Coco Chanel_ An Intimate Life - Lisa Chaney [186]
Gabrielle had so far outwitted her demons by “never resting.” Still on the move from everything she found too painful, she was obliged to use her hotel hopping as a new method of forgetting.
Did she make herself forget, too, the mounting deaths of her friends, lovers and family that reminded her of time passing? Her two brothers, whom she had cut off so peremptorily at the beginning of the war, were both dead, Lucien felled by a heart attack early in the war, and without seeing their sister again. Gabrielle rarely referred to her family. She was one of those who had so outgrown their roots that in doing so she had rejected them, left them far behind. When they pulled her back, they did nothing but remind her of a childhood that she said she remembered every day and that she spent her whole life trying to avoid. Either through a sense of social inadequacy or a genuine impatience with the roots that were of no use to her emotionally, psychologically or financially, Gabrielle had made the decision and ruthlessly thrust them aside.
Excising almost all her family from her life, Gabrielle appears to have retained only her aunt Adrienne and her nephew, André Palasse, and his family. She brought André and his family to Switzerland in an attempt to improve his health, but André would eventually die of tuberculosis.
In 1942, Gabrielle’s friend Max Jacob had died in the appalling Drancy internment camp, in Paris’s outer suburbs; his sister and brother had already been sent to be gassed in Auschwitz. That same year, Duke Dmitri Pavlovich had died in another kind of prison, a sanatorium in Switzerland, where for more than a year he had struggled with tuberculosis. In 1948, Vera Bate-Lombardi died in Rome. But before Vera, Gabrielle’s old friend José Maria Sert’s death was announced. Theirs had been what Gabrielle called a relationship “with all the ripples that the clash of characters as entrenched as ours can stir up.” Sert was “as munificent and as immoral as a Renaissance man,” who had done nothing to curb the pace of work, food, drink and the drugs that his doctors had said would kill him. One day, in November 1945, while laboring on his huge mural in the cathedral of Vichy, he dropped dead.
Misia had been quite unaware that Sert was close to death, and was bereft, afterward writing, “With him, disappeared all my reasons to exist.”9 Her beloved brother had already died; and her divorced niece, now living with her, would be killed in a car crash, leaving Misia more alone than ever. The dosage and frequency of her morphine increased. It was her only way of keeping at bay the inevitability of loss and its sibling, pain, made worse by the sequence of her own aging. She survived by spending increasingly long periods shielded from reality under her cloak of narcotics: “Chatting at dinner parties, or wandering through the flea market, she would pause to jab a needle right through her skirt.”10 And here was one of the great differences between Misia and her friend and sometime lover Gabrielle. Both of them had long ago reached a state where they could not live without their drugs. But where Misia’s addiction meant that she became utterly controlled by it and used her narcotics in increasing quantity, Gabrielle was never in that position. She was dependent, but her great force of character never allowed the morphine to control her; Gabrielle controlled the morphine.
Procuring Misia’s drugs had become dangerous, yet she bothered less and less about concealing her habit. “Once, in Monte Carlo, she walked into a pharmacy and asked outright for morphine, while a terrified Gabrielle pleaded with her to be more careful.”11 In those postwar years, Misia traveled to Switzerland to spend time with Gabrielle, and also to collect her supplies, as she and Gabrielle had done together so many times before. But Misia’s name was now found on a drug dealer’s list in Paris; she was arrested and thrown into a cell with fellow