The Allure of Chanel

DIAGHILEV

MISIA NEVER LEFT Diaghilev’s side; between them it was one of those whispered, doting relationships, spiteful, affectionate, riddled with snares, in which Serge found his pleasures, his social contacts, his conveniences, his necessities, and in which Misia found the one remedy for her boredom. With Diaghilev she didn’t pout any more (Misia’s famous pout).

From the day I first met him, until the day I closed his eyelids, I have never seen Serge take a rest.

“I could have earned millions if I had put on Petrushka again, and lived off Schéhérazade as others did from Le Miracle or Die Fledermaus, but I prefer my pleasures.”

As he spoke he kept reassuring himself, with his heavily ringed hand, that his large black pearl was properly in place on his pearl-grey cravat. After the Ballets, he came to my home to have a quick supper, without removing that pelisse made from the pelts of Siberian animals and strapped with frogging in which Cocteau caricatured him so often; without taking off his white gloves, he took a chocolate. Then he succumbed, finished the box, his fat cheeks and his heavy chin wobbling as he munched, made himself ill, and stayed chatting all night.

An extraordinary prospector of the wells of European genius, a purveyor on a Balzac-like scale of dance, music and painting, which until then were unknown, a white-flecked intriguer offering the Orient to the West. In Spain he discovered Falla, and in St Petersburg a young student of Rimsky’s by the name of Stravinsky; in Arcueil, Satie.

He was the most delightful of friends. I loved his zest for life, his passions, his scruffiness, so different from the sumptuous figure of legend, the days spent without eating, the nights spent rehearsing, living in a theatre seat, destroying himself by putting his all into the show. He introduced the best painters to the best musicians, he taught the French public, those who out of snobbery were willing to make Arabian Nights journeys, that there were unknown enchanters at the corner of the street, Dukas, Schmitt, Ravel, Picasso, Derain. He shook Montparnasse out of its jabbering and opened up the debate to the public at large, made them interested in it and transformed it. Stubborn, generous, mean, then a spendthrift all of a sudden, never knowing beforehand what he was going to do, buying priceless paintings for nothing, giving them away, allowing them to be stolen from him, he travelled through Europe in the role of penniless patron, his trousers held up by a couple of safety pins. One evening, in Venice, between the two columns, he spoke to us about his childhood, about his friend Benois, about the St Petersburg School of Art, about his father, General Diaghilev, about his arrival in Paris, in that heroic period when he was exhibiting icons, or giving concerts of Russian historical music.

“Moussorgsky …” Misia would say (the pout reappears).

“Of course, not Prokofiev! You have to begin gently.”

I can see him with that air of a furry cat that enjoys its food, his thick lips opened wide in laughter, his drooping jowls, the glint of mockery in his eye beneath his monocle, with its black braid blowing in the wind.

Russia was moving forwards stealthily. 1910, classical and sophisticated. Le Spectre, Les Sylphides. And then Nijinsky comes and batters down our doors, like those of a harem. Pink and mauve posters suggestive of his leaps, signed by Cocteau, cover the walls of Paris. The earth trembles beneath the rhythm of the archers from Igor. One wondered what was being put in motion … Young lords lounged languidly in the aisles of the Châtelet, as did certain of our new Stendhals—Giradoux, who wore a monocle at the time, jealously guarding Monsieur de Balzac’s walking-stick, Emile Henriot and Vaudoyer, twin brothers disguised as knights of Orsay, Mauriac, his hands clasped together, wearing the blue uniform of the ambulance service created by Etienne de Beaumont, a young man from Bordeaux who was unable to sleep on account of the Parisian Cocteau’s successes, and for whom no honour would alleviate his provincial complexes—all were in raptures about the essential colours and about the harmonies of tones. As for Diaghilev, he got straight down to business. His business was to make Russia known subconsciously, to assert his Russian faith; with his handsome slaves, who hung on his success, following in his wake, he behaved like a Turkish despot.

Diaghilev was an extraordinary acrobat, a recreator of talent and an entertainer of genius. Had he brought to France companies such as the Imperial Theatre Ballet, he would merely have earned a succès d’estime. (The more so since he had only restored to Paris what St Petersburg had once borrowed from her.) But he did better; he invented a Russia for abroad, and, naturally, abroad was taken in. (Petrushka and Schéhérazade were not shown in St Petersburg until ten years after they were seen in Paris.) Since everything in the theatre was only trompe l’oeil, false perspectives were necessary: the Russia of the Ballets Russes succeeded in the theatre precisely because it was built on fictional material.

