Coco Chanel_ An Intimate Life - Lisa Chaney [64]
Although Marie-Louise believed that Gabrielle’s lack of technique led her to compensate with an unsettling need to demonstrate her authority, Marie-Louise was in awe of what she described as “her innate taste.” Whatever the première’s criticisms, she remained impressed by her employer’s “audacity and incredible nerve, especially since she was a milliner and knew little about dressmaking.”10 She would add that Gabrielle’s method “must have had something good in it, since we made such admirable things.” As for Gabrielle herself, Marie-Louise found her “extraordinarily chic. You should have seen her, getting out of her Rolls-Royce in front of the firm on the stroke of noon, for she had . . . acquired a Rolls with a chauffeur and footman. She was a queen!”11
This “queen” remained at the salon until two or three o’clock, depending upon the importance of her customers. And then “she retired to her drawing room, where she entertained a great deal.”12 The impression this gives—that Gabrielle didn’t work hard—was just what she intended, and is also entirely inaccurate. And one remembers her famous remark, made years later: “It is through work that one achieves. Manna didn’t fall on me from heaven; I molded it with my own hands . . . The secret of this success is that I have worked terribly hard . . . Nothing can replace work; not securities, or nerve, or luck.”13
At the same time, as we have seen, Gabrielle had insisted on remaining in the background when she sold hats from Etienne Balsan’s garçonnière, sending her assistants out to deal with the customers rather than meeting them herself. And over the preceding few years, as she had become familiar with people and surroundings of the highest sophistication, the impression that would sometimes be given, that Gabrielle didn’t do much work, signaled something significant in her present thinking. She had recognized that in order to acquire a greater reputation than her fellow designers, she would be wise to cultivate the impression that she didn’t need to work hard; that, by implication, she was the equal of her clients. Having had her nose rubbed in her social inferiority throughout her life, as Gabrielle grew more successful, she felt less and less a sense of personal inadequacy before those more socially exalted than herself.
Under Arthur’s watchful eye, at first using her contacts and the press to promote her hats, Gabrielle’s keen instincts had begun telling her she needed something more all-encompassing than the old-fashioned virtue of a well-known name. However consciously, we will never know, Gabrielle began fostering something on a grander scale.
Even her première, who knew Gabrielle’s working methods and something of her complex personality, was persuaded enough by her projection of status to call Gabrielle “a queen,” and misinterpreted her entertaining as no more than that—entertainment. As Gabrielle’s innate self-belief began to flourish, she was also drawing the outlines of a persona. She was cultivating around her name something that can thrive on any real scale in the modern world only through an ongoing relationship with the press: a public image.
12
The War Bans the Bizarre
Even during the war, the upper echelons of French society, with whom Arthur had always passed his time, still dedicated much of theirs to leisure. The nobility was no different from other classes in being made up of various elements—including from intermarriage with the grande bourgeoisie—and was neither an assimilated nor a homogenous group. Yet while no longer retaining much power, they nonetheless retained much of their old sense of exclusiveness and still enjoyed great status. Conferring prestige and receiving deference from those around them, they confirmed the existence of a social hierarchy at whose apex they had remained.
Arthur was a haut