Lisa Chaney - Coco Chanel - An Intimate Life

At the same time, Sachs believed that in giving her orders with such certainty and authority, Gabrielle “was a general: one of those young generals of the Empire in whom the spirit of conquest dominates.” Gabrielle shared another trait with military men: “a shyness which overcame her as soon as she left the battlefield.” 9

As each of the biannual collections approached, the atmosphere at Chanel heightened and Gabrielle grew more nervous. As for many an artist working under pressure, these tense conditions were what often provoked her most successful pieces. Marie Pavlovna was repeatedly amazed at how the chaos in the days prior to a show was miraculously transformed into a collection just in the nick of time. On the eve of a show at rue Cambon, Gabrielle had a “dress rehearsal” for herself and her personnel in the salon below her studio. Anything considered unfit was “banished altogether” or else sent back, somehow to be redone before the morrow. Marie was intrigued by the “language of the dresses,” how their different characteristics and appeal were so familiar to Gabrielle, and how it was this unified set of relationships she was most concerned with at this final stage. “Not one single detail escaped her notice. She was so concentrated upon the study that… she forgot even to talk.”

And all the while a “religious and respectful silence hung over the salon, around which the saleswomen sat in a row along the walls,” nodding, and no more than lifting their eyebrows by way of approval. Gabrielle’s fashion shows were becoming extremely popular, and each season the rue Cambon entrance was besieged by a crowd of indignant buyers. Only those with invitations were admitted. The largest important foreign houses, above all those from the United States, were invited first, and only then did smaller and native firms receive an invitation. This very exclusiveness, of course, made them clamor still more for admittance. In future years, the detachment of police posted to guard the front door of Chanel at rue Cambon was an imposing sight.

When Marie Pavlovna’s embroideries were first shown — probably in the spring of 1922—she joined Gabrielle and a group of her friends in what were the most uncomfortable yet most privileged “seats… on the upper steps of the staircase, from where we could see what was going on.” (The mirror-paneled walls of this staircase were part of a modernist refurbishment Gabrielle would have installed at some point during the early twenties.) Until the end of her life, this ritual spot was where she placed herself to survey her collection below.

This now-famous staircase has remained intact. The salon below, while updated, is decorated in the same color scheme to this day: carpeted in beige with white walls and the distinctive black cast-iron banisters. Gabrielle commented once, “I spent my life on stairs.” The mirrored staircase was the spine of her house; everything that happened at rue Cambon could be observed from it. But Gabrielle was also making oblique reference to that other staircase, central to her youth in the convent at Aubazine. Here the orphan girls trudged up and down the great stone steps several times each day.

The show including Marie Pavlovna’s embroideries lasted a full three hours — this was not untypical — but from Gabrielle’s aerie at the top of the stairs, Marie was amazed at the speed with which she had absorbed and gauged the audience’s interest. Long before the concluding piece, Gabrielle told the dazed young Russian duchess that her work was a success.

The biggest orders for these embroideries — indeed, all Chanel clothes — came from America, a tendency that would become the norm. It was the sophisticated yet pervasively casual and sportive element of American society that had appreciated Gabrielle’s “language” as quickly as France, and possibly more so.

Marie learned much from Gabrielle, not least the example of her worldliness. While, at first, the young aristocrat found the way clients were referred to “behind the scenes” quite shocking, she eventually came to the conclusion that, in fact, “any noble sentiments were wasted” on the customers of haute couture: “Mlle Chanel did much to give me more practical views on life. A number of my illusions were destroyed in the process.”

Gabrielle, with her “usual outspokenness,” also steered Dmitri’s sister away from the puritanical belief that taking trouble with one’s appearance was unseemly. She told Marie that it was “a great mistake to go round looking like a refugee… people will end by avoiding you. If you wish to do business, the first thing is to look prosperous.”

Gabrielle’s abhorrence of amateurism impressed her employee. In this same spirit, Marie was taught how to use makeup and instructed to lose weight. Still despairing of Marie’s long hair, one day Gabrielle declared, “No, I really cannot see you any longer with that unattractive bun… it will have to come off.” Deftly removing Marie’s hairpins, she “snatched up a pair of scissors and was cutting off my hair by the handful.” While subsequently having this “cut” improved, from that day, Marie Pavlovna was more modish and wore her hair short. 10

In early 1920, Cocteau had invited Gabrielle to a “spectacle concert” of art, music and popular entertainment called Le boeuf sur le toit ( The Ox on the Roof ). Financed by Comte Etienne de Beaumont, the show was Cocteau’s, music was by Darius Milhaud (of Les Six) and sets were by the painter-designer Raoul Dufy. Le boeuf sur le toit reflected the fascination with all things American and proved a great success with its avant-garde audience. In January 1922, when the patron of a bar called The Gaya, a focal point for artistic Parisian gatherings, launched his enlarged restaurant-bar on the rue Boissy d’Anglas, he had been given permission to call it, after Cocteau’s spectacle, Le Boeuf sur le Toit. Often known to English enthusiasts as The Nothing Doing Bar, overnight, Le Boeuf sur le Toit became one of the most fashionable meeting places for artists and their cronies. Quickly rivaling the reputation of the Moulin Rouge or Maxim’s, Le Boeuf was noisy, smart and “amusing”; it was the place to be seen. And with her artist and society friends, Gabrielle soon became one of its regulars.

Le Boeuf was one of the first bars hosting what came to be known as café society, both leading and reflecting a new kind of salon — a public one. Here sexual preferences were openly indulged, and Le Boeuf appeared to be for everyone. As well as beautiful women and men, and beautiful boys, and boys dressed as girls, and girls dressed as boys, there were the poets, painters, musicians, actors, dancers, the titled, the rich and the famous. Anyone could speak to anyone. They talked, they danced, and the atmosphere was alive with possibility.

Opium, morphine and cocaine were acquiring a certain ubiquity at the time. And while it wasn’t only the social and artistic elite who regularly used one or more of these preferred narcotics, a good many became hopelessly addicted. Just three of the more famous examples would be Jean Cocteau; the lesbian princess Violette Murat, hostess to a salon of prominent artists and musicians; and another of Gabrielle’s friends, Misia Sert. Confirmed opium smoker that Cocteau would become, he, like Princess Murat, also used cocaine, while Misia Sert’s need for morphine was to get the better of her in the end. Despite Diaghilev’s absolute veto of any drug use in his company, it has been said that he was a cocaine user himself. 11

Le Boeuf sur le Toit aficionados soon read like a list of the contemporary avant-garde combined with the fashionable elite of Europe. On any night of the week, one might come across André Gide swathed in a black cape; the wunderkind writer Raymond Radiguet; Jean Cocteau; and Max Jacob, the brilliant semialcoholic, semitramp, homosexual, Jewish Catholic-convert poet. Then there were the “nonpainters”: the Cuban Dadaist Francis Picabia; Dada’s Hungarian founder, Tristan Tzara; and any number of musicians and composers, including Francis Poulenc and Georges Auric; Marie Laurencin, painter-printmaker and future illustrator for the surrealists another painter, Valentine Hugo; Misia and José Maria Sert, whose booming voice could always be heard above the hubbub; Stravinsky the dandy, with his “mustard-yellow trousers, black jacket, blue shirt, yellow shoes, clean-shaven and with slicked-down blonde hair”; 12more Russians; and Erik Satie, the “faun with the little beard and cracked laugh.” Then there might be Diaghilev and his entourage; the protosurrealist André Breton and his cronies; Maurice Sachs, with some beautiful boy, or girl, in tow; and then numbers of now-forgotten minor luminaries and colorful unknowns.