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  After one year, with business thriving, Coco longed to expand beyond Etienne’s apartment, but for that, she needed money and space. For the moment, neither seemed forthcoming. Balsan remained skeptical about Coco’s real prospects, and put off her requests for a loan. Capel, though, thought Coco was onto something. He was falling in love with her, and he admired her ambition. He talked about Chanel’s drive and ability with his childhood friend Elisabeth de Gramont, who recalled Capel’s remarks: “You don’t understand how much idleness can weigh on some women, especially when they are intelligent. And Coco is intelligent.… She has the qualities necessary for a businesswoman.” As they fell deeper into their romance, Chanel prevailed upon Capel to approach Balsan on her behalf.

  Balsan allowed himself to be won over. Together, the two men came up with a plan: Balsan would permit Coco to take full possession of his Malesherbes apartment as her atelier, and Capel would supply her with the additional funds needed. Coco was thrilled. With the entire apartment at their disposal for the business, the girls converted the bedroom into a second studio space. Antoinette would now work there during the days, but spend her nights in a newly rented room, nearby at no. 8, avenue du Parc Monceau. Coco had stopped using the bedroom entirely.

  Under Boy’s encouragement, Coco started to see herself in a new light, as someone with talent and a future, someone worthy of respect. “He listened to me and gave me the impression of having something to say,” she confided to Vilmorin. For Boy, taking Coco seriously also meant subjecting her to some brutal honesty, calling her on her mean-spirited humor (she would defensively insult other women: “They’re so ugly!… so dirty!”), her lack of education, even her poor eyesight. He talked to her of politics, and gave her books to read. She welcomed even his harshest criticism: “In teaching me, he didn’t coddle me,” she told Paul Morand. “He would critique my behavior, ‘You acted badly,’ ‘you lied,’ ‘you were wrong.’ He had the gentle authority of men who really know women, who love them without being blind.” Boy didn’t want Coco to be blind, either, and insisted she see an eye doctor about her severe myopia. Setting aside even vanity under Boy’s suasion, Coco submitted to wearing the eyeglasses she had long needed badly. The new clarity of her vision proved a mixed blessing, given her critical nature. “I found people so ugly! For the first time, I was seeing them as they were, and not as I imagined them.” (Later, Chanel convinced the world’s women that spectacles—especially those in tortoiseshell frames like her own—were not a sign of a physical defect, but the chicest of accessories.) Slowly, Boy would sharpen her vision in countless other ways as well.

  By 1910, Balsan could no longer ignore the obvious—his close friend had seduced Coco away entirely. Etienne finally confronted her, asking “Where are you and Boy these days?” to which she replied, “We are where men and women generally are together.” Balsan then turned to Capel, who confirmed it: “I adore her,” he told Etienne, upon which (according to most accounts), Balsan ceded gracefully. “If she loves you, she’s yours.” As amicable as this exchange sounds, some accounts suggest a tad more rancor was actually attached to the proceedings. Quitterie Tempé, Balsan’s granddaughter, has said that Etienne suffered considerable pain upon losing Coco. And everyone agrees that shortly after the breakup, Balsan left on an extended trip to Argentina—perhaps to distance himself from his sorrow.

  Thus began Coco and Boy’s initial idyll together in Paris—a period that coincides precisely with the true start of Coco’s business career. The two events, in fact, cannot be separated. Chanel owed her launch into the fashion world to Capel’s love, his inspiration, and—not least—to his generous financial help.

  Coco and Boy formed a highly unusual couple for their day. In 1910, no Parisian sophisticate would have batted an eye at a wealthy bachelor supporting a pretty, lower-class girl. But between Boy and Coco, more was happening. Capel was helping Chanel transform herself yet again, encouraging her as she turned from courtesan into something almost unheard-of for the era: a self-supporting businesswoman. At the same time, he was collaborating with her on an even more surprising venture: the birth of the couturière-celebrity, a fashion designer whose life as well as work would be accepted into society. We know the confluence of early events that drove Chanel in her ambition, but what accounts for Capel’s open-mindedness?

