“The upheaval of values characterizes our era, some say. A somewhat naive statement, since only one value dominates our times: money — first through the plethora, then through its lack.” So wrote the diarist Elisabeth de Gramont, in her measured and sardonic tone, when the fevered pitch of the twenties finally reached its climax in November 1929, after the Wall Street crash. Gramont told how the preceding decade had seen “all values, the only ones left in this world… going up like a column of mercury,” and described the luxury cars — the Rolls-Royces, the Hispano-Suizas, the Mercedes — and the spendthrift lifestyle of the speculators and the war profiteers, and how artists called it a golden age because “from the masterpiece to the daubed, everything sold for exorbitant sums.” People previously of moderate means acquired new ambitions, buying châteaus, racing stables and yachts, and the price of property continued rising astronomically. When the banks failed, many people’s assets were reduced by as much as 90 percent.
A well-to-do Englishman, weathering the storm in a Paris hotel, described how a man shot himself in an adjacent room, an old American woman threw herself out of the window clutching her cat to her bosom, and another woman was saved from an overdose of sleeping pills only because her Pekinese barked and gave the alarm. The Englishman wrote, “I lost lots of money, and Coco Chanel was in a panic, while Misia Sert… remained quiet in her flat on the top floor of the Meurice,”1 the famous Parisian hotel.
Gabrielle was in certain panic in this period of great dearth, but she hid it well from her reduced number of clients, and still made money. This was helped by the fact that in the few short years since its introduction, Chanel № 5 had become the world’s highest-selling perfume.
Meanwhile, Adrienne Chanel’s faithful lover, Baron Maurice de Nexon, had finally been released by his father’s death to receive his inheritance and marry. And in April 1930, “Mademoiselle Gabrielle Chanel, dress designer, residing at 29 rue Faubourg Saint-Honoré,” was Adrienne’s chief witness at the quiet Paris wedding. On that day, Gabrielle’s thoughts must have dwelt on her initial fall from respectability, when she chose to live openly with her horse-mad Etienne Balsan. Did she regret? Probably not; nevertheless, she must have recognized the irony of having recently given up a man who had now married someone else, while her aunt was at last entering into her own marriage. Some of the old Royallieu friends, including Etienne, were present on that otherwise happy day.
That summer, Misia was Gabrielle’s almost permanent guest at La Pausa. While she had not recovered from her desertion by Sert (she never would), Misia nonetheless enlivened the atmosphere for the villa’s numerous guests. Dmitri Pavlovich was also in the south of France, and introduced Gabrielle to the present tsar of Hollywood, Samuel Goldwyn. As America’s economic crisis worsened with each month, Goldwyn was doing his best to counter it by turning Hollywood into an even greater star attraction than it had so far been. He engaged Gabrielle in earnest discussions. She was reluctant, but Goldwyn persevered: he wanted her to come to Hollywood.
When millions of Americans were now jobless, Goldwyn understood that reducing his costs would be a mistake: he must make his films even greater extravaganzas of escape. Recognizing the need to encourage a more middle-class audience to view his films, he believed that women would be more attracted if they knew they were to see the very latest fashions from the hand of the most famous Parisian couturier. He would pay Gabrielle the fabulous sum of one million dollars a year if she would visit Hollywood twice a year to dress his female stars, both on and off the stage. The great salesman Goldwyn failed to comprehend Gabrielle’s hesitation. She would be clothing the women who peopled the dreams of millions. They would not only advertise Chanel in every dream palace in the world, but also every time they set foot in any public place. Gabrielle finally consented.
