Coco Chanel_ An Intimate Life - Lisa Chaney [185]
(These were the evenings referred to at the beginning of this book, and the record of which, years later, Morand would publish as Gabrielle’s “memoir,” The Allure of Chanel. In his introduction, Morand would recall that “with nothing to do for the first time in her life,” Gabrielle was “champing at the bit.”) Reflecting on her heart, which “unburdened the secret of a taciturn disposition,” Morand remembered Gabrielle’s voice “that gushed forth from her mouth like lava, those words that crackled like dried vines, her rejoinders, simultaneously crisp and snappy . . . a tone that was increasingly dismissive, increasingly contradictory, laying irrevocable blame, I heard them all.”2 He heard her doubts about when to return to the rue Cambon, and how she felt both “trapped by the past and gripped by time regained.” She was part of an age which was suddenly “foreign to her . . . black bile flowed from eyes that still sparkled, beneath arched eyebrows increasingly accentuated by eyeliner.”3 And although Morand’s Gabrielle was formidably alert and well informed, her star was no longer in the ascendant.
Sitting in the palatial opulence of the Swiss hotel, she talked. Far too intelligent not to be self-aware, she said of herself, “I lack balance . . . I talk too much,” but she added, “I forget quickly, and furthermore . . . I like to forget. [Emptying her mind enabled her to create.] I throw myself at people in order to force them to think like me.”4 The contradictions came thick and fast, and while she did always forget, this woman of paradox also declared, “I have never forgotten anything.” Saying that “aging is Adam’s charm and Eve’s tragedy,” Gabrielle now had more time than she wished to contemplate the possibility of her own decline. On the one hand, she despised women who faced aging without dignity, and on the other, she was unable to comprehend the thought of her own nonexistence. She would say that the idea “of youth is something very new, who talked about it twenty years ago?”; she also said that 1939 was the first time it had occurred to her that she was no longer young: “It hadn’t occurred to me that I could grow old. I’d always been among bright, pleasant people; friends. And all at once I found myself alone, separated from everyone I liked. Everyone I liked was on the other side of the ocean [she means those who had fled to the States].”5 But there were distractions. A few old friends, such as Visconti, visited her in Switzerland; there was a handful of new Swiss friends, and a new female companion, Maggie van Zuylen.
Marguerite Nametalla was an Egyptian (it was said she had been a violet seller) married to the diplomat Baron Egmont van Zuylen, whose home was the immense medieval De Haar Castle, in the Netherlands. Maggie was elegantly beautiful, with pale skin and green eyes, and enjoyed dramatizing her “unwealthy origins.” Her son-in-law, Guy de Rothschild, described her as “witty and gay, lively and provocative, she combined audacity and fantasy. Completely natural and devoid of timidity, her sense of humor . . . her repartee, her gift for imitation, made her seem like a character in a play.”6 André Malraux would proclaim that “Chanel, General de Gaulle and Picasso are the three most important figures of our time,” and of Maggie van Zuylen, he said, “Hers is intelligence in its purest state, since it is unencumbered by any intellectual baggage.”
“Maggie could participate in any conversation, for while conscious of her lack of culture, she never gave it a second thought.”7 Her vivacity was seductive, and Gabrielle felt renewed in the company of this worldly and vital younger woman. She also became her lover. In the winter of 1945–46, they entertained each other uproariously with their sparkling and acid wit. Writing many years later in his journal, Paul Morand would say that before Gabrielle “became exclusively lesbian, I lived with her and Mme.