Coco Chanel (33 page)

Gabrielle had a redeeming contradictory trait, and one particularly rare in people who are controlling. An old employee would say that “she hated things which were planned. She didn't have this notion of organization like we do.” And Jean Cocteau once said, “She has, by a kind of miracle, worked in fashion according to rules that would seem to have value only for artists.”
⁸

At the same time, Sachs believed that in giving her orders with such certainty and authority, Gabrielle “was a general: one of those young generals of the Empire in whom the spirit of conquest dominates.” Gabrielle shared another trait with military men: “a shyness which overcame her as soon as she left the battlefield.”
⁹

As each of the biannual collections approached, the atmosphere at Chanel heightened and Gabrielle grew more nervous. As for many an artist working under pressure, these tense conditions were what often provoked her most successful pieces. Marie Pavlovna was repeatedly amazed at how the chaos in the days prior to a show was miraculously transformed into a collection just in the nick of time. On the eve of a show at rue Cambon, Gabrielle had a “dress rehearsal” for herself and her personnel in the salon below her studio. Anything considered unfit was “banished altogether” or else sent back, somehow to be redone before the morrow. Marie was intrigued by the “language of the dresses,” how their different characteristics and appeal were so familiar to Gabrielle, and how it was this unified set of relationships she was most concerned with at this final stage. “Not one single detail escaped her notice. She was so concentrated upon the study that . . . she forgot even to talk.”

And all the while a “religious and respectful silence hung over the salon, around which the saleswomen sat in a row along the walls,” nodding, and no more than lifting their eyebrows by way of approval. Gabrielle's fashion shows were becoming extremely popular, and each season the rue Cambon entrance was besieged by a crowd of indignant buyers. Only those with invitations were admitted. The largest important foreign houses, above all those from the United States, were invited first, and only then did smaller and native firms receive an invitation. This very exclusiveness, of course, made them clamor still more for admittance. In future years, the detachment of police posted to guard the front door of Chanel at rue Cambon was an imposing sight.

When Marie Pavlovna's embroideries were first shown—probably in the spring of 1922—she joined Gabrielle and a group of her friends in what were the most uncomfortable yet most privileged “seats . . . on the upper steps of the staircase, from where we could see what was going on.” (The mirror-paneled walls of this staircase were part of a modernist refurbishment Gabrielle would have installed at some point during the early twenties.) Until the end of her life, this ritual spot was where she placed herself to survey her collection below.

This now-famous staircase has remained intact. The salon below, while updated, is decorated in the same color scheme to this day: carpeted in beige with white walls and the distinctive black cast-iron banisters. Gabrielle commented once, “I spent my life on stairs.” The mirrored staircase was the spine of her house; everything that happened at rue Cambon could be observed from it. But Gabrielle was also making oblique reference to that other staircase, central to her youth in the convent at Aubazine. Here the orphan girls trudged up and down the great stone steps several times each day.

The show including Marie Pavlovna's embroideries lasted a full three hours—this was not untypical—but from Gabrielle's aerie at the top of the stairs, Marie was amazed at the speed with which she had absorbed and gauged the audience's interest. Long before the concluding piece, Gabrielle told the dazed young Russian duchess that her work was a success.

The biggest orders for these embroideries—indeed, all Chanel clothes—came from America, a tendency that would become the norm. It was the sophisticated yet pervasively casual and sportive element of American society that had appreciated Gabrielle's “language” as quickly as France, and possibly more so.

Marie learned much from Gabrielle, not least the example of her worldliness. While, at first, the young aristocrat found the way clients were referred to “behind the scenes” quite shocking, she eventually came to the conclusion that, in fact, “any noble sentiments were wasted” on the customers of haute couture: “Mlle Chanel did much to give me more practical views on life. A number of my illusions were destroyed in the process.”

Gabrielle, with her “usual outspokenness,” also steered Dmitri's sister away from the puritanical belief that taking trouble with one's appearance was unseemly. She told Marie that it was “a great mistake to go round looking like a refugee . . . people will end by avoiding you. If you wish to do business, the first thing is to look prosperous.”

