Mademoiselle Page 22
When Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, got wind of Bendor’s freelance foreign policy work, he wrote him a letter of strong rebuke, warning him of the dangers and potential reprisals involved in countermanding the official actions of the British government. Bendor was haunted for the rest of his life by accusations of treason.
Bendor’s politics were already quite well formed during his years with Coco, and we can safely assume Chanel had ample exposure to the duke’s political opinions, which ultimately resembled Grand Duke Dmitri’s. But Coco—with the rare exceptions of Boy Capel and Pierre Reverdy—was attracted by men who espoused the most antidemocratic, racially driven politics.
To fit more comfortably into the duke’s elite world, Coco realized she needed to learn English. At first, when they were together, Bendor and Coco communicated mostly in French, which the duke spoke serviceably. Once ensconced at Eaton Hall, though, Chanel prevailed upon one of Westminster’s secretaries (“an insignificant young man with a vague title,” as she described him) to tutor her privately in English, imploring him to keep the lessons a secret from the duke.
Although nervous about the deception, the young man agreed and accepted payment from Coco for these sessions. To excel at language acquisition, especially as an adult, one needs a keen ear, a gift for imitation, and a quick mind. Chanel possessed all of these and rapidly learned a great deal of English. But, for months, she bided her time, hiding her increasing fluency from the duke and his friends. By feigning incomprehension during their conversations, she cleverly bought herself the freedom to study her new world without fear of making embarrassing grammatical—or social—gaffes. Eventually, Coco and Bendor communicated using a mélange of both languages: “We talked half in English, half in French,” she said.
Chanel adopted English style as eagerly as she did the language. Westminster’s world opened up to her the muted elegance of the British aristocracy, its genteel refusal of ostentation, its cozy fabrics, sports clothes, and reverence for tradition. In addition to his lavish gifts of jewelry (he favored Cartier), Bendor offered her more subtle presents, including three little enameled jewel boxes she would always keep on her dressing table. When opened, the boxes revealed that, beneath their enameled tops, they are made of solid gold—a fact undetectable on the outside. Exposure to such soft-spoken treasures taught Chanel the concept of luxe caché or “hidden luxury”—a philosophy she put into practice by sewing gilt chains inside hems, hiding luxurious fur inside simple trench coats, or inserting glossy, printed silk linings into basic wool jackets. “Luxury must remain nearly invisible, it must be felt,” Chanel told an interviewer decades later. “Luxury is the coat a woman throws inside out over an armchair … and the underside is more valuable than the exterior.” Adding hidden luxury to her designs allowed Coco to create a cognoscenti, an elite community of those who appreciated the subtle cues inaccessible to the less discerning. (“Hidden luxury” was also a fitting concept for the girl whose peasant exterior had hidden a startlingly rich and grand inner self.)
Bendor was comfortable only in age-softened, twenty-year-old tweeds and faded golf sweaters, and he opened Coco’s eyes to the beauty of well-worn clothes. He preferred his oldest shoes, and required his valet to soak new socks in water for days to soften them sufficiently. Chanel claimed he’d worn the same jackets for twenty-five years.
Chanel’s collections from 1924 to 1931 reflected the duke’s inspiration, and featured man-tailored, sportswear-inspired tweed jackets, tartans, Fair Isle golf sweaters in heathered wools, houndstooth polo coats and shorter, nautical-style peacoats with gilt buttons—modeled closely after the one Westminster wore when yachting. Her new English country look was a big hit. The Baroness Edouard de Rothschild appeared in Vogue wearing a “natural-colored” Chanel suit in an article devoted to chic Scottish shooting parties in the Highlands. “Tweeds have made the practical beautiful and the beautiful practical,” announced Vogue in 1928. That same year, Time magazine chronicled Chanel’s growing success: “The Fame of G. (‘COCO’) Chanel has waxed since the war. Sweaters have made her name and her fortune, the light, boyish sweaters which form the sports costume of many an American and English woman. [But] the story of C. is shrouded in mystery.” As ever, the fog surrounding Chanel’s past life only enhanced her image.
