by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2014 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
After the weekly news
programs last night, Charles and I watched the next show that was on PBS: an
episode in a series of Extraordinary Women about Coco Chanel (the other women profiled in this quirky and bizarre
BBC series are Madame Chiang Kai-Shek, Indira Gandhi, Audrey Hepburn and Grace
Kelly), whose story I hadn’t really known much of because of my acute distaste
for the whole world of fashion. (One thing I have noticed working for a woman
client and talking to her and her women friends is how many more clothes women
buy than men; we tend not to give a damn about what we looked like — as long as
we have something clean and reasonably presentable to put on in the morning
before we go out, we’re cool — but women go out and buy scads of various
costumings, many of which they may wear once, or not at all.) I knew a little
about her — basically how she had fought her way up from the French gutters
with a talent for clothes much the way Edith Piaf did later with a voice, and
how her reputation collapsed after World War II when she was accused both of
collaborating with the Nazi occupiers and of having failed to keep up with the
latest fashion trends — and the show was quite fascinating. Chanel wasn’t born
in Paris — she was born in a small town called Samour in southern France — and
her last name on her birth certificate was “Gabrielle Chasnel.” Her parents
weren’t married to each other — not that this was that big a scandal, not in 1883 France, when rich
people flaunted their affairs and not-so-rich people like the Chasnels didn’t
flaunt theirs but had them anyway — and when Gabrielle was either five or nine
(the information on the Wikipedia page for her varies, but I believe the TV
show said nine) her mom died (her dad had already abandoned this wing of his
family) and her relatives placed her in a convent school, sort of like the one
in The Sound of Music, where
upon graduating you had two choices: either take the vows and become a nun, or
leave and be totally on your own.
The nuns brutalized Cha(s)nel but also
probably inculcated in her the tight sense of discipline that helped her build
her later career. She first worked as a seamstress by day, and at night tried
for a career in the music halls in the small towns of Moulins and Vichy (she
got the name “Coco” from the nonsense lyrics of the two songs she knew), then
ended up the mistress of a rich man named Étienne Balsan, a former cavalry
officer in the French army. Balsan bankrolled her first fashion venture, a
hat-making shop (like the later designer Halston, Chanel began with hats and
then worked her way down the body to full outfits). Chanel, who like a lot of
the women French society referred to as les grandes horizontals knew how to use her good looks and bedroom skills
to get what she wanted out of life, ended up involved with one of Balsan’s
friends, a British nobleman and army officer named Arthur Capel, whom she
nicknamed “Boy.” Once Capel invited her to a horse race, and she came wearing
an outfit she’d adapted from one of his — including a necktie — and when she
finally started designing full outfits instead of just hats she made her
clothes loose-fitting, cut in chic patterns but made out of common materials,
with the idea that instead of wearing heavily padded, ruffled designs that
required them to encase their waists in corsets that made even the simplest
tasks of daily life excruciatingly difficult and painful, women should dress in
styles both beautiful and practical.
According to the program, Chanel was
actually the first woman to create a major business designing and making
women’s clothes — the idea that clothes should actually be manufactured by a
company run by a person with the same sort of body as the ones that were going
to wear them was revolutionary (which is itself an indictment of how deep the
sexism of the time ran; today it seems common sense that a woman might know
more about how women should dress than a man!) — and she managed to make it to
Paris (via stops in Deauville in northern France and Biarritz in the Pyrenees,
both hot spots for France’s 1 percent of the time) and set up hat shops,
clothing shops and even perfume shops (I’ve heard two different accounts of how
the Chanel No. 5 perfume got its name — one that it was the fifth formulation
she tried and the first one she liked; one that she simply liked the sound of
the number — and this show offered a third: that she considered it her lucky
number when she gambled.) When World War I broke out she kept the House of
Chanel going through the war by whatever means necessary, including making
clothes out of jersey because that was a fabric readily available as war
surplus, but as the war wound down she suffered a double blow: her lover Arthur
Capel married a fellow British aristocrat in 1918 and then died in 1919. What
this show doesn’t mention — though Chanel’s Wikipedia page does — is that she
had long-standing prejudices against both Jews and Queers; in 1946 she told her
friend Paul Morand, “Homosexuals? … I have seen young women ruined by these
awful queers: drugs, divorce, scandal. They will use any means to destroy a
competitor and to wreak vengeance on a woman. The queers want to be women—but
they are lousy women. They are charming!” In 1923 she started an affair with
another English nobleman, the Duke of Westminster (while she was also involved
with the composer Igor Stravinsky, an association depicted in a recent movie),
and through him got introductions to Edward, Prince of Wales (later Edward VIII
until he abdicated the throne to marry American divorcée Wallis Simpson) and
Winston Churchill — associations that led to Chanel’s apparent delusion that
she could use those contacts to negotiate an end to World War II that would
leave the Nazi government in place.
She had an affair with German officer Hans
Gunther von Dincklage (13 years her junior; indeed, when she was called out for
collaboration after the war one of her defenses was that she wanted a boyfriend
and in her 50’s she couldn’t be that choosy!) who worked for Walter
Schellenberg, chief of SS Intelligence in occupied Paris. Schellenberg
apparently hit on the idea in 1943 that Chanel could be used as a back-channel
contact to the British aristocracy to see if Churchill could be persuaded to
end the war on terms more favorable to Germany than the “unconditional
surrender” he and the fellow Allied chiefs of state were publicly demanding.
Nothing came of this, but apparently Churchill personally interceded with the
French authorities after the war to make sure Chanel wasn’t prosecuted for
collaboration. The TV show then went into Chanel’s comeback: she exhibited a
collection in 1952 that was a reaction to postwar fashion in general and
Christian Dior in particular (apparently she particularly resented Dior for
reintroducing cinched waists, ruffles and all the other confining crap Chanel
thought she had permanently removed from women’s clothes); it got terrible
reviews in both France and Britain but was a huge hit with American buyers. This is the part of the story dramatized in the musical
Coco, which the program
erroneously dated from 1962 (it was actually 1969) and which starred Katharine
Hepburn in her one musical role on stage or film — it was bankrolled by Paramount in exchange
for the movie rights, but with big-budget musicals on their way out by 1969 they
never actually filmed it; and Hepburn only got to be in it when producer
Frederick Brisson’s first choice, Rosalind Russell (also, by a freak
coincidence, Mrs. Frederick Brisson), was too ill to do it. For the rest of her
life Chanel held forth from her Paris boutique, still officially listed as
working when she died on January 10, 1971 at age 88.
Among the aspects of
Chanel’s life mentioned on Wikipedia but not in the show were her political
oscillations (at different times she bankrolled both Right- and Left-wing
papers in Paris), her unsuccessful sojourn in Hollywood (Sam Goldwyn,
recognizing a marketable name when he heard one, signed her in 1931 but she
only worked on two films before giving up her movie career, though she designed
again for films in Jean Renoir’s fascinating 1939 production Rules of the
Game), her long-standing
rivalry with Schiaparelli (the second woman to open a major fashion house), and the sweetheart deals she cut
with Pierre Wertheimer, his family and others off the revenues of Chanel No. 5
perfume, which covered her living expenses from the end of the war until she
died (she’s known primarily as a couturiere but she made far more money off the
perfume than she ever did off her clothes). Seen today, Chanel comes off as an
indomitable woman, making her own career and living life her way, though also a
quirky, cranky and crotchety figure whose collaboration with the Nazis, such as
it was, seems more opportunistic than anything else: amoral, not immoral.
