Mademoiselle Page 43
Given how indelible, ubiquitous, and theatrical a character she’d become, it was hardly surprising that Broadway came calling for Coco Chanel. Accounts differ, but perhaps as early as 1954, producer Frederick Brisson approached Chanel with the idea of turning her life story into a play and then a movie. Initially, Chanel refused Brisson’s offer, just as she had turned down similar offers from Samuel Goldwyn in 1936 and again in 1940. Brisson, though, persisted for years, claiming he considered Chanel “the most fascinating woman on earth.”
Finally, in 1962, Chanel agreed to a meeting in Paris with Brisson and his team: composer André Previn and Broadway lyricist Alan Jay Lerner (of the famous Lerner and Loewe, creators of Brigadoon, My Fair Lady, and Camelot, among others). Chanel did not recognize Lerner’s name, but when she was told he had written the lyrics for My Fair Lady, she announced how much she had hated that play, particularly Cecil Beaton’s costumes and sets—which she’d found inauthentic. Brisson knew better than to tell Chanel at that moment that Beaton was his first choice to design all sets and costumes for Coco, the musical, as well.
Coco had another reservation: She did not want her life portrayed as another rags-to-riches, Eliza Doolittle fairy tale. “I am not your ‘Fair Lady,’ ” she reportedly chided Lerner. No, Coco saw herself as Pygmalion, not Galatea. In truth, she was both. Brisson reassured her that she would be pleased with the script.
Coco was finally won over after Previn played some songs for her on piano and Lerner sang. (Lerner’s fluent French may also have impressed her.) Yet another obstacle remained: Pierre Wertheimer was refusing to grant permission for the commercial use of the “Chanel” name. Negotiations with the company dragged on for nearly three years, until Chanel threatened to shut down her couture house entirely if Pierre did not relent. Wertheimer gave in in 1965, approving the production with the proviso that there be no depiction of any Wertheimer family member or employee. Shortly after signing off on Coco, Pierre Wertheimer passed away at the age of seventy-seven, leaving another enormous gap in Chanel’s life.
Brisson cast Katharine Hepburn as his leading lady—disappointing Coco, who’d initially thought he’d meant the far younger Audrey Hepburn. It was a counterintuitive move—Katharine Hepburn could neither sing nor dance, and had no interest in musical theater. She did have a long-standing interest in Coco Chanel, though, having tried and failed to get Chanel hired as costumer for Hepburn’s 1932 film, A Bill of Divorcement. But the role of Coco Chanel would suit Hepburn for a number of subtle reasons.
By the late 1960s, Katharine Hepburn was easily as well known as Chanel, her distinctive persona indelibly graven into the American public imagination. Hepburn’s famous face and voice instantly evoked a specific constellation of traits: intelligence, wit, WASP privilege, independence, and a certain androgynous charm, hinting at bisexuality. Hepburn had, in fact, been involved with a number of women lovers, in addition to her twenty-six-year relationship with Spencer Tracy, and rumors of her lesbian affairs had long plagued her. In other words, Katharine Hepburn offered Frederick Brisson a way to “translate” Chanel’s iconicity for American audiences; Kate was Coco’s Yankee doppelgänger.
Preparations proved arduous. Coco was unhappy that, to accommodate Hepburn’s age, the story focused on Chanel’s comeback years rather than on her romantic early days in Deauville. Chanel was most enraged, though, when Brisson refused to let her design the costumes and hired Cecil Beaton instead.
While Chanel might have seemed the ideal—or even the only—candidate for the job of costume designer, Brisson had his reasons. Cecil Beaton had an impressive track record. He’d already won two Oscars for costume designs he’d created for Lerner and Loewe films (in 1958 for Gigi, and again in 1964 for My Fair Lady). And Beaton was a crowd-pleaser. He made big, colorful, exaggerated designs that could be visually grasped in an instant. In this, his approach differed sharply from Chanel’s costuming practice of more or less inserting her regular fashions into theatrical settings. Brisson was not looking for that kind of subtlety for his musical, and so he had Beaton create more than two hundred Chanel-like costumes for Coco—outfits reminiscent of Chanel’s style yet completely devoid of their muted elegance. In the final scene, dozens of models appear wearing bright red evening dresses with big floating capes, trailing sleeves, and other extravagant details Chanel would never have permitted.