In 1918, when he had exhausted this seam, Diaghilev changed his style completely, with the introduction of comedy into dance (Massine and Les Femmes de bonne humeur, Pulcinella with Picasso, after Parade). For five years, served well by les Six, he rediscovered his youth; and posterity may be more grateful to him for having created Les Biches, Les Fâcheux and Matelots than for Les Sylphides or Le Spectre, for having inspired Etienne de Beaumont’s Soirées à Paris and given birth to the Swedes.

The flighty, frivolous, fickle Diaghilev was the first to understand that you had to grab hold of masterpieces, that nothing prevented you from dancing in circles so much as dance music did (it’s true that Isadora Duncan dancing to a Beethoven symphony had been a precursor), that you could dance to a painting by Picasso, to Dada ideas, to Claudel’s poetry. Börlin wanted to go even further in this direction, and he came a cropper, but Diaghilev, who was taste itself, never put a step wrong, precisely because he was light-footed. He nearly devised a ballet out of the 1913 riots based on Sacré, that Hernani of our times! After Serge, they danced among black statues, in the ruins of factories of futurism, in museums, to Velasquez and to Berlioz, to Bach and to Handel, to Shakespeare and to Paul Valéry. I know all the criticisms people have made about him, that he tackles dance from the outside, that he subordinates it to other art forms, etc, but one fact remains: Diaghilev dominated his age, and his age, which has been that of Nijinsky, Massine, Lifar, la Pavlova, the Sakharoffs, Argentina, the rebirth of the music hall, negro dance steps, rhythmics and explosive rhythm, etc, was probably the most brilliant period that dance has ever known.

I can see him as he was when he was alive, and how lively he was. He rides roughshod over scores. He hacks into them, without knowing whether it’s dance music. He picks out the best bits, as a gourmet might. He succeeds in the impossible. He ruins himself after having gone banco. He tears at his lock of white hair. He rushes over to Princesse Edmond’s house; he rushes over to Maud Cunard’s; he explains that he needs a thousand pounds, that very evening, that the creditors have seized control, that the curtain won’t rise; he wrings his hands; diabetes makes his forehead perspire.

“I went to see the Princess. She gave me seventy-five thousand francs!”

“She’s a grand American lady,” I say. “I’m only a French dress designer, but here is two hundred thousand.”

With the money in his pocket, he plunges back into the adventure the next day, he disappears, beset by romantic dramas that are as relentless as they are tortuous, and he emerges from the shadows or from America with a new musician and with his eightieth ballet.

Diaghilev sometimes told me about his experiences in Switzerland, during the First World War. He was rehearsing in Lausanne, in a hangar; Stravinsky was working with Ramuz next door; Lenin and Trotsky were waiting on the shores of Lake Leman for the moment when they were to return to Russia, through Germany, in a sealed carriage. 1917. Parade and revolution. The Châtelet and the Poutiloff factories. When I bring together these similar Russias that were unaware of each other, I think that they amount to one and the same thing.

The years go by. He continues to put his trust in genius, to search for genius, as a tramp searches for cigarette butts on a pavement.

In Venice, on his way back from Salzburg, in front of our very eyes, Diaghilev has just died. Present are Catherine d’Erlanger, Misia, Boris Kochno, Lifar.

“My friends, my only friends … it seems to me that I am drunk …”

The next day, a long procession of gondolas leaves the Orthodox dei Grecchi church and makes its way towards the San Michele cemetery, where the cypresses rise above the pink walls bordered in white.

“What will become of the Ballets?”

“Who can take them on again?”

“Nobody.”

I did not prevent Diaghilev’s ballets from collapsing, as people have said. I had never seen Le Sacre du printemps before 1914. Serge spoke about it as if it had caused a scandal and had been a great historical moment. I wanted to hear it and to offer to subsidise it. I don’t regret the three hundred thousand francs that it cost me.

Serge stirred up a world full of ideas, colours, passions and of banknotes: all he left was a pair of cuff links which Lifar would swap for his own at the moment he was placed in the coffin.