Coco Chanel_ An Intimate Life - Lisa Chaney [136]
Looks designed for sports graduate to country day-dressing and then arrive in town, and Chanel’s country tweeds have just completed the course . . . She pins a white pique gardenia to the neck. Her lingerie touches are copied everywhere—piping, bands of contrasts, ruffles and jabots. She initiates fake jewelry, to be worn everywhere, even on the beach.
When Gabrielle was asked why Westminster liked her, she believed it was because she was French. She “had not tried to lure him.” As a result of her experience of—largely aristocratic—English women, her opinion was that they “think only of luring men, all men.” Declaring that she had no interest in doing this, Gabrielle came to the interesting conclusion that English women were “either pure spirits (‘souls’) or grooms. But in both cases they are huntresses; they either hunt with horses or with their souls.”10
The affair between Gabrielle and Westminster was a major item for the gossip columnists on both sides of the Atlantic. Doing their damnedest to follow every twist and turn of this dazzling relationship, they vied with one another in predicting the date of the engagement. Both Westminster and Gabrielle, however, would always remain coy about any plans they had to marry. Though many at the time believed Gabrielle’s own lineage would have made this an impossibility, this may not have been correct. At forty-six, Bend’Or was in a position where he no longer felt the pressure to keep up that kind of public reputation. He had been divorced twice; he had done much in the way of fulfilling his public duty; he continued fulfilling his private duties regarding his estates and his employees; and his thoughts about marriage were now untrammeled by too much consideration for social nicety.
Above all, Bend’Or needed a woman who could “manage” him, who could relieve his boredom with her vivacity, who was sophisticated enough to forgive his infidelities, and, finally, who would provide him with more children than the two girls from his first marriage. He had only partially recovered from the death of his four-year-old son a few years earlier, and very much wanted a male heir. Gabrielle fulfilled all the above criteria: she was independent, strong, a self-made woman of great wealth who was also capable of compliance. Being Gabrielle, she was utterly clear in the maturity, and the Frenchness, of her comment here: “A woman does not humiliate herself by making concessions.” She fascinated the Duke of Westminster and, for now, it seemed that the only stumbling block was whether she could present him with an heir.
For a time, she forgot her obsession with independence and remembered that, in her heart, she had always wanted the certainty of marriage and, now, children. Despite being wedded to her couture house, Gabrielle may have courted a proposal of marriage. She would quote an eighteenth-century Frenchman’s remark: “The English are the best people in the world at marrying their mistresses and asking them the least about their past.”11 In 1927, Gabrielle was forty-four, and it appears that she did her best to become pregnant, including doing everything the doctors asked of her.
Meanwhile, Bend’Or was bored by Gabrielle’s friends. She said, “He couldn’t understand Misia at all, and she couldn’t understand the English at all. He was appalled by Sert, who sawed off swan’s beaks so that they would die of hunger, and who pushed dogs into the Grand Canal in Venice.” Thus, when together, they socialized mostly with Bend’Or’s set.
In an unconscious attempt to cement their relationship, Gabrielle and Bend’Or “made” two houses together. The first was a simple seven-bay classical house in Scotland, never a well-known part of the Chanel-Westminster romance. This was Rosehall House, in Sutherland, bought by Bend’Or as a place in Britain where he and Gabrielle might be more intimately together. Gabrielle didn’t like the decor and so had it redecorated in her now celebrated style. The house has been in a state