Mademoiselle Read online

  In persuading François to stay, Marquand may have somewhat overstated Coco’s romantic notions. Chanel was no fool. Although she continued to charm men of all ages well into her elder years, it is improbable that she thought Mironnet and she could conduct a “normal” marriage. More likely, she had hoped that their mutual affection and her continued generosity might suffice to keep François by her side for however many years remained to her—hardly a crazy idea. Countless rich and powerful men have acted upon similar impulses with no loss of dignity.

  But Mironnet declined and tried to live his own life, discreetly. One weekend, though, François disappeared and did not return for four days. Chanel discovered he had gone off to get married without informing her, which so devastated her that she increased her dose of Sedol from one injection to four that night. We don’t know whether, with this act, Coco was simply trying to ease her pain or end it forever. Whatever her intention, Mademoiselle’s iron constitution allowed her to wake up the next morning. She said nothing when Mironnet once more returned to work.

  Chanel had no choice but to forgive François’s “betrayal.” She depended on him too much to cut him off. Instead, she redoubled her generosity toward him, even buying and furnishing an apartment for him near the rue Cambon, to keep him that much closer to her. Mironnet was, in fact, one of the few people to whom Coco confided her anxieties about her failing health and her fear of losing her independence. She took great comfort in his promise that, should she become incapacitated, he would take her home to his parents’ house in Cabourg, where his family would care for her (at last, the hope of caring parents). Coco even mapped out for François her somewhat ghoulish, even if tongue-in-cheek, wish for her last day. She would prefer, she told him, that upon her death, he and Lilou Marquand transport her corpse to Switzerland—seated upright in her private car. “Put me in the back of the car, between the two of you.” Coco seemed to be imagining herself exactly where she always preferred to be: sandwiched between the two halves of a couple, like the cherished child she never was.

  Inevitably, old age extracted its price from Coco. She grew physically weaker and unsteady on her feet, even while refusing to accept her limitations. When she fell while walking alone on the street near rue Cambon and cracked three ribs, it took stern convincing to get her to the hospital for X rays. Chanel also began exhibiting signs of slight cognitive decline—misjudging the exact location of a chair as she sat down, or climbing into the bathtub without realizing it had no water in it. She started forgetting appointments, or whether she had eaten lunch. Usually, though, Coco would catch herself in these moments and laugh.

  Chanel also seemed to find the physical world around her increasingly intrusive or distasteful. Always fanatic about cleanliness and avoiding unpleasant odors, she now experienced smells so powerfully that she could hardly bear to eat in a public place, finding the aromas of other people’s meals overwhelmingly repugnant. This may have been an inherited trait. Coco had always recalled her father’s extreme sensitivity to smells. At the Ritz, she demanded a table at the farthest corner of the dining room, closest to the window and as removed as possible from other diners.

  Beyond the infirmities and indignities of age, the question of her legacy consumed Chanel. Who would succeed her at the helm of the Maison Chanel? There was no obvious candidate; Chanel had never groomed a successor. She disliked sharing credit with the many talented people who worked for her, and so, at the end of her career, no one stood ready to assume responsibility for the house. Somewhat haphazardly, Chanel broached the possibility with a number of her friends and associates, including Marcel Haedrich, then director of Marie Claire; Hervé Mille, editor in chief of Paris Match; and Pierre Bergé, Yves Saint Laurent’s business and life partner. None of these men was interested. The future of the Chanel empire remained an open question.

  Yet Chanel showed little inclination to turn over the keys to the kingdom. Sustained by her small cadre of long-suffering and devoted intimates, she held illness, age, and anxiety at bay for a long time, continuing to create ceaselessly and to amass an ever-greater fortune. In 1970, the Maison Chanel employed a total of 3,500 people, spread over the four divisions of her company: clothing, textiles, perfume, and jewelry. Her 1970 sales were up 30 percent over those of 1969. She was more successful than ever, instantly recognizable to millions, and stopped in the street by admirers from every country. “I am more famous than I was before the war,” she crowed to Marcel Haedrich. “The common people know me!”

