Coco Chanel_ An Intimate Life - Lisa Chaney [121]
The ballet Le Train Bleu came about initially as compensation for Cocteau’s involvement in a contretemps between Diaghilev and the ambitious and flirtatious Ukrainian dancer Serge Lifar, who had stepped out of line. The ballet was set at a resort and became a vehicle for the extraordinary gymnastic antics of Diaghilev’s present lover, a young Englishman named Anton Dolin (real name Patrick Kay). Cocteau’s thin story line had Dolin impressing a troupe of golf and tennis players and featured beach belles of both sexes who were all in search of adventure.
With a score from Darius Milhaud, choreography was to be by Nijinsky’s dour but gifted sister, Bronislava Nijinska; set designs were by the cubist sculptor Henri Laurens, and costumes were by Gabrielle. Laurens’s Riviera beach set of sloping cubist planes and lopsided beach huts was in natural hues, dramatically setting off Gabrielle’s costumes in bright dynamic colors.
Diaghilev didn’t like Laurens’s front curtain. And remembering that in Picasso’s chaotic studio he had seen a canvas of the now-famous giant women, hand in hand, bare breasted and running across a beach, he set out to acquire it. Diaghilev loved the earthy abandon of these women, and his majestic powers of persuasion overcame even the wily and stubborn Picasso. Diaghilev was so pleased with this painting that a brilliantly enlarged version—painted by the Russian émigré prince Shervashidze—was used as the Ballets Russes front cloth from then on.
The train to which the ballet refers was then the ultimate in chic. Launched only two years earlier, it carried the wealthy between Calais and the French Riviera in exclusively first-class carriages. Leaving Paris in the evening, and renowned for its cuisine, the Train Bleu made three stops before arriving at Marseille the following morning. Then it called in at the most important resort towns along the Riviera, finally halting close to the Italian border. Named by its wealthy passengers for its beautiful dark blue carriages, speeding south in search of pleasure and escape, the train had an image of up-to-the-minute sophistication and romance. Each of its sleeping cars had only ten compartments, with an attendant for every car. Early passengers included the Prince of Wales, Charlie Chaplin, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Evelyn Waugh, J. M. Barrie, Somerset Maugham and Gabrielle Chanel. In the years between the two world wars, the Train Bleu carried almost everyone who was anyone traveling to the south of France.
In Gabrielle’s utterly fashionable beachwear, Cocteau’s undesirable passengers—gigolos, good-time girls and chancers of one sort or another—were “hardhearted modern youth that pushes us around with impertinent contempt . . . Those superb girls who stride past swearing, with tennis racquets under their arm, and get between us and the sun.”7 Cocteau was commenting on the radical change in the way the young felt empowered to behave in the postwar years. They revealed the tendency to disdain authority, already flourishing in those small groups of artists in the early years of the century, and now sufficiently widespread that Cocteau could characterize it in a ballet.
A good fraction of Gabrielle’s clients were young women in this category: tomboys with short hair who wished for emancipation. Their wealth and privilege made them appear liberated, but a few recognized that there was more to independence than pretending to it by simply taking their father’s, their spouse’s or their lover’s money.
Gabrielle was present at many of the rehearsals for Le Train Bleu, and was by now well versed in the infighting and tensions ever present during the making of a Diaghilev production. With the Ballets Russes, Diaghilev had created around him, as he always did, a kind