In the spring of 1931, she set sail for Hollywood with Misia as her companion. It was an extraordinary enterprise, and there was no question that in these testing times, her enormous bursary would come in useful. Whatever came of Gabrielle’s attempt at dressing Hollywood, she and Misia would distract themselves together. Gabrielle was not at all concerned at the thought of dressing some of the most famous women in the world. But could she convince them her style was what they wanted? On her arrival in New York, word had already gone out, and Gabrielle was besieged by journalists. She told The New York Times:
It’s just an invitation. I will see what the pictures have to offer me and what I have to offer the pictures. I will not make one dress. I have not brought my scissors with me. Later, perhaps, when I go back to Paris, I will create and design gowns six months ahead for the actresses in Mr. Goldwyn’s pictures. I will send the sketches from Paris and my fitters in Hollywood will make the gowns.2
The reporters found Gabrielle taken aback at the scores of interviewers and the reception committee crowding out her suite at the Hotel Pierre. She answered questions, declaring that longer hair would be back in style, that a chic woman should dress well but not eccentrically. She said that flower-based perfumes were not mysterious on a woman, that men who used scents were disgusting, and that where, previously, people of elegance had led fashion, it was now the young who set the tone.
In a second interview, Gabrielle spoke about giving the films fashion authority, although saying she wasn’t quite sure how it was going to work out once she arrived in California. The New York Times reporter found Gabrielle “a woman whose business is charm in dress. She does not make speeches, nor has she any theatrical affectation or exhibition — her answers are simple, direct.” Gabrielle said that she never saw her clients at her salon; that her work was “impersonal.” A gown was designed on a model, and that ended it for her. She seldom had the opportunity to see a frock, and even more seldom had the inclination. Typical Gabrielle! Once something was done, it was gone; she was bored and on to the next thing: “I needed to cleanse my memory, to clear from my mind everything I remembered. I also needed to improve on what I had done. I have been Fate’s tool in a necessary cleansing process.”3
Her brief was to clothe the greatest stars of the time: Norma Talmadge, Clara Bow, Gloria Swanson, Lillian Gish, Ina Claire and Greta Garbo. Interestingly, the records for rue Cambon show that the witty and intelligent Ina Claire had already become a private customer of Gabrielle’s, in 1926. Indeed, it was Ina Claire’s Chanel wardrobe that became one of the best advertisements for Gabrielle in the States. Meanwhile, the film and fashion worlds were laying bets on whether Gabrielle really could impose her fashion dictates on the notoriously petulant and self-willed actresses of the silver screen, a group known neither for their decorum nor for the elegance of their style.
When Gabrielle and Misia arrived in Hollywood, Gabrielle was once again mobbed by reporters. The French guests were entertained at a celebrity reception in Gabrielle’s honor, and here she met several of those actresses she was due to design for, such as Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich and Claudette Colbert. The renowned directors George Cukor and Erich von Stroheim were also at the party, and von Stroheim charmed Gabrielle. She said of him, “Such a ham, but what style.” Meanwhile, Goldwyn’s chief publicist dubbed Gabrielle “the biggest fashion brain ever known.”
At another party, George Cukor introduced Gabrielle to his new “find,” Katharine Hepburn.
Gabrielle was taken around the studios, saw how films were made, saw the clothes, met the costumers, understood what the camera wanted and learned that her role was to create clothes that accentuated the personality of the stars. She was supposed to design costumes that would still be in fashion two years after she had created them; that was how long it took to make a film. She wasn’t impressed by Beverly Hills, and the ruthlessness of the studio system appalled the woman who had fought so hard for her own independence. She believed the stars were “producers’ servants,” and didn’t have much time for many of the actors either. She thought that “once you’ve said the girls were beautiful and there were a lot of feathers around, you’ve said it all… You know perfectly well that everything “super” is the same. Supersex, super productions…” Gabrielle would, however, enjoy quoting Garbo, saying to her later, “Without you I wouldn’t have made it, with my little hat and my raincoat.”
The woman who put fashionable women into raincoats had met the stars, met the producers, wasn’t that impressed and became impatient to get back to France. En route, she stopped again in New York, for what turned out to be a most useful set of encounters. She met Carmel Snow, now editor of Harper’s Bazaar; Margaret Chase, editor of Vogue; and Condé Nast, the extraordinary magazine publisher who had a gift for making money; he lived in a thirty-room penthouse on Park Avenue. Nast had amassed a fortune through his publishing company; this included Vogue and Vanity Fair. His manipulation and machinations were legendary, and Gabrielle would always have a difficult relationship with this gifted yet unscrupulous man.
