Coco Chanel_ An Intimate Life - Lisa Chaney [146]
During the Depression, a young New York heiress, Maybelle Iribarnegaray, discovered that her husband was having an affair with Gabrielle. It was 1933. Her husband, Iribe, as Paul Iribarnegaray styled himself, was a thickset Basque with an impenetrable accent who often utilized his incessant womanizing to further his extraordinary talent. Besides the great Sem, Iribe had been the most talented and successful French prewar caricaturist, with a facile and sharp pen. He had then branched out and launched a successful design business, creating furniture, fabrics, wallpaper and jewelry. The success of his business had made him a significant arbiter of taste. Then, one year into the war, having dispensed with his first wife, the actress Jeanne Dirys, who subsequently died of tuberculosis, Iribe left for America, scooped up Maybelle and spent the next ten years in America, most of them in Hollywood.
Iribe worked on some of the legendary Cecil B. de Mille’s most important films, including The Ten Commandments, the largest-scale film yet made, and was promoted to artistic director of Paramount. By this point, he was also designing dresses and film sets, and was sometimes even directing. Iribe was witty and clever, with an unctuous charm, but he had also gained a reputation for being arrogant and argumentative. One day, when he reacted badly to de Mille’s criticism of his sets for King of Kings, de Mille had had enough and fired him. Iribe had also had enough, and left Hollywood, returning to France with his wife and her two children. With Maybelle’s money, Iribe now opened a shop on rue Faubourg Saint-Honoré—not far from Gabrielle’s residence, Hôtel de Lauzan—and reapplied himself to designing furniture and jewelry. He had always been intent on riches, fame and acceptance by society, and was envious of Cocteau, an old acquaintance and colleague, who infiltrated the haut monde with such ease.
On his return to Paris, Iribe hailed luxury, artisanship and nationalism as the cornerstones of his beliefs. Enslaved to money, he appears to have made and lost it at a great rate. For the moment, however, Iribe made huge sums, acquiring a luxury car, a yacht and a house in Saint-Tropez, the fishing village now transformed into one of the most select playgrounds of the rich. Colette hadn’t visited for a while, and friends warned her that it was overrun by “the sort of people photographed by Vogue.” Colette herself was in fact photographed by Vogue, but bemoaned the smothering of one of her favorite places with traffic and tourists. One morning, she found a horde of them awaiting her as she left the stationer’s, and wrote to a friend, “I didn’t hide what I thought of them.”6
Then Iribe did less well, so his long-suffering wife hustled and found him a commission from Chanel. Maybelle’s parents were meanwhile pressuring their daughter to curtail their son-in-law’s excessive spending; they were concerned he would bring them to ruin. This, combined with Iribe’s serial infidelity, finally brought the marriage to an end, and Maybelle left for America with her two children.
When Gabrielle and Iribe’s affair was still a well-kept secret, Colette and her lover, Maurice Goudeket, were inadvertently to discover it. (Gabrielle had met Colette at some point in the early twenties. They never became close, but with a number of friends in common, they met on numerous occasions.) At the end of 1931, “strangled by the Depression,” as Colette put it, and in financial straits—“Great God above, things are difficult for Maurice and me”—they were forced to sell their retreat outside Paris.
La Gerbière was a pleasant house surrounded by trees and high up in the village of Montfort-L