Coco Chanel_ An Intimate Life - Lisa Chaney [92]
Misia now put it about that she was horrified lest Stravinsky should divorce his poor wife so as to marry Gabrielle. Sert next took it upon himself to “talk” to Stravinsky, informing him that Capel had “entrusted [Gabrielle] to me; and a man like you . . . is known as a shit.”15 While Sert “cultivated the anguish” Stravinsky was suffering, Misia heightened the emotional atmosphere by telling Gabrielle that Stravinsky was distraught, and wanted to know if she would marry him. Having stirred up this drama, the Serts were then highly amused by Stravinsky’s distress and spread the story among their friends, including Picasso. At last, Gabrielle begged for the drama to stop and for Stravinsky to “come back.” He did, every day. If Gabrielle did not feel the depth of passion that her Russian lover felt for her, her mind, her emotions and her intelligence had nonetheless become engaged in a new way. Apart from anything else, the compliment of having an intelligent and highly creative man in love with her must have been restorative after her tormented months of mourning.
Stravinsky’s very Russian soul was, in itself, an escape for Gabrielle from herself into an exciting mental and emotional landscape. Indeed, she would say, “Russians fascinated me. Inside everyone from the Auvergne [the place she sometimes chose to claim as her own] there is an Oriental one doesn’t realize is there: the Russians revealed the Orient to me.”16 Gabrielle said that she found “all Slavs . . . naturally refined.” She must also, in Stravinsky, have identified with the deep seriousness central to the artist’s life. For a woman who said, “Nothing interested me any more . . . nothing at all, only esoteric things,”17 her love affair with Stravinsky had helped her, secretly still mourning, to feel herself more grounded and alive.
It had also brought a measure of humor, albeit a mad Russian version, back into her life. Someone who was not close enough to be sure about the affair would later write:
There were rumors of a great flirtation between her and Stravinsky; nobody knows how far it went. All I know is that once, after one of her large dinner parties in the garden of the Ritz, she asked for a glass of water and Stravinsky, in a playful mood, or maybe in a fit of jealousy, filled a large glass with vodka and brought it to her. Coco drank the strong alcohol practically in one gulp, stood up, and fell on the floor. She had to be carried to her bedroom.18
Finally, when the Ballets Russes was leaving for a tour of Spain, Stravinsky asked Gabrielle to come with him. She said she would follow soon. Whether Gabrielle really intended going is uncertain because she allowed herself to be waylaid by circumstance, and Stravinsky was to wait for her in vain.
17
Dmitri Pavlovich
On February 9, 1921, not long after Stravinsky had left Paris with Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes, a young man recorded an evening with Gabrielle at the singer Marthe Davelli’s, with whom Gabrielle and Arthur had picnicked on the beach at Saint-Jean-de-Luz in 1915. Our diarist said of Gabrielle that he “hadn’t seen her for ten years.” Commenting that she “didn’t say a word about Boy Capel,” he said she was a most agreeable companion and was almost unchanged in looks. Gabrielle drove him home, “and we suddenly found ourselves on an amazingly friendly footing.”1
The diarist was Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich, grandson of Tsar Alexander II and cousin of Tsar Nicholas II. No previous biographer of Gabrielle has had access to Dmitri Pavlovich’s diaries. But with them, we have been able not only to revise important aspects of their ensuing relationship but also to trace the course of a famed yet mysterious trip they made together not long after their meeting.
At thirty, Dmitri Pavlovich had already experienced a life of great upheaval. His mother had died at his birth and his father’s remarriage, eleven years later, had led to his banishment, so