Mademoiselle Page 42

  “I wore Chanel every single day. Everyone [at Cambon] wore Chanel. It was not possible to work at Chanel wearing anything other than Chanel.… If I have succeeded, it’s because of her. Everything I know I learned from that woman,” she says, adding, “She was a true Pygmalion.” After Chanel’s death, Marquand ran a boutique for a time selling her own knitwear copies of Chanel suits in the trademark neutral tones of beige and navy. Later, she became a highly accomplished textile and metal artist and, now in her eighties, continues to produce beautiful woven screens and wall hangings whose shimmering patterns of blended colors call to mind the nuanced tonal play of Chanel tweeds.

  Chanel imposed her personality as strongly as she imposed her aesthetic. Her staff understood that they were to submit entirely to Coco’s authority and caprices. With little or no personal life to return to after work, Chanel tended to vent her frustration and loneliness on those who worked for her. Employees quickly learned what was required of them in this luxurious yet severe environment.

  While much of the staff reported to work at about eight thirty in the morning, Coco had never been an early riser and tended to show up hours later. When she did arrive, usually around one p.m., she was attended by a degree of fanfare befitting a five-star general or royal monarch. The moment Coco left her apartment across the street at the Ritz, hotel staff members would immediately telephone the operator at rue Cambon to alert her. A buzzer would sound throughout the studio to spread the word: Mademoiselle was on her way. Someone downstairs would spray a mist of Chanel No. 5 near the entrance, so that Coco could walk through a cloud of her own signature scent. “She was the first to have a perfumed space … a divine scent,” recalled actress Jeanne Moreau. “When she entered the studio, everyone stood up,” recalled photographer Willy Rizzo, “like children at school.” Then, the staff would form a line, hands at their sides, “as in the army,” employee Marie-Hélène Marouzé put it.

  Once upstairs, Coco would loop over her head the ribbon necklace from which hung her indispensable scissors, indicating the start of serious work. From that point on, she addressed herself ferociously to creation, rarely even sitting down, although sometimes lying flat on the floor to check hemlines. She continued to design entirely without patterns and without wooden dress mannequins, and so spent long hours draping and pinning fabrics on live bodies—the models’ bodies.

  Although decades older than everyone around her, Chanel never tired. She could remain standing for nine hours at a time, without pausing for a meal or a glass of water—without even a bathroom break, apparently. She inflicted this schedule on others, holding them hostage to her energy and, in truth, her loneliness. Fueled by adrenaline and cigarettes, Coco kept her models standing while she fitted clothes on them for hours on end, rarely addressing the girls directly. The possibility that someone might need a respite from standing perfectly mute and motionless never seemed to concern Chanel.

  By turns affectionate and callously manipulative, Coco kept her staff in a state of watchful anxiety. She played staff members off one another, “taking one person’s ideas and giving them to another … playing on our nerves and creating competition,” Manon Ligeour explained. She also tended to play favorites with her models, singling one out at a time for special treatment—generously lending her dresses or jewels, for example—and then abruptly changing course, freezing out her object of affection in favor of a new girl.

  Yvonne Dudel offered a thoughtful interpretation: “She was so changeable, very difficult. She would … give … great privileges then take them away.… Was it perhaps meant to show people that they should never think themselves above her?”

  Dudel may be right; Chanel certainly asserted an imperious dominance. But with such wounding, mercurial behavior Coco also reproduced—wittingly or not—the circumstances she’d endured in her own life, in which loving attachments nearly always came to an abrupt and painful end, either through abandonment or death.

  Chanel works with model Paule Rizzo, 1959 (illustration credit 12.6)

  That lifetime of loss weighed heavily upon Chanel in these years, but her hardened exterior permitted little outlet for emotion. When Jean Cocteau, a friend she had known for nearly fifty years, died in 1963, she claimed to be unmoved by his death. “Jean, a poet? You make me laugh,” she reportedly declared after Cocteau’s funeral. Coco’s misery expressed itself obliquely. As her intimate connections fell away, she increasingly filled her time with work and—especially—with talk, holding friends and colleagues hostage to manic, torrential streams of one-way conversation from which no one could escape. Journalist Rosamond Bernier found Coco highly frustrating to interview: “I must say, it wasn’t a real conversation.… She talked without stopping!”

