Coco Chanel_ An Intimate Life - Lisa Chaney [188]
Meanwhile, Gabrielle, who was as powerful and forthright as she was vulnerable and alone, said she would recall Arthur Capel’s comment to remember that she was a woman and to remind herself, she would stand in front of the mirror where she saw her
two menacing arched eyebrows, my nostrils that are as wide as those of a mare, my hair that is blacker than the devil, my mouth that is like a crevice out of which pours a heart that is irritable but not selfish... My dark gypsy-like skin that makes my teeth and my pearls look twice as white; my body, as dry as a vine-stock without grapes; my worker’s hands . . .
The hardness of the mirror reflects my own hardness back to me . . . it expresses what is peculiar to myself, a person who is efficient, optimistic, passionate, realistic, combative, mocking and incredulous, and who feels her Frenchness. Finally, there are my gold-brown eyes which guard the entrance to my heart: there one can see that I am a woman. A poor woman.19
This same “poor woman” believed she had been put here for a purpose and said, “That is why I endured, that is why the outfit I wore to the races in 1913 can still be worn in 1946, because the new social conditions are still the same as those that led me to clothe them.” Remembering the revolution she had initiated, she described how “I was working toward a new society.” She described clothes until then as being for women who were “useless,” who did nothing for themselves or with their lives. Saying she designed for busy working women, she added that “a busy woman needs to feel comfortable in her clothes. You need to be able to roll up your sleeves.”20 And in the drive to fulfill her destiny, and her deep urge for independence, Gabrielle also understood, and regretted that “I belong to that breed of foolish women, women who think only of their work.”21
While saying that she had never really known happiness, she also said, “I have never had the time to be unhappy, of existing for another human being, or having children. It is probably not by chance that I have lived alone.”22
Asking herself where she would go now, Gabrielle continued looking forward : “I don’t know, but I’m going somewhere and it’s not over.” Saying that her reaction to being told that Europe was in ruins made her think that while she felt that Europe was her mother, if it was lagging behind in the world, she would readily leave it behind, as she had done her family, and begin her new life: “I want to be part of what happens. I will go wherever is necessary for that . . . It will be necessary to do something else. I am ready to start all over again.”23
This refusal to be bowed by circumstance, as well as the willingness to “start all over again,” was most impressive in a woman of sixty-three. For all her tenacity and verve, however, Gabrielle didn’t have quite the same energy she had possessed thirty years earlier. And yet the icon Coco Chanel had become so intertwined with whoever Gabrielle was, she was unable to relinquish it. As it turned out, what she would take up wasn’t as novel as she might have envisaged when she spoke these words in 1946.
When Gabrielle had agreed with her lawyer, René de Chambrun, that she should leave France and live in Switzerland for a while, she also asked him if he would help her in taking on her partners, the Wertheimers. Gabrielle believed that during the course of the war they had once again defrauded her, and she told Chambrun, “I want revenge.”24
For several years before the war, convinced that their initial agreement had been a bad one, Gabrielle had intermittently skirmished with the Wertheimers. In the early thirties, for example, they had begun