SITTING IN HER rambling town house on the rue du Faubourg St.-Honoré, with its army of uniformed footmen, maids, and chefs, its grand piano, striking geometric furniture, and haute epoque chairs draped in a fine, beige-colored satin, Coco Chanel had considerable cause to celebrate.1 Queen of Paris couture, supreme architect of the feminine form, artisan of jersey and tweed and rayon, creator of Chanel No. 5 and the “little black dress,” she had overcome the disadvantages of an unfortunate childhood spent deep in the wilderness of rural France. Her admirers naturally wanted to know how she did it—how she had landed on top having started so low down.
Though she would always prove strangely reticent about her past, journalists pried at least this much from the tight-lipped Mademoiselle Chanel:
She was born in 1893 to a poor but upstanding family of traveling merchants. Her mother, a frail woman only thirty-two years of age, contracted pneumonia and died when Coco was a child. Her father, an affable but unreliable drifter, couldn’t own up to the responsibility of raising three young daughters and two sons. He did what any good wanderer would do: He abandoned them and sailed for fortune and freedom in America, leaving his family destitute and at the mercy of private charity.
The boys, Alphonse and Lucien, were packed off to a work farm. Her sisters, Julia and Antoinette, went to live with distant relatives.
And little Coco, all of six years old, was taken in by two aging spinster aunts in Auvergne.
Living “at the farthest corner of that backward province,” young Coco—her real name was Gabrielle—was provided for but not loved.2 Later in life, she told an acquaintance, “My aunts were good people, but absolutely without tenderness.… I got no affection. Children suffer from such things.”
Coco didn’t have many friends—in fact, she didn’t have any. Her afternoons were spent in melancholy play at a long-forgotten cemetery near her aunts’ farmhouse. There, with a bitter autumn wind whistling in the trees, amid the crackling of dead leaves and overgrown weeds, she positioned her rag dolls over the headstones and tried to communicate with all the departed souls. “I told myself that the dead are not dead as long as people think about them,” she later confided to a friend.3
Those bleak country winters would remain etched in her memory. From late fall until early spring, snowdrifts as high as a grown man’s waist blanketed the thick woods in a sea of unending white. Ice crystals clung to the branches of the tall chestnut trees that ringed the town. The house grew cold and dark. Coco stayed mostly indoors. She remembered thinking of herself as a “little prisoner.”4
From the small alcove where she slept, young Coco devoured popular romance novels—especially those by the popular writer Pierre Decourcelle—and allowed her imagination free rein. Lying on her plain cot, with one arm behind her head and the other propping up the latest newspaper serial, she learned to block out the sounds of the old women who gathered each afternoon in her aunts’ kitchen to confer in hushed tones about the financial burdens of raising someone else’s child.
Every year on her birthday, her grandfather sent her five francs. And every year she used a small portion of the money—just one franc—to buy a handful of mint candies at a local market stall. She squirreled the rest away in a piggy bank, until one year her pious aunts forced her to tithe all of her savings at a church charity drive. She never forgot the rage that consumed her. It taught her an early lesson about the distinction between avarice and autonomy.
“I have never been interested in money,” she said of the incident, “but I was concerned with independence.”5
It’s easy to understand why her admirers were spellbound by Coco’s tale of a lonely Auvergne childhood. Hers was a classic story of triumph over adversity.
And almost every word of it was untrue.
Coco Chanel lied about it all. She lied about her aunts, who never existed. She lied about her father, who never went to America. She even lied about her age and hired someone to doctor her birth records at the city hall at Samaur. She was born in 1883—not 1893.
Some of the details of Coco’s fictional childhood were torn directly from the pages of Pierre Decourcelle’s romance novels. She borrowed other story lines from her friends, who either didn’t notice or didn’t care that she was appropriating their memories. Certainly she never pretended to be even remotely forthright about her roots. When a close companion proposed that she consult a psychotherapist, Coco laughed off the suggestion. “I—who never told the truth to my priest?”6
Chanel’s early life—or the little that is known about it—was even lonelier than she chose to remember in public. Her mother succumbed to pneumonia when Coco was twelve years old—not six, as she claimed—and her father abandoned the family shortly thereafter, though not for adventures in America. Coco’s brothers were sent off to a work farm; she and her two sisters went to live at a church-run orphanage at Auberzine, a grim, densely wooded backcountry town that lay on high terrain above the Corrèze River.
The orphanage was a converted twelfth-century monastery bounded by towering stone walls that kept out the sun. Coco and the other girls wore identical black skirts and white blouses, lived in unadorned rooms with black-painted doors and whitewashed walls, and spent six days a week learning practical homemaking skills like sewing and needlepoint. What little academic work they accomplished was taught by rote: the kings and departments of France, the alphabet, the multiplication tables.
