Mademoiselle Page 24

  Losses were piling up. The relationship between Westminster and Chanel grew increasingly strained, and Bendor spent very little time at La Pausa during the late summer of 1929. Finally, a line was crossed. While both were aboard Flying Cloud, Coco discovered that the duke had invited a third party onto the boat—a pretty young interior decorator who had caught his eye. This was too much. Shocked by Westminster’s indifference to her feelings, Coco demanded that the woman be escorted ashore at the next port. The duke complied, but Chanel had lost her tolerance for humiliations of this sort. The duke would never marry her, and his interest in finding a new wife to bear him a son was all too clear.

  Chanel’s relationship with the duke drew to a close in late 1929, although their rupture did not happen all at once. For a time, Coco found comfort in the arms of her former flame, the devout, ascetic, intellectual Pierre Reverdy—a man arguably the exact inverse of Westminster. When Bendor got wind of Chanel’s renewed dalliance with Reverdy, he was shocked: “Coco is crazy! She’s taken up with a priest!” Coco visited Eaton Hall once more in mid-December. By Christmas, though, the fifty-year-old duke was engaged to the Honorable Loelia Mary Ponsonby, a twenty-seven-year-old English noblewoman he had met only two months prior.

  If, after their six years together, Chanel felt shock and sorrow as Bendor replaced her so blithely—in a matter of weeks—she said little about it. She had encountered this particular heartache before. As she had with Boy, Chanel once more lost a lover to a woman of a higher, more suitable social position, and this time her rival was nearly twenty years her junior. Although she would later tell Paul Morand that she “had never tried to trap [Westminster]” and indeed had even “demanded that he get married” to someone else, Chanel’s actions over the course of their years together prove just how serious she had been about becoming his wife. She’d grown entranced with his version of England, too, later insisting that “everything I liked was on the other side of the [Channel].”

  Aggravating the humiliation of his swift engagement, Bendor insisted on presenting his new fiancée to Coco—as if seeking the Chanel stamp of approval. The only account of this meeting comes from Ponsonby’s memoir. Her description makes clear that neither woman found the afternoon enjoyable:

  At the time, Mademoiselle Chanel had reached the pinnacle of fame. Her sober clothes, simple and uncomplicated, were considered the height of chic.… She sat down in an armchair.… She offered me a small footstool at her feet! I felt as though I were before a judge who was about to decide whether I was worthy enough to become the wife of her old admirer. I doubt very much if I passed the test.

  Loelia and the Duke married on February 20, 1930, in what proved to be the society wedding of the year. Winston Churchill served as best man.

  When Coco talked of her time with the duke years later, she rewrote history as liberally as she always did. It’s painful to read the tale she concocted for Paul Morand, so much does it betray her need to save face. Even while insisting on her great boredom with Bendor, she turned their six years together into an entire decade. (She told Marcel Haedrich she had spent thirteen years with the duke. In a later interview, she increased it to fourteen.) “Salmon fishing is not a life.… Ten years of my life were passed with Westminster.… I’ve always known when to leave.… ‘I’ve lost you, I can’t live without you,’ he said to me. I responded, ‘But I don’t love you. How can you sleep with a woman who doesn’t love you?’… With me, [the Duke] couldn’t have everything he wanted. Being ‘His Grace’ meant nothing, so long as a little Frenchwoman could refuse him. It was a terrible shock for him.”

  The denial and bravado only made it plainer: That old, familiar chasm between the royal realm she aspired to (“His Grace”) and the peasant girl still within (the “little Frenchwoman”) had come back to haunt her. Chanel’s young niece, Gabrielle Palasse, spent the summer after Bendor’s wedding with “Auntie Coco,” and recalled the lyrics to a song Chanel sang over and over to herself during those weeks: “My woman has a heart of stone … not human but with a heart of stone.” In perfect keeping with the role-reversed account she had invented for Paul Morand, Chanel had chosen a “she-done-me-wrong” tune, singing from the perspective of a wounded man. Perhaps singing this, she imagined herself the stony inflictor of pain, rather than its victim. Or perhaps she sang the words as a mantra, hoping to harden her own heart in the process.

