Coco Chanel (5 page)

For the most part, however, Gabrielle's time at Aubazine was to remain a poorly healed wound. To contemporaries, an illegitimate birth, impoverished childhood and abandonment to an orphanage were slurs upon one's reputation, and once out in the world, Gabrielle set about concealment. If, once or twice, the burden of this anxious secret left her feeling so alone she was driven to confide it in full, her confidantes were decent enough to tell no one.

While we catch only glimpses of these crucial formative years, over time Gabrielle found ways to tell her story. She described repeatedly, for example, a profound antipathy for a group of women she called her “aunts.” Unpicking the web of misinformation she wove around herself, one sees that these “aunts” were not one but two sets of women. They were a conflation of her real aunts and the sisters of Aubazine. Together they took the brunt of Gabrielle's youthful resentment, the memory of which still rankled more than half a century later. Above all, she believed that for her “aunts”—her family and the nuns—“Love was a luxury and childhood a sin.”
¹⁵
Surrounded as she was by unloving authority figures, Gabrielle's early experience was one of disharmony, repression and neglect.

4

In their eighteenth year, when the girls left the confines of Aubazine, the nuns saw themselves as responsible for their continuing welfare. First Julia-Berthe, then Gabrielle and, finally, Antoinette left behind this remote place that had held them for so long. What we don't know is why, on leaving Aubazine, they didn't set off, along with the thousands of other girls from humble backgrounds, in search of work. Instead, the nuns arranged for the Chanel girls' transfer to
another
convent. This was in Moulins, a small town more than a hundred miles to the north.

The convent of Notre Dame was a local finishing school of sorts, with a contingent of charity pupils whom Gabrielle joined in 1901. Seated in a lower position at table and in church, and wearing clothes of poorer quality, the charity pupil was seldom permitted to forget her inferior status. At Moulins, young Gabrielle's position was even more irksome to her than at Aubazine, where at least the girls had all sprung from similarly modest backgrounds. As a final humiliation, the Moulins charity girls were obliged to fulfill domestic duties to supplement their keep. Despite the fact that Gabrielle's sisters were at Aubazine, she always gave the impression that her childhood and youth were spent without siblings or friends. At Moulins, however, she found a friend.

Adrienne Chanel was the youngest of Henri-Adrien and Angélina Chanel's nineteen children. Their eldest, Albert, Gabrielle's father, was twenty-eight years older than his youngest sister. Adrienne had been boarding at Notre Dame since the age of ten, and she made Gabrielle feel most welcome. The girls were separated by only two years and looked much like sisters. Adrienne's self-possessed and tranquil nature was a strong contrast to her defensive and pent-up niece. A photograph of the girls together, taken shortly after Gabrielle's move to Moulins, is a striking illustration of their different personalities. Adrienne places one hand fetchingly on her hip; the other is behind Gabrielle's head, as if showing her to the camera. She looks a little concerned, and pleased, smiling lovingly at her friend, who keeps her own hands firmly behind her back. With the barest hints of a smile, Gabrielle gazes fiercely into the camera.

What had made these young women so unalike, when they had so much in common? Both were the children of impoverished, nomadic market traders. Adrienne was first sent to Moulins at ten; Gabrielle joined Aubazine at eleven and neither girl's parents could scrape together the money to spare their daughter the stigma of charity status. There was, though, one significant difference between them: Adrienne had always felt cared for. Her parents made regular visits to Moulins to see their favorite daughter and Adrienne often visited her older sister Louise, who lived not far away with her husband, the stationmaster at Varennes. Adrienne made the best of her lot, and a lovable and vibrant personality had endeared her to the nuns at Notre Dame. She benefited from her time there and became a charming and competent young woman.

Louise, having long since rejected the nomadic life that was her birthright, didn't mind that Varennes was a one-street, nowhere place consisting of her husband's railway station, an inn, a church and a short straggle of houses. She happily occupied herself with her children, the housekeeping and maintaining the niceties of her improved social position. And it was she who drew the Chanels together, at Varennes, where they had the semblance of a home. Even Gabrielle's recalcitrant father called in on occasion, albeit secretly, so as to avoid seeing his children. (Gabrielle's disillusionment intensified when, one day, Louise let slip this information.)

