© Apis/Sygma/Corbis

Sleek. Chic. Notoriously guarded. Welcome to the secret world of Gabrielle Chanel.

The story of Chanel begins with an abandoned child, as lost as a girl in a dark fairytale. Unveiling remarkable new details about Gabrielle Chanel’s early years in a convent orphanage, and her flight into unconventional adulthood, Justine Picardie explores what lies beneath the glossy surface of a mythic fashion icon.

Throwing new light on her passionate and turbulent relationships, this beautifully constructed portrait gives a fresh and penetrating look at how Coco Chanel made herself into her own most powerful creation. An authoritative account, based on personal observations and interviews with Chanel’s last surviving friends, employees and relatives, it also unravels her coded language and symbols, and traces the influence of her formative years on her legendary style.

Feared and revered by the rest of the fashion industry, Coco Chanel died in 1971, at the age of 87, but her legacy lives on. Drawing upon her unprecedented research, Justine Picardie brings Gabrielle Chanel out of hiding and uncovers the consequences of what she covered up, unpicking the seams between truth and myth, in a story that reveals the true heart of fashion.

‘Justine Picardie’s thoughtful and beautifully illustrated biography illuminates the iconoclast who might justifiably be said to have invented the twentieth-century woman’

Times Literary Supplement

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First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2010 This revised edition published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2017

© Justine Picardie 2010, 2017

Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers 2010 Cover photograph © Apis/Sygma/Corbis

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Justine Picardie asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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Source ISBN 9780007318995

Ebook Edition © JUNE 2017 ISBN: 9780007346295

Version 2017-04-24

‘I imposed black;it’s still goingstrong today,for black wipes outeverything else around.’

Coco Chanel

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Foreword: Chanel and I

Mademoiselle Is at Home

Gabrielle

In the Shadow of the Cross

Coco

Courtesans and Camellias

The Double C

The Little Black Dress

Misia and the Muse

Number Five

The Russians

The Duke of Westminster

Riviera Chic

The Woman in White

The Promised Land

Diamonds as Big as the Ritz

Through a Glass, Darkly

The Comeback

Celebrity Chanel

Scissors

La Grande Mademoiselle

Picture Section

Bibliography

List of Searchable Terms

Acknowledgements

About the Author

About the Publisher

Foreword: Chanel and I

I am writing this at the desk of Gabrielle Chanel, in her private apartment above the couture salon of the business she founded in 1910, in Rue Cambon. This is a place I first came to many years ago, not long after the death of my sister Ruth in 1997. The story that follows is not about my sister, but she is part of it, as is my mother, who married my father wearing a little black dress, cut from a Chanel pattern, eight months before I was born. That dress took on a talismanic quality when I was old enough to wear it as a young woman; it seemed to speak of elegance, but also of rebellion (for to marry in black is to break a powerful taboo). And Chanel appeared to be significant in other ways, too – for like legions before me, I came to associate her name with the scent of womanhood; in my case, via the flask of Chanel N°5 in my mother’s bedroom, and the vial of Chanel N°19 that her mother, my grandmother, gave me as a birthday present when I turned 18. Thus Chanel was written into our lives, but with a light touch (a spray of perfume; the feel of black satin against naked skin).

And then my beloved sister died of breast cancer at the age of 33, when her longed-for twins had just reached their second birthdays. In the aftermath, I felt as if my heart was cracked and might never mend again; for Ruth was my best friend, my comrade since childhood, the girl I had always sought to protect, a lifelong companion whose journey I had shared for so long.

As a consequence, perhaps, I discovered that grief has a strange communality (and also that mourning takes on many more forms than merely wearing black). This may also explain why I felt an unexpected rush of sympathy for Chanel herself, on that initial visit to her apartment; for it seemed to be the inner sanctum of a woman whose life had been marked by a series of savage losses. First came her mother’s death, when Gabrielle was 11 years old; swiftly followed by the disappearance of her father, who abandoned his five children; and then the demise of her two sisters (one committed suicide, having been rejected by the man she loved; the other drank herself to death after a failed marriage). All this I heard from my expert guide to the apartment – one of the remarkable women who work in Chanel’s archives – and later that day from Karl Lagerfeld, Chanel’s creative director since 1983, and a man who knows and understands every last detail of the life and work of the brand’s founder.

