Coco Chanel (42 page)

When Gabrielle and Misia arrived in Hollywood, Gabrielle was once again mobbed by reporters. The French guests were entertained at a celebrity reception in Gabrielle's honor, and here she met several of those actresses she was due to design for, such as Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich and Claudette Colbert. The renowned directors George Cukor and Erich von Stroheim were also at the party, and von Stroheim charmed Gabrielle. She said of him, “Such a ham, but what style.” Meanwhile, Goldwyn's chief publicist dubbed Gabrielle “the biggest fashion brain ever known.”

At another party, George Cukor introduced Gabrielle to his new “find,” Katharine Hepburn.

Gabrielle was taken around the studios, saw how films were made, saw the clothes, met the costumers, understood what the camera wanted and learned that her role was to create clothes that accentuated the personality of the stars. She was supposed to design costumes that would still be in fashion two years after she had created them; that was how long it took to make a film. She wasn't impressed by Beverly Hills, and the ruthlessness of the studio system appalled the woman who had fought so hard for her own independence. She believed the stars were “producers' servants,” and didn't have much time for many of the actors either. She thought that “once you've said the girls were beautiful and there were a lot of feathers around, you've said it all . . . You know perfectly well that everything “super” is the same. Super-sex, super productions . . .” Gabrielle would, however, enjoy quoting Garbo, saying to her later, “Without you I wouldn't have made it, with my little hat and my raincoat.”

The woman who put fashionable women into raincoats had met the stars, met the producers, wasn't that impressed and became impatient to get back to France. En route, she stopped again in New York, for what turned out to be a most useful set of encounters. She met Carmel Snow, now editor of
Harper's Bazaar;
Margaret Chase, editor of
Vogue;
and Condé Nast, the extraordinary magazine publisher who had a gift for making money; he lived in a thirty-room penthouse on Park Avenue. Nast had amassed a fortune through his publishing company; this included
Vogue
and
Vanity Fair.
His manipulation and machinations were legendary, and Gabrielle would always have a difficult relationship with this gifted yet unscrupulous man.

Something that impressed Gabrielle perhaps the most about the United States, and was to have a lasting effect on her attitudes, was the way she saw clothes sold in the great metropolis of New York. Taking a trip around the most elegant department stores, including Bloomingdale's, Macy's and Saks, she also visited the Seventh Avenue garment-making district, and was fascinated by S. Klein's, the huge discount store on Union Square.

Samuel Klein had begun, in 1912, with six hundred dollars, and by 1931, he owned the world's largest women's-wear store, selling as much as twenty-five million dollars' worth of clothes every year. This was then a vast sum. Klein made no attempt at aesthetics—the floors were bare, and there were no salespeople. Riffling through crude iron racks, customers selected dresses (all copies of one kind or another) without assistance and tried them on in crowded public dressing rooms. Klein didn't advertise, relying on rapid turnover and a markup of around 10 percent. If something on the $7.95 racks was there for more than two weeks, it was marked down a dollar. At the end of another two weeks, its price was cut again. Sometimes, dresses were sold for as little as one dollar. Large signs in Yiddish, Armenian, Polish and English read: “Don't try to steal, our detectives are everywhere.” Today, versions of this type of clothes shopping are common, but in 1933, Gabrielle was amazed.

S. Klein would become part of American mythology, and Gabrielle returned to France, confirmed in her prophesy to her fellow couturiers that copying was inevitable and Klein's selling policy was a sign of things to come. Refusing to believe this, the couturiers exerted themselves each season to prevent the pilfering of their ideas. And Gabrielle would say, “Fashion does not exist unless it goes down into the streets. The fashion that remains in the salons has no more significance than a costume ball.”
⁴
She said she wouldn't have been able to realize all her ideas, that she liked seeing them used, and that copying was not the drama for her that it was for other couturiers: “What rigidity it shows, what laziness, what unimaginative taste, what lack of faith in creativity, to be frightened of imitations! The more transient fashion is the more perfect it is. You can't protect what is already dead.”
⁵
(Gabrielle meant she had already moved on.)