While Gabrielle was at Aubazine, she and Adrienne may have met on the odd occasion, but after Gabrielle's arrival at Moulins, the two girls became firm friends. Adrienne's parents (Gabrielle's grandparents), Henri-Adrien and Angélina, had finally come to a halt in Moulins, not far from the convent. In 1901, a young woman's reputation still required her being chaperoned in public and, accordingly, Louise would have accompanied the girls on their visits to her home.

Adept with a needle and a woman of some artistic flair, Louise had a great passion for hats. Following her periodic orgies of window-shopping in the fashionable spa town of Vichy, nearby, she would visit the haberdasher's and buy the wherewithal to conjure the latest stylish hat. Adrienne and Gabrielle were willing pupils, their imaginations fired by these flights of fancy. Gabrielle recalled with venom the needlework her “aunts” had imposed upon her at “their gloomy house” (presumably, the convent). She much preferred Louise's modish hats and was elated when she was able to abandon working on her trousseau, “embroidering initials on towels . . . and sewing crosses in Russian stitching on my nightdresses, for a hypothetical wedding night,” which made her “spit.”
¹

Despite the new proximity to her grandparents and the home-loving Aunt Louise, the only extended family member for whom Gabrielle developed any real affection was Adrienne. For the rest, she was pretty well impervious to any advances from them. Although we can't be certain, it appears that her mother's relations in Courpière had virtually no contact with her and her siblings after Jeanne's death. She may, though, simply have erased them from her story because she resented them for not having taken her in.

 

Moulins, an ancient cathedral town situated in central France, was previously seat to the dukes of Bourbon. In 1901, it was a garrison town, whose livelihood largely depended upon the military regiments stationed on its perimeter. Following Gabrielle's years of seclusion at Aubuzine, this bustling provincial center must have seemed a bright prospect indeed. But before she could savor life in town, she had to watch from the sidelines in the convent for one last frustrating year. At year's end, on the mother superior's recommendation Gabrielle joined Adrienne as an assistant in a smart draper's shop in town. Lodging with their earnestly respectable employers, M. and Mme. Desboutin, the girls were disdained by the local society women they served in the shop.

After a year and a half under the Desboutins' watchful eyes, at the age of twenty-one, Gabrielle could bear it no longer. Escaping her oppressive surveillance, she set off to live somewhere of her own choosing. Although her room was in the most downmarket neighborhood, her liberty must at first have felt quite heady, and she persuaded Adrienne to strike out from the Desboutins and join her. As seamstresses, the Chanel girls had joined the thousands upon thousands of others working at what was then, along with domestic service, the most common of all female employment. A seamstress's wages were generally pitiful. Like many others, the girls took on a Sunday job to bolster their paltry earnings, working at one of the town's several tailor shops.

With hundreds of officers stationed around Moulins, there was a lot of tailoring work available, altering uniforms and kitting out local worthies for the racing each season. The most exalted of the cavalry regiments was the 10th Light Horse, whose members were drawn from the highest echelons of Parisian society as well as the landed gentry. Although forward-thinking politicians and military men now regarded cavalry regiments as outdated, the old guard saw them as the most distinguished.

Legend has it that one Sunday, Gabrielle and Adrienne were at work in the tailor's shop when a party of six young lieutenants turned up for some last-minute alterations. Standing around, some in their shirt-tails, they noticed the two pretty girls busy in the next room. Despite determined overtures from the young men, they remained studiously absorbed in their sewing. Intrigued, the officers quizzed the tailor, discovered the girls' other place of work and waylaid them with an invitation to watch the horse jumping. The girls agreed, but with an hauteur that further captivated the distinguished young men. All went well, and soon Gabrielle and Adrienne were being escorted to La Tentation for sorbets, or passing the time flirting with their admirers at the smart set's favorite rendezvous, the art nouveau Grand Café.

The Chanel girls were enthralled by these encounters and savored this unfamiliar admiration from their socially superior escorts, some of the most eligible young men in France. Confident in their youth and pedigree, the officers exuded the casual charm of those accustomed to having their own way.