But if the shadow of bereavement is perceptible in the place where I am writing today, so too is a sense of the life that Chanel created for herself. Just in front of me, looking directly into my eyes, is one of her favourite mementoes – a small painting of a lion – and there are a number of others elsewhere in the apartment. These act as a reminder that she was born under the sign of Leo, but also of her own fierce spirit in establishing her independence, at a time when women in France were still denied the vote.

Fashion is often deemed facile – and indeed, there are moments when it does make itself look ridiculous – yet Gabrielle Chanel brought dignity to her conception of style, while also reminding us that beautiful surfaces may have hidden depths. She herself kept so much of her past concealed – the shame of her childhood abandonment; the pain of her years spent in an orphanage; the agony of lost loves and loneliness. She became the most famous woman in fashion – whose iconography remains as potent today as it was a century ago – but for all her elegance, she remained vulnerable, despite the protective qualities of her perfectly tailored clothes.

It took me some time to feel brave enough to embark on a book about this complex and brilliant woman, although I wrote often about her, and her enduring legacy, in the years after my first visit to Rue Cambon. When I thought about Chanel – which was often, given that I worked for Vogue after my sister’s death; and subsequently for Harper’s Bazaar – I could not disentangle my feelings about its present incarnation, as a supremely powerful global fashion brand, from my instinctive emotional response to Gabrielle Chanel. She seemed to have everything, and nothing (though as I write those words, I am tempted to delete them, for fear of being misleading). Could it be that she was a tragic heroine, or someone else entirely, a more elusive figure than anyone could ever fully know?

But for all my doubts, I continued searching for clues about Chanel, making notes, slowly gathering the confidence to write her biography, acknowledging my own ambition in doing so. Doors began to open – to the Chanel archives in Paris, and a number of others elsewhere (including several private archives in England and Scotland containing previously unseen material dating back to Chanel’s love affair with the Duke of Westminster in the 1920s, and her friendship with Winston Churchill). I was also fortunate to meet two women who had been close to Chanel: firstly, her friend Claude Delay, an author and psychoanalyst (and therefore a perceptive interpreter of Chanel’s complex emotions, dreams and nightmares); and Gabrielle Labrunie, Chanel’s great-niece, who might in fact have been her granddaughter. Both women were exceptionally kind to me, and generous with their time and memories; indeed, Gabrielle Labrunie even allowed me to stay with her at her country house, outside Paris, while I was researching the book.

Their kindness may have had something to do with my own vulnerability when I first met them; for this coincided with the end of my marriage. My then husband, and the father of my two sons, had fallen in love with someone else; it was as simple, and as complicated, as that. In the chaotic, unhappy period following our separation, I travelled to Aubazine, a remote convent and Cistercian abbey, hidden away in the rural French region of Corrèze, where Chanel had lived with her two sisters in the wake of their mother’s death and their father’s disappearance. It was winter when I went there – and I had been reluctant to go, longing to remain within the familiar sanctuary of home, yet also knowing that the opportunity to visit Aubazine and stay in the convent might never arise again.

I still remember the journey – leaving London in tears, weighed down by anxiety and a corrosive sense of impending catastrophe; arriving in Paris, feeling as if I could not go on; catching another train to the town of Brive-la-Gaillarde, where Chanel’s mother had died; and then following the route that her father had taken her with her sisters, up through a circuitous mountain road towards Aubazine, where the grey stone walls of the ancient abbey looked more forbidding than I could ever have imagined. During Chanel’s residence there, in the late nineteenth century, the convent was filled with dozens of orphans and nuns; but by the time of my visit, the orphanage had been closed for decades, and the religious community had dwindled to a handful of nuns. The Mother Superior had agreed to my staying there, as long as I followed the daily routine of the nuns: prayers at dawn, noon, dusk, and night; silence except at meals; respect for their religious rituals and spiritual retreat.