  “Chanel rattled on, her words … like piercing machine gun bullets,” wrote John Fairchild, former editor of Women’s Wear Daily. “She would keep people standing talking for up to two hours,” recalled Willy Rizzo.

  Chanel used conversation to reel in her prey and hold it immobilized—in an attempt to forestall the crushing loneliness that overtook her the moment she stopped working. Above all, she dreaded weekends and holidays. “That word, ‘vacation,’ makes me sweat,” she told Claude Delay. Her staff was keenly aware of Coco’s fears: “[She] anguished at the idea of going home.” said Gisèle Franchomme. At the end of even the longest workday, she had a habit of installing herself on the top step of her spiral staircase, subjecting any model trying to leave with an interminable monologue.

  “She was exhausting,” admits Lilou Marquand. “I would come home exhausted—she talked so much.”

  Sometimes, Coco would try to sweeten the captivity and offer her employees hospitality, inviting them into her rue Cambon apartment. There, Chanel called upon her great talents as a hostess, pouring the finest champagne and wines, still chattering nonstop. However grand the setting and refreshments, though, Coco’s guests chafed under her regime of impromptu soirees. To them, these were lost evenings—time stolen from their family and friends. Dates had to be broken, boyfriends placated. But no one could refuse Coco’s invitation, and although everyone but Chanel would have to be back at the studio by eight thirty the next morning, no one dared leave early.

  Even those not in Coco’s employ could wind up strong-armed into keeping her company. In these cases, Chanel’s weapon of choice was guilt. In his memoir, Michel Déon recounts one Christmas Eve when Chanel invited him to dinner at the last minute, clearly afraid of spending the night alone. Christmas had brought her sorrow ever since Boy’s death during that holiday season of 1919. Somehow, even though he had plans, Déon felt compelled to run over to the Ritz where he spent hours at dinner with Coco, drinking champagne. “I kept her company.… Left to herself she might have cried,” he recalled. The girlfriend with whom Déon had planned to celebrate Christmas was left alone at a party, wondering why she had been stood up. Coco had not been unaware of the couple’s plans; she had, in fact, given the young woman a Chanel dress to wear for her night out with Déon. “Had she forgotten the dress she’d lent, or did she remember it and want to have some fun with me?” Déon wonders in his account. Even in her old age, Coco could not resist inserting herself between members of a couple, dressing the woman and “borrowing” the man.

  Chanel holding court in her studio with models and staff, 1959 (illustration credit 12.7)

  Many of Chanel’s guests noted the extent to which even her décor contributed to their sense of imprisonment: “The screens enclosed the space,” recounts one former model. “When you sat on the couch, it felt like a cave.… It was dark at all hours.” Even today, a visitor to Chanel’s rue Cambon apartment can find the space disorienting. Coco used her Coromandel screens as paneling, covering every square inch of the walls (even cutting holes into the valuable antique screens to accommodate light switches), including all doors. This made it next to impossible for visitors seeking an escape to find their way gracefully out of any room.

  Implicit within all the talkin
g were Chanel’s rules about what she would not discuss. Her staff and even clients knew that Coco would brook no conversation about family life. Although many of the women around her were married and had children (even a number of the models, which was unusual for the profession), Chanel would tolerate no reference to these outside relationships. She preferred to preserve the fiction that everyone’s life resembled hers—that those around her were as solitary as she.

  Lilou Marquand felt that her marriage had deeply unsettled Chanel and discovered that Coco had begun spreading false and injurious rumors about her husband. Chanel also made it clear that no one could speak of personal pain or trauma. “We left our concerns outside, our sorrows, our personal losses. She would not tolerate that!”

