Mademoiselle Chanel Read online

  DEDICATION

  For Melisse, the only person I know who loves Chanel more

  than I do, and for Jennifer, who always believes

  EPIGRAPH

  My life didn’t please me, so I created my life.

  —GABRIELLE “COCO” CHANEL

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Paris

  Act One: Nobody’s Daughter

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  Chapter XIII

  Chapter XIV

  Chapter XV

  Act Two: 21 Rue Cambon

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Act Three: Discarding Frills

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Act Four: No. 5

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Act Five: Not the Time for Fashion

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  Chapter XIII

  Chapter XIV

  Chapter XV

  Paris

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  Sources

  About the Author

  Also by C. W. Gortner

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  PARIS

  FEBRUARY 5, 1954

  The herd gathers below. I can hear them, all the journalists and eager celebrities, and select critics who received my embossed invitation. I hear their excited voices, a buzz that creeps up the mirrored staircase to where I wait in my disordered atelier.

  About me, the twelve models are already dressed in my new creations, wreathed in clouds of cigarette smoke and my signature perfume. I’ve asked for silence as I lie on my back checking their hem lengths and snipping at stray threads. I cannot think when they chatter, but there is no stopping them. They tug the jeweled belts of my black gowns, clanking their bracelets and clicking their pearls; they reflect the agitation I feel but cannot show.

  I rise to my feet, letting my scissors dangle on their ribbon around my neck. I know the speculation going on below: Will she do it? Can she do it? She is seventy-one. She hasn’t designed a dress in fifteen years. After falling so low, how can she possibly rise again?

  How, indeed.

  None of this is new to me. I have faced it all before. The expectation of failure, the craving for adulation; these are the hallmarks of my life. I light another cigarette and survey the models before me. “You,” I tell a dark-haired girl who reminds me of myself at her age. “Too many bracelets. Remove one.” Even as she flushes and does as I ask, I hear my beloved Boy whisper in my ear, “Remember, Coco, you’re only a woman.”

  Only a woman who must continue to reinvent herself if she is to survive.

  I catch sight of myself in one of the room’s mirrors—my Gypsy skin and mouth red with lipstick, my thick brows and flashing gold-brown eyes, my body all angles and edges in my braided pink suit. There is nothing left of the pliant skin of my youth. And my hands, covered in precious rings, are as raw as a stonemason’s, knotted, marred by a thousand needle pricks—the hands of the Auvergne peasant I am at heart, the foundling, the orphan, the dreamer, the schemer. My hands reflect who I am. I see in them the struggle that has always existed between the humble girl I once was and the legend I deliberately created to hide my heart.

  Who is Coco Chanel?

  “ALLEZ,” I CALL OUT. The models line up at the head of the staircase to my salon. I have overseen this ritual so many times before, straightening a sleeve at the last minute, adjusting the tilt of a hat, the fold of a collar. As I wave the models forward, I draw back. I will not make my appearance until the applause has faded—if there is applause.

  I cannot be sure anymore, not after all this time.

  Coiling my knees to my chest, my cigarettes at my side, I silence the chimes of my bijoux and perch at the top of my mirrored stairs, becoming a hidden spectator, solitary, as I have always been.

  And as I behold my uncertain future, I will reflect on my past and do my best to tell the truth, though myth and rumor clothe me as much as my signature crêpe de chine or tweed.

  I will try to remember that for all my triumphs and mistakes, I am still only a woman.

  ACT ONE

  NOBODY’S DAUGHTER

  1895–1907

  “I DO NOT REGRET HAVING BEEN DEEPLY UNHAPPY TO BEGIN WITH.”

  I

  The day Maman died, I was lining up my dolls in the cemetery. They were poppets of cloth and straw I had made when I was a child, dirty and misshapen now because I was almost twelve. I gave them different names at different times. Today, they were Mesdames les Tantes, named for the black-clad women in our garret nearby, watching my mother gasp out her final breaths.

  “You sit here and you here,” I said, forcing their little bodies into position against the toppling headstones and imagining I was ordering about les Tantes. The cemetery was my haven, a patch for the dead on the edge of the village where my mother had brought me and my siblings after Papa left us. We had moved so often, I did not think of it as home. Papa often disappeared for months at a time, a marketplace vendor who took to the road with his wares.

  “I was born for the road,” he would say when Maman nagged him. “For generations, we Chanels have been wanderers. Do you expect me to change what is in my blood?”

  Maman sighed. “Not entirely. But we are married now, Albert. We have children.”

  Papa laughed. He had a big laugh, and I loved hearing it. “Children learn to adjust. They don’t mind if I travel. Isn’t that so, ma Gabrielle?” he asked, turning to wink at me. I was his favorite; he’d told me so, swooping me up in his burly arms and scattering ash from his cigarette over my thick black braids as I laughed. “Gabrielle, mon petit chou, my little cabbage!”

  Then he’d set me down, and he and Maman would argue. It inevitably ended with her shouting “Then go! Go away as you always do and leave us to our misery!” and I covered my ears. I hated her then. I hated her tears and scrunched-up face, her clenched fists as Papa stormed from the house. I feared he might never come back because of her. She didn’t see that he left because he had to—her love was like smoke without flame. It left him nothing to breathe.

