Paris, Paris: Journey Into the City of Light (17 page)

Chanel, General de Gaulle, and Picasso are the three most important figures of our time
.

—A
NDRÉ
M
ALRAUX

Fashion is the handmaiden of false consciousness
.

—Attributed to W
ALTER
B
ENJAMIN

aute couture has long struck me as residing somewhere on the scale of human endeavor between useless and obnoxious. Yet I’ve been fascinated for years by the figure of Coco Chanel, an ambivalent figure if ever there was one, and somehow, for me, the incarnation of a peculiar breed of Parisian. I once had the privilege, usually reserved for VIPs and big spenders, of visiting Coco’s private hideaway in Rue Cambon in Paris. Ever since, certain Paris places associated with Coco have echoed with a special resonance for me: Rue Cambon, Rue de Rivoli and its unchanging Angelina tearoom, and Place Vendôme with the venerable Hôtel Ritz. She was not just a denizen of this so-called Golden Triangle—the city’s ritziest neighborhood—for some sixty years, until her death in 1971. She was its archetype and mistress.

Arbiter of unfeminine yet unmistakably female elegance for half a century, lover of men both rich and famous, Coco cut and shaped her past like a suit of clothes. For instance, she fancied herself born in 1893, the daughter of a well-to-do winegrower from Saumur, in the Loire Valley. The truth is her birthday was ten years earlier than that, and her impoverished and unloving father, a street hawker, sent her to be brought up by nuns in a draughty medieval monastery in the Massif Central. Coco’s mother, Jeanne Devolle, died in 1895 of tuberculosis, in utter destitution.

Throughout her long life, Chanel moved between two worlds, one real and the other imaginary. Unloved, she lived for love. Despite her countless conquests, from English noblemen to Russian dukes, she spent years alone, work her only solace. Coco knew little about literature, art, or music. Yet in Paris her pet celebrities were men the likes of Igor Stravinsky, Pablo Picasso, and Jean Cocteau. She never worshipped money but nonetheless made a fortune with her hats, suits, and perfumes. A social outcast from the provinces, she came to rule Paris society and almost single-handedly revolutionized the way women around the world dressed, smelled, and behaved, a feat impossible to contemplate in today’s anything-goes world of street fashion and cultural eclecticism. Cocteau described her as at once spiteful, creative, extravagant, loveable, humorous, generous, hateful, and excessive, “a unique character.” Uniquely Parisian, I would add.

Despite the work of a dozen biographers, several of whose tomes I’ve read over the years, Chanel remains an enigma. However, she has left behind her in certain Paris places an unmistakable whiff of stale perfume, a fleeting reflection in a wavy mirror, like the one that fills the wall alongside table eleven at Angelina, the time-capsule tearoom on Rue de Rivoli, facing the Tuileries.

Coco always sat at table eleven and everyone at Angelina knew her. The establishment opened for business in 1903 under the name Rumpelmayer but Coco would’ve been too poor to go there then. It became her refuge late in life, in the 1950s, when a quiet cup of hot cocoa was a daily ritual. Back then, the faux Louis XVI armchairs in the downstairs salons were covered in green, not brown patent leather as they are today. Otherwise the pleasantly worn décor hasn’t changed. Her marble-topped table is still the third from the back in the main room, set against the fifteen-foot mirror. Coco had a thing about looking glasses. She could observe herself in them, certainly, but she could also watch the world in reflection, one step removed. She would sit at table eleven, order her
chocolat africain
and gaze at her wizened reflection, surrounded by the tearoom’s sculpted plaster encrustations and faded Belle Époque murals of Mediterranean scenes. Those who knew her well say she was in fact looking into her past, as into a crystal ball that somehow transported her backward in time.

I sat at her table not long ago, a biography in hand, and enjoyed a plump raisin roll and a rich cup of cocoa. The fashion shows, under way in the Tuileries across the street, had not caused an overflow at Angelina. Near me a blue-rinse matron caressed her lapdog. She dug her spoon into a bowl of whipped cream, topped her cocoa, and smiled contentedly at the young men and women nearby, escapees, perhaps, from the pages of Henry James. I squinted and imagined she was Coco, slipping through her looking glass.

