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