  Still, I always waited for Papa, though this last time he left, a gossip in Lorraine eventually spotted him and the news winged its way to our village: Albert Chanel was working in a tavern and had been seen with a woman—a harlot. I didn’t know what a harlot was, but Maman did. She went cold. Her tears dried. “He is a bastard,” she whispered.

  Packing up our meager belongings, she brought me, my two sisters, Julia and Antoinette, and my brothers, Alphonse and Lucien, here to Courpière, where her three widowed aunts cl
ucked their tongues and said, “We warned you, Jeanne. We told you, the man is no good. His sort never are. What will you do now? How will you support this tribe he’s left you to raise?”

  “Papa is coming back,” I yelled, rattling their chipped teacups. “He is good. He loves us!”

  “This child is a hoyden,” Maman’s aunts declared in unison. “She has his bad blood. No good will come of her, either.”

  Coughing and clutching a cloth to her mouth, Maman sent me out to play. She grew thinner by the day, vanishing before my eyes. I knew she was sick but I did not want to admit it. I glared at the aunts and marched out, as I had seen Papa do so many times.

  Mesdames les Tantes stayed away after that. But when Maman’s cough settled in her chest and she could no longer work as a seamstress’s assistant, they crept back into the house. They overran everything, turned everything black, and saw Maman to her bed, from which they said she would never rise again.

  “Will Maman die?” asked my sister Julia. She was thirteen, only a year older than I was, but perpetually frightened by the winter winds that gnawed the village, by the clatter of carts splashing mud on our ragged skirts and the suspicious glances of the townsfolk. But most of all, she was afraid of death, for what would become of us, left alone in the world with les Tantes, who had watched in pitiless silence as our mother wasted away?

  “She won’t die,” I said. Maybe if I said it, it would be true.

  “But she is very sick. I heard one of les Tantes say she’s not long for this earth. Gabrielle, what will happen to us?”

  I felt a lump in my throat, like the stale bread Maman gave us when there was nothing else to eat. She would send me to the baker with the few centimes she had saved but told me not to beg, for we had our pride. Still, the bread the baker gave me was always hard.

  This lump was like that. Swallow, I told myself. I must swallow it.

  “She will not die,” I said again, but a sob escaped Julia as she looked over her shoulder to our sister Antoinette, only five, happily tugging weeds from between the tombstones. “They will get rid of us,” she said, “send us to an orphanage or worse because Papa is never coming back.”

  I bolted to my feet. I was too thin, as les Tantes often scolded, an urchin who looked as if she’d never had a full meal—as if such a feat were something Maman could conjure up like the miracle of the fishes and the loaves. Grabbing up one of my dolls, I shook it at Julia. “You must never say that. Papa is coming back. You will see.”

  Julia squared her narrow shoulders. It took me aback, the abrupt defiance in her, for though she was the eldest, Maman always said that Julia was too timid. “Gabrielle,” she said somberly. “This is no time for make-believe.”

  No time for make-believe . . .

  My sister’s words echoed in my head as we trudged back to our house, summoned by one of the aunts yelling from the garret window.

  In the parlor, the faded drapes were drawn and the table swept clean of the stuff of Maman’s work—the bobbins, needles, and half-cut patterns for gowns she made for others, but could never afford for herself. The aunts had laid out our mother’s corpse.

  “Her suffering is over . . . Her pain is no more . . . Our poor Jeanne is at peace.” One of the aunts beckoned with her claw. “Come, girls. You must kiss your mother good-bye.”

  I froze in the doorway. I couldn’t move as Julia went to the table and leaned over it, setting her lips on Maman’s purple mouth. Antoinette began to wail. In the corner, six-year-old Lucien banged his tin soldiers together, while nine-year-old Alphonse stared in bewilderment.

  “Gabrielle,” les Tantes said. “Come here this instant.” Their voices flapped around me like ravens, swooping and pecking. I stared at my mother’s body, her hands folded on her chest, her eyes shut and sunken cheeks like wax. Even from a distance, seeing her like that made me think that when people said the dead were at peace, they lied.

  The dead didn’t feel. They were gone forever. I would never see Maman again. She would never stroke my hair from my brow and say, “Gabrielle, why can’t you keep your braids neat?” She would never check on us in our bed to make sure we were warm at night, never come trudging up the stairs with her baskets and give sugar cakes to keep the little ones happy so Julia and I could help her with her work. She would never again show me the difference between a slip stitch and a blanket stitch, never laugh in her quiet way when Julia sewed the edge of her own skirt to the garment she was supposed to be mending. Maman was gone and we were here alone, with the aunts and her body, without anyone to comfort us.

  I whirled around and ran. I heard les Tantes shouting behind me, banging their canes on the floor. Lucien joined Antoinette’s chorus of cries, but I did not look back. I didn’t stop, flying down the staircase and out the door, running until I was back in the cemetery. I dropped to my knees before the tombstone where I’d left my dolls. I wanted to cry. I had refused to kiss my mother good-bye, so I must cry for her, to let her know I had loved her.

