Coco Chanel_ An Intimate Life - Lisa Chaney [171]
On January 11, Boulos commented on Misia’s distress at Sert’s departure for Spain and a sojourn with his mistress, and then described going with Cocteau and Marais to an all-night pharmacy “to fill in a prescription.” Marais had almost succeeded in weaning Cocteau off his opium, so this must have been a prescription “for the morphine to which Misia and Boulos were both hopelessly addicted.”
Over the years, Misia and Gabrielle had made numerous trips to Switzerland together, apparently to visit this or that clinic. Almost certainly, one of the major reasons for these trips was in fact to collect not only Misia’s new supply of morphine but also Gabrielle’s.
In the postwar period, Gabrielle had someone else pick up her “prescription.” Her assistant Lilou Marquand said she knew that “someone would go to Switzerland to get her morphine” with the protection of Chanel Inc.”18
Parisians were now pretty desperate for distraction from their privations, and entertainment of all kinds—theaters, cinemas, the opera and ballet as well as music halls, cabarets and brothels—were doing a roaring trade. Cafés and restaurants were filled with celebrities, the old rich, the black-market new rich and many Germans keen to sample the famed pleasures of “Gay Paree.” Those revelers unwilling to call a halt to their evening and brave the rigors of the Metro at the eleven o’clock curfew hour—virtually everyone had to use it; private cars were almost unknown—stayed on at the clubs and cafés, frequently open all night. Colette wrote to a friend that the composer Georges Auric, out with Marie-Laure de Noailles and a German officer, had his leg badly injured: “Nightclub, two in the morning, champagne, accident.”19
Intelligent and sensitive though Boulos Ristelhueber was, he could only partly comprehend the history and complexity of the friendships recorded in his diary. Perhaps most complex of all was that between Misia and Gabrielle. Since their meeting in 1917, they had fought, hurt, envied, loved and sometimes hated each other. Gabrielle was drawn to the mad Slav in Misia, who was, like her, as Morand said, extraordinarily rich in “that singular commodity called taste.” And while they each had a gargantuan appetite for gossip and intrigue, these were just as readily used against each other. Each of them was also probably the only woman the other knew to whom she could unfailingly turn. From its initiation, their friendship had been an intensely close one, often provoking gossip. Their many mutual friends were completely divided as to whether Gabrielle and Misia were lovers. At various times, it is almost certain that they were.
Gabrielle and Misia were connoisseurs of women’s beauty, and bedding each other—or another woman, for that matter—was not something that would have concerned them in the least. They were libertarians who had lived through an era that was increasingly open to sexual experiment. Gabrielle also spent her working days molding her artistry on women’s bodies. As she would say, it was a woman’s body itself that was one of the things that inspired her designs. She was also enough of an artist that Coleridge’s assertion in many ways applied to her: “A great mind must be androgynous.” In like manner, Virginia Woolf ’s conviction was pertinent: “It is fatal for anyone who writes [or makes any art] . . . to be a man or a woman pure and simple; one must be woman-manly or man-womanly.”20 With time, despite loving and wanting to be loved by men, it seems that Gabrielle turned more often to her own sex for both exhilaration and consolation.
In the period immediately before and during the early part of the war, one of her lovers was the woman mentioned above, the duchesse Antoinette d’Harcourt. This beautiful and rather tormented woman apparently needed her beloved opium in order to better express her passion and intelligence. Her son, Jean, remembers Gabrielle visiting them often before the war at the d’Harcourt