Coco Chanel (27 page)

Gabrielle did not become a person of artistic significance because Misia made her one. Misia wanted to know Gabrielle because Misia's unerring sense of the creative possibilities in other people picked up on something in Gabrielle that was already there, something whose great force Misia described in her memoirs. The image of a slightly pathetic Gabrielle is one based on a veiled snobbery that subtly discounts both her tremendous intelligence and her remarkable character. With that unsettling capacity for self-knowledge, Gabrielle herself signaled how it was that her qualities had made her quite equal to the challenge of formidable success: “I was self-taught; I learned badly, haphazardly. And yet, when life put me in touch with those who were the most delightful and brilliant people of my age, a Stravinsky, or a Picasso, I neither felt stupid, nor embarrassed.”
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She went on to say that this was because “I had worked out on my own that which cannot be taught... It is with this that one succeeds.”
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When Stravinsky met Gabrielle, she already had achievements behind her that, for the times, must have appeared astounding. Although her modernity was expressed with great finesse, it would, nonetheless, have been seen by many as quite shocking. With a very few exceptions, the only women who were financially independent were those with inherited wealth. Among the most prominent of these exceptions were the courtesans and the actresses who had made their own money—but at what long-term cost? As we have seen, the ability of these women to act with real independence was severely curtailed by a series of powerful social constraints. One of the outstanding contemporary exceptions—regarded as an exciting stimulant, and a very dangerous one at that—was the writer-actress Colette. Colette had flaunted her outrageous difference for several years (as a bisexual who had lived with her female lover and performed seminude and in provocative female embrace on stage) and had transformed herself, through tremendous hard work, from being an entirely dependent woman to one who was financially independent.

One of the ways Gabrielle expressed her independence was in establishing friendships with the coterie of artists, writers and musicians that was making Paris the seat of modernist art. She felt most at ease with these people, whose work inevitably made them outsiders. For Gabrielle, the artists' lives, and the way they were perceived, were not so very different from the courtesans', living, as they did, both at the center and at the edges of society.

 

As far as we can make out, the day before New Year's Eve 1920, Gabrielle and Stravinsky, and a number of these artists, were present at a party later recorded by Paul Morand. He tells how it “started again at Chanel's” at rue Cambon. A buffet was laid out in the fitting rooms. A good proportion of upper Bohemia was present; several were to become Gabrielle's lifelong friends. These included Diaghilev's chief dancer Serge Lifar, Satie, the painter André de Segonzac, the sculptor Jacques Lipchitz, who in 1922 would sculpt a bust of Gabrielle, Picasso's fellow founder of cubism Georges Braque, Picasso himself, the painter Luc-Albert Moreau, Jean Cocteau, his sulky teenage boyfriend Raymond Radiguet, the literary prodigy of the moment, Misia and José Maria Sert, Elise Toulemon (Caryathis), the outrageously modernist writer Blaise Cendrars, and several young composers, who came to be known as Les Six:

Gabrielle's personal involvement in the great cultural shifts taking place in these years made her a most interesting woman. As someone also involved in the forging of a new world, irrespective of whether he spoke about it or not, Stravinsky cannot have failed to recognize, and find stimulating, this difference in Gabrielle. In years to come, Gabrielle's undignified inclination to represent Stravinsky as younger and less sophisticated than he was may have come about in reaction to her virtual omission from future discussion of this period in his life.

While snobbery was at the heart of the musical establishment's motivation here, jealousy of Gabrielle may well have motivated the woman who would take charge of constructing Stravinsky's legacy. This was Vera Sudei-kine, who began her own affair with him shortly after he was rejected by Gabrielle and who would eventually become Stravinsky's second wife.

Meanwhile, fascinated as Misia was by Gabrielle and Stravinsky, she was also piqued at their affair, and when an opportunity arose, she strove to bring about its ruin. Gabrielle and Stravinsky's mutual friends could see how deeply he was affected by her, while Stravinsky's wife, Catherine, accepted his neglect with almost superhuman grace, concerned above all for his own and her children's welfare.

Misia now put it about that she was horrified lest Stravinsky should divorce his poor wife so as to marry Gabrielle. Sert next took it upon himself to “talk” to Stravinsky, informing him that Capel had “entrusted [Gabrielle] to me; and a man like you . . . is known as a shit.”
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While Sert “cultivated the anguish” Stravinsky was suffering, Misia heightened the emotional atmosphere by telling Gabrielle that Stravinsky was distraught, and wanted to know if she would marry him. Having stirred up this drama, the Serts were then highly amused by Stravinsky's distress and spread the story among their friends, including Picasso. At last, Gabrielle begged for the drama to stop and for Stravinsky to “come back.” He did, every day. If Gabrielle did not feel the depth of passion that her Russian lover felt for her, her mind, her emotions and her intelligence had nonetheless become engaged in a new way. Apart from anything else, the compliment of having an intelligent and highly creative man in love with her must have been restorative after her tormented months of mourning.

Stravinsky's very Russian soul was, in itself, an escape for Gabrielle from herself into an exciting mental and emotional landscape. Indeed, she would say, “Russians fascinated me. Inside everyone from the Auvergne [the place she sometimes chose to claim as her own] there is an Oriental one doesn't realize is there: the Russians revealed the Orient to me.”
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Gabrielle said that she found “all Slavs . . . naturally refined.” She must also, in Stravinsky, have identified with the deep seriousness central to the artist's life. For a woman who said, “Nothing interested me any more . . . nothing at all, only esoteric things,”
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her love affair with Stravinsky had helped her, secretly still mourning, to feel herself more grounded and alive.

