Coco Chanel_ An Intimate Life - Lisa Chaney [208]
In a quieter moment, she would also confide to one of her last intimates her belief that “a woman is a force not properly directed. A man is properly directed. He can find refuge in his work. But work just wipes a woman out. The function of a woman is to be loved.” And she confessed her feeling that “my life is a failure. Don’t you think it’s a failure, to work as I work ?”30 This formidably powerful yet always feminine woman, who had found consolation in work, also believed that women “ought to play their weakness never their strength. They ought to hide that . . . One ought to say ‘yes but’ . . . in other words play the fish.”31
31
I Only Hear My Heart on the Stairs
Gabrielle’s aversion to any kind of constraint had not diminished with the years; she was defiant: “I never settle down anywhere, I’ve chosen freedom.” Stimulated by the unpredictable, she remained irritated by much organization, and “loathed people putting order into my disorder or into my mind,”1 declaring, “Order bores me. Disorder has always seemed to me the very symbol of luxury.”2 And while the houses she had owned were beautiful and innovative in their design, she also said, “It’s not the houses I love, it’s the life I live in them.”
In her Hôtel Ritz suite, and her apartment on the rue Cambon, meanwhile, Gabrielle had created sumptuous and atmospheric surroundings, luxurious interiors filled with private symbols. Yet the apartment at 31 rue Cambon was never at heart a domestic one. Gabrielle had entertained many friends there over the years, but she also conducted business there. Someone now very familiar with the apartment describes it as “the place where she kept her memories, her links with her close friends, and her past. But if it had been a really intimate, personal apartment it would have had a bedroom. In some ways she lived her life like a man.”3 Neither was there a kitchen at rue Cambon ; Gabrielle had food brought in. And while she could juxtapose grandeur with simplicity and severity with comfort, in truth, Gabrielle had little interest in the hearth.
A hotel, where she slept and ate most of her meals, is essentially an undomestic space, and its underlying atmosphere of transition precisely served Gabrielle’s needs. Although she lived in the Ritz for more than seventeen years, in theory, at any moment she could be on her way: “In a hotel I feel I am traveling.” An echo of her nomadic childhood—in whose recollection Gabrielle often spoke of trains—this existence also represented her undaunted and slightly cracked refusal to be tied down. Her openness to the possibility of change in turn represented the possibility of creativity, leading her to say, “When I can no longer create, I’m done for.”4
By contrast, the symbols of others’ rootedness affected Gabrielle more adversely as she grew older. For example, she hated Sundays. Traditionally the family day, it was also the one when her salon was closed, making it more difficult to divert herself—with work—from admitting her sense of isolation. She professed to dislike marriage, and children, and on occasion used her unerring capacity for fantasy to erase spouses and their progeny from the lives of those around her. In the same spirit, she was quite capable of trying to destabilize a relationship. Good ones unsettled her. Gabrielle could also quietly admit to the one member of her family with whom she remained close, her namesake, Gabrielle Labrunie, “Actually, it’s you who has been right in life. You are much happier than I am. You have a husband and children. I have nothing. I am alone with all my millions.”5 Gabrielle told one of her favorite models, “I envy you because I always wanted to have children, and I had an abortion and I could never have any. It’s not true when I say that I find children disgusting.”6
In the late sixties, when Gabrielle