Three months before Arthur’s death, Gabrielle had signed a contract. While keeping number 21 rue Cambon, she was to move her salon and personal apartment to much larger premises, just down the street at number 31. At this address, she was registered for the first time in Paris as a couturier. The five floors of 31 rue Cambon were where Gabrielle was to design, meet clients, and promote her business. By no means the largest Chanel salon, to this day, number 31 has remained the most important in the Chanel empire.
During the first months after Arthur’s death, on Saturdays, Gabrielle’s chauffeur drove her back to her villa retreat out at Garches. There, relieved of the need to pretend, she gave herself up to grief. At times, her faithful butler and housekeeper, Joseph and Marie Leclerc, became concerned. Gabrielle had her bedroom and everything in it done out in black. Grief had not, however, entirely obscured her good sense and robust physical and mental health. Having retired for her first night in her tomblike black bedroom, Gabrielle was overcome by its melancholy and reappeared, begging Marie to make her up a bed somewhere else.
In February 1920, Arthur’s will was published in The Times of London. The executors in Britain were Diana’s father and brother-in-law, the lords Ribblesdale and Lovat, respectively. In Paris, Arthur had chosen his friends the banker Evelyn Toulmin and Armand de Gramont, Duc de Guiche.
To Arthur’s sisters, Henriette and Edith, he bequeathed twenty thousand pounds. To his favorite, Bertha, he left nothing, knowing that she was well taken care of. (In early 1919, Bertha had entered into an arranged marriage with Herman Stern, son of the extremely wealthy art collector Lord Michelham. Herman was rather retarded, and he and his wife never lived together. But this had apparently been the deal with Bertha and her scheming motherin-law, who wanted her son to inherit the majority of the family fortune. Bertha kept her promise to have no children by Herman and in return was made financially independent for life. It appears that Arthur was an integral part of the negotiations, which had ensured his rather dotty sister’s future.)1
For Gabrielle Chanel, and someone called Yvonne Viggiano, Comtesse de Beauchamp, there was forty thousand pounds. Having dispensed his fortune with the freedom from constraint sometimes accompanying thoughts of death, Arthur had made no attempt to hide this hitherto unknown aspect of his life. Yvonne Viggiano was a young, recently widowed Italian countess with whom he must have had an important relationship. We know nothing more, except that she had a son.
For the remainder, Arthur left his estate in trust for Diana “for life, and then for our child.” Before the other bequests were taken out, the total sum was well over seven hundred thousand pounds (equivalent to approximately ten million pounds or sixteen million dollars in today’s currency). The Times noted that Arthur had disposed of his great assets in a mere one hundred words.
Regarding the emotional complications of Arthur’s short life — he was thirty-seven when he died — and his regret at having given up Gabrielle, his comment to Elisabeth de Gramont springs to mind: “It is easier… to organize the trade of coal than one’s private life.”2
The few who cared to look behind Gabrielle’s professional demeanor would see that three months after Arthur’s death, she had not begun to pull herself out of the misery into which it had plunged her. Her mourning was now to play itself out in a dark and complex fashion.
Early that spring, she would move with her two German shepherd dogs, Soleil and Lune; their three puppies; the two terriers, Pepita and Popee (her last present from Arthur); Joseph and Marie Leclerc and their little daughter, Suzanne, to a large art nouveau villa, Bel Respiro, just a short walk from La Milanaise, the one Gabrielle had rented for the previous year. It has always been said that she bought Bel Respiro.3 Gabrielle did indeed buy Bel Respiro, but not for a whole year after her move there. This was because, at first, the owner permitted her only to rent it. To all intents and purposes, this move was to help Gabrielle make a fresh start, with her friends Henri and Antoinette Bernstein as next-but-one neighbors. The real story of Gabrielle’s move was, however, much stranger than that, and until now has not been known.
On moving to Bel Respiro, she had the shutters painted an intense black. This was strongly disapproved of by her neighbors, but Gabrielle was not in a fit state to care. Indeed, those black shutters were the first indication that Bel Respiro was to be both her refuge and a kind of mausoleum for her memories. And in fact, it wasn’t the proximity of her friends but her memories that were the most significant reason for Gabrielle’s move here.