By the twenties, Gabrielle had come to believe that haute couture would inevitably be translated “down into the streets.” And her increasingly unfitted and simple shapes could now be replicated relatively easily; they also required less yardage than previous dresses and could be copied in cheaper fabrics. New synthetics, such as rayon, were emulating much rarer textiles, such as silk, and the haute couture copies were being made up at a fraction of the cost. The line of descent began with the unofficial drawings taken—secretly—from the shows. Specialist copying houses made a living out of less costly versions of designer clothes. This idea went down through women's personal dressmakers until it reached the cheaper, mass-market end of the garment trade and the “woman in the street.”

Following through her thought that she was quite willing for her clothes to be copied, in 1932 Gabrielle presented a fashion exhibition at the Duke of Westminster's London house in aid of charity. (The two remained on close terms.) The idea was that dressmakers and manufacturers should come along with the express intention of copying Gabrielle's designs. Five hundred or so society and entertainment personalities attended over the course of several days. The
Daily Mail
reported how “many visitors bring their own seamstresses because this collection is not for sale . . . Mademoiselle Chanel has authorized it being copied.” The other designers in Paris went to great lengths to protect their designs and were absolutely opposed to Gabrielle's initiative.

 

Sam Goldwyn had been unconcerned about Gabrielle's return to France and agreed that she could design the costumes for Gloria Swanson's forthcoming film,
Tonight or Never,
when Swanson was in Europe. When she came over to Paris, Gabrielle's designs for her were deemed perfect. However, after two seasons of Gabrielle's fashion dictatorship, the stars rebelled, and refused to wear clothes designed by the same person in all their films. Confirmed in their belief that Hollywood was more significant than Paris, they didn't care if the designer they were rejecting was Coco Chanel. As a result, Gabrielle felt released from her contract with Goldwyn and didn't return to Hollywood.
The New Yorker
published a witty piece on the reasons for her retreat:

Gabrielle and Goldwyn remained, nonetheless, on the best of terms, for their relationship had been mutually beneficial. Gabrielle's success in Hollywood raised her status yet further in France; she had become grand on an international scale. It was also good for Goldwyn, who kept the prestigious association between the designer and his films.

While Poiret was going bankrupt—creditors seized all his assets—and many of Gabrielle's rivals cut their prices, her own two Hollywood stipends of one million dollars were a considerable help in those tough years. She had lost a number of English and American clients, and while the Americans would eventually return in force, there were still many rich women in India and South America who could well afford her couture.
Vogue,
meanwhile, told the world that Coco Chanel had revolutionized Hollywood by putting the actress Ina Claire into white satin pajamas.

Once again, as in the First World War, in difficult times Gabrielle's Hollywood endeavor had enhanced her reputation. Even so, the Depression of the thirties, following the crash of 1929, had a devastating effect on virtually every country in the world. Despite Gabrielle's upbeat pronouncement—she said that, like Goldwyn, she believed the best way to survive lean times was to maintain the highest standards—this was a tense period. In 1930, while Gabrielle had a turnover of around 120 million francs and a workforce of around 2,400, in twenty-six workrooms, it has been said that in 1932 she was forced to cut her prices by half. And although managing to retain her huge workforce, she did temporarily reduce the luxury of some of her fabrics. Silk manufacturers, for example, were horrified when Gabrielle introduced the idea of evening dresses in cotton. She had been invited to do so by an English firm, Ferguson Brothers, to promote the use of their cotton fabrics. Thus Gabrielle's spring 1931 collection included thirty-five cotton-piqué, lawn, muslin and organdy evening dresses. It proved very popular.

