Coco Chanel: The Legend and the Life

If the mirrored staircase is the backbone of the House of Chanel, then Mademoiselle’s salon – the largest of the three main rooms in her apartment – is its hidden heart. The outside world is not entirely excluded, for there are windows reaching from floor to ceiling, overlooking Rue Cambon to the school on the other side of the street, where children still study in the first-floor classroom, just as they did when Mademoiselle Chanel lived here. But did she look out of the window at them, or keep her eyes fixed on the treasures within these walls? There are yet more Chinese screens hiding the doors (Chanel hated the sight of doors, she said, for they reminded her of those who had already left, and those who would leave her again). Look closer, and you could lose yourself within their intricacies, drawn into a landscape of boats and bridges, of graceful women kneeling beside the water; a place where serpents and dragons fly through the air, above unicorns and elephants; where the trees grow leaves like fine white lace, and camellias are perpetually in blossom.

You could spend days in this room and never want to leave, such is the wealth of its riches. Two walls are lined with leather-bound books: antique editions of Plutarch, Euripides and Homer; the memoirs of Casanova and the essays of Montaigne; The Confessions of St Augustine and The Dialogues of Plato; the complete works of Maupassant and Molière in French, Shelley and Shakespeare in English; and two volumes of a weighty Holy Bible, published in London by the aptly named Virtue and Co. (If you happen to take down Volume Three of Shelley from the shelf, it falls open at a well-thumbed page from the poet’s preface to Julian and Maddalo: ‘Of the Maniac I can give no information. He seems, by his own account, to have been disappointed in love. He was evidently a very cultivated and amiable person when in his right senses. His story, told at length, might be like many other stories of the same kind: the unconnected exclamations of his agony will perhaps be found a sufficient comment for the text of every heart.’)

In front of one of these walls of rare books stands Mademoiselle’s roll-top desk, where her cream-coloured writing paper and envelopes are still in the compartment where she kept them. Above is a gilt-framed painting of a lion, signifying Chanel’s astrological sign of Leo, in commemoration of her birthday on 19th August, although she was less willing to remember the year of her birth, 1883, adjusting it when it suited her purposes; even tearing it out of her passport. ‘My age varies according to the days and the people I happen to be with,’ she told a young American journalist in 1959, when she was 76. ‘When I’m bored I feel very old, and since I’m extremely bored with you, I’m going to be a thousand years old in five minutes …’ Beside the lion is a vase of crystal camellias; on the leather desktop is her tortoiseshell fan, engraved with the stars that she constantly reworked into her jewellery designs, and a pair of her spectacles. Try them on, and the room dissolves into a blur of gold and red and shadows; quickly take them off again, to stop the walls from closing in.

The drawers of the desk are unlocked; two are empty – and much was emptied from here, mysteriously vanishing on the night of Mademoiselle’s death; shadowy figures stealing down the mirrored staircase, disappearing with bags of her belongings, including most of her precious jewels (the priceless ropes of pearls and necklaces of rubies and emeralds, her dazzling diamond rings and bracelets). But the right-hand drawer still contains a few of her personal possessions: a pair of sunglasses in a soft leather pouch, another fan, this one even more delicate, fashioned in paper and fragile wooden frets, and a sheaf of photographs of Mademoiselle Chanel. The first is of her in 1937, elegant in a white jacket and pearls, standing beside the Coromandel screen in the hall. Her eyes do not look into the camera lens, but gaze sideways, towards something or someone unseen, somewhere beyond the screen, beyond the white birds and camellias.

There are several more photographs in the drawer: Chanel as a young woman astride a white horse, head held high to the camera, but her eyes hidden in the shade of a wide-brimmed hat. A man stands beside her, her lover, Boy Capel, his hands lightly touching her foot in the stirrup; they are dressed in near-identical riding outfits, a boyish tie her only addition to the crisp white shirt and trim jodhpurs. Twenty years on, and Boy Capel is gone, while Chanel is balanced on the shoulder of her friend Serge Lifar, a handsome ballet dancer, his hair as glossily dark as hers. She is wearing her strands of pearls over a black sweater and white trousers, and smiling in the light of a Riviera morning. Sunshine dapples her face again in a picture of a younger Chanel on a countryside road, where she is standing beside her car, nonchalant in a striped matelot top and navy sailor trousers; a reminder of her life beyond Rue Cambon, of her villa beside the sea in the South of France. And then there is the photograph of Chanel in 1920 with her lover, the Grand Duke Dmitri, cousin of the Russian tsar, and one of the assassins of Rasputin. He is as handsome as a movie star; she is more beautiful than any of her models, hair cropped short, tanned skin glowing against iridescent pearls and white satin dress, gazing into his eyes.

