Mademoiselle Page 9

  Coco began trekking up to the rue Lamarck in Montmartre for early morning class with Toulemon. Montmartre was already the simmering epicenter of modernist artists of every stripe, and several members of Chanel’s future coterie were already living and working there, including Pablo Picasso, Max Jacob, and poet Pierre Reverdy. Though Coco was dedicated to her new pursuit, it was not to be. She had little appreciable talent for dance, and Caryathis told her so. Upon this, Coco—now twenty-eight—finally put away her stage dreams. She did, however, continue studying with Caryathis for a time, as a way of keeping her body toned and fit, she said. And the study of eurythmics may have benefited Coco even more than she realized. Her fresh modern fashion designs, which would bring Chanel the stardom she longed for, actually displayed some Dalcrozian qualities. In their striking ease, simplicity, and heightened sense of bodily awareness and harmony, Chanel clothes suggest, even now, a sartorial translation of some of the guiding principles of early modern dance.

  Chanel’s evolving fashion sensibility owed a good deal to Boy Capel’s aesthetic influence as well. As she had with Etienne, Coco now regularly pilfered objects from Boy’s closet—especially sportswear items such as the polo shirts he favored for beach weekends, English schoolboy-style blazers, and loose-fitting sweaters. And she continued to fancy masculine-style riding attire, too. Seeing this, Boy insisted her riding clothes be of the finest material and cut: “Capel said to me, ‘I am going to have your clothes redone elegantly, by an English tailor.’ ” He sent her to the finest British menswear tailor in Paris and had a suit made for Coco that fit her to perfection—a long, slim, asymmetrical jacket and trousers, in a shimmering pearl gray. Coco wore the outfit when she and Boy visited Royallieu to go riding with Balsan—with whom they stayed on good terms. Coco’s newfound elegance stunned the old gang.

  While hats still made up the bulk of her business, a few of the tomboyish pieces she was now wearing found their way into her store—or rather into her stores. In 1913, Boy had the great foresight to encourage Coco to expand her Paris boutique and open a branch in the seaside resort of Deauville—where they spent summers, at the Hôtel Normandy. The new shop opened on the rue Gontaut-Biron, just across from Deauville’s very grand casino. Chanel hired two local teenaged girls and hung out her first awning, on which black letters spelled out “Gabrielle Chanel,” against a white background. The new store location proved as brilliantly chosen as the one on Cambon—rue Gontaut-Biron lay directly in the path of a constant stream of strolling aristocrats on holiday. Chanel and her staff had no qualms when it came to promoting their wares—as proved by an early article in the September 1913 issue of the woman’s magazine Femina:

  Deauville: At [Chanel’s] “Frivolities” Shop, Rue de Gontaut Biron: Every morning, at the chic time of day, groups form in front of this trendy new boutique. Sportsmen, foreign nobility, and artists call to one another and chat; some, friends of the establishment, approach passing ladies, inviting them to enter and select a hat, “Come dear Countess, a little hat, just one, for just five Louis!” And they enter, they chatter, they flirt, they show off their astonishing outfits.… Outside, it’s a commotion, a double row of people sit and watch, contemplating, a double wave that rises ceaselessly toward the sea. It’s Deauville passing by.

  Women: he wanted them all the time.… He wanted … to study their profiles … to cultivate their intelligence, to debauch them, to mould their characters, to get rid of them … to stay in bed for days instructing them in strange literatures.

  —PAUL MORAND, LEWIS AND IRENE

  The years between 1910 and 1914, from age twenty-seven to thirty-one, were probably the best of Coco Chanel’s life, bringing her fulfillment in the two realms Freud deemed necessary for happiness: love and work. Coco and Boy were not married, but together they enjoyed many domestic pleasures, including the pleasure of looking out for young André Palasse, Chanel’s orphaned nephew. André had lodged with a country priest after the death of his mother, Julia, but by 1913, when André was nine, Coco and Boy had welcomed him into their home. They took him along when they traveled to Deauville, where he kept Coco company in her boutique.

