Lisa Chaney - Coco Chanel - An Intimate Life

I give you my love. No one of us must ever die.

La Pausa

1938

Dear beautiful Chanel

… It scares me more and more to telephone you, it gives me palpitations, anguish seizes me by the throat and I understand absolutely nothing of what you’re telling me… I have to tell you where I stand… and it is better to write it to you than not to tell you.

I give you my love and I love you.

Your Salvador

La Pausa, Roquebrune

Late 1938

Dear beautiful little bird

… Gala [his wife] is gone… While you were here you have truly enchanted La Pausa. One gets used to not seeing this little image… One thing is certain is that our meeting is becoming very “good” and very important…

I give you all my love

Your Salvador 4

Salvador is Salvador Dalí and, for several months, he and Gabrielle had been having an affair. A few years later, she would brush the romance aside and say she indulged in it only to annoy Gala. Reading the series of Dalí’s letters to Gabrielle, one can see that he, however, had clearly both fallen in love with Gabrielle and was amazed by her. In spite of his (intentionally or not) surreal way of communicating, one sees that Dalí was no fool, and he undoubtedly appreciated something of the great breadth of Gabrielle’s character. This included “seeing” her melancholy. He would no doubt have agreed with her comments when she said: “I provide contrasts… which I cannot get used to: I think I am the shyest and the boldest person, the gayest and the saddest. It’s not that I am violent; it’s the contrasts, the great opposites that clash within me.” 5

Gabrielle’s horror of loneliness left her still yearning for love and companionship. But after Iribe’s death, disillusionment would harden her. She seemed resigned to the thought that nothing lasts and you take what you can while you can. And for all her growing self-presentation as invincible and hard, as much as anything this was because of those violent contrasts she had described. On the one hand, she was very strong; on the other, her vulnerability never left her. Thus she could say, “Anyway, that is the person I am. Have you understood? Very well, I am also the opposite of all that.” 6Thus one is not entirely convinced by Gabrielle’s protestations that she was untouched by her affair with Dalí and that her only thought had been to spite his wife, Gala, extremely annoying though Gala Dalí was.

Gabrielle came and went from La Pausa, regularly allowing one or more of her friends to stay for lengthy periods in her absence. During the thirties, one of these guests had been Pierre Reverdy. While Reverdy had exiled himself to the monastery outside Paris in the twenties, periodically he found the life of an ascetic insupportable and returned to the outside world. For some time, this had also involved an intermittent “return” to Gabrielle.

In that summer of 1938, Dalí’s letters to Gabrielle repeatedly stress how they are “terribly anxious about this nightmare you are living with Roussi.” This was Roussadana, the Russian girl who had married José Maria Sert.

Sometime before, Roussadana had become addicted to morphine, and in recent months she had also been reduced to a painful thinness. When she and Sert arrived to stay at La Pausa, Roussadana looked terrible; she was permanently feverish and coughing. Gabrielle took over. Sert didn’t “believe” in illness and, anyway, he was far too selfish to take a proper interest in his wife’s failing health. Gabrielle insisted they take Roussadana to a specialist for X-rays, and the verdict did not surprise her: Roussadana was in an advanced stage of tuberculosis. The doctors insisted she must enter a sanatorium, but the ravaged young woman absolutely refused to do so. Finally, Gabrielle used the ruse of paying a visit to her doctor in Switzerland. Would Roussadana come with her? When their train had set off, Roussadana showed Gabrielle the bruises given her by Sert in his fury at seeing her leave. She called them “Sert’s last gifts.”

Arriving in Switzerland, Gabrielle persuaded her to enter a clinic. On receiving the news in Paris, Misia rushed to Switzerland to see her, but once there, she was repeatedly refused entry. She was told that the smallest upset could be fatal for Roussadana. Distraught, Misia returned to Paris, convinced it was Gabrielle, not the doctors, who had prevented her from seeing the dying young woman. She may well have been correct. Misia suffered terribly at not being able to see the woman who had not only destroyed her marriage but whom she also adored.

As a final pathetic twist, tradition has it that Roussadana’s morphine addiction was now so relentless that although mortally ill from tuberculosis, she could survive only short periods without a new fix. Ever the resourceful one, Gabrielle procured a substantial quantity, then brought Roussadana a large basket of marzipan “flowers,” ordered from Fauchon in Paris, into each one of which she had inserted a “dose” of morphine. 7

Not long after Roussadana and Sert had married, Abbé Mugnier dined at the Robert Rothschilds. The Abbé talked with Misia about what he called her “peculiar social situation.” Painting a touching portrait of her, he was amazed at her lack of vitriol, saying that she “didn’t speak ill of her husband either.” 8And when, on December 16, 1938, Roussadana Mdivani Sert was released from her suffering, Misia had been prevented from bidding her farewell. Jean Hugo (great-grandson to Victor and the writer and artist whose benign personality led Maurice Sachs to describe him as having no enemies) wrote that Roussadana lay smiling as the Reverend Conan Doyle administered the last rites. The insane Sert had arrived with a blue eiderdown in which he wanted to wrap Roussadana’s body. The eiderdown was too big for the coffin, but he was determined. Gabrielle was also determined to have her lilies in the coffin, and they argued; a depressing image. 9

A few weeks earlier, on September 21, the Western powers had abandoned Czechoslovakia to its fate, agreeing to appeasement rather than confrontation with Germany. The following day, Churchill had voiced the opinion of many when he wrote to The Times:

The division of Czechoslovakia, under pressure from England and France, is equivalent to the total surrender of western democracies to threats of Nazi force. Such a collapse will bring peace and security to neither England nor France.

His words would of course prove correct, and time was running out.

The Paris spring collections for 1939 continued, meanwhile, with their escapist historical theme. Vogue said that “Paris, the worldly, the sophisticated — Paris, where a woman is hardly considered a passable beauty until she is thirty-five — this Paris has suddenly gone completely innocent, quaint, modest, girlish.” Describing the “modest grace” of the evening clothes, the magazine said, “You can choose between the provoking gypsy modesty of Chanel’s bodice-and-skirt dresses, Mainbocher peasant types, or the eighteenth-century modesty that is in every collection.” Gabrielle’s day clothes remained simple, but for evening, she “did” charming peasants, too, and had full skirts in multicolored taffetas, puff-sleeved and embroidered blouses, short bolero jackets and handkerchiefs tied at the neck. And while her signature (fabric) camellia flowers were pinned to shoulders and necklines, she also had several pieces taking up a tricolor theme, trimming them with red, white and blue. For the first time, Gabrielle was interviewed by the American National Broadcasting Corporation (NBC) in Paris. Schiaparelli was interviewed, too, but separately.