In later years, Coco never acknowledged this part of her life. In nineteenth-century France, poverty and orphanhood were marks of shame. Anything—anything—was better than admitting she had been penniless and unwanted. Even a made-up story about two spinster aunts.
As it stood, her only solace came during school vacations, when the Chanel sisters went to stay with relatives in a small town just outside the provincial capital of Moulins, where her grandparents still lived. Her female relatives taught Coco how to sew with more skill and flourish than the nuns at the orphanage were able to demonstrate. It was probably during these cherished escapes that she discovered Pierre Decourcelle’s novels, whose plotlines and characters she blended effortlessly into her own life story.
When Coco turned eighteen, she left the orphanage. “Nobody can live with low horizons,” she later said. “A narrow outlook will choke you. All I had when I left my Auvergne”—she stuck tenaciously to her story about the spinster aunts—“was a summer dress in glossy, wiry black woolen fabric with cotton wrap and for winter a suit in Scottish tweed and a sheepskin, but my mind was full of fabulations.”7
After a brief stay at the Notre Dame boarding school in Moulins, where she was admitted as a charity case, Coco took a job as shopgirl with a local milliner. On weekends, she picked up extra money by working for a tailor. It was there on a slow Sunday morning that a rich playboy walked in and asked for a last-minute alteration on his riding suit. He changed Coco’s life.
Whoever invented the term prodigal son might well have had Etienne Balsan in mind. The youngest heir of a wealthy textile baron, he spent his teenage years at a posh boarding school in England, where he developed all the affectations associated with the Edwardian gentry, including a lifelong adoration of horse breeding. Balsan’s parents died when he was eighteen, leaving him a vast fortune and little incentive to work. Instead, he raced Thoroughbreds. All day. All week. All the time.
Etienne bought a sprawling twelfth-century castle called Royallieu, where he kept dozens of horses and staged lavish parties and outings for his old friends from the cavalry, many of whom spent weeks on end at the pleasure and hospitality of their rich, twenty-four-year-old host.
As if his retreat from the family business weren’t adequate cause for offense, Etienne scandalized his older brothers by keeping a well-known courtesan, Emilienne d’Alençon, at his grand chalet.
The crowd of men and women that Etienne gathered around him at Royallieu was unusual—sons of wealthy industrialists who shirked their family callings in favor of fast horses and expensive wine; famous Parisian courtesans; daughters of the rising bourgeoisie who rejected their parents’ manners and morals; Oxbridge graduates who fled England and empire for the more permissive atmosphere of prewar France.
They all gravitated to Etienne. And Coco fit in with ease. She was twenty-one years old when she went to live at Royallieu, though she would later claim to have been sixteen. Tall, long necked, and angular, with dark olive skin and pitch black eyes that shone flecks of gold when the light touched her face at just the right angle, Coco was no ordinary beauty. But she was striking in her own fashion. If it bothered her that Etienne already had a mistress, she never complained. In turn, Emilienne welcomed Coco to the fray and helped her make the leap from a childhood of minimal comfort to the lifestyle of the landed elite.
Coco was unaccustomed to the art of high living, but she was a discerning student. On one of her first trips to Paris with Etienne, from their lavish suite at the Hotel Ritz, Coco discreetly ordered several dozen oysters to the room. She had never so much as tasted one but knew she would have to develop a liking for—or at least a tolerance of—the cold, slimy delicacy that was featured so prominently at many of the Royallieu dinner parties.
“I invited the chambermaid to share them with me.”8 Coco laughed. “She didn’t want any. I told her: ‘make an effort. You’re young, you’re pretty, one day perhaps you’ll have to eat oysters.’ ”
Coco’s role at Royallieu defied classification. Along with Emilienne, she was one of Etienne’s resident mistresses. This much was certain. But she was less a coquette than a resident personality, and she soon became part of the maverick culture that Balsan endeavored to establish at his refuge for wayward gentlemen. “She would lie in bed until noon, drinking coffee and milk and reading cheap novels,” he recalled.9 But she was ready in a flash to join the men in the most unfeminine of amusements.
Leaving the bustles and crinolines and lace and feathers to Emilienne, Coco opted instead for jodhpurs, men’s collars and ties, pigtails, and bowler hats. She raced Thoroughbreds with the boys, attended the races decked out boldly in masculine attire, trudged through the mud in her high riding boots, and galloped astride her horse without the slightest care when the mire and manure splattered and caked on her pants.