  Working at the pace she did past the age of eighty-seven, Chanel seemed for a time indestructible. It took a Sunday to bring her down. Coco spent the afternoon of Sunday, January 10, 1971, in the company of Claude Delay. They lunched together at the Ritz (a small steak, potatoes, a glass of Riesling, and coffee for Coco) and then drove in Chanel’s Cadillac to the Bois de Boulogne, returning in the early evening. Coco repaired to her suite at the Ritz, fully planning to resume work the next morning on her collection.

  A terrible fatigue overtook her that night, and at about eight thirty, Coco climbed into bed without even changing into her customary silk pajamas. Soon she was gasping for breath and crying out for “Jeanne,” her maid, to open the window. When she fumbled with the vial of Sedol, unable to break it open and inject herself, Céline did it for her, administering Chanel’s last dose of morphine. Relieved of the most intense pain of what was later adjudged an internal hemorrhage, Coco whispered, “So this is how one dies.” By the time Céline rushed back to her side after frantically telephoning the doctor, Coco was gone. Her face was bathed in tears, according to Céline.

  Before all the tributes and retrospectives attending the death of a global celebrity, there come first the ripples of reaction through the closest circle—family and friends, which tend to reflect the tenor of the deceased’s personal interactions in life. In the case of Coco Chanel, her death predictably launched a series of bitter accusations, shifting stories, and misrepresentations. It seems indisputable that Chanel died alone save for the presence of her maid, Céline. Yet, perhaps wishing to confirm her special closeness with Chanel, Lilou Marquand claims to have rushed over at the last moment to hold Coco’s hand as she died, then, by her own admission, removing from that hand—and keeping for herself—one of Chanel’s rings.

  We do know that Gabrielle Palasse-Labrunie arrived soon after Chanel’s death and hurried everyone out, insisting that her aunt had expressly wished for no one to see her in death—a very plausible claim given Coco’s embarrassment about her appearance in old age. Both Marquand and Jacques Chazot were angered by the way Labrunie stepped in to direct the proceedings, insisting that Chanel had never had more than minimal contact with her niece. “In fifteen years, I saw [Labrunie] there maybe three times,” says Marquand, still angry forty years later that her intimacy with Chanel was not honored in the end.

  Some of the infighting concerned, unsurprisingly, the distribution—or disappearance—of Chanel’s personal property and fortune. The Chanel corporation, of course, was already entirely under the financial control of the Wertheimers. Premier jeweler Robert Goossens, who worked for Chanel as well as for Jacques Fath and Cristóbal Balenciaga, among others, has said that many of Chanel’s most valuable jewels, precious stones given her by Grand Duke Dmitri or the Duke of Westminster and kept in a locked lacquered box, simply vanished after her death—and vaguely accuses Chanel’s two great-nieces Gabrielle and Hélène of making off with the stones. Gabrielle Palasse-Labrunie completely contradicts Goossens, recounting that she arrived the morning after her aunt’s death to find the jewelry box already nearly entirely empty. Labrunie, too, is still angry; she blames François Mironnet for the missing jewels. He had the key to the box, she says.

  As for the devoted François, he placed himself in the eye of a legal hurricane immediately after Chanel’s death by going to court to claim that Mademoiselle had bequeathed to him her home in Lausanne, all her jewels, and about 5 million francs in cash (about $6 million today).
The case remained unresolved until one year later when a sealed handwritten letter fell out of a book found in Chanel’s personal library. The letter, signed with Coco’s name, detailed the legacy she’d promised to him, and appeared to legitimize Mironnet’s claim. When handwriting experts could not confirm the letter’s authenticity, Mironnet accepted an out-of-court settlement, and returned to his new life as a jewelry designer in Saint-Tropez.

  Who did inherit Chanel’s personal fortune, whose estimated total ranged from 30 million francs to several billion? No one. At least, no one specific. In 1965, Chanel had formally declared that her sole inheritor was her foundation, COGA, in Vaduz, Liechtenstein—a venue chosen on the advice of her lawyers. The trust was administered by the Zurich law firm of Alfred Hier. Chanel might have stipulated a thousand possible uses for the trust, but she did not. Her entire will consisted of two sentences: “This is my last will and testament. I establish as my sole and universal heir the Coga Foundation Vaduz, Liechtenstein.”

