Lisa Chaney - Coco Chanel - An Intimate Life

Once again, as in the First World War, in difficult times Gabrielle’s Hollywood endeavor had enhanced her reputation. Even so, the Depression of the thirties, following the crash of 1929, had a devastating effect on virtually every country in the world. Despite Gabrielle’s upbeat pronouncement — she said that, like Goldwyn, she believed the best way to survive lean times was to maintain the highest standards — this was a tense period. In 1930, while Gabrielle had a turnover of around 120 million francs and a workforce of around 2,400, in twenty-six workrooms, it has been said that in 1932 she was forced to cut her prices by half. And although managing to retain her huge workforce, she did temporarily reduce the luxury of some of her fabrics. Silk manufacturers, for example, were horrified when Gabrielle introduced the idea of evening dresses in cotton. She had been invited to do so by an English firm, Ferguson Brothers, to promote the use of their cotton fabrics. Thus Gabrielle’s spring 1931 collection included thirty-five cotton-piqué, lawn, muslin and organdy evening dresses. It proved very popular.

In the end, however, not only did Gabrielle retain the custom of some of her richest society clients, such as Daisy Fellowes, Lady Pamela Smith, the South American Madame Martínez de Hoz and the Americans Laura Corrigan and Barbara Hutton, by 1935 business was very much improved for Gabrielle. Her clientele had grown sufficiently that her workforce had now reached four thousand. The Duke of Westminster had permitted her to adapt his nine-bedroom Audley Street London house to her own requirements. From 1930 to 1934, this became the center of Gabrielle’s cosmetics venture, part of her drive to grow by diversifying, it included the expansion of her perfume range, with № 22, Glamour and Gardénia. Like other couturiers, in order to maintain a high profile, she also now endorsed products and designed for manufacturers.

During the Depression, a young New York heiress, Maybelle Iribarnegaray, discovered that her husband was having an affair with Gabrielle. It was 1933. Her husband, Iribe, as Paul Iribarnegaray styled himself, was a thickset Basque with an impenetrable accent who often utilized his incessant womanizing to further his extraordinary talent. Besides the great Sem, Iribe had been the most talented and successful French prewar caricaturist, with a facile and sharp pen. He had then branched out and launched a successful design business, creating furniture, fabrics, wallpaper and jewelry. The success of his business had made him a significant arbiter of taste. Then, one year into the war, having dispensed with his first wife, the actress Jeanne Dirys, who subsequently died of tuberculosis, Iribe left for America, scooped up Maybelle and spent the next ten years in America, most of them in Hollywood.

Iribe worked on some of the legendary Cecil B. de Mille’s most important films, including The Ten Commandments, the largest-scale film yet made, and was promoted to artistic director of Paramount. By this point, he was also designing dresses and film sets, and was sometimes even directing. Iribe was witty and clever, with an unctuous charm, but he had also gained a reputation for being arrogant and argumentative. One day, when he reacted badly to de Mille’s criticism of his sets for King of Kings , de Mille had had enough and fired him. Iribe had also had enough, and left Hollywood, returning to France with his wife and her two children. With Maybelle’s money, Iribe now opened a shop on rue Faubourg Saint-Honoré—not far from Gabrielle’s residence, Hôtel de Lauzan — and reapplied himself to designing furniture and jewelry. He had always been intent on riches, fame and acceptance by society, and was envious of Cocteau, an old acquaintance and colleague, who infiltrated the haut monde with such ease.

On his return to Paris, Iribe hailed luxury, artisanship and nationalism as the cornerstones of his beliefs. Enslaved to money, he appears to have made and lost it at a great rate. For the moment, however, Iribe made huge sums, acquiring a luxury car, a yacht and a house in Saint-Tropez, the fishing village now transformed into one of the most select playgrounds of the rich. Colette hadn’t visited for a while, and friends warned her that it was overrun by “the sort of people photographed by Vogue.” Colette herself was in fact photographed by Vogue, but bemoaned the smothering of one of her favorite places with traffic and tourists. One morning, she found a horde of them awaiting her as she left the stationer’s, and wrote to a friend, “I didn’t hide what I thought of them.” 6

Then Iribe did less well, so his long-suffering wife hustled and found him a commission from Chanel. Maybelle’s parents were meanwhile pressuring their daughter to curtail their son-in-law’s excessive spending; they were concerned he would bring them to ruin. This, combined with Iribe’s serial infidelity, finally brought the marriage to an end, and Maybelle left for America with her two children.

When Gabrielle and Iribe’s affair was still a well-kept secret, Colette and her lover, Maurice Goudeket, were inadvertently to discover it. (Gabrielle had met Colette at some point in the early twenties. They never became close, but with a number of friends in common, they met on numerous occasions.) At the end of 1931, “strangled by the Depression,” as Colette put it, and in financial straits—“Great God above, things are difficult for Maurice and me”—they were forced to sell their retreat outside Paris.

La Gerbière was a pleasant house surrounded by trees and high up in the village of Montfort-L’Amaury, where the composer Maurice Ravel lived. Gabrielle came down alone from Paris, and made the deal with Maurice Goudeket to buy the house as they walked around the garden. Colette had had no idea her partner was confirming the purchase of their house until it was all over. She then realized that Gabrielle intended bringing Iribe here for their trysts: “a place for billing and cooing,” as Colette put it.

At the end of the transaction, she was left with a sense of Gabrielle’s decisive toughness. These two remarkable women may not have felt great warmth for each other, but they did feel a strong mutual respect. Gabrielle described Colette, correctly, as “this highly intelligent woman,” saying, “The only two female writers who appeal to me are Madame de Noailles and Colette.”

In 1933, by which time everyone who was anyone summered in the south of France, Misia met Colette one day and gossiped about Gabrielle and Iribe’s engagement. Colette then wrote to a friend: “I’ve just been told that Iribe is marrying Chanel. Aren’t you horrified for her? That man is a most interesting demon.” 7Iribe’s first wife had been a good friend of Colette’s. Colette didn’t like Iribe. Finding him fawning, she was suspicious of his thrusting drive to succeed. She described him as wrinkled and pale and said that he “coos like a pigeon.” His friend Paul Morand felt rather differently.

Back in Paris, having foretold the transatlantic cataclysm… having sensed that the time for misery was to come; Iribe felt that one had to fight against these curses and die, as a French artisan, for the individual and for quality. In love with the homeland he was returning to and disappointed by it, he was publishing Témoin.”

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Iribe had founded the magazine Le Témoin before the First World War, and now persuaded Gabrielle to fund its relaunch. With forceful Iribe graphics, this time Le Témoin served to support a growing French nationalism. In one illustration, Marianne, female symbol of liberty in France, was Gabrielle, under a bench of sneering judges: Roosevelt, Chamberlain, Mussolini and Hitler. Iribe was now an archpatriot who despised his nation’s present government. Fierce antirepublican sentiment — the same that had brought Hitler to power in Germany not so long before — spawned a number of right-wing leagues, the aim being to overthrow the French Third Republic in favor of a strong, uniting individual. One of the most powerful right-wing elements, the Action Française, under François Maurras, wanted a restoration of France’s monarchy. Iribe wasn’t a monarchist, but he believed that democratic government was ineffectual.