Something that impressed Gabrielle perhaps the most about the United States, and was to have a lasting effect on her attitudes, was the way she saw clothes sold in the great metropolis of New York. Taking a trip around the most elegant department stores, including Bloomingdale’s, Macy’s and Saks, she also visited the Seventh Avenue garment-making district, and was fascinated by S. Klein’s, the huge discount store on Union Square.
Samuel Klein had begun, in 1912, with six hundred dollars, and by 1931, he owned the world’s largest women’s-wear store, selling as much as twenty-five million dollars’ worth of clothes every year. This was then a vast sum. Klein made no attempt at aesthetics — the floors were bare, and there were no salespeople. Riffling through crude iron racks, customers selected dresses (all copies of one kind or another) without assistance and tried them on in crowded public dressing rooms. Klein didn’t advertise, relying on rapid turnover and a markup of around 10 percent. If something on the $7.95 racks was there for more than two weeks, it was marked down a dollar. At the end of another two weeks, its price was cut again. Sometimes, dresses were sold for as little as one dollar. Large signs in Yiddish, Armenian, Polish and English read: “Don’t try to steal, our detectives are everywhere.” Today, versions of this type of clothes shopping are common, but in 1933, Gabrielle was amazed.
S. Klein would become part of American mythology, and Gabrielle returned to France, confirmed in her prophesy to her fellow couturiers that copying was inevitable and Klein’s selling policy was a sign of things to come. Refusing to believe this, the couturiers exerted themselves each season to prevent the pilfering of their ideas. And Gabrielle would say, “Fashion does not exist unless it goes down into the streets. The fashion that remains in the salons has no more significance than a costume ball.”4 She said she wouldn’t have been able to realize all her ideas, that she liked seeing them used, and that copying was not the drama for her that it was for other couturiers: “What rigidity it shows, what laziness, what unimaginative taste, what lack of faith in creativity, to be frightened of imitations! The more transient fashion is the more perfect it is. You can’t protect what is already dead.”5 (Gabrielle meant she had already moved on.)
By the twenties, Gabrielle had come to believe that haute couture would inevitably be translated “down into the streets.” And her increasingly unfitted and simple shapes could now be replicated relatively easily; they also required less yardage than previous dresses and could be copied in cheaper fabrics. New synthetics, such as rayon, were emulating much rarer textiles, such as silk, and the haute couture copies were being made up at a fraction of the cost. The line of descent began with the unofficial drawings taken — secretly — from the shows. Specialist copying houses made a living out of less costly versions of designer clothes. This idea went down through women’s personal dressmakers until it reached the cheaper, mass-market end of the garment trade and the “woman in the street.”
Following through her thought that she was quite willing for her clothes to be copied, in 1932 Gabrielle presented a fashion exhibition at the Duke of Westminster’s London house in aid of charity. (The two remained on close terms.) The idea was that dressmakers and manufacturers should come along with the express intention of copying Gabrielle’s designs. Five hundred or so society and entertainment personalities attended over the course of several days. The Daily Mail reported how “many visitors bring their own seamstresses because this collection is not for sale… Mademoiselle Chanel has authorized it being copied.” The other designers in Paris went to great lengths to protect their designs and were absolutely opposed to Gabrielle’s initiative.
Sam Goldwyn had been unconcerned about Gabrielle’s return to France and agreed that she could design the costumes for Gloria Swanson’s forthcoming film, Tonight or Never, when Swanson was in Europe. When she came over to Paris, Gabrielle’s designs for her were deemed perfect. However, after two seasons of Gabrielle’s fashion dictatorship, the stars rebelled, and refused to wear clothes designed by the same person in all their films. Confirmed in their belief that Hollywood was more significant than Paris, they didn’t care if the designer they were rejecting was Coco Chanel. As a result, Gabrielle felt released from her contract with Goldwyn and didn’t return to Hollywood. The New Yorker published a witty piece on the reasons for her retreat:
The film gives Gloria a chance to dress up in a lot of expensive clothes… the gowns are credited to Chanel, the Paris dressmaker who recently made a much publicized trip to Hollywood, but I understand she left that center of light and learning in a huff. They told her her dresses weren’t sensational enough. She made a lady look like a lady. Hollywood wants a lady to look like two ladies.