  Apart from private instructions she left about bequeathing sums of money to various individuals who had been helpful to her, Chanel left almost no directions for her executors. She had perhaps spoken vaguely to her lawyers about COGA being used to help artists, but nothing in the legal documents required any particular disbursement of funds whatsoever. For Coco, it seemed, COGA’s mission was far less important than its discretion. She wanted to keep the foundation entirely shielded from public eyes, and in this, Mademoiselle succeeded entirely. Tiny Vaduz is home to more than fifty thousand holding companies, trusts, and foundations—none of which has any reason to be in Liechtenstein apart from the country’s status as a tax haven and its policy of sepulchral silence about its investors and holdings. It is considered one of the most secretive tax jurisdictions in the world. The woman who strove so mightily to obscure her origins in life had found the perfect place to hide the last vestiges of herself in death, burying her treasure without a trace.

  Whatever the private chaos unleashed by Chanel’s death among her intimates, the public received her passing with mournful respect and admiring tributes. On Wednesday, January 13, 1971, several hundred people filed into the grand marble Eglise de la Madeleine, just blocks from the rue Cambon, for the funeral of Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel. Bowers of white flowers covered her simple oak casket, within which Coco, too, was all in white—the simple white bouclé suit in which Céline had dressed her for burial.

  Mourners at Chanel’s funeral (illustration credit 12.10)

  The mourners included many of the stars of the Paris fashion world: Yves Saint Laurent, Pierre Balmain, Cristóbal Balenciaga, André Courrèges, and Marc Bohan of the Maison Dior. Chanel had outlived many of her closest and most illustrious friends, but among those remaining to say good-bye were dancer Serge Lifar, Jacques Chazot, Salvador Dalí, Antoinette Bernstein, and Edmonde Charles-Roux—the friend whose plans to write Chanel’s biography had so enraged her. Chanel’s models paid tribute to their mentor with their gift of a white floral sculpture in the shape of a giant pair of scissors, which sat atop the coffin, too. Six of the models sat together in one pew, none of them wearing black. Instead, the young women had all dressed in variations of Mademoiselle’s trademark suits of tweed or plaid, in light or pastel tones. In his eulogy, Father Victor Chabanis, vicar of the Madeleine, may have felt compelled to acknowledge—albeit subtly—Chanel’s less-than-perfectly Catholic life: “It would take a greater voice than mine to describe this very Parisian, very human personality. She was universally respected.”

  Chanel was not buried at La Madeleine. After the funeral, a small procession of fifteen of her closest friends and family drove on to Lausanne, where in 1965, Coco had bought a plot in the beautiful, verdant Bois-de-Vaux Cemetery near Lake Geneva. There, in a very brief ceremony, Gabrielle was finally laid to rest.

  The stone marking her grave was designed by sculptor Jacques Labrunie, her niece Gabrielle’s husband, in close consultation with Coco. It is not directly above the grave, but off to one side, so that Chanel “could get out” if she wished, as she put it. Nearby stands a small bench, so that visitors might sit and converse with Coco, as she had so often with other graves during her lifetime. The stone bears only her name—Gabrielle Chanel (without “Coco”)—and the dates of her birth and death. There is no quotation, no epitaph. Instead, a phalanx of bas-relief lions’ heads keep watch over the woman beneath, born under the sign of Leo. Their manes fall into artful waves, as if arranged by a coiffeur, and their sculpted gaze mingles ferocity and an almost cartoonish sweetness. There are five of them.

  Grave of Gabrielle Chanel, Bois-de-Vaux Cemetery, Lausanne, Switzerland (illustration credit 12.11)

  AFTERWORD

  I believe in the fourth dimension, and in the fifth, and in the sixth.… It is born from the need to be reassured, to believe that we never lose everything and that something exists on the other side.

  —COCO CHANEL

  Citing the Eastern philosophies she’d studied with Boy Capel, Chanel often insisted that death was not a final disappearance, but a mere crossing over—one passage among many. It’s hard to know if this notion of “the other side” ever really convinced or comforted Coco, especially during her intensely lonely last few years.

  But if Chanel had doubted the existence of an afterlife, events since her demise encourage the rest of us to believe in it, for Coco Chanel lives on with astonishing force and vividness, through the ubiquity of her signature style, the apparently endless fascination with Chanel herself, and the odd couple she makes with her successor, Karl Lagerfeld.

