Lisa Chaney - Coco Chanel - An Intimate Life

Sometime around 1953–54, von Dincklage disappeared from Gabrielle’s life. All we know is that Gabrielle continued giving him an allowance; he eventually settled on a Spanish island, and there he devoted his time to painting erotica.

After considerable perseverance, by the end of 1953 Michel Déon had produced a manuscript of three hundred pages recounting Gabrielle’s life story. He waited for her judgment, but none came. Then, Gabrielle sent word through her friend Hervé Mille, editor of Paris Match and one of the arbiters of postwar Parisian taste: “In these three hundred pages there is not a single sentence that is not hers, but now she sees the book, she thinks that it is not what America is expecting.”

Michel Déon understood Gabrielle’s message. He had written down her words just as she had spoken them, without interpretation and with all the fantasies intact. He understood that in her heart she knew the truth perfectly well, that the fantasies that helped her survive were fine to expand on in conversation but, as he says, “not to read black on white.” As a writer, Déon was sensitive to the very powerful hold her imagination had upon her. “What I found truly moving about her was her constant call to this strange, imaginary, quality of existence,” he said, “her charming impulses, a very delicate generosity — when one did not ask for anything — a remarkable intuition in music, poetry, drama.” 29

Rather than criticize her fantasy life—“this strange, imaginary, quality of existence — he understood that she could not have survived without it. He also appreciated her respect for the integrity of writing. Thus when she said to him, “Michel, it is my voice, but I don’t want to hear it,” he told her he understood, and they remained friends. He then destroyed his manuscript. Asked why, Déon said, “I knew that one day I would be approached to use it and, if I didn’t have that unique copy, then I couldn’t.” 30In Michel Déon, Gabrielle had found a true ally: someone who appreciated her blend of understanding exactly what truth is, and her emotional need to fantasize. In this, Déon did not judge her. Rather, he felt great sympathy for her childlike fears, her “inability to abandon her dreams in order to face reality.”

In the spring of 1953, Gabrielle traveled to the United States. For three months, she was the guest of Maggie and Egmont van Zuylen in New York. On weekends, they mostly socialized with people Gabrielle already knew. Out on Long Island, for example, she spent time with the photographer Horst. Then there was Mona Williams, later von Bismarck.

Mona had been named by several designers, including Gabrielle, the best-dressed woman in the world; her fame had triggered Cole Porter’s lines “What do I care if Mrs. Harrison Williams is the best-dressed woman in town?” Her husband (who would die that year) was reputedly the wealthiest man in America. Gabrielle had often been a visitor at the Harrisons’ villa on Capri, originally belonging to the emperor Tiberius. Before the war, she and Harrison had had a brief liaison. He had told Gabrielle that his beautiful socialite wife — most famously photographed by Cecil Beaton in Chanel—“is a fashion model, just a model,” and had attempted to capture Gabrielle for himself. She said if he’d asked her a year earlier she would have gone. As it was, “It felt too late.”

Gabrielle’s visit to the States was in part motivated by the prospect of work. Chanel Parfums New York had asked for her assistance in redesigning their new offices. Gabrielle relished the challenge and created a luxurious yet restrained interior. To accompany the group of signature Coromandel screens she had brought with her from France, Gabrielle included another signature: her beige carpets. These worked as soothing background to the honey-colored straw-cloth walls and the warm wood of the antique pink-beige leather-covered French chairs. Around the rooms was a mixture of African bronzes and paintings by Renoir and Henri Rousseau.

In Gabrielle’s years without designing, she almost never spoke of it. Events, however, were leading her toward it once again. While she was in New York, she made a point of being introduced to Alex and Tatiana Liberman, who had escaped France to safety in America in 1940. Liberman was both talented and tremendously ambitious, and had risen to become the art director of Vogue. He recalled how Gabrielle’s business manager, Count Koutouzof, introduced to her by Dmitri Pavlovich, had “brought Chanel to our house, and we became great friends.” This was that same Alex Liberman who had charged his Parisian friends to break off their friendship with von Dincklage, shortly before the war.

Liberman enjoyed Gabrielle’s company: “I loved the Proustian aspect… the stories, the legends, and her involvement with Diaghilev and Picasso and Cocteau and Reverdy. She was a constant lesson in refinement… Tatiana and Chanel got along well on the surface, although I don’t think there was ever much warmth between them.” 1Quite possibly this was because of Gabrielle’s liaison with von Dincklage, who had deceived Tatiana’s close friend Hélène Dessoffy so badly.

In 1950, Schiaparelli’s sensational style had run its course, and she was obliged to close down her house. Between the First and Second World Wars, some of the most distinguished and influential Parisian couture houses had been directed by women, but several were now gone. Jeanne Lanvin died in 1946; the great Madeleine Vionnet had closed her house in 1939. Admired by Gabrielle, Marlene Dietrich, Katharine Hepburn and Greta Garbo, Vionnet had described herself as “an enemy of fashion,” stating that her interest was in expressing a timeless vision of woman.

The postwar designer Christian Dior, who had shot to overnight fame in 1947, would write that the earliest twentieth-century designers gained variety largely by “trimmings of exquisite craftsmanship.” After the creation and decoration of Poiret:

It was Madeleine Vionnet and Jeanne Lanvin who finally transformed the profession of couturier, by executing the dresses in their collections with their own hands and scissors. The model became a whole and at last skirt and bodice were cut according to the same principle. Madeleine Vionnet achieved wonders in this direction: she was a genius at employing her material, and invented the famous cut on the cross which gave the dresses of the women between the two wars their softly molded look. Freed from the trimmings of 1900 and decorative motives of Poiret, dresses now depended entirely on their cut. 2

Another woman, Nina Ricci, was one of the best designers for elegant older women, and Germaine Krebs, known as Madame Grès, was a sculptress whose house had opened in 1942. The last of the couturiers to develop a ready-to-wear collection, Grès called it “prostitution.” Christian Dior knew his subject well, describing the interwar period as “the age of the great couturiers. Outstanding among them was Mlle Chanel, who dominated all the rest… In her personality as well as in her taste, she had style, elegance, and authority. From quite different points of view, she and Madeleine Vionnet can claim to be the great creators of modern fashion.” 3

Meanwhile, Marcel Rochas, Lucien Lelong, Jean Patou, Edward Molyneux, Cristóbal Balenciaga, Mainbocher and a handful of other young male designers were now the dominant figures in the couture. At the same time, many commentators agreed with Dior that postwar fashion lacked purpose and was often rather ugly: “Hats were far too large, skirts far too short, jackets far too long, shoes far too heavy… and worst of all there was that dreadful mop of hair raised high above the forehead in front and rippling down the backs of French women on their bicycles.” Appreciating that this zazou style had originated in the desire to “defy the forces of occupation and the austerity of Vichy,” nonetheless, as fashion, Dior found it repellent. 4