Coco Chanel_ An Intimate Life - Lisa Chaney [191]
Gabrielle made a remarkable admission to a young Jean Cau, then Jean-Paul Sartre’s secretary, that in fact everyone intimidated her, from her mannequins to minor employees to the delivery boy. And she added, “Fortunately no one or almost no one knows this.”
Déon was both sufficiently observant and imaginative enough that in spite of the flaws, he found Gabrielle sympathetic and tantalizing. She asked him to come with her to Switzerland in her Cadillac, but he preferred to remain independent, making the journey in his own car, a black MG. Gabrielle traveled “with two black Cadillacs, one for her, driven by her chauffeur in livery, and another carrying her two personal maids, one of them clutching the famous jewelry box in detergent-worn hands. Traveling in convoy like this, halfway she stopped her car and got into my convertible, her head veiled in pink gauze like a motorist from the early 1900s.”27 The young novelist was paid a monthly salary by Gabrielle and occasionally returned to Paris to write an article or pay his rent. In the end, Déon spent so much time away from Paris listening to her that his girlfriend got tired of waiting and dumped him.
On several occasions, Déon met von Dincklage in Switzerland and describes how Gabrielle “continued with the pretense that he hadn’t had anything to do with the war on France.” (In 1950, a Swiss police report stated that “Today, VD still comes across as a very cold man and tries to impose his will on every occasion.”) Meanwhile, Déon wryly tells a story demonstrating how much the older man, by then aged fifty-seven, still retained his looks and his ability to ensnare. One night, Gabrielle had retired early to bed, and Déon and von Dincklage set off for a nightclub. There they met Déon’s new German girlfriend, a club dancer. Von Dincklage worked his charm so effectively that Déon was amazed at the speed with which his girl dropped him for the older man.28
Sometime around 1953–54, von Dincklage disappeared from Gabrielle’s life. All we know is that Gabrielle continued giving him an allowance; he eventually settled on a Spanish island, and there he devoted his time to painting erotica.
After considerable perseverance, by the end of 1953 Michel Déon had produced a manuscript of three hundred pages recounting Gabrielle’s life story. He waited for her judgment, but none came. Then, Gabrielle sent word through her friend Hervé Mille, editor of Paris Match and one of the arbiters of postwar Parisian taste: “In these three hundred pages there is not a single sentence that is not hers, but now she sees the book, she thinks that it is not what America is expecting.”
Michel Déon understood Gabrielle’s message. He had written down her words just as she had spoken them, without interpretation and with all the fantasies intact. He understood that in her heart she knew the truth perfectly well, that the fantasies that helped her survive were fine to expand on in conversation but, as he says, “not to read black on white.” As a writer, Déon was sensitive to the very powerful hold her imagination had upon her. “What I found truly moving about her was her constant call to this strange, imaginary, quality of existence,” he said, “her charming impulses, a very delicate generosity—when one did not ask for anything—a remarkable intuition in music, poetry, drama.”29
Rather than criticize her fantasy life—“this strange, imaginary, quality of existence—he understood that she could not have survived without it. He also appreciated her respect for the integrity of writing. Thus when she said to him, “Michel, it is my voice, but I don’t want to hear it,” he told her he understood, and they remained