Coco Chanel_ An Intimate Life - Lisa Chaney [39]
Arthur’s ambition did arise out of his sense of inadequacy. However, it wasn’t because of any illegitimacy but because his parentage was undistinguished. As much as anything, he was driven by the desire to move—as was Gabrielle, and his own father before him—beyond his origins. This brought about the urge to reach a still higher social position than the haut bourgeois one his father had created for his children to inhabit. The Capels had considerable riches but neither a great name nor the land traditionally accompanying one. Later, we will see the tragic consequences for Gabrielle, and Arthur, to which this urge would eventually drive him.
In the meantime, Arthur played polo and socialized with society.14 A close friend was Duc Armand de Gramont, Comte de Guiche, one of the most gifted and sympathetic personalities of his generation. Armand was a tall, dazzlingly handsome polo player whose family had managed to divert him from becoming a painter and to steer him toward what they saw as the more serious pursuit of science. Here Armand’s considerable gifts would eventually help make his name far beyond the self-absorbed confines of the disintegrating haut monde from which he sprang. His and Arthur’s impeccable connections had permitted them entry to the Jockey Club, that luxurious male preserve and organ of the ruling elite. In 1908, Marcel Proust was elated to be put forward as a member. The sponsors for Proust’s promotion to another of the city’s most distinguished clubs, the Paris Polo, were none other than the two young heartthrobs, Arthur Capel and Armand de Gramont. On April 30, Le Figaro announced, “Marcel Proust, presented by the Comte de Guiche and M. Arthur Capel, is received as permanent member of the Polo de Paris.”
In spite of Arthur’s great worldly success, his drive and ambition were shot through with ambivalence. Although he liked the luster of his friends’ privileged lineages, an important aspect of his close friendship with men such as Armand de Gramont and Etienne Balsan was not their joining with him in the leisured man’s love of high living, but their notable strength of purpose. While increasing his wealth and socializing with the beau monde, the young playboy was not fulfilled by money and power alone. Laboring under the philosophical and spiritual disquiet of many sophisticates at the dawn of the twentieth century, he questioned the Jesuit ethos under which he had been schooled. Searching, he had taken up one of the routes followed by a number of his contemporaries who felt restricted by the old religions. Maintaining a friendship with the popular spiritual guru Rabindranath Tagore, Arthur also joined the Theosophists, the recent religious movement whose declared objects chimed with his own leanings.15
Somehow, between his hectic schedule of work, socializing and grand sporting events, Arthur also found time to cultivate his affair with Gabrielle. Indeed, it was over the winter of 1909–10 that the problems regarding her relations with her two most significant lovers, Etienne and Arthur, reached a resolution: she moved into Arthur’s apartment on the avenue Gabriel. This was where we first met them, on that evening when Arthur shocked Gabrielle out of her fantasy by telling her she wasn’t making any money.
In deciding to work at all, Gabrielle had made her position socially ambiguous. While in some ways resembling a courtesan who made money, Gabrielle was now an untypical rich man’s mistress who did not. Part grisette, again, Gabrielle wasn’t typical, in that the grisette was more often a man’s lover than his live-in mistress.
Popularly seen as charming and “all-powerful interpreters of fashion,