Extraordinarily, it turns out that Bel Respiro belonged to Arthur — it was the very house he had bought for himself and Diana the previous year.4
This explains the mystery of a letter from Diana to Duff Cooper, written not long after Arthur’s death and headed “Bel Respiro.” Diana had told Cooper that “I have been and still am, & I suppose I shall go on being, so terribly, desperately unhappy… I can’t write more because there is nothing to say… I have to lead the life of a recluse, otherwise I can’t sleep… I suppose I shall leave here soon and return to England.”5
Diana did indeed soon leave France, and almost never visited it again.
Meanwhile, Gabrielle was not only aware that Bel Respiro was Arthur and Diana’s house, this was exactly why she wanted it. How better to immerse herself in Arthur than by living in his home? It didn’t concern Gabrielle that Diana had only recently left, or that she knew it was Gabrielle who took up the lease. (Diana must have been beyond caring that the new tenant was toto be her husband’s old lover.) Gabrielle cared only that by being there, in some strange way she would be “living” with Arthur. In addition, her presence in his house would erase Diana from his life, and Gabrielle would gradually “replace” her.
For several months, she lived out this half-cracked existence at Bel Respiro with no one, besides Joseph and Marie, really aware of what she was doing. In her state of semibreakdown, Gabrielle, who could always move from reality to fantasy in one bound, now did so more readily. At the same time, each day, she was driven into Paris to the salon, and business prospered. Although she was a wreck and often close to tears, work really was the only thing that kept her from collapse. One wonders how she responded to the news that Diana Capel had given birth to another baby girl, in June of that year, 1920. Named June, the baby had been conceived only three months before her father’s death.
It was Misia Edwards’s marriage that August, to José Maria Sert, her lover of twelve years, that would finally initiate Gabrielle’s recovery.
Misia’s efforts to lift Gabrielle out of her blackness had so far failed. So, after the wedding, she instructed her to get out of Paris and come away with them to Venice. Tempted by the prospect of distraction, of possible relief from a state that had become a kind of madness, Gabrielle accepted Misia’s invitation to leave Paris behind her. From then on, the Serts would become two of her closest friends.
As a young woman, Misia had acquired a salon and become one of the undeniable queens of Paris. Paul Morand described her then as “a beautiful panther, imperious, bloodthirsty and frivolous.” He also said that she was “brilliant in perfidy, and refined in cruelty.”6
Misia Godebska had grown up in the world of haute bohème, where artists and society met. Musically gifted, she had married, at twenty-one, Thadée Natanson, founder of the La revue blanche; then, in order to clear her husband’s debts, she divorced him and married a fabulously wealthy newspaper magnate, the monstrous Alfred Edwards. Full of perverse nonchalance, Misia cared little about the scandal her behavior provoked.
Misia’s stormy friendship with Sergei Diaghilev had been forged at their first meeting when, after hours of talking, Diaghilev recognized the quality of Misia’s musical and artistic appreciation. Diaghilev and his impresario, Gabriel Astruc, knew that in order to succeed on any scale, they needed the patronage of the self-absorbed world of artistic fashion. Astruc called these patrons “mes chers snobs” and cultivated them with great flair. Like these “snobs,” Misia Sert was wealthy. However, her feeling for art ran far deeper than snobbery or fashion. Her generosity to the financially incompetent artistic genius Diaghilev was interspersed with endless disputes, reconciliations and Slavic declarations of affection. Without Misia, much of Diaghilev’s work might never have reached the stage.
Paul Morand said that Misia was a “harvester of geniuses, all of them in love with her — Vuillard, Bonnard, Renoir, Picasso”; the list also included Toulouse-Lautrec, Ravel and Debussy as well as poets such as Verlaine, Mallarmé and Apollinaire. Having divorced, Misia began living with José Maria Sert, a master voluptuary who revealed her own as yet unfulfilled sensuality to her. In Sert, Misia had finally discovered her life’s companion. Misia’s impromptu and bohemian entertaining had an infectious and exciting quality, reflecting the newer Paris rather than the “studied grandeur” of the older haut monde. As for Sert’s serial infidelities, the new bride had for long schooled herself to ignore them, even treating them with a “grudging admiration.”
En route to Venice, the Serts and Gabrielle stopped off at Padua, where Gabrielle went with Misia to the Basilica of Saint Anthony. Misia insisted it would dissolve Gabrielle’s despair, that Saint Anthony would give her peace. Gabrielle was reluctant, but constantly close to tears, she had obliged. Where Donatello’s high-altar masterpiece still stands, Gabrielle found herself before his statue of the saint.
