Coco Chanel (26 page)

Gabrielle was asked by Beaumont to help design some of the costumes for his 1919 spring ball. Beaumont loved nothing better than accentuating his power through manipulating his friends, and typically kept them in suspense about their invitations. He made a point of leaving off two or three who expected one, and anyone “in trade.” When Misia discovered, to her embarrassment, that her friend Gabrielle Chanel had not been invited, she protested by refusing to take up her own invitation. Instead, on the night of the ball, she collected Gabrielle “with Sert and Picasso as our escorts . . . and mingled with the chauffeurs crowded in front of the house, to watch the costumed guests make their entrance.” They must have made an odd quartet: Picasso, known to several of the guests; Misia and Sert, well-known to most of them; and then Gabrielle, unknown to a great many but recognizable as an immensely stylish woman.

Misia said they had an uproarious time sending up the guests. No matter how up-to-date the upper class's attitudes to the arts, to bohemia, they still appeared mired in the suffocating and ancient habits of social superiority. Indeed, Etienne de Beaumont had no qualms about using Gabrielle's skills while rejecting her as a guest. It wouldn't be long, however, before he and his wife comprehended Gabrielle's growing significance and were then all too keen to include her in their suave set.

It is commonly said that once Gabrielle gained power, she made it her business to subject the haut monde to the same condescension she had suffered at their hands. But Gabrielle was a more complex and ambivalent creature than that.

16

In 1921, after several months at a small Breton seaside resort, Stravinsky had been driven to distraction for lack of stimulation and returned to Paris in search of a house for his chronically ill wife and four children. His financial position was precarious. Recognizing his difficulties, Gabrielle suggested that Stravinsky bring his family to stay at Bel Respiro. She had spared no expense in the creation of a beautiful and consoling retreat, and by late September that year, the Stravinsky entourage, including extended family and various domestic and childcare staff, had settled themselves into Bel Respiro's luxury.

Writing to an old friend, Stravinsky sounded tense. Apologizing for the brevity of his letter, he said his nerves were “in a poor condition”; possibly a reference to the emotional complications developing at the villa.
²
Stravinsky had fallen for Gabrielle. When she voiced concern for Stravinsky's wife, Catherine, his “very Russian” response was: “She knows I love you. To whom else, if not her, could I confide something so important?”
³

Stravinsky took to absenting himself from Bel Respiro and visiting Gabrielle at the Ritz, where she had taken a suite while his family was staying at her house. The composer's originality as a musician was augmented by his brilliant, intense and highly ambitious nature. He was not handsome, but his memorably strong features were an interesting contrast to his notably dandyish appearance. His aloofness added an attractive element to a complex personality. Gabrielle said, “I liked him . . . because he was very kind, because he often went out with me, and it's very pleasant to learn . . . from people like that.”
⁴
They went out to clubs, to parties and, once, with Misia and Sert, to the Paris fair. This is borne out by the passport-type photograph they had taken of themselves to commemorate the event.

Gabrielle had little knowledge of music, but Stravinsky set out to teach her. Unsurprisingly, she proved an able pupil. In the process, she developed a passion for Stravinsky's compositions. He, in turn, developed a passion for Gabrielle, and it wasn't long before they were launched into an affair. Gabrielle had been seduced once more by that Slavic cast of mind she seems to have found so irresistible—first Misia, then Diaghilev and now Igor Stravinsky.

If the composer's nerves were strained by the management of his liaison, his stay at Bel Respiro was, at the same time, very creative. Not only did he finish the brilliant
Concertino for String Quartet
, he also completed
Les noces villageoises,
a ballet he had struggled with for several years. This was first heard, in 1923, at the magnificent town house of Winnaretta Singer, the Princess de Polignac and heiress to the vast Singer sewing-machine fortune. Winnaretta's highly dedicated musical salon was one of the most powerful in Paris, and on that evening, Stravinsky, Diaghilev, the whole of the Ballets Russes and a number of other guests were present. The princess, who had by then become one of Gabrielle's clients, was asked, “Why do you not ask Chanel?” and in her famously imperious manner she answered, “I don't entertain my trades people.”
⁵
Winnaretta Singer admired hardworking, self-made women, and her refusal to associate with Gabrielle may well have been partly out of jealousy; she was one of Stravinsky's most important patrons.

We know little of the details, but during Stravinsky's affair with Gabrielle, he was able to complete his memorial tribute to Claude Debussy,
Symphonies d'instruments à vent,
recognized as his most important work of that decade. Its spare and urbane quality has been related to the way postwar reconstruction became an important aspect of all Parisian artistic endeavor. The symphonies are seen as a new departure in Stravinsky's music, for which no label yet existed, and which was at the heart of the modern sensibility.
⁶
There is no doubt that this brief but intense period at Bel Respiro saw Stravinsky liberated to resolve several long-standing musical problems.

The composer and his lover may have been worlds apart, but one can appreciate the attraction this now quintessentially modern woman had for a man whose musical power had already acted as a force blasting away the last of musical romanticism. With the end of the war, the intellectual climate had been transformed by a sense of the futility, the sheer irrelevance of so much that had gone before. A fellow composer, Pierre Boulez, would say in the future that “something radically new, even foreign to Western tradition, had to be found for music to survive, and to enter our contemporary era. The glory of Stravinsky was to have belonged to this extremely gifted generation and to be one of the most creative of them all.”

Seven years after composing
The Rite of Spring,
Stravinsky made significant changes in preparation for its new staging. One of Stravinsky's children recalled how the house was often filled with “the echoes of the piano,” resounding with “music so powerful that it scared us.”
⁷
In this new version of the great ballet's score, Stravinsky was delineating the outlines of a more urban, cosmopolitan modernism than in its earlier, more folkloric incarnation. This was exactly the atmosphere emanating from Bel Respiro, and from Gabrielle herself. Stravinsky's artistic imagination cannot but have been stimulated by having an affair with a woman who exemplified that very sense of modernity the composer now incorporated into
The Rite of Spring.

