Mademoiselle Chanel Read online

  “Is anything amiss?” asked Kitty de Rothschild as I tallied her purchases and Adrienne desultorily wrote down the acquisitions in a ledger for the workroom.

  “She’s just heard about our declaration of war,” I said, for in truth I was too flustered myself to fabricate a convenient lie on the spot. “She’s worried for the Baron of Nexon.”

  “Oh, is that all?” Kitty shrugged. “So much wind in the grass. It will be over before we return to Paris. Those Germans do like to bully everyone, don’t they? They’re like boys in a playground.”

  I laughed, and kissed her on both cheeks. “Demain,” she said as her maid staggered behind with my white-and-black boxes containing her purchases. “Cécile Sorel is coming again to visit and so is Madame Santos-Dumont, who’s dying to see your clothes. Plus tard!” She blew me a kiss as she sailed out the door with the princess. Together, they had bought half my inventory.

  Adrienne was crying again. I told her to go back to our suite in the hotel. She was no use to me in her current state and I wanted to reconcile the day’s profits without her laments.

  We would remain open, as Boy had requested. But as I pulled out my account books and hunched over them to count, my hands were trembling.

  SO MUCH WIND IN THE GRASS . . .

  Kitty de Rothschild’s careless pronouncement stayed with me as summer ended, emptying Deauville of its sun-worshipping inhabitants. The war of bullies transformed into a monster intent on devouring us alive.

  I did not return to Paris. I saw no point with Boy gone, though Adrienne did, boarding the first train she could with the breathless promise to write once she had any news.

  “Call me instead,” I told her. “We have a telephone in the hotel, remember?”

  Returning to the Hôtel Normandy through the ghostly streets, I wondered at my own reluctance to succumb to anxiety, my seemingly imperturbable calm. Not until I was sipping a rare cognac—I never drank much—and smoking on the balcony, gazing out to the Channel, did I realize that what I felt was not indifference.

  I simply refused to consider that anything bad could ever happen to him.

  THE MONTHS DRAGGED ON. I learned via another telegram from Boy that he was stationed as a lieutenant with the British division on the Marne. Deauville filled again, this time in panic, when the Germans tromped over Belgium and menaced Paris. They did not enter the city, but the mere threat sent the women racing onto trains to the nearest haven they could find that offered an escape route across the Channel. Once more, I was up to my elbows in work, sending urgent telegrams to Adrienne—she never did master using the telephone—to join me and stop moping over Maurice, who had enlisted with our forces to stop the Germans before we all ended up saluting the kaiser. She refused several times before she finally came. By then, I was selling my designs faster than I could deliver them. Many of the women were now eager to support the cause as communiqués reported massive casualties at the front, and formed voluntary nursing teams at the hospital.

  They needed comfortable attire they could move in all day, sensible clothing that would withstand the wear and tear of labor. Unwittingly, my sportswear had become exactly that, and I dove into the workroom to create special smock-type dresses to fit the requirements. Society matrons who had not so much as pulled on a glove by themselves now rolled up the sleeves of my open-collared shirts and tucked rolls of gauze and morphine vials into my jacket pockets. Once again, every woman in Deauville wore my styles but I took no satisfaction in it. Opportunity had again favored me, but it came at the price of the disintegration of the world I had known. I did not possess the sangfroid to see it as anything but soul wrenching.

  Besides, by now what I had refused to consider was fast becoming a possibility. When I heard Royallieu had been occupied and Balsan’s prized stables converted into barracks, I had to go into the back room to clutch my stomach and resist the dread churning inside me.

  If Balsan’s château was not safe, if Paris was not safe, what would happen to Boy?

  REASSURING NEWS THAT MAURICE WAS ALIVE eased Adrienne’s worries. Living and working with her was a test in forbearance, and as soon as word came that we could return to Paris, I left my Deauville boutique in the hands of a formidable head seamstress and boarded the train with Adrienne.

