Mademoiselle Page 32
In 1920, Fenosa was drafted into the army. A committed pacifist, the twenty-one-year-old Apel-les could not join the military he despised. Risking imprisonment, he decided to make a run for it. Along with his like-minded brother, Oscar, he fled across the border, into the French Pyrenees town of Bourg-Madame. Within hours, the French police arrested them, but not before the brothers had managed to meet and befriend two young local girls who turned out to have some influence. The girls intervened with the town’s mayor, who arranged for the Fenosa brothers’ release. Instead of deportation or a French prison sentence, Oscar and Apel-les received their liberty. They had successfully deserted the Spanish Army.
Oscar settled in Toulouse, but Apel-les traveled on to Paris, arriving in Montmartre on New Year’s Day 1921 with eighty borrowed francs in his pocket. Soon enough, through friends, he wrangled an introduction to the man he would come to regard as an artistic father, Pablo Picasso. Quickly recognizing the younger man’s talent, Picasso took Apel-les under his wing. He let Fenosa work beside him in his studio; he critiqued his sculptures; he even arranged his first Paris exhibition. “Without him I would have died having accomplished nothing,” said Fenosa of Picasso. “He gave birth to me.”
Fenosa blossomed in Paris, joining Picasso’s circle and becoming especially close to Jean Cocteau. He worked prodigiously and managed to support himself—barely—by selling his busts and figurines of terra-cotta, bronze, and clay. His subjects tended to be minimalist female nudes with gracefully curved, elongated limbs. In their visual sleekness, Fenosa’s sculptures conjure the early Constantin Brancusi, but their small size and delicate faces—framed often by long curls—suggest medieval statuettes. Fenosa was unconcerned with labeling his style. “All arts were modern in their time,” he told an interviewer in 1968. “One mustn’t worry about that.”
Paris had become home, but in 1929, when a Barcelona gallery arranged an exhibition of his work, Fenosa dared to return to Spain. As a deserter, he had to reenter his home country on foot, surreptitiously, “hopping over the border like a rabbit,” as he put it. But leaving the country the same way was impossible. Even a daredevil like Fenosa hesitated to tempt fate so brazenly. He considered his options. Spain seemed ready to turn a blind eye toward his transgressions, and his Paris bona fides brought him cachet in Barcelona. Although he had planned to be there for a week, Apel-les stayed in Spain for ten years.
Fenosa did not leave Barcelona again until May 1939, when he joined the nearly five hundred thousand other Spaniards fleeing the horrors of Franco’s regime. Once more, Apel-les crossed the French border on foot, without proper papers. Once more he was arrested, and threatened with imprisonment or deportation. As always, Fenosa maintained his charm and sangfroid. While being held overnight by the border patrol, he talked his way into a card party with the French border policemen. They stayed up all night playing a raucous game of belote. When morning came, the guards felt so fond of their new prisoner-friend that they lent him money from their own pockets, doctored his visa, and waved him safely into France. The magic (or manipulation) had worked again. Fenosa had a genius for turning new acquaintances into devoted, even parental, protectors.
Back in France, that particular brand of genius continued to serve Apel-les well. Picasso gave him money, cooked him paella, bought his sculptures, and arranged a free apartment for him in Versailles, across the street from the Château—and just forty-five minutes by train from Paris. Boasting vast bay windows overlooking the famous Bassin de Neptune, the reflecting pool built for Louis XIV, the apartment was perfect for sculpting. Here, through the summer of 1939, Fenosa worked well and peacefully—all the more so since Jean Cocteau had called in a favor with the Foreign Office to obtain a legal visa for Apel-les.
If Cocteau played the role of guardian angel so well, perhaps it was because he had long enjoyed the attentions of one himself: his own patroness, Coco Chanel. Throughout their decades of friendship, Cocteau had turned to Chanel repeatedly whenever he found himself in need emotionally, medically, or financially. He’d often prevailed upon her to help his various friends and lovers as well. It seemed the most natural thing in the world to bring Fenosa to the Ritz, to meet the undisputed queen of his social circle.