  What, then, did Chanel talk about? Often, her low opinion of others. Betty Catroux is one of many who remember Chanel’s bitter view of the world. “She taught me to hate people and to trust no one,” Catroux says. “Everyone except her was at fault,” wrote Cecil Beaton. “When she talked about other people, it was always to speak ill of them,” says Gisèle Franchomme.

  Coco reserved some of her sharpest words for her fellow designers—except Cristóbal Balenciaga, whom she called “a great talent.” As time passed, the free-spirited styles of the 1960s particularly enraged Chanel. She abhorred the miniskirt and any fashion she deemed immodest. Although she’d based her career on a model of independent, sexually liberated womanhood, Coco distinguished sharply between freedom and vulgarity in fashion. “They’re showing the navel now,” she complained. “That is not a woman’s best feature. Pants below the navel with a blouse above it. It’s so precious, the navel, that we have to put it in a shop window? Soon women will be showing their ass.” She didn’t mind Yves Saint Laurent too much, though, especially when he dropped his hemlines and created a simple, geometric black dress of wool and silk. “Saint Laurent has excellent taste. The more he copies me, the better taste he displays.”

  While Chanel was no doubt given to ill humor as she aged, some of the harshness of her tone might have been intended simply for shock value—to force people to hear her, to notice her, to feel her effect. Preserving her strong impact on others remained paramount to Chanel—it was her way of staying alive and relevant. At some level, Coco understood this, essentially admitting to Claude Delay that her constant talking was an attempt to forestall death: “If my friends tease me about my mania for nonstop talking, it’s that they don’t understand that I’m terrified of being bored listening to others. If one day I die [if!], I am persuaded that death will be nothing other than boredom.”

  Her frequent critique of other designers reassured her of her own dominance, her command over fashion. While she needn’t have worried about the longevity of her influence, Coco’s increasingly demanding, even despotic, behavior at work bespoke a deep anxiety about losing her control and authority.

  No one who worked with her ever disputed Chanel’s talent and vision. But producing a fashion collection requires a team effort, and Coco seemed reluctant to acknowledge the effort and gifts of her many employees. In 1960, more than three hundred people worked on the five floors of offices on rue Cambon. She had always been sharply critical, but now Chanel grew cold and withholding. Virtually never offering a word of praise, she responded to most of her employees’ creations with stinging criticism, which sometimes took the form of her completely undoing—literally ripping apart—a newly sewn garment, insisting it be remade from scratch. The scissors always around her neck made Coco very quick on the draw.

  Sometimes, Chanel’s outbursts would reduce a seamstress to tears. “You’d arrive with a dress or a coat … and then a half hour later there’d be nothing left, everything demolished!” recalled Jean Cazaubon, a top Chanel tailor who specialized in suits. The staff smarted all the more under such arbitrary cruelty given the fact that they worked entirely without any drawn patterns. Their instructions consisted only of what Coco told them verbally.

  The experts working for her knew how to design and sew Chanel garments, of course, and it seems that Coco’s angry displays usually resulted less from genuine displeasure than from her unease that someone other than herself had created it. “It was all because she didn’t want it said that it was us, that we were the ones who made it. When the girls cried, I’d tell them, ‘If she ripped it up, that means she liked it!’ ”

  Often, according to Cazaubon, the seamstresses would simply re-sew the destroyed garment without changing it at all, knowing there was a good chance that Coco would never mention the matter again. Sometimes Chanel would turn her destructive perfectionism against a random, non-Chanel item of clothing, tearing up the jacket of a visitor for example, simply because it seemed ill tailored.

  Jean Cazaubon understood how ferociously Chanel wanted to hold on to her power, to her total ownership of the Chanel look, brand, and impact on the world. She had always had this kind of will—which had made the entire Chanel empire possible. With age making her more vulnerable, some of her inner desperation began to show. Coco grew less adept at couching her famous will in charm and seduction.

