Mademoiselle Page 23
In 1928, Chanel was forty-five years old. Most women would have trouble conceiving at that age, but in Coco’s case, the odds may have been even longer—probably because of internal damage caused by an earlier abortion. Now, Coco turned her attention to combating biology, consulting doctors and midwives and gathering information on the limited fertility treatments available in that era. Her efforts—which involved performing what she called “humiliating gymnastics” during lovemaking—proved unsuccessful. “I always had the belly of a very young girl,” she told Edmonde Charles-Roux, suggesting that somehow her slim figure was to blame.
With pregnancy eluding her, Chanel looked for other ways to create an enticing domestic, familial setting for herself and the duke, one that might encourage him to see a long-term future for their relationship. She decided to build an estate. The French Riviera had provided the backdrop for much of the couple’s vacationing over several years, but they had always traveled there on Bendor’s yacht and stayed in hotels or rented villas. In 1928, Chanel launched plans for her own Mediterranean retreat. She had certainly owned many impressive homes by this point in her life, and now she would build herself a palace to rival a duke’s. As the lady of her own mansion, she would make a home for them both, where Bendor could relax completely. In the back of her mind, she might also have hoped that new, restful surroundings could be conducive to pregnancy. (She must also have been thinking of Boy Capel, who spent the last moments of his life driving along a stretch of Riviera coastline.)
Coco and Bendor scouted property on the Côte d’Azur, and in 1928, Chanel alone signed the deed on a tract of land in Roquebrune, France, paying 1.8 million francs. The property sat on the sloping hills of the Maritime Alps. On one side, it overlooked Monte Carlo and the Bay of Monaco; on the other, Menton and the Italian border town of Ventimiglia. In the late twenties, this region of coastal France was establishing itself as the most exclusive real estate in the world, home to European and American high society. Coco and Bendor would know many of their neighbors. Aviator and industrialist Jacques Balsan (Etienne’s brother) and his wife, Consuelo Vanderbilt, had a home nearby in Cap d’Antibes, where they entertained Winston Churchill. Daisy Fellowes vacationed in the area, too, as did Viscount Esmond Rothermere, owner of the Daily Mail and The Evening News, who often hosted the Prince of Wales and Winston Churchill, who seems to have relished the role of houseguest. Along with the Ballets Russes crowd, other famous artists and performers set up housekeeping on the Riviera, among them F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald; Cole and Linda Porter; Fernand Léger; and Ernest Hemingway.
Although for years many believed that Bendor had subsidized the Roquebrune estate, Coco alone undertook every expense for the project. After hearing Count Jean de Segonzac sing the praises of Robert Streitz, a promising young architect, Chanel interviewed the twenty-eight-year-old Streitz aboard Flying Cloud, asking him to submit a preliminary proposal for the design. Three days later he returned with his plans. Thrilled with his ideas, Coco and the duke hired him on the spot. It was Streitz’s first major commission and he’d hit the jackpot.
At first, project engineer Edgar Maggiore tried to dissuade Chanel from building on the hillside site she’d chosen. The land consisted of mostly solid rock and clay pockets, inadequate support for the large and heavy construction planned. The hill, moreover, was out of plumb, rendering the site even more precarious. Chanel was adamant; she would build nowhere else. Finally, his objections overruled, Maggiore was obliged to construct a massive foundation for the house, with supporting beams more than a meter thick.
Chanel’s choice of real estate had likely been prompted by more than just the spectacular views. This particular corner of Roquebrune boasted a serious, even sacred genealogy. The original house that had stood on the property was called La Pausa, a name with origins in Christian lore.
According to a Gallic legend, when Mary Magdalene fled Jerusalem after the Crucifixion, she traveled through Roquebrune, where a beautiful garden filled with graceful olive trees enticed her to stop and rest—to “pause.” In the story, a chapel arose in the very spot where Mary Magdalene rested. In the fifteenth century, an actual chapel was built nearby to honor Our Lady of La Pausa, which remains to this day, adjacent to Chanel’s property. For six centuries now, every August 5, believers make a pilgrimage from Roquebrune’s Church of Sainte-Marguerite up to the chapel of La Pausa, carrying a statue of the Virgin Mary and enacting the Passion of Christ.