  Capel’s background has remained relatively opaque, despite attempts by many Chanel biographers to clarify it. For nearly a century, persistent rumors have suggested that Boy was actually the illegitimate son of a powerful man—possibly one of the famous Péreire brothers, Isaac and Emile—two wealthy Paris-based Portuguese-Jewish bankers. (Paul Morand incorporated this possibility into his novel Lewis and Irene.) Rumors of that nature have served as partial explanations for Boy and Coco’s special rapport—which makes sense. A shared bond of illegitimacy would certainly have enhanced mutual understanding and given Boy more sympathy for Chanel’s painful childhood. Yet no evidence substantiates Boy’s illegitimacy.

  Newly discovered information, however, sheds light on the little-known maternal side of Capel’s family. Edmonde Charles-Roux claimed that Capel never spoke of his mother, and until now, neither has anyone else. His mother’s life, though, explains a good deal about Capel’s attraction to Coco Chanel, and, by extension, what twists of fate led to the founding, against all odds, of the Chanel empire.

  Although born in France in 1856, Berthe Andrée Anne Eugénie Lorin Capel spent at least part of her youth in London’s posh Kensington district, as a boarder at a French Catholic convent school for upper-class girls. Serving as the school’s “spiritual director” was none other than the handsome and glamorous Reverend Monsignor Thomas Capel, a well-known clergyman with a libertine private life—and the elder brother of Arthur Joseph Capel, Boy Capel’s future father. The reverend, in other words, was Boy Capel’s future uncle.

  On July 24, 1873, the Reverend Capel officiated at the wedding of his younger brother, Arthur Joseph Capel, age twenty-five, and his former student, eighteen-year-old Berthe Lorin. Now unearthed, the marriage certificate provides vital and previously unknown information about Berthe.

  After leaving secondary school, girls of the upper classes generally returned home to make their society debuts and find a husband. Yet upon graduation, Berthe Lorin did not return to France. The marriage certificate lists her address as 12 Scarsdale Villas, Kensington—a town house just blocks away from the convent school. Why did she not go home? It is possible she was not welcome.

  That something was amiss in Berthe’s family is confirmed by the marriage certificate: The space on the form reserved for the name of the bride’s father has been left blank, which, according to Great Britain’s General Register Office, “would suggest illegitimacy.” Stranger still, no members of Berthe’s family seem to have been present at the ceremony. Of the two witnesses required by law, contrary to convention, neither hailed from the bride’s side, nor was there any signature granting the parental permission normally required to authorize the marriage of an underage girl.

  Marriage certificate for Arthur Capel and Berthe Lorin, Boy Capel’s parents (illustration credit 3.2)

  Berthe Lorin clearly came from an affluent French family, yet, she did not marry into society. Her new husband, Arthur Joseph Capel, had worked as an office clerk and lived with his widowed mother. After the wedding, he and Berthe moved in with Monsignor Thomas Capel. This marriage, then, has the air of an expedient “arrangement.” Some might guess at an unplanned pregnancy, but the evidence points elsewhere.

  Despite his humble professional beginnings, by 1876, within three years of marrying his teenage French bride, Arthur Joseph Capel met with some real prosperity—via new French connections. He became a partner in Chamot and Capel, a shipping concern that acted as the London agent for the Paris-based French General Transatlantic company. A closer look at Capel’s partner, Alexandre Chamot, reveals the likely source of those rumors about Boy Capel’s provenance: Chamot was a brother-in-law
of Jacob Péreire, founder of the Jewish banking fortune. Here, then, lies a link between the Capel family and the Péreires—although it exists one generation earlier than previously believed. Rather than the illegitimate son of a Péreire brother, Boy Capel may have, in fact, been an illegitimate grandson of this eminent clan.

  Berthe and Arthur Capel postponed starting their family until they were financially stable. Not until 1877, four years into her marriage—and one year into her husband’s new business arrangement—did Berthe give birth to daughter Marie, her first child (which likely dispenses with out-of-wedlock pregnancy as the reason for this union), soon to be followed by Edith, Bertha, and finally the couple’s only son, Arthur Edward, or “Boy.” In 1879, Chamot and Capel dissolved their partnership and Arthur founded a new business, listing himself as sole proprietor. From then on, his success accelerated, as he expanded his business internationally, branching out into coal, insurance, and transportation.

