Coco Chanel_ An Intimate Life - Lisa Chaney [139]
One of those always there in times of need since Arthur’s death was Misia Sert. Gabrielle would say dreadful things of Misia, most of which were true. Describing her as having no sense of moderation or rationality, she said she was like a nomad from the steppes:
She has an acute thirst for success and a deep and sacrilegious passion for failure. For herself, whom she loathes, for the man she serves . . . She aspires to greatness, she loves to mingle with it, to sniff it, to control it and reduce it . . .
She had absolutely no shame, no sense of honesty, but she had a grandeur and an innocence about her that surpassed everything one usually observes in women . . . it’s because of this I adored her . . . In woman there is everything, and in Misia there was every sort of woman.15
Whatever Misia’s faults, Gabrielle would, nonetheless, continue to love her. Indeed, she would claim that she was the only woman who remained her true friend.
For the moment, however, Misia suffered, too, and Gabrielle came to her rescue. At her insistence, Misia had joined the Cutty Sark with a party sailing along the Dalmatian coast. While there was intermittent tension between Gabrielle and Bend’Or, Misia’s situation was more acute: her marriage was in ruins.
Sert had become besotted with a tall, narcissistic and self-destructive Russian princess, Roussadana Mdivani. Finding her beauty luminous, half of the Parisian haut monde appeared besotted, too. Roussadana’s brothers’ indigence led them to use their exotic charm and titles to make marriages with a series of American film stars and heiresses, acquiring for them a moniker, “the marrying Mdivanis.”
Meanwhile, Misia had worked her way through the repertoire of attitudes for the long-suffering wife. But her accustomed open-mindedness, as she waited for another of her middle-aged husband’s infatuations to subside, had, this time, been to no avail. And foolish Misia had herself also grown to love this self-absorbed and high-spirited young woman who was destroying Misia’s marriage.
When Misia had first met Gabrielle, Sert had been taken aback at her passion for yet another woman. Now his wife’s ardor for another woman only heightened his own desire for Roussadana, who so intertwined herself with their lives that the three of them no longer understood their motivation or their emotions. Geared as Sert was to the world of “fashion, the rich and the vaguely talented, he had moved from Misia’s lightness, with its solid basis of art, to Roussy’s frivolity, with its nihilistic base of chic.”16 In time, Gabrielle became more than a little besotted herself with the captivating creature, but for now, in hour-long conversations on the phone, she admonished Misia for involving herself with the girl, telling her she was playing a dangerous game. Misia replied that the forces that drew people toward calamity had her in their clutches and that she was powerless to do anything but try to subdue disaster.
Gradually, her increasing doses of morphine failed to keep her far enough removed from her emotions, and she was faced with the despair she really felt. Paul Morand would recall his admiration for Misia’s “joie de vivre, always concealed beneath a mask of ill-humor; that perfect poise even in moments of despair.” It must have been hard work indeed for Misia and Gabrielle to retain their legendary poise while concealing their real feelings from everyone—except each other—on board Bend’Or’s pleasure ship.
One day, Gabrielle and Misia received a telegram onboard the Cutty Sark from Diaghilev’s assistant, Boris Kochno, in Venice: Diaghilev was very ill; they must come at once. Gabrielle had Bend’Or sail the ship to Venice, and the two women went in search of their friend Diaghilev. There, in the Hôtel des Bains on the Lido, with sunlight shimmering off that endlessly lapping water, the beautiful young Boris Kochno and Serge Lifar, each at various times Diaghilev’s lover, were beside him: he was dying. The diabetes that Diaghilev had refused to attend to with any discipline was in its