  Chanel’s romance with Paul Iribe coincided with a turning point, perhaps even the central pivot moment, of her life. When they met, in 1931, she was forty-eight—in the very middle of middle age—and had recently broken off with the Duke of Westminster. Many of her fondest dreams had come true, while others, she now realized, would have to be put aside forever.

  Coco was, unquestionably, at the height of her fame, power, and influence. She had established herself as an arbiter of style, her classic look worn or emulated by millions. She was one of the richest women in the world, with a business grossing 120 million francs annually. She owned a perfume factory and a textile mill, and employed 2,400 workers in twenty-six different studios. Chanel’s personal fortune was estimated at 15 million francs, with holdings and investments spread over several countries. “Chanel” had become a household word in Europe and the United States.

  Coco had also reinvented herself as a legitimate artist, continuing to cultivate friendships and collaborations with the brightest lights of the modernist movement. While guarded and defensive in many ways, she was free and generous with money. Happy to play the grande dame with a ready checkbook, she supported her friends’ artistic endeavors, and bailed them out personally when the need arose. “I prefer to give rather than lend money,” she wrote. “It costs the same.”

  Weekends and holidays found her on the Riviera where house parties at La Pausa took place on a royal scale. After lavish buffet lunches featuring an array of world cuisines, guests could play tennis on the professional courts framed by yew bushes, wander the grounds, or be motored down the steep hill by one of Chanel’s chauffeurs, passing through the olive groves and fragrant orange trees en route to Monte Carlo for an afternoon of shopping. No one’s life could have been grander or more accomplished, but even so, certain hard truths were coming into focus.

  The rupture with Westminster brought with it the sound of doors closing. Coco experienced a new kind of pain as she considered the options no longer possible for her. She would never have a child; she would never accede to royalty. Even worse, the second disappointment resulted from the first. Had she been able to conceive, Bendor, she was sure, would have married her and made her a duchess. (Loelia and Bendor did not have a child together and divorced acrimoniously after five years.) When he left her, the duke had taken with him Chanel’s last chance for the kind of historic and familial legacies she craved.

  On April 29, 1930, Coco’s beloved aunt and longtime companion, Adrienne, finally married her long-term lover, Maurice de Nexon (after the death of his father, who had long opposed the union), making her the Baroness Nexon. Chanel would never have admitted it, but to stand by as the mild and unambitious Adrienne acquired an aristocratic title would surely have rankled. Some women might have talked it all over with their girlfriends, but the woman who sang of a “heart of stone” sought other ways. With Paul Iribe, Chanel would find another path to another glory.

  Iribe was Chanel’s first serious romance after the duke and clearly she had decided it was time for a change. In Iribe, Coco seemed to have chosen a lover more for his personal qualities than for what he could do for her. Iribe had no royal pedigree, and was far from wealthy. He was not particularly good-looking or athletic. He was even a bit pudgy and had false teeth. None of that, however, had impeded his success with women—including beautiful, and often very rich—women. They saw in him what Chanel would see: a talented designer and illustrator; a self-assured wit and—most crucially—a great admirer and connoisseur of womanhood, someone whose career in fashion, jewelry, and interior design seemed based on his sophistic
ated understanding of female beauty. “A woman is like a pearl,” he told an interviewer in 1911. “Just as a beautiful pearl must never be carved or deformed by a setting ill-suited to its structure, so must each woman’s body determine the lines and colors that complement its form. I would no more try to change the form of a pearl than I would dream of trying to alter the beauty of the feminine body.”

  As so many times before, when Chanel encountered a new potential lover, he was married—to his second wife, the beautiful American heiress Maybelle Hogan. His first wife, French actress Jeanne Dirys, died of tuberculosis shortly after their divorce in 1918. She had been among the earliest performers to wear one of Chanel’s hats onstage, even appearing in it on a magazine cover drawn by Iribe.