The site may have lacked solid geological foundations, but its grounding in Catholic history would have appealed powerfully to the convent girl in Chanel. Perhaps she was also recalling Pierre Reverdy’s poem “Bande de souvenirs,” which features a statue of Mary Magdalene, “in a chapel at the edge of the roads.” In any case, as a woman who had risen above a compromised past, Chanel could not have found a home with a more apropos patron saint. Although she had the three houses standing on the property razed, she decided to keep the site’s original name. Every year thereafter, on August 5, Coco showed her respect for the property’s biblical past by placing roses at the portal of the public staircase used by the procession and setting out refreshments for the pilgrims—on a table covered with a white cloth.
Coco’s Catholic childhood was, in fact, very much in her mind as she collaborated with Streitz on the design—perhaps because Eaton Hall reminded her of Aubazine, perhaps because of her new focus on domesticity. She wanted La Pausa to feel like a deeply rooted family home, and the only real family home in her own life had been her convent orphanage. Coco asked Streitz to take the abbey as a partial model, and had him travel to Aubazine to study the building—particularly the dramatic curving stone staircase that dominated it, which Coco called “the monks’ staircase.” While visiting the orphanage, Streitz met and spoke with the institution’s long-standing mother superior. She remembered Gabrielle Chanel very well—“an illegitimate child born in the poorhouse.” Times had changed.
La Pausa eventually cost Chanel a total of 6 million francs to build and would become a masterpiece of its genre, “one of the most enchanting villas that ever materialized on the shores of the Mediterranean,” as American Vogue described it. Even with its ten thousand square feet set on nine acres, La Pausa managed to be warm and inviting. Built like a Roman villa, the house had three wings gracefully framing a central courtyard, which Chanel had paved with one hundred thousand specially sanded bricks. A white balcony ran the length of the house’s interior face on the upper level, providing a stretch of private space for sunbathing. From within the open and airy central atrium, a majestic stone staircase arose—Streitz’s homage to the central stairs at Aubazine.
Views of Chanel’s villa La Pausa on the Côte d’Azur (illustration credit 8.12)
Chanel was deeply engaged in the creation of La Pausa, traveling down at least once a month from Paris to check on its progress. She would board the famous Blue Train to Monte Carlo, and, from there, hire a taxi to take her up the hills to Roquebrune. Sometimes she would return to Paris the same day. On one occasion, when Chanel had no time to spare for the commute south, Maggiore sent one of his stucco workers north to Paris, so that Chanel could consult with him personally on the exact color she wanted for her villa’s exterior. She decided on a very soft gray, intended to melt into the tones of the weathered houses that dotted the seaside hills above Monte Carlo.
On every slate
sliding from the roof
someone
had written
a poem
The gutter is rimmed with diamonds
the birds drink them
—PIERRE REVERDY, “ROOF SLATES,” 1918
Coco was equally exacting about the villa’s roof, which was to be tiled in the fashion of traditional Mediterranean houses in the area. Although they were building from scratch, she wanted to endow La Pausa with an aura of history and tradition, to make it look as if it had always stood on that hill.
After studying local architecture, Chanel determined t
hat she needed a particular kind of slightly curved, handmade tile whose warm terra-cotta color had been softened by the sun. La Pausa’s vast roof would require twenty thousand such tiles, and they proved almost impossible to procure. And so Chanel had her contractor search the entire region for houses whose roofs featured these tiles. He then offered to pay the owners of these homes—many of them peasants—an exorbitant fee to allow the tiles to be stripped off their roofs and replaced with new ones. It was an arduous and costly process, but eventually, a sufficient number of the desired tiles were purchased and carted back to shingle the roof of La Pausa. The arrangement pleased everyone. Local residents were thrilled to have their roofs retiled at someone else’s expense and to turn a handsome profit in the bargain. And Chanel achieved her goal: She had essentially “grafted” a feeling of august history onto a brand-new creation—exactly what she accomplished so often in clothing, and—arguably—with her own life story as well. (A few people were less excited about Chanel’s choices for La Pausa: Her carpenters grew indignant when she demanded that they artificially “age” the perfect new shutters they’d built. They took pride in their pristine craftsmanship and had never heard of anyone simulating the appearance of wear and tear on a house.)