  In the late 1880s, the family relocated to Paris, living on the avenue d’Iéna, in the very affluent sixteenth arrondissement. There, Berthe Capel blossomed into a celebrated society hostess, entertaining everyone from Russian dukes to performers from the Folies-Bergère. Society reporters chronicled her activities, noting her great beauty, fashionable clothes, and her connection to Monsignor Capel.

  Arthur Joseph Capel was a smart, capable, and highly ambitious man, but it is obvious that someone was helping him from behind the scenes. In this case, coincidence may indicate causality. That is, it is logical to infer a connection between Arthur Joseph Capel’s marriage to Berthe, a well-heeled but forsaken French girl, and the life-changing, lucrative partnership with affluent Frenchman Alexandre Chamot.

  What is probable is that Berthe posed some sort of problem or inconvenience to her French family—perhaps illegitimacy—which led to her being sent abroad to England. Despite this, someone—who would not identify himself—was looking out for her, arranging a fine education and the chance for her to marry. Berthe was beautiful and accomplished, and as a dowry, Arthur Joseph Capel would have received a business partnership. The offer would have been irresistible. (Boy Capel would later write quite compellingly of the sexism inherent in society marriages and dowries.)

  Berthe Capel died of unspecified causes at forty-seven, in Paris, on August 5, 1902. Her death certificate describes Madame Capel as “the daughter of a father and mother on whom we have no information.” Newspaper accounts reveal that Berthe had some fortune of her own: She bequeathed to her son valuable shares in a coal shipping company, though it is unclear from whom she had acquired these.

  These details about Berthe Lorin Capel grant us a fresh perspective on Coco and Boy’s romance. Boy had been raised by a mother who’d spent her teens far from home, cared for and educated by nuns—a woman with no family present even on her wedding day—a woman not unlike Coco Chanel. While Berthe Capel clearly came from a social background far grander than Chanel’s, she seems to have known what it meant to be alone in the world and to have something to hide. Growing up with such a mother would have sensitized Boy to an unusual story like Chanel’s.

  If Berthe Lorin enabled Boy to empathize with Coco, it was surely his father, Arthur Joseph, who’d taught him how to help her. Having watched his father develop his shipping empire, Boy knew what success looked like, and how to attain it. But Boy was far more than a canny businessman; he was learned. Berthe and Arthur Joseph had sent their only son first to a Paris Jesuit school, l’Institution Sainte-Marie, then to Beaumont, an exclusive Jesuit boarding school for boys in the English countryside, sometimes called “the Catholic Eton,” and finally on to Stonyhurst, the most prominent and rigorous Jesuit institution in England. At both British schools, Boy had distinguished himself, winning several academic prizes. (All her life, Chanel kept in her library a beautifully illustrated book Capel had won as a prize at Beaumont in 1892, when he was twelve: The Common Objects of the Seashore, by J. G. Wood.) After his studies, he entered his father’s business, while continuing to study philosophy, political science, history, and world religions.

  Boy had traveled farther afield than did many in his cohort, spending extended periods at least twice in the United States, and possibly traveling to India as well. By the time Boy met Coco, he was a polished, erudite, and wealthy young man with a discerning eye. When he trained that eye on Coco, she became a project for him to nurture.

  One of the first steps toward nurturing the Chanel enterprise entailed moving Coco and company out of their boulevard Malesherbes studio. In 1910, Boy subsidized Coco’s move into new, more spacious commercial quarters. He helped her choose 21, rue Cambon for the site of her new boutique—an inspired location and just a few doors from where the Chanel store still stands today—at no. 31, rue Cambon. The rue Cambon nestles in the center of the first arrondissement, in the sanctum sanctorum of Parisian culture and luxury commerce, just steps from the Tuileries, the Louvre, the Palais-Royal, the Opéra, and the historic landmark and commercial mecca that is the Place Vendôme, home to the Ritz hotel—where Coco would later live for decades. Capel also helped her find a new studio head—or première—for Cambon, Angèle Aubert, a superb seamstress and manager who remained with Coco for years.