It was a bitter winter that year, and my prevailing memory of those days – and long nights – at Aubazine is of the chill of the little room where I slept in a narrow iron bed, a wooden crucifix of an anguished Christ above me. The chapel where I knelt with the nuns as they prayed was equally icy; the stone floor cold as the black earth of the abbey’s garden, where the trees were leafless and the plants frostbitten and decaying. When I was alone at night, I alternated between weeping and writing; although eventually, my focus shifted away from my own dreary unhappiness, as I became more absorbed in the unfamiliar surroundings. In the short hours of daylight, between the nuns’ prayer services, I explored the abbey, and at last began to feel a profound sense of wonderment: not because of a sudden religious conversion, but rather because Chanel’s symbols – the interlocked double Cs that appeared in her designs; the restrained aesthetic of black, white and beige; the stars and crescent moons that were her signature in jewellery and other decorative embellishment – were also apparent in the ancient world of Aubazine. As I retraced Chanel’s steps along the corridor to the dormitory where she slept, I saw the mosaic of five-sided stars that had been crafted from thousands of tiny stones by the Cistercian monks who inhabited Aubazine during its medieval era; while inside the dark abbey itself were stained-glass windows with a stylised design that seemed to reflect – or pre-figure – Chanel’s logo. The nuns themselves still wore black habits with white cuffs and collars – again, reminiscent of Chanel’s ascetic monochrome palette – and their rosaries looked unexpectedly similar to her pearl necklaces and crucifixes.

By the time I left Aubazine, I had not experienced a miraculous recovery from the pain of the end of a marriage, but I did feel lucky: to have been allowed to stay at the abbey, and also to have been free to leave there, unlike the orphans who had been locked behind its iron gates. Before returning to Paris, I went to see Gabrielle Labrunie again and told her about my experience at Aubazine. And it was then that she led me to a simple bedroom in her house that I had never been inside before and showed me the wardrobe lined with Chanel’s own clothes; most of them in the colours of Aubazine (white silk and linen, like the whitewashed walls of the convent; beige tweed, reminiscent of the sandstone floors of the abbey; black chiffon, dark as the shadows that shrouded the chapel). And there, too, was a faint scent that I recognised from childhood – Chanel N°5 – the scent of a woman, still distinct today, in Gabrielle Chanel’s apartment …

Gabrielle Labrunie died several years ago, but as I sit here on a winter’s morning, the pale sunlight filtered by the translucent curtains, I remember her face and her gentle voice; her compassion and her understanding; the touch of her warm hand on mine. The hidden mirrored door to the apartment is closed, but I can hear the sound of voices, from the women who are working in the couture salon below, the day after Chanel’s latest show (this one held at the Ritz, with a light-hearted parade of dancing models, wearing black wisps of chiffon, lustrous pearls and soft tweeds). There is a ripple of laughter, and I find that I am smiling, too. Chanel’s clock on the desk has stopped – it is forever 5.38 (a time that seems to have no significance, though I could be wrong, in this place where numbers remain powerful). But I am aware of how much time has passed since I first came here, and all that I have discovered about myself – as well as Gabrielle Chanel – in the intervening years.

What would Gabrielle say to me now, I wonder, if she could speak to me? Would she chastise me for daring to think that I could understand the infinite mysteries of her life? Possibly; probably … But even so, I say to her, speaking out loud in the quiet room, thank you. Thank you for all that you have given me. Thank you for making me braver than before, and for showing that women can, and should, be independent spirits, while also recognising that it is love that makes and shapes us. And thank you for giving me the hope to believe in second chances; and to trust that endings can also lead to beginnings, even when all seems forever lost. Would I have fallen in love again were it not for Chanel? Perhaps, though my own propensity for magical thinking (a trait that I share with Chanel) allows me to believe she might have helped me along the way; for after all, when I first met the man who I am now married to, our initial conversation was about Chanel. Indeed, as a consequence of that unexpected encounter, he led me to the faraway places where Chanel had stayed in the Scottish Highlands, and unlocked the door to her Riviera villa, La Pausa. And when we married on a June day in Scotland, with my sons and friends around us, I was wearing an ivory silk dress by Chanel …