Wanting to give her house a lush and ancient-looking setting—perhaps recalling Mary Magdalene resting in her grove—and finding the vegetation a bit spare, she asked Maggiore to find additional olive trees of the right size and age. After much effort and expense, he managed to locate twenty olive trees, each at least a century old, in the neighboring town of Antibes. He then had these painstakingly transplanted onto Chanel’s property. When Vogue later rhapsodized that “the house [was] set quite simply in the midst of a large grove of ancient olive trees,” few readers would have imagined that while the trees were ancient, technically, the grove was not. Like the aged tiles on the roof, the ancient trees were brand-new transplants, put there to enhance La Pausa’s glow of borrowed time. Ever masterful at inventing her own, fictional histories, Chanel had artificially added ancient splendor to her new setting.
A grand estate needs grand gardens. Moved by the wild beauty of the gardens at Eaton Hall, Chanel designed similarly free-form landscaping at La Pausa. Along with the olive trees, she had her gardeners plant groves of orange trees, fields of lavender, fragrant hyacinth, masses of purple irises, and rosebushes of every color, which climbed up the walls of the house.
In dramatic contrast to the lush and vibrant floral colors, the interior of La Pausa featured Coco’s typical muted and restrained palette, with spare furnishings and nearly no knickknacks or objets of any kind. Antique cabinets, dark oak tables, and couches upholstered in mahogany leather stood against cream-colored walls. Thick carpets of a deep claret color were scattered throughout the main living space on the first floor, and heavy beige silk curtains framed the six sets of French doors opening onto the patio. Even the piano was beige. A vast library featuring handmade oak shelves and deep armchairs for reading stood off to one side of the atrium. And to enhance further the ambiance of an old country estate, outsize stone fireplaces were built into most rooms.
Upstairs, his and her suites for Coco and the duke stood separated by a white marble bathroom. Eager to provide Bendor with a familiar setting commensurate with his background, she once more “transplanted history,” covering his bedroom walls in panels of eighteenth-century dark oak and arranging to have a sixteenth-century Elizabethan-era oak bed transported from one of Westminster’s other homes. She even had the lights in the villa’s entryway decorated with the crown from Westminster’s coat of arms. Coco’s own suite featured beige taffeta drapes and bedding, oak paneling, and an antique wrought iron bed. Suspended above both beds were curtains of gold netting, to repel mosquitoes in style.
If Bendor was to see La Pausa as an extension of his usual surroundings, it would need to be filled regularly with his friends and family. Coco had always been a world-class hostess, and to encourage visitors, she converted an entire wing of the house into a series of two-room guest suites that offered couples the feeling of private apartments. Chanel especially wanted Bendor’s cousin and friend Vera Bate Lombardi to feel at home, so she offered Vera and Alberto use of La Colline, one of the guesthouses on the estate. Jean Cocteau also availed himself of La Colline, whose walls he decorated with some of his distinctive cartoon drawings.
Finished in 1929, La Pausa was a smash, becoming the hub of some of the most talked-about parties of Europe. Scores of British and French luminaries trained down for weekend parties of dinner and tennis hosted by Coco and the duke. Churchill grew fond of La Pausa and visited it when he was in the area. Few of their friends wanted to miss out on Chanel’s legendary yet low-key hospitality, all organized by her house manager, Admiral Castelan—another one of the highborn Russian refugees she collected. (Chanel treated Castelan with great respect; he dined alongside all invited guests.)
Every morning, guests could press a button and within two minutes find breakfast waiting outside their door, including twin thermoses of coffee and warmed milk, all left discreetly by Coco’s majordomo, Ugo. Visitors were left entirely undisturbed until lunchtime, when Chanel typically had her staff prepare an elaborate buffet. “La Pausa was the most comfortable, relaxing place I have ever stayed,” said Bettina Ballard, a former Vogue editor who frequented Roquebrune in the 1940s and ’50s: “The house was blissfully silent in the morning.… Lunch was the moment of the day when the guests met in a group and no one missed lunch—it was far too entertaining. The long dining room had a buffet at one end with hot Italian pasta, cold English roast beef, French dishes, a little of everything.”
Westminster must have found La Pausa relaxing as well. He converted one of the smaller buildings on the property into a studio for himself, where he painted watercolors—perhaps inspired to take up this hobby by his friend and amateur artist Winston Churchill. Decades later, Churchill would wind up spending a lot of time at La Pausa, after Chanel sold it to his literary agent, Emery Reves.
