Coco Chanel (62 page)

In the absence of François, meanwhile, Gabrielle had been “distraught. Distraught at the rejection. Then, instead of her single dose of Sédol each day to sleep, she took more. Three, four of them. For days she didn't go out. It was terrible, terrible. François was in her confidence, he was her support.”
²⁴

Back in Paris, François and Lilou had acquired the habit of playing cards outside Gabrielle's bedroom each evening, to be nearby as she went to sleep:

Gabrielle's unstill mind meant that the sleepwalking from which she had suffered intermittently since childhood had grown worse. In her sleep, she cut up curtains, bedspreads, towels; making them into new designs carefully laid out upon the floor or hanging up on hangers. She was found sleepwalking naked in her rooms; on other occasions, she wandered through the Ritz and was gently guided back to her suite. Once, she was discovered hurrying along a corridor in her nightgown in the small hours with a wild expression on her face. Her maid, Céline (Gabrielle insisted on calling each new personal maid Jeanne, no matter what her real name might be), once watched as Gabrielle walked into her bathroom, broke a comb then turned on the water in the basin. To a friend, she would make a most revealing comment: “I've never known just what it was I wanted to forget. So, to forget, whatever it was—probably something that was haunting me—I threw myself into something else.”
²⁶

In order to make a life, Gabrielle, when young, had re-created herself, and this had nourished and encouraged her for many years. In her heart, meanwhile, she knew the truth of what haunted her. But lacking that emotional resilience, with time her frantic attempts to throw herself “into something else” through work had grown ever less successful. Even in sleep, her need to forget no longer left Gabrielle, and she was obliged to fill that, too, with work. Finally, worried about embarrassing herself in sleep, Gabrielle told Céline and Lilou that she wanted to be tied down to her bed, leaving her unable to “stray” through the corridors of the Ritz at night.

But the sadness of Gabrielle's trials was not to end there. One of her favorite models recently remembered that after dinner with Lilou and Gabrielle one evening, she came with them to Gabrielle's rooms. The model was astonished at the ritual of Gabrielle's preparations for the night, and watching Lilou and Céline strap her to her bed, she objected, “But are you mad, why are you tying her up, what's going on?” And Gabrielle told her that recently she'd been found “cornering the elevator man . . . and dragging myself through the hotel.” The model continued:

Gabrielle began falling over. She injured her leg, cut her nose, hurt her hand. But she was terribly wary of being treated by the doctors, fearful they would disclose her weakness to the press. (Rumors of Gabrielle's reduced health had indeed been going around the news offices for some time.) She had a minor stroke, was hospitalized, and felt humiliated at her infirmity. She was becoming very frail.

Her arthritis and rheumatism had made her less nimble; at work she would jab herself with pins. Sucking the injury, she would yell, “Ouch, what was that?” and while she was exhausted and would sometimes say, “There are days I want to drop everything,” the underlying theme was always the same: “I must think of my collection, because that's the future.” And, of course, as long as there was the possibility of another collection, of working, there was always the possibility of avoiding death.

By 1970, while knowing that it drew nearer, Gabrielle often found the thought of not existing an impossibility. Yet in saying “I don't believe much in death,” she was contemplating something further: “The soul departs: the ordeal has lasted long enough. For the Hindus it's merely a transformation . . . “Give up one's soul to God”—I like that expression . . . what remains of us is what we've thought and loved in life.”
²⁸

 

On that Saturday in January 1971, Gabrielle had been particularly irritable with her assistants; she was even short with her devoted Claude Delay. Gabrielle's collection was almost upon her, and her nerves were raw:

She changed her mind constantly, one minute telling Claude she was going to give it all up, that she wouldn't do it anymore; then, away from work, she was waiting only until it was time to go back to the rue Cambon. On her bedside table was Erlanger's
Richelieu
; she told Claude it was “the best story there is in the history of France . . . it's better than Alexander Dumas, but it hasn't got so much passion.”

On that Sunday, January 10, Claude returned and lunched with Gabrielle, then accompanied her on her customary drive around the Longchamp racecourse. The sun shone pale through the wintry mist. Later as they drove back through the place de la Concorde—the great square through which Gabrielle had fled, almost sixty years before, from Arthur Capel's truth about her business not making any profit—Gabrielle bowed, telling Claude she was saluting the moon. It was full. Bidding Claude farewell, Gabrielle told her, “I'll be working tomorrow.”

In her suite, she told Céline that she was very tired and must lie down; Céline could only persuade her to remove her shoes. Gabrielle lay drowsing. Later, she told her maid she would eat in her rooms, read the restaurant menu, then cried out, “I'm suffocating . . . Jeanne . . . the window.” Céline rushed to her side; Gabrielle's face was taut with pain and she held her hands over her chest. She was too weak to break the phial of morphine always by her bed, and taking the syringe, Céline injected her to relieve the pain. Gabrielle murmured, “So that's the way one dies.” Celine immediately phoned the doctor, but when she returned, she saw that her mistress was quite still. She closed Gabrielle's eyes.