Of course, my Chanel is just one version of her legend and her life; we none of us can ever fully comprehend someone else’s experience, nor pin them down, like butterflies, in a glass case, or preserve them in amber. Instead, I prefer to think of Chanel as a beguiling, elusive ghost – endlessly close, yet just out of reach, slipping through the mirrors that reflect one another in this beautiful room. When I touch the leather surface of her desk, I can feel the marks of her pen, but there are no words visible in the abstract pattern scored by her sharp nib, no apparent meaning within the labyrinth of lines engraved during the decades that she lived and worked here. I could study these puzzling marks forever, and never turn them into words; and therein lies the genius of Chanel. The enigmatic lines are mysteriously beautiful … just like the woman who made them, the eternally alluring Gabrielle Chanel.

Rue Cambon, 8 December 2016

Mademoiselle Is at Home

When my customers come to me, they like to cross the threshold of some magic place; they feel a satisfaction that is perhaps a trace vulgar but that delights them: they are privileged characters who are incorporated into our legend. For them this is a far greater pleasure than ordering another suit. Legend is the consecration of fame.

Coco Chanel, 1935

The House of Chanel stands at 31 Rue Cambon, a shrine to its dead creator, yet also a living, thriving temple of twenty-first-century fashion, the destination for pilgrims who travel here from all around the world. Outside, dusk falls on a grey wintry afternoon in Paris, the darkness and the drizzle mingling into an early twilight, the shadows of the surrounding buildings lying heavy on the narrow street. Inside, the air is perfumed and warm in the ground-floor boutique, a cocoon of luxury lined with cream surfaces and silvered mirrors, the customers hovering like hummingbirds above glass cases of enticing jewel-coloured lipsticks, or swooping on rails of silk-lined tweed jackets. Their eyes dart towards the film projection of the latest collection, comparing what they see in the shop with what is portrayed on the screen (and perhaps in their mind’s eye, a vision of themselves transformed, dressed all in Chanel). You can watch the video reflected in the mirrors, too; the porcelain-faced models riding on a white and gold carousel. But instead of wooden horses galloping in a ceaseless circle, there are the famous symbols of Coco Chanel: pearls and camellias and the interlocked double-C logo, as globally recognisable as the Stars and Stripes or the swastika. As the carousel revolves on the screen, the reflections in the mirrors are also spinning, and for a few seconds everything is in movement; nothing seems solid at all.

This is as you would expect in the heart and headquarters of an international fashion brand, where mutability is integral to its business of selling new stock every season; yet there must always be something immediately familiar, suggestive of an iconography that denotes heritage and enduring value. The contradictions of such an enterprise are unavoidable – it’s a balancing act between constant change and constancy – as is evident in Coco Chanel’s own observations on the business of fashion: ‘A dress is neither a tragedy, nor a painting; it is a charming and ephemeral creation, not an everlasting work of art. 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.’

And yet Mademoiselle protected her house, and here it still stands. Beside the entrance to the boutique is another doorway, closed to the public by a discreet dark-suited security guard, though not to select couture clients, who ascend Chanel’s mirrored staircase when they come for private fittings in the hushed salon on the first floor. Not a trace of dust or dirt marks the floor, dark and shiny as a lipstick case, and the ivory walls are perfectly smooth, as befits a ceremonial space where pieces from the current couture collection hang on rails, veiled in white shrouds like novitiates. Beyond here, the staircase continues to rise through the centre of the house, up to the place where Chanel watched her fashion shows unfold, hidden from the audience below, yet seeing everything beneath her, perched on the fifth step from the top of the spiralling stairs.

Pause for a moment on the staircase, and it gives you the strangest sensation. The mirrors are simultaneously reflecting from all angles; there is no escape from the sight of your body bisected, slivers of face and limbs. So you must watch yourself as you climb the flight to the second floor, to the unmarked mirrored double doors that lead into Mademoiselle Chanel’s private apartment. Open the door, and it is as if she has never left the building; for here is her sanctuary, polished and preserved, decades after her death on 10th January 1971.