Gabrielle's abhorrence of amateurism impressed her employee. In this same spirit, Marie was taught how to use makeup and instructed to lose weight. Still despairing of Marie's long hair, one day Gabrielle declared, “No, I really cannot see you any longer with that unattractive bun . . . it will have to come off.” Deftly removing Marie's hairpins, she “snatched up a pair of scissors and was cutting off my hair by the handful.” While subsequently having this “cut” improved, from that day, Marie Pavlovna was more modish and wore her hair short.
¹⁰

 

In early 1920, Cocteau had invited Gabrielle to a “spectacle concert” of art, music and popular entertainment called
Le boeuf sur le toit
(
The Ox on the Roof
)
.
Financed by Comte Etienne de Beaumont, the show was Cocteau's, music was by Darius Milhaud (of Les Six) and sets were by the painter-designer Raoul Dufy.
Le boeuf sur le toit
reflected the fascination with all things American and proved a great success with its avant-garde audience. In January 1922, when the patron of a bar called The Gaya, a focal point for artistic Parisian gatherings, launched his enlarged restaurant-bar on the rue Boissy d'Anglas, he had been given permission to call it, after Cocteau's spectacle, Le Boeuf sur le Toit. Often known to English enthusiasts as The Nothing Doing Bar, overnight, Le Boeuf sur le Toit became one of the most fashionable meeting places for artists and their cronies. Quickly rivaling the reputation of the Moulin Rouge or Maxim's, Le Boeuf was noisy, smart and “amusing”; it was the place to be seen. And with her artist and society friends, Gabrielle soon became one of its regulars.

Le Boeuf was one of the first bars hosting what came to be known as café society, both leading and reflecting a new kind of salon—a public one. Here sexual preferences were openly indulged, and Le Boeuf appeared to be for everyone. As well as beautiful women and men, and beautiful boys, and boys dressed as girls, and girls dressed as boys, there were the poets, painters, musicians, actors, dancers, the titled, the rich and the famous. Anyone could speak to anyone. They talked, they danced, and the atmosphere was alive with possibility.

Opium, morphine and cocaine were acquiring a certain ubiquity at the time. And while it wasn't only the social and artistic elite who regularly used one or more of these preferred narcotics, a good many became hopelessly addicted. Just three of the more famous examples would be Jean Cocteau; the lesbian princess Violette Murat, hostess to a salon of prominent artists and musicians; and another of Gabrielle's friends, Misia Sert. Confirmed opium smoker that Cocteau would become, he, like Princess Murat, also used cocaine, while Misia Sert's need for morphine was to get the better of her in the end. Despite Diaghilev's absolute veto of any drug use in his company, it has been said that he was a cocaine user himself.
¹¹

Le Boeuf sur le Toit aficionados soon read like a list of the contemporary avant-garde combined with the fashionable elite of Europe. On any night of the week, one might come across André Gide swathed in a black cape; the wunderkind writer Raymond Radiguet; Jean Cocteau; and Max Jacob, the brilliant semialcoholic, semitramp, homosexual, Jewish Catholic-convert poet. Then there were the “nonpainters”: the Cuban Dadaist Francis Picabia; Dada's Hungarian founder, Tristan Tzara; and any number of musicians and composers, including Francis Poulenc and Georges Auric; Marie Laurencin, painter-printmaker and future illustrator for the surrealists another painter, Valentine Hugo; Misia and José Maria Sert, whose booming voice could always be heard above the hubbub; Stravinsky the dandy, with his “mustard-yellow trousers, black jacket, blue shirt, yellow shoes, clean-shaven and with slicked-down blonde hair”;
¹²
more Russians; and Erik Satie, the “faun with the little beard and cracked laugh.” Then there might be Diaghilev and his entourage ; the protosurrealist André Breton and his cronies; Maurice Sachs, with some beautiful boy, or girl, in tow; and then numbers of now-forgotten minor luminaries and colorful unknowns.