  Paris was a cemetery of waiting, devoid of able-bodied men, with frantic mothers, daughters, and wives checking the daily posters announcing the names of the dead. Business at rue Cambon, however, was better than I expected. Here, too, sensibility in apparel was at a premium, so I installed the same types of merchandise as I had in Deauville, save for the dresses. I spent my days in the shop and my after hours in the Ritz, as Allied officers came to the hotel bar across from my shop bringing news of the front.

  The horrors they related stunned me. The losses numbered in the tens of thousands, entire armies crushed under the German heel. Every night when I returned to the apartment on rue Gabriel, my mind reeled with images of Boy blown to shreds in a trench, hanging on barbed wire with his guts spilling out, and other indescribable nightmares. When telegrams arrived, I had to hand them to Antoinette to read instead. God help me, when news came from Moulins that Adrienne’s parents, my paternal grandparents, had finally died of decrepitude, I uttered a prayer of thanks under my breath and accompanied her to the train to see to their burial. She left with money from me for flowers and a bank draft for my five-year-old nephew, André, whom I ordered sent to boarding school in England at once. Though he was still too young and we had never met, I wanted him safe from harm.

  I did not spare a thought for my long-lost father or my brothers. Too much time had passed for me to pretend we had anything but our shared blood between us.

  As long as my nephew and Boy survived, I did not care who perished in their stead.

  BOY CAME HOME ON LEAVE in the spring of 1915 after nearly a year of absence—gaunt, weary, but alive. After he slept for nearly two days without waking, he told me that when the war was over, he wanted to write a book about his experiences. He would title it Reflections on Victory and removed from his burlap sack tomes by Napoleon, Bismarck, and Sully. He set these battered volumes muddied with dirt from the front on the bed. He had read them as bombs crashed and tear gas flooded the trenches. I started to cry, burying my face in my hands and releasing all the suppressed fear and anxiety for him that I had carried within me.

  “Oh, no, not my Coco,” he murmured, gathering me in his arms. “Not my brave lioness. I can bear to see anyone cry but you.”

  He had only had a few weeks before he had to return to duty and he suggested a vacation in Biarritz, the resort near the Spanish border—not far, in fact, from Pau, where we first fell in love. Spain had refused to become embroiled in the war and an unsettling nonchalance cushioned the resort, with aristocrats, black-market entrepreneurs, the bored haut monde, and other wealthy scions seeking diversion as though the suffering of thousands was an unfortunate circumstance.

  Boy needed the respite, so I ignored this folly of extravagance in a time of desperation. We danced at the Miramar and the Hôtel du Palais and took drives along the cliffs of Saint-Jean-de-Luz in sleek new automobiles. We picnicked on the beach with our new acquaintances, the sugar-refinery heir, Constant Say, and his acclaimed diva mistress, Marthe Davelli, whose swan’s neck, enigmatic dark eyes, and wide mouth bore an uncanny resemblance to my own. She insisted I cut my hair short like hers so we could dress alike and confuse our lovers. I allowed her to trim my locks to shoulder length. When we entered the casino in matching white gowns and ropes of pearls, Boy deliberately kissed her instead before turning to me with an impish grin to say, “Hello. Who might you be?”

  It was to be a vacation, nothing more. Marthe became a friend and client, but I never intended our trip to be anything else until she piped up one evening shortly before Boy was due to return to Paris and his war duties, “Why doesn’t Coco open a shop in Biarritz? It’s going to be the place to vacation, once this tedious war is over. Property valu
es are rising faster here than the price of petrol. After her success in Deauville, she’s certain to double or triple her clientele.”

  Boy glanced at me through the fog of smoke drifting over the table. We had drunk too much champagne and I had no head for it. As he escorted me back to our suite in the Miramar, I felt as though I floated in a bubble. He had to help me undress.

  As I drifted into drunken slumber, I heard him say, “You know, it’s not a bad idea.”

  II

  My maison de couture in Biarritz was to be my pièce de résistance, the resort’s first fashion house in the center of town, located on the rue Gardères in the castlelike structure of the Villa Larralde. It faced the casino, en route to the beach promenade—a prime location, certain to attract the wealthiest visitors. In order to satisfy their demand for innovation and style, I had to offer more upscale apparel without sacrificing my code of utility and simplicity. However, with the war in full force, obtaining adequate supplies of fabric was an issue.