Asking for help to recover from her ceaseless mourning, she saw before her a man resting his forehead on the stone floor: “He had such a sad and beautiful face, there was so much rigidity and pain in him, and his exhausted head touched the ground with such weariness that a miracle took place within me.” All at once, Gabrielle felt shameful. “How could I compare my sorrow… with someone in this distress? Energy flowed through me. I took new heart and decided that I would live.”7 Gabrielle believed she wasn’t alone, that the man she had loved was near her “on the other side, and wouldn’t leave me.” She now told herself that as long as she felt Arthur was waiting for her, she had no right to weep. “It doesn’t matter that you’re alone on this side still, for a while.”8 Gabrielle later told a friend how the woman “who had turned into a shadow, came out of that church transformed.”9
In Venice, the reborn Gabrielle understood better Misia’s fascination with Sert, the Spanish painter of grandiosity. Intense, short and vibrant, José Maria Sert was full of impassioned self-assurance, and also possessed a cruel streak. He was obsessed with art, enjoyed a consuming passion for women and, aided by an alcohol and morphine habit, lived in a world absurdly full of fantasy, high drama and adventure. The abandon of his parties was legendary.
Even the artists of Montmartre and Montparnasse, snobbish about Sert’s abilities as an artist, gave him credit for his creation of atmosphere with his striking choices and juxtaposition of objects and works of art. In Venice, Sert spoke about works of art with an erudition that “generated endless connections” for Gabrielle, and she marveled. He took her to museums and churches and showed her the mournful splendor of the city’s buildings. Fascinated and amazed, she absorbed it all like an intelligent, wondering child. Like so many before and since, Gabrielle fell under the sway of that melancholy, watery paradise La Serenissima, and returned to it regularly for the rest of her life.
In the end, though, it wasn’t history that motivated Gabrielle. With the mind of an artist, she intuited that by nurturing in oneself a certain savage disregard for the past, one was better able to make things for the present. Without denigrating the past, Gabrielle could say, with Misia, “Oh, to hell with these Botticellis and da Vincis,” and they would go off to rummage around, unearthing unlikely treasures in some backstreet junk shop, or move from the city’s restaurants to the luxury of a fashionable salon. This was the Venice where Gabrielle saw works of art in the palaces for which they were made, where she socialized with the Serts’ friends, international and Venetian society keen to live the life of the present as much as dwelling upon the illustrious past of their ancestors.
By chance, the three travelers came upon Diaghilev, in a tête-à-tête with a mutual friend, Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna (the elder), and they stayed on to lunch. The grand duchess herself had been left with little and was gracious, and grateful that she and her children had escaped the ravages of the revolution. While they talked, Diaghilev spoke of his perennial financial problems. His choreographer, Massine, was rehearsing a new production of The Rite of Spring for performance in Paris; the cost would be prohibitive. As much as anything, this was because Diaghilev insisted on a vast orchestra. (In struggling to resuscitate the postwar fortunes of the Ballets Russes, he faced problems: ballet audiences had changed, and both his French and Russian patrons’ sources of wealth had collapsed.)
It is said that Diaghilev paid no attention to Gabrielle on this occasion or several others when they met while in Venice.10 But we know that Gabrielle had not only been at the original performance of The Rite of Spring, the premiere of Parade in 1917, and the parties afterward, she had also been at the Parisian premiere of the first postwar Diaghilev-Stravinsky ballet, Pulcinella, in May of that year, 1920. And yet this woman whom Morand had described as “quite a personality,” was apparently meek and silent on these occasions. As we have seen, Misia would have the world believe that Gabrielle trailed around as her shadow in these early years of their friendship. The implication is always that the bohemian types with whom Gabrielle would socialize — and, on occasion, have affairs — liked her for nothing more than her money. The most significant reason for their friendship with her, however, was Gabrielle herself. As to her subdued manner in this period, it was more a result of her state of mourning than because she was meek and self-effacing.
