‘“Since you are so attached to them,” Capel said to me, “I’m going to get you to have the clothes you have always worn remade elegantly, by an English tailor.” Everything to do with Rue Cambon stemmed from there.’
But for all the outward success of her designs – and the impeccable surface that she presented to the outside world – inside, something was troubling her. ‘I often fainted,’ she told Haedrich, recalling a day at the racetrack when she had collapsed three times. ‘I had too much emotion, too much excitement, I lived too intensely. My nerves couldn’t stand it. And all at once … I was standing beside a gentleman who had a horse running. Suddenly I had the feeling he was slipping away from me, fast. What a terrible feeling. I fell to the ground, thinking, this is it, it’s all over.’
She did not name the gentleman slipping away from her; but if she did fear the loss of Boy Capel (her lover who was also ‘my brother, my father, my whole family’), it may have contributed to her sense of overwhelming emotion. ‘Several times I’d been brought home unconscious,’ she said to Haedrich. ‘These weren’t any hysterical woman’s swoons. I fell down, my eyes turned black … I was taken for dead.’ Chanel returned to these episodes again and again in her conversations with Haedrich. ‘They talk to me about attacks of nerves,’ she said (without specifying who ‘they’ might be). ‘For two years I couldn’t cross a street or go into a church. So I stopped going to Mass …’ Yet whatever the true cause of her dread and anxiety, she believed that Capel had a miraculous ability to heal her: ‘Boy Capel cured me, with exceptional patience, simply by repeating: “Faint if you want to.” He took me wherever there were people, and said: “I’m here. Nothing can happen to you. Faint while I’m here.”’
But he wasn’t always there; he came and went; he appeared and disappeared. When she worked, she said, her health recovered; and although she never admitted it, the House of Chanel seemed to give her more stability – a sense of where she stood in the world – than she gained from Boy Capel. Hence the story she often told of her distress at discovering that Capel had deposited bank securities as a guarantee for her business and overdrafts, and that the money she believed she was making had not yet repaid her debt. On the evening he told her this, they had been on their way to dinner in Saint-Germain; she immediately insisted that they return to the apartment they now shared in Paris. ‘I felt sick,’ she told Morand. ‘Impossible to eat … We went up to our flat in the Avenue Gabriel. I glanced at the pretty things I had bought with what I thought were my profits. So all that had been paid for by him! I was living off him … I began to hate this well-brought-up man who was paying for me. I threw my handbag straight at his face and I fled.’
She rushed outside, running through a downpour of rain as stormy as her outburst, not knowing where she was going. But Capel ran after her, caught up with her on the corner of Rue Cambon, and took her home to the apartment that he paid for.
The following morning, she told Morand, she went back to Rue Cambon at dawn. ‘“Angèle,” I said to my head seamstress, “I am not here to have fun, or to spend money like water. I am here to make a fortune.”’ A year later, Chanel was earning sufficient money to have no more need of Capel’s financial support, and she rejoiced in her independence. Her clothes looked simple – sleek and fluid, designed to be worn without corsets and with insouciance and she sometimes gave the impression that her success as a designer had come as easily as slipping on a cardigan. It may be that her aesthetic subverted the cliché that appearances can be deceptive (whatever the subterfuges Chanel practised in reshaping her life, the twist she gave to modern fashion was that the line of beauty need not necessarily be misleading). ‘Fashion, like landscape, is a state of mind, by which I mean my own,’ she declared to Morand; but her territory of effortless chic took far more planning and hard-headedness than she let on. The rewards, however, were considerable, for her work, like her clothes, liberated Chanel from other constrictions. ‘I was my own master, and I depended on myself alone,’ she told Morand. ‘Boy Capel was well aware that he didn’t control me: “I thought I’d given you a plaything, I gave you freedom,” he once said to me in a melancholy voice.’
Even so, the House of Chanel still linked them together; for in some unspoken way they had set it up as partners. There was no business contract to bind them together, just as there was no marriage certificate, but it nevertheless joined them, as the double C logo seems to suggest; Chanel and Capel; overlapping, but also facing away from each other.
Something of this capacity for closeness, combined with an ability to turn their back on one another (and others, too), is apparent in the role that both played in the upbringing of André Palasse. Chanel had some support from Capel when she assumed responsibility for her nephew; and although she revealed little about the circumstances of his childhood, she did tell Delay that Capel had called André his son, and that every time the little boy saw a coal barge on the Seine, he would say, ‘Look, that’s ours.’ (Capel had already expanded into coal transportation, as well as mining.) ‘It’s not ours, it’s Boy’s,’ Coco would tell him; and she smiled as she told Delay the answer that André gave her: ‘But he told me you’re going to marry him.’
No marriage transpired, and Coco sent André to boarding school in England, to Beaumont, where Boy had been educated. Here the little boy was taught to speak perfect English, and to behave with British reserve, remaining at a distance from his aunt, who may have been his mother, and from her lover, who called him his son. André’s daughter, also named Gabrielle, was born in 1926, and recalls her childhood with absolute clarity, but learned quickly never to question her father or her great-aunt (whom she still refers to as ‘Auntie Coco’) about anything relating to the family history. Gabrielle accepts with apparent equanimity the circumstances of her father’s childhood, and the possibility that Coco might have been her grandmother rather than her great-aunt. ‘Several people who were close to her were sure that this was true,’ she says, but also acknowledges that she will never know the truth. ‘There were so many things she invented – she invented a fairy tale that had nothing to do with reality – even though she lived her own fairy tale, by making her way from the orphanage in Aubazine to Rue Cambon. But the truth hurt her too much – she preserved herself by hiding the truth – and she found a way of putting aside the things that hurt her.’
While André was cared for in England, Chanel’s business flourished, even in the shadow of the First World War. She had opened her first shop in Deauville in 1913; the following summer, after the outbreak of hostilities, Capel (by then a captain in a British army division in France) suggested that she withdraw from Paris to the safety of the seaside resort. There, according to the story she told Paul Morand, Boy ‘rented a villa for his ponies’. Along with the polo ponies, there were legions of fashionable women who had retreated to Deauville that year, all of whom needed new clothes. Chanel had brought several milliners with her, rather than dressmakers, but soon adapted to the wartime restrictions, and set her employees to work. ‘There was a shortage of material,’ she explained to Morand. ‘I cut jerseys for them from the sweaters the stable lads wore and from the knitted training garments that I wore myself. By the end of the first summer of the war, I had earned two hundred thousand gold francs!’
A less romantic version of the story is that jersey was the only fabric she was able to buy in sufficient quantity from textile manufacturers; but in any case, Chanel rose to the occasion, even as France seemed to fall around her. Royallieu had been taken by the German forces, reclaimed by the French and then turned into a front-line hospital; Antoinette and Adrienne left Paris, along with thousands of other women, and came to join Coco in Deauville. Meanwhile, a letter arrived from her brother, Alphonse, saying that both he and their younger