  “I’ll put you in touch with suppliers of Scottish wools,” said Boy before he left, having deposited an enormous sum for me to draw upon. “You should also contact Balsan’s brothers in Lyons. Their family textile plants are churning out broadcloth in bales for the army. Balsan is always offering to help you. Let this be his contribution to the cause.”

  He didn’t seem to mind that we were seizing advantage from chaos. I voiced doubts about such an undertaking, wondering how I’d manage three shops, much less deliver merchandise as the war raged on. Boy shrugged my concerns aside. “You didn’t start the war. Anyone who can seeks profit in it; why shouldn’t we? I certainly intend to emerge from this fiasco richer than when I started. Frankly, if we don’t, others will—and in fact, already are.”

  I contacted Balsan, who was willing to send whatever I required and put the family silk stock at my disposal, as well. Through him, I located a manufacturer named Rodier who had developed a raw jersey for sportsmen’s underwear. His samples had proved too scratchy, leaving him with a sizeable quantity he could not sell. I requested everything he had and placed an order for more. With the samples he sent, I made frock coats in its natural cream and beige hues, with discreet embroidery on the sleeves and linings of Balsan silk. They sold within hours. Soon thereafter, I received my next order. Rodier had modified the product with cotton, at my suggestion, so it would be more malleable, and dyed it in colors I requested: coral, azure, shades of gray and cream. I presented a new line of dresses, cardigans, and coats, some in the wools Boy had arranged for me, trimming my collars and sleeve cuffs with available pelts like rabbit, squirrel, or skunk (importing fur from Russia or South America was now impossible and locally produced skins bolstered the economy at home). I accessorized these ensembles with new suede and felt hats in various shapes, banded in velvet or broadcloth, with faux-pearl pins.

  I could barely keep up with the demand. Orders came from as far as Madrid, as aristocratic Spanish women returned home from Biarritz carrying luggage stuffed with my garb, prompting envious friends to rush my store. I even had a massive order from the Spanish royal family, with the infantas photographed strolling through El Prado in my dresses and coats.

  I hired sixty seamstresses and dispatched urgent word to Antoinette to find her replacement for rue Cambon and come to Biarritz as soon as possible. I also wrote to Adrienne, who demurred because Maurice was on leave from the front. I gritted my teeth at his poor timing and searched locally for someone to oversee the workroom.

  Enter Madame Deray. She was another Lucienne, a veteran of the craft—imperious, demanding, and indefatigable. We clashed from the moment we met, when she criticized the excessive formlessness of my silhouettes. I hired her on the spot. She, in turn, brought in more help and took charge with an iron fist. She had mouths to feed, a large family of cousins and aunts who had lost men in the war. Her salary was adequate but I promised a raise if she could increase production. She did. She worked harder than I did, mastering the latest sewing machines and supervising the legion of seamstresses who created our clothes even as she personally oversaw each client fitting, often the first to arrive and the last to leave. We never became friends, but I relied on her as I had on none of my other premières, for I knew that whenever I needed to depart from Biarritz to attend to my other businesses, I left my maison in the best of hands.

  Antoinette arrived with a sullen air. When I asked what ailed her, she muttered, “I’m twenty-eight, Gabrielle, and now you want me to manage this salon in a resort that empties in winter. How am I to find a husband? You have Boy. I have no one.”

  “No one?” I exclaimed, taken aback by her petulance. “You have me. You are my sister. Would you call what we are building here nothing?”

  She pouted. “What you are building. I am only your employee. I want to marry one day and have a family of my own. Don’t you? It is what’s expected of us.”

  “Who expects it?” I flared. “I certainly do not. If you so desire a husband, where else to find him than here in Biarritz, where rich men abound? As for me, I’m married already—to my work.”

  I turned on my heel and left her, exasperated that even as I worked my fingers to the bone to liberate women from our cloth chains, our minds remained as closed as ever to the possibility that we might deserve more than a husband, children, and growing old cooking sausage.

