Coco Chanel_ An Intimate Life - Lisa Chaney [187]
Now too frightened to answer the door, Misia turned ever more to her chemical oblivion. In September 1950, when there was little of herself left to destroy, Misia made her last trip to Switzerland to visit Gabrielle and collect her latest consignment of drugs. Not long after returning to Paris, she withdrew to her bed. A month later, her maid called friends to her bedside; she was dying. Gabrielle came, and stayed until Misia retreated into that silent space before death. Late that night, her breathing quietly stopped. Early the following morning Gabrielle took charge, as only she knew how. She had Misia’s body removed to Sert’s great canopied bed, then set to work to “perform her last rites for her friend.”
She arranged Misia’s hair, made up her face and decorated her with her jewels. In white, on a bank of white flowers, a pink ribbon across her breast, at its center one pale rose. Thus Misia was presented by Gabrielle to her mourning friends. Misia’s biographers would say that Gabrielle had made the years fall away and that Misia looked “more beautiful than ever.” With more realism, in a typically arch aside, the novelist Nancy Mitford wrote, “Dolly . . . had just come from the deathbed of Misia Sert. Mlle Chanel was there doing up the corpse. “Well, Coco was doing her nails—I thought it was kind of her—but I must say, she had overdone the makeup.”12 The funeral was held in the Polish church, in rue Cambon, close by the Chanel boutique.
First Sert and now Misia were gone. Whatever dreadful things Gabrielle might have said of Misia, these two had been a source of strength and comfort to each other in an enduringly passionate friendship lasting for more than thirty years. Gabrielle said, “Whoever mentions Sert mentions Misia,” and so it must have been in her own heart. With the death of the prodigiously unreconstructed Sert and his woman, a crucial aspect of Gabrielle’s life’s entertainment, exasperation and support was gone, leaving her world a diminished one. While declaring that “I am much more frightened of women than I am of men,” she added, “Women never amuse me. I feel no friendship for them . . . They don’t play the game, but expect it to be played for them.”13 Meanwhile, Misia, who like Gabrielle was “neither good nor bad,” was also the one about whom Gabrielle would say with stark simplicity, “She has been my only woman friend.”14
As she sat in that Swiss hotel with Paul Morand, Gabrielle’s now unsparing tongue demonstrated the formidably tough exterior few were brave or imaginative enough to challenge. Yet hidden in her armory of words, every now and then, alongside the unrelenting worldliness, Gabrielle revealed her other self, a diffident, fragile and lonely creature. This vulnerable woman who admitted, “I have only ever found loneliness . . . at the age of six I am already alone,” went on to say defiantly, “It is loneliness which has forged my character, which is bad-tempered, and bronzed my soul, which is proud, and my body which is sturdy.” At the same time, she said, “I have a horror of loneliness and I live in total solitude. I would pay so as not to be alone.” (In fact, she often did. On her annual trips to Italy, for example, she took lovers, saying later, “One doesn’t go to Italy for gentlemen. But I always paid.”15 And reading her comment “I would have the duty police constable sent up so as not to dine alone,” the thought of von Dincklage, there in the background, springs to mind.
Since his arrest by the British in 1945, von Dincklage had been living in Schleswig-Holstein (British zone) with his aunt, Baroness Weber-Rosenkranz.16 But in September 1949, we find him once again in Switzerland, staying at the Hôtel Beau-Rivage in Lausanne. Between December 1949 and January 1950, Gabrielle was also at the hotel.17 Von Dincklage and she had somehow arranged to meet. With Gabrielle, von Dincklage was able to enjoy a well-appointed lifestyle, while Gabrielle