Lisa Chaney - Coco Chanel - An Intimate Life

Offering her strength and capabilities as support, she helped him with great tact and generosity, made visits to his publishers, paid them grants to pass on to him, and also bought his manuscripts. It was Gabrielle who financed his first major book of poems, Cravates de chanvre (the hempen rope used for hangings). And all this she did in secret so as to save his terrible pride. Reverdy alienated a growing number of his friends, including the surrealists who had idolized him and sometimes Gabrielle tried to mediate. Eventually, there were few left who would support his dreadful rages: Picasso, Gris, Braque, Max Jacob — friends Reverdy and Gabrielle had in common. One senses, too, that Gabrielle and Reverdy must have each caused the other emotional torment.

Gradually, his periods of absence from her home grew longer until, sometime in 1924, he left, no more to return. Finally, to his friends’ amazement, Reverdy would withdraw from the world completely. Accompanied by his ever-faithful Henriette, he placed himself in a small house beside the Benedictine abbey at Solesmes, out in the Pays-de-la-Loire.

For Gabrielle to trust a man was most unusual. But over the years, whatever the tumult of her relationship with Reverdy, she never ceased admiring him and remained devoted to his poetry. It was immaterial that Reverdy was married, or that their love affair was turbulent. In turn, until his death, Reverdy would send copies of all he wrote to Gabrielle, with touching dedications:

Dear Coco

The time that passes

The weather outside

The time that flies

Of my obscure life I had lost the trace

Here it is found again darker than the night

But what remains clear is that with all my heart I give you my love

And all that follows doesn’t matter. 5

Despite all Gabrielle’s best efforts, she had lost yet another man, and with Reverdy’s final departure, she was left wretched. While outsiders had little comprehension of this relationship, they could yet see that between this strange pair there was a deep rapport. Sometime later, Abbé Mugnier, that inveterate old commentator on the Parisian comedy of manners, wrote, correctly, that Gabrielle’s affection encouraged Reverdy to write and that she herself was not the same as she had been before their affair.

Cocteau’s mother’s comment on the relationship as “the return of a peasant woman to a peasant,” albeit said in snobbery, went some way toward understanding Gabrielle and Reverdy. It wasn’t exactly that they were peasants — they had both traveled way beyond those roots, and neither of them could have either lived with or been accepted by their kin — it was the residual element of their inherited connections to the earth and tradition. Despite the strains of their relationship, in Reverdy Gabrielle had discovered someone whose significance, while not replacing Arthur’s, reconnected her with the pastoral nature of her roots, giving her emotional and spiritual nourishment. Reverdy had written to her, “You know well that whatever happens, and God knows how much has already happened, you cannot render yourself anything other than infinitely precious to me, for ever.”

With Reverdy’s departure, Gabrielle’s heart had been dealt a ferocious blow. But her habit of concealing the depth of her feelings was not so difficult to achieve because the worlds in which she moved were noted for their particular egotism and self-regard. All the same, one suspects that in her entire life, there may only have been a handful of people who understood this highly intelligent, paradoxical and defensive woman with anything like the emotional imagination necessary to do so.

In that same year, 1924, Gabrielle was once again asked by Cocteau to design the costumes for a new Ballets Russes production, Le Train Bleu, whose inception arose out of a Diaghilev fit of pique. Following the death of Radiguet, Cocteau had gone to Monte Carlo to find distraction with his musical friends Stravinsky, Poulenc and Auric. Whatever the histrionics, Cocteau was genuinely prostrate at the death of his youthful amour and would take years to recover from it.

In Monte Carlo was the music critic Louis Laloy, a man of great cultivation who was also addicted to opium. In 1913, his notorious Le livre de la fumée, a history and manual of opium smoking, was credited with the great popularity of its practice in postwar Europe. Cocteau would write, “My nervous suffering became so great, so overwhelming, that Laloy at Monte Carlo suggested I relieve it in this way,” 6and so, with Poulenc, Auric and Laloy, he began smoking in earnest. By the time he left Monte Carlo a few weeks later, he was hooked, and in the future he would at times be reduced to an appalling state by his addiction. While Gabrielle would complain about Cocteau, she also remained his supporter, paying on several occasions for his rehabilitation. It is worth bearing in mind here the opinion of a present-day expert in drug addiction: “Addiction beginning in one’s midthirties [Cocteau’s age], or thereafter, is not a search for excitement or pleasure, as in the very young.” Cocteau was not out for kicks; he was desperate to escape the depths of his depression.

The ballet Le Train Bleu came about initially as compensation for Cocteau’s involvement in a contretemps between Diaghilev and the ambitious and flirtatious Ukrainian dancer Serge Lifar, who had stepped out of line. The ballet was set at a resort and became a vehicle for the extraordinary gymnastic antics of Diaghilev’s present lover, a young Englishman named Anton Dolin (real name Patrick Kay). Cocteau’s thin story line had Dolin impressing a troupe of golf and tennis players and featured beach belles of both sexes who were all in search of adventure.

With a score from Darius Milhaud, choreography was to be by Nijinsky’s dour but gifted sister, Bronislava Nijinska; set designs were by the cubist sculptor Henri Laurens, and costumes were by Gabrielle. Laurens’s Riviera beach set of sloping cubist planes and lopsided beach huts was in natural hues, dramatically setting off Gabrielle’s costumes in bright dynamic colors.

Diaghilev didn’t like Laurens’s front curtain. And remembering that in Picasso’s chaotic studio he had seen a canvas of the now-famous giant women, hand in hand, bare breasted and running across a beach, he set out to acquire it. Diaghilev loved the earthy abandon of these women, and his majestic powers of persuasion overcame even the wily and stubborn Picasso. Diaghilev was so pleased with this painting that a brilliantly enlarged version — painted by the Russian émigré prince Shervashidze — was used as the Ballets Russes front cloth from then on.

The train to which the ballet refers was then the ultimate in chic. Launched only two years earlier, it carried the wealthy between Calais and the French Riviera in exclusively first-class carriages. Leaving Paris in the evening, and renowned for its cuisine, the Train Bleu made three stops before arriving at Marseille the following morning. Then it called in at the most important resort towns along the Riviera, finally halting close to the Italian border. Named by its wealthy passengers for its beautiful dark blue carriages, speeding south in search of pleasure and escape, the train had an image of up-to-the-minute sophistication and romance. Each of its sleeping cars had only ten compartments, with an attendant for every car. Early passengers included the Prince of Wales, Charlie Chaplin, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Evelyn Waugh, J. M. Barrie, Somerset Maugham and Gabrielle Chanel. In the years between the two world wars, the Train Bleu carried almost everyone who was anyone traveling to the south of France.

In Gabrielle’s utterly fashionable beachwear, Cocteau’s undesirable passengers — gigolos, good-time girls and chancers of one sort or another — were “hardhearted modern youth that pushes us around with impertinent contempt… Those superb girls who stride past swearing, with tennis racquets under their arm, and get between us and the sun.” 7Cocteau was commenting on the radical change in the way the young felt empowered to behave in the postwar years. They revealed the tendency to disdain authority, already flourishing in those small groups of artists in the early years of the century, and now sufficiently widespread that Cocteau could characterize it in a ballet.