Gabrielle and Goldwyn remained, nonetheless, on the best of terms, for their relationship had been mutually beneficial. Gabrielle’s success in Hollywood raised her status yet further in France; she had become grand on an international scale. It was also good for Goldwyn, who kept the prestigious association between the designer and his films.
While Poiret was going bankrupt — creditors seized all his assets — and many of Gabrielle’s rivals cut their prices, her own two Hollywood stipends of one million dollars were a considerable help in those tough years. She had lost a number of English and American clients, and while the Americans would eventually return in force, there were still many rich women in India and South America who could well afford her couture. Vogue, meanwhile, told the world that Coco Chanel had revolutionized Hollywood by putting the actress Ina Claire into white satin pajamas.
Once again, as in the First World War, in difficult times Gabrielle’s Hollywood endeavor had enhanced her reputation. Even so, the Depression of the thirties, following the crash of 1929, had a devastating effect on virtually every country in the world. Despite Gabrielle’s upbeat pronouncement — she said that, like Goldwyn, she believed the best way to survive lean times was to maintain the highest standards — this was a tense period. In 1930, while Gabrielle had a turnover of around 120 million francs and a workforce of around 2,400, in twenty-six workrooms, it has been said that in 1932 she was forced to cut her prices by half. And although managing to retain her huge workforce, she did temporarily reduce the luxury of some of her fabrics. Silk manufacturers, for example, were horrified when Gabrielle introduced the idea of evening dresses in cotton. She had been invited to do so by an English firm, Ferguson Brothers, to promote the use of their cotton fabrics. Thus Gabrielle’s spring 1931 collection included thirty-five cotton-piqué, lawn, muslin and organdy evening dresses. It proved very popular.
In the end, however, not only did Gabrielle retain the custom of some of her richest society clients, such as Daisy Fellowes, Lady Pamela Smith, the South American Madame Martínez de Hoz and the Americans Laura Corrigan and Barbara Hutton, by 1935 business was very much improved for Gabrielle. Her clientele had grown sufficiently that her workforce had now reached four thousand. The Duke of Westminster had permitted her to adapt his nine-bedroom Audley Street London house to her own requirements. From 1930 to 1934, this became the center of Gabrielle’s cosmetics venture, part of her drive to grow by diversifying, it included the expansion of her perfume range, with № 22, Glamour and Gardénia. Like other couturiers, in order to maintain a high profile, she also now endorsed products and designed for manufacturers.
During the Depression, a young New York heiress, Maybelle Iribarnegaray, discovered that her husband was having an affair with Gabrielle. It was 1933. Her husband, Iribe, as Paul Iribarnegaray styled himself, was a thickset Basque with an impenetrable accent who often utilized his incessant womanizing to further his extraordinary talent. Besides the great Sem, Iribe had been the most talented and successful French prewar caricaturist, with a facile and sharp pen. He had then branched out and launched a successful design business, creating furniture, fabrics, wallpaper and jewelry. The success of his business had made him a significant arbiter of taste. Then, one year into the war, having dispensed with his first wife, the actress Jeanne Dirys, who subsequently died of tuberculosis, Iribe left for America, scooped up Maybelle and spent the next ten years in America, most of them in Hollywood.
