young lover, Jean Marais, wore the raciest costume Chanel ever dreamed up, consisting entirely of white elasticized bands wound around his naked body. The costume (and its variations worn by secondary male characters) scandalized some viewers, and blended overtones of S&M eroticism with a macabre reference to mummy wrappings, all while evoking Chanel’s famous use of striped fabrics—with the elastic bandage material effectively “striping” the body.

  Marais as Oedipus (illustration credit 7.3)

  For Cocteau’s version of Orpheus (1926), which coincided with Coco’s “English Country” phase, Chanel dressed the title character and his wife, Eurydice (played by the famous married couple of French theater, Georges and Ludmilla Pitoëff), in sporty British tweeds and golf sweaters (inspired by the casual clothes of Chanel’s lover at the time, the Duke of Westminster). The character of Death, played by beautiful young actress Mireille Havet, wore a bright pink ball gown beneath a fur coat, prompting critic André Levinson to grouse, “Cocteau has supplanted Thanatos with a socialite dressed by Mademoiselle Chanel.”

  Levinson’s remark speaks to the theatrical power of Chanel’s work and its uncanny suitability to Cocteau’s “lifestyle modernism.” As was his custom, Cocteau removed the “patina of age” from the tale of Orpheus. Chanel’s golf attire and ball gowns instantly updated the ancient Greek myth. Yet despite his modernizing alterations (and the several new characters he introduced into the story), Cocteau remained true to the spirit of Greek legend. His Orpheus is still a poet who travels to Hades to reclaim his wife, and is dismembered at the end. We learn nothing of the characters’ psychology, childhoods, or family lives. These are not “real” people in a real world. Mythology does not concern itself with the vagaries of human nature, and neither did Cocteau. His Greek plays, like the ancient originals, live in a realm of timeless inevitability, devoid of personal psychology.

  Therein lay antiquity’s appeal for the French modernists, whose version of Greek mythology looked outward at broad social themes, rather than showcasing inward, intimate stories. The classics offered Cocteau and other writers a tool kit from which to pull ready-made plots and stock characters to be recombined in new ways.

  Implicitly, Cocteau added one extra character to the legend of Orpheus: the character of “Coco Chanel.” Although she did not appear onstage, Coco was palpably present. The world of golf sweaters, tweeds, and ball gowns was Chanel’s world. Coco had become, in effect, her own stock character, as identifiable to audiences as were the legendary characters of Greek mythology. “Chanel” had become a latter-day mythological type—“a kind of strange goddess,” as Maurice Sachs described her.

  Diaghilev’s 1924 pantomime ballet, The Blue Train, demonstrated that Chanel’s mythic stock character worked just as effectively in non-Hellenic performances. Here, once more, through her non-costume costumes, she dominated the production with her celebrity presence.

  For The Blue Train, Diaghilev gathered his most gifted collaborators: Cocteau wrote the libretto, Picasso painted the stage curtain—the largest work of his life at 10.4 by 11.7 meters; architect Henri Laurens designed the set, which featured cubist-inspired, tilting beach cabanas; Darius Milhaud composed the score, and Bronislava Nijinska served as choreographer.

  Diaghilev said he wanted to cast off “the mists and veils of ballet”—much as Cocteau had wanted to strip the “patina of age” from Sophocles. Accordingly, The Blue Train leavened its ballet with acrobatics, popular dance moves, satire, and broad pantomime.

  As upper-class spectators would have known, the title was the nickname of the Calais-Méditerranée Express, a luxury train inaugurated in 1922, renowned for its all-first-class sleeping cars, which were painted deep blue with gold trim. Parisians boarded this evening train at the Gare du Nord, enjoyed five-star cuisine in the dining car, turned in for the night, and then awoke to the rocky cliffs, terra-cotta roofs, and glittering blue Mediterranean of Saint-Raphaël, Antibes, Nice, and Monte Carlo. The manifest for the Blue Train regularly included Winston Churchill, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Cole and Linda Porter, Charlie Chaplin, and the Prince of Wales. Chanel and Cocteau were also regular passengers. The ultimate in modern celebrity glamour, the Blue Train figured often in the society and gossip columns.