Le Boeuf came to represent not only the turmoil, disenchantment and excesses of the period, it also reflected every aspect of the intense, almost febrile creative atmosphere of those interwar years in Paris. In those same years, Gabrielle and Cocteau's friendship was cemented. While Cocteau was accused of having no path of his own and of walking along everyone else's, in writing about his spectacle
Le boeuf sur le toit
he also epitomized the mood of the times when he said, “Here, I avoid subject and symbol. Nothing happens,
¹³
or what does happen is so crude, is so ridiculous, that it is as though nothing happens.” Cocteau's dizzyingly varied artistic activity antagonized many, yet it was the ever-perceptive English poet W. H. Auden who captured what Cocteau had to offer and saw that it was important. Here one sees how modern Cocteau was, and also why Gabrielle had so much time for him:

In 1919, Cocteau had met and fallen for the precocious sixteen-year-old writer Raymond Radiguet, whose “cool insolence, now spontaneous, now calculating,” people found either repulsive or alluring. His quite remarkable callousness aside, Radiguet's astounding precocity and association with the great socializer Cocteau meant that he not only became known, he made it his business to know all Paris. This included frequently being present at Gabrielle's table.

Radiguet periodically resisted his clamorous lover-mentor Cocteau and would disappear to indulge in one, or all, of his escape routes: alcohol, opium and women. Madame Warkowska, frequenter of Le Boeuf sur le Toit, introduced him to opium. Her effortlessly modish judgment on the prevalence of the drug was: “Opium? Why make such a fuss? I smoked at my first communion in Shanghai.”
¹⁵
When Radiguet wasn't fulfilling Max Jacob's injunction “You have to do things,” the boy wrote hard. Cocteau said, “He wrote the way Beau Brummel dressed. No tics, no patina, but a special gift . . . of making the new look as though it had been seen before.” Referring to Diaghilev's famous command to Cocteau—“Astonish me”—Radiguet subsequently countered with the remarkably adult “Elegance consists in not astounding.”
¹⁶
These two injunctions—“making the new look as though it had been seen before” and “Elegance consists in not astounding”—so exactly characterized Gabrielle's philosophy, they could have been her motto.

In the autumn of 1922, Cocteau asked Gabrielle if she would design the costumes for his modernized version of Sophocles'
Antigone.
The play's theme, defiance of the establishment, was then a most attractive one. With scenery by Picasso and music by Arthur Honegger, of Les Six, the actor Charles Dullin played Creon. (This was the same Charles Dullin who had accompanied Gabrielle to the first night of
The Rite of Spring,
in 1913; his lover Caryathis had wanted to attend the performance with her other lover.)

Cocteau said, “To costume my princesses I wanted Mlle Chanel, because she is our leading dressmaker, and I cannot imagine Oedipus's daughters patronizing a “little dressmaker” . . . I chose some heavy Scotch woolens, and Mlle Chanel's designs were so masterly, so instinctively right.”
¹⁷
Indeed, Gabrielle's costumes were powerful and convincing, and
Vogue
said they looked like “antique garments discovered after centuries.” However, in an angry moment during a rehearsal, when Gabrielle felt her contribution wasn't being appreciated, she grabbed a strand of the heroine's hand-knitted coat and pulled it so far undone that there was no time to reknit it; the heroine wore one of Gabrielle's own coats.

Charles Dullin said, “Many society people came to the performances because of Chanel, Picasso and Cocteau.” The play was a success, and while the likes of André Gide and the poet Ezra Pound spoke in its favor, in the end, it was Gabrielle who was commended for her costumes, rather more than her collaborators.

 

By March 1923, elite magazines such as
Vogue
were writing that “Gabrielle Chanel is now famous for her treatment of the youthful short-skirted silhouette which innumerable smart women have achieved.” While a leader of fashion, at the same time, Gabrielle was almost “outside” it. Thus
Vogue
wrote, “She doesn't concern herself with fashion but with her fashion, she improvises dresses which . . . do not age.”