Mademoiselle Page 26
Ever manipulative, Iribe was not placated. He preferred weekends at her villa on the Riviera. “He dominated her,” recalled Serge Lifar, “and she hated it.” While Chanel may have groused about Paul’s demands to Lifar, at some level she clearly accepted being dominated in this way, perhaps seeing it as an acceptable sacrifice for love. Coco was also all too aware of Paul’s discomfort with her greater wealth and success. In giving in to him on every front, she may have been trying to spare his masculine pride.
Among Chanel’s many concessions to Iribe was her agreement to finance the resurrection of Le Témoin, the journal he’d founded twenty-five years prior with the backing of an earlier mistress. (Chanel’s library contained six first editions of the original Le Témoin.) This new version, which premiered on December 10, 1933, ran for two years and served as a weekly platform for Iribe’s increasingly virulent xenophobia and hard-right nationalism, which, for him, was deeply tied to the arts, fashion, and design. Passionately concerned about France, he felt it was in decline and greatly threatened by outside forces, including Freemasonry, Bolshevism, the rising tide of fascism (Hitler had become chancellor of Germany in 1933), taxes, nonwhite peoples, and international modernism in art.
In other words, with the exception of Germany, once more a potential common enemy, these were the very movements and forces associated with the Paris Commune. Iribe was allying himself with the very same archnationalist, conservative politics that his own father had so publicly opposed. Chanel’s social circle was well aware of Iribe’s father’s story, and warned her not to forget that “[Jules Iribe] brought down the Column onto the straw,” as if he might have bequeathed a subversive streak to Paul. In fact, quite the opposite was true. Iribe wanted not to revolutionize France but to preserve it in amber, and to repel the many dangers threatening it.
Iribe understood these dangers primarily—and nearly exclusively—through their effects upon the French luxury industry. He felt that France risked losing the elite refinements that distinguished it as a country, and that the solution was to “make France French again,” by restoring French perfume, jewelry, fashion, and furniture to their rightful dominance, and safeguarding them from homogenizing forces of modernist art and the machine aesthetic. “There is more authentic French art in the windows of a great perfume shop or a great shoe store, than in most exhibitions of paintings,” he wrote in 1932.
Iribe had come to believe that the most important art movement of his time—modernism—was actually a conspiracy by leftists, foreigners, and nonwhite peoples to undermine the sanctity of France. Only the original “brand” of France, he insisted in several published articles, could fend off the attacks launched by the likes of Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, Pablo Picasso (whose interest in African statuary disgusted Iribe), and Jewish playwright Henry Bernstein (perhaps also targeted for being one of Chanel’s former lovers). Modern fashion and fabric were also anathema to Iribe; he ranted against “undistinguished,” “machine-made” clothing, particularly those “in solid colors.”
For Iribe, a proper “Defense of Luxury,” as he put it, demanded a resurrection of prerevolutionary values. He lamented the death of the nobility and the concomitant loss of the “privileges … of … race.” Within his curious logic, this aristocratic, or “racial,” privilege was tied inextricably to French luxury manufacturing: “The prosperity and prestige of these industries is the prosperity and prestige of France.” Luxury goods, moreover, were indistinguishable from their female consumers: “The supreme client of these industries is Woman.” Iribe would dedicate the rest of his life to his vision of idealized aristocratic womanhood—a figure blending the patriotism of Marianne with the luxury boutique appeal of La Parisienne, the statue dressed in haute couture who reigned over the Paris World’s Fair of 1900.
• • •
On November 27, 1933, The New York Times announced Coco’s engagement to Paul Iribe. The headline, however, referred only to Chanel’s relationship with another, more famous man: “Mlle Chanel to Wed Business Partner; Once Refused Duke of Westminster.” The article goes on to describe Chanel as the “independent-spirited dictator” of fashion and a woman of “enormous personal fortune,” and once more mentions that she was the former mistress of the Duke of Westminster. Anyone looking for information on the actual bridegroom would have found but one mention of him, seven lines into the first paragraph, identified simply as “Paul Iribe, painter and decorator.”