But mostly the pictures show Chanel alone: poised by the fireplace, or reclining on the long beige-suede sofa in the salon, studying a book, her hand hovering over a page of cryptic Indian illustrations. You cannot read her expression in these photographs of a solitary woman, the elegant lines of her face impassive, her eyebrows arched, a cigarette in her hand, its smoke rising like a decoy.

And so you go back to searching the room, trying to decode the cipher, looking for clues that might explain its owner’s enigmatic face. There are bunches of dried wheat on either side of the marble fireplace, and two more made of gilded wood on the mantelpiece, emblematic of good fortune and prosperity. A golden lion raises its paw to a Grecian mask, a woman’s face with eyes as dark as Chanel’s; and in the centre of the mantelpiece is a first-century headless torso of Aphrodite, its marble curves reflected in the looking glass, so that it seems to be one of twins. The Baroque mirror above the fireplace is vast, reaching the high ceiling, framed by pillars of cherubs and grapes. Its reflections are refracted by yet another mirror, of darker, smokier glass, which hangs above the suede sofa; leaning against the faded gilt frame is a gold crucifix (a double-barred cross, typical of those seen in the Spanish holy town of Caravaca, a former stronghold of the Knights Templar). Beside the cross is a painting of a single wheatsheaf by Salvador Dalí, one of Chanel’s many artist friends and lovers.

You could go on searching for meaning here, noting the quilted cushions on the sofa (diagonal quilting, the same pattern as her famous handbags); hunting for the lions in the room; counting the pairs of animals. There are the two bronze deer by the fireplace, almost life-size, a buck and doe, their cloven feet sinking into the carpet, and another tiny pair beside the sofa, in painted metal, with vases of pink flowers on their backs. Two camels on a side-table, two frogs (one glass, one bronze); two lovebirds made of pearl in a tiny jewelled cage; two porcelain horses, on either side of the smoky mirror; two golden fire-dogs in the empty hearth. Once you start looking, the doublings are everywhere: a second Grecian mask, staring at its twin from across the room; two Egyptian sphinx; two ceramic bowls on top of a bookshelf, one containing a broken shard of crystal; two clocks, one on the desk, which has stopped at 3.23, on the eleventh day of an unnumbered month, the other suspended, miraculously, on a mirrored wall between the two windows, its hands motionless at 1.18, a winged and vengeful angel of death wielding a scythe above the clockface.

A collection of symbolic objects is scattered throughout the room: a Catholic icon, a Buddha holding a spray of roses in his hand, another Buddha beside a strange mythical creature (part lion, part dog, part man, with an expression on his face of a sorrowful Caliban); a crystal glass cross, a mariner’s navigational tool, a single bronze hand made by Diego Giacometti; a pack of Tarot cards (the number five is on top, Chanel’s lucky number, illustrated by a picture of a green tree, its roots visible above the ground). There is evidence of great wealth, and perhaps of great love: Chanel is said to have discovered her taste for Coromandel screens with the first and foremost love of her life, Boy Capel, the Englishman who also introduced her to theosophy and literature. 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. The boxes stand empty on a low table in front of the sofa, flanked by a pair of fortune-teller’s glass globes: one is in white quartz, cool to the touch; the other of gold-flecked resin, unexpectedly warm beneath the hands. Gaze into the glass, and nothing is clear; both globes contain only the faintest reflections of the chandelier that hangs from the middle of the ceiling. It is a magnificent creation – designed by Chanel herself – adorned with dozens of crystal orbs and stars, camellias and grapes; sparkling from a black wrought-iron frame. Look long enough, and the hidden letters and numbers in the frame begin to emerge from the abstract pattern: at the top of the chandelier there are Gs for Gabrielle, Chanel’s name at christening; double Cs for Coco Chanel, the name under which she became famous; and fives – the number which made her fortune, as the label on the perfume that still sells more than any other brand in the world.

