Coco Chanel: The Legend and the Life

by Justine Picardie

Fashion should die and die quickly, in order that commerce may survive … The more transient fashion is the more perfect it is. You can’t protect what is already dead.’

Then there are the weighty solid-gold boxes engraved with the crest of a crown, a gift to Chanel from the Duke of Westminster, who showered her with jewels during their decade-long love affair, although there is no further sign of him here in the apartment apart from a novel by Alexandre Dumas, borrowed from the ducal library.

‘People’s lives are an enigma,’ she said to another friend, Claude Delay, not long before

her death, when her face had already become a fixed mask to the world, and her myth apparently impenetrable.

gave birth to Gabrielle on 19th August 1883 in the poorhouse in Saumur, a market town on the river Loire.

“That poor Jeanne” -I couldn’t stand hearing my mother talked about in that way anymore. Like all children, I listened at closed doors. I learned that my father had ruined my mother – “poor Jeanne”. All the same, she’d married the man she loved. And having to hear people call me an orphan! They felt sorry for me. I had nothing to be pitied for-I had a father. All this was humiliating. I realized no one loved me and I was being kept out of charity. There were visitors – plenty of visitors. I heard the questions put to my aunts: “Does the little one’s father still send money?”’ But there were no visits, and no money, and no stern aunts. Gabrielle spent seven years in the orphanage, until she was 18. Her father never returned to see her or her siblings, although she created a version for Marcel Haedrich in which he did visit; but even in that fantasy he did not rescue her: ‘When my father came to visit, my aunts did themselves up for him. He had a great deal of charm, and he told many stories. “Don’t listen to my aunts,” I said to him. “I’m so unhappy-take me away…”’ Like her father, Gabrielle told many stories, and she used them to protect his memory, identifying herself with him, rather than her sickly mother. It was as if she felt her father had been right to leave his wife and children, and sought to portray his flight as an act of youthful strength. In this version of her past, Gabrielle reinvented him as a far younger man – ‘not yet thirty’ – and the father of only two ...

‘Nothing makes a woman look older than obvious expensiveness, ornateness, complication,’

True, the little black dress wasn’t formally identified as the shape of the future until 1926, when American Vogue published a drawing of a Chanel design, and announced: ‘Here is a Ford signed Chanel.’

‘You do not know, dear Coco, that light is best set off by shadow.’)

‘I’ve been asked some questions about the subject of the creation of N°5. When did I create it? In 1920 exactly, upon my return from the war. I had been part of the campaign in a northern region of Europe, above the Arctic Circle, during the midnight sun, where the lakes and rivers exuded a perfume of extreme freshness. I retained this note and recreated it, not without difficulty, for the first aldehydes I was able to find were unstable and unreliable. Why this name? Mademoiselle Chanel, who had a very fashionable couture house, asked me for some perfumes for it. I came to present my creations, two series: N° 1-5 and 20-24. She chose a few, one of which was N°5. “What should it be called?” I asked. Mademoiselle Chanel replied, “I’m presenting my dress collection on the 5th of May, the fifth month of the year; let’s leave the name N°5.” This number would bring her luck.’

All that is known for certain is that the scent went on sale in 1921.

formula that she described a ‘a bouquet of abstract flowers’.

Stack Lodge remains much as it was when Chanel stayed here in the Twenties – the upstairs bedrooms snug beneath the eaves; cottage rooms, unlike the ducal splendour of Lochmore – and there is still no other building in sight, its mountain views and isolation maintained by the narrow stone bridge that is the sole way across the river to the lodge. The mansion at Lochmore is equally quiet – empty now, its echoing rooms inhabited only by the sightless heads of stags, their glass eyes gone or clouded, and a cabinet of stuffed birds, kestrel and curlew, jacksnipe and grouse – and its windows overgrown with roses gone wild.

(After buying number 31 Rue Cambon in February 1918, she had added number 29 in April 1923, number 25 in April 1926, and 27 and 23 in October 1927.)

For if Villa America represented the Murphys’ motto – ‘Living well is the best revenge’

The dress code was equally relaxed: ‘You dress or not as you choose for dinner. Chanel herself wears black velvet slacks with the pink satin pyjamas showing about two inches round the ankles. With them she clings to her fine woollen slip-on sweaters brightened by strings of emeralds and pearls.’ Thus she held court, generally without sitting down at the table: ‘Mademoiselle Chanel, who eats very little anyway, is the prize entertainment, standing in front of the huge fireplace, making superb conversation

Coco Chanel was never the bride, but she understood the potency of a white dress, even before the craze for white satin that swept Paris fashions in the wake of the Wall Street Crash.

the black days of the Crash were followed by a style that Chanel characterised as ‘candid innocence and white satin’, which prevailed in the dark shadow of the Depression.

Dress women in white or black at a ball: they are the only ones you see.’

‘You see,’ she said to the Duke, ‘in the first place I don’t like doing things that bore me. And in the second you wouldn’t really have liked it either.’

Describing her hotel suite in Hollywood to Delay, Chanel listed its comforts with a certain amount of contempt: two bedrooms and four television sets, including one that could be watched in the bathroom. ‘All that’s for people who have gone soft. The English hide everything, the Americans show everything! America is dying of comfort.’

French cost of living, compared to French wages, higher by 30 per cent than any other on earth.

Her past ‘tortured him’; for he was a Basque, she said to Morand, and displayed the jealousy of ‘a real Spaniard’.

unlike Cartier, who sold jewellery to Goering: ‘let no one think Mademoiselle Chanel would have spoken to him, or smiled. She did not see them, she declared, and I am sure she was telling the truth. “That did something to them,” she told me, “when a woman who still has something left ignored them completely.”’

Schellenberg, like the Abwehr commander Wilhelm Canaris, was already searching for ways of covert negotiation with the Allies, despite the fact that to do so was to risk execution by Hitler, who had forbidden any such overtures.

Schellenberg had long nursed an ambition to establish contact with Hoare – he had first conceived the idea in July 1942 – and was therefore swift to settle upon Chanel as the means to move forward. The mission was code-named Operation Modellhut (‘model hat’); and for all the pantomime frothiness of the title, the participants appear to have embarked upon it with serious intent.

Several of Chanel’s closest friends teetered on the edge of the abyss in the purge that came to be known as the épuration sauvage.

Her legal manoeuvres against the Wertheimers were immensely complicated, but in essence she attempted to use the anti-Jewish laws of the German Occupation to oust her business partners; a strategy that proved unsuccessful, and gravely tarnished her reputation.

John Updike in The New Yorker: ‘her attempted exploitation of the Holocaust was not becoming.’

Marcel Haedrich described her as ‘entrenched in her Fortress Chanel’; Pierre Galante observed ‘her retirement on the edge of oblivion and of history, cut off from the kind of life that had nourished her celebrity’.

publicity in turn boosted the sales of the perfumes; though perhaps the biggest coup of all came courtesy of Marilyn Monroe. When the film star was asked in an interview what she wore at night, she replied – in an apparently unpremeditated line that did more than a multimillion dollar advertising campaign – ‘Chanel N°5.’

“One shouldn’t live alone,” she’d say. “It’s a mistake. I used to think I had to make my life on my own, but I was wrong.”