Lisa Chaney - Coco Chanel - An Intimate Life

By June 4, the Germans were bombing the outskirts of Paris. The government instructed everyone who was able to leave the city to do so. Ahead of an advancing German army, millions of men, women and children, in any vehicle to be found, or otherwise on foot, were now fleeing Paris. Along the big west and south highways, motor and horse-drawn vehicles were “piled high with babies’ cribs, luggage, pets, bedding and food, all under a hot summer sun.” 5“The exodus,” as it came to be known, was followed ten days later by the government, itself fleeing south to Tours in a convoy of limousines.

After war had been declared, Dalí wrote to Gabrielle from a villa at Arcachon, not far from the Spanish border, to which he and Gala had withdrawn. He was concerned about Gabrielle, saying he had

sent you two telegrams and we are constantly waiting for a sign from you to know that you are running your little face somewhere. I imagine that you are snowed under with worries, for you cultivate such a “fanaticism of responsibilities’ in everything!… Only enormous and very “important” things will be “visible” in the times that will follow… When will we meet, where?

Then, in another letter, he tells her about the night bombings at Arcachon and regrets not being able to look at her: “How sweet it is to grab you on the corner of a tablecloth… Whatever you do, be careful, I know that you have a crazy and useless carelessness, that you run like a cockerel without being scared of anything.” 6

In the first week of June, along with most of Paris, Dalí’s “crazy” Gabrielle escaped, just ahead of the advancing German army. On closing her couture house and laying off all her workers except those in the boutique, Gabrielle had instructed her director, Georges Madoux, to remove all the accounts and archives and take them to a makeshift office he was to set up in the Midi. Madoux, however, had been called up and decided his first priority was to save his family and his own possessions before the administrative hub of the House of Chanel.

Stories differ as to Gabrielle’s precise movements in those hazardous days, but we know she left Paris with a hastily recruited driver in his own car. Petrol had been rationed, and fear walked abroad. Gabrielle decided against her own house, La Pausa, as a refuge. In response to a Royal Air Force attack on Turin, the Italians had declared war on the Allies and begun bombing the Riviera. Cocteau had fled to Aix-en-Provence with the Aurics, but Gabrielle decided not to go there.

Having managed the long journey down through France, she reached Pau, in the Pyrenees, before turning off farther into the mountains and the small village of Corbères-Abères. Here André Palasse had his château, and Gabrielle came to a halt there for a few weeks. She had bought the château for André in 1926—the sale was negotiated by Gabrielle’s old lover Etienne Balsan, living nearby — and, most summers, Gabrielle had spent time there with André and his family.

Other refugees soon began to arrive. Gabrielle Labrunie, André’s daughter, tells how these were her great-aunt’s employees who had nowhere else to go. In all, there were about fifteen. Madame Labrunie remembers that some of them “were rather lost, confused… they were quite old… and no longer able to work… We’d heard that Paris was going to be very dangerous, so they all came to Corbères.” 7One of the refugees was a pregnant girl called Annick. She was the daughter of Madame Aubert, the redhead who had been Gabrielle’s right-hand woman for so long. Another of those who ended up at Corbères-Abères was Gabrielle’s friend the socialite Marie-Louise Bousquet.

On June 14, the Germans occupied Paris; Reynaud’s coalition government then collapsed, and Marshal Pétain was chosen as France’s new premier. On June 16, he requested an armistice. At dawn, a week later, Hitler arrived in Paris accompanied by his entourage, including his architect, Albert Speer, and the neoclassicist sculptor Arno Breker. With them he made his notorious lightning tour of the defeated city. Stopping at the Opéra, the party continued down the Champs-Elysées and on to the Trocadéro. Hitler posed for the infamous photograph in front of the balustrade overlooking the Seine and the Eiffel Tower. At Les Invalides, he stood musing over Napoléon’s tomb. He was impressed by the proportions of the Panthéon but was uninterested in other monuments signaling the illustriousness of Paris. The rue de Rivoli, however, delighted him, and the military governor of Paris requisitioned the Hôtel Meurice there for himself and his associates.

By 9:00 a.m., Hitler had finished his tour. He told Speer, “It was the dream of my life to see Paris. I cannot say how happy I am to have that dream fulfilled.” He later told Speer that he had often considered destroying the city, but it was clear that instead they must continue with the new buildings of Berlin, so that “when we are finished Paris will only be a shadow.”

France had agreed to accept its military defeat. On June 21, in a clearing in that same forest of Compiègne that Gabrielle had ridden through many times with Etienne Balsan and their friends, and in the same carriage in which the Allies had watched the Germans sign their defeat in the First World War, the Germans now dictated their terms to the French delegation. On hearing the news in the faraway Pyrenees, Gabriele Labrunie tells how her great-aunt shut herself up in her room for several hours and wept, scandalized at Pétain’s surrender without a fight.

After a few weeks of hiding in the hills, Gabrielle decided it wasn’t for her. Dalí was right: she wasn’t really “scared of anything”—with one exception: being abandoned. On July 14, she sent a telegram to a Spanish sculptor friend of Picasso’s, Apelles Fenosa, who had fled Paris for Toulouse, and told him that she would be “reaching Toulouse Monday afternoon. Please find me somewhere to stay… Greetings. Gabrielle Chanel.”

Apelles Fenosa was an exiled Spanish Republican sculptor who had arrived in Paris in 1938 with nothing. Picasso had helped him escape from Spain, and Cocteau had introduced him to Gabrielle in early 1939. By this time, Fenosa’s work was selling well, and Gabrielle commissioned him to sculpt her. (For some time, Picasso had failed to persuade his friend to sculpt him, but Gabrielle finally encouraged Fenosa to do so.)

Fenosa was a dynamic, attractive character, and not long after their meeting, he and Gabrielle were launched into an affair. She offered to move Fenosa into the Ritz, where she was already living, but the communist sculptor found himself uncomfortable in the bourgeois confines of the hotel, so Cocteau made a deal with him. He would swap his apartment in the place de la Madeleine with Fenosa, and Cocteau would take the room offered by Gabrielle at the Ritz. In the late autumn, Fenosa was diagnosed with double mastoiditis, and Cocteau told his boyfriend, the matinee idol Jean Marais, away in the army, that Gabrielle’s doctors were looking after Fenosa, who was very ill. Away from Paris, Gabrielle had telegrammed asking for news of his health.

The affair between the couturier and the sculptor continued for a year or more, and they were said to be very close. Dalí had intuited correctly that he had “been left a widow.” Fenosa felt great admiration for Gabrielle and would later say that “she was highly intelligent, she was good for me. She never left anything to chance.” But in the end, it was he who felt driven to break off their affair, saying there were two reasons for their separation. Apparently, “there were two or three stories about men around her, as was often the case with her… but mostly it was drugs!” Fenosa was vehemently against drug use. Adamant that he didn’t want to become habituated to them himself, he said, “It was drugs that pulled us apart. If you love someone who takes drugs, either you take them yourself or the other person quits.” Fenosa had told Gabrielle, “Either you quit drugs, or I leave!” He left. 8