Jean Cocteau with his portrait bust by Fenosa (illustration credit 11.2)
Coco was approaching her fifty-sixth birthday that summer and had weathered some rough years personally and professionally. Apel-les was not yet forty and embarking on a hopeful new phase of life. But the attraction between them was instant. Chanel was among those women who remain truly gorgeous into middle age, her carriage upright and regal, her gait supple, her famous figure as svelte as a girl’s. She looked, in fact, not unlike the slim, elongated female figures Fenosa sculpted. And with her black hair and eyes, Coco had always had a Spanish air about her. She also had a profound and intuitive grasp of Fenosa’s art form, since her own approach to fashion had always been deeply sculptural—tactile and three-dimensional—involving hours draping and pinning fabric on living models, rarely sketching or drawing her designs in advance. And although she had long harbored a crush on Picasso (“She was in love with Picasso,” Fenosa told Josep Miquel Garcia, director of the Apel-les Fenosa Foundation and a friend of Fenosa’s later years), nothing had ever happened between them—perhaps because they were too alike, both commanding and controlling presences, each quick to anger, each adept at seduction. “He fascinated me.… He frightened me,” Coco had said of Picasso. Apel-les offered a more accessible Catalan conquest. She swept him into her orbit immediately.
By all accounts Apel-les and Coco were genuinely attached for a time. Fenosa admired Chanel and appreciated her savvy and generosity. “She was very intelligent, and she did a great deal for me.… She never did anything by chance.” Chanel, charmed by Fenosa’s talent and winning vulnerability, showered him with expensive gifts—a solid gold penknife, gold cuff links set with topazes, a set of silver hairbrushes.
Pencil sketch of Chanel by Fenosa (illustration credit 11.3)
Chanel and Fenosa had only been involved a few weeks when, on September 3, 1939, in response to Hitler’s invasion of Poland, France and Great Britain declared war, beginning the strange period known to the British as the “phony war,” and to the French as the drôle de guerre—the nine months of relative calm before the Allies took any major military action against the Third Reich. The lack of combat reassured no one, though, and the wariness of the preceding years in Paris escalated dramatically. In a frenzy to root out Communists, the French police conducted raids on suspected political organizations, seizing documents, books, even furniture. Newspapers and periodicals supporting Communism were abolished, and surveillance of suspected Communist sympathizers led to thousands of arrests and imprisonments.
Uneasy now in Versailles, Apel-les longed to be closer to his friends. He moved into his own room at the Ritz, courtesy of Coco.
Fenosa was not alone among Chanel’s men living in the fabled hotel. Pierre Reverdy was there as well. Torn as ever between the two poles of his personality—ascetic Catholic mystic and worldly poet—Reverdy had temporarily swapped his monastery retreat for city life again (leaving his wife behind in Solesmes), and was living at the Ritz, on Chanel’s tab. As usual, Coco continued to underwrite expenses for a man who routinely accused her—as had Iribe—of having too much money and leading an immorally lavish life. Now Pierre could argue with her from the comfort of a neighboring suite as they continued their platonic but intense friendship at the Ritz.
If Fenosa was perturbed by Reverdy’s presence, he never said so. Both men were close with Cocteau and Picasso, and had likely met many times before. Chanel had no problem juggling the attentions of several men, particularly when she held the financial reins.
Outside the cocoon of the Ritz, Paris was grappling with the certainty of another European war. Inside the hotel, amid her Coromandel screens, thick Persian carpets, and oversize baroque gilt mirrors, Coco continued to hold court, perched upo
n the cushions of her impossibly soft quiltedsuede sofa—designed in her signature beige. “I take refuge in beige, because it’s natural,” she told Claude Delay.
For the time being, Reverdy was able to tolerate the cognitive dissonance of being a leftist and devout Catholic ensconced among the glitterati as a Chanel “pensioner.” Fenosa proved less flexible in his philosophies. Although Apel-les had long relied upon wealthy friends, he could not bear life at the Ritz circa 1939. “It bothered me to be at the Ritz.… It was opulence to a degree that made me crazy!… It was impossible. I had not been born to lead such a life.” He shared his discomfort with Cocteau, and the two came up with a quick solution: Why not exchange apartments? Cocteau and Jean Marais occupied a small but lovely flat just west of Vendôme, in the Place de la Madeleine. Fenosa jumped at the chance and traded living quarters with the two men. Cocteau could now live even closer to his buddies Coco and Reverdy, and Fenosa could take some distance from the hothouse atmosphere of the Ritz.
