Читать книгу Coco Chanel: The Legend and the Life - Justine Picardie - Страница 13
ОглавлениеSince I am not yet of an age to invent, I must make do with telling a tale. I therefore invite the reader to believe that this story is true.
Alexandre Dumas, La Dame aux camélias
There are many mysteries in the myth of Coco Chanel, but few more perplexing than her years with Etienne Balsan at Royallieu; perhaps because Balsan never gave away her secrets, however often he was questioned in later life, when Chanel was far more famous than him. In the drama of Chanel’s life – a drama in part of her own making, as well as of others – Balsan has been cast as a rich playboy, the roué who introduced the little orphaned seamstress into the decadent world of the Belle Epoque, deflowering her in an unsentimental education. While there may be some truth in this portrait, Chanel also used Balsan as a stepping stone from Moulins to Paris, gaining poise in place of an innocence already lost. The two of them continued to be friends until his death in 1953, and if their initial sexual relationship had been characterised by his infidelities, Balsan nevertheless displayed a lifelong loyalty to Chanel and remained unfailingly discreet.
Balsan’s father had died when he was 18, his mother a few years later, leaving Etienne and his two older brothers heirs to a solid fortune made in textiles. The family business, based in Châteauroux, a traditional wool town in central France, had been well established for a century, supplying the French army with uniforms and the British military during the Boer War. As a boy, Balsan was sent to boarding school in England, where he showed more interest in horses than anything else: he arrived with his dog, bought himself two hunters, and rode to hounds more often than he attended classes.
After his parents’ death, he made it clear to his more industrious brothers, Jacques and Robert, that he had no intention of following them into the family business. (Both of them continued to run it with the same success as their forebears; Jacques also went on to distinguish himself as a fighter pilot during the First World War, and in 1921 married Consuelo Vanderbilt, after her divorce from the Duke of Marlborough.) Instead, Etienne enlisted in the army and was posted to Algiers with a light cavalry regiment, the Chasseurs d’Afrique. As his nephew François Balsan later reported in a privately printed family history, Etienne fell asleep on sentry duty one afternoon, and having been discovered in this compromising position by the governor of Algiers himself, was thereafter confined to the guardhouse. During his period of punishment, the regiment’s horses were afflicted with a mysterious skin ailment. Balsan sent a message to his commanding officer proposing a deal: if he were to come up with a cure for the disease, he would be released. The young officer duly applied a successful remedy (the recipe for which he had learned in England), and, much to his relief, was subsequently transferred from Algeria to Moulins.
By the end of 1904, when he was 24 (and Chanel was 21), Balsan had completed his military service as a cavalry officer and elected to pursue more sporting equestrian activities. He found a suitable estate to purchase in Compiègne, in Picardy, about 45 miles north-east of Paris. The region was formerly a vast forest where the kings of France hunted in the Middle Ages, and while large expanses of woodland remained, the area had become established as a leading centre for racehorse trainers and thoroughbred stables. As such, it was a perfect location for Balsan’s new property. Royallieu had originally been built in 1303 as a monastery, was later remodelled as a royal hunting lodge, and then converted into a convent for Benedictine nuns in the seventeenth century. The nuns were driven out by the Revolution, but the portrait of its first abbess, Gabrielle de Laubespine, was still hanging on the staircase when Balsan moved in. And there she remained, a silent witness to his reign, during which Royallieu was devoted to the worship of horses and the pursuit of amusement and pretty women.
At some point in 1905 Chanel followed him there, in circumstances that remain quite unclear. They had met at Moulins, and that they became lovers is certain. But Balsan already had a mistress in residence at Royallieu, Emilienne d’Alençon, a famous courtesan-turned-actress. She was 14 years older than Coco, and although past the first bloom of youth, still widely regarded as one of the leading beauties of the day. Decades later, however, when Chanel described Emilienne to Marcel Haedrich, it was as if the two women had been separated by great age, as well as by experience. ‘Etienne Balsan liked old women,’ she said, with some terseness. ‘He adored Emilienne d’Alençon. Beauty and youth didn’t concern him. He adored cocottes and lived with that one to the scandal of his family.’