  Diaghilev’s ballet brought those gossip pages to life, featuring a featherlight romance involving a group of leisured beachgoers, with nameless characters known only by their generic types—“handsome boy,” “tennis player,” “golf player,” “bathing beauty,” and so forth.

  Instead of making “costumes,” Chanel dressed the dancers in sportswear copied directly from her commercial line, altering the garments only minimally to accommodate the wear and tear of dancing. It was the first time that Ballets Russes dancers had ever appeared onstage in street clothes, and the crowds loved it.

  Chanel dressed the entire cast in androgynous striped jersey, playing off her reputation for garçonne (tomboy) style. Dancers Anton Dolin (Cocteau’s new lover at the time) and Lydia Sokolova (“handsome boy” and “bathing beauty”) wore nearly identical versions of Chanel’s hugely popular two-piece striped jersey swimsuit, consisting of fitted shorts and tank-style top. Sokolova sported one of Chanel’s more practical inventions: a head-hugging rubber swim cap designed to permit women ease of movement in water. Fitted close to the head and hiding all of Sokolova’s hair, the cap recalled Chanel’s trademark little cloche hats while underscoring the dancer’s boyish (slightly “bald”) appearance. As an added accessory, Sokolova wore oversize “pearl” stud earrings (made of wax-coated china), adapted from Chanel’s costume jewelry line.

  Cast of The Blue Train (left to right): Léon Woizikovsky, Lydia Sokolova, Bronislava Nijinska, and Anton Dolin (illustration credit 7.4)

  Two characters in The Blue Train did wear somewhat more specific costumes, for they were meant to evoke particular, real-life celebrities: The role of “tennis player”—performed by Nijinska—referred directly to French champion Suzanne Lenglen, an Olympic gold medalist and six-time Wimbledon winner. Like Chanel, Lenglen had earned a reputation as a “liberated” woman; she favored daringly bare tennis attire and was known to sip brandy between sets. The “golf player,” played by Léon Woizikovsky, was modeled after Edward, Prince of Wales, famous for his love of the game and recently appointed captain of the Royal and Ancient Golf Club.

  Nijinska wound up looking like a composite photo of Lenglen and Coco Chanel, in a two-piece all-white tennis outfit consisting of a long skirt, short-sleeved blouse, and mannish necktie, with her hair cut into a short “shingle” style adorned with a white head wrap. And in his tweed plus fours and pullover sweater, the “golfer” unmistakably called to mind photographs of the Prince of Wales in virtually the same outfit, although Woizikovsky’s featured Chanel’s distinctive striping.

  French tennis sensation Suzanne Lenglen, 1923 (illustration credit 7.5)

  Coco was not overtly depicted onstage, but she might as well have been. Her self-created mythic, “stock” character was palpably present. This effect was intensified by a new development in Chanel’s love life: When The
Blue Train premiered in June 1924, Coco was in the first flush of her love affair with a well-known Riviera habitué, Hugh Grosvenor, the Duke of Westminster. The duke was sometimes spotted at rehearsals and was known to whisk Coco off for frequent yachting weekends in Monte Carlo.

  “Whose yacht is that?”

  “The Duke of Westminster’s I expect. It always is.”

  —NOËL COWARD, PRIVATE LIVES

  Had she met him earlier, Chanel would not have been ready for Hugh Richard Arthur Grosvenor, the 2nd Duke of Westminster. While she may not have realized it initially, Coco had been training most of her life for her relationship with Westminster, which began in 1923, when she was forty and he forty-four. Among his many attractions, the duke was British, like Boy Capel, but even more crucial was the fact that, by startling coincidence, Westminster and Capel were actually related by marriage: Westminster’s half brother, Percy Wyndham, had been the first husband of Diana Wyndham Capel, Boy’s wife. The duke then belonged, indirectly, to the Capel family tree. This led Coco to a mystical interpretation: Westminster must be Boy Capel’s gift to her from the beyond. “I am sure Boy sent Westminster to me,” she said.

