Lisa Chaney - Coco Chanel - An Intimate Life

After the hunting, the galas and the balls, he even managed to find time to expand his fortune. Apparently, Gabrielle didn’t feel neglected by her lover’s tremendous pace; to a degree, it matched her own. She admired in him “the mindset of a businessman… not hampered either by precedent or hierarchy,” and she loved his “eccentricity.” Yet in the whirl of Arthur’s life, how much of it included his mistress? A man in the vanguard of his times, he was, for example, a staunch believer in the emancipation of women. No doubt bearing Gabrielle in mind, in a political treatise he was soon to write he would say:

The door to the future city is still closed to women. For centuries women have been considered by their masters as inferior creatures, as beasts of burden or of pleasure. The time has come to liberate them. Already they are liberating themselves… The education of women tends to teach them only the art of pleasing. In society as it is conceived, the woman who is incapable of pleasing falls into a state of dependency and inferiority. As the convent is no longer very much in fashion, one must choose between prostitution and work. The latter has shown that the inferiority of women was only an illusion of the other sex. 9

However, with the customary tension between belief and practice, Arthur’s actions weren’t always quite consistent with his sentiments. It was common knowledge that he lived with his mistress, but where a liberal upper-class hostess might now welcome a bohemian artist, writer or musician into her salon, it was a rare one who yet dared do the same for a tradeswoman. But if attendance with one’s mistress was out of bounds in the salons of the haut monde, obliging contemporary double standards enabled navigation around such prohibitions. In the theater, in fashionable restaurants and bars, it wasn’t only acceptable, it increased one’s cachet to be seen out with one’s mistress. And at private suppers where fellow diners were not all entirely “respectable,” Gabrielle felt at ease. These people, too, lived at the edge of society.

And yet, largely untrammeled by the constraints of family, Gabrielle had also been left rudderless by her dysfunctional upbringing. With the exception of Adrienne and Antoinette, she saw very little of her family. This was the great significance of her statement that Arthur was her brother, her father, her entire family. Meanwhile, Gabrielle’s failure to become a singer in the café-concerts in Vichy had left her hankering after something other than hats, and her tremendous energy and rich inner life hadn’t yet found an adequate outlet for expression. While Arthur was often away and understood Gabrielle’s need for occupation, he now encouraged her in an activity that, although unrelated to her work, did have a bearing on her perception of herself as a modern woman.

Back in the 1870s, France had taken up “physical culture,” and following Britain, sport for men was promoted as patriotic and a healthy and moral outlet for the newly urban masses. Upper-class women, who had enjoyed croquet, archery and horse riding for some time, were now joined by their bourgeois sisters, who also took to the streets in outdoor clothing developed by the English companies Burberry and Aquascutum. Country walks became a favorite feminine pastime. A small fraction of women also took up physical culture and other forms of exercise such as calisthenics, and in the early years of the twentieth century, the idea of exercise as a form of self-expression was developing.

In 1913, the American dancer Isadora Duncan was scandalizing Europe. Her uninhibitedly sensual emphasis upon the expression of emotion and physical improvisation was revolutionary, and deeply shocked many of her contemporaries who were still convinced that the body was a shameful thing. Duncan believed intensely in the idea that we are mind and body; her body was not external to her, it was her. She rejected formal dancing, including ballet, with its strict rules of posture and formation, because they were “ugly and against nature.” Her following was huge. Whatever Isadora Duncan’s pretentiousness and however justified her critics, this woman had responded to the emotional and physical alienation emerging as a side effect of life in the first machine age. She touched many of those who flocked to see her in revealing the very unmachinelike possibility of an unself-conscious relationship with one’s body. When the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées was completed in 1913, Duncan’s reputation was such that her likeness was carved by the sculptor Antoine Bourdelle over the entrance, while inside the theater, Duncan appeared in Maurice Denis’s murals of the nine muses.

Gabrielle was in search of a means to express something in herself as yet undefined, and now believed that she, too, wanted to be a dancer. Contriving an invitation with a friend to a private performance at Duncan’s house, she was game enough to be unimpressed and would remain caustic in her criticism of the great muse. Rejecting such a distinguished teacher, she found instead Elise Toulemon (stage name Caryathis), an early devotee of the dance methods of Emile Jaques-Dalcroze.

In about 1905, while attempting to improve his music students’ abilities, Jaques-Dalcroze had created a system of musical education. Naming his “harmonious bodily movement as a form of artistic expression” eurythmics, his intention had neither been an end in itself nor a form of dance. However, the timing was propitious and his ideas had spread quickly across Europe. Suggesting as they did nonballetic dance techniques, the principles of eurythmics would soon be used to develop radically new dance forms. At the same time, by 1912, eurythmics as a form of dance-exercise had become something of a Parisian fashion.

The health-giving aspects of sport, and Isadora Duncan’s and Jaques-Dalcroze’s philosophies of self-expression, encouraged a small number of young women to take up these ideas as a form of self-development as well as a means of maintaining lithe and exercised bodies. Such attitudes were seen by most contemporaries as distastefully antifeminine, and the young women were regarded as more or less outrageous. They themselves saw their exercising as a kind of emancipation. Reacting against the flaccidness of middle-aged women, made taut by nothing more taxing than a corset, Gabrielle diverted herself with the unconventional idea that physical perfection could be gained only via exercise.

Her dance teacher Elise was most definitely unconventional. Having escaped from a background as impoverished and defective as Gabrielle’s, Elise ended up in Montmartre, where her flamboyance had given her a wild reputation. Later, she would make a tempestuous marriage to the troubled homosexual writer Marcel Jouhandeau, but for now, she was one of the dancers at the Théâtre des Arts. In the period when Gabrielle met her — about 1912–13—while Elise’s talents as a dancer and choreographer were becoming recognized, to make ends meet she also gave classes in expressive dance. Her extrovert sensuality would be captured in the Russian artist-designer Léon Bakst’s poster for the composer Erik Satie’s “ballet” La belle excentrique. La belle excentrique , Elise, danced her invention in a provocatively scanty outfit designed by a very young poet-artist, Jean Cocteau. Renowned for her wit, her untamed and extravagant personality and her numerous affairs, at the time she and Gabrielle met, Elise was in the midst of a tumultuous relationship with Charles Dullin, the avant-garde actor-producer.

Day after day, Gabrielle climbed up to Elise’s studio in Montmartre and then strove to convince her teacher that she could become a dancer. Once again, however, she was to be disappointed; after several months, Elise told her that she just wasn’t right for the stage. For all her noted grace, was it that some part of Gabrielle remained self-conscious, inhibiting her ability to abandon herself completely? Whatever the reasons for her failure, she was by now devoted to her expressive dance lessons (and her eccentric teacher), and continued with the classes. Convinced by the idea that a beautiful body was a slim and exercised one, for the rest of her life Gabrielle would work to keep hers that way. If she couldn’t become a dancer, at least she would have a dancer’s body.