Walk back to the desk, and dare to sit down on the beige suede-upholstered chair where Mademoiselle used to work; run your fingers over the marks of her pen still visible in the multiple scores and angry scratches on the ink-stained leather desktop. The hands of the clocks are fixed for ever, the room is silent, the cream linen curtains are still; nothing moves across the mirrors, the gleaming light from the chandelier remains caught in time, as if preserved in amber. You cannot see the reflections in the mirrors when you are writing at the desk, only the eyes of the painted lion in the gold frame, the hands of the blackamoors, disappearing through the half-open door; but the hairs on the back of your neck are prickling; and perhaps, if you could turn around quickly enough, who on earth might be reflected in the looking-glass walls?

‘Sometimes, when the boutique is closed, we feel her presence,’ said my guide to the apartment, on my first visit here, glancing over her shoulder at the sound of a creaking door, the murmur of voices on the staircase, nervous as if she were being watched. ‘After dark, even when the lights are on, you might glimpse her in the mirror, or hear her footsteps in the drawing room, very soft and quiet, too quick for anyone to catch up with her …’

Gabrielle

‘Those on whom legends are built are their legends,’ declared Coco Chanel to her friend Paul Morand, one of several writers to whom she tried, and failed, to tell the story of her life. ‘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. Delay was a young woman at the time, the daughter of a well-known French psychiatrist, but is herself now an eminent psychoanalyst, and an expert guide to the labyrinth of secrets and lies that Chanel constructed to conceal the truth of her past. Not that there is ever a single truth in a life, especially for a woman who built a career on refashioning women’s ideas of themselves; which may be why Chanel recounted so many different stories about herself, as if in each version something new might emerge from her history.

‘I don’t like the family,’ she told Delay, in one of a series of revelatory, rambling conversations in her final decade. ‘You’re born in it, not of it. I don’t know anything more terrifying than the family.’ And so she circled around and about it, telling and retelling the narrative of her youth, remaking history just as she remade the sleeves of a jacket, unfastening its seams and cutting its threads, and then sewing it back together again. ‘Childhood – you speak of it when you’re very tired, because it’s a time when you had hopes, expectations. I remember my childhood by heart.’

If Chanel’s memory did survive intact, she nevertheless obscured her past from others, reshaping its heartaches, smoothing away the rough edges. Even her birth certificate is misleading – her father’s surname, and hers, were misspelt due to a clerical error as Chasnel. But she could not keep all the details hidden: her mother’s maiden name was Eugénie Jeanne Dévolles, and despite attempts by Chanel in later life to erase the date, the official record shows that her mother gave birth to Gabrielle on 19th August 1883 in the poorhouse in Saumur, a market town on the River Loire. Eugénie (known as Jeanne) was 20, Henri-Albert (known as Albert) was 28, and listed as a marchand, or merchant, on Gabrielle’s birth certificate. They were not yet married but already had one daughter, Julia, born less than a year previously, on 11th September 1882.

‘I was born on a journey,’ Chanel told an American reporter in answer to his question about the exact location of her birthplace. Although this was an evasion – she was born in a hospice for the poor, run by an order of nuns, the Sisters of Providence – her parents were generally on the move, itinerant market traders selling buttons and bonnets, aprons and overalls, travelling between towns, just as her paternal grandparents had done. Gabrielle’s father was the son of a peddler, and like her, he had been born in a poorhouse (in Nîmes in 1856); his surname had also been misspelt on his birth certificate, but on this occasion as Henri-Albert Charnet. The mistake was not corrected in official records until over two decades later, in 1878, when a court decree stated that Charnet be replaced on the certificate by Chanel, ‘which is the true name’.

‘My father was not there,’ she explained to another journalist, Marcel Haedrich (editor-in-chief of Marie Claire, and a man who had spent enough time with Chanel to regard himself as her friend, drawing on his conversations with her in a biography he wrote soon after her death). ‘That poor woman, my mother, had to go looking for him. It’s a sad story, and very boring – I’ve heard it so many times.’