For the record, Gabrielle Chanel preferred to forget not only her infancy and childhood but also her early years in Moulins, in southern France, before the First World War, when she was a shop assistant and seamstress by day, a
café-concert
singer by night. From that far-off Belle Époque echoes the nickname given to Gabrielle by the army officers who hung out at Moulin’s La Rotonde to hear her sing. She knew only two songs, one of which ran
“Qui qu’a vu Coco dan l’Trocadéro”
—“Who’s seen Coco at the Trocadero?” They shouted
“Coco! Coco!”
when calling for encores. Étienne Balsan, a French gentleman infantry officer of considerable means, was among them. He was Coco’s first famous lover.

Addicted to horseflesh and racy mademoiselles, Balsan the bon vivant was smitten. He offered to finance her, first during her short-lived stage career (where she learned about theater costumes and makeup) and later as a milliner. The nuns had taught Coco to sew and embroider. From an aunt she had learned to decorate hats. At Royallieu, Étienne Balsan’s lavish residence and stud farm near Compiègne, north of Paris, Chanel was installed as official mistress and soon began making hats for society ladies and
irrégulières
—unmarriageable women like her.

A natural sportswoman, Coco rode horses as well as a man could, and adopted the clothes of the English gentleman rider. Her unusual attire, along with her wit and sharp tongue, quickly earned her a reputation as formidable. Balsan’s best friend was the star of this horsey set, a rich English polo player named Arthur “Boy” Capel. His infatuation with Coco was matched only by her passion for him.

Edmonde Charles-Roux, Chanel’s longtime friend and probably her best hagiographer, once noted that Coco, the model of the modern, independent woman, was “formed, discovered, and invented by men.” Balsan raised her out of poverty but it was Boy Capel who gave her true happiness—for a time. Chanel liked to say that Boy was the man of her life, the only one who understood her passion and thirst for freedom. Capel introduced her to his society friends and helped her expand from a modest shop at 160 Boulevard Malesherbes in Paris to his own lavish digs at number 138 down the street. He also set her up with a workshop in Rue Cambon and a stylish boutique in Deauville, the Parisians’ seaside retreat, summer headquarters of Europe’s great and good. He made it clear she would remain his friend and lover but would never become his wife.

After Boy’s marriage to a proper lady, and his sudden death a few months later in a car accident, Coco took to men, and work, the way some people take to drink. Her unstoppable rise began in the Roaring Twenties, a decade cast in her image. She bought the luxurious Villa Bel Respiro in Paris’s suburbs and began entertaining Stravinsky, Cocteau, the poet Pierre Reverdy, Serge Diaghilev of the Ballets Russes, and the pianist and artists’ muse Misia Sert, for decades her closest friend. Gone were the social constraints of her youth. Among her artist comrades Coco was no longer an
irrégulière
.

The taste of Angelina chocolate, and the echo of the slender Coco’s high heels, followed me the few blocks from Rue de Rivoli’s mosaic-paved arcades north. Swann, the long-established British-American pharmacy in Rue de Castiglione, evoked Proust. A block east the rare books illustrated by Joan Mirò, Max Ernst, and Jean Cocteau displayed in the windows of Librairie les Arcades brought my mind back to Coco. The traffic on Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré was thick. Still, I was able to smell the perfume wafting out of the historic Chanel boutiques nearby at numbers 27 and 31 Rue Cambon. It was on these hallowed premises, during my fortuitous visit to Coco’s upstairs apartment, that I heard the story of how Chanel No. 5 was born. Shortly after World War I, some Russian friends introduced Chanel to Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich Romanov, the murderer of Rasputin, exiled even before the Revolution of 1917. In 1920 Coco took as a lover this penniless aristocrat a decade her junior, keeping him in a style to which he had once been accustomed. In return Dmitri taught her about the heady scents of the tsar’s court, and introduced her to Ernest Beaux, perfumer extraordinaire. A year later, Beaux brought her five phials containing scents intended to express the quintessence of her sartorial styles. Coco sniffed the first four and shook her head. She might’ve named the last one, marked number five, the sweet smell of success.