But it wasn’t as simple as that. Emilienne came and went from Royallieu as she pleased, and at one point took a new lover, Alec Carter, a famous English jockey. Balsan was similarly diverted by other girls, some of whom would come to stay at Royallieu. No one knows how this curious arrangement was reached and maintained, or where Chanel fitted into the hierarchy. Several French writers, including Marcel Haedrich, have related gossip that Coco had to eat her meals with the servants in her early days at Royallieu, particularly when Balsan had his upper-class friends or family to stay. But Chanel herself gave little away, even to Claude Delay, beyond portraying Emilienne as having worn ‘heavy gowns and spotted veils’, like an ancient Miss Havisham. She described herself, in contrast, as free and unencumbered, dressing ‘neither as a great lady nor as a scullery maid’: a young tomboy, spending her days galloping on horseback through the forests. ‘I didn’t know any people; I knew the horses,’ she said, as if to protect herself from the memory of the isolation she suffered at the time, not understanding her position in the household (neither servant nor châtelaine). And yet, as always, she sought to define herself by her idiosyncratic choice of clothes. Unlike Emilienne, Coco wore simple riding breeches and equestrian jackets from a local tailor, thus distinguishing herself as somehow unique; if not yet the one and only Coco Chanel, then at least not just another cocotte in Balsan’s stable of women.
But whatever she chose to wear, she was also kept in her place. And for all the freedoms of Royallieu – a house where social conventions seemed not to apply; where courtesans and aristocrats drank champagne together, and men were free to enjoy more than one girl at a time – it was also a form of imprisonment. To Morand, Chanel described herself as having been a minor, below the age of consent; too young to be away from home, and desperately homesick. ‘I was constantly weeping,’ she said to Morand, and then gave him a curious blend of truth and falsehood about the lies that she had previously invented for Balsan. ‘I had told him lies about my miserable childhood. I had to disabuse him. I wept for an entire year. The only happy times were those I spent on horseback, in the forest. I learned to ride, for up until then I hadn’t the first idea about riding horses. I was never a horsewoman, but at that time I couldn’t even ride side-saddle.
‘The fairy tale was over. I was nothing but a lost child. I didn’t dare to write to anyone. MB was frightened of the police. His friends told him: “Coco is too young, send her back home.” MB would have been delighted to see me go, but I had no home any more.’
Thus she cast herself and Balsan as caught in a trap of their own making; but as she elaborated on her story to Morand, emphasising Balsan’s fear of the authorities, Chanel remade herself into a helpless girl with no control over her destiny (which may well be how she felt at the time), while also acknowledging the damage done by her lies (even as she told lies about her lying). ‘MB was afraid of the police, and I was afraid of the servants. I had lied to MB. I had kept my age a secret, telling him that I was nearly twenty: in actual fact I was sixteen.’ In actual fact, she was over 21 when she arrived at Royallieu, and she continued to live there well into her twenties.
But the biggest secret of all was whether or not Coco became pregnant during the course of her relationship with Etienne Balsan. Several of her friends believed that she did: some speculated that she had an abortion that left her infertile, others that she had the baby boy who she claimed was her nephew rather than her son. Balsan ended up in later life as a neighbour to Chanel’s nephew, André, and to André’s daughters, Gabrielle and Hélène, and was certainly close to the family. Beyond that, it is impossible to establish the truth of the rumours. Chanel told Delay that her sister Julia had married at 16, given birth to a son, and then killed herself because of her husband’s infidelity. But even if this were a veiled clue to a possible pregnancy of her own, the date would be as blurred as the rest of the dates that she shifted and erased. Julia was born in September 1882, and would therefore have been 22 when her son André was born in 1904; a year older than Gabrielle, who was by then already involved with Balsan. Nevertheless, the idea of being a frightened 16-year-old seems to have been in some sense real to Chanel, however unreliable her stories appear in retrospect. Hence her description to Morand of herself at 16, venturing out to the races at Compiègne while she was still living with Balsan (a man supposedly so scared of the authorities that he had to hide her away, like a timid Bluebeard, to keep her out of view of the police). ‘I wore a straw boater, set very low on the head, and a little country suit, and I followed events from the end of my lorgnette. I was convinced that no one was taking any notice of me, which shows how little I knew about life in the provinces. In reality, this ridiculous, badly dressed, shy little creature, with her three big plaits and a ribbon in her hair, intrigued everybody.’
