Lisa Chaney - Coco Chanel - An Intimate Life

She saw a man who was drunk stumbling over his woman companion. He was paralyzed. He must have wanted to have dinner at the Ritz. He was in a dinner jacket, very well turned out; she was in an evening dress. She stood in front of him and put both his arms around her neck, and they walked like that, she holding him up. She signed to the hotel people not to help her. I would have run to go with them at the least sign. But she didn’t make it. And when the woman’s hand went near the man’s lips, he kissed it. 19

And Gabrielle confessed to Claude: “The only time I hear my heart now is on the stairs.” 20

In company with the few who took the trouble to see through the carapace of Gabrielle’s self-defense, Claude could not but be affected. As time passed, like Lilou Marquand, she was called upon more frequently to help relieve Gabrielle’s isolation. She hated dining alone. Having alienated a good many, she had brought on her own head this reminder of her pressing solitude, but lamented, “I cannot eat when I’m alone, when there’s no one across from me to talk to.” Claude Delay recalls the poignancy of managing Gabrielle’s suffering:

There was her primitive mistrust and her disconcerting feminine resistance… these were never to leave her. She knew very well what it was to be lost, to be miserable. But I had a husband; I had two little girls. I felt a criminal that I had to go back home. I had dinner with her at the Ritz, sometimes in her room. And at the end, at the door, you know, I felt a criminal. She hated to be alone. Because she hated to go back to her loneliness without love; to the terrors of the past, to the somnambulism of her childhood; to her dreams. Why? Because she lived again those things. Her father’s abandonment, her mother’s fragility, the deaths; and of Boy… The imagination, which is the opposite of the deadly ruthlessness of the world. It gives you peace…

She was a woman of life not death; that twin struggle between death and life, we carry on in every act of our life. But she felt life the right way. She had a healthy psychic attitude. 21

Indeed, if Gabrielle had not in many ways had a “healthy psychic attitude,” she could not have withstood her past. Nevertheless, each time she was “left,” it was revived and she collapsed. Lilou Marquand remembered an event highlighting Gabrielle’s disproportionate response. It took place on one of the regular visits to Switzerland with Lilou and François at the Grand Palace Hotel. (Gabrielle increasingly preferred the life of a hotel to the little house, Le Signal, she had bought beyond Lake Geneva and restored for her “retirement.”) François was almost always by Gabrielle’s side. She liked his sense of humor, appreciated his uncomplicated, unassuming presence. She gave him money, bought him an apartment, sent him to Switzerland for cures, took him ever more into her confidence. She would say of him, “Ah, how restful they are these ordinary people who are what they are, natural. Not at all like the Parisians, all those liars.” 22

As they sat in the hotel one day discussing the next collection, Gabrielle said to François, “You don’t understand a thing, my dear, I’ve asked you three times to abduct me to no avail. Are you pretending not to understand what I’m saying or are you deaf? I say it again in front of Lilou: will you marry me?” François got up immediately, left the table and checked out of the hotel. It took Lilou six days to find him, there in Lausanne, in another hotel, and she said:

He was still in shock, furious that he might have passed for an old lady’s gigolo. He couldn’t believe that a character as extraordinary as Chanel could love him. I asked him to be generous, to understand that she still had the heart of a sentimental young girl and a romantic mind… He came back to the hotel and no one ever mentioned it again. 23

In the absence of François, meanwhile, Gabrielle had been “distraught. Distraught at the rejection. Then, instead of her single dose of Sédol each day to sleep, she took more. Three, four of them. For days she didn’t go out. It was terrible, terrible. François was in her confidence, he was her support.” 24

Back in Paris, François and Lilou had acquired the habit of playing cards outside Gabrielle’s bedroom each evening, to be nearby as she went to sleep:

We had sworn to her that we’d never abandon her. But still Mademoiselle was frightened. My return was always a surprise. Simply to see me, to hear my “Good morning” or my “Goodnight” overwhelmed her. “You see, when you’re here the loneliness, the anguish, it all flies away!” Ah, if only night had not existed… If Mademoiselle had been able to go directly from the evening to the morning! She would have lived without the horrible suspicion that she was being abandoned. 25

Gabrielle’s unstill mind meant that the sleepwalking from which she had suffered intermittently since childhood had grown worse. In her sleep, she cut up curtains, bedspreads, towels; making them into new designs carefully laid out upon the floor or hanging up on hangers. She was found sleepwalking naked in her rooms; on other occasions, she wandered through the Ritz and was gently guided back to her suite. Once, she was discovered hurrying along a corridor in her nightgown in the small hours with a wild expression on her face. Her maid, Céline (Gabrielle insisted on calling each new personal maid Jeanne, no matter what her real name might be), once watched as Gabrielle walked into her bathroom, broke a comb then turned on the water in the basin. To a friend, she would make a most revealing comment: “I’ve never known just what it was I wanted to forget. So, to forget, whatever it was — probably something that was haunting me — I threw myself into something else.” 26

In order to make a life, Gabrielle, when young, had recreated herself, and this had nourished and encouraged her for many years. In her heart, meanwhile, she knew the truth of what haunted her. But lacking that emotional resilience, with time her frantic attempts to throw herself “into something else” through work had grown ever less successful. Even in sleep, her need to forget no longer left Gabrielle, and she was obliged to fill that, too, with work. Finally, worried about embarrassing herself in sleep, Gabrielle told Céline and Lilou that she wanted to be tied down to her bed, leaving her unable to “stray” through the corridors of the Ritz at night.

But the sadness of Gabrielle’s trials was not to end there. One of her favorite models recently remembered that after dinner with Lilou and Gabrielle one evening, she came with them to Gabrielle’s rooms. The model was astonished at the ritual of Gabrielle’s preparations for the night, and watching Lilou and Céline strap her to her bed, she objected, “But are you mad, why are you tying her up, what’s going on?” And Gabrielle told her that recently she’d been found “cornering the elevator man… and dragging myself through the hotel.” The model continued:

She’d been taking morphine for 25 years and morphine made her delirious. She told me,

“I want to make love.” She didn’t say “make love,” she used the direct word.

“It’s not because I don’t want to fuck, it’s because I’m ashamed of my body.”

So I think that at this moment (when she was injected with her morphine), she was delivered from her inhibitions, and then, she’d leave her room. Searching. So she explained to me that she started to have herself tied up to her bed. After that she was in her dream and said, “We’ll say goodbye now. Lilou, tie me up.” 27

Gabrielle began falling over. She injured her leg, cut her nose, hurt her hand. But she was terribly wary of being treated by the doctors, fearful they would disclose her weakness to the press. (Rumors of Gabrielle’s reduced health had indeed been going around the news offices for some time.) She had a minor stroke, was hospitalized, and felt humiliated at her infirmity. She was becoming very frail.