Gabrielle and Adrienne were invited to evenings at La Rotonde, a large café functioning as a small-scale music hall to entertain the army in garrison towns. A poor cousin of the far more worldly Parisian
café-concerts,
such as the Alcazar and the Eldorado, where celebrated performers like Yvette Guilbert and the great Mistinguett took to the stage, the
beuglants
(the name given to provincial
caf'concs
) was an altogether less sophisticated affair.
Café-concerts
had developed around midcentury as simple shows for the populace at cafés on Paris's boulevards. Performers sang about the travails of everyday urban lowlife, their acts full of erotic innuendo, with catchy nonsensical choruses. Before the cinema took off in a big way, the
caf'conc
was the pivot of social life for the newly urban working classes. They paved the way for music halls and cabarets, such as the Folies-Bergère, the Moulin Rouge and the Mirliton, that became popular with other sections of society. Bohemian painters, poets and writers routinely patronize these café-clubs, and the bourgeoisie got a frisson from their raffish and anarchic atmosphere.

The Chanel girls relished their visits to the
beuglants
, whose bawdy, quick-talking showmanship must have reminded them of the fairs and markets of their childhood. The singer, accompanied by a pianist, belted out her numbers over the cheery din of the crowd. Behind her sat a ring of
poseuses—
young hopefuls who stepped forward, one by one, to fill in with popular refrains while the lead took her well-earned break. The
poseuses
were there above all to strike poses, the more suggestive the better. Yet despite the frequent indignity of these occasions—the audience booed and threw cherry pips if the girl didn't pass muster—life on stage beckoned to these young women as one of the available escape routes from lives of certain servility.

The celebrities at the great
caf'concs
in Paris were invariably from impoverished backgrounds. Armed with singular personalities, they cloaked themselves in glamour and sang with black humor about the exacting lives of the poor. Gabrielle must have harbored fantasies of becoming such a celebrity when she persuaded the manager of La Rotonde to take her on as a
poseuse.
Not a girl with come-hither eyes or the traditionally prized voluptuous female form, she possessed her own particular allure. So did Adrienne, whom she soon persuaded to join her.

While Gabrielle can't have had much of a voice, by some accounts this is when she acquired the sobriquet by which the world came to know her. One of the songs she is supposed to have sung to greatest effect was a verse from a popular
caf'conc
revue called
Ko Ko Ri Ko
. Another was “
Qui qu'a vu Coco dans l'Trocadéro?
” (“Who's Seen Coco at the Trocadéro?”). She was game, with a quick sense of humor, and character was what the cabarets wanted above all. Her admirers were noisy in their approval. For an encore, they simply chanted the word found in both her songs: “Coco! Coco! Coco! And at La Rotonde she was soon La Petite Coco. Gabrielle herself always insisted that her nickname had originated with her father—and Coco
was
a known diminutive for a child—but the story of her stage name has stuck.

In a short time, the spirited and entertaining Chanel girls became favorites of the officers and their crowd, an indispensable complement to an evening. Among their aristocratic companions was a young
haut bourgeois
, Etienne Balsan, whose family's considerable fortune derived from astute investments in wool. At Châteauroux, in the Indre, in the center of France, where fine wool had been made for centuries, the Balsan family's vast textile factory produced cloth for military uniforms (and the British police) with great success. The Balsans virtually owned the town and kept a number of fine houses in the environs. The three sons were expected to enter the family business, but their social lives as well-to-do fin de siècle bachelors were colorful. In time, both Etienne Balsan and his older brother, Jacques, were to make names for themselves far beyond the family trade in wool.

Following their father's premature death, Etienne was sent to private school in England by his uncle, Charles, in an attempt to instill some discipline into the boy. From England, he had sent home a telegram from his dog, Rex, saying, “My master has arrived safely, Rex.” He then bought two horses, which he used at the local fox-hunting meets. Etienne was obsessed with horses, and during his time away he paid little attention to his lessons. Neither, after the initial telegram from his dog, did he make any more effort to contact his family. Summoned home by Uncle Charles, Etienne was unconcerned. His despairing relation failed to appreciate that beneath Etienne's apparent lack of purpose was the seed of a serious and disciplined calling. He was simply not interested in the same things as his uncle and informed him that under no circumstances would he enter the family firm. It was only with great reluctance that the young man was cajoled into military service.