Mademoiselle Page 38
With Misia’s death, Chanel lost an important part of herself. Misia had been her constant companion, the keeper of all her secrets. Misia had witnessed and nurtured Chanel’s ascent in the world. Spatz’s departure in 1950 had essentially marked the end of Chanel’s romantic life with men. Now, with Misia’s death, not only was Chanel without a lover; she had lost her best friend.
Misia’s was not the only significant death among Chanel’s closest circle during this time. The years between 1946 and 1956 claimed the lives of a startling number of Chanel’s former lovers, friends, and associates. Vera Bate died in 1948, and Walter Schellenberg in 1952. Bendor, the Duke of Westminster, whom Chanel had hoped to marry and with whom she had always remained in close contact, died of a heart attack in 1953, at the age of seventy-four. Despite many attempts, Bendor had not produced a male heir. At the time of his death, he was married to his third wife, thirty-eight-year-old Anne Sullivan. Just one year later, in 1954, a traffic accident in Rio de Janeiro took the life of another major figure from Chanel’s past: Etienne Balsan, the man who had moved her out of a rented room and into a castle. He, too, had remained in touch with Coco, perhaps because of his possible connection to André Palasse. It was Etienne who had introduced Coco to Boy Capel, and the fact that the two men died in such similar fashion must have seemed to her a particularly cruel irony. Finally, in 1956, Coco’s softer, look-alike aunt, boon companion, and stalwart helpmeet of the early days, the lovely Adrienne Chanel de Nexon, died at seventy-four. Adrienne and Coco had been the only Chanel women of their generation to escape to a better life. When Adrienne died, so did Coco’s last link to the past. Adrienne had been the only other person who truly knew how shockingly far Coco had come. The loss was “devastating,” according to Gabrielle Palasse-Labrunie.
These years also ravaged the group of artists who had been attached to Cocteau and the Ballets Russes, all of whom Chanel knew well. Stage designer Christian Bérard, who had drawn fashion illustrations for Chanel, died in 1949, as did actor-producer Charles Dullin, who had starred in and produced Cocteau’s 1922 Antigone. Vaslav Nijinsky, his genius long dimmed by schizophrenia, died in a London clinic in 1950; and composer Arthur Honegger, who had scored Cocteau’s 1927 opera version of Antigone, passed away in 1955. The year 1954 saw the demise of writer Colette, with whom Coco had always had a respectful, if cantankerous, friendship. “I like Colette … but she was wrong to let herself get fat,” Coco told Paul Morand. “Two sausages would have been enough for her, two dozen, that’s just affectation,” she added, channeling Oscar Wilde. Nevertheless, when apprised of Colette’s decline, Chanel made a trip to the writer’s bedside to pay her last respects. The brightest lights of her generation were dimming at an alarming rate.
Little in Switzerland could compensate for the loss of Chanel’s community of artists. Her new Swiss social circle featured instead a variety of people who provided Coco with some kind of professional service. She spent a lot of time, for example, with her Swiss dentist, Dr. Felix Vallotton, and his wife. Asked by a reporter about her choice to live in Switzerland, Chanel proffered the improbable explanation “I’m here for the altitude and for my dentist. My dentist is the best in the world.” Other companions included a rheumatologist, Dr. Theo de Preux (Chanel suffered increasingly from arthritis, especially in her hands), an ophthalmologist named Professor Steig, and a number of attorneys who managed her affairs. Such friendships—the kind sustained with individuals who are also on the payroll—are often the last resort of rich or famous people who mistrust the intentions of new acquaintances.
Chanel lived comfortably and well in Switzerland but was, in a sense, as unmoored as she had been during the dark days in Aubazine. She drifted about in a country not her own, without benefit of work, love, or most of her old friends. She lived under a cloud of political opprobrium.
In response, Coco retreated into herself. She took long walks in the woods, her chauffeur following slowly behind in her car until she was ready to be driven back to town. She spent long mornings in bed, reading novels or fashion magazines, just as she had some fifty years earlier when she lived as one of Etienne Balsan’s stable of beauties. As during those years at Château de Royallieu, Coco endured a period of reclusive idleness. She had used the Royallieu years to divest herself of her peasant background, to draw a veil over her impoverished childhood, and to learn the ropes of upper-class life. Then, once she’d moved on, Coco had similarly drawn a veil over that period, willing out of existence her years as a rich man’s courtesan. Now, all these decades later, Chanel once more took a time-out from the world, seeking to expunge yet another chapter from the book of her life: her affiliation with the Nazis.
