Coco Chanel_ An Intimate Life - Lisa Chaney [94]
For many years, it has been said that Gabrielle met Dmitri Pavlovich through Marthe Davelli, at Biarritz, in 1920. Thanks to Dmitri’s diaries,6 we now know that while Gabrielle and Dimitri did indeed meet throught Marthe Davelli, it was in 1921 and in Paris, not Biarritz; and Marthe Davelli’s 1921 dinner was not their first meeting. As Dmitri’s diary records, they had met ten years earlier, in 1911. No doubt this was on one of Dimitri’s periodic visits to his father, Grand Duke Paul, living at Saint-Cloud outside Paris.
Dmitri’s lineage, his gracious manner and fine looks had given him an immediate entrée to the haut monde, and at twenty, in 1911, he was already known for his sympathetic and carefree personality. He and Gabrielle would have met through Arthur’s connections. As a fine horseman—Dmitri represented Russia in the 1912 Olympics—he may also have ridden to polo with Arthur and Etienne when in France.
The most significant aspect of Dmitri’s diaries, however, is its revision of Gabrielle’s relationship with him. What little has been known derives from the older Gabrielle’s fairly jaundiced comments to Paul Morand and others, implying that it was no more than her allowing this handsome young nobleman to bed her. Gabrielle’s comments have successfully concealed from us what Dmitri’s diary reveals: how vulnerable she was at the beginning of their affair.
The day after their meeting at Marthe Davelli’s dinner, Dmitri bumped into Gabrielle and Marthe once again, with what he called “all the old crowd.”7 Following “an amazingly boring dinner” at the Ritz, Dmitri spied Gabrielle dining there, and invited her back to his apartment, where “she remained until four a.m.”8 The next morning, Dmitri’s tennis suffered as a result, then the couple lunched together again. Seeing them together on several occasions, the gossips set to work putting around word of their trysts.
Misia and Diaghilev “adored gossip and had talents for intrigue that were to blossom alarmingly.”9 Misia had rapidly discovered the identity of Gabrielle’s new lover and fired off a spiteful telegram to Diaghilev and Stravinsky in Spain. “Coco is a little shop girl who prefers Grand Dukes to artists,” it read, and Diaghilev famously sent it back by return to Gabrielle, saying that under no circumstances should she now appear in Spain, because Stravinsky wanted to kill her. Gabrielle was incensed at Misia’s telegram, refused to believe her protestations of innocence, and didn’t speak to her for weeks. This episode signaled, definitively, the end of Gabrielle and Stravinsky’s affair.
Gabrielle’s chance meeting with the young duke was thus the unexpected route by which she stepped back from Stravinsky’s emotional fervor. Their affair had been stimulating and life affirming for her, but it had also become something of a burden. Gabrielle’s well-concealed yet underlying state of mourning left her unable, or unwilling, to be involved at Stravinsky’s level of intensity. His jealous rage at her rejection must have been compounded by the knowledge that he had not only been thrown over for a younger fellow Russian, but also by a member of the royal family.
Meanwhile, Gabrielle and Dmitri continued their daily assignations until a week later, when he “stopped by the Ritz to say goodbye,” en route for a few weeks’ stay with friends in Copenhagen. Sir Charles and Lady Lucia Marling had been the ambassadorial couple in Tehran who had looked after Dmitri there in exile. Sir Charles was now British ambassador