Always enthusiastic about her business, the duke put a textile mill in the Highlands at Coco’s disposal, where she negotiated the production of a new, softer, lightweight wool whose flexibility lent itself better to women’s clothing, particularly her feminine sweaters. Coco’s clients loved the new casual, “English” look, which they coveted even more after the June 1926 Paris opening of Jean Cocteau’s much-heralded Orpheus, in which all the classical characters sported Coco’s tweeds and golf sweaters. “Tweeds that I had imported from Scotland … dethroned silk crepe and chiffon,” she told Paul Morand.
Coco looked down as well as up the social ladder for ideas. The distinctive striped uniforms of the Eaton Hall staff resurfaced on Coco’s casual wool pullovers and some blouses. The bell-bottomed trousers worn by the crew of Bendor’s yacht inspired Coco’s first significant foray into “slacks”—which became (and remain) a universal staple for women. She copied the sailors’ hats too, and had her models (and herself) photographed wearing the caps and berets pulled down over their eyebrows, at just the angle she’d seen them worn on Flying Cloud. On the front of her own beret, she affixed a brooch bearing the Westminster royal insignia.
Chanel in her own English-style sweater and pleated skirt, with pianist Marcelle Meyer, aboard Westminster’s yacht (illustration credit 8.4)
Attracted always by uniforms, Chanel also borrowed the fitted silhouettes of waistcoats worn by the butlers of Eaton Hall, adapting the style for her suit jackets; the footmen’s starched collars and cuffs appeared on the blouses she designed for women, as did the color scheme of the butlers’ vests. Filtered through Chanel’s aesthetic, all these ultra-British, masculine style elements reemerged to look somehow French and feminine. With her easy glamour, Chanel made the transformation seem effortless.
Chanel also expanded her use of black during these years—a color traditionally associated only with servants’ uniforms or mourning. She had started creating black evening dresses around 1920, announcing that loud, theatrical colors made her ill.
Chanel in nautical-style flared trousers and yachting-inspired cap, on the Lido with her friend Duke Laurino of Rome, 1930 (illustration credit 8.5)
“Colors are impossible,” she said. “These women, I am going to put them in goddamned black.” Just one year after the death of Boy Capel, then, Chanel turned the color of mourning into a global trend. By 1926, she had created an entire series of simple black dresses—in wool for daytime and silk or floaty chiffon for evening. The evening dresses featured rows of fringe or sequined beading.
The exquisite simplicity of the dresses drew admiration from the fashion press: “Chanel [is] famed for her black chiffons … a little bit of nothing, yet a masterpiece,” gushed Vogue. Sleek, geometric numbers like these dresses had earned Chanel a place at the 1925 Paris Exposition internationale des arts décoratifs et industriels modernes, the definitive exhibition of Art Deco in every genre, including fashion. Chanel’s boyish—garçonne—look helped cement her reputation as the epitome of modernity. And by October 1926, what we now call “the little black dress,” that ubiquitous, infinitely reproducible, infinitely chic garment, was lauded by Vogue as “The Chanel ‘Ford’—the frock that all the world will wear.”
The remark was prophetic. Vogue had intuited the close relationship between Chanel’s work and the automobile: Both conferred mobility upon women, both could be manufactured on a mass scale, and both would soon be indispensable. The little black dress turned the color associated with housemaids’ uniforms and widow’s weeds into a marker of privileged yet.… accessible—and somehow American (Ford-like)—freedom. Chanel summed up the phenomenon simply: “Before me, no one would have dared d
ress in black. For four or five years, I did nothing but black, with a little white collar, which sold like hotcakes, I made a fortune. Everyone wore a little black dress … movie actresses, housemaids.”
The “little black dress,” as it appeared in Vogue, 1926 (illustration credit 8.6)
Chanel herself continued to lead a life of mobility and luxury—precisely the virtues implicit in the little black dress. It is hard to know, though, if any of it made her happy. Little record remains of how she felt inwardly, of whether the dazzling successes of her midlife counterbalanced the earlier tragedies. This absence of documentation may itself be revealing: We may have few accounts of Coco’s inner state partly because she had willed it out of existence, emotionally disappearing from her own life. Salvador Dalí took note of the “young and hard bitterness of [Coco’s] unavowed sentiments.”
