Coco Chanel_ An Intimate Life - Lisa Chaney [209]
Gabrielle had many years ago nurtured her image, now she was tending her legend. And while saying, “May my legend gain ground, I wish it a long and happy life!”7 she had also become its victim. Unable sometimes to distinguish it from herself, she had said some years before, “My legendary fame . . . each of us has his or her legend, foolish and wonderful. Mine, to which Paris and the provinces, idiots and artists, poets and society people have contributed, is so varied, so complex, so straightforward and so complicated at the same time, that I lose myself within it.”8 Her friend the novelist Michel Déon recently recalled to me how “with time, she turned a cynical eye on her milieu . . . She didn’t care, because being a celebrity no longer went to her head. I have rarely seen someone desire victory so much and then so disdain its rewards.”9
Gabrielle’s friends were only temporarily able to hold back her solitude, in which she had become imprisoned, and one day, she posed a mournful question to one of them: “What’s going to happen to me? What can I do ? . . . In bed at night I say to myself: “Why do you put up such a front? Why don’t you dump all that ?”10 But she couldn’t. She talked on, through shyness and through fear. Indeed, years before, she had declared with that startling self-awareness, “I prattled away out of shyness . . . How many windbags, mocked for their self-assurance, are simply quiet people who, deep down, are frightened of silence ?”11 Meanwhile, that “prattling” public self made a habit of toughness and self-aggrandizement: “So much insensitivity . . . the jewelry, the rings on her thin fingers . . . the monologues, the Chanel jargon, with the opinions, the judgments without appeal.”12 It was as if poor Gabrielle had welded her armor of self-protection to her mind and frequently to her heart. Her inner plight, accurately described by a young friend as the “truant furies,” had overtaken her.
Her solitude had deepened even further with the deaths of her oldest friends and ex-lovers. Hardly had the war ended than José Maria Sert had gone. Then, in 1950, Misia, whom she had loved, and hated, for so many years, and who knew so many of Gabrielle’s secrets that they had both long since dispensed with any pretense. In 1953, the Duke of Westminster, with whom, as with Dmitri Pavlovich, Gabrielle had always remained on close terms, died of a heart attack after only six years of his final and happiest marriage. The sympathetic, horse-mad Etienne Balsan, who had recognized that, in Sachs’s words, “Her spirit and her heart were unforgettable,” had rescued Gabrielle from her servitude, and died in South America. Following his daughter’s marriage and move to Rio de Janeiro, Etienne had gone there, too. His wish to die quickly had been answered when he was run over by a bus, in 1954.
When Adrienne de Nexon (née Chanel) died, in 1955, she took to her grave the most intimate details and appreciation of Gabrielle’s background. At Solesmes, in 1960, when Pierre Reverdy, the man for whom Coco “would have gladly given up everything,” died, only his wife and the monks were present at his simple funeral. As with all the rest, Gabrielle only heard about it through the papers. In 1963, Jean Cocteau, whom she had supported and denigrated