Coco Chanel_ An Intimate Life - Lisa Chaney [149]
After years of wrestling with his homosexuality, Luchino Visconti had finally reached an accommodation with himself. This in turn led to some major decisions. Rejecting a conservative aristocratic existence and the comforts of family—in which, nonetheless, he believed profoundly—Visconti had decided he would make his mark on the world through art. In company with a number of others, he had fallen passionately in love with the photographer Horst, who had recently cemented his reputation with a set of alluring photographs of Gabrielle. Horst remembered that she
had had a row with Vogue [in fact, Condé Nast] and no photograph of her was allowed to appear in the magazine. I was sent to her: I photographed her and she said that the photographs were good of the dresses but looked nothing like her. “How can I take a good photograph of you if I don’t know you,” I answered. So she asked me to dinner. At that time she had had a row with Iribe . . . and she was thinking of him when I took my photographs. She adored them. “How much are they?” she asked. “Nothing,” I said. “To be able to take a photo like that of you was wonderful”—and we became friends.13
In the summer of 1935, Gabrielle was at La Pausa awaiting Iribe, who had spent the previous weeks in Paris. He called to say he would arrive on the sleeper from Paris the following morning and suggested they could begin their day with a game of tennis. According to some sources, Iribe was warming up when Gabrielle joined him. Halfway through the first set, she went over to the net to ask him not to hit the ball so hard. Looking at her over the rim of his sunglasses, he stumbled and then collapsed. He had suffered a massive heart attack. Two days later, Iribe died in a nearby clinic, never having regained consciousness. Years later, Gabrielle would confess to believing she had caused his death because she’d persuaded him to resume the game when he’d complained of feeling faint.14
Gabrielle was in a terrible state; it felt as if her own life was finished. Her affair with Iribe may have been a tempestuous one, but she had felt both stimulated and supported by this dominating man. Unusually, she had allowed herself to lean a little.
At night, Gabrielle’s anguish grew worse as she lay alone, rigid with wakefulness and grief. Misia rushed to La Pausa. The doctor was summoned and prescribed a sedative, Sedol, to calm her and ensure some sleep. Gabrielle would later say that it wasn’t so as to live she had taken it, but simply to “hold on.”
Once again, a man had “left” her and, once again, she was alone. Each time Gabrielle lost someone, she appears to have relived her desertion by her father and been plunged into an emotional crisis. But this time the effect was bad indeed. Not only did she feel again that desertion, she also experienced the most terrifying reminder of her own mortality. The night was impossible without the sedative. For a few hours it numbed her grief and protected her from the sense that every time she closed her eyes she was no longer alive. Gabrielle quickly became dependent on this blessed release from pain, and after this period of abject misery, she continued injecting herself each night with Sedol to help her relax and find sleep.
Years later, in the sixties, Gabrielle’s Swiss doctor would tell her assistant, Lilou Marquand, that while on a skiing trip to Switzerland, Gabrielle had broken her ankle. This was most probably the year following Iribe’s death, when Gabrielle was indeed on a skiing trip with Etienne de Beaumont and other society friends. She was given morphine to combat the pain