From the outside, Chanel’s life looked idyllic. She was more successful than ever, and she’d built a seaside palace fit for a duke and future duchess. But by the end of the 1920s, all was not well. Despite her new surroundings, Chanel had not conceived a child, to her great disappointment. And—as many guests at La Pausa could attest—peace did not always reign between Coco and Bendor. While the duke was clearly smitten with Chanel, he had always been a philanderer, and old habits are hard to break. Coco knew of his frequent infidelities, and they wounded her deeply. Visitors more than once reported overhearing bitter arguments and slamming doors at La Pausa. After such explosions, the duke would try to make amends, often with an expensive piece of jewelry. According to one account, during a yachting trip, Bendor tried to apologize for an indiscretion by giving Coco a priceless string of pearls. Coco accepted the gift, opened her fingers, and without a word, let the necklace fall into the sea. A nearly identical story exists about another affair, another apology, and Chanel dropping a priceless emerald into the waves.
The summer of 1929 brought another heartache as well. Serge Diaghilev, Chanel’s and Misia’s great friend, was gravely ill. At fifty-seven, he was suffering complications from the diabetes he had long ignored, often gorging himself on desserts or eating entire boxes of chocolates. Now he lay in a Venice hotel room, felled by a combination of meningitis and typhus. He had a telegram sent to Misia and Coco: “Am sick, come quickly.” On August 17, the two women, who were sailing the Adriatic on Flying Cloud, disembarked on the Lido and hurried to the Grand Hôtel des Bains de Mer. There they found Diaghilev in the care of his lover Serge Lifar and Boris Kochno, the Ballets Russes dancer and librettist serving now as Diaghilev’s secretary. Kochno and Diaghilev had also been lovers in the past, and Lifar and Kochno’s bitter rivalry for Diaghilev’s affections made the sickroom atmosphere tense.
Misia stayed behind, but Chanel sailed off later that day. She didn’t get far. Consumed with worry for her friend, s
he turned back toward Venice. She arrived too late. Diaghilev passed away on Chanel’s forty-sixth birthday, August 19, 1929. He died as he had often lived—penniless. Misia was ready to sell a diamond necklace to raise funds for his burial, but Chanel wouldn’t hear of it. She arranged and paid for a funeral fit for a king.
As the sun rose over the Grand Canal on August 20, 1929, three gondolas sailed slowly away from Piazza San Marco toward the Isola di San Michele, Venice’s cemetery island where the doges lie buried. The first boat, the funeral gondola carrying Diaghilev’s coffin, bore a sculpted angel with golden wings on its bow. The next two carried four mourners: Diaghilev’s former lover Boris Kochno; dancer Serge Lifar, Diaghilev’s current lover; Misia; and Coco—the two women all in white. When they disembarked, the grief-stricken Russian men fell to the ground and began crawling to the grave site on their knees. An exasperated Chanel insisted they rise and walk normally. Even in sorrow, she remained her practical self—the crawling was melodramatic and taking too long.
Diaghilev’s death signaled the end of a major chapter of European modemist dance and theater. Lifar and Kochno would try for several years to hold the Ballets Russes together, but it soon lost its momentum. And Chanel must have felt a personal chapter in her life ending as well. Diaghilev had welcomed her into his artistic world, recognizing her not only as a wealthy patron but as an artist—someone who could work alongside the likes of Picasso and Stravinsky.
Coco had remained forever a grateful admirer: “I loved him in his hurry to live,” she said of Diaghilev. “He taught French audiences … that there were unknown enchantments on every street corner.… He looked for genius the way a bum looks for cigarette butts on the sidewalk.” Her metaphor is as revealing as it is startling. She is referring to Diaghilev’s famous eye for talented people, and also to his cubist-inspired penchant for incorporating unexpected, humble elements (jogging, sunbathing, folklore, newspaper headlines) into his productions. But as Chanel knew well, she herself fell into the category of street-corner enchantment or cigarette-butt genius. It had taken visionaries on the order of Diaghilev and his coterie to espy the serious artist that lay within a mere dressmaker. For Coco, Serge’s death represented a great personal loss.