  The fashionable crowds of the rue Gontaut-Biron, Deauville (illustration credit 3.3)

  The sight of the dark-haired little boy at Chanel’s side invited gossip and speculation, despite Coco’s repeated explanation that André was her nephew, not her son. (Capel’s sister, Berthe, liked to bruit about that André was Coco’s child by Boy, though she knew this to be impossible logistically.) And although he was assuredly not the child’s father, Capel grew close to André, calling him “son,” and taking an interest in his future. “Boy knew my father very well,” recalled André’s daughter Gabrielle Palasse-Labrunie. For a time, the little trio of Coco, Boy, and André Palasse looked and functioned much like the kind of nuclear family that Coco had never had before—and never would again.

  But André did not fit perfectly into his aunt’s elegant world. While he seemed to remember little of his mother, he still loved and missed the man he called “Monsieur le Curé”—the priest who’d been his guardian and sole tutor. The country cleric had not troubled about refining the boy’s manners, and nine-year-old André evinced little interest in social decorum. His crude ways sometimes vexed Coco and Boy. Coco lamented, for example, André’s audible burping at the table (“But Monsieur le Curé does it!” André would retort); and Boy balked when, while dining with him at the Rothschilds’, the child mistook a finger bowl for a distasteful beverage and shouted, “I will not drink that!”

  Deciding that her nephew had been “badly brought up,” Chanel was adamant that André be turned into a gentleman. Her “son”—whether by nature or unofficial adoption—was a reflection of her, and would have to become learned, polished, courtly, and bilingual—as much like Boy Capel as possible.

  With Capel’s intervention, André was accepted into Beaumont College, Boy’s Jesuit alma mater. The arrangement was ideal—Coco had neither the time nor, frankly, the inclination for the domestic duties of motherhood. She cared deeply for André, but she had a business, a love affair, and a social life to manage. Besides, at Beaumont, André would meet the right people and learn everything necessary to leap over many rungs on the social ladder, including perfect, unaccented English and the manners of an upper-class Briton. Still struggling to acclimate to her own dramatic social rise, Chanel was ensuring a far smoother ascent for her young charge—the greatest gift she could imagine giving him.

  While André boarded away in England, Coco received instruction at home in Paris. Boy revealed to her the infinite joys of books and art, sharing with her his eclectic, even slightly mystical tastes. Like many progressive people of his generation, Boy had discovered theosophy—the movement devoted to investigating connections between humanity and the divine—propounded in the early twentieth century by Madame Helena Blavatsky and Rudolf Steiner, and studied by such modernist artists as Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, and Kazimir Malevich. Coco joined Boy at the lectures on theosophy by Isabelle Mallet, at Paris’s Société théosophique.

  The side of Boy that drew him to such quasi-religious theories must have resonated with the peasant Catholic in Chanel. Like Boy, she’d grown up surrounded by the symbology of the church, but she’d also been steeped as a young child in the residual pagan beliefs of her rural ancestors—people who kept talismans and believed in curses. Her mystical side and his could commune over topics such as theosophy, and Capel’s spirituality and Catholic training undoubtedly helped Coco to absorb and accept him as her teacher. Theosophy appealed to Coco, and in her later years, she referred to herself as “an old theosophist.”

  An ardent student of European philosophy, Boy read Voltaire, Rousseau, and Nietzsche; but he was equally drawn to Hindu theology, Old Testament exegesis, mathematics, science, east Asian history, and anything on art. He haunted art auction houses, with an eye especially for Chinese and Japanese art, and collected catalogs for these sales, which Coco
kept in her own library for the rest of her life.

  Boy also introduced Coco to poetry—especially Baudelaire’s 1865 prose poem, “Knock Down the Poor!” (“Assommons les pauvres!”) This still-shocking short piece skewers liberal pieties about the “deserving poor.” In it, a man recounts beating an elderly beggar nearly to death: “I [broke] two of his teeth … grasped his throat … and began vigorously to beat his head against a wall.” Just when the narrator believes he’s killed the man, the tables turn: “[The beggar] hurled himself upon me, blackened both my eyes, [and] broke four of my teeth.” This retaliatory violence thrills the (now-bloody) narrator, who believes he has “restored [the beggar] his pride and his life.” Declaring, “Sir, you are my equal,” the attacker then offers to “share his purse” with the beggar.