Perhaps this was the consoling story that Coco told herself when it appeared that no one cared (not the police, nor her family, nor anyone else, for that matter): that she was intriguing, even when it seemed that she was never the centre of attention. At least Emilienne d’Alençon took a certain interest in Coco, while apparently unperturbed by her presence, if Chanel’s description of her to Claude Delay is to be believed. ‘Emilienne d’Alençon used to ask me, “Well, are you happy?” I answered, “I’m neither happy nor unhappy – I’m hiding. It’s like home here, only better.”’
But she was sufficiently unhappy to write to her aunt Adrienne – who was still the mistress of the Baron de Nexon, though not yet married to him – to ask her to send the money for a train fare. In telling this story to Delay, Chanel did not specify where the train might take her; but in any event, she claimed that Adrienne wrote back to say that Coco should not leave Royallieu: ‘Whatever you do keep out of the way or they’ll put you in a reformatory.’ Who were ‘they’, that could lock up a woman for bad behaviour? Except, of course, as Chanel reiterated to Delay, she was still a little girl; so young that she used to fall asleep at the table and weep, because she was up past her bedtime, and at her aunts’ house she would have been asleep long before. But in this version Bluebeard was transformed into a perfect gentleman: ‘“I’ll take you home,” said Balsan. “I’ll tell them that I’m bringing you back just as I found you and you’re still only a little girl.”’
The idea of herself as a little girl was to permeate the rest of Chanel’s life, and yet, as is evident in Truman Capote’s description of her in 1959, it was also suggestive of a particular blend of innocence and experience that was so profitably displayed in her own appearance, and upon which she went on to make her fortune in couture. Capote observed: ‘Chanel, a spare spruce sparrow voluble and vital as a woodpecker, once, mid-flight in one of her unstoppable monologues, said, referring to the very costly pauvre orphan appearance she has lo these last decades modelled: “Cut off my head, and I’m thirteen.” But her head has always remained attached, definitely she had it perfectly placed way back yonder when she was thirteen, or scarcely more, and a moneyed “kind gentleman”, the first of several grateful and well-wishing patrons, asked petite “Coco”, daughter of a Basque blacksmith who had taught her to help him shoe horses, which she preferred, black pearls or white?’
Capote’s portrait of Chanel was written just a year after Breakfast at Tiffany’s, his glittering depiction of the balancing act undertaken by a beautiful girl dependent on the patronage of rich men; and he was alert to the imaginative possibilities of modern fairy tales. But it would be unkind not to recognise the real pain that Chanel suffered, even as she distanced herself from the past in storytelling (for telling stories is, amongst other things, a way in which to imagine a happy-ever-after, and for the misunderstood to come to an understanding of their tribulations).
So there she was; poor little Coco (‘Qui qu’a vu Coco?’), imprisoned in another abbey, surrounded by the forest of Compiègne. The nuns’ regime had vanished, and in pride of place was a courtesan – the famous Emilienne, a former mistress of the king of Belgium, among others; a cocotte so highly prized that Leopold II had in turn introduced her to King Edward VII, to whom she allegedly declared that French aristocrats were the only men who knew how to make love to a woman. Emilienne had been heaped with diamonds and endearments; men had lost their hearts and their fortunes to her; although some had come up with a more practical arrangement, such as the eight members of the Jockey Club who had pooled their resources in order to procure her attention on a regular basis.
Coco was still the outsider looking in, the girl with no money and no father, just as she had been at school, with all the unease and uncertainty that such a position entailed. Even so, if her years in Aubazine had taught Gabrielle everything she knew about needlework, then her time in Royallieu gave her an equally thorough education in how to stitch the empty hours together, to make something of herself. She spent six years there – a period of apparent idleness, punctuated by fancy dress parties and horseriding; of lengthy boredom and occasional debauchery; of setting herself apart from the courtesans who came and went from Royallieu. But for all her efforts at distancing herself, she was intrigued by the beauties who entertained the men; along with Emilienne, there was another cocotte-turned-actress, Gabrielle Dorziat, a charming young singer named Marthe Davelli, and Suzanne Orlandi, the mistress of Balsan’s friend Baron Foy. Coco watched and waited; she saw the manner in which Emilienne ceased to be Balsan’s lover but remained his friend. And Coco listened to Emilienne’s stories, as well as telling her own, taking heed of the woman who had come from nothing – the daughter of a Parisian concierge in Montmartre, who had made a teenage debut scantily clad in a circus act – and ended up with something more precious than her ample wealth. ‘The only serious person I met in those days was Emilienne d’Alençon,’ Chanel remarked to Haedrich; for Emilienne not only wrote the poetry to prove it but was turned into prose by Marcel Proust. (She was said to have inspired the writer’s portrait of Rachel in A la recherche du temps perdu, a demi-mondaine who ensnares the heart and jewels of the young aristocrat, Robert de Saint-Loup.)
