Women run to extremes; they are either better or worse than men.
La Bruyère
IT’S AN OVERCAST DAY as I stroll along rue de Castiglione towards Place Vendôme in the 1st arrondissement. Here, say all the guidebooks, I will confront one of the masterpieces of Paris. And last time I saw Place Vendôme I adopted the official line: it was stunning, beautiful, god, of course! a masterpiece. Dazzled by Paris, in awe of its grand monuments, it never occurred to me that any alternative opinion was possible.
Rachel changed all that over breakfast this morning. Face obscured behind the International Herald Tribune, coffee cup moving expertly from table to mouth, she scanned the latest United States political news while I looked at notes and guidebooks and planned my day which included, I added aloud, a visit to Place Vendôme and the Hôtel Ritz. As she turned the page and re-crossed her legs I suddenly heard Rachel’s voice above the crackle, ‘Always thought Place Vendôme was ugly.’ She raised her right hand, short dark nails clashing dramatically with her Cartier tank ring, a plain gold band crested by a square golden citrine. ‘That’s why I bought this in Cartier’s Left Bank store instead.’ Still engrossed in American politics, she doesn’t notice my astonishment at her casual heresy.
Now, as I turn from rue de Castiglione into Place Vendôme, I experience this place as if for the first time. The first thing I notice is the temperature. It starts to drop. Everything seems cold – from the blue-grey buildings set in a massive octagon, to the black unyielding asphalt which covers the huge central square. The sky itself seems lower here, a watery grey sponge pressing the slate rooftops. Squeezed up through the middle of Place Vendôme is the greenish, rusty Vendôme column: now I see that this long thin spire lacks the necessary scale and power to dominate the space.
Place Vendôme is where cold hard cash meets the beautiful things that money can buy. JP Morgan and the Banque National de Paris nestle against Cartier, Bulgari, Boucheron, Armani and Chanel. It’s all very impressive, as it should be, for this square was built to impress. Here is the Roi Soleil’s absolute authority embodied in architecture: magnificent, orderly and harmonious. Instead of whole buildings, the architect simply designed uniform facades, giving Place Vendôme the atmosphere of a stage-set, a theater for the display of wealth and power. From an aerial view it would be exactly the same shape as a square-cut diamond – and on the ground it has the same bright cold hardness.
There are no cafés here, no garden benches, no perches to prop against and no little nooks from which to stare or daydream. So I do what all the tourists do: I crawl around the edge of Place Vendôme, looking in shop windows. I walk past the Gianmaria Buccellatti jewels and Giorgio Armani suits and Mikimoto pearls and Patek Philippe watches. Like everyone else I am reduced to making clownish ooh-aah faces as I press my face against the glass windows. A perfect suit, a string of matchless pearls, ooh, aah. My face blanches in the cold bluish reflection of diamonds.
Now I arrive at number 12, opposite the Ritz, where Chaumet jewelers displays a single magnificent necklace of rubies, pearls and diamonds. The collar rests insolently upon its velvet bed. On my reflected face I see conflicting emotions. There’s admiration and awe, certainly. There’s also uneasiness at the blatant excess of the gesture.
Next to the shop is an elaborate entrance to the apartments above. In October 1849 Europe’s most adored Romantic composer, Frédéric Chopin, lay dying up there, in the exquisite gold and white salon of a financier’s borrowed apartment. At only thirty-nine years old, he was dying, some said, of a broken heart, and all due to the woman who had been his companion for ten years, who had dumped him two years earlier by what his friend, the artist Eugène Delacroix, called an inhuman letter. That woman was, of course, George Sand.
A bevy of Poles and artists and society ladies walked through these heavy iron doors and climbed these curved stairs to pay homage to Chopin. An opera singer sang for him. Eugène Delacroix gently talked to him. Fashionable women flocked for the privilege and social cachet of sobbing quietly at their idol’s side. Chopin, conscious and unconscious by turns, lay lightly on his death-bed. He moaned and prayed and slept and whispered. The society ladies’ sobs turned to recriminations when Chopin murmured, weakly, She said to me that I would die in no arms but hers … before expiring. His love affair with George Sand had been the major relationship of Chopin’s life.
You will still find Poles who have not forgiven George Sand for Chopin’s early death. An old friend of Chopin’s, Count Wojciech Grzymała, who knew them both well, attributed Chopin’s demise directly to George Sand: If he had not had the misfortune of meeting GS, who poisoned his whole being, he would have lived to be Cherubini’s age [that is, 82].
George Sand was well aware of the criticisms directed against her. She wrote a novel and memoir about her relationship with Chopin, portraying him as an immature and jealous child. People were amazed by her self-assurance: The conversation this evening at the Princess’s [Princess Mathilde], turned to Mme Sand. We discussed the question of Mme Sand’s love affairs and everybody agreed that she had a very unfeminine nature, with basic coldness which allowed her to write about her lovers when practically in bed with them.
George Sand’s longest relationship was with a humble engraver, who was, she said, as faithful as a dog. After fifteen years of loyal service and love, Manceau died in her arms in 1865. The playwright Alexandre Dumas went to visit George Sand. With the dead man still awaiting burial, he asked her how she felt. I feel, she answered, like having a bath, going for a walk in the woods and going to the theater this evening. Dumas recounted this tale to the Goncourt brothers, concluding that Madame Sand was a monster unconscious of her depravity, her egoism, her good-natured cruelty.