For most women in their sixties, especially one tainted by suspicions of treason, such a period of inactivity would qualify not as a hiatus, but as permanent retirement. Yet as Chanel would later say, “Never was I in retirement in my heart.” She had long experience in reinventing herself, and idleness had never suited her. Age didn’t suit her, either, and so, somehow, she held it at bay, even as most others of her generation faded away.
When Michel Déon—a young journalist at the time—visited Chanel in Switzerland, he had plans of writing her biography. As was her wont, Coco would scotch these plans. But years later, in his memoirs, Déon beautifully evoked the woman he’d encountered in Switzerland, a stillvital Coco incongruously trapped among the decrepit, slightly louche crowd whiling away the time on Lake Geneva:
The Beau Rivage was an antediluvian hideout inhabited by troglodytes.… Mlle Chanel stood out for her energy and health. Her appearance at lunch, after her long preparations, was a theatrical entrance. If she had been forgotten by the crowd, her image, her allure, revived the memories of the Beau Rivage clientele: thirty years ago these dowagers in black lace, jowls held up with stiff velvet ribbons, had been dressed by her, skirts at the knee, and those old gentlemen, hobbling on their ebony canes, had once opened charge accounts for their girlfriends at Chanel.… And so when she crossed the lobby … a murmur accompanied her. A fairy was passing, and they relived their youths, from Deauville circa 1910 to the last years between the wars.
As Déon makes clear, Chanel retained her iconic power in Switzerland. She had dropped off the world’s radar screen, but in her limited new context, she still stage-managed her persona. And despite the grim collection of matrons around her, she found at least one vital new friend with whom she could laugh and let loose a little: the Baroness Margarita Nametalla van Zuylen, the Egyptian-born wife of the Belgian diplomat Baron Egmont van Zuylen.
Chanel with Maggie van Zuylen and Serge Lifar, mid-1950s (illustration credit 12.2)
The baroness, or Maggie, as she was known, was a big, squarish, commanding woman who enjoyed a good time. Friends remember hearing Maggie and Coco singing old cabaret songs together. According to a source close to the Van Zuylen family, the baroness was an “obsessive card player”—much like many other dowagers inhabiting Swiss hotels at that time. Coco later disparaged the idle ladies of Switzerland and their card games, but she and Maggie had something more important uniting them: They had both taken a quantum leap from their social origins.
Although Van Zuylen was a titled noblewoman when Chanel met her, the baroness came from a modest background. Born to Syrian parents in Alexandria, she had received little education and spoke French with a heavy Egyptian accent, rolling her Rs conspicuously. Some say that before she married the baron, she had made a living selling violets—a common flower girl. According to a friend of the family, Maggie seemed to have read only one book in her entire life—a popular biography of Cleopatra. Her interest in that ancient queen makes sense, for like Coco (and Cleo), Maggie possessed an instinctive allure that drew rich and powerful men to her. In this domain, she had even surpassed Coco, achieving the one goal that had always eluded Chanel: marrying an aristocrat. It hadn’t been easy. Maggie’s marriage to Egmont had so enraged the baron’s father that he disinherited his son. For three years the you
ng couple cobbled together a livelihood, relying partly on Maggie’s poker winnings to sustain themselves. Eventually, the elder Baron Van Zuylen relented—he, too, had fallen prey to Maggie’s charm.
Coco would have felt very comfortable with Maggie van Zuylen—a woman described as “unself-conscious, unconventional, and a breath of fresh air in a pretty stodgy environment.” Their closeness, moreover, seems to have included erotic intimacy as well. Chanel and those close to her always denied rumors of her lesbianism. “Can you imagine? An old garlic clove like me?” Coco exclaimed when asked about women lovers. (Her word choice may have been telling though, since “garlic clove” was actually Belle Epoque French slang for “lesbian.” Was this a private joke? An unconscious slip?) Gabrielle Palasse-Labrunie and Lilou Marquand similarly refuse to acknowledge Coco’s likely bisexuality, Marquand dismissing the whole issue as “ridiculous.” Renowned fashion photographer Willy Rizzo claimed never to have believed the “lesbian stories.” And the Van Zuylen family never acknowledged the nature of Maggie’s friendship with Coco.