Thus she dismissed the beginning of her story, and never told it with any accuracy herself; never acknowledging that the truth was far from boring, but too troubling to reveal. Gabrielle’s father was not present at her birth, setting a pattern that was to be repeated thereafter. A man who often appeared to be on the run from his family, he had already vanished when Jeanne became pregnant with their first child, and refused to marry her when he was finally tracked down, a month before she gave birth to their daughter Julia. Consequently, both the girls were born illegitimate; it was not until Gabrielle was 15 months old that her parents eventually married, in November 1884. Soon afterwards, her mother was pregnant again, and on the move through the Auvergne in south-central France, an isolated region where Jeanne had been born into a peasant family in the village of Courpière. She would have found little refuge there: both Jeanne’s parents were dead by the time she had met her elusive future husband, and although her brother had done his best to protect her interests when she fell pregnant, her illegitimate babies did nothing to soften the weight of local disapproval. A boy, christened Alphonse, was born in 1885; another daughter, Antoinette, in 1887; a son, Lucien, in 1889; and the final baby, Augustin, who died in infancy, in 1891.

Chanel rarely talked about the circumstances of her birth, but she did occasionally mention a train journey that her mother had undertaken just beforehand, in search of the elusive Albert. ‘What with the clothes of that time,’ she remarked to Haedrich with her customary, circuitous vagueness, ‘I suppose no one could see that she was about to have a baby. Some people helped her – they were very kind: they took her into their home and sent for a doctor. My mother didn’t want to stay there.

‘“You can get another train tomorrow,” the people said, to soothe her. “You’ll find your husband tomorrow.” But the doctor realised that my mother wasn’t ill at all. “She’s about to have a baby,” he said. At that point the people who had been so nice to her were furious. They wanted to throw her out. The doctor insisted that they take care of her. They took her to a hospital, where I was born. One of the hospital nuns was my godmother.’

The name of this nun was Gabrielle Bonheur, according to Chanel, ‘so I was baptised Gabrielle Bonheur Chanel. I knew nothing of this for a long time. There was never any occasion to check my baptismal certificate. During the war I sent for all my documents because one was always afraid of the worst …’ In fact, the name Bonheur does not appear on her baptismal certificate, but perhaps Gabrielle felt the right to make it her own in later life; to lay claim to its meaning, which is happiness.

In yet another version of her birth, told to a different friend, André-Louis Dubois, Gabrielle mentioned a train again, suggesting that her mother went into labour while travelling on the railway. ‘She talked constantly about trains, sometimes even claiming to have been born on a train,’ said Dubois, remembering Chanel to a French journalist soon after her death. ‘Why this obsession with trains?’ One possible answer is that she had an uncle who was a railway employee, but even so, trains seemed to have a deeper significance for Chanel than that; as if they were a connection to a past that was always on the move, yet ran along fixed lines, to a destination of her own choosing.

Whatever her association with train travel, she was also a child of the poorhouse, plain Gabrielle Chasnel. And Gabrielle she stayed throughout her childhood – Coco was a creation that came later – although she invented a story that is revealing in its untruths: ‘My father used to call me “Little Coco” until something better should come along,’ she told Haedrich. ‘He didn’t like [the name] “Gabrielle” at all; it hadn’t been his choice. And he was right. Soon the “Little” drifted away and I was simply Coco.’ Or might it be that her father was complaining that he didn’t like Gabrielle herself; that he had not chosen to have children; for soon he left them, discontented with marriage and fatherhood, always on the lookout for something better.

At times, Gabrielle declared Coco to be an ‘awful’ name; and yet she was proud of its recognition throughout the world, evidence of her indisputable presence, despite the lack of acknowledgement or recognition by her father. But still it was a cipher, a name that her father had never known, even though she declared otherwise. ‘If anyone had told me before the war that I’d be Coco Chanel to the whole world, I’d have laughed,’ she said to Haedrich. ‘Mademoiselle Chanel had four thousand employees and the richest man in England loved her. And now I’m Coco Chanel! Nevertheless, it isn’t my name … People stop me in the street: “Are you really Coco Chanel?” When I give autographs, I write “Coco Chanel”. On a train to Lausanne a couple of weeks ago, the whole carriage paraded past me. In my own premises I’m called “Mademoiselle”; that goes without saying. I certainly don’t want to be called Coco in the House of Chanel.’ (These seemingly disconnected sentences are as Haedrich transcribed them; the fleeting references to her name and the train exactly as he recorded them.)

