Lisa Chaney - Coco Chanel - An Intimate Life

The maestro, Sergei Diaghilev, was an extraordinary creature, an incongruous, distracted mix of impulse and caprice, generosity and meanness, combined with a breathtaking ability to manipulate. He had no qualms whatsoever about a ruthless dedication to his objectives, which were devoted almost exclusively to his art. As someone remarked of him, “It was not easy to resist Diaghilev’s pressure. He would wear out his opponent, not by the logic of his arguments, but by the sheer stress of his own will.” 16His single-mindedness made him arrogantly selective about his companions, and perhaps it was only in Venice that he first registered Gabrielle properly. Perhaps it was in Venice, too, that Gabrielle understood something better about Diaghilev himself. Certainly, she found his exotic foreignness most attractive. Later, she would describe him as “the most delightful of friends. I loved his zest for life, his passions, his scruffiness, so different from the sumptuous figure of legend.” 17

Meeting once again this powerful and charismatic figure, three of whose ballets she had now seen brought to the stage, Gabrielle was keen to be a catalyst for the return of the most scandalous of them so far: The Rite of Spring.

The war had not been kind to Igor Stravinsky. Little of his music had been played, and he was eking out an existence with his family in neutral Switzerland. With the successful launch of his ballet Pulcinella, however, enhanced by Picasso’s stage sets and costumes, all was set to change. Stravinsky both reclaimed his position at the center of the Ballets Russes and was relaunched as the musical darling of the most elevated Parisian salons.

For many years, with the cream of Europe’s elite, le tout Paris had reveled in the ritual of Venice’s Rabelaisian Carnevale festivities, and a series of glittering balls was followed assiduously by the journals of style. Vogue was so enamored of the festival that it became the sole subject of each February’s issue. The midwinter trip to Venice broke the tedium of the cold season, and in the emotionally chaotic postwar years, the pre-Lenten festivities were indulged in with particular abandon ( Carnevale was the Italian Mardi Gras). For those unable to get to Venice, a round of parties was held in Paris, in private ballrooms. Fancy dress was already popular, and because many of the young now believed that life was pretty worthless, they sought escape in partying with a kind of nihilistic fervor.

Stravinsky’s Pulcinella brought the fashion for fancy dress out onto the theatrical stage. If Diaghilev hadn’t vetoed it, Picasso would probably have put the female dancers into contemporary dress, and the strong connection between contemporary art and fashion would have been made more explicit. Picasso’s new wife, the dancer Olga Khokhlova, “had many new robes from Chanel to show,” as Stravinsky would report. 18Olga was a devotee of Gabrielle’s clothes before her marriage to Picasso in 1918, and as his reputation began to soar she was far less constrained by cost. While Picasso indulged his insatiable appetite for sexual encounters outside marriage, he also indulged his beautiful bourgeois wife’s passion for avant-garde fashion.

After the premiere of Pulcinella, a legendary costume party was thrown for the beau monde by the affable and extravagant young prince Firouz of Persia, then a favorite of Parisian society. (He died not long afterward, probably at the hand of an assassin.) The relay of partygoers’ cars was directed out of Paris by men flashing electric torches at crossroads toward a bogus castle rented by an ex-convict friend of Cocteau’s. (The ex-convict’s business was illicit nightclubs, and he regularly had to escape capture by the police.)

On this occasion, “vast quantities of champagne were drunk. Stravinsky got tight, he went up to the bedrooms and, collecting all the feather pillows, counterpanes and bolsters, hurled them over the banisters into the great hall.” 19The ensuing pillow fight was so enthusiastic that the party went on until three the next morning. It was at this party that Gabrielle met Stravinsky once again. Afterward, he left for the provinces.

Still in festive spirit, Misia’s and Picasso’s friend the “fiendish social tyrant” Count Etienne de Beaumont gave one of his magnificent entertainments, a regular highlight of the Parisian spring calendar. From early May to the end of June, this included a series of events that took place across the city as the beau monde disported itself before its peers, all aching to outdo one another in the outlandishness of their costumes and their behavior.

Etienne de Beaumont and his wife, Edith, were then at the apex of the Parisian elite. After the war, the young couple had quickly become two of the city’s most significant hosts, and events at their spectacular hôtel particulier, at the heart of the fashionable seventh arrondissement, were noted for their edgy flavor of modernity. Vogue cooed, talking of “dinners and balls without ceasing,” and did its part to keep the Beaumonts in the forefront of everyone’s minds. Their friendships and patronage of artists of all kinds, including Picasso, Braque, Satie, Cocteau and Massine, and their reputation for daring and exhibitionism, were heralded at an evening in 1918 at which American jazz was played by black performers, arguably for the first time in France. 20

The height of each year’s entertainment was the Beaumonts’ spring costume ball, a melding of seventeenth-century court masques and the most radical avant-garde. These spectaculars always had a theme, and the one for 1919 was that guests “leave exposed that part of one’s body one finds the most interesting.” 21No matter how incredible the guests’ costumes, Beaumont always strove to upstage them, with one extraordinarily androgynous outfit after another, and always designed by him. Etienne de Beaumont liked men; his wife, Edith, liked women. They also had a great fondness for each other.

Gabrielle was asked by Beaumont to help design some of the costumes for his 1919 spring ball. Beaumont loved nothing better than accentuating his power through manipulating his friends, and typically kept them in suspense about their invitations. He made a point of leaving off two or three who expected one, and anyone “in trade.” When Misia discovered, to her embarrassment, that her friend Gabrielle Chanel had not been invited, she protested by refusing to take up her own invitation. Instead, on the night of the ball, she collected Gabrielle “with Sert and Picasso as our escorts… and mingled with the chauffeurs crowded in front of the house, to watch the costumed guests make their entrance.” They must have made an odd quartet: Picasso, known to several of the guests; Misia and Sert, well-known to most of them; and then Gabrielle, unknown to a great many but recognizable as an immensely stylish woman.

Misia said they had an uproarious time sending up the guests. No matter how up-to-date the upper class’s attitudes to the arts, to bohemia, they still appeared mired in the suffocating and ancient habits of social superiority. Indeed, Etienne de Beaumont had no qualms about using Gabrielle’s skills while rejecting her as a guest. It wouldn’t be long, however, before he and his wife comprehended Gabrielle’s growing significance and were then all too keen to include her in their suave set.

It is commonly said that once Gabrielle gained power, she made it her business to subject the haut monde to the same condescension she had suffered at their hands. But Gabrielle was a more complex and ambivalent creature than that.

In 1921, after several months at a small Breton seaside resort, Stravinsky had been driven to distraction for lack of stimulation and returned to Paris in search of a house for his chronically ill wife and four children. His financial position was precarious. Recognizing his difficulties, Gabrielle suggested that Stravinsky bring his family to stay at Bel Respiro. She had spared no expense in the creation of a beautiful and consoling retreat, and by late September that year, the Stravinsky entourage, including extended family and various domestic and childcare staff, had settled themselves into Bel Respiro’s luxury.