Opening night for Coco, on December 18, 1969, at the Mark Hellinger Theatre, drew scores of New York luminaries all dressed to kill, many wearing Chanel, including Gloria Vanderbilt, Lauren Bacall, Martha Graham, Princess Lee Radziwill, and a very young Mia Farrow, then wife of André Previn. Beyond the theater, New York department stores had made a point to feature even more Chanel-inspired designs than usual, expecting (correctly) that the musical would boost sales.
With a production budget of $900,000, Coco was the most expensive show that had ever been produced on Broadway, yet reviews were tepid. Hepburn was hardly a musical star, and was talk-singing her lyrics (as Rex Harrison had in My Fair Lady). “Her voice is like vinegar on sand paper … a mixture of faith, love, and laryngitis,” wrote Clive Barnes—not without affection—in The New York Times.
Coco disappointed even André Previn, who admitted, “Coco was not very good, I disliked it a lot.” The play’s choreography, by twenty-six-year-old Michael Bennett—who later created A Chorus Line—drew some plaudits, but the thin, clichéd plot depicted Chanel as the stereotypical frustrated and lonely career woman. In Hepburn’s big finale number, “Always Mademoiselle,” she tremulously talk-sang of a wasted (read: “unmarried”) life:
Katharine Hepburn starring in the Broadway musical Coco (illustration credit 12.9)
Dazzling Mademoiselle
in her golden shell
Life is such a very solitary holiday!
Not even the costumes escaped criticism. In The New York Times Marylin Bender attacked Beaton’s designs: “Beaton’s Chanels are as much like Chanel’s Chanels as a jar of gefilte fish on a supermarket shelf is to quenelle de brochet [pike croquettes] at Grand Véfour [one of Paris’s most exclusive restaurants, situated in the Palais-Royal and founded in 1785, before the French Revolution].” Bender’s analogy was telling. She’d injected a distinctly Jewish element, likening Beaton’s inadequate costumes to gefilte fish, while comparing real Chanel couture to the supposed opposite of that Passover staple: the refinements of Ancien Régime France.
Marylin Bender’s remark recalls the extent to which Americans see French culture as a social elevator, an antidote for shame or perceived inadequacy, and how easily Jewishness is understood as one source of such shame. Bender suggests that Chanel offers a polished, “corrected” version of American Jewish identity—conveying a status superior by virtue of being more French, less vulgar.
The classic Chanel look and “atmosphere” felt familiar and attractive to postwar American women because they saw in it a version of their own famous “all-American” ideal: a sleek, athletic, slightly boyish creature, especially fetching in a uniform. In fact, though, the 1950s “all-American boy” look (for it starts with boyishness) is actually a distant cousin to the avatars promoted by fascists in both Italy and Germany. As historian George Mosse explains: “While most of the symbols and rituals of the civic religion of fascism vanished after the Second World War, its stereotypes are still with us.… There is little difference in looks … behavior, and posture, between Mussolini’s New Man, the German Aryan, the clean-cut Englishman, or the all-American boy.” Mosse is right. Even now, a whiff of racial hierarchy still clings to our idea of the “all-American” look, which conjures the blond hair, blue eyes, and sharp features typically associated with Northern European ancestry.
• • •
Fascism may have vanished, but a variant of those “symbols and rituals of a civic religion” live on in aspects of the Chanel phenomenon: its creation of a self-enclosed universe, its panoply of branded, status-conferring clothes and accessories, and its offer of membership
in an elite yet accessible community.
It only adds to the irony that Chanel owed her comeback to men with names such as Stanley Marcus, Bernard Gimbel, and Nathan Ohrbach, founder of Ohrbach’s department store. But, of course, the Seventh Avenue “rag trade”—like the 1930s Hollywood studio system (incubator of Katharine Hepburn)—was built largely by Jewish men: immigrants and their sons who made their fortunes by selling back to America an impossibly glossy, idealized—and ethnically neutralized—dream of itself.
This is not to say that women were or are fascists for loving Chanel, but rather that the mechanism that drove fascism taps into and manipulates certain desires that never go away—a desire to outclass someone else, to be more elegant, to be better dressed, to “pass,” or to be, in some cases, “more French.” Fashion in general speaks to some of these desires, but Chanel offered more than just fashion; she offered a world to inhabit and a heroine to emulate.