From Venice, the ever-restless Serts took Gabrielle down to Rome. “We arrived weary and drained, and were obliged to visit the city, by moonlight, until we were exhausted. At the Coliseum he [Sert] remembered the recollections of Thomas de Quincey, and said some wonderful things about architecture and about the parties that might be given amongst these ruins.”11 Recalling Sert’s gargantuan appetites and his inability to do anything on a small scale, Gabrielle said that “he was as munificent and as immoral as a Renaissance man.” His perennial good humor, his erudition and encyclopaedic knowledge of the oddest things made him, for Gabrielle, the perfect traveling companion. She said that this “huge, hairy monkey, with his tinted beard, his humped back, his enormous tortoiseshell spectacles — veritable wheels — loved everything colossal.”12 He led her through the museums of Venice, explaining everything, and found in her an “attentive ignorance… that he preferred to all his erudition.”13 Gabrielle thought Sert resembled “some enormous gnome who carried gold as well as rubbish inside his hump like a magic sack. He had extremely poor taste and exquisite judgment, the priceless and the disgusting, diamonds and crap, kindness and sadism, virtues and vices on a staggering scale.”14
Returning to Paris, Gabrielle appeared to have emerged from her emotional retreat, and the Serts pronounced her cured. Gabrielle would never be entirely cured of Arthur’s loss, bearing forever its scars. Nonetheless, her powerful urge for life was too strong to lie dormant in her for more than a certain amount of time. Exhilarated by the two Serts’ mad adventures, she had decided “to live.”
One of the first signs of this more positive frame of mind was that Gabrielle now made a dramatic move. There are several versions of this story. One has it that she appeared at Diaghilev’s hotel and asked if she might see him. Another, which subtly alters the balance of power, has it that she asked him to come and see her. One suspects it was the latter, and that her description is correct:
I understand that there is a great tragedy. He has fled London because he could not pay his debts… “I live at the Ritz hotel, come and see me, say nothing to Misia.” He came to my apartment… I gave him a check… I think he didn’t think it was real… He never wrote to me, he never compromised himself by a word.15
The astonished impresario, who had hoped Misia Sert would bail him out, had instead been given a very large sum by Gabrielle to relaunch The Rite of Spring. Her request that he tell no one was to no avail; Diaghilev thrived on indiscretion almost as much as his boon companion, Misia, and in no time at all she knew. The customary explanation for Gabrielle’s gesture of munificence is that she was flexing her cultural muscles: it wasn’t only Misia who could make things happen. Unlike Misia, however, for whom the cultivation of a salon was almost a raison d’être, the artist in Gabrielle meant that she was only moderately interested in one with herself at its center. (As we have already seen, her interest in power was not for its own sake; it was above all a means to an end, usually freedom to do her work and thereby maintain her independence.) Gabrielle never failed to fall under the spell of creativity, and what primarily interested her in Diaghilev’s case was the fact of his being another artist at work. Anything made well, however modest, never ceased to enchant her. There was, however, nothing modest about Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes.
The maestro, Sergei Diaghilev, was an extraordinary creature, an incongruous, distracted mix of impulse and caprice, generosity and meanness, combined with a breathtaking ability to manipulate. He had no qualms whatsoever about a ruthless dedication to his objectives, which were devoted almost exclusively to his art. As someone remarked of him, “It was not easy to resist Diaghilev’s pressure. He would wear out his opponent, not by the logic of his arguments, but by the sheer stress of his own will.”16 His single-mindedness made him arrogantly selective about his companions, and perhaps it was only in Venice that he first registered Gabrielle properly. Perhaps it was in Venice, too, that Gabrielle understood something better about Diaghilev himself. Certainly, she found his exotic foreignness most attractive. Later, she would describe him as “the most delightful of friends. I loved his zest for life, his passions, his scruffiness, so different from the sumptuous figure of legend.”17
Meeting once again this powerful and charismatic figure, three of whose ballets she had now seen brought to the stage, Gabrielle was keen to be a catalyst for the return of the most scandalous of them so far: The Rite of Spring.
The war had not been kind to Igor Stravinsky. Little of his music had been played, and he was eking out an existence with his family in neutral Switzerland. With the successful launch of his ballet Pulcinella, however, enhanced by Picasso’s stage sets and costumes, all was set to change. Stravinsky both reclaimed his position at the center of the Ballets Russes and was relaunched as the musical darling of the most elevated Parisian salons.
For many years, with the cream of Europe’s elite, le tout Paris had reveled in the ritual of Venice’s Rabelaisian Carnevale festivities, and a series of glittering balls was followed assiduously by the journals of style. Vogue was so enamored of the festival that it became the sole subject of each February’s issue. The midwinter trip to Venice broke the tedium of the cold season, and in the emotionally chaotic postwar years, the pre-Lenten festivities were indulged in with particular abandon (Carnevale was the Italian Mardi Gras). For those unable to get to Venice, a round of parties was held in Paris, in private ballrooms. Fancy dress was already popular, and because many of the young now believed that life was pretty worthless, they sought escape in partying with a kind of nihilistic fervor.