With the launch of Le Témoin the following month, Iribe tried to reassert himself. Every issue’s cover telegraphed its patriotism, resembling the French tricolore, in blue, white, and red. The words “Paul Iribe, directeur,” were printed clearly on the upper left-hand corner. Chanel’s name appeared nowhere, although she had financed the entire operation.
Chanel was not acknowledged as Le Témoin’s publisher, though she did receive prominent exposure in the journal. Every issue included one or more political cartoons featuring Marianne, usually one on the cover and another as a centerfold. And this Marianne, who appeared hundreds of times in these pages, bore Coco’s unmistakable face and figure. Week after week, Iribe made Coco Le Témoin’s top (and only) cover girl. He did not depict her wearing any of her trademark fashions—no jersey dresses, no suits, no cloche hats, no pearls; this version of Coco modeled only one outfit—a Phrygian cap and flowing robes. But with or without her name or famous accoutrements, and even transformed into a cartoon illustration, Coco was known by all at a glance. “It was her face!” as Gabrielle Palasse-Labrunie put it simply.
Iribe had turned the pages of Le Témoin into his own series of wedding announcements, symbolically righting the power balance between him and his world-famous fiancée. By suppressing her name and powerful role as publisher, and subsuming Chanel into Marianne, Paul made Coco his creation, his symbol of the nation, essentially declaring himself betrothed to France herself. Iribe summed up his intentions for Le Témoin with the motto he chose for the journal: “We speak French. Subscribe to us.”
Coco offered Iribe the ideal image for his project. She had become the very embodiment of francité—the deeply rooted essence of national culture and pride and, especially, of the feminized luxury trades that he so revered. As John Updike would write, “Chanel … was in a way, France itself—the ubiquitous name of French chic, its subtle, rational, penetrating glamour.”
Although her classical garb recalled her symbolic role in the French Revolution, as well as the Commune, Iribe’s Marianne did not represent democracy or egalitarianism (and certainly not socialism) so much as she did a beleaguered elitism. To drive home the imperiled state of France, Iribe subjected his Marianne to all manner of torments. She suffered gunshot wounds, drowning, evil spells, criminal prosecution, and hanging. She appeared stripped naked, garroted, unconscious; her eyes gouged out to bloody holes à la Oedipus; she was buried alive. Iribe even portrayed her nailed to the Cross. In every case, this tortured lady remained recognizably Chanel.
Iribe depicted Coco flatteringly, even lovingly; her body long and graceful, her face regal; and not all the Marianne drawings feature such gore. But there is no denying the violence of dozens of these illustrations. Whatever its patriotic intent, Le Témoin’s treatment of the Coco-Marianne figure bordered on sadism. The resultant tone was a blend of hero worship, fetishism, and cartoon snuff. Chanel was well aware of the violent undercurrent of Iribe’s feelings, telling Morand years later, “He wanted to see me vanquished, humiliated.”
Iribe did not rely on his Marianne alone to express his vexed and conflicted feelings toward Coco. He vented his animus against modernism weekly on the pages of Le Témoin, targeting the Bauhaus and cubism, as well as specific elements of contemporary women’s fashion, all of which screamed their association with Chanel: costume jewelry, solid-color fabrics (“unfeminine”), British tweeds (not French), and military styles. “We have renounced French fashion in favor of the uniform,” wrote Iribe. He also unleashed his contempt on a Coco trademark, the faux p
earl necklace, opining that “[pearls] … available at any price range … signify nothing.” But Iribe reserved his harshest criticism for another item instantly associated with Chanel: inexpensive couture knockoffs, which he dismissed as “leprosy on the clear complexion of Paris.”
Chanel appearing as Marianne in Le Témoin: being interred, with eyes gouged out, presiding over an imperiled France turned roulette table, and nailed to the Cross
The Paris Commune, figured as a crucified Marianne in an 1871 political cartoon
Iribe never mentioned Chanel’s name in these diatribes, but he did not need to. By the midthirties, Coco enjoyed a long-established reputation for her use of solid colors; her textile factory was now producing the British tweeds that she had begun using—to great acclaim—during her Westminster years, and her suits had always been distinctly inspired by the military. While genuine political zeal may have driven Iribe, his public laments over modernism—especially in women’s fashion—amount, in effect, to a thinly veiled attack on his own fiancée and primary source of funding. Clearly, Paul loved Coco best as a silent icon who could be beaten and battered week after week in the pages of Le Témoin.
