Coco Chanel_ An Intimate Life - Lisa Chaney [190]
The Swiss now told Schellenberg he wasn’t welcome there. The Schellen-bergs then moved to Italy and a house on Lake Maggiore, where, apparently, all their expenses were paid by Gabrielle. Schellenberg had developed cancer, and by early 1952, he was dead. His wife would write to von Dincklage’s friend Captain Momm that “Madame Chanel offered us financial assistance in our difficult situation and it was thanks to her that we were able to spend a few more months together.”25 When Schellenberg’s memoir, The Labyrinth, was published, there was no mention of Gabrielle or any reference to the mission to Spain with Vera Bate-Lombardi, christened Operation Modelhut by Schellenberg . At the end of 1952, von Dincklage went to visit Mrs. Schellenberg in Düsseldorf in order to collect two “objects’ she wanted to give Gabrielle. We have no evidence, but these “objects” may well have been documents.
With time on her hands in Switzerland, Gabrielle had turned to thoughts of safeguarding the myth of Coco Chanel. As she was no longer perpetuating it in her couture, she wanted someone to take down a more formal record of her life than her earlier conversations with Morand. Her choice of ghostwriter was the poet and novelist Louise de Vilmorin, a formidable character with a distinguished literary reputation. Among her numerous affairs, after the war, Vilmorin became the lover of both the British ambassador Duff Cooper and his wife, Diana. In her last years, she was the companion of the writer André Malraux, by then the French minister of culture. Gabrielle admired Vilmorin’s cleverness, her urbanity and her irony, and in 1947, they sat down together in Venice to work through Gabrielle’s life.
Notwithstanding Vilmorin’s lack of moralizing, she was unable to subsume her own personality sufficiently to permit her subject to settle into the foreground. Vilmorin was also driven mad by Gabrielle’s inability to be straight about her early years. Gabrielle wasn’t pleased with Vilmorin’s account, especially when it failed to find sympathy with any of the American publishers. Their friendship did, however, weather this episode. Next, Gabrielle tried out one of the extraordinary Kessel brothers, Georges, the suicidally depressed ex-lover of Colette, whose opium-cocaine-morphine habit left him wasted before his time. This, too, was a failure. Undaunted, for the rest of her life Gabrielle tried to coax a succession of writers into helping her construct and reconstruct her legend.
Soon after Kessel, there was the journalist and novelist Gaston Bonheur, then came the young novelist Michel Déon, who had recently helped Salvador Dalí with his memoirs and brought out his own successful first novel. Michel Déon, who spent a good part of 1951 to 1953 in her company, recently described Gabrielle as an “exceptional, and at the same time exasperating and brilliant woman.” Traveling with her from Paris to Lausanne, from Roquebrune to Rome to New York, he faithfully noted down her stories. Déon’s mode was not to query what she said. She talked; he listened, and then wrote.
Déon is now a youthful nonagenarian and one of the grand old men of French literature. His irony and sly wit are countered by a prevailing warmth, and one can imagine Gabrielle being charmed by the young writer. In conversation, he alludes to a novelist’s material-gathering. Describing himself as “a robber,” Déon was fascinated by her “complexity and seductiveness.”
Telling how he listened happily to this woman forty years his senior, “who had seen and experienced everything,