Chanel occasionally admitted to unhappiness: “What followed [Boy’s death] was not a happy life.… I don’t like to become attached, because as soon as I care about someone, I become weak.” By the time she was involved with Westminster, Coco was practicing detachment. Friends remarked that she had never really been enamored of Bendor, and her passion certainly seemed focused more on his manorial lifestyle than on the man himself.
Chanel now lived her life quite consciously for public consumption—from the outside in. Society columns breathlessly followed her activities—taking in the Grand National races in Liverpool, sunning herself on the Lido. If there had ever been a boundary between her private life and her fashion business, it disappeared completely once she met Westminster. Her life was another commodity, a movie for the world to watch, with costumes available for purchase. Soon after a series of articles appeared about Coco’s yachting expeditions with the duke, for example, Coco marketed her first line of cruise wear, based on the outfits she herself had worn in all the photos. Chanel herself was as watched and admired as were her aristocratic clients. Vogue reported approvingly sightings around Monte Carlo of “a striped costume of tissu roulier like the one that Chanel, the Duchesse de Gramont, and many others are wearing.”
Chanel and the Duke of Westminster at the Grand National horse race (illustration credit 8.7)
Through the duke, Coco vastly enlarged her circle of aristocratic clients, which now included such luminaries as Baba d’Erlanger, Princess Jean-Louis de Faucigny-Lucinge; the Honorable Daisy Fellowes, a fashionable socialite and heiress to the Singer sewing machine fortune; the Duchess of Sutherland; and the future queen consort of England, Elizabeth, Duchess of York (who had figured among Coco’s initial clientele at Deauville but now became a regular customer). Chanel even opened a branch of her boutique in London’s Davies Street in 1927, on Mayfair property lent to her by Bendor.
Coco had such an effect on fashion that even her skin tone could spark a lasting trend. For centuries, upper-class white women had cherished their pallor, shunning a tan as evidence of manual, outdoor labor. But when Chanel’s olive skin turned bronze while sailing the Mediterranean, she unwittingly incited a craze for sunbathing and for the white beach pajamas she wore to offset her tan. “I was as tan as a gypsy from the cruise with the Duke. I who had always avoided the sun … had let myself go this time. That night, my color made my teeth shine, and I looked as if I were bursting with life. And that’s when women began to sunbathe,” she said later. In 1924, taking advantage of this new practice, the Maison Chanel introduced the first tanning lotion for women, L’Huile Tan. Later Coco would ask her chemists to add a sunscreen to the lotion. But Chanel had begun a trend that lasted for at least the rest of the twentieth century. Even now, talk of UV rays and cancer can barely squelch our collective fondness for a tanned appearance.
For a while, as Chanel worked to secure her position with the duke, she lived with him virtually full-time, staying for two to three weeks at a stretch and then commuting back to her business in Paris. Although Bendor would travel to Paris twice yearly to attend Chanel’s runway shows, he did not enjoy spending time in rue Cambon, and took no pains to hide his impatience. He preferred to enjoy Coco’s company on his own terms and on his territory. On one occasion, Chanel permitted the duke to ship all her seamstresses over to Eaton Hall so that she could work with them without having to leave his estate.
In general, Coco subordinated her schedule to the duke’s, and traveled with him as much as possible. The truth was, despite her famously fierce independence, so admired by Bendor, Coco hesitated to leave him for long periods. She knew his reputation. She also hesitated to express the full force of her usually vibrant personality. While she recognized that he hardly compared to most of her friends in intellectual depth or brilliance, Chanel was uncharacteristically accommodating with the duke. “Coco was like a little girl before the Duke and was very careful not to contradict him,” Lady Abdy told Pierre Galante.
She may have feigned childlike deference, but Chanel still had a multimillion-dollar empire to run, and that could not be done indefinitely from the English countryside. Coco moved back to the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, although she continued to visit England for weekends. In Paris, Chanel was now entertaining in a new more relaxed style, picked up during country weekends with the duke. “The greatest pleasure that I derived from him was merely to watch him live,” she said of Bendor. Inspired, Coco threw large, buffet-style dinner parties, at which guests moved freely around. “Never a big, solemn dinner table,” she said.