  Together, Boy and Coco also moved their personal residence, leaving Capel’s Malesherbes apartment for a love nest on the avenue Gabriel, an elegant street that begins at the Place de la Concorde and runs parallel to the Champs-Elysées. (Boy retained ownership of the Malesherbes bachelor pad, though, as attested to by his use of letterhead stationery bearing that address, as late as 1915.) Living on the avenue Gabriel put the couple within a few meters of the Elysée Palace, home to the president of France, as well as several international embassies on the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. Their apartment windows opened out over rows of classic Parisian chestnut trees, which bloom riotously pink in springtime.

  On avenue Gabriel, Coco enjoyed that once-in-a-lifetime pleasure of decorating the first home one shares with a lover, reveling in being a grown-up, fully sexualized (if not, in this case, legitimately married) “we.” Boy had already developed his own tastes in interior design and opened Coco’s eyes to the beauties of his favorite antiques and offbeat objets. He introduced her, for instance, to his beloved Coromandel screens. These folding dark lacquered wood panels date back at least to seventeenth-century China (although they derive their name from the Indian region to which they were imported in the eighteenth century). Sometimes inlaid with jade, porcelain, or iridescent abalone, they feature delicately painted natural landscapes—birds in flight, trees, flowers, and snowcapped mountains—or decorative interior motifs depicting fans, palaces, and human figures in flowing Asian robes. Capel may have known and admired the beauty of Coromandel screens before Coco ever did, but they exerted an instant magnetic pull on her. She would spend a lifetime collecting them. “The first time I saw a Coromandel, I cried, ‘How beautiful!’ They play the role that tapestries did in the Middle Ages,” she told Morand.

  Chanel would come to be known for a fashion sensibility distinguished by modern, airy lightness, crisp lines, and sparse adornments, but under Boy’s guidance (and with the help of his pocketbook), she indulged a somewhat different aesthetic sense at home. The avenue Gabriel apartment reflected Coco and Boy’s love of deep, golden tones, ornate lacquered furniture, mirrors in gilt frames, floral designs, English silver, Oriental vases, white satin bedding, and sofas piled with soft, puffy cushions—all enclosed by those dark folding screens. Coco had the rugs dyed a deep beige, to give them, she said, an earthy color. The resultant décor communicated at once a warm, embracing feeling and a tasteful aura of privilege and old money. For the rest of her life, in every home she occupied, Coco would re-create for herself the look of this early apartment—the only place it seems she ever felt truly settled and at ease. She would also keep a white marble bust of a handsome young clergyman atop her mantelpiece. It was the focal point of her living room, and she told friends and visitors it wa
s a distant relative of hers, the canonized Reverend Father Chanel, killed by “African natives” while doing missionary work in the nineteenth century. A closer look reveals that it is, in fact, Monsignor Thomas Capel, Boy’s uncle. She had claimed Boy’s family as her own.

  Not even the delight of new love deterred Coco from pursuing, for a time, her earliest and most deeply held ambition: to become a star. Singing, she knew, was out, and so in 1911 she switched her focus to dance. Having been introduced to much of the Parisian avant-garde by Boy, Coco learned about the new “barefoot” dance of American sensation Isadora Duncan. A proponent of a free, less constrained form of dance, Duncan was drawn to the movement depicted on ancient Greek pottery and friezes, and had traveled to the Acropolis to stand among the ruins and commune with the Hellenic world, “inhaling inspiration,” as she put it. Now she’d come to Paris with her troupe of young girls, known as the Isadorables.

  Coco attended one of Duncan’s salon performances on the avenue Villiers—at which the dancer appeared nude beneath her diaphanous toga—and claimed to be unimpressed. Coco never cared for nudity and dismissed Duncan as “a Muse for the provinces.” But she was intrigued by another young dancer who traveled in modernist circles and was currently the mistress of actor Charles Dullin: Elise Toulemon, otherwise known by her Hellenic stage name, Caryathis. Although a classically trained ballerina, Toulemon practiced “eurythmics,” a new, improvisational, natural approach to movement, invented by Swiss educator Emile Jaques-Dalcroze. (Later, Caryathis—like Coco—would collaborate closely with the Ballets Russes.)