  Chanel’s afterlife passed through several phases. Immediately after her death came a period of respectful contemplation—in print as well as on the runway. Obituaries highlighted the epic story of the girl who’d transcended modest origins to become a fashion revolutionary, “the great spirit of the twentieth century,” as Diana Vreeland put it. It would take years before some of the more accurate, gritty details about Coco’s early life emerged, but most of the articles did acknowledge the mystery that had always attended Coco Chanel.

  Just weeks after Chanel’s death, her fashion house staged its first runway show without her, featuring the muted collection she’d been working on in her final days: bouclé tweed suits, unstructured coats and dresses, and the three white evening dresses with which Coco had always ended runway shows. Despite the subdued mood that afternoon, at the end of the show, audience members burst into unusually sustained applause, while craning their necks toward the celebrated spiral staircase, as if hoping to conjure Mademoiselle back to her usual observation post.

  In the absence of any obvious successor, leadership at Chanel remained uncertain, and for more than a decade no one challenged the absolute authority of the house’s deceased founder. In February 1971, the corporation tapped Gaston Berthelot, former designer of ready-to-wear at Christian Dior, as the new artistic “coordinator,” tasking him only with perpetuating the extant Chanel style—not with creating any original designs. A few seasons later, Berthelot was replaced by former Chanel assistants Yvonne Dudel and Jean Cazaubon—with similar results: the impeccable reproduction of Chanel style, to the exclusion of all innovation.

  While the Chanel brand remained as famous as ever, its air of luxury and exclusivity had begun to fade. Patronized throughout the 1970s largely by dignified ladies of a certain age—politicians’ wives and wealthy grandmothers—the House of Chanel fell into a torpor. Once the epitome of youthful chic, the Chanel suit gradually morphed into a symbol of stodgy matronhood. Chanel No. 5 continued to generate tremendous revenue for the company, but by 1974, the famous flacon was being sold in thousands of corner drugstores across America, slumming alongside aspirin and shampoo—its magical allure all but evaporated.

  Recognizing the problem, owner Alain Wertheimer (Pierre’s grandson) took steps to restore the brand’s cachet, hiring a Washington law firm to help him pull Chanel perfume out of low-market stores and developing a new line of cosmetics, Chane
l Beauté, to be sold for high prices in a limited number of upscale locations. But shaking the Maison out of its deeper somnolence required a new vision, and Chanel’s true renaissance did not begin until 1983, when Wertheimer appointed the fifty-year-old German-born Karl Lagerfeld as artistic director.

  A prodigiously gifted couturier (who had never met Chanel), Lagerfeld had already enjoyed a thirty-year career in Paris, working for such houses as Patou, Fendi, and Chloé. He was also a true personnage—a self-styled dandy who spoke four languages, wore his hair in a small, low ponytail, and dressed like a Baroque nobleman, favoring brocade waistcoats, even a monocle. “The eighteenth century is my first love,” Lagerfeld said, and the elaborate pageantry of his life confirmed this. In Paris, Lagerfeld resided in an eighteenth-century mansion, furnished with red damask draperies, gilded mirrors, and rococo furniture. He also maintained homes in Rome, Monte Carlo, Switzerland, and Brittany.

  While his wealth was indisputable, its origins were not. Lagerfeld often hinted that his parents were leisured aristocrats, but in truth, he came from an affluent but solidly bourgeois family that had endured genuine privation, hunger, and fear during World War II. But Lagerfeld never admitted to any of the harder memories of his youth. For him, facts mattered far less than image, and he was a genius at creating his own myth. Wry, ironic, scathingly disparaging of anyone he deemed inelegant or boring, Lagerfeld had the sprezzatura to take on the ghost of Mademoiselle.

  With his first Chanel runway collection, Lagerfeld walked a couture tightrope: While clearly acknowledging the Chanel tradition, he dared to look beyond the reigning classic tweeds and reached far back into the Chanel archives to revamp some of Coco’s earliest, most beguiling ideas: the jersey suit, evening dresses with fluffy tulle boleros, and jewels sewn directly onto dresses.