By giving the role of Coco Chanel to legendary film star Katharine Hepburn, Frederick Brisson confirmed that he grasped Chanel’s implied promise of social class enhancement and even ethnic leveling. Hepburn never affected a French accent onstage, but instead spoke in her trademark lockjaw American style, which, coupled with her casually regal, Bryn Mawr bearing, telegraphed an impeccable Anglo-Saxon pedigree—the American version of aristocracy. That peculiar marriage of Coco’s and Kate’s magic explains how Coco succeeded despite its myriad weaknesses. The play ran for a little more than nine months and 329 performances. Despite his detractors, Cecil Beaton walked away with the 1970 Tony Award for his costume work on the production.
The eponymous heroine of Coco never saw the play. By most accounts, she had intended to attend opening night, and had even made herself a white sequined dress for the occasion (perfect for being visible in a darkened theater). But in December 1969, shortly before the premiere, Coco suffered a small stroke that paralyzed her right hand. Instead of heading to New York, she checked into the American Hospital of Paris in Neuilly-sur-Seine for several days. Doctors predicted she’d make a full recovery if she followed a regimen of physical therapy for several months. But until then, Chanel would need to wear a black, elasticized brace to support her lifeless hand. She was horror-struck. Her hands were the source of all her creative activity; without them she could not work. “I’d rather have typhoid,” she snapped to Claude Delay. She was naturally disappointed to miss seeing her story on Broadway, although she’d gotten wind of Beaton’s distortion of her work: “He ruined the costumes, everyone has told me so.”
Most of all, Coco feared that her stroke would make her seem old and feeble. Determined to keep up appearances, she hired a makeup artist to come to her apartment every morning to do her face. She would not be seen without her full Coco regalia.
Chanel did recover the use of her hand, although severe arthritis deformed the joints of both hands, rendering them partially numb and causing her to prick her fingers often with the dressmaker pins. Anxious always about losing her dexterity, Coco would play with a little rubber ball, turning it over and over to exercise her fingers. Sometimes she’d ask her niece Gabrielle to toss the ball back and forth with her to keep up her agility and reflexes.
During these years, Coco developed angina, and suffered as well from chronic insomnia, which she sometimes tried to alleviate by injecting herself with more than her usual nightly vial of Sedol. Coco’s most troubling symptom, though, was her somnambulism—a nocturnal sleepwalking habit that she claimed to have suffered also as a child. Rising from her bed in the middle of the night, Coco was found several times by her maid Céline wandering her apartment. Once, Céline found her mistress immobile before the bathroom sink, compulsively running water over her hands. On a few other occasions, Chanel had to be kept from harming herself when she was found—still asleep—using her bedside scissors to shred her own nightgown.
Finally, when Mademoiselle Chanel was discovered one night partially undressed in the lobby of the Ritz, her staff took action. From then on, after Coco’s nightly injection, Lilou and Céline attached her to her bed, gently tying her down. Chanel put up no resistance: “I used to do it all the time as a child. When I am like that, I must be attached,” she told Claude Delay. And, like a child, Coco demanded that someone stay by her side until she fell asleep. Sometimes, Céline and another household staff member would play cards quietly in Chanel’s bedroom until, seeing her drift off, they could tiptoe out. Coco felt especially vulnerable in sleep, the only time she was forced to abandon control. This was why she slept only at the Ritz, never in her Cambon apartment across the street. “I can’t [sleep at Cambon], I’m too frightened!” Chanel told her niece Gabrielle. At a hotel, one is never alone, and Coco needed the presence of others around her—even strangers—at all times.
Neither her growing fears nor various maladies slowed Chanel’s daytime existence very much. Work remained Coco’s lifeline to the world, and she clung to it fiercely, staying fit and active. Even well into her eighties, Chanel was flexible enough to bend over and place both palms flat on the floor without bending her knees. She continued to show up at the Cambon studio—fully dressed and made up—six days a week.
