Lisa Chaney - Coco Chanel - An Intimate Life

While often contradictory, the source of Gabrielle’s reaction to the sixties was that she had never been interested in attacking culture. She had espoused a different — and in some ways more serious — kind of liberation for women. Gabrielle was now old, and critical, but she also understood that jeans (originally workwear) were subtly different from her appropriation of fishermen’s tops or her lover’s polo shirt for women. Their new glamour was based upon living more emancipated, modern lives. In Chazot’s interview, for example, her point was serious when she said, “I do not approve of the Mao style; I think it’s disgraceful and idiotic… the idea of amusing oneself with such games, with such formidable countries, I think it’s dreadful.” 27

When it came to miniskirts, while Gabrielle’s objections revealed her age, she was also capable of saying, “I have no right to criticize, because [the time] isn’t mine. Mine is over… Frequently I feel so alien to everything around me. What do people live for now? I don’t understand them.” 28And then she made one of those typical comments, requiring a moment’s trouble and reflection to understand, and revealing her comprehension of those tumultuous times: “I’m very well aware that everyone is out of date.” 29

Age had some time ago crept up on the woman who had remained so perennially youthful, and her arthritis and rheumatism now grew more painful. To counteract the pain, and “inconvenience,” she swallowed quantities of vitamins, painkillers and sedatives. Then, despite her doubts and apprehension about the sixties, and while she had enough self-knowledge to be able to say, “Sometimes I realize I’m ridiculous,” she continued, driven by work. Gabrielle had understood long ago that work is vital to who we are. However, setting aside the striving involved in creativity, work consumed her, was her raison d’être. In the process, it had become her demon master. But as with the drugs — the only means by which poor Gabrielle could find any rest at night — she needed to dull her sense of isolation; in her waking hours, it was only through work that she found some sense of peace.

In a quieter moment, she would also confide to one of her last intimates her belief that “a woman is a force not properly directed. A man is properly directed. He can find refuge in his work. But work just wipes a woman out. The function of a woman is to be loved.” And she confessed her feeling that “my life is a failure. Don’t you think it’s a failure, to work as I work?” 30This formidably powerful yet always feminine woman, who had found consolation in work, also believed that women “ought to play their weakness never their strength. They ought to hide that… One ought to say ‘yes but’… in other words play the fish.” 31

Gabrielle’s aversion to any kind of constraint had not diminished with the years; she was defiant: “I never settle down anywhere, I’ve chosen freedom.” Stimulated by the unpredictable, she remained irritated by much organization, and “loathed people putting order into my disorder or into my mind,” 1declaring, “Order bores me. Disorder has always seemed to me the very symbol of luxury.” 2And while the houses she had owned were beautiful and innovative in their design, she also said, “It’s not the houses I love, it’s the life I live in them.”

In her Hôtel Ritz suite, and her apartment on the rue Cambon, meanwhile, Gabrielle had created sumptuous and atmospheric surroundings, luxurious interiors filled with private symbols. Yet the apartment at 31 rue Cambon was never at heart a domestic one. Gabrielle had entertained many friends there over the years, but she also conducted business there. Someone now very familiar with the apartment describes it as “the place where she kept her memories, her links with her close friends, and her past. But if it had been a really intimate, personal apartment it would have had a bedroom. In some ways she lived her life like a man.” 3Neither was there a kitchen at rue Cambon; Gabrielle had food brought in. And while she could juxtapose grandeur with simplicity and severity with comfort, in truth, Gabrielle had little interest in the hearth.

A hotel, where she slept and ate most of her meals, is essentially an undomestic space, and its underlying atmosphere of transition precisely served Gabrielle’s needs. Although she lived in the Ritz for more than seventeen years, in theory, at any moment she could be on her way: “In a hotel I feel I am traveling.” An echo of her nomadic childhood — in whose recollection Gabrielle often spoke of trains — this existence also represented her undaunted and slightly cracked refusal to be tied down. Her openness to the possibility of change in turn represented the possibility of creativity, leading her to say, “When I can no longer create, I’m done for.” 4

By contrast, the symbols of others’ rootedness affected Gabrielle more adversely as she grew older. For example, she hated Sundays. Traditionally the family day, it was also the one when her salon was closed, making it more difficult to divert herself — with work — from admitting her sense of isolation. She professed to dislike marriage, and children, and on occasion used her unerring capacity for fantasy to erase spouses and their progeny from the lives of those around her. In the same spirit, she was quite capable of trying to destabilize a relationship. Good ones unsettled her. Gabrielle could also quietly admit to the one member of her family with whom she remained close, her namesake, Gabrielle Labrunie, “Actually, it’s you who has been right in life. You are much happier than I am. You have a husband and children. I have nothing. I am alone with all my millions.” 5Gabrielle told one of her favorite models, “I envy you because I always wanted to have children, and I had an abortion and I could never have any. It’s not true when I say that I find children disgusting.” 6

In the late sixties, when Gabrielle was in her late eighties and had become more famous still, she was once again acceptable to most of France. Yet while this enabled her to go anywhere and meet almost anyone, this usually left her unimpressed. There was, however, the odd exception. Claude Pompidou, elegant wife to de Gaulle’s prime minister, had for some time been one of Gabrielle’s clients, and she realized that Gabrielle would like an invitation to the Elysée Palace. De Gaulle’s permission must be sought. Eventually, he agreed, and Gabrielle went — accompanied by her friend, ex-prefect of police and ambassador André-Louis Dubois — to dine alone with the Pompidous. Claude Pompidou found Gabrielle beautiful, wonderfully dressed; intelligently observed her complexity, her failings, her “boldness,” and yet still found her fascinating.

Gabrielle had many years ago nurtured her image, now she was tending her legend. And while saying, “May my legend gain ground, I wish it a long and happy life!” 7she had also become its victim. Unable sometimes to distinguish it from herself, she had said some years before, “My legendary fame… each of us has his or her legend, foolish and wonderful. Mine, to which Paris and the provinces, idiots and artists, poets and society people have contributed, is so varied, so complex, so straightforward and so complicated at the same time, that I lose myself within it.” 8Her friend the novelist Michel Déon recently recalled to me how “with time, she turned a cynical eye on her milieu… She didn’t care, because being a celebrity no longer went to her head. I have rarely seen someone desire victory so much and then so disdain its rewards.” 9

Gabrielle’s friends were only temporarily able to hold back her solitude, in which she had become imprisoned, and one day, she posed a mournful question to one of them: “What’s going to happen to me? What can I do?… In bed at night I say to myself: “Why do you put up such a front? Why don’t you dump all that?” 10But she couldn’t. She talked on, through shyness and through fear. Indeed, years before, she had declared with that startling self-awareness, “I prattled away out of shyness… How many windbags, mocked for their self-assurance, are simply quiet people who, deep down, are frightened of silence?” 11Meanwhile, that “prattling” public self made a habit of toughness and self-aggrandizement: “So much insensitivity… the jewelry, the rings on her thin fingers… the monologues, the Chanel jargon, with the opinions, the judgments without appeal.” 12It was as if poor Gabrielle had welded her armor of self-protection to her mind and frequently to her heart. Her inner plight, accurately described by a young friend as the “truant furies,” had overtaken her.