  I left Biarritz at the end of the season to supervise my other shops and prepare a new line of clothes for the spring. Antoinette sulked that she had to stay behind at my insistence; my new establishment needed tending in the off-season, as winter visitors from Spain often arrived.

  As I rode the express to Paris in a first-class compartment where I could stretch my legs and review my accounts (my first season in Biarritz had yielded unbelievable profit, thanks to Madame Deray, who priced my dresses at 3,000 francs apiece). I marveled that Antoinette could have thought I’d ever entertain such a notion as marriage. I had never broached the subject with her or anyone else, not even Boy . . .

  It is what’s expected of us.

  It might be expected but I was more unsettled by the fact that now I couldn’t stop thinking about it, nor wonder once again, as I had with Balsan, if something was wrong with me that I didn’t crave what so many others of my gender did. Why did I not desire the comforts of an established home, of a husband and children running underfoot? Had my own childhood damaged me in some way that I rejected the very things that made women happy?

  I was thirty-two years old. By 1916, I had three hundred employees on my payroll and was deemed a rising figure in fashion. America’s premier magazines, Women’s Wear Daily and Harper’s Bazaar, ran articles heralding my latest skirt length, which daringly allowed a glimpse of ankle and upper calf. Even that bastion of credibility, Vogue, had featured my designs and declared me “the designer to watch.”

  Conformity was the last thing I should ever want.

  THE WAR CONTINUED to slaughter men like a thresher scything wheat. Boy returned to Paris on leave, looked fitter than the last time but was cryptic about his duties. I suspected he acted as an intelligence officer for the English, but, as had been established since the start of our relationship, I did not ask.

  He was delighted to find me thriving, to read the magazine clippings I showed him, even if thus far no established French fashion publication had given me their stamp of approval. He had finished his book and it would be published in England—again, I didn’t inquire as to how or where he’d found the time to write. To celebrate, we went out on the town.

  Paris was regaining some of its faded allure. We had grown accustomed to war and while everyone lamented the shortages it caused—the lack of consistent hot water being the worst for me—the bistros and cabarets helped to ease our deprivations, filled with officers on leave from every nation, drinking and romancing gullible girls. Boy and I dined at Maxim’s and the Café de Paris; we attended the theater and were even invited to a society dinner by the actress Cécile Sorel, who frequen
ted my shops and had been presented to me by my fearless champion Baroness Rothschild.

  It was at this dinner where I met Misia.

  HER HOME ON THE RUE DE RIVOLI overlooking the Tuileries was like a tinker’s shop—if tinkers collected masses of African masks and primitive statuettes, porcelain bric-a-brac from Russia, gilded English tea tables, antique busts from Italy, and dozens of paintings and sketches by every working and unknown artist in Paris. “Is it all for sale?” Boy whispered to me as we weaved our way through the detritus. He was appalled; his tastes always bordered on the traditionally austere. He had trouble tearing his gaze away from a black marble reproduction of Michelangelo’s David propped in a corner, festooned with discarded hats, scarves, and coats.

  “Here is a portrait Toulouse-Lautrec made of me at the piano,” Misia said, pointing at the painting crammed between twenty others hanging in haphazard array on the wall. “I’m an accomplished pianist, taught by Franz Liszt himself. I used to give lessons. I first trained in St. Petersburg, where I was born. Oh, Lautrec was such a divine little man,” she went on. “How they made fun of him! As if they could ever have seen the world with half his sensitivity. I was so sorry when he died.” And: “This is Renoir. I posed for him. He wanted me to show my breasts and I regret to this day that I declined. No man knew better how to capture the sheen of a woman’s skin. Oh, and this is my latest acquisition: Van Gogh. Do you know him? No? He was brilliant. Just look at his palette; he bathed in color. Forget Botticelli and Da Vinci; such rubbish, so antiquated! This man was the soul of divinity. It’s a crime that talent often goes hand in hand with insanity.” She sighed. “He killed himself. Not only was he as mad as a war widow but he didn’t understand the first thing about selling his work. Even if he had, no one knew what to do with it. They couldn’t figure out whether to hang his paintings upside down or not.”