 

Next day, newspapers across the world announced the death of “one of the greatest couturiers of the century,” and tried to encapsulate her achievements as the woman who had become a legend in her own lifetime. Claude Delay returned to pay Gabrielle her own respects and found her “very small under the white Ritz sheets drawn up to her heart.” On Gabrielle's bedside table was the beautiful icon Stravinsky had given her in 1921
.

On January 14, a funeral service was held for Gabrielle in the Madeleine, the great parish church of the Parisian elite, close by the rue Cambon. Gabrielle's small coffin was covered in a mass of white flowers, with the exception of two wreaths of red roses, one from the Syndicat de la Couture, the other from Luchino Visconti.

Whatever the personal feelings of her fellow couturiers, virtually all of them were there to render her homage, including Balmain, Balenciaga (whose graciousness and forgiving nature sent him there “to pray for her” despite her having destroyed their close friendship with unkindness), Castillo, Marc Bohan and Yves Saint Laurent. Notwithstanding Gabrielle's criticism of most of them at one time or another, they cannot but have been conscious that her remarkable life's work had brought great credit to their profession. Gabrielle's friend Michel Déon made a plea for compassion in one's final judgment:

Meanwhile, standing in the front row for the entire funeral ceremony were Gabrielle's models, all dressed in Chanel suits. Behind them were the forewomen and foremen, the seamstresses and numerous assistants who made up the team at rue Cambon, without whom Gabrielle's ideas would have been impossible. A fascinated crowd joined Paris society, and Gabrielle's friends, who included Salvador Dalí, Lady Abdy, Antoinette Bernstein, Serge Lifar, André-Louis Dubois, Robert Bresson, the Mille brothers, Jacques Chazot and Jeanne Moreau, whose friendship Gabrielle's defensiveness had made her reject.

A much smaller group of mourners, including Gabrielle's great-niece, François Mironnet and Lilou Marquand, later followed Gabrielle's coffin to Switzerland, where she was laid to rest in the cemetery of Lausanne. Why Switzerland? While deeply French, Gabrielle was also ambivalent about her compatriots, just as some of them were about her. She had said, “The French don't like me, it can't be helped.” She had also said, “I have always needed security,” and in Switzerland, apparently, she felt secure. A marble headstone was raised to her, with the heads of five lions, her zodiac sign, carved in bas-relief. Below them is a cross, below that, simply:

However many words were written on Gabrielle in the weeks after her death, typically, in death as in life, she would manage her legacy. In that remarkable memoir she had given to Paul Morand just after the war, she had “written” her own epitaph:

AFTERWORD

Gabrielle once said to Morand, “Contrary to what Sert used to say, I would make a very bad dead person, because once I was put under, I would grow restless and . . . think only of returning to earth and starting all over again.”
¹

When one of her managers was asked if Gabrielle had thought about the future of Chanel, he retorted, “Certainly not. She was
much
too egocentric.” Yet while Gabrielle had told her Zurich lawyer that she “longed for peace” and wanted no publicity after her death, she had also been thinking for some time about her successor, and her personal fortune. With regard to that fortune, she did her best to avoid giving any of it to the French state. Taking her lawyer's advice, that Lichtenstein was a superior tax haven to Switzerland, in 1965 she set up a foundation there—named Coga, after Coco-Gabrielle—and then made her will. This stated: “I establish as my sole and universal heir the Coga foundation.” Having thus bequeathed the majority of her personal estate, Gabrielle made certain bequests to a handful of people. Her added verbal instruction to help the needy, and gifted artists, was sufficiently vague that it is possible nothing has ever been put into effect.

Gabrielle's manservant, François Mironnet, was apparently at first informed he had “inherited Mademoiselle,” however, the document proving this was never found. The estate did, nonetheless, make an out-of-court settlement with Mironnet. Others who made claims on Gabrielle's estate were not so fortunate. Over the years, her bankers and lawyers have maintained a stony silence over the Coga Foundation, and its function remains a mystery. So does the extent of Gabrielle's personal fortune. In 1971, Mironnet claimed it was worth $1.5 billion. The Wertheimer family claimed it was $30 million. It has been estimated that, at the time of Gabrielle's death, the House of Chanel brought in approximately $160 million annually.

Gabrielle's manager was mistaken about her failure to contemplate a successor, because several years before her death she had discussed it with more than one friend. Where her manager had been correct was in Gabrielle's inability to put anything into practice. The House of Chanel had become her final solace, her raison d'être
.
If she handed it over, there would be nothing left for her but to die. In avoiding choosing a successor, Gabrielle implicitly staved off death.

When it finally came, there was much doubt as to whether Chanel could continue without her. While the owner, Jacques Wertheimer—son of Gabrielle's partner, Pierre, who had effectively bankrolled Chanel since 1954—wished to continue, Chanel couture was to languish for some time. In 1974, Jacques's sons, Alain and Gérard Wertheimer, took over the running of the company. With the intention of maintaining Chanel as a family business, they refused to bring in shareholders; the number of outlets permitted to sell the perfumes was drastically reduced; Gabrielle's policy of employing Chanel's own perfumers, craftsmen and jewelers was continued, and large sums were spent on promotion.