Coco Chanel: An Intimate Life Read online

  After Jeanne’s death, her aunts, uncles and grandparents were unwilling to take responsibility for Albert’s children. And by now it was clear he was not going to do so himself. Perhaps no one could afford to feed and house these extra mouths; perhaps their impoverished and seminomadic lifestyle had left them unacceptably feral in the eyes of their relatives. Clearly, the bond between the children and their extended family wasn’t strong, or a way would have been found to take in at least one or two of them. Gabrielle was left with an undying grudge against her family. She struggled to camouflage it, but her father’s abandonment was to haunt Gabrielle, revealing its corrosive power over and over again.

  The pain of blaming her father was more than she could bear. So she did the only thing that gave her any control: she retold their story. In the retelling, Albert was absolved of almost all blame. Gabrielle would tell how, after her mother’s death, when she was still in deep mourning, she had arrived with her father at the miserable house of some unwelcoming old aunts. Albert ignored his six-year-old daughter’s pleas and left her there without further ado. He then sailed for America, where he went to seek his fortune. And this time he succeeded. Having at last made a fortune, he returned and visited his pining daughter. He wrote to her when he could. But he never took her to the new home he had promised, and Gabrielle remained with her aunts, effectively an orphan.

  The more accurate details of the story are these: Albert never traveled to America; neither did he make anything resembling a fortune. He was a drunken braggart, his life one of fantasy and evasion. When Gabrielle’s mother died, Gabrielle was in fact eleven, not six. Neither was she alone in the place where her father so callously left her. She was accompanied by two sisters, Julia and Antoinette. But who were these aunts? According to family memory, they were the nuns of the convent orphanage at Aubazine, a small village in the Corrèze, not far from Brive-la-Gaillarde, where the children’s mother had died. While the records from this period are lost, it was in this convent of Aubazine that Gabrielle would be cloistered, with her sisters and other orphan girls, for the following six or so years.

  The young Gabrielle was desperate at her father’s imminent departure and cried out, “Take me away from here! Take me away!” Albert told her not to worry, everything would be all right; he would return and take her with him as soon as he was able. But he had no intention of returning. Over the years, Gabrielle usually kept to the story about Albert’s journey to America; it enabled her to maintain her pride. But, on other occasions, she communicated her sense of abandonment, saying, “Those were his last words. He did not come back.”

  Sometimes, she would say that he wrote telling her to trust him and that his business was doing well, but the other, more levelheaded Gabrielle would say, “We didn’t hear another word from him.” Almost certainly, Albert Chanel never wrote to Gabrielle or to any of his other children, and Gabrielle waited in vain for the father whom she never saw again. This final rejection somehow sealed her fate. Although she was to become a woman of great fortitude, Gabrielle would never prove emotionally resilient when left, particularly when the leaving was by a man. In summing up her childhood, she would say she knew “no home, no love, no father and mother. It was terrible.”7 And as she had in that childhood, in adulthood she would weave herself new stories in order to survive.

  When the eleven-year-old Gabrielle was deposited in the convent, she sought refuge in thoughts about dying or destruction or injuring those who had cruelly betrayed her. In her impotent rage, she dreamed of setting fire to the convent’s great barn. Yet for all her misery and longing to destroy this “awful place,” in many ways, Gabrielle and her sisters were to fare better than their brothers, Alphonse and Lucien.8

  Unable to enter the convent, at the tender ages of ten and six they were placed with peasant farmers, becoming two more of the thousands of children abandoned by their parents each year into this then-still-acceptable form of semislavery. Authorities frequently placed orphaned or deserted boys with foster families, whose modest payments for their charges’ board and lodging traditionally supplemented the family’s income, while the boys’ hard labor supplemented the workforce. These young children were seldom nurtured and remained, literally, outsiders, more often than not sleeping in the barns. In winter, they slept close to the animals in their attempts to keep warm. Remonstration with foster parents by the parish priest had little effect, and it wasn’t uncommon for these shunned, abused and neglected children to die while in the care of their foster families.

  Jeanne and Albert Chanel’s five children may have suffered emotional and physical deprivation when tramping the roads with their parents, but their mother’s death, their father’s abandonment and the harshness of their new lives initiated a period of even greater hardship. Added to this, the girls were separated from their brothers, and they may not have seen one another for several years.

  A small compensation for the Chanel children’s life of nomadic poverty had been the companionship of other families like themselves. But life in the convent for Gabrielle and her sisters could not have been more different. Aubazine was the largest girls’ orphanage in the region, and behind its high walls they must truly have felt imprisoned. From the moment of waking to the moment of falling asleep, from early Mass to prayers before bed, life was rigidly prescribed.

  Unlike the young women whose moneyed parents could afford to pay for their convent schooling, these were charity children at an orphanage. A good fraction of the Aubazine girls were also illegitimate, a state bringing with it yet further stigma. Neither would the nuns have held back from reminding their charges that their condition was indeed shameful.