  But no tears would come. Kicking my dolls aside, I crouched against the tombstone and waited as dusk fell, staring toward the dusty road that led from the village.

  Papa would come. He must. He would never abandon us.

  II

  Three days later, Papa arrived and we gathered in the shabby parlor at the same table where Maman’s body had lain. He’d missed the funeral—“My job, I had things to do,” he explained as the aunts clucked—but he was here now, and I clung to his hand, inhaling the smell of his sweat and tobacco. He had come to us just as I said he would, and we were safe.

  “What shall you do now?” les Tantes declared. “With a wife in the ground and this tribe she’s left for you to raise on your own?”

  Papa was quiet for a moment before he said, “What do you suggest, mesdames?” I jolted in my chair beside him. “I have my job at a tavern,” he added, “with no room for children.”

  “A tavern,” said one of the aunts, “is no place for children, room or not. Aubazine is the only place. Let them gain the skills to support themselves and avoid their mother’s fate.”

  As I saw the scarce color drain from Julia’s cheeks, I realized this Aubazine must be an orphanage, or worse. “But we are not orphans,” I protested, and I took pleasure in les Tantes’ horrified expression. They didn’t care about us. They wanted us gone, but Papa would not let them. He would show them how wrong they were.

  I turned to my father. “Papa, tell them we must live with you.” I heard an imploring note in my voice that I tried to hide. But he didn’t seem to know what to say. Then he muttered, “Gabrielle, the grown-ups are talking. You must trust we have your best interests at heart.”

  We? I stared at him.

  He went on: “Aubazine, eh?” He was looking over my head toward the aunts, lined up like my childish dolls in the cemetery. “And you think the nuns will . . . ?”

  “Absolutely,” they replied, with determined bobs of their chins. “They cannot do anything else. The holy sisters of Aubazine have devoted themselves to such a cause.”

  “Hmm.” Papa’s grunt sent a shiver down my spine. “And the boys . . . ?”

  “There are always families to take in boys,” said the aunts, and I clutched at my father’s hand, seeing now the cruel resolution in les Tantes’ eyes.

  “Papa, please,” I said, forcing him to look at me. “We’ll be no trouble. We always sleep together, so we don’t need extra room. Julia can take care of Antoinette and Lucien, and Alphonse and I can help you. We helped Maman all the time. I used to help her sew, and I . . . I did errands for her. I’m good at it. I can work for you. We’ll be no trouble at all,” I repeated, speaking faster as I noticed a distance in his eyes that made my heart pound.

  He took his hand away. Not with harshness. His fingers just unraveled from mine, like poorly spun threads. I was holding on to emptiness—it felt as if he had already gone as he said quietly, “I cannot. There is no room.”

  He stood. As I gazed up at him,
frozen on my chair, he turned to the door. I lunged to my feet, running to him, trying to catch hold of his hand again as I cried, “Please don’t leave us!”

  He cast a vague smile over my head at my aunts as he carefully avoided my grasping fingers. “Mesdames,” he said, “you will see to it, yes? The necessary clothes and the rest of it.”

  The aunts nodded in agreement. He looked down at me. “Mon petit choux,” he murmured. He ruffled my hair before he walked out. I couldn’t move, hearing his footsteps fade down the stairs. Behind me, one of the aunts snapped, “She has no shame. Defiant till the end.”

  I didn’t wait. Before they could swoop over to grab me, I bolted after Papa. But when I ran into the street, I didn’t see him anywhere. I spun about, searching for his figure striding away, clapping his hat to his head.

  He had disappeared, as though he’d never been here at all. The world darkened around me. I suddenly felt cold all over. In that moment, I realized Julia had been right.

  The time for make-believe was over.

  III

  Les Tantes wouldn’t let me leave to look for him, coming downstairs to haul me back up to the garret, kicking and struggling, locking the door and ordering us to pack our belongings. They pulled out the tattered cloth valise we’d used so many times before, and flung it open on the bed.

  “I will not,” I told them. “I hate you. My mother is dead because of you. You killed her.”

  Even as Julia whispered, “Gabrielle, please stop,” I glared at the aunts until one of them spat out, “If you don’t do as we say, we’ll give you to the ragman. Would you like to spend your days sorting through trash? You told your father you knew how to work. So, go. Work.”

  My brothers cowered in the corner. Julia tugged at my arm. “Gabrielle,” she implored, “come. Let’s pack. It won’t take long.” Turning my back on the aunts as they gathered about the table to watch us, I sorted through the few items of clothing I had, makeshift articles darned and patched by Maman so they would last longer.

  The next morning, a stranger arrived—an old man in a beret with a cigarette clamped between his teeth. We barely had a moment to hug Alphonse and Lucien farewell before the aunts hustled us into the man’s cart, where he told us to sit in the back, on a pile of hard burlap sacks of flour. “Stay still,” he ordered, and I saw one of the aunts ladle coins from a purse into the man’s hand—a small tapestry purse I recognized as my mother’s.