Iribe worked on some of the legendary Cecil B. de Mille’s most important films, including The Ten Commandments, the largest-scale film yet made, and was promoted to artistic director of Paramount. By this point, he was also designing dresses and film sets, and was sometimes even directing. Iribe was witty and clever, with an unctuous charm, but he had also gained a reputation for being arrogant and argumentative. One day, when he reacted badly to de Mille’s criticism of his sets for King of Kings, de Mille had had enough and fired him. Iribe had also had enough, and left Hollywood, returning to France with his wife and her two children. With Maybelle’s money, Iribe now opened a shop on rue Faubourg Saint-Honoré—not far from Gabrielle’s residence, Hôtel de Lauzan — and reapplied himself to designing furniture and jewelry. He had always been intent on riches, fame and acceptance by society, and was envious of Cocteau, an old acquaintance and colleague, who infiltrated the haut monde with such ease.
On his return to Paris, Iribe hailed luxury, artisanship and nationalism as the cornerstones of his beliefs. Enslaved to money, he appears to have made and lost it at a great rate. For the moment, however, Iribe made huge sums, acquiring a luxury car, a yacht and a house in Saint-Tropez, the fishing village now transformed into one of the most select playgrounds of the rich. Colette hadn’t visited for a while, and friends warned her that it was overrun by “the sort of people photographed by Vogue.” Colette herself was in fact photographed by Vogue, but bemoaned the smothering of one of her favorite places with traffic and tourists. One morning, she found a horde of them awaiting her as she left the stationer’s, and wrote to a friend, “I didn’t hide what I thought of them.”6
Then Iribe did less well, so his long-suffering wife hustled and found him a commission from Chanel. Maybelle’s parents were meanwhile pressuring their daughter to curtail their son-in-law’s excessive spending; they were concerned he would bring them to ruin. This, combined with Iribe’s serial infidelity, finally brought the marriage to an end, and Maybelle left for America with her two children.
When Gabrielle and Iribe’s affair was still a well-kept secret, Colette and her lover, Maurice Goudeket, were inadvertently to discover it. (Gabrielle had met Colette at some point in the early twenties. They never became close, but with a number of friends in common, they met on numerous occasions.) At the end of 1931, “strangled by the Depression,” as Colette put it, and in financial straits—“Great God above, things are difficult for Maurice and me”—they were forced to sell their retreat outside Paris.
La Gerbière was a pleasant house surrounded by trees and high up in the village of Montfort-L’Amaury, where the composer Maurice Ravel lived. Gabrielle came down alone from Paris, and made the deal with Maurice Goudeket to buy the house as they walked around the garden. Colette had had no idea her partner was confirming the purchase of their house until it was all over. She then realized that Gabrielle intended bringing Iribe here for their trysts: “a place for billing and cooing,” as Colette put it.
At the end of the transaction, she was left with a sense of Gabrielle’s decisive toughness. These two remarkable women may not have felt great warmth for each other, but they did feel a strong mutual respect. Gabrielle described Colette, correctly, as “this highly intelligent woman,” saying, “The only two female writers who appeal to me are Madame de Noailles and Colette.”
In 1933, by which time everyone who was anyone summered in the south of France, Misia met Colette one day and gossiped about Gabrielle and Iribe’s engagement. Colette then wrote to a friend: “I’ve just been told that Iribe is marrying Chanel. Aren’t you horrified for her? That man is a most interesting demon.”7 Iribe’s first wife had been a good friend of Colette’s. Colette didn’t like Iribe. Finding him fawning, she was suspicious of his thrusting drive to succeed. She described him as wrinkled and pale and said that he “coos like a pigeon.” His friend Paul Morand felt rather differently.
Back in Paris, having foretold the transatlantic cataclysm… having sensed that the time for misery was to come; Iribe felt that one had to fight against these curses and die, as a French artisan, for the individual and for quality. In love with the homeland he was returning to and disappointed by it, he was publishing Témoin.”
8
Iribe had founded the magazine Le Témoin before the First World War, and now persuaded Gabrielle to fund its relaunch. With forceful Iribe graphics, this time Le Témoin served to support a growing French nationalism. In one illustration, Marianne, female symbol of liberty in France, was Gabrielle, under a bench of sneering judges: Roosevelt, Chamberlain, Mussolini and Hitler. Iribe was now an archpatriot who despised his nation’s present government. Fierce antirepublican sentiment — the same that had brought Hitler to power in Germany not so long before — spawned a number of right-wing leagues, the aim being to overthrow the French Third Republic in favor of a strong, uniting individual. One of the most powerful right-wing elements, the Action Française, under François Maurras, wanted a restoration of France’s monarchy. Iribe wasn’t a monarchist, but he believed that democratic government was ineffectual.