  Iribe had long been a part of Misia’s and Cocteau’s circle, so he and Chanel may have been acquainted prior to their first official encounter in 1931 when Maybelle Iribe, seeking to boost her husband’s flagging career, arranged a commission for him to design some jewelry for Mademoiselle Chanel. Maybelle likely came to rue this helpful intervention. It’s not known exactly when this business arrangement turned into a love affair, but in 1932, Chanel and Iribe announced—with much fanfare—their collaboration on a new, lavish diamond jewelry collection, and Maybelle moved out of the Iribe family apartment on the avenue Rodin. In 1933 she filed for divorce and moved back to the United States, taking their two children with her. In November of that same year, a New York Times headline read “Mlle Chanel to Wed Business Partner”—announcing the first and only time in her life that Coco was engaged to be married.

  It had taken an exceptional confluence of circumstances to get Chanel, at age fifty, to the brink of marriage at last. Although his career was in decline and hers still on the ascent when they met, Iribe proved able to give Chanel something that she had been seeking since her first days in Paris, something loftier than money, artistic renown, or even a royal title: Paul Iribe transformed Coco into an allegory, an icon of historic importance. Nothing could have seduced her more.

  Despite the power imbalance between them and Chanel’s considerably greater fame and fortune, Iribe had her spellbound, entranced by the vision of herself that he reflected back to her. He knew just what kind of beautiful pearl she longed to be. He also understood her yearning for personal apotheosis via national glory. Iribe’s hard-right, ultranationalist, xenophobic political views confirmed and reinforced Chanel’s own opinions, crystallizing tendencies she had long harbored. Only Iribe could have yielded so much influence over Coco at this stage of her life.

  He was her age exactly, born in Angoulême, France, in 1883, but he was not of French descent. His mother and father (who were unmarried) were Spanish and Basque, respectively. Yet in his youth, Paul’s father, Jules Iribarnegaray (who later shortened and Gallicized the family name), wound up thrust into the spotlight during one of the most iconic moments in French history: the climax of the 1871 Paris Commune uprising. And strange as it may seem, sixty years later, via Jules’s son, Paul Iribe, aftereffects of Iribarnegaray’s strange role in this epochal event made themselves felt in the life of Coco Chanel.

  The Commune, which seized governing control of Paris from March to May 1871, was born of the devastation, poverty, and famine engendered by France’s humiliating defeat in the Franco-Prussian War. The ongoing privations of war, coupled with rising concern about a possible restoration of the French monarchy, fueled the founding of the commune—a largely proletarian committee that maintained leadership of Paris for seventy-one days. Replacing the French tricolore with the red flag of international socialism, the Communards agitated for secularism in schools and government, enhanced workers’ rights, and equality for women. Throughout its brief rule, the Commune remained under consistent attack by the newly formed Government of National Defense, which governed the rest of the country from its headquarters at Versailles, under President Adolphe Thiers, known for his ruthlessness and brutality.

  Within right-wing circles and even among some moderates, the Commune incited bitter invective infused with xenophobia and racism. The movement consisted nearly entirely of white French people, but to its angry critics, the Commune looked like an invading horde. Communards were depicted as dangerous, “barbaric,” inferior, and racially other. The women participants, the Communardes, appeared in caricatures as grotesque, promiscuous hags.

  For its most iconic act, designed to symbolize its utter rejection of French imperialism, the Commune chose to demolish the Colonne Vendôme, the enormous bronze obelisk at the center of the Place Vendôme, commissioned by Napoléon to celebrate his victory at Austerlitz and modeled after Trajan’s Column in Rome. At the column’s very top, majestically surveying the Place Vendôme, stood a statue of the emperor himself, dressed as Caesar, in Roman toga and laurel wreath, and holding a smaller statue representing Liberty perched upon a globe.