In truth, no one knew for certain what name Gabrielle answered to in childhood, nor where exactly Coco came from. In old age, Chanel told Claude Delay that her father spoke English – ‘that was considered something diabolical in the provinces’ – which seems highly unlikely, but it is possible that the story formed a link in her mind with the English-speaking men that she loved in adulthood (Boy Capel and the Duke of Westminster, both of whom were to prove unfaithful to her). She also told Delay that her father gave her a present when he returned from one of his numerous trips away: a penholder made of a knucklebone, with Notre-Dame depicted on one side, and the Eiffel Tower on the other; and that she had dug a hole for this decorated bone in a cemetery, and buried the gift, as an offering to the dead.

If Chanel’s own account is to be believed, by the age of six she was spending as much time as possible in a graveyard. ‘Every child has a special place, where he or she likes to hide, play and dream,’ she said to Paul Morand (who set down her memories in his evocative book, L’Allure de Chanel). ‘Mine was an Auvergne cemetery. I knew no one there, not even the dead.’ And yet the dead seemed to become alive for her there, although they remained as silent as their graves. ‘I was the queen of this secret garden. I loved its subterranean dwellers. “The dead are not dead as long as we think of them,” I would tell myself.’

She became attached to two unnamed tombstones, decorating them with wildflowers – poppies and daisies and cornflowers – bringing her rag dolls to the cemetery; her favourite dolls, because she had made them for herself. ‘I wanted to be sure that I was loved,’ she told Morand, ‘but I lived with people who showed no pity. I like talking to myself and I don’t listen to what I’m told: this is probably due to the fact that the first people to whom I opened my heart were the dead.’

Her mother figures only as a shadowy invalid in Gabrielle’s memories; though there are a few splashes of crimson that stain the blank pages within Chanel’s shifting narratives – her stories of the blood that a sick woman coughed onto white handkerchiefs, and an interior which bears some resemblance to the sinister red room where Jane Eyre was incarcerated as a child. Chanel, in later life, was a fan of the Brontës, returning repeatedly to Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights (stories of near incestuous passion, of locked doors and unhinged minds). But her description of the red room is also reminiscent of another nineteenth-century novel, The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, in which a woman goes mad after the birth of her child, and peels the paper from the walls of the room that imprisons her. In Chanel’s story (as told to Paul Morand), the wallpaper was red. She was five, and her mother already very ill, when she was taken with her two sisters to stay at the home of an elderly uncle. ‘We were shut away in a room covered in red wallpaper. To begin with, we were very well-behaved; then we noticed that the red wallpaper was very damp and could be peeled off from the walls.’ The girls started by peeling small pieces, then climbed onto chairs, and stripped the entire room down to its bare pink plaster: ‘the pleasure was sublime!’ When their mother came into the room, she was silent, saying nothing to her daughters, simply contemplating the disaster, and weeping without making any sound.

Chanel was to claim that her mother died of tuberculosis, which was not necessarily an accurate diagnosis of what killed Jeanne; poverty, pregnancy and pneumonia were as likely to blame. In her account to Delay (subsequently published in Chanel solitaire), the family lived in a large enough house for the children to be kept in isolation from their sick mother. In fact, they were crowded with her into one room in the market town of Brive-la-Gaillarde, while their father abandoned them for his road trips. But the story Chanel told Delay had her father present, kissing her sister Julia and her on the head as they were eating lunch (no mention was made of the other siblings). ‘He hated the smell of hair and always asked how long it was since we’d had ours washed.’ Who knows how often the Chanel children were able to wash their hair, while their mother lay sick in bed, and their father was gone; but in Chanel’s memory, she would answer to her father that her hair was clean, washed ‘three days ago, with yellow soap’.