In the end, however, not only did Gabrielle retain the custom of some of her richest society clients, such as Daisy Fellowes, Lady Pamela Smith, the South American Madame Martínez de Hoz and the Americans Laura Corrigan and Barbara Hutton, by 1935 business was very much improved for Gabrielle. Her clientele had grown sufficiently that her workforce had now reached four thousand. The Duke of Westminster had permitted her to adapt his nine-bedroom Audley Street London house to her own requirements. From 1930 to 1934, this became the center of Gabrielle's cosmetics venture, part of her drive to grow by diversifying, it included the expansion of her perfume range, with N° 22, Glamour and Gardénia. Like other couturiers, in order to maintain a high profile, she also now endorsed products and designed for manufacturers.

 

During the Depression, a young New York heiress, Maybelle Iribarnegaray, discovered that her husband was having an affair with Gabrielle. It was 1933. Her husband, Iribe, as Paul Iribarnegaray styled himself, was a thickset Basque with an impenetrable accent who often utilized his incessant womanizing to further his extraordinary talent. Besides the great Sem, Iribe had been the most talented and successful French prewar caricaturist, with a facile and sharp pen. He had then branched out and launched a successful design business, creating furniture, fabrics, wallpaper and jewelry. The success of his business had made him a significant arbiter of taste. Then, one year into the war, having dispensed with his first wife, the actress Jeanne Dirys, who subsequently died of tuberculosis, Iribe left for America, scooped up Maybelle and spent the next ten years in America, most of them in Hollywood.

Iribe worked on some of the legendary Cecil B. de Mille's most important films, including
The Ten Commandments,
the largest-scale film yet made, and was promoted to artistic director of Paramount. By this point, he was also designing dresses and film sets, and was sometimes even directing. Iribe was witty and clever, with an unctuous charm, but he had also gained a reputation for being arrogant and argumentative. One day, when he reacted badly to de Mille's criticism of his sets for
King of Kings
, de Mille had had enough and fired him. Iribe had also had enough, and left Hollywood, returning to France with his wife and her two children. With Maybelle's money, Iribe now opened a shop on rue Faubourg Saint-Honoré—not far from Gabrielle's residence, Hôtel de Lauzan—and reapplied himself to designing furniture and jewelry. He had always been intent on riches, fame and acceptance by society, and was envious of Cocteau, an old acquaintance and colleague, who infiltrated the haut monde with such ease.

On his return to Paris, Iribe hailed luxury, artisanship and nationalism as the cornerstones of his beliefs. Enslaved to money, he appears to have made and lost it at a great rate. For the moment, however, Iribe made huge sums, acquiring a luxury car, a yacht and a house in Saint-Tropez, the fishing village now transformed into one of the most select playgrounds of the rich. Colette hadn't visited for a while, and friends warned her that it was overrun by “the sort of people photographed by Vogue.” Colette herself was in fact photographed by
Vogue,
but bemoaned the smothering of one of her favorite places with traffic and tourists. One morning, she found a horde of them awaiting her as she left the stationer's, and wrote to a friend, “I didn't hide what I thought of them.”
⁶

Then Iribe did less well, so his long-suffering wife hustled and found him a commission from Chanel. Maybelle's parents were meanwhile pressuring their daughter to curtail their son-in-law's excessive spending; they were concerned he would bring them to ruin. This, combined with Iribe's serial infidelity, finally brought the marriage to an end, and Maybelle left for America with her two children.

When Gabrielle and Iribe's affair was still a well-kept secret, Colette and her lover, Maurice Goudeket, were inadvertently to discover it. (Gabrielle had met Colette at some point in the early twenties. They never became close, but with a number of friends in common, they met on numerous occasions.) At the end of 1931, “strangled by the Depression,” as Colette put it, and in financial straits—“Great God above, things are difficult for Maurice and me”—they were forced to sell their retreat outside Paris.

La Gerbière was a pleasant house surrounded by trees and high up in the village of Montfort-L'Amaury, where the composer Maurice Ravel lived. Gabrielle came down alone from Paris, and made the deal with Maurice Goudeket to buy the house as they walked around the garden. Colette had had no idea her partner was confirming the purchase of their house until it was all over. She then realized that Gabrielle intended bringing Iribe here for their trysts: “a place for billing and cooing,” as Colette put it.