Lisa Chaney - Coco Chanel - An Intimate Life

Marguerite Nametalla was an Egyptian (it was said she had been a violet seller) married to the diplomat Baron Egmont van Zuylen, whose home was the immense medieval De Haar Castle, in the Netherlands. Maggie was elegantly beautiful, with pale skin and green eyes, and enjoyed dramatizing her “unwealthy origins.” Her son-in-law, Guy de Rothschild, described her as “witty and gay, lively and provocative, she combined audacity and fantasy. Completely natural and devoid of timidity, her sense of humor… her repartee, her gift for imitation, made her seem like a character in a play.” 6André Malraux would proclaim that “Chanel, General de Gaulle and Picasso are the three most important figures of our time,” and of Maggie van Zuylen, he said, “Hers is intelligence in its purest state, since it is unencumbered by any intellectual baggage.”

“Maggie could participate in any conversation, for while conscious of her lack of culture, she never gave it a second thought.” 7Her vivacity was seductive, and Gabrielle felt renewed in the company of this worldly and vital younger woman. She also became her lover. In the winter of 1945–46, they entertained each other uproariously with their sparkling and acid wit. Writing many years later in his journal, Paul Morand would say that before Gabrielle “became exclusively lesbian, I lived with her and Mme. de Zuylen at the Beau Rivage , shared their private life… in Lausanne. They didn’t hide when I found them in bed together.” 8

Gabrielle had so far outwitted her demons by “never resting.” Still on the move from everything she found too painful, she was obliged to use her hotel hopping as a new method of forgetting.

Did she make herself forget, too, the mounting deaths of her friends, lovers and family that reminded her of time passing? Her two brothers, whom she had cut off so peremptorily at the beginning of the war, were both dead, Lucien felled by a heart attack early in the war, and without seeing their sister again. Gabrielle rarely referred to her family. She was one of those who had so outgrown their roots that in doing so she had rejected them, left them far behind. When they pulled her back, they did nothing but remind her of a childhood that she said she remembered every day and that she spent her whole life trying to avoid. Either through a sense of social inadequacy or a genuine impatience with the roots that were of no use to her emotionally, psychologically or financially, Gabrielle had made the decision and ruthlessly thrust them aside.

Excising almost all her family from her life, Gabrielle appears to have retained only her aunt Adrienne and her nephew, André Palasse, and his family. She brought André and his family to Switzerland in an attempt to improve his health, but André would eventually die of tuberculosis.

In 1942, Gabrielle’s friend Max Jacob had died in the appalling Drancy internment camp, in Paris’s outer suburbs; his sister and brother had already been sent to be gassed in Auschwitz. That same year, Duke Dmitri Pavlovich had died in another kind of prison, a sanatorium in Switzerland, where for more than a year he had struggled with tuberculosis. In 1948, Vera Bate-Lombardi died in Rome. But before Vera, Gabrielle’s old friend José Maria Sert’s death was announced. Theirs had been what Gabrielle called a relationship “with all the ripples that the clash of characters as entrenched as ours can stir up.” Sert was “as munificent and as immoral as a Renaissance man,” who had done nothing to curb the pace of work, food, drink and the drugs that his doctors had said would kill him. One day, in November 1945, while laboring on his huge mural in the cathedral of Vichy, he dropped dead.

Misia had been quite unaware that Sert was close to death, and was bereft, afterward writing, “With him, disappeared all my reasons to exist.” 9Her beloved brother had already died; and her divorced niece, now living with her, would be killed in a car crash, leaving Misia more alone than ever. The dosage and frequency of her morphine increased. It was her only way of keeping at bay the inevitability of loss and its sibling, pain, made worse by the sequence of her own aging. She survived by spending increasingly long periods shielded from reality under her cloak of narcotics: “Chatting at dinner parties, or wandering through the flea market, she would pause to jab a needle right through her skirt.” 10And here was one of the great differences between Misia and her friend and sometime lover Gabrielle. Both of them had long ago reached a state where they could not live without their drugs. But where Misia’s addiction meant that she became utterly controlled by it and used her narcotics in increasing quantity, Gabrielle was never in that position. She was dependent, but her great force of character never allowed the morphine to control her; Gabrielle controlled the morphine.

Procuring Misia’s drugs had become dangerous, yet she bothered less and less about concealing her habit. “Once, in Monte Carlo, she walked into a pharmacy and asked outright for morphine, while a terrified Gabrielle pleaded with her to be more careful.” 11In those postwar years, Misia traveled to Switzerland to spend time with Gabrielle, and also to collect her supplies, as she and Gabrielle had done together so many times before. But Misia’s name was now found on a drug dealer’s list in Paris; she was arrested and thrown into a cell with fellow addicts, prostitutes and down-and-outers. Friends got her out after twenty-four hours, but at seventy-six, she was greatly shaken by the experience.

Now too frightened to answer the door, Misia turned ever more to her chemical oblivion. In September 1950, when there was little of herself left to destroy, Misia made her last trip to Switzerland to visit Gabrielle and collect her latest consignment of drugs. Not long after returning to Paris, she withdrew to her bed. A month later, her maid called friends to her bedside; she was dying. Gabrielle came, and stayed until Misia retreated into that silent space before death. Late that night, her breathing quietly stopped. Early the following morning Gabrielle took charge, as only she knew how. She had Misia’s body removed to Sert’s great canopied bed, then set to work to “perform her last rites for her friend.”

She arranged Misia’s hair, made up her face and decorated her with her jewels. In white, on a bank of white flowers, a pink ribbon across her breast, at its center one pale rose. Thus Misia was presented by Gabrielle to her mourning friends. Misia’s biographers would say that Gabrielle had made the years fall away and that Misia looked “more beautiful than ever.” With more realism, in a typically arch aside, the novelist Nancy Mitford wrote, “Dolly… had just come from the deathbed of Misia Sert. Mlle Chanel was there doing up the corpse. “Well, Coco was doing her nails — I thought it was kind of her — but I must say, she had overdone the makeup.” 12The funeral was held in the Polish church, in rue Cambon, close by the Chanel boutique.

First Sert and now Misia were gone. Whatever dreadful things Gabrielle might have said of Misia, these two had been a source of strength and comfort to each other in an enduringly passionate friendship lasting for more than thirty years. Gabrielle said, “Whoever mentions Sert mentions Misia,” and so it must have been in her own heart. With the death of the prodigiously unreconstructed Sert and his woman, a crucial aspect of Gabrielle’s life’s entertainment, exasperation and support was gone, leaving her world a diminished one. While declaring that “I am much more frightened of women than I am of men,” she added, “Women never amuse me. I feel no friendship for them… They don’t play the game, but expect it to be played for them.” 13Meanwhile, Misia, who like Gabrielle was “neither good nor bad,” was also the one about whom Gabrielle would say with stark simplicity, “She has been my only woman friend.” 14