She even studied breeding and training with the jockeys.
“I just didn’t know anything,” she once admitted.10 “I understood in the broadest sense, but I had to teach myself. The boys with whom I was living didn’t want me to change. They played with me, and had a great time. They had found a person who was straightforward. They were wealthy men who had no idea who this girl was who came into their lives.”
It was fun for a while, but Coco knew there was a limit to how long she could act as part-time mistress to Etienne Balsan and part-time play pal to his friends. Almost by accident, she discovered that she had a talent that was begging to be cashed in. Whether out of boredom or pent-up creativity, she began decorating simple straw and felt hats that she bought on the cheap at Galeries Lafayette in Paris. Her unusual designs caught the notice of other women who attended the horse races at Longchamps, especially after a well-known stage actress began sporting them around the countryside. Soon enough, the wives and mistresses of the racing set were beseeching her to custom-design headpieces to complement their afternoon attire.
Coco had an exit strategy.
But Etienne wouldn’t hear of it. When she asked for a loan to fund her own millinery shop, he brushed off the idea and reminded her that she knew nothing about running a business.
So Coco continued to bide her time.
Then she met Boy Capel. It was 1907, and Coco was twenty-four years old.
Arthur “Boy” Capel was Etienne’s close friend and opposite in every possible way. An Englishman of modest wealth and impeccable style, he could match the Thoroughbred set on horseback and vanquish them on the polo grounds without so much as breaking a sweat. His French was near perfect, his woolen suits were perfect, and unlike Etienne, he didn’t think it was a crime to work. He planned to multiply his wealth rather than spend it.
Coco and Etienne met up with Boy Capel in Pau, where all three were vacationing at a thirteenth-century château that overlooked the vast, snow-capped Pyrenees mountains. There were extravagant dinners, stallions and Arabian horses for racing, and bloodhounds for foxhunting.
Etienne was so consumed by the local equestrian splendors that he scarcely noticed when Boy and Coco started lingering by candlelight each night in the mirror-lined manor hall. There, sipping from generous tumblers of pale red cognac, and by daylight, when they took long rides through the lush meadows encircling the château, they found a spark that neither could have expected. It didn’t hurt matters at all that Capel endorsed Coco’s plans to open a millinery shop. He was the first person in her life who took her seriously.
Boy Capel returned to Paris at the end of the week, and Coco went with him.
“Forgive me,” she wrote to Etienne, “but I love him.”11
Coco had been ready to make the break for some time. “I had just spent two years in Compiègne, riding horses,” she said—actually more like four years, but when it came to Coco, who was counting?—“[and] I couldn’t earn a livelihood with that. And, now that I loved someone else, I had to move to Paris.”
Had theirs been a conventional story, Coco and Boy would have ridden off into the night, severing all ties to Etienne Balsan. But these weren’t conventional people. Balsan’s ego was probably bruised, but he tried not to let on. “Like every good Frenchman,” Coco later remarked, “like all men in general, Etienne Balsan began to love me again because I’d left him for someone else.”
The year 1908 found Coco living with Boy Capel at his apartment on rue Gabriel—and sometimes in a furnished suite at the Hotel Ritz—and running her upstart millinery out of Etienne’s apartment on the boulevard Malesherbes, an elegant, tree-lined thoroughfare bordered by expensive shops, banking houses, and private apartment buildings. With both men now invested in Coco’s success—Etienne had put up the real estate, and Boy had lent her starting capital—the three friends became almost inseparable. “I was just a kid,” she later explained.12 “I had no money. I lived at the Ritz and everything was paid for me. It was an incredible situation. Parisian society talked about it. I didn’t know Parisian society. I still didn’t know anybody.”
But her objective was independence. “It was very complicated,” she admitted.13 “The cocettes were paid. I knew that, I’d been taught that. I said to myself, ‘Are you going to become like them? A kept woman? But this is appalling!’ I didn’t want it.” Etienne and Boy agreed. “You have no idea how amusing it was,” Coco recalled with a smile, “that three-sided discussion that started up fresh every day.”
Coco didn’t have to wait long for success to beckon. Headquartered just blocks from the Greek Revival columns of the Madeleine, Chanel found that her quirky style might be out of pace with old Paris, but it was right in step with the modernist sensibility that was taking hold among the fashion-conscious New Women of France, England, and America. Within months, the business was booming.
It was the beginning of the House of Chanel.
Years later, when asked how she emerged from obscurity to become the world’s most important designer of women’s clothes, Chanel said it was simple.
“Two gentlemen were outbidding each other over my hot little body.”14