Lisa Chaney - Coco Chanel - An Intimate Life

Bearing this guardedness in mind, while most had believed her relationship with Arthur was rather insecure, among their inner circle there was an implicit understanding that their union was a profound one. Captivated by Gabrielle’s allure, her knowingness, her intelligence and gaiety, Arthur had also been struck by her seriousness and her sheer breathtaking force, qualities all leavened by her great femininity. But it was that very force, which was making her so successful, that had led to Arthur’s loss of courage and rejection of her. He made, he believed, a simpler choice: Diana — and came to regret it.

Was that the ultimate cause of Arthur’s accident, as he had driven along the Cannes road toward a Christmas with his sister? There was no satisfactory resolution to his dilemma: staying with Diana or going to Gabrielle. Had Arthur’s tiredness at the end of that long journey south been the last factor heightening his overwrought state of mind, so that he brought about his own death? The possibility of his suicide must have occurred to Gabrielle that day when she had sat, weeping, beside the wreck of her dead lover’s car.

The following day, Gabrielle and Dmitri left old Marseille behind them. Marveling at Aix-en-Provence, Avignon and Orange, they drove on, reaching Lyon for the night. Next morning, they altered their proposed route, making a long detour to Vichy. The subsequent entries in Dmitri’s diary show that while he was unaware of it, there was actually nothing random about this next leg of their journey. Gabrielle was giving the impression of leaving things to chance; in reality, she had made a plan.

As they left Lyon, the sun shone, and they drove with the Silver Cloud’s roof rolled down. After lunch, they abandoned the major road and drove out “across country.” With the Rolls impressively negotiating the winding road through high and remote terrain, Dmitri noted their frequent stops to admire the drama of the Auvergne landscape, where the peaks are often snow covered. On reaching Vichy, he was less impressed, finding it flat and unattractive. The weather had turned, and the resort was mournful in its dearth of tourists. Thanks to the low season, they met no one there they knew, for which Dmitri was grateful. On a desultory walk around the town, little could he have known that his companion had a clear agenda: she was secretly reliving her youth. As far as we know, Gabrielle hadn’t returned to Vichy since her failed bid for the stage more than fifteen years earlier. How her life had changed.

The next day, she suggested a trip to Thiers, the center of the French cutlery trade since the fifteenth century. She must have had to sell this detour to Dmitri with some enthusiasm, for Thiers is almost twenty-five miles in the opposite direction from their final destination, Paris. But Gabrielle was now in earnest; she was intent on traveling through the terrain of her childhood.

While Dmitri innocently noted Thiers’s reputation, Gabrielle was reliving her memories of her father’s buying his scissors and knives there for resale throughout the Midi. Dmitri recorded that after a bad meal they “made a little excursion around the area.” 12First navigating the tortuous mountainous roads through the chestnut and pine forests in their “little excursion,” Gabrielle must next have suggested they follow the river Dore just six miles farther south to Courpière, her mother’s birthplace.

How strange it must have been to see the place where Gabrielle’s mother had left her and her siblings in search of her renegade husband, the place where Gabrielle had played those lonely childhood games in the churchyard. Gabrielle gave away nothing to Dmitri about the significance of this remote Auvergne backwater, but her thoughts must have been brimful of the past. Driving in one of the world’s most luxurious cars and supporting herself as one of the world’s most avant-garde designers, she was the personification of female modernity. She was being sought out by the Parisian elite, could name among her friends some of the most famous artists, writers and musicians of the day, and now her traveling companion was a grand duke. Did Gabrielle feel triumphant, remembering those Courpière relations who had said she was useless, and who had pitied “poor Jeanne” for following that no-good Albert Chanel around? Jeanne, the woman her daughter defended with the comment: “Hadn’t she at least married the man she loved?”

Gabrielle had not only traveled way beyond that humiliation, she had also outgrown the mindset burdening her with those judgments. And while, from her origins, she drew her stubborn and forthright tenacity, for the rest, Gabrielle Chanel had long since outgrown her roots. Ironically, it was that inherited capacity for endurance that had permitted her to make the leap from a fantasized self-transformation to one sustained by reality and hard work. These were the two opposing yet complementary aspects of Gabrielle’s nature. Like any artist of caliber, she possessed an outlandish imagination, which had allowed her to reinvent first herself and then the wardrobes of the female population; she also possessed the essential counterpart of a vivid imagination: practicality.

Gabrielle would say, “People say I’m an Auvergnat. There’s nothing of the Auvergnat in me. Nothing, nothing! My mother was one. In that part of the world… I was thoroughly unhappy… I fed on sorrow and horror, and regularly thought of dying.” 13How Gabrielle had hated her childhood. Meanwhile, on that very day, May 2, 1921, while she chose her secret return to the distant places of her childhood, on the other side of the world, one of her closest childhood companions reached a mournful conclusion.

From Canada, Gabrielle’s sister Antoinette had continued sending despairing letters to Gabrielle and Adrienne, and they had continued urging her to persevere. But Antoinette was entirely unsuited to her new life. In response, Gabrielle had recently dispatched a young Argentinian with a letter of recommendation to Antoinette’s father-in-law. The reasons are lost with the letter, but he may have been an emissary sent to discover the extent of Antoinette’s plight. Antoinette found the young man entertaining, and within days of his departure for Buenos Aires, she had fled her in-laws’ household, leaving everything behind her.

Whatever precipitated her departure, once Antoinette arrived in Buenos Aires, her movements are a mystery. All we know is that any hopes she might have had of beginning again were disappointed, because, on May 2, she gave up the struggle and took her own life. This was almost certainly with an overdose of drugs. Until the recent discovery of Antoinette’s death certificate, 14the story has usually been told that she had already died, a year earlier, in 1920, a casualty of the postwar Spanish flu epidemic. 15Gabrielle and Adrienne possibly never knew the real cause of Antoinette’s death. On the other hand, they might have fabricated the Spanish flu story so as to conceal her despairing end and avoid the stigma of another family suicide.

Gabrielle’s response to her sister’s suicide is nowhere recorded. But Antoinette had been part of Gabrielle and Adrienne’s undertaking to transform their lives, and she had worked hard for her older sister. She had benefited, but in reality, Antoinette had only taken on the trappings of their new lives. She hadn’t possessed Adrienne’s prudence, which would finally lead to her marriage to the man she loved. Nor did Antoinette have the inspired, rule-breaking originality of her sister Gabrielle. In the end, poor Antoinette lacked their tenacity and force of personality. She neither succeeded in marrying “above herself” nor in making herself into a truly New Woman, dependent upon no one but herself. Perhaps there was no connection, but for many years Gabrielle didn’t present a wedding dress at the end of her show, a tradition all the couture houses followed.