  The duke had terrestrial charms as well. Not only was he the wealthiest companion she would ever have, he was the wealthiest man in Great Britain, and possibly all of Europe, his inherited fortune consisting of vast international real estate holdings as well as the Eaton Railway. With Grand Duke Dmitri Romanov, Coco had dreamed in vain of becoming an empress. With Westminster, she saw the distinct likelihood of becoming a duchess. No revolutions had destroyed this duke’s empire or deprived him of rank or title. No mishap had ever cut the golden threads that wove him into the tapestry of history. Westminster’s birthright of tremendous wealth and power remained perfectly intact.

  To friends and family, the duke had always been known as Bendor—Ben or Benny more casually. It was a prophetic nickname, auguring the Duke’s lifelong affinities for ancient, aristocratic interests and values, as well as his powerful attachment to the Victorian era into which he was born. The word “Bend’or” derived originally from the royal motto—azure à bend d’or—meaning “blue with a band of gold,” emblazoned on the fourteenth-century heraldic crest belonging to the duke’s ancestors. The duke was not the first, though, to bear the name; that honor had gone to Bendor the horse—a thoroughbred belonging to the duke’s grandfather Hugh Lupus Grosvenor (himself named after a wolf). Bendor I had distinguished himself by taking first prize at the Epsom Downs Derby in 1880, when his young, human namesake was but a year old.

  Bendor the child was only four when his father, Earl Grosvenor, died. Four years later, his mother, Lady Sibell Grosvenor—then thirty-two—married twenty-four-year-old George Wyndham. Only sixteen years older than Bendor, Wyndham acted more as a genial older brother than as a father to the boy. It fell to Hugh Lupus Grosvenor, the 1st Duke of Westminster, to step in as a father figure and help raise his grandson. Very much a man of the nineteenth century, the 1st Duke of Westminster had earned fame for his great philanthropy, courage, and his famously close relationship to his godmother, Queen Victoria.

  Hugh Lupus Grosvenor took pains to tutor the boy who would inherit his title. Classic paintings by masters such as Thomas Gainsborough, Joshua Reynolds, and Francisco de Goya lined the vaulted corridors of Eaton Hall, the gothic estate where Bendor grew up, including portraits of illustrious Grosvenor ancestors and their horses. As a boy, Bendor would gaze up at these paintings while his grandfather regaled him with stories of forebears both human and equine. He learned, for example, of the famous horse Copenhagen, ridden into battle at Waterloo by the Duke of Wellington, and of Macaroni, the family horse that had beaten all odds to win at Epsom, York, and Doncaster in the 1860s. So great was the Grosvenors’ passion for the stables that, in addition to the paintings, actual bodily remnants of deceased thoroughbreds figured in their décor: Bones taken from some of the horses’ skeletons were hung under the chandeliers at Eaton Hall. Given the zeal of this family preoccupation, it surprised no one when, as a toddler, Bendor asked, “Am I also a descendent of Macaroni?”

  Growing up in this atmosphere had made Bendor something of a nobleman’s nobleman. Striving all his life to live up to his grandfather’s expectations, Bendor could never lapse in his devotion to title and legacy. Overshadowed thus by a larger-than-life figure from his family’s past, the duke—although only four years older than Coco—seemed never fully to have entered the twentieth century. His concerns and surroundings remained far more rooted in the nineteenth.

  Six feet two inches tall and robust, blond and blue-eyed, with a complexion weathered by sun and sea (Noël Coward described him as “floridly handsome”), Westminster excelled at polo, golf, and hunting, was a champion yachtsman, and had been a member of the 1908 British Olympic motorboat racing team. He evinced less aptitude, though, for academic matters. After a mediocre career at Eton, the duke put aside plans to stand for admission to Cambridge, setting his sights on the military instead.