Their relationship remained the talk of the international press, and their marriage seemed a real possibility. Chanel never spoke of it, but her actions suggest that she still craved the legitimacy and security of marriage. Most of her friends, even the demimondaines, had found husbands by this point. Marthe Davelli had married Constant Say, heir to a great sugar fortune. The beautiful actress Gabrielle Dorziat—who’d worn Chanel’s earliest millinery creations onstage—was now the Countess de Zogheb; and Vera had divorced Frederick Bate and in 1927 had married Prince Alberto Lombardi, a dashing Italian military man.
Chanel thought carefully about how to position herself to become the next Duchess of Westminster. Her family back in the provinces caused her particular concern, especially her brothers, Lucien and Alphonse. Lucien peddled shoes for a living and Alphonse ran a café-tabac. The duke knew little of her origins except the embroidered tales she told most friends, featuring a father off in America and two maiden aunts. She grew sick with anxiety at the thought of the press somehow uncovering her brothers and exposing the great Coco Chanel, future duchess, as the sister of uneducated, rural peasants. Coco must have heard the stories about the duke’s contentious relationship with the demanding and cash-poor Cornwallis-Wests, his first wife’s family, and surely assumed that Bendor would be disinclined to acquire any more impecunious in-laws.
Coco decided that, to clear the path to her future happiness, she had to prune her family tree. It took some convincing, but she got both Alphonse and Lucien to accept lifetime pensions from her in exchange for lying low. She even bought a palatial new home for Lucien and his family, hoping that, in the event he was discovered, the house would lend him an aura of respectability and prosperity.
At first, Lucien resisted his sister’s offer; his wife found it too lavish and disapproved of her husband’s retiring. Coco finally won Lucien over by promising that, when she retired, she would return to Clermont-Ferrand to live with him in the new house. The sweeter and more guileless of the brothers, Lucien believed this and accepted her offer. The thought of his famous sister honoring him with her presence made him happy. The final term of her agreement displayed more cruelty on Coco’s part: She extracted a promise from Lucien never to speak to or see Alphonse again. Alphonse was the crafty one and she didn’t want him inciting his brother to any potentially embarrassing activities that could wind up in the press.
With increasing sureness, Chanel was navigating British society. When Bendor’s daughter, Lady Mary Grosvenor, invited Chanel to her coming-out ball, to be hosted by her mother, the duke’s ex-wife, Coco acc
epted, reciprocating the gesture by organizing a pre-ball dinner for Mary in London. That night, Chanel hosted Westminster; his ex-wife; the Duchess of Westminster; both of his daughters, Ursula and Mary; and Winston and Clementine (“Clemmie”) Churchill.
After dinner, as her guests prepared to leave for the ball, being held down the street, Coco went back upstairs, claiming she needed to change her dress. She would see them in a few minutes, she assured them, waving them off. Chanel then promptly undressed, took to her bed, and told her maid that she was unwell. Bendor soon noticed her absence at the ball and hurried back to Bourdon House. There he was told that Mademoiselle was ill and no longer receiving that evening. He went upstairs to find Chanel, her face ghostly white. She refused a doctor and when she embraced him, he found she’d left traces of white powder on his black coat. She had powdered her face with talc to appear pale with illness. Although onto her ruse, the duke was obliged to return alone to Bourdon House.
Chanel had made a strategic move worthy of a great general. The king and queen were expected at the ball, and she knew that all of London society would be there lying in wait, longing to see her fail somehow, to watch her prove her unworthiness—the proper comeuppance for the duke’s mistress, the brazen French parvenu. By not appearing, she had set them back on their heels. Everyone whispered about her absence all evening. Coco had become an advanced player.
But nature is harder to outwit than even the British peerage, and no matter how she tried, Chanel could not offer Bendor the one thing he desired above all: an heir. The duke had never recovered from the death of his son, Edward, and his unsuccessful marriage to Violet had only heightened his frustration at having no male child to inherit his title. While he seemed largely unconcerned with Coco’s commoner status, the duke did not hide his interest in having another child.