You might call it a mausoleum, yet it feels too alive for that, for these rooms are still filled with her presence, along with her possessions. On the other side of the door is an entrance hall, the walls lined with early eighteenth-century Coromandel screens, their red lacquer patterned with a mysterious Oriental landscape, where women in kimonos fly on the back of white birds, and men are carried by fishes and turtles. There are pale mountains and wraiths of clouds and lakes on the screens, waterfalls and temples and precipices, a world beyond the walls of this Parisian apartment; and the sound of the city is silenced by the softness of thick beige carpet, the view concealed by the mirrors that reflect the Chinese screens.

The hall seems hermetically sealed, the way out hidden by mirrors, but two life-size Venetian blackamoors gesture to go on, past a pair of reindeer that stand to attention on either side of a bunch of gilded wheat in a silver vase. The statues point into the salon, but the reflection of their painted eyes and hands is multiplied in a series of mirrored images, upending all sense of direction, skewing perspective within these looking-glass walls. Another door leads from the hall to the dining room where Chanel entertained guests, six beige suede-upholstered chairs at a walnut table; two lions on the tabletop; two gilt and crystal-encrusted mirrors in the alcoves; the ceiling curved like the vaulting of a Romanesque church. A smaller sitting room is lined with more antique Chinese screens, watched over by a stone statue of the Madonna and Child, his eyes at the door, hers cast down to the ground. But there is no bedroom in the apartment, for Mademoiselle slept across the street, on the top floor of the Ritz, with a view over the rooftops of Rue Cambon. Her hotel room was unadorned – white cotton sheets, white walls, austere like the convent orphanage where she was educated – but her apartment remains as ornate as it was in her lifetime. The walls are lined in gold fabric; not that much can be seen of them, for they are covered with books and screens and mirrors, conserved like the inside of a holy sanctum, or the final resting place of an Ancient Egyptian queen.

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’.

She also imagined herself as her father’s favourite. ‘I didn’t so much love as want to be loved,’ she told Delay. ‘So I loved my father because he preferred me to my sister. I couldn’t have borne for him to feel the same about us both.’ But she also claimed to have had a rival, a servant who she believed was poisoning her. ‘I knew she slept with my father – that is, I didn’t know, I didn’t understand anything about that sort of thing, but I guessed, and I used to frighten her by saying I’d tell my mother.’ Once upon a time, in this dark fairytale, her parents went away together, and Gabrielle and her sister set out in search of them, to escape from the evil servant. When they finally reached their parents, Gabrielle fell asleep on her father’s shoulder, and the next day he bought her a blue dress.

In another of her confessions to Delay (narratives in which the truth may or may not be unravelled from the fictions), Chanel said that as a child she was frightened of ghosts and what lay hidden beneath the bed in the darkness. Gabrielle’s graveyard offerings were not enough to protect her, and in the night the dead seemed more sinister than they did in her daylight games at the cemetery. But in the story as she told it – one of a series that could have been designed more for herself than for her listener – her father came to her; he was there to soothe her fears. ‘Don’t be frightened,’ he said to her, as every good father should. ‘No one is going to hurt you.’ Even so, she was still terrified of a man under her bed, throwing wheat at her. ‘But wheat is very good,’ her father said, taking her into his arms. Ever since then, she explained to Delay, she had always kept a bunch of wheat close to her: in her bedroom at the Ritz, and in each room of her apartment in Rue Cambon.

Yet all the goodness of the wheat could not keep her mother from dying. Gabrielle maintained that she was 6 years old at the time; in reality, she was 11. Her father was absent again, travelling away from home, when Jeanne was found dead in her bed in a freezing room in Brive, on a bitterly cold February morning in 1895. History does not relate if Gabrielle watched her mother die, or for how long she and her siblings remained alone with the corpse; and Mademoiselle Chanel never revealed the truth, either.

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