It was that seventh day that posed problems. The long solitude of Sunday grew unbearable for Chanel in her last years. Her social circle had shrunk to just a few companions, prime among these former dancer and television personality Jacques Chazot, journalist Hervé Mille, and psychoanalyst Claude Delay, and a handful of devoted employees—especially Lilou Marquand, and Chanel’s household staff: her butler, François Mironnet, and the maid she hired in 1966, whose given name was Céline, but whom Chanel had, somewhat heartbreakingly, rechristened “Jeanne”—her mother’s name. Céline accepted the new name with compassionate grace. Occasionally, Gabrielle Palasse-Labrunie or her sister, Hélène Palasse, would also visit.
Never having lost the need to be escorted by a gentleman, Chanel would often spend Sundays with François, the butler, strolling in the Tuileries and sitting with him on the garden’s wrought iron chairs. Sometimes, she and Claude Delay would promenade on the Champs-Elysées or the Trocadéro. Other weekends would find Coco at the Longchamp Racecourse in the Bois de Boulogne. Racing was a passion she shared with the Wertheimers and in 1962 she had bought a thoroughbred, Romantica, whose jockey was the celebrated Yves Saint-Martin. Since cemeteries had always calmed her, sometimes Coco would have her driver take her to Père Lachaise—resting place of so many Parisian cultural stars, including a few of her own acquaintance, such as Isadora Duncan, Colette, and Francis Poulenc.
Despite her increasing ill humor, Chanel continued to bestow great generosity upon certain friends and associates. She supported her niece Gabrielle with a comfortable monthly allowance. When Lilou Marquand confided that her family needed money, Coco granted her an enormous raise immediately. (Marquand refused, however, Chanel’s later offer to buy her a country home.) Sometimes, Coco let Jacques Chazot take her shopping at particular antiques stores whose owners, she knew, paid him a commission on any purchase she made—she didn’t tell him she knew of his arrangement. She also granted Chazot an exclusive on-camera interview with her, simply to boost his television presenting career.
Mademoiselle reserved her greatest generosity for butler François Mironnet—one of the few people she trusted completely. Tall, strong, and charismatic, Mironnet was just thirty-three when Chanel hired him in 1965. Though of humble background—born to a peasant family in Normandy—he was said to bear a passing resemblance to the Duke of Westminster, which might account for some of Coco’s attachment to him. Lilou Marquand remembers Coco’s habit of leaning her head on Mironnet’s shoulder and sighing affectionately, “Oh, François.”
Over time, Chanel looked increasingly to Mironnet for companionship, care, and household management. She entrusted to him the responsibility of maintaining her house in Lausanne and all her financial transactions. She gave him the key to the hotel safe that held her jewel collection. Mironnet was the last m
an in Coco’s life. “François calms me,” she told Claude Delay.
In return for his calming attentions, and surely to encourage him to stay with her, Coco tried to elevate François’s social condition. She invited him to put aside his butler duties and choose instead to work in any division of the Maison Chanel. Mironnet chose jewelry making, whereupon Chanel gave him private tutorials on creating costume jewelry, showing him her method of arranging imitation gemstones in modeling paste. When Mironnet created a convincing copy of a ruby necklace that Chanel had long ago received from the Duke of Westminster, Coco gave him the actual rubies as a “reward.” When Coco’s longtime friend Maggie van Zuylen died in 1969, François Mironnet accompanied Chanel to the funeral in Amsterdam, on a private plane. Coco bought François a new car. She even invited him to join her as a guest when she hosted a dinner for the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. Mironnet attended that party and when the woman seated next to him told him he looked “familiar,” he startled the assembled company with his honest reply, “Yes, I used to serve at Mademoiselle’s table.” Coco was delighted—she liked nothing better than upending the social hierarchy.
But François had no aspirations to dining with royalty, nor would he bend entirely to Mademoiselle’s caprices. One night, while dining in Switzerland with Coco and Lilou, Chanel, in all seriousness, asked François to marry her. Stunned, Mironnet stood up from the table and bolted from the restaurant, disappearing for days. Eventually, Lilou Marquand located him, holed up in a hotel in Lausanne, furious and wounded. In his mind, Chanel had mistaken him for a fortune-hunting gigolo, a man capable of marrying a woman nearly fifty years his senior simply for personal advancement. Lilou begged him to be generous, to understand that Chanel, in her heart, imagined herself a young girl, capable still of giving and inspiring love. François let himself be cajoled into returning to Mademoiselle’s service. Chanel accepted his return and never mentioned the incident again.