After a time, Coco realised that she preferred the courtesans to the sneering society women. At least Emilienne was clean, she said; unlike the supposedly respectable wives and mothers, who smelled dirty to Coco. ‘I thought the cocottes were ravishing with their hats that were too big and their heavy make-up,’ she observed to Haedrich. ‘They were so appetising!’ Not that she wanted to dress like them – all her efforts went into creating herself as a gamine, choosing sober androgyny over their crinolines and whalebone corsets, their feathers and lace and chinchilla. She wore softly knotted schoolboy ties, and simple white shirts with Peter Pan collars; and little straw boaters, as plain as a convent uniform.
But her taste for romance did not leave her, and neither did her sense of loss. Perhaps this is why she responded with such heightened emotion to Alexandre Dumas’s novel La Dame aux camélias, and its stage version starring Sarah Bernhardt as Marguerite Gautier, a courtesan who nevertheless remained the embodiment of purity, a tragic lover who dies of consumption, having stayed untainted by the vice all around. ‘La Dame aux camélias was my life, all the trashy novels I’d fed on,’ she said to Delay, who recognised the link between Marguerite and Chanel’s story of her mother’s deathbed – the drops of red blood coughed onto white sheets and a snowy handkerchief. But in this particular narrative, Chanel placed herself centre-stage, as a provincial 13-year-old on a trip to the theatre in Paris with her aunts. She sobbed her way through the entire performance of La Dame aux camélias, she told Delay; and her grief was so noisy that the rest of the audience complained. Nevertheless, she was dressed for the part that she had assigned herself: ‘I was in black. It looked nice, with my white collar. In the provinces, you wear your mourning until it falls off you in pieces! People told my aunts I ought to have another dress. “But she’s an orphan,” they said. “When she’s 16 we’ll see.”’
On other occasions, however, Chanel said that she was already living at Royallieu when she went to see La Dame aux camélias, accompanying her aunt Adrienne and the Baron de Nexon; and her account veered between disdain and distress: either she wept so loudly that the rest of the audience hissed at her, or she declared her disgust for Bernhardt as grotesque, like ‘an old clown’. Something of that abhorrence and fascination remained: when Sarah Bernhardt died in 1923, Chanel joined the lines of other sightseers, then found herself troubled by the difference between the staged beauty of Marguerite’s death in La Dame aux camélias and the grim reality of the cadaver before her. ‘It was terrible,’ she told Delay, ‘they were queuing up. Sarah was dead and all I saw was a poor little lifeless ruin with a scrap of tulle … I was pale as death. The sordidness of it all …’
In Delay’s sympathetic interpretation, the inconsistencies of Chanel’s response to La Dame aux camélias suggested ambivalence, rather than an aversion to the truth; not least because of the earlier experience of her mother’s deathbed, and the unavoidable sight of the pale corpse lying beside the children as they waited for their father to return. But if Chanel was haunted by this memory, she was also aware of its potency, an archetypal scene for others as well as herself.
Later, many years later, when Chanel had slipped away from her life as a kept girl, replacing its shadowy uncertainties with what looked like the security of a self-made woman, the white camellia would appear in her work: in fabric prints, or shaped into diamonds and pearls; embossed on buttons, preserved in corsages. And in her salon, they glittered as crystals from her chandelier, and were carved into her Coromandel screens. These replications were in some sense true to life, in that they had no scent – for the camellia is without fragrance, and therefore does not decompose from sweet-smelling purity to the odour of decay. It is, perhaps, the perfect symbol of death as portrayed on stage in its least brutal way; the death of a courtesan or an abandoned woman, tragic yet compelling for an audience; stripped of the horror of visceral pain and fear and animal smell.
After her mother died, Chanel told Delay, she had been instructed to kiss her dead body, to kiss the corpse on the lips. For ever afterwards, she was possessed of a highly developed sense of smell, and was revolted by anything redolent of dirt. The courtesans smelled good, she said, but the society women were filthy. And Coco always kept herself clean.