Winding upward one floor from the showroom of the Rue Cambon boutique is the mirrored staircase atop which Coco perched, unseen, to watch models show off her clothes. The private apartment upstairs is off-limits, marked with a sign:
MADEMOISELLE—PRIVÉ
. The two immaculate, slightly chilling rooms are not so much a museum as a shrine, dedicated to the memory of Coco—to a certain official version of Coco, I should add. An unrepentant frump troubled by Coco’s wartime record, I found myself seated on the vast leather couch where she loved to nap wrapped in a mink blanket. Her eyeglasses sat somewhere nearby and I felt they were staring at me archly, the way insiders say Coco stared at unwelcome critics. Her possessions, displayed for the delight of select reverent visitors, include a pair of Chinese Coromandel screens, plus books, sculptures, and
objets d’art
, all of them reflected ad infinitum in the mirrors Coco cherished. Especially egregious are the Venetian Renaissance sculptures of black slaves of which reportedly she felt particularly fond. On a coffee table facing the couch among the gold baubles lie the heraldic arms of Westminster. I remember asking myself why they were there, and finding the answer months later, in a biography.

Coco’s Slavic period lasted a few years, with Dmitri eventually marrying an American heiress who had means and a more pliable character. Coco continued to mount the social ladder, nonetheless, by moving into a sumptuous two-story apartment at number 29 Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré, just a few minutes away on foot. As I strolled toward it through bumper-to-bumper BMWs and Mercedes I reflected on the fact that at Coco’s lavish digs Stravinsky and Diaghilev had been regulars. Picasso came to stay while working on stage sets for Cocteau’s
Antigone
. It’s well known that Picasso was a peerless womanizer but hardly anyone remembers that the man-eating Coco snacked on him here between meals. It was at this felicitous juncture that the poet Pierre Reverdy, like Chanel an ambitious product of the provinces, became her third famous lover.

The apartment they shared is in private hands and I’ve never managed to get closer to it than the unremarkable downstairs entrance hall. Nothing remains from the time of Chanel except the memories the site summons. Reverdy, deep in spiritual crisis, eventually left her in Paris. But Coco was not lonely for long. In Monte Carlo she had caught the eye of Bend’Or, nickname of the Duke of Westminster, the richest man in England. He swept her away on his yacht,
Flying Cloud
, and before the year was out they were inseparable. Their whirlwind romance was to last for half a decade. Despite what appeared to be a never-ending vacation, in 1926 Coco managed to invent prêt-à-porter fashion with her “little black dress,” the revolutionary garment American
Vogue
dubbed “the Ford signed Chanel.”

The Duke of Westminster did as dukes do and broke Coco’s heart by announcing his engagement to a certain Loelia Mary Ponsonby, whose very name makes anyone without blue blood sneeze. Again, Coco rebounded. In short order Paul Iribe, a flamboyant caricaturist, jewelry designer, and magazine editor, took up the flame. It was under Iribe’s guidance that Chanel began creating diamond jewelry, spin-offs of which are still sold today. In the spring of 1934, tired of the housekeeping, perhaps, she moved from the Faubourg-Saint-Honoré to a nest at the Hôtel Ritz overlooking Rue Cambon, where she lived on and off for the rest of her life.

A stroll from the Faubourg to Place Vendôme takes you through several acres of old and new money. Leading jewelers such as Cartier, Bulgari, and Van Cleef & Arpels wink at you, the Chanel shop set among them. Fashion boutiques, upscale hotels, and Michelin-starred restaurants abound. This was Coco’s Paris, the snooty summit, the tip of the tallest peak an impoverished, uneducated provincial climber could reach. Nowadays the Ritz offers clients what’s known as the Chanel Suite, though it has little to do with her digs (she lived on the opposite side of the hotel). It’s certainly not a shrine: you can rent the 1,549-square-foot apartment for about ten thousand dollars a night. Most mere mortals who ask to see it are directed to
ritzparis.com
for a virtual tour to the strains of Mozart. However if you ask very politely, dress nicely, and have the good fortune to time your request with a vacancy, you might be able to peek in without paying.