  Before the Chanel sisters’ incarceration at Aubazine, their school attendance can have been only sporadic. It was not simply that the Chanels moved around so much. For the poor, schooling was seen as next to useless for any practical purposes. A child not earning was a burdensome mouth to feed. In addition, what use to them was the metric system they were taught in school? When Gabrielle was young, market traders and ordinary people still weighed their goods in toises, cordes and pouces, and counted out in louis and écus. They didn’t use the franc, the currency imposed since the revolution as a tool to unite France.

  While the recent drive to educate more French children had radically shaken up the system, nowhere near all school-age children regularly attended in the 1890s. Many of the poor simply couldn’t afford books, paper, ink and pens, and none were provided by the state. It was all just a further strain on the already depleted family purse, and the response was often truancy. In 1884, a year after Gabrielle’s birth, the future president of France, Georges Clemenceau, asked a peasant why his son didn’t go to school. The retort came quickly: “Will you give him a private income?”9

  If reading and books were of little use for many country people because they had little practical application,10 the French language itself, the most basic tool of the educational system, presented one of the greatest difficulties for people such as the Chanels. French, the language intended to unite the regions of this large and disparate country, was not the language of most people in the provinces, where local dialects still dominated discourse. As one teacher put it in 1894, the year before Gabrielle arrived at Aubazine, “In the great majority of our rural schools, children come… knowing little French and hearing only patois spoken.”11

  To make matters worse, Gabrielle’s lessons were taught by dictation and rote learning, the core teaching method since the Middle Ages. Learning things by heart, patois-speaking children often failed to understand what it was they were learning. “Parrot fashion” was an apt description. Eventually, the people from the provinces would learn the language of their nation, but at the end of the nineteenth century, one teacher despaired of these patois speakers. “Our children… have no way to find enough French words to express their thoughts.”12 While Gabrielle would always remain grateful to the sisters at Aubazine for helping her to lose her patois and teaching her to
speak the “language of well-bred people,” it is most unlikely she was ever comfortable writing in her national language. In years to come, she would know the painter Salvador Dalí, and in one of his letters to her he said he’d been told that “you never, never, never write, which I’m already starting to notice.” This is not an anomaly. In the small number of letters we know of in Gabrielle’s hand, her unfamiliarity with written French is confirmed. In comparison with the finesse of her personal manner, her written French is neither very well expressed nor particularly grammatical. My own belief is that almost no letters from Gabrielle will ever be found because she actually wrote very few. By committing as little as possible to paper, she was hiding another source of her sense of inadequacy.

  The twelfth-century hermit Etienne de Viezaux (St. Stephen) founded the convent of Aubazine at a remote spot, in his words, “to be far from the concourse of men.” Even today, Aubazine feels distant from any great “concourse,” and soon after its founding, the monastery became a welcome resting place on the great pilgrim route to Santiago de Compostela. During the terrors of the revolution, a new religious order, the Congregation of the Sacred Heart of Mary, was founded to care for the poor and rejected, and to run homes for abandoned and orphaned girls. The sisters restored the austere buildings at Aubazine, whose towering chapel reflects its previous role as church to the Romanesque abbey. The long, whitewashed corridors and convent rooms are high, wide and airy, and the doors are a contrast in black, the color worn by nuns and pupils alike. When Gabrielle arrived at Aubazine, seven centuries, and many feet, had worn a beautiful dip in the great central stone staircase.

  Aubazine’s isolation meant that aside from the odd festival, guided walk or occasional visit to relations, there was little respite from the girls’ regimented and cloistered existence. State education wasn’t always up to much, but religious institutions such as this were often woefully behind even that. The educational drive of such orphanages was the molding of their charges into devout Christians and devoted future employees. Long hours were spent at catechism and the prayer book. Given the convent’s rural location, the majority of its girls were, like Gabrielle, the offspring of peasants. Social hierarchy inside religious institutions rigidly followed life outside them, and social mobility was not something the nuns expected of their charges. They became servants, shop assistants or, if they were lucky, the wives of peasant farmers. Aubazine pupils were an underclass and as such it was presumed they would remain.

  Beyond a limited proficiency in reading, arithmetic and possibly French history and geography, lessons were of a very basic nature. What orphanage sisters did regard as essential, however, were housekeeping skills for the girls’ hardworking future lives. They also tried to ensure that their pupils left with the modest trousseau including household linen they had sewn for themselves during their years under the nuns’ care.

  Life at Aubazine was busy but deeply uneventful. By contrast, Gabrielle’s first eleven years had been spent in a round of ceaseless activity, either traveling or in the noisy, gaudy bustle and repartee of the markets. She was accustomed to people whose rough and precarious lives were lived on a public stage. Those who succeeded best had the keenest sense of showmanship, the quickest sense of humor and the greatest flair for holding their audience with a tale or a joke. Capturing the imagination, these people knew that the business of selling was, in large part, performance. Transplanted to the seclusion of a convent, Gabrielle chafed at her incarceration. One rare form of escape, however, did provide a feast for her imagination.

  In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, as village communities were much reduced and the urban mentality became dominant in France, the hugely expanded popular newspapers developed a vast circulation. These organs of mass communication celebrated speed, spontaneity and all that was unpredictable. They glorified the city, and Paris in particular. The popular press enabled people to make some sense of their newly urbanized world. It also introduced a new concept, the serial novel, the feuilleton, and these soon became something of a national obsession. While many families collected their installments until they had grown into a book, critics lamented the feuilletons’ formidable influence.