  Today, the elegant Place Vendôme is home to some of the world’s most exclusive shops and businesses—most famously Coco Chanel’s boutique and the Ritz. But in 1871, the Place Vendôme was known more as a war memorial, and its column represented everything the Communards decried: imperialism, militarism, and the smug implication that France’s imperial conquests were actually benevolent, bringing “liberty” to the world. With the column’s demolition, the Communards intended to offer participants a cathartic, even festive moment. They even hired musicians to entertain the crowds.

  On May 16, 1871, the appointed day, ten thousand people overflowed the Place Vendôme, which had been renamed the Place Internationale for the occasion. Tons of manure and straw had been laid to absorb the shock of the falling monument. But felling the column proved more challenging than expected. It took more than fifty men working for hours in the heat with chisels, ropes, and hammers to maneuver the monument into place. Leading the workers was Jules Iribarnegaray, Paul’s father—a civil engineer hired by the Commune to ensure the day’s success.

  Under Iribarnegaray’s direction, the workers finally managed to crack the tower precisely into three parts. It crashed to the ground with a deafening noise, sending up thick and fetid dust clouds as it hit the straw-covered manure. The impact decapitated Emperor Napoléon, whose laureled head rolled away from his body. Amid cries of “Vive la Commune!” and the strains of “La Marseillaise,” spectators scrambled to spit on the fallen emperor or grab bits of his fractured stone body as souvenirs. As a special token of gratitude for Jules Iribarnegaray, who’d risked his life and freedom in service to the Commune, officials presented him with the little statue of Liberty atop the globe. He left the Place Vendôme that day six thousand francs richer (his fee), and in possession of the allegorical figure of liberty that had long nestled in the palm of Napoléon’s hand.

  The fall of the Colonne Vendôme during the 1871 Paris Commune (illustration credit 9.1)

  Soon after, the Commune met its demise in one of the bloodiest massacres of French history, with Adolphe Thiers’s government sending in the military. More than twenty-five thousand French citizens were gunned down indiscriminately, and at least seven thousand others were deported to a wretched penal colony in New Caledonia.

  Amazingly, Jules Iribarnegaray escaped execution and arrest, but, fearing for his life, went into self-imposed exile for ten years in Spain, where he met his future common-law wife and started a family. It is impossible to ignore the dramatic contrast between Paul Iribe and his father. Jules’s role in the Paris Commune forged much of his adult life. He was obliged to go into hiding—eventually living in four different countries, uprooting his children repeatedly as he moved from place to place. He remained a liberal intellectual, joining the Freemasons and studying philosophy and science. As a Basque, he would have regarded himself as part of a culturally and ethnically distinct group, neither French nor Spanish. In other words, Jules Iribarnegaray was a nomadic internationalist and an intellectual—not unlike Boy Capel.

  Jules’s son, Paul Iribe, on the other hand, seemed determined to invert every aspect of hi
s father’s life, devoting himself to the most xenophobic, ardent versions of French nationalism and patriotism, insisting constantly on his Gallic bona fides.

  By the early 1930s, when Chanel met Paul Iribe, his pro patria ardor had tipped over into zealotry. He was the Frenchest of Frenchmen, as much a pillar of chauvinism as was the Colonne Vendôme his father had laid low. Chanel was attracted to his passionate nationalism. French identity offered a consoling antidote to the lingering wounds of a rootless childhood for both Coco and Paul, and during her time with him Chanel grew more ardent in her own patriotism.

  As an adult, Paul made little mention of his itinerant youth or his father’s exile. But his past did not hold him back. By the age of seventeen, in 1900, he was working as an apprentice to architect René Binet assisting in designing the iconic Porte Binet—the vast, ornamental main entrance to the 1900 Paris World’s Fair, adorned with a twenty-foot sculpture of a beautiful woman wearing a flowing dress and matching coat designed by celebrated couturière Jeanne Paquin. Sculpted by Paul Moreau-Vauthier, this figure was known as La Parisienne, and the tiara she wore represented the city of Paris.