Coco Chanel_ An Intimate Life - Lisa Chaney [150]
When Gabrielle came to describe her relationship with Iribe, we understand something of what it had meant to her. She said he was
a very perverse creature, very affectionate, very intelligent, very self-seeking and exceptionally sophisticated . . . He was a Basque with astonishing mental and aesthetic versatility, but where jealousy was concerned, a real Spaniard. My past tortured him. Iribe wanted to relive with me the whole of that past lived without him and to go back through lost time, while asking me to account for myself.16
One suspects that, perhaps along with Reverdy, Iribe was the other man to whom Gabrielle confided the most about her past. She and Iribe had set out “on the trail of my youth” and visited the convent at Aubazine, far away in Corrèze.
Yet, years later, Gabrielle also said that
he wore me out, he ruined my health. My emerging celebrity had eclipsed his declining glory. He loved me, subconsciously . . . so as to be free of this complex and in order to avenge himself on what had been denied him. For him I represented that Paris he had been unable to possess and control . . . I was his due.17
At the end of August 1935, following Iribe’s death, Gabrielle was not yet in a fit state to return to Paris, and stayed on in the south until late autumn. For the first time, the enthusiasm that drove her to make each new collection failed to draw her back to Paris. She was the same age Iribe had been—fifty-two—and she felt worn out. Perhaps Gabrielle was having an intimation that her phenomenal energy was finite. She managed by giving instructions for the following spring’s collection in long conversations over the phone to Paris. Years later, one of her long-term artisan employees lost his father, and Gabrielle asked him to come and see her at the Ritz:
She sat me down beside her. She told me, and I’ll always remember this discussion, which lasted for over an hour . . . “I wish you a lot of passion, a lot of love, this happens in life! But against grief, there is only one true friend—when you knock on the door, he is behind it: work!”
And as work had become her habit, it was the only antidote Gabrielle knew of that calmed her many woes. In work she approached a state of something akin to peace. Thus, when she returned to Paris, that was what she did.
Cocteau now asked her to design the costumes for a new play he was about to write, Oedipus Rex, and Jean Renoir asked her to do the same for his forthcoming film The Rules of the Game. It was Gabrielle who had recently introduced her sometime young lover Luchino Visconti to her friend Jean, the painter Renoir’s son. She explained to Renoir that the young Italian count wanted to work in films. Despite Visconti’s painful shyness, he and Renoir got on, and Visconti went to watch the great director at his work. A year later, Renoir was sufficiently impressed that he included him in his film crew. Sometime later still, Visconti was generous enough to give Gabrielle the credit for being the instrument that helped him find his true path.
When Gabrielle returned to Paris that autumn, she had not only returned to work, she had returned to do battle. She was setting about overcoming a professional obstacle, growing steadily over the last couple of years, but which she had so far refused to countenance. For the first time in more than fifteen years, she had a serious competitor: her name was Elsa Schiaparelli. There were other competitors—Mainbocher, Marcel Rochas—but it was “that Italian woman,” as Gabrielle called