  This is not to say that Chanel’s charm had deserted her completely. On the contrary, she still exercised considerable fascination on those around her. She excelled, for example, at creating intimacy through private jokes, sometimes at the expense of a third party. Lilou Marquand remembers accompanying Chanel to an interview where Coco was asked her age. She was seventy-eight at the time but answered, “Eighty-seven,” to which the credulous journalist replied, “Wow, you don’t look a day over seventy-eight!” Under the table, Coco pressed Lilou’s leg in a secret sign of complicity as the two women tried to keep from laughing. “Oh we had crazy laughs together,” says Marquand. “Coco was enormously funny.” Jeanne Moreau also remembers sharing lighthearted confidences with Chanel: “We spoke … of things I’d never discussed with anyone else in my life, and she would laugh!”

  Along with her wit, Chanel also maintained her considerable seductiveness. Even into her eighties, men continued to find her alluring. “Oh, she knew how to be a coquette,” recalls Willy Rizzo. Her ever-slim figure and great energy helped sustain this appeal. John Fairchild remembers catching sight, sometime in the 1960s, of “a Chanel [suit]. I thought it was a young girl. She walked rapidly with great paces, her head high, never looking to one side or the other. I took a second look. It was a Chanel, a real Chanel, Mademoiselle Chanel herself.”

  Lilou Marquand also attests to the elderly Chanel’s startling effect on men, recounting a day when Chanel received an American journalist at her studio for an interview—a man in his early forties. According to Marquand, Chanel “worked her big charm number” upon this visitor, flirting, bantering, and joking. They talked for hours, and when he left, the journalist confided to Marquand in all seriousness, and with some confusion, “This is the most beautiful day of my life.… I am married, I have two children [but] I just fell in love with that woman.” He had not forgotten that she was over eighty, but somehow her age did not impede her charm. “That was her extraordinary charisma,” says Marquand. “She was seductive even then.”

  French guides for the 1961 Exposition Française in Moscow, in identical Chanel suits (illustration credit 12.8)

  This rare combination of vision, will, and unusually enduring personal appeal allowed Chanel to impose her vision on the world for seventeen years after her return from exile. That vision communicated itself through her fashions, of course, but also through something more intangible—that Chanel persona and way of being. The “Chanel” name evoked a universe, a worldview, all of which stemmed from the woman herself. A Chanel press release put it this way in 1959: “You will not discover [Chanel] … if you try to look separately at a suit, a dress, a blouse, or a hat.… They are part of an ‘atmosphere.’ ”

  Chanel’s overwhelming, even oppressive, personality with friends and colleagues was, in fact, another part of that “atmosphere”—or perhaps the force that sustained the atmosphere. Coco
had an unquenchable need to see herself reflected everywhere around her—in mirrors, in the look-alike models she hired, in the uniforms she imposed on her staff and indeed on the world, in the millions of knockoffs she encouraged. And her self-centered, demanding behavior can be seen as an attempt to confirm just how deeply she could impress her will on others. Chanel even took to scheduling her runway shows deliberately to conflict with President Charles de Gaulle’s press conferences, ever eager to assert her dominance and, perhaps, her political importance.

  World domination seemed within Chanel’s grasp when, in 1961, she was commissioned to design the uniforms for all the female interpreters at the Exposition Française in Moscow, the largest exhibition of French culture to date in a foreign country. From August 15 to September 15, approximately forty-five thousand Russian citizens paid two rubles each to stroll through forty thousand square meters in Sokolniki Park, near Red Square, and peruse displays of French art, commerce, science, and history. In addition to dressing the guides, the Maison Chanel presented a runway collection at the expo.

  Of course, no one expected the expo would open a new market for French fashion. The Russians were decades away from having an economy strong enough for haute couture. But the point was not to sell dresses, as Chanel knew well: “I find that this is a worthwhile experience. I have always had but one goal in my life: to send my fashions down into the street. And now here they will be, on Red Square, in Moscow.” The Russians had invited Coco to attend personally, but she found travel increasingly tiring and chose instead to send seven of her models to present her designs. Chanel knew she didn’t need to appear in person to make her mark on Russia. Her presence was felt powerfully enough via the 130 female interpreters who flooded Red Square in identical Chanel suits, ambassadors not only of their country, but of one woman’s unmistakable identity—fused seemingly permanently to France’s cultural prestige.