As one element of the drive to patriotism, Le Témoin was anti-German and anti-Jewish. Above all, it was antiforeign, claiming France for the French alone. However, in 1934, Gabrielle was as shocked as the rest of Paris when a demonstration by forty thousand right-wing associations and war veterans ended by being one of the bloodiest since the Paris commune of 1871. Sixteen people were killed, more than two thousand were injured, the Right was narrowly defeated and the communists and socialists were roused to sink their differences in a new party, the Popular Front.
After more than a decade of entertaining and “show,” Gabrielle now gave up the Hôtel de Lauzan on the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, and moved into a large suite at a hôtel pension in the Ritz; her rooms were situated on the rue Cambon side. The furniture and objects she wished to keep were moved into a third-floor apartment she had made for herself in her rue Cambon building, at number 31. Here she would keep her clothes. For the rest, when Gabrielle felt the need of a home, she could travel south to La Pausa.
This move into the hotel had possibly come about after some prodding from the demanding Iribe. He had told her he thought her way of life was corrupting and didn’t understand why she needed so much. If she lived more simply, he might live with her. He said he hated complex people. Gabrielle apparently obliged, moving into two rooms in a family house nearby. After a short time, Iribe asked her, “Do you think I’m accustomed to living in such hovels?” and went to stay in the Ritz. Not long afterward, Gabrielle moved to the hotel, too.
This transition from the Faubourg Saint-Honoré to somewhere with its own servants meant that Gabrielle brought to an end her long association with her devoted majordomo, Joseph. Joseph had arrived when “given” to her by Misia on the eve of her wedding sixteen years before. Gabrielle and her manservant parted on bad terms: her ability to be unsentimental was at times quite ruthless. And yet, the loyal Joseph would never make any public criticism of his ex-employer.
Between Gabrielle’s fashion house and her textile and jewelry workshops, her expenditure was large. The effects of the Depression and the need to cut costs may have been another contributing factor in her move from the Faubourg Saint-Honoré to the Ritz. She now permitted herself to lean on Iribe. After years of grumbling resentment against the distributors of her perfumes, the Wertheimers, Gabrielle had begun a legal tussle with them over her “abused rights.” Iribe was sufficiently bullish that Gabrielle overestimated his abilities as a negotiator and asked for his assistance.
The serious lawsuits Gabrielle now brought against the Wertheimers drove them to attempt removal of her as president of the board. In September 1933, Gabrielle had given Iribe power of attorney, and he presided over a board meeting. But he was reckless enough to refuse signature of the minutes, giving the board just the ammunition it wanted; he was voted off by a majority. Continuing with the company’s reorganization, the Wertheimers succeeded in removing Gabrielle as president in 1934. Outraged, she could do little for the moment.
In 1934, Gabrielle was again in Roquebrune for the summer, at La Pausa. Friends staying included the composer Poulenc, the dancer Serge Lifar, and Horst P. Horst, a young German photographer. Another friend who often stayed at La Pausa was the Italian count Luchino Visconti, the future film director. Gabrielle had known Visconti for several years. At this time, Visconti’s self-consciousness about his position as a nobleman of leisure drove him to put much of his energies into his racehorse breeding. He met Gabrielle and her friends in Venice at the Lido or at the Venetian palazzo of his sisters-in-law, Madina and Niki Arrivabene, and in Paris. Serge Lifar recalled how it appeared as if all society was in Venice, and they all thought themselves
unique, exciting and beautiful… During those years… at Venice there were the great popes, like the Visconti, and the Volpi “doges.” Between Paris and Rome, society communicated and intertwined continuously. In Paris, those who welcomed me were the same ones I met in London, Rome or Venice, all capitals on that axis of triumphant worldliness.9
Visconti’s biographer wrote that “Visconti loved Natalie Lelong [half sister of Dmitri Pavlovich], who had an affair with Serge Lifar and several women as well; Chanel had an affair with Visconti, who also loved Niki Arrivabene — they all loved each other and were all beautiful, bisexual and attractive.”10
Despite his painful shyness, when Visconti arrived in Paris, his background and his handsome looks gave him a natural entrée into the Parisian version of the sophisticated Venetian milieu. When he was there, he had an open invitation to Gabrielle’s much-coveted lunches and dinner parties, where he found “the most glittering, famous and interesting wits at her table.” One or the other of Visconti’s sisters-in-law sometimes accompanied him, and one of them remembered these occasions as “so chic, one could die.”