  Albert’s younger sister, Gabrielle’s aunt Louise, decamped from her daily rounds by immersing herself in the latest feuilleton. Gabrielle later remembered: “We never bought books… we cut out the serial from the newspaper and sewed them all together.13 She also smuggled these back to the attics at Aubazine, where she hid from reality in their glamour and romance. Her adolescent dreams were fueled by these torrid fictions, crammed with scenes of passion and love that always triumphed. When Gabrielle’s shameful worldliness was discovered, she was severely chastised by the nuns, but years later, while saying that the writers were “ninnies,” she also claimed to have learned more from these popular fictions than from anything in her impoverished education. She added meaningfully that the romances “taught me about life; they nourished my sensibility and my pride.”14

  For the most part, however, Gabrielle’s time at Aubazine was to remain a poorly healed wound. To contemporaries, an illegitimate birth, impoverished childhood and abandonment to an orphanage were slurs upon one’s reputation, and once out in the world, Gabrielle set about concealment. If, once or twice, the burden of this anxious secret left her feeling so alone she was driven to confide it in full, her confidantes were decent enough to tell no one.

  While we catch only glimpses of these crucial formative years, over time Gabrielle found ways to tell her story. She described repeatedly, for example, a profound antipathy for a group of women she called her “aunts.” Unpicking the web of misinformation she wove around herself, one sees that these “aunts” were not one but two sets of women. They were a conflation of her real aunts and the sisters of Aubazine. Together they took the brunt of Gabrielle’s youthful resentment, the memory of which still rankled more than half a century later. Above all, she believed that for her “aunts”—her family and the nuns—“Love was a luxury and childhood a sin.”15 Surrounded as she was by unloving authority figures, Gabrielle’s early experience was one of disharmony, repression and neglect.

  4. Things That I Should Be and Which I Am Not

  In their eighteenth year, when the girls left the confines of Aubazine, the nuns saw themselves as responsible for their continuing welfare. First Julia-Berthe, then Gabrielle and, finally, Antoinette left behind this remote place that had held them for so long. What we don’t know is why, on leaving Aubazine, they didn’t set off, along with the thousands of other girls from humble backgrounds, in search of work. Instead, the nuns arranged for the Chanel girls’ transfer to another convent. This was in Moulins, a small town more than a hundred miles to the north.

  The convent of Notre Dame was a local finishing school of sorts, with a contingent of charity pupils whom Gabrielle joined in 1901. Seated in a lower position at table and in church, and wearing clothes of poorer quality, the charity pupil was seldom permitted to forget her inferior status. At Moulins, young Gabrielle’s position was even more irksome to her than at Aubazine, where at least the girls had all sprung from similarly modest backgrounds. As a final humiliation, the Moulins charity girls were obliged to fulfill domestic duties to supplement their keep. Despite the fact that Gabrielle’s sisters were at Aubazine, she always gave the impression that her childhood and youth were spent without siblings or friends. At Moulins, however, she found a friend.

  Adrienne Chanel was the youngest of Henri-Adrien and Angélina Chanel’s nineteen children. Their eldest, Albert, Gabrielle’s father, was twenty-eight years older than his youngest sister. Adrienne had been boarding at Notre Dame since the age of ten, and she made Gabrielle feel most welcome. The girls were separated by only two years and looked much like sisters. Adrienne’s self-possessed and tranquil nature was a strong contrast to her defensive and pent-up niece. A photograph of the girls together, taken shortly after Gabrielle’s move to Moulins, is a striking illustration of thei
r different personalities. Adrienne places one hand fetchingly on her hip; the other is behind Gabrielle’s head, as if showing her to the camera. She looks a little concerned, and pleased, smiling lovingly at her friend, who keeps her own hands firmly behind her back. With the barest hints of a smile, Gabrielle gazes fiercely into the camera.

  What had made these young women so unalike, when they had so much in common? Both were the children of impoverished, nomadic market traders. Adrienne was first sent to Moulins at ten; Gabrielle joined Aubazine at eleven and neither girl’s parents could scrape together the money to spare their daughter the stigma of charity status. There was, though, one significant difference between them: Adrienne had always felt cared for. Her parents made regular visits to Moulins to see their favorite daughter and Adrienne often visited her older sister Louise, who lived not far away with her husband, the stationmaster at Varennes. Adrienne made the best of her lot, and a lovable and vibrant personality had endeared her to the nuns at Notre Dame. She benefited from her time there and became a charming and competent young woman.

  Louise, having long since rejected the nomadic life that was her birthright, didn’t mind that Varennes was a one-street, nowhere place consisting of her husband’s railway station, an inn, a church and a short straggle of houses. She happily occupied herself with her children, the housekeeping and maintaining the niceties of her improved social position. And it was she who drew the Chanels together, at Varennes, where they had the semblance of a home. Even Gabrielle’s recalcitrant father called in on occasion, albeit secretly, so as to avoid seeing his children. (Gabrielle’s disillusionment intensified when, one day, Louise let slip this information.)