  Chanel immediately grasped the poem’s allegorical resonance for her life. Like Baudelaire’s beggar, she shocked the world by aggressively avenging the wrong done to her, demanding that the privileged recognize her as an equal worthy of financial reward. Decades later, Chanel would tell an interviewer, “Boy Capel introduced me to ‘Assommons les Pauvres!’… which informed my moral outlook.… I was that pauper whom Baudelaire needed to shake out of passivity.”

  That Boy pointed Coco toward the poem suggests that she had revealed to him her wretched early life and the bitterness it had sown in her. Perhaps he used it to urge her to action. Capel clearly saw himself as Chanel’s teacher in myriad ways. He discouraged her, for example, from accepting conventional standards of beauty. While supremely attractive, Coco knew that her appearance did not conform to her era’s notions of beauty. With her thin, boyish frame and long neck, “I didn’t resemble anyone,” she told Paul Morand. “I’m not pretty,” she’d lament to Capel. But Boy had little patience for her insecurities: “Of course you’re not pretty. But I have nothing more beautiful than you.” It was effective. Coco tended to believe what Boy told her.

  Actress Gabrielle Dorziat costumed in a Chanel hat and Jacques Doucet gown for Le Diable Ermite, 1913

  According to Chanel, Boy also debunked some of her expectations of romantic love, finding them childish. When a petulant Coco, for example, whinged about not receiving flowers from him, Capel responded by having a bouquet delivered within the half hour. She was delighted. One half hour after that, another bouquet arrived, and then one more soon after. Coco grew bored and impatient with all the flowers—and that was the point. “Boy wanted to train me. I understood the lesson. He was training me in happiness,” Chanel told Morand. “He was only happy in the company of the little provincial brunette, the undisciplined child I was. We never went out together (at that time, Paris still had certain rules). We put off such public expressions of sentiment for later, when we would be married.”

  Coco unquestionably wished to marry Boy. “We were made for each other,” she said. But whatever he may have told her, Capel never intended to legitimize their union. For all his open-mindedness and genuine appreciation of Coco, Boy Capel was still a man of his times and class. He limited their appearances in public and introduced her only to some of his friends, mainly artists or intellectuals, including actress Cécile Sorel and newspaper mogul Alfred Edwards (whose wife, Misia, became Coco’s lifelong best friend).

  Actress Cécile Sorel, costumed by Chanel in striped silk jersey for her role in L’Abbé Constantin, 1918 (illustration credit 3.5)

  Theater artists like Sorel proved especially useful new friends, since Coco prevailed upon them to wear her hats in public and eventually convinced a few to wear her creations onstage. The lovely Gabrielle Dorziat—an acquaintance of Boy’s whom Chanel had encountered at Royallieu—was among the first actresses to promote Chanel in this way. Starring in a 1912 adaptation of Maupassant’s Bel Ami, Dorziat appeared in a Chanel hat, a simple broad-brimmed model adorned with a single dramatic plume. The rest of her costume had been designed by the most famous couturier in Paris, Jacques Doucet, who’d required some cajoling to permit his work to mingle onstage with that of a young upstart like Chanel. The following year, Dorziat sported a black satin hat by Chanel in a production of Le Diable Ermite (again paired with Doucet costumes). Chanel would continue providing hats, and soon entire costumes for theater (and later films) for the rest of her career.

  Along with Boy Capel’s artist friends, some of his more broadminded British friends also met his new mistress. In their company, Boy and Coco would dine at Maxim’s and the Café de Paris, visit art exhibitions, and attend the most glamorous musical and theater events. When Sergei Diaghilev shocked and dazzled Paris with his 1913 Rite of Spring, Coco attended opening night, escorted by power couple Charles Dullin and Caryathis. She seemed to be navigating perfectly through Parisian waters, with Boy removing most obstacles in her path. But this new freedom had its limits: Rarely, if ever, did Capel bring Coco into the drawing rooms of French society. France’s titled class was not yet ready to welcome the likes of her, and Boy was clearly looking after his own interests. Introducing Coco into French salons might be a social gaffe from which an ambitious young man would never recover.

  Coco tolerated such restrictions and—at least in retrospect—tended to put the best face on them. When she recalled, for example, how many evenings she and Boy spent home alone in their apartment, she claimed to have preferred this arrangement, giving the memory an exotic, slightly racy spin: “I have a harem woman side to me, which is quite happy with this kind of seclusion.”