Although Visconti’s understanding of Gabrielle wasn’t comprehensive, he came to know her well. Describing her as La Belle Dame Sans Merci, he recalled “her sufferings, her pleasure in hurting. Her need to punish, her pride, her rigour, her sarcasm, her destructive rage, the single-mindedness of the character who goes from hot to cold, her inventive genius.”11 Visconti was a connoisseur of interiors, making a number of fine ones himself, and admired what Gabrielle had created at La Pausa. He added that the gardens were “special again,” saying that Gabrielle “was the first to cultivate “poor” plants like lavender and olive trees, discard lilies… and flowers of that kind. The house was decorated in beige leather and chamois sofas, pieces of Provençal and Spanish furniture, then totally out of fashion, and everything was in soft colors like a painting by Zurburan.”12
After years of wrestling with his homosexuality, Luchino Visconti had finally reached an accommodation with himself. This in turn led to some major decisions. Rejecting a conservative aristocratic existence and the comforts of family — in which, nonetheless, he believed profoundly — Visconti had decided he would make his mark on the world through art. In company with a number of others, he had fallen passionately in love with the photographer Horst, who had recently cemented his reputation with a set of alluring photographs of Gabrielle. Horst remembered that she
had had a row with Vogue [in fact, Condé Nast] and no photograph of her was allowed to appear in the magazine. I was sent to her: I photographed her and she said that the photographs were good of the dresses but looked nothing like her. “How can I take a good photograph of you if I don’t know you,” I answered. So she asked me to dinner. At that time she had had a row with Iribe… and she was thinking of him when I took my photographs. She adored them. “How much are they?” she asked. “Nothing,” I said. “To be able to take a photo like that of you was wonderful”—and we became friends.13
In the summer of 1935, Gabrielle was at La Pausa awaiting Iribe, who had spent the previous weeks in Paris. He called to say he would arrive on the sleeper from Paris the following morning and suggested they could begin their day with a game of tennis. According to some sources, Iribe was warming up when Gabrielle joined him. Halfway through the first set, she went over to the net to ask him not to hit the ball so hard. Looking at her over the rim of his sunglasses, he stumbled and then collapsed. He had suffered a massive heart attack. Two days later, Iribe died in a nearby clinic, never having regained consciousness. Years later, Gabrielle would confess to believing she had caused his death because she’d persuaded him to resume the game when he’d complained of feeling faint.14
Gabrielle was in a terrible state; it felt as if her own life was finished. Her affair with Iribe may have been a tempestuous one, but she had felt both stimulated and supported by this dominating man. Unusually, she had allowed herself to lean a little.
At night, Gabrielle’s anguish grew worse as she lay alone, rigid with wakefulness and grief. Misia rushed to La Pausa. The doctor was summoned and prescribed a sedative, Sedol, to calm her and ensure some sleep. Gabrielle would later say that it wasn’t so as to live she had taken it, but simply to “hold on.”
Once again, a man had “left” her and, once again, she was alone. Each time Gabrielle lost someone, she appears to have relived her desertion by her father and been plunged into an emotional crisis. But this time the effect was bad indeed. Not only did she feel again that desertion, she also experienced the most terrifying reminder of her own mortality. The night was impossible without the sedative. For a few hours it numbed her grief and protected her from the sense that every time she closed her eyes she was no longer alive. Gabrielle quickly became dependent on this blessed release from pain, and after this period of abject misery, she continued injecting herself each night with Sedol to help her relax and find sleep.