But relocating to the Place de la Madeleine did little to lighten Fenosa’s malaise and deepening guilt. His new apartment was mere steps from the Ritz, just down the street from Fauchon—Paris’s most exclusive purveyors of truffles and foie gras—and within sight of the Eglise de la Madeleine, the splendid neoclassical temple built to honor Napoléon’s army. He was earning good money now, sculpting busts of prominent friends, and he had a dazzling and famous lover. But he could not take pleasure in any of it. “He was desperate,” according to Josep Miquel Garcia. “One day, he found himself at the Place de la Concorde, at the foot of the Obelisk, weeping; the disparity between the horrors of war which he had lived [in Spain] and this triumphant return to Paris was just too great.”
Perhaps aggravated by his depression and the bitter winter of 1940—the coldest on record in France since 1893—Fenosa’s faltering health weakened further. A bout of double mastoiditis brought high fever, extreme pain, and chills. Fenosa took to his bed, where he was attended by Chanel’s personal physician. When he was hospitalized for several days, Chanel sent a handwritten note on Ritz stationery, inquiring about his health. It is signed “tenderly, Coco.”
Handwritten note from Chanel to Fenosa (illustration credit 11.4)
That tenderness was real, but the relationship foundered. Fenosa found too much about Chanel’s world repellent. Unlike most of her friends, he had an inner compass pointed always toward progressive causes, republicanism, and empathy. While clearly not averse to borrowed luxury, Apel-les could not tolerate the disjunction between the atmosphere on Place Vendôme and the war he could feel but not yet see. Life with Coco felt excessive. “Fifty-two Coromandel screens!” he exclaimed to Garcia. “Each one worth a million [francs]…. She covered me with gifts. She gave me for example an enormous gold bracelet. But I hid it.… It disgusted me to have a gold bracelet, I gave it back to her.”
Beyond her personal excesses, Coco’s response to the war would also have repelled Fenosa. Despite her much-touted patriotism, and her recent tricolore fashion palette, only three weeks after war was declared, she fired all 2,500 of her employees without warning and closed all her workshops. She also abruptly ceased the monthly stipends she had been sending her brothers, Lucien and Alphonse. To Lucien, she wrote:
I am very sorry to have to tell you this sad news. But with the Maison now closed, I find myself nearly in poverty. You can no longer count on anything from me as long as circumstances remain this way.
Taking her at her word, Lucien, now fifty-one and a retired peddler, sent a letter back to the Ritz (where he’d never been allowed entrée into Gabrielle’s apartment), offering to share his own meager savings with his sister—this despite having retired years earlier only to please her. Alphonse, who ran a café-tabac, received a similar letter from Coco, but reacted differently: “My Gaby, So now you’re flat broke. It was bound to happen.”
Chanel responded to neither of them and would never see her brothers again. Lucien died in 1941, and Alphonse in 1953. From September 1939 onward, “Gaby” also severed all contact with her many nieces and nephews, remaining in touch only with André Palasse and her aunt Adrienne, the baroness. Chanel had always kept an aloof distance from the more hardscrabble branch of her family, but now she had decided, as Edmonde Charles-Roux put it, “to play dead.”
Chanel played dead with her terminated employees as well. Shocked to be so swiftly deprived of their livelihoods just as husbands and fathers left for war, they tried to appeal her decision with the Confédération générale du travail, the French labor bureau. Negotiators were sent to reason with Chanel, imploring her to consider not only her employees but also her clientele, and the “prestige of Paris” with which she was so tightly allied. They could not move her. Like the Russian army retreating from Napoléon, Coco was practicing a “scorched-earth” policy, leaving nothing behind. Or almost nothing. Virtually empty, the Cambon boutique kept one counter open for selling perfume—the main source of Chanel’s fortune, which she kept largely in Swiss bank accounts.