Still, evidence points to the two women having slept together on many occasions. In his Journal inutile, Paul Morand wrote of Maggie and Coco “shar[ing] their private life” in Switzerland. “They didn’t hide when I found them in bed together,” he recalled. Whatever the exact details of their intimacy, the two women were deeply attached to each other. For most of the last years of her life, Coco wore nearly every day a gift that Maggie had given her: a gold Egyptian medallion on a very long chain, engraved in Arabic with the “Verse of the Throne,” from the Koran. Sometimes, Coco would tuck the medallion into her jacket pocket, allowing only the chain of the necklace to show—as if to make a little secret of the pendant’s poetry, held close to her body and hidden away.
Maggie was likely not Chanel’s only female lover. As a young woman, Coco may have been tempted to experimentation while living among the demimondaines of Royallieu, women such as Emilienne d’Alençon and Liane de Pougy. At times, Misia Sert, too, may have been her lover. And with the advance of age, intimacy with women came to replace the many love affairs with men that had so defined Chanel’s private world.
Not surprisingly, Chanel’s earliest foray back into business took the form of an angry swipe at the Wertheimer family. New developments in their relationship left her enraged once more. Coco was well aware that, during the war, the Wertheimers had dramatically increased their fortune by selling Chanel perfumes in American PX stores around the globe. After the war, the Wertheimers returned to Paris, where they took back the shares of their company they had transferred to Félix Amiot. Amiot parted with the stock gladly, for, in exchange, the Wertheimers had arranged to shield him from prosecution by the French government for having sold his warplanes to the Germans.
Pierre Wertheimer visited Chanel in Switzerland and informed her of her share of the wartime perfume royalties. Since the Wertheimers had sold their shares of the original company, Parfums Chanel, and formed a new company, Chanel, Inc., Coco would receive only $15,000—a derisory fraction of what she knew to be millions of dollars. Even while siphoning off the lion’s share of the profits, moreover, the Wertheimers continued to capitalize heavily on the Chanel brand. In advertisements and even their Christmas cards, they had been linking the Chanel and Les Parfumeries Bourjois company logos, exploiting her famous name without her permission. Coco planned her revenge.
Her first salvo came in 1946. Working with a small Swiss perfumer (whom she never identified), Coco invented a new perfume. Christening it “Mademoiselle Chanel,” she began stocking it for sale in her rue Cambon boutique, the one venue she had kept open through the war. The Wertheimers reacted swiftly. Invoking their legal ownership of all Chanel perfume formulas, they had “Mademoiselle Chanel” perfume declared a counterfeit, and procured a court order to have all bottles seized from the shelves. Chanel had been angling for a fight, and she got one. When the court deferred ruling for two months, Chanel consulted her attorney René de Chambrun to help her devise a response.
Chambrun advised Coco to settle out of court peacefully and maintain her low profile—for her sake, as well as his own. As the son-in-law and former staunch defender of Pierre Laval—who was executed for treason—Chambrun was not inclined to mount a public legal battle. Chanel did not care. She countersued the Wertheimers for back royalties and damages, and for producing “inferior products” under her label. But her plan did not stop there. With Chambrun’s guidance, she found a loophole to exploit in her contract with Chanel, Inc.
Although enjoined from selling perfumes independently of her agreement with the Wertheimers, Chanel remained legally free to create her own perfumes and merely give them away to her friends. From Switzerland, she began work on a new series of beautiful fragrances, all of which smelled strikingly like Chanel’s top-selling perfumes—even better, according to some. They all bore the same names as Chanel’s top perfumes, with one small change: the addition of the word “Mademoiselle” in each. Her new product line consisted of Mademoiselle Chanel No. 5, Mademoiselle Cuir de Russie, and Mademoiselle Bois des Isles. Chanel carefully observed the letter of the law. All the formulas differed slightly from those of the original perfumes; all bottles and labels had been redesigned.