The midthirties brought tremendous turmoil to all of Europe, and especially to Paris. The French economy grew perilously weak; unemployment soared; and, most frighteningly, violent antigovernment riots—provoked by the so-called Stavisky affair and organized by the burgeoning French pro-fascist movement—rocked France. This instability only stoked Iribe’s and Chanel’s anxiety about their country’s decline, and hardened Iribe’s stance in Le Témoin.
Protests against the government continued throughout January, with special vitriol from right-wing sectors reserved for both Prime Minister Edouard Daladier and his Socialist (and Jewish-born) deputy, Léon Blum (who later became prime minister). Paris boiled over on February 6, 1934, in one of the bloodiest riots seen in the city since the Commune. Demonstrators stormed the Palais Bourbon, home of the Chamber of Deputies (although all the deputies had fled); mobs streamed down the streets on both sides of the Seine. Right-wing leagues such as the pro-fascist Jeunesse patriotes (Patriotic Youth), in their paramilitary blue uniforms, and the similarly pro-fascist Action française and Solidarité française, marched in formation shouting “France for the French.” As they had during the Commune, government troops, the Garde mobile, fired into crowds of French citizens, discharging as many as twenty thousand rounds of ammunition. The official death toll was between twenty and seventy, but many believed it much higher. More mass demonstrations and strikes followed. On February 12, more than a million workers descended into the streets of Paris during a general strike called for by the unions and the Socialist Party; thousands more marched in other towns.
Hundreds of such uprisings occurred regularly throughout the midthirties, organized by both ends of the political spectrum, leading many to fear France had plunged anew into a kind of violent, even revolutionary, upheaval. Journalists and publishers occupied center stage in much of the political drama, for the 1930s saw an explosion of mostly right-wing, often anti-Semitic, periodicals. A great many of these journals received their funding from the luxury goods industry. Perfume magnate François Coty owned three conservative papers, Le Figaro, L’Echo de Paris, and the right-wing tabloid L’Ami du Peuple. Pierre Taittinger and Jean Hennessy, of the champagne and cognac empires respectively, each also owned right-wing papers. Taittinger had also founded the Jeunesse patriotes.
As another multimillionaire in a luxury business, Chanel would have found herself among peers in her new capacity as the publisher of Le Témoin. But she was the biggest celebrity of the group, and surely the only one underwriting a newspaper—and anonymously—to please a boyfriend.
Chanel increasingly embraced her lover’s worldview. “More than ever before, I wanted to create aristocratic fashion,” she wrote in August 1934, introducing her new collection. Through Iribe, she had acceded to a status surpassing even that of duchess or tsarina; Chanel had become the face of France. However much her cartoon doppelgänger suffered, Chanel must have enjoyed Iribe’s vision of her. She may even have appreciated the pain he inflicted on Coco-Marianne, seeing in it confirmation and cathartic reflection of her own many sorrows. For Iribe, Chanel made grand-scale sacrifices: She moved out of her home for this man, commissioned him to create print fabrics (which she rarely used in her work), and diamond jewelry (ditto), and subsidized his journal. For a brief time—quite uncharacteristically—she even ceded her business authority to him. It happened in the midst of a high-stakes argument with the Wertheimer family, her partners in Parfums Chanel, the most lucrative division of her empire.
Chanel owed her fortune to her perfume business, in which she held only a 10 percent interest, the rest belonging to Pierre and Paul Wertheimer, the founders of Bourjois cosmetics. But relations with the Wertheimers had always been vexed, since despite the tremendous wealth the company had brought her, Parfums Chanel had made far more money for the two Jewish brothers, who now held 90 percent of the business. In 1933, after Chanel’s attorneys subpoenaed all the Wertheimers’ financial records, the brothers responded by trying to freeze her out as president. Chanel mounted suit against them.
