Lisa Chaney - Coco Chanel - An Intimate Life

The story told in all Gabrielle Chanel’s previous biographies is that Arthur Capel inherited large interests in shipping and Newcastle coal from his distinguished Catholic family. In addition to his considerable wealth, he was a noted polo player and rake. But while his origins were apparently a little mysterious — there were rumors about his paternity — and his drive to make money was untypical of the Parisian haut monde, nonetheless, Arthur was one of the elite.

Until now, very little further detail has been known: his background, his early life, his arrival in France, his movements between Britain and France, his urge to make money, his activities during the First World War and, afterward, as a political secretary at the Versailles Conference. Finally, our knowledge of his affair with Gabrielle, his marriage and its aftermath, all have remained obscure.

Gabrielle’s biographers and fashion journalists long ago turned Arthur into something of a caricature: a polo-playing, womanizing tycoon who had done important things in the First World War. Little more than an adornment in his role as consort to the icon Coco Chanel, the finer points of the real Arthur Capel and his story were lost, while his character was submerged in cliché as the improbable hero from one of Gabrielle’s newspaper fictions. For more than half a century, the very elusiveness of Gabrielle’s lover has added to the romance of his reputation. But if she so insistently credited this unreal figure with her very invention, we can reasonably assume that in discovering more about him, we will understand more about Gabrielle.

In piecing together much new information about Arthur, it became clear that significant details were wrong, even his date of birth. Part of the problem has always been that one of the few sources of information about Arthur was Gabrielle, and while her comments are invaluable, she added to the confusion with unintentional inaccuracies.

After more than a year, research led me to Arthur’s family. In the lengthening dusk of a winter’s afternoon, we sat by a fire as they told me what little they knew. This, and the small cache of letters, they gave me — hidden in a “secret” book in a private library for more than half a century — were together, however, to become immensely significant. The letters were written by Arthur during the First World War. His generous handwriting, almost spilling over the small, forgotten pages, gave a clear sense of that voice sought for so long. With each letter, this elusive man emerged with more clarity from the shadow of his lover, Gabrielle.

What stood out in the letters, across the almost one hundred years that separated us, was the strong impression of a man who was confident, humorous and ironic. He was also commanding, thoughtful and touching in his intimacy. As one learns more about his and Gabrielle’s story, one appreciates both why Arthur wanted to be with this young woman without background, and why he appeared, both to Gabrielle and to many others, as quite unforgettable. In discovering Arthur Capel, we do indeed discover more about Gabrielle herself.

Arthur Edward Capel was born in Brighton, on the southern English coast, in September 1881. This made him two years older than Gabrielle Chanel. His parents, Arthur Joseph (so as not to confuse father and son, I will refer to him as Joseph) and Berthe already had three small daughters, Bertha (English spelling), Edith and Marie-Henriette. Their mother, a Parisian, had met Joseph while she was a boarder at a London school (most probably through Joseph’s brother, Thomas, a prominent socialite Catholic priest). While Berthe’s family, the Lorins, remain frustratingly mysterious (the relevant archives in Paris went up in flames in 1983), enough has come to light about Joseph to make some of the forces that drove his son, Arthur, more comprehensible. 3

Joseph Capel’s family was of very modest means — his father was a poor coastguardsman, his Roman Catholic mother, from Ireland, had been in service — but Joseph was industrious and ambitious and had quickly risen from a position as a clerk to prosper as a man of business. His talent as an entrepreneur then enabled him to move his family from London to a pretty house on Brighton’s Marine Parade, where his only son, Arthur, was born. 4Joseph commuted to London’s hub of commerce, the Royal Exchange, while expanding his business portfolio still further. This included extending, for example, his contact with Europe by becoming the agent for several railway and shipping companies in France and Spain. 5Work often took him abroad, and he now mixed in the upper circles of “society.” 6

Enterprising and adaptable, at thirty-seven Joseph was a rich man and moved his family to Paris, where he was now able to live on his investments. While this move might have come about because Berthe wanted to return to her homeland, it might also have been precipitated by Joseph’s priest brother Thomas’s recent and dramatic fall from grace in the British Catholic community. A popular society priest, he had been chamberlain to Pope Pius IX, had lectured at Oxford and was appointed by the distinguished Cardinal Manning as president of Kensington University College, Britain’s first Catholic university since the Reformation. Not only was Thomas Capel responsible for this important venture’s ending in financial collapse, but among other misdemeanors, he was also brought to book over an alleged affair with one of his parishioners. Cardinal Manning exerted his far-reaching influence and Capel was forbidden to act as priest anywhere in the world; his reputation was ruined and he emigrated to America. 7

In Paris, the Capels were removed from this shameful scandal. Their home, at 56 avenue d’Iéna, was previously one of the great Rochefoucauld family mansions. Situated in the sixteenth arrondissement, the tree-lined avenue d’Iéna, with its understated wealth and assiduous discretion, was particularly distinguished. The Capels’ haut bourgeois neighbors included politicians and the odd aristocrat. Today, the avenue hosts a number of diplomatic missions; the Capels’ mansion has become the Egyptian embassy.

After Arthur’s junior period at the elite Saint Mary’s in Paris, his parents chose for their son a distinguished English school. Beaumont College was at Old Windsor, in Berkshire, and was dubbed “the Catholic Eton.” 8And it was from here, throughout his adolescence, that Arthur traveled back and forth across the Channel to holiday with his parents at avenue d’Iéna and fashionable French resorts. In 1897, at sixteen, his ordinary school studies over, Arthur moved to complete his education with an advanced course of study.

It has always been said, mistakenly, that he went on to Downside School, in the county of Somerset. However, a move from a Jesuit college (Beaumont) to a Benedictine one (Downside) would have been highly unlikely. Arthur in fact went on to one of England’s most venerable Jesuit institutions, the college of Stonyhurst, in Lancashire. 9

It was only recently that Catholics in England had been permitted to obtain degrees, in a handful of Catholic colleges such as Stonyhurst. In 1897, some years after Arthur’s uncle’s failure to make the London Catholic university prosper, Stonyhurst was the most important place of Catholic higher learning in Britain. And Arthur was duly welcomed into its small senior group, holding the illustrious title of “Gentlemen Philosophers.” These young grandees’ college lives were part country-house living, part finishing school and part Oxbridge college. They played much sport, rode, hunted and shot (keeping their own horses and dogs at the college); they also wore extravagant clothes “and bore themselves with a careless dignity.” 10The Gentlemen Philosophers were ferociously sociable; they acted, made music, debated fiercely and conscientiously smoked and drank their way through their privileged college years.