It had also brought a measure of humor, albeit a mad Russian version, back into her life. Someone who was not close enough to be sure about the affair would later write:

Finally, when the Ballets Russes was leaving for a tour of Spain, Stravinsky asked Gabrielle to come with him. She said she would follow soon. Whether Gabrielle really intended going is uncertain because she allowed herself to be waylaid by circumstance, and Stravinsky was to wait for her in vain.

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On February 9, 1921, not long after Stravinsky had left Paris with Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes, a young man recorded an evening with Gabrielle at the singer Marthe Davelli's, with whom Gabrielle and Arthur had picnicked on the beach at Saint-Jean-de-Luz in 1915. Our diarist said of Gabrielle that he “hadn't seen her for ten years.” Commenting that she “didn't say a word about Boy Capel,” he said she was a most agreeable companion and was almost unchanged in looks. Gabrielle drove him home, “and we suddenly found ourselves on an amazingly friendly footing.”
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The diarist was Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich, grandson of Tsar Alexander II and cousin of Tsar Nicholas II. No previous biographer of Gabrielle has had access to Dmitri Pavlovich's diaries. But with them, we have been able not only to revise important aspects of their ensuing relationship but also to trace the course of a famed yet mysterious trip they made together not long after their meeting.

At thirty, Dmitri Pavlovich had already experienced a life of great upheaval. His mother had died at his birth and his father's remarriage, eleven years later, had led to his banishment, so Dmitri and his sister, Marie, were placed with their aunt and uncle. Grand Duke Sergei loved his young charges, but the relationship became strained as they grew older. When this uncle was assassinated by an anarchist's bomb in 1905, Dmitri was sent to a military academy; he was fourteen. The men he loved—his educational supervisor, his father and the tsar—through personality or circumstance, were all to thwart Dmitri's need for a man he could unreservedly admire. As an intelligent young patriot, he combined traditionalism with what he saw as open-mindedness. Although wishing to serve his country in some significant way, Dmitri also felt inadequate to the task because of a lack of self-assurance.

In 1916, he was one of those involved in the conspiracy to murder the “holy man” Grigori Rasputin, whose hold over the tsarina had become deplorable. After hours of black farce, the assassins rolled Rasputin up in a curtain, tied it with rope and then dumped him in the river Neva through a hole in the ice. When discovered, Rasputin had survived poisoning and gunshot wounds, finally to die by drowning. Dmitri's efforts at improving the situation in his country were largely frustrated. Camouflaging his shyness and any depth of character behind his good looks and the persona of a charming playboy, he always found it difficult to be taken seriously.

Rasputin's murder led to Dmitri's exile to an army unit on the Persian front. Thus, when most of the Russian royal family—including his father, brother and aunt—was murdered by the Bolsheviks in 1918, Dmitri was one of those few who escaped the slaughter. Throughout his life, great privilege had served him ill in his loss of every figure of significance, save his sister, Grand Duchess Marie. A life already filled with such loss may have inhibited Dmitri in the formation of close attachments aside from his sister.

Making his way to Britain from Tehran at the end of the war, Dmitri was permitted to take up residence. Here he studied in preparation for his possible future role as tsar. He also continued socializing, with a noted predilection for actresses and ballerinas. Dmitri's sister described his life before the revolution:

Dmitri's breathtakingly privileged and yet isolated upbringing had left him badly equipped to make the changes necessary for a successful new life in the West. Like most of his fellow Russian aristocrats, in the revolution Dmitri had lost not only virtually his entire wealth, but he had also lost caste, to a devastating degree.

Marie described the aristocratic émigrés' social lives: “the atmosphere that settled down around us had almost nothing to do with the people or the interests of the country we were living in; we led an existence apart.”
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All had lost family, and narrowly avoided death. And while they had usually been reduced to near-poverty, they didn't speak of their losses or “the harrowing tales of our escape from Russia. Everyone tried to make the best of his present situation . . . We managed even to be gay in a detached, inconsequential sort of way.”
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While Dmitri appeared to have adjusted to his new life, it was as if the energy involved in escaping (and losing) one's country had left him, like many fellow émigrés, so emotionally reduced that he was unable, really, to begin his life again. Although many were still young, they had effectively withdrawn, living an impoverished version of their old lives. A few even allowed their transformation into celebrity pastiches of their previous selves: modeling clothes for couturiers or film acting, their noble blood touted as the draw. Only recently, Dmitri Pavlovich had turned down a lucrative film contract with Hollywood.

Meanwhile, in 1919, he had arrived in Paris from England, where he had pursued the beautiful forty-two-year-old American heiress Consuelo Vanderbilt, ex-wife of the Duke of Marlborough. Consuelo Vanderbilt described Dmitri as “an exceptionally handsome man, fair and sleek with long blue eyes in a narrow face, he had fine features, and the stealthy walk of a wild animal, moving with the same balanced grace.”
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But Consuelo quickly thought better of this briefest of liaisons and made a happy marriage to Jacques Balsan. Balsan was the famed aviator elder brother of Etienne, Gabrielle's lover from Royallieu days.