The Allure of Chanel

AFTERWORD

WHAT WAS GABRIELLE CHANEL really like? Several biographies have been published in France, notably the highly fanciful one by Edmonde Charles-Roux, L’Irregulière (Grasset, 1974), published in an almost impenetrable English translation as Chanel (Cape, 1976; Harvill, 1995); and no less than three celebrated writers—Paul Morand, Louise de Vilmorin, and Michel Déon—have patiently withstood Chanel’s renowned volubility and have attempted to tell her life story, according to what she chose to reveal, in her own words.

With the reopening of her Paris premises in rue Cambon in 1954, ‘Coco’ Chanel, then aged seventy-one, considered it necessary to provide her public—particularly the wealthy American market—with an ‘official’ record of her life that would help bolster her newly-revived post-war reputation. Yet her true purpose was twofold: firstly to perpetuate her own self-created myth and expunge her wretched, poverty-stricken childhood by creating one that she could embroider and adapt to her own taste; and secondly, to avenge herself on a public that had all too quickly forgotten her after the debacle of 1940 and, in many cases, had not forgiven her for her sentimental allegiances during the Occupation.

Louise de Vilmorin’s unfinished account—begun in Venice, during Chanel’s exile, in the autumn of 1947, but only finally published in book form, after Vilmorin’s death, as Mémoires de Coco (Le Promeneur, 1999)—was not to Chanel’s liking, particularly after the manuscript failed to attract a contract from an American publisher. It is a book that reflects its author as much as it does its subject, for Louise de Vilmorin was a formidable figure in her own right and her meetings with Coco Chanel must have been a clash of Amazon-like proportions. Louise was also an intimate friend of Duff Cooper, the British ambassador to Paris at the end of World War II, who, at Winston Churchill’s behest, protected Chanel and thus saved her from the épuration (‘cleansing’)—the fate of many French women who had been intimately involved with German officers.

Michel Déon first caught sight of Mademoiselle Chanel before the war, at the Monte-Carlo-Beach hotel, where his father had pointed her out to him walking in silk pyjamas beside the swimming-pool, followed by the Duke of Westminster smoking an enormous cigar: “Look at that lady there, she is Mademoiselle Chanel, and behind her, that large man in shirt sleeves, with his trousers all twisted, and his old yachting cap, that’s one of the richest men in the world and the cousin of King George V.”’11

Déon did not meet this “exceptional, and at the same time exasperating and brilliant woman”, however, until November 1952, in Roquebrune-Cap Martin, on the French Riviera, when he first began helping her to write her memoirs. In his own captivating autobiographical work, Pages françaises, he describes the month he spent at her Villa La Pausa, where his duties included driving Mademoiselle Chanel to lunch with Jean Cocteau at Cap-Ferrat. But Déon’s main duties as ‘ghostwriter’ really began in 1953. Chanel was living in post-war exile at the Beau-Rivage Hotel in Lausanne, as she had sold her property, and for over a year she paid Déon to take down her confabulated memories of her miserable childhood in the Auvergne, her early success, the famous people she had known (Stravinsky, Dali, Picasso, Cocteau, etc); her intimate friendships (Arthur ‘Boy’ Capel, the Duke of Westminster, Grand-Duke Dimitri, Paul Iribe, though not, interestingly enough, the true love of her live, the poet Pierre Reverdy). Déon persevered, rewrote a number of chapters, and after a year or more produced a three-hundred-page manuscript born of Chanel’s lengthy monologues. But the book was still not to her taste. Déon believes that she may have had a childlike fear of abandoning the world of her dreams and confronting the realities of existence, for she said nothing to him, but sent word via a friend, Hervé Mille, the editor of Paris-Match, who conveyed her reaction: “In these three hundred pages, she says there is not a single sentence that is not hers, but now that she sees the book as it is, she thinks that it is not what America is expecting.”

Paul Morand first met Gabrielle Chanel through Misia Sert in 1921, as he describes in typically limpid style in his preface to this book. They were both stars of their generation: she, the undisputed queen of fashion; he, a young diplomat and the author of such acclaimed books as Tendres stocks (a collection of stories with its preface by Marcel Proust) and the novel, Hecate and Her Dogs. Cosmopolitan, refined, effortlessly accomplished, Morand reflected a certain idea of Third Republic France, one that would vanish forever with the disaster of the German occupation. “Everywhere I go, they are switching out the lights,” he once remarked to Michel Déon.

Morand, who was an admirer of English traditions and literature, and who had many friends in England, had been working in the French embassy in London from 1939 to July 1940 as ‘chief of the blockade commission’. Influenced possibly by his Germanophile and anti-Semitic Roumanian-born wife Hélène, he made the fateful decision to return to France in July 1940 and to support the ‘wait and see’ government of Maréchal Pétain. In 1943 he was appointed Minister in Bucharest, and in 1944 ‘Plenipotentiary Minister’ in Berne. It was in Switzerland, along with many another political exiles, that he was obliged to take refuge after the war, and it was from his home in Vevey in 1946 or 1947, impoverished and vilified by much of the French literary establishment,12 that he was invited by Coco Chanel to visit her in St Moritz and offered the opportunity to write her memoirs. We do not know what Mademoiselle Chanel thought of her friend’s efforts, or indeed whether Chanel ever read his manuscript—it was put away in a drawer and only came to light again, after Chanel’s death, in 1975. L’Allure de Chanel was finally published in Paris in 1976, the same year that Paul Morand died, and, for the first time, readers were at last given some insight into the woman Chanel really was. Just occasionally in these selective, acid-tongued memoirs, the mask drops, and we glimpse the true face of the fragile, lonely creature who revolutionised the way women dress and who became one of the twentieth century’s great monstres sacrés.

In her biography of Paul Morand, published in 1994, Ginette Guitard-Auviste quotes from a letter Morand sent to her in response to a question she had asked about Chanel. “Chanel is France’s greatest figure,” he wrote from Vevey on 1st May 1964. “Despite her age, she sparkles; she is the only volcano in the Auvergne that is not extinct… the most brilliant, the most impetuous, the most brilliantly insufferable woman there ever was.”

EUAN CAMERON

11 Michel Déon Pages françaises (Gallimard 1999)

12 Morand’s candidature to the Académie Française was effectively vetoed by de Gaulle in 1958; he was finally elected and presumably ‘forgiven’ in 1968.