Chanel never offered a single coherent explanation for her decision to close her business. She told Pierre Galante and Claude Delay that she had simply been responding to the times. “I had the feeling that we had reached the end of an era. And that no one would ever make dresses again.” She told Marcel Haedrich the implausible story that she’d had no choice, since her entire staff of thousands had all disappeared to bid farewell to family members being shipped off to war. “In a few hours the place was empty.” Interviewed jointly with her close friend Serge Lifar, she maintained that she had intended her actions as a patriotic protest against the Germans—who had not yet occupied Paris—comparing herself favorably to other couturiers who kept their businesses open: “My dear, the only true résistante, was me!” Coco declared to Lifar (who after the war hid out in her closet at the Ritz, trying to evade his arrest for treason). Serge agreed emphatically.
Other possible explanations circulated: Perhaps Coco sought revenge against the employees who had enraged her three years earlier by striking. Perhaps the competition with Elsa Schiaparelli (now also living at the Ritz) got the better of her. The sheer number of contradictory hypotheses suggests that none was correct. Coco had never been idle a day in her life; early retirement did not seem a plausible choice for her. Another sort of employment may have awaited, however.
It is likely that Fenosa was deeply dismayed by Chanel’s blithe dismissal of so many workers. Some of her other reactions left him cold as well. Coco could seem disdainful and snobbish. “I never really lived up to [her] expectations. What one must do, what one mustn’t do.” He recalled her reaction to a bottle of cologne he’d once bought. “She asked me to bring it to her and, right in front of me, she poured the entire bottle down the drain. The entire bottle.”
Even more disturbing to him was what Fenosa called Chanel’s serious drug habit. For five years, since the death of Paul Iribe, Coco had been injecting herself every night with Sedol, the morphine-based sleep medication. To the outside world she seemed unchanged, as productive and creative as ever. No record seems to exist of anyone else accusing Coco of outright drug abuse at this stage of her life. Aware of the Sedol habit, Claude Delay interpreted it as an antidote to loneliness, “the ferocious partner of her solitude.”
According to Fenosa, though, Chanel’s employees knew of her problem and hoped he might help her overcome it. “The workers were all very glad to see me with her, because she was doing drugs and that, I would not tolerate.” Recreational drug use was not uncommon among Chanel’s set. Misia, by this time, had already descended into her ruinous dependence on morphine, and recently suffered a heart attack and a severe retinal hemorrhage. And despite multiple stints in rehab (which Coco always paid for) Cocteau could not shake his love of opium, which he thought of in the most lyrical terms: “We all carry within us something folded up like those Japanese flowers made of wood that unfold in water. Opium plays the same role as the water. None of us carries the same kind of
flower.” More than once, Fenosa accompanied Cocteau to one of his opium dens. “I never [tried it], but … it was tempting,” he admitted. Apel-les declined many kinds of pleasures offered to him by Cocteau, who addressed notes to Fenosa “my dear little squirrel.”
No evidence suggests that Chanel smoked opium, and she did not partake of Cocteau’s social drug world. As with most troubling aspects of her life, her drug use was kept entirely private; she injected herself at home. But Fenosa’s account suggests that Coco’s use exceeded any prescribed dose or medicinal purpose: “It was morphine, it was too much, you see. I was spent.” Certainly, at whatever dosage, given the nature of the drug and the continued use over years, Coco must have been physically addicted. And as her lover, Fenosa would have seen the ill effects close up. He was adamant about the toll it took: “It was the drugs that separated us. When you love someone who takes drugs, either you start doing drugs yourself or the other one must stop.” She did not stop, and Fenosa left, although the two remained on good terms.
Years later, when a fifty-year-old Fenosa finally decided to marry, he brought his beautiful twenty-year-old fiancée, Nicole, to rue Cambon. Chanel offered to design the young woman’s wedding dress—which consisted of an eighteenth-century-style riding coat, with a fitted waist and flared panels. “She was brilliant, very brilliant,” recalled Nicole Fenosa. Chanel had always delighted in taking the wives of her lovers or ex-lovers under her fashion wing. She did this out of generosity, to be sure, but dressing these women was also her way of leaving her mark upon them. Outfitting Nicole Fenosa on her wedding day allowed Chanel to be present at the altar—sartorially, at least—as yet another one of her lovers married someone else—in this case a girl easily young enough to be her granddaughter (Coco was sixty-seven by the time of Fenosa’s nuptials, nearly half a century older than Nicole, the bride).