  A classic example of the elaborate style Chanel rejected: a striped day dress by Charles Frederick Worth, 1900 (illustration credit 3.6)

  The truth was, not only was Boy protecting his social reputation by hiding Coco, he was freeing himself to see other women. Capel loved Coco, but that did not hinder his pursuit of the many conquests that fell into his lap so easily. Any young man as handsome, charming, worldly, and rich as Boy Capel would have found it challenging to resist the seductions of Paris. But Boy was driven by more than pleasure. He had large-scale ambitions and clearly saw himself as a future world leader. He needed a suitable consort for such a life—not a seamstress, however dazzling.

  Coco knew of Boy’s other women but—at least in her recollection of these days—maintained an insouciant calm about it all. “He could sleep with all those ladies.… I found it … a bit disgusting, but I didn’t care,” she recalled. She even claimed to have encouraged Boy to share the details of his conquests. In her telling, Boy rewarded her sangfroid with utter devotion, of soul if not of body.

  Deauville … was a perfect orgy of wealth and amusement.

  —HELEN PEARL ADAM

  By the summer of 1914, the onset of World War I brought events far more momentous than Boy’s indiscretions. When the German army invaded nearby Belgium and began making significant progress toward Paris, upscale French citizens sought refuge outside of the city. For many, Deauville beckoned as a safe haven, and Capel shepherded Coco up to the coast, insisting she stay there for her protection. Ever the businessman, he advised her to keep her Deauville shop open, which she did. The decision proved wise in several ways, for Deauville was becoming an outpost for wealthy women temporarily displaced from Paris. Deprived of their usual dressmakers and willing to pay highly inflated prices, these women needed more than just clothes—they needed a new style commensurate with a drastically changing world. Coco’s fresh, minimalist style struck the perfect chord. The look she’d created for herself—born of her own limited funds, tomboyish temperament, social contrarianism, and instinctive desire for speed and freedom—now seemed to suit almost everyone. Somehow, through a kind of fashion alchemy, the Chanel look started feeling inevitable. A page had been turned.

  I became famous very suddenly, without realizing it.

  —COCO CHANEL

  With her double status as fashionable boutique owner and companion of the dashing Boy Capel, Coco had become something of a personage in Deauville. While not yet accepted by society ladies, she aroused their curiosity. Count Jean-Louis de Faucigny-Lucinge,
a long-standing acquaintance of Coco’s, shared his mother’s memories of Deauville, which sum up the contradictory nature of Chanel’s renown at the time:

  A young designer established herself in Deauville, Gabrielle Chanel. She made ravishing hats that elegant women loved to order. She had been the mistress of Etienne Balsan and belonged, therefore, to a certain “class,” or rather, she was déclassée. According to my mother, people visited [Chanel’s] boutique out of curiosity or because they liked her clothes. But when she showed up at the Casino, on the arm of her English lover, whom everyone knew, Boy Capel, they’d “forget” entirely to greet her. She did not take offense, and played the game, aware that she belonged to the demi-monde. This ostracism … was, in truth, the spur of her irresistible social ascent.

  The count was right—Coco was biding her time. Even while staying on the margins of society, she’d learned how to use that fact to attract attention. And Deauville, with its concentrated population of style mongers and people watchers, offered Chanel an ideal showcase for her unconventional look.

  Coco developed a reputation for flouting convention. She thought nothing, for example, of going for a dip in the Atlantic Ocean—something society women rarely did. Odd as it seems to us today, only children, servants, and the occasional foreigner at Deauville and other resorts ever ventured into the sea; ladies merely gazed—fully dressed—upon it. Given the rarity of ocean bathing, Coco had little choice but to fashion her own swimsuits, which looked much like what men wore—two-piece ensembles consisting of knee-length jersey culottes and matching tank tops. Soon, though, as wartime rendered many such fine points of feminine decorum irrelevant, objections to women swimming fell away. When that happened, Chanel’s bathing costumes (modest to our eyes but daring at the time) flew out of her boutiques, along with the head-hugging swim caps she’d also devised. The beaches were quickly covered with jersey-clad Chanel look-alikes.