While the ballet was relaunched by Diaghilev on December 15, 1920, its scandalous reputation had gone before it. And the air of anticipation was so intense that success was almost inevitable. One admiring critic wrote that audiences had simply needed time to catch up with the modernity of the composer's great work. Gabrielle, whose sponsorship made it possible, would later say, “I loved the Ballets Russes very much . . . when Diaghilev would tell me, “but it will be very expensive to put this on—I didn't care at all.”
⁸
Declaring that money was an “accursed thing,” and because of that “it should be squandered,” Gabrielle used her patronage to put into practice her professed belief that the only real point of wealth was its ability “to make us free.” She not only “squandered” it on Stravinsky's
Rite of Spring,
she was to become, albeit as discreetly as possible, one of Diaghilev's and Stravinsky's major patrons for several years to come.

From its first night, this
Rite of Spring
was heralded as a classic, and Gabrielle was present at the grand supper party Diaghilev gave to celebrate the launch of the new season. Among the guests were the principal dancers, the Picassos, Stravinsky, Misia and the choreographer and principal dancer, Léonide Massine. Massine became overwrought, made himself completely drunk and apparently burned “Picasso's hand with a cigarette (Picasso never moved).”
⁹
Diaghilev had just discovered that Massine, his present lover, was having an affair with one of the female dancers.

Diaghilev's fantastic possessiveness made him incapable of forgiving Massine. And although his reaction to Massine's affair would drive Diaghilev to an emotional collapse, he was obdurate that his gifted friend would no longer work with the Ballets Russes.

While this episode was particularly dramatic, emotional dramas of one kind or another were not only constantly being played out behind the scenes in the Ballets Russes, they were integral to its existence. Somehow, Diaghilev and his troupe created an ongoing atmosphere of chaos, out of which they made their extraordinary ballets. Picasso's own kind of creative chaos had a very different rhythm, however, and he had vowed he wouldn't work with those mad Russians again. Diaghilev's notoriously unscrupulous passion and conviction were nevertheless so persuasive that he had succeeded in luring back the painter, normally intractable once his mind had been made up. Even Diaghilev's fellow Russian, Stravinsky, obviously familiar with the vagaries of the Russian temperament, once declared:

When Misia had got wind of Gabrielle's philanthropy toward Diaghilev, she felt her role as the sole source of invention, especially if it had to do with Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes, had been subverted. Extraordinarily, she complained to Gabrielle about giving Diaghilev the finances to mount
The Rite of Spring.
Then, on hearing of Gabrielle's further generosity, she said, “I am overcome with sorrow when I think that Stravinsky has accepted money from you.”
¹¹

Misia was fascinated by Gabrielle, and would remain so for the rest of her life. She understood, with that uncanny intuition, that Gabrielle was different—in her own way, completely original. But she felt that the great Diaghilev was her “property.” Now that Gabrielle's own philanthropic acts had intruded on Misia's territory, she was incensed.

 

Gabrielle's creative success and distinctive persona were enlarging her position in Parisian society. While only the most up-to-date of the haut monde were prepared to socialize with this “dressmaker,” she was now meeting some of the most significant musicians, artists and writers then in Paris. With both the haut monde and bohemia curious about her, Gabrielle had allowed herself to be seduced not by another wealthy socialite but by an artist. This particular artist, Stravinsky, was no ordinary struggling composer, and Gabrielle's affair with this towering figure was an intriguing and thought-provoking interlude. While sometimes denying the affair, she also said what was clearly closer to the truth for her: that “he was marvelous.” This relationship confirmed Gabrielle's unusual ability to inhabit those two worlds that are, in many ways, mutually exclusive: the world of society, the haut monde, and the world of the artist.

This ability involved a tension at the heart of Gabrielle's creativity, and was something she would have to negotiate for the rest of her life. Like all true artists, Gabrielle was obsessed with reality and functionality and, in turn, the peculiar relation of these to beauty. This was the unique position she was forging for herself in fashion: an unobtrusive functionality.

The artist in Gabrielle intuited that if an artist associates too much with power, the creative spirit can be sterilized. And yet luxury, which was an essential part of what she was promoting, is about exclusivity, itself inextricably associated with power. As a couturier, Gabrielle was dressing the rich and powerful, who used their luxury to exhibit their wealth and power. As an artist of simplicity and minimalism, Gabrielle was running into implicit conflict and confrontation all the time. She worked in the midst of a paradox. Yet unlike many of her artist friends, Gabrielle was not a rebel whose actions were based on destruction. Her fascination, even obsession, with youth and youthfulness emerged from a different motivation. For Gabrielle, youth was a vital, creative force, not a destructive one. In dressing the rich as if they were poor—in frustration, Poiret described this as her
pauvre de luxe
—she was forever walking a tightrope. A tightrope from which, nonetheless, she didn't fall because, unlike the rebel, Gabrielle was not attacking culture.

An image of her has grown up over the years, originating in this period. It evokes a picture of an ignorant, socially meek woman whose powerful personality helped her rise to prominence as a designer because she had an instinct for the right clothes. Apparently, through Misia Sert's tutelage and introductions, Gabrielle was able to meet and understand how to communicate with the artistic community. This picture is the one painted by Misia Sert for her own aggrandizement. It is an image perpetuated by all subsequent writers on Gabrielle. And it is nonsense. It implies that Gabrielle's association with artists was simply a diverting pastime. In fact, her friendship with these people was crucial both to who she was and to the cultural influence she was already wielding.