Coco Chanel_ An Intimate Life - Lisa Chaney [1]
Leaving behind her youth of incarceration in religious institutions, Gabrielle became a shop assistant in a town thronging with well-to-do young military men from the regiments stationed on its perimeter. She then threw away any chance of respectability by becoming mistress to one of them, and over the years her numerous subsequent liaisons were much talked about. Her relationship with Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich was a remarkable reflection of changing times, while that with the fabulously wealthy Duke of Westminster was the stuff of legend. Her love affair with one of Europe’s most eligible men, the enigmatic playboy Arthur Capel, enabled her to flourish, but would end in tragedy.
Aside from her dark beauty, Gabrielle was described as “witty, strange, and mesmerizing.” She would become the muse, patron, collaborator or mistress of a number of remarkable men, including some of the most celebrated artists of modern times. These included: Picasso, Cocteau, Stravinsky, Visconti, Dalí and Diaghilev. In addition, Gabrielle rose to the highest echelons of society; created an empire; acquired the conviction that “money adds to the decorative pleasures of life, but it is not life”; became a quintessential twentieth-century celebrity and was transformed into a myth in her own lifetime.
To those already interested in her, the general outline of her life is well-known. Gabrielle’s story is one of drama and pathos, and I had become intrigued, though I doubted that there was much left to discover. Her first biographer, Edmonde Charles-Roux, appeared to have found all that the passage of time and Gabrielle’s concealment of her past would permit. Subsequent biographers had accepted this state of affairs, and thus various periods in her life remained unknown. My interest had been caught, though—among other things, by the variety and caliber of artists whom she had known, artists instrumental in the creation of modernism in early twentieth-century bohemian Paris. Simply retelling the rags-to-riches narrative and listing the sartorial changes she is credited with inventing don’t do justice to a woman who played a part in the formation of the modern world, not only its clothes but its culture.
As I became more familiar with her story, the gaps grew more tantalizing. While that first biographical interpretation had stamped itself upon the general perception of the woman who became Coco Chanel, intuition told me things were subtly different. She left behind few letters and no diaries. Believing, nevertheless, that I might be able to turn up some new details, I embarked on early reconnaissance. Little did I know then the trails I was to follow and the raft of discoveries I would be fortunate enough to make over the next four years. As these new elements of her story gradually fell into place, more light was in turn thrown on Gabrielle’s character.
Her dreadful childhood was obviously critical, but while her own version shifted like the sands, I found treasures once I had learned how to filter her storytelling. Gabrielle often tells us as much about herself in what she left out or altered as in what she chooses to reveal. Approaching her from a peripheral viewpoint was also fruitful. Had so-and-so known her? If so, what had been written up in his or her diaries or letters? One line here, another there in a letter or an interview became crucial to the expanding story.
I traveled to Ireland to meet Michel Déon, who had spent a great deal of time with Gabrielle sixty years before. As a successful young novelist he had been commissioned to write her biography. I returned with no new “facts” but something more important. Michel Déon had regaled me with anecdotes, interspersed with the sharpest of observations. At the same time his compassion for her