Coco Chanel_ An Intimate Life - Lisa Chaney [111]
“Bonjour Mademoiselle.”
“Bonjour Jeanne.”
This was the only moment when Chanel would look up at the model’s face . . . As the girl approached, Chanel, with her head slightly bent to one side, would take in the first impression. Then the fitting began . . . The fitter standing beside her handed her the pins. No one spoke except Chanel, who kept up a steady monologue. Sometimes she would be giving instructions, or explaining some detail. Sometimes she would criticize and undo the work . . . already done. The old fitter listened to all, in silence, her face impenetrable . . . Chanel, intent on her work . . . talked on without taking notice of anybody.
I had seen people occupying great offices ... had listened to orders being given by those whose birth or position gave them the right to command. I had never yet met with a person whose every word was obeyed and whose authority had been established by her own self, out of nothing.6
At about five o’clock, coffee was brought in, sometimes with sandwiches. If the day’s work was complete, Gabrielle stood up, stretched, and the models, condemned to wait outside, were finally permitted to leave. If the pressure was on, Gabrielle gulped down her coffee then took up her work once more. One or two “obsequious executives and an occasional friend sat around on the carpet” while Gabrielle held forth indefatigably. “Discussing everything and everybody with immense assurance, she dispensed strong opinions on people and events; these opinions could just as quickly be reversed. Forging on, her power of persuasion was amazing.”
Maurice Sachs, an ambitious young con man who sometimes acted as Cocteau’s secretary got himself small writing commissions and, later in the decade, became an astute chronicler of his times. In his portrait of Gabrielle, he said that she “created a feminine personage that Paris had not known before.” He was surprised at “how small she was. She was very slim; the line of thick black hair was low, her eyebrows met over the nose and when she laughed her eyes [were] hard and sparkling.” Commenting that she “almost always’ wore simple black clothes, he said:
She put her hands in her pockets [then still an unusual thing for a woman to do] and began to speak. The flow of her words was extraordinarily fast, rushing forward, but she laid out clearly what she had in mind. She had none of the circumlocution, and fabricated asides that so often make a woman halt at incidental subjects and never reach the target of their conversation. Her train of thought was utterly clear . . . She had great practical sense; she liked to manage, to organize, to put in order and to be in charge.7
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