Stravinsky’s Pulcinella brought the fashion for fancy dress out onto the theatrical stage. If Diaghilev hadn’t vetoed it, Picasso would probably have put the female dancers into contemporary dress, and the strong connection between contemporary art and fashion would have been made more explicit. Picasso’s new wife, the dancer Olga Khokhlova, “had many new robes from Chanel to show,” as Stravinsky would report.18 Olga was a devotee of Gabrielle’s clothes before her marriage to Picasso in 1918, and as his reputation began to soar she was far less constrained by cost. While Picasso indulged his insatiable appetite for sexual encounters outside marriage, he also indulged his beautiful bourgeois wife’s passion for avant-garde fashion.
After the premiere of Pulcinella, a legendary costume party was thrown for the beau monde by the affable and extravagant young prince Firouz of Persia, then a favorite of Parisian society. (He died not long afterward, probably at the hand of an assassin.) The relay of partygoers’ cars was directed out of Paris by men flashing electric torches at crossroads toward a bogus castle rented by an ex-convict friend of Cocteau’s. (The ex-convict’s business was illicit nightclubs, and he regularly had to escape capture by the police.)
On this occasion, “vast quantities of champagne were drunk. Stravinsky got tight, he went up to the bedrooms and, collecting all the feather pillows, counterpanes and bolsters, hurled them over the banisters into the great hall.”19 The ensuing pillow fight was so enthusiastic that the party went on until three the next morning. It was at this party that Gabrielle met Stravinsky once again. Afterward, he left for the provinces.
Still in festive spirit, Misia’s and Picasso’s friend the “fiendish social tyrant” Count Etienne de Beaumont gave one of his magnificent entertainments, a regular highlight of the Parisian spring calendar. From early May to the end of June, this included a series of events that took place across the city as the beau monde disported itself before its peers, all aching to outdo one another in the outlandishness of their costumes and their behavior.
Etienne de Beaumont and his wife, Edith, were then at the apex of the Parisian elite. After the war, the young couple had quickly become two of the city’s most significant hosts, and events at their spectacular hôtel particulier, at the heart of the fashionable seventh arrondissement, were noted for their edgy flavor of modernity. Vogue cooed, talking of “dinners and balls without ceasing,” and did its part to keep the Beaumonts in the forefront of everyone’s minds. Their friendships and patronage of artists of all kinds, including Picasso, Braque, Satie, Cocteau and Massine, and their reputation for daring and exhibitionism, were heralded at an evening in 1918 at which American jazz was played by black performers, arguably for the first time in France.20
The height of each year’s entertainment was the Beaumonts’ spring costume ball, a melding of seventeenth-century court masques and the most radical avant-garde. These spectaculars always had a theme, and the one for 1919 was that guests “leave exposed that part of one’s body one finds the most interesting.”21 No matter how incredible the guests’ costumes, Beaumont always strove to upstage them, with one extraordinarily androgynous outfit after another, and always designed by him. Etienne de Beaumont liked men; his wife, Edith, liked women. They also had a great fondness for each other.
Gabrielle was asked by Beaumont to help design some of the costumes for his 1919 spring ball. Beaumont loved nothing better than accentuating his power through manipulating his friends, and typically kept them in suspense about their invitations. He made a point of leaving off two or three who expected one, and anyone “in trade.” When Misia discovered, to her embarrassment, that her friend Gabrielle Chanel had not been invited, she protested by refusing to take up her own invitation. Instead, on the night of the ball, she collected Gabrielle “with Sert and Picasso as our escorts… and mingled with the chauffeurs crowded in front of the house, to watch the costumed guests make their entrance.” They must have made an odd quartet: Picasso, known to several of the guests; Misia and Sert, well-known to most of them; and then Gabrielle, unknown to a great many but recognizable as an immensely stylish woman.
Misia said they had an uproarious time sending up the guests. No matter how up-to-date the upper class’s attitudes to the arts, to bohemia, they still appeared mired in the suffocating and ancient habits of social superiority. Indeed, Etienne de Beaumont had no qualms about using Gabrielle’s skills while rejecting her as a guest. It wouldn’t be long, however, before he and his wife comprehended Gabrielle’s growing significance and were then all too keen to include her in their suave set.
It is commonly said that once Gabrielle gained power, she made it her business to subject the haut monde to the same condescension she had suffered at their hands. But Gabrielle was a more complex and ambivalent creature than that.