Years later, in the sixties, Gabrielle’s Swiss doctor would tell her assistant, Lilou Marquand, that while on a skiing trip to Switzerland, Gabrielle had broken her ankle. This was most probably the year following Iribe’s death, when Gabrielle was indeed on a skiing trip with Etienne de Beaumont and other society friends. She was given morphine to combat the pain from her broken ankle, and Lilou Marquand went on to say, “The pain disappeared, and habit did the rest.” Saying that “this story was not well known” and that Gabrielle seemed to have forgotten it, Marquand, who knew Gabrielle well, speculated that even if her doctor might not have told her everything, “Did she really believe she was only injecting a little bit of morphine in a liquid with added vitamins?”15 However, Gabrielle always had her own truths, and as time went on, one of these would be that what she injected herself with was a simple sedative.
When Gabrielle came to describe her relationship with Iribe, we understand something of what it had meant to her. She said he was
a very perverse creature, very affectionate, very intelligent, very self-seeking and exceptionally sophisticated… He was a Basque with astonishing mental and aesthetic versatility, but where jealousy was concerned, a real Spaniard. My past tortured him. Iribe wanted to relive with me the whole of that past lived without him and to go back through lost time, while asking me to account for myself.16
One suspects that, perhaps along with Reverdy, Iribe was the other man to whom Gabrielle confided the most about her past. She and Iribe had set out “on the trail of my youth” and visited the convent at Aubazine, far away in Corrèze.
Yet, years later, Gabrielle also said that
he wore me out, he ruined my health. My emerging celebrity had eclipsed his declining glory. He loved me, subconsciously… so as to be free of this complex and in order to avenge himself on what had been denied him. For him I represented that Paris he had been unable to possess and control… I was his due.17
At the end of August 1935, following Iribe’s death, Gabrielle was not yet in a fit state to return to Paris, and stayed on in the south until late autumn. For the first time, the enthusiasm that drove her to make each new collection failed to draw her back to Paris. She was the same age Iribe had been — fifty-two — and she felt worn out. Perhaps Gabrielle was having an intimation that her phenomenal energy was finite. She managed by giving instructions for the following spring’s collection in long conversations over the phone to Paris. Years later, one of her long-term artisan employees lost his father, and Gabrielle asked him to come and see her at the Ritz:
She sat me down beside her. She told me, and I’ll always remember this discussion, which lasted for over an hour… “I wish you a lot of passion, a lot of love, this happens in life! But against grief, there is only one true friend — when you knock on the door, he is behind it: work!”
And as work had become her habit, it was the only antidote Gabrielle knew of that calmed her many woes. In work she approached a state of something akin to peace. Thus, when she returned to Paris, that was what she did.
Cocteau now asked her to design the costumes for a new play he was about to write, Oedipus Rex, and Jean Renoir asked her to do the same for his forthcoming film The Rules of the Game. It was Gabrielle who had recently introduced her sometime young lover Luchino Visconti to her friend Jean, the painter Renoir’s son. She explained to Renoir that the young Italian count wanted to work in films. Despite Visconti’s painful shyness, he and Renoir got on, and Visconti went to watch the great director at his work. A year later, Renoir was sufficiently impressed that he included him in his film crew. Sometime later still, Visconti was generous enough to give Gabrielle the credit for being the instrument that helped him find his true path.
When Gabrielle returned to Paris that autumn, she had not only returned to work, she had returned to do battle. She was setting about overcoming a professional obstacle, growing steadily over the last couple of years, but which she had so far refused to countenance. For the first time in more than fifteen years, she had a serious competitor: her name was Elsa Schiaparelli. There were other competitors — Mainbocher, Marcel Rochas — but it was “that Italian woman,” as Gabrielle called her, who was beginning to attract as much attention as Gabrielle had been accustomed to since the First World War.