In the midst of these negotiations, on September 12, 1933, Coco took the peculiar step of granting power of attorney to Iribe, transferring control to him and having him preside over a board meeting of Parfums Chanel. Never before had Coco abdicated responsibility so blithely. Iribe had never run a business, knew nothing of corporate law, and had demonstrated no particular gift for business diplomacy. And as Chanel might have predicted, he got nowhere in the meeting. Making matters worse, Iribe refused to sign the minutes at the end of the meeting—a necessary formality—whereupon the majority shareholders, who had tolerated his presence merely as a courtesy to Chanel, voted him off the board. The Wertheimers went ahead with their plans to reorganize the company, and Coco herself was ousted as president in 1934, after further disputes involving the Wertheimers’ introduction—without Chanel’s approval—of a Chanel brand cleansing cream. This step intensified the acrimony among them, though her 10 percent stake in the company continued to fill her coffers handsomely.
Chanel was far too smart to think Iribe a worthy proxy for herself in a business deal, so why would she have risked her fortune in this way? The only explanation is that Chanel yearned to disarm Paul, to attenuate his insecurities by allowing him to dominate her. She may have enjoyed the fantasy—however fleeting—of being able to rely on a man, of being the kind of protected woman she’d never been.
In at least one major way, Paul had provided her with a womanly status she’d never enjoyed: He had proposed. At last, Coco would have the status of wife. At the same time, Iribe’s publishing venture assured her every week that she was France incarnate. While Boy Capel and Westminster had ultimately abandoned her to marry aristocrats, Iribe was different. He was prepared to marry Coco, not because he overlooked her commoner status but because he did not see it. For Iribe, Chanel was a kind of natural French aristocrat—a point he allowed Coco to make for herself on the sole occasion he permitted her a (discreet) byline in Le Témoin. On February 24, 1935, the regular column called Notre Mode (Our Fashion) was signed by its guest contributor’s initials “G.C.”—clearly Chanel—and devoted to Iribe’s favorite topic, “French luxury”:
I’ve always considered good manners, fine dining, and good humor in all social interactions to be the three essential elements of French luxury. These are more moral than superficial attributes and people who are very simple, very natural, and very refined acquire and keep them all their lives, without worrying about the state of their fortune, which has nothing to do with real elegance … thank God. For my part, and without any xenophobia, I believe that well brought up students have no need of foreign examples to know what is appropriate to wear to any social occasion they may attend.
The little essay summed up most of Chanel’s and Iribe’s philosophy.
As
the populist uprisings of the midthirties spilled regularly into the streets, Coco’s upper-class coterie began throwing ever more lavish formal, often masked, balls that transformed Paris town houses and Riviera villas into enchanted forests, African deserts, Mount Olympus, or the court at Versailles. Elaborate feasts were prepared, and guests vied with one another for the most original or historically accurate costumes. Among Paris’s elite, an ambiance of decadence reigned during these pre-war years, as if this group sensed imminent despair and privation. A distinctively “après moi le déluge” sentiment filled the air.
Chief among the festivities were the renowned masked balls organized by the Count and Countess Etienne de Beaumont, the very ones who had barred Chanel from their home back in 1920. Coco became a beloved regular, showing up bedecked in elaborate, beautifully made costumes of her own design, often captured by the society photographers. For the Masterpiece Ball, Coco became the androgynous, balletic fop of Jean-Antoine Watteau’s 1716 portrait L’Indifférent, with silk cap, tights, and tunic. For Daisy Fellowes’s Colonial Ball of August 1935, Chanel posed, with the thoughtless racism of her cohort, as a “humorous Negro sailor” (in blackface); for the Forest Ball given by André Durst in 1935, she dressed as a leafy tree (in greenface); and for the Waltz Ball of 1934, Coco became Queen Victoria (outshining even her companions Napoléon III and Emperor Franz Josef), in full nineteenth-century regalia: a black silk gown with a gigantic hoopskirt over layers of starched crinolines—the very sort of garment she had rendered obsolete long ago.