  Bendor was stalwart and exceptionally loyal, especially to the British Empire, and its global mission as he understood it. For Bendor, the imperial project was sacred and needed to be promoted passionately. Such beliefs led him to the political role that consumed much of his life: that of ardent disciple to Lord Alfred Milner (1854–1925). Milner, the German-born, Oxford-educated, charismatic founder of “New Imperialism,” was one of the chief architects of the Boer War, a close collaborator of key British imperialist Cecil Rhodes, and a self-described “British race patriot.”

  The Duke of Westminster in 1903

  Milner had a tremendous gift for moral suasion, especially with young men. After the Second Boer War brought South Africa under British rule, he formed a circle of such young men—mainly Oxford graduates—who came to be known as “Milner’s Kindergarten.” This group devoted itself to postwar reconstruction, and to creating a system for controlling the black population, which developed into apartheid. Bendor, who’d served as aide-de-camp to Milner in the Boer War, joined the group, although he lacked the intellectual firepower of the other Kindergartners and participated largely by making generous financial contributions. According to Westminster biographer Michael Harrison, the duke became something of a groupie, maintaining an “emotional, semimystical rapport” with Milner.

  The duke had been a fine and admired officer during his first, teenaged stint in the military, in South Africa. Fifteen years later, he returned to military service during World War I, rising to the rank of colonel. In 1914, at the age of thirty-five, he accomplished the most famous feat of his military career: leading a fleet of armored cars (reconverted Rolls-Royces whose configuration he had designed himself) across ninety-three miles of Libyan desert, braving enemy fire, to rescue ninety-one stranded British prisoners of war.

  He did not abandon his usual upper-class comforts—the caravan included his valet, several specialized mechanics, uniformed coachmen, and other servants who saw to his personal needs—but the duke saved all the prisoners, who were discovered nearly dead of thirst and starvation. He received the British Army’s Distinguished Service Order for bravery.

  Along with his athletic and military accomplishments, Bendor built a long and varied romantic career. His first marriage, to the beautiful Constance Edwina Cornwallis-West, known as Shelagh, lasted eighteen years (from 1901 to 1919) but had been often unhappy, marred by quarrels about the financial demands of the Cornwallis-West family, the duke’s frequent infidelities, and, most dramatically, the tragic death of the couple’s four-year-old son, Edward, after surgery for appendicitis. She did not bear him another son, nor did his second wife, Violet Mary Nelson, and by 1923 the British press was reporting that the second Duchess of Westminster had discovered her husband in flagrante with a certain Mrs. Crosby, at the Hôtel de Paris in Monte Carlo.

  The Hôtel de Paris provided the backdrop as well to a more significant romantic encounter for the duke: his meeting with Coco Chanel. During the Chr
istmas season of 1923, Chanel was vacationing on the Riviera, staying at the hotel with her friend and muse Vera Arkwright Bate—an English beauty widely acknowledged as the illegitimate daughter of a British prince. The two women complemented each other perfectly. Coco hungrily absorbed Vera’s easy, joking manner with aristocrats, met her wellborn friends, and, frankly, cadged much from Vera’s androgynous British style of dress. In exchange, she’d put the chronically strapped Vera on the Maison Chanel payroll, as a kind of style consultant and mannequin, paying her handsomely simply to wear Chanel outfits to society parties.

  The duke first noticed Chanel at the Hôtel de Paris one night, sitting at a table with her Russian friend Lady Iya Abdy, Grand Duke Dmitri (with whom she had mostly broken off), and Vera. Westminster approached and asked Coco to dance. She accepted, leaving Vera and Iya to exchange glances—what might this mean? Bendor was Vera’s first cousin, and she saw him often socially, so when, later that week, he begged to see the intriguing Coco Chanel again, she could not say no. Vera conveyed to Chanel the duke’s invitation to dine aboard his yacht, Flying Cloud, which was moored—as it was often—in Monaco’s harbor. (Chanel later hinted to Paul Morand that the duke had actually paid Vera to help him press his suit with Coco.) Westminster loved the Riviera, and frequently sailed down in Flying Cloud, a four-masted schooner with a crew of forty. It was the smaller of his two yachts; the other one, Cutty Sark, was an 883-ton converted Royal Navy destroyer and employed 180 people.