It remained only to give away these lovely new scents to a few “friends”: American industrialist Bernard Gimbel, owner of Gimbel’s department store and Saks Fifth Avenue; Stanley Marcus, owner of Neiman Marcus; and, for good measure, Samuel Goldwyn, Hollywood mogul. It was a brilliant move. The American perfume market had proved a gold mine for the Wertheimers during their years in New York. Now Coco was threatening their dominance in the United States by launching (or threatening to launch) a line of rival products—all bearing the magical “Chanel” name that still carried so much resonance for retailers. Coco herself might not have had the right to sell these perfumes directly, but nothing could stop Mr. Gimbel and Mr. Marcus from buying the formulas and then selling the new perfumes in their big American stores, bypassing the Wertheimers completely.
Coco did not have to wait long to see the results of her gambit. The American department store moguls had barely unwrapped the enchanting new perfumes when Pierre Wertheimer got wind of it and rushed up to Lausanne, ready to settle out of court. After long negotiations in Switzerland between the Wertheimers and Chanel’s lawyers, Coco obtained a new and far more lucrative agreement. She was granted the right to produce and sell her own perfumes, so long as she never used the number “5” in their labeling; she would receive a onetime settlement of back royalties totaling $326,000 (the equivalent of approximately $3.2 million in 2013); and, most crucially, beginning in May 1947 (the year Paul Wertheimer died), Pierre agreed to pay Coco royalties of 2 percent annually on worldwide perfume sales, a figure worth at least $1 million a year (or close to $10 million in 2013). Toasting the deal with Chambrun, Chanel declared, “Now, I am rich.”
Pierre Wertheimer had good reasons for yielding to Coco. However tumultuous and even vicious their relationship might seem from the outside, they remained curiously bound together, their fates inextricably linked. The last thing Pierre needed was the bad publicity of a drawn-out legal battle with Mademoiselle Chanel, the woman whose name guaranteed his family fortune. A lawsuit, furthermore, would only remind the public of the all-too-recent scandal surrounding Chanel’s wartime activities. Pierre recognized that nothing good could come of fighting Coco. But more than logical business reasons motivated Pierre. Underneath it all, he maintained a powerful and abiding admiration—a kind of grudging love—for Chanel and her talents. The two were locked in a highly charged, passionate agon distinguished by bitter feuds followed by reconciliation and renewed collaboration—a pattern that lent weight to the persistent rumors of a long-ago love affair between them.
“Mademoiselle Chanel and Pierre Wertheimer were a mythic couple,” observed Marie-Louise de Clermont-Tonnerre, director of international public relations for the Maison Chanel. In the years directly following t
he war, the ongoing saga of the Chanel-Wertheimer partnership reached mythic levels of intrigue: The Jewish billionaires who’d escaped from the Nazis with help from a profiteer who trafficked with Nazis now acceded to the financial demands of the woman who’d tried to seize their business using Nazi policies.
Although she’d won the right to manufacture her own line of perfumes in Switzerland, Chanel never exercised it. Those rival scents she’d created and sent to America had served their main purpose as a negotiating lever with the Wertheimers. Once she’d hammered out a new agreement with them, Coco seemed to put aside thoughts of returning to an active role in the perfume business. Fashion, however, was another matter. Coco had never stopped caring about design, and from her perch in Switzerland, she watched the Paris couture with increasing frustration.
Fashion, in her eyes, had taken a dramatically wrong turn since the Liberation. Before the war, a number of significant women designers had shared the limelight with the men. Names such as Madeleine Vionnet, Jeanne Lanvin, and Elsa Schiaparelli had appeared regularly alongside Chanel in the fashion press. By the late 1940s, though, most of the women had faded away, ceding the stage to new, male designers such as Jacques Fath, Pierre Balmain, and, most importantly, Christian Dior—who opened his own studio after working for designer Lucien Lelong. The names were new but the clothes emerging from their ateliers had a distinctively retro feel, featuring oversize skirts stiffened with crinolines, corsets, hemlines nearly to the floor, and big hats. The clothes were sculptural and beautiful but often impractical and cumbersome to wear. Paris couture had done an abrupt about-face, replacing the sleek, emancipatory aesthetic of modernism with an exaggeratedly hourglass silhouette.
The vision of womanhood appearing on runways now conjured an earlier, more traditional femininity, “suggesting something like a Gibson girl or whatever … grandmother should have worn,” as one journalist wrote. French fashion had fallen into a nostalgic Belle Epoque dream, as if trying to turn the clock back to those last innocent years before anyone had ever imagined a world war. Leading this march backward in time was Christian Dior, a man whose mild manner and bland appearance contrasted ironically with the over-the-top glamour of his designs.