As I continue around Place Vendôme the somber beat of Chopin’s funeral march fills my head. But quite different tunes suggest themselves when I arrive at the Chanel boutique – some hot Sidney Bechet jazz, perhaps, or the jangly sparkle of Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps.
In 1929, Coco Chanel had made it. She had become the most influential person in fashion. She had showed women how to strip off their heavy satins and corsets, chop off their hair and move their bodies in the sunshine until they turned slender and golden. Then she put them into the lightest, easiest, softest clothes. By day they wore lithe jersey dresses or little suits; it was all short, sexy and free. By night they wore little black dresses with delicate beading and floating tiers and strings of translucent pearls.
One of Coco Chanel’s lovers was the Duke of Westminster, the richest man in England, friend to the Prince of Wales and the Churchills. He wooed her with jewels hidden in posies of daisies. Chanel loved magnificent jewels and she bought many herself, but she was the first woman to openly mix real and costume jewelry. Though a peasant by birth, she had a kind of aristocratic hauteur about her. The point of jewelry, she said disdainfully, is not to make women look rich, but to adorn them, which is not the same thing.
Once the Duke of Westminster was unfaithful to Coco. Aboard his enormous yacht, cruising the Mediterranean in luxury, he gave her a priceless pearl rope in apology. She looked him in the eye as she held the pearls over the deck-rail of the yacht and deliberately allowed them to slip through her fingers into the sea. Did he ask her to marry him? If he did, Coco later denied that she gave him this magnificent response: Everyone marries the Duke of West-minster. There are a lot of duchesses but only one Coco Chanel.
On my circuit around the Place I now approach the Ritz. When César Ritz set about designing his new hotel in 1897 at the height of Paris’s belle époque, he specifically planned it as a place to flatter women, to emphasize their softness, their pliability. The sweeping staircase was designed to show off the shapely curves of women making an entrance. Pink silk lampshades ensured the light would be flattering to smooth society complexions. Little hooks for handbags were situated under the custom-made restaurant chairs – they are still there today. Modern, well-lit bathrooms encouraged attention to personal hygiene.
Monsieur Ritz cultivated the delicious fiction of feminine sweetness and clean docility. It was a story only a man could have believed.
So here I am in the front bar of the Hôtel Ritz, looking out on the famous courtyard, sipping a glass of champagne, surrounded by glamorous ghosts.
Here’s Coco Chanel. Her spindly frame glides past me and up the stairs to her suite on the rue Cambon side of the hotel. It’s 1971, a very cold and quiet Sunday afternoon in the Christmas holiday season. She enters her suite where a fire glows and her maid, Jeanne, hovers. Coco is tired. Since bursting out of retirement in 1954, she has worked relentlessly. When she closed up her shop at the beginning of World War Two, Coco assumed her career was over. She believed that her elegant, simple clothes had permanently transformed fashion – that she had accomplished her life’s mission.
But in 1947, a bald, rotund, retiring gay man named Christian Dior released his first collection – an unashamed hommage to belle époque glamor – including wasp-waists, ankle-length skirts with yards of fabric, stiletto heels and, most extraordinary of all, the return of the corset. These absurdly beautiful, impractical and feminine clothes immediately captured the war-torn and glamor-deprived hearts of fashionable women everywhere.
Chanel was horrified. She, who had meticulously crafted clothes on female bodies, was now being eclipsed by a little man who drew sketches in his bathtub. She fumed as she pored over the fashion magazines. Ah no! she shouted furiously, definitely no, men were not meant to dress women! There was only one thing to be done. Chanel would have to come back and fight the fight anew. Once I helped liberate women, I’ll do it again, she declared.
The Americans were the first to come back to Chanel. A new generation of women was becoming liberated. They wanted clothes in which to live, work and be active. Season after season they snapped up the new Chanel classics, suits and dresses of immaculate simplicity.
Now, on this winter’s afternoon, Coco is in the final stages of preparation for the Fall collections, to be shown on February 5. Her motto has always been: There’s a time for work and a time for love. That leaves no other time … For Mademoiselle Chanel, the time for love has long passed, but the work has never let her down. Now, suddenly, even the work seems an unbearable burden.
Coco slips off her shoes and lies on the bed. She turns her head to look at a small icon given to her many years ago by one of her lovers, Igor Stravinsky. Suddenly Coco cries out hoarsely, I’m suffocating! Jeanne runs to help her, but for Coco, death is already on its way. With typical candor Coco faces her situation. So this is how you die, she says. These are her last words.
Now it’s another winter’s day, this time in February 1997. American Ambassador Pamela Harriman has swept into the hotel. This seventy-six-year-old in her power suit and gold jewelry, her body toned by exercise, her face lifted by discreet surgery, is still beautiful. She descends to the Ritz spa, a peach-colored haven complete with Roman-style frescoes and mosaics. In the soft light she lowers herself into the pool, carefully holding her radiant golden head above the water.
There was a time when Pamela Harriman came to the Ritz as a kept woman, a paid-up courtesan who catered to powerful men. These were vulnerable times, finally and wonderfully erased by a lucrative third marriage. Now she is a wealthy widow of substance. She has the grateful ear of President Clinton and the open admiration of President Chirac. The nasty lawsuit brought by her step-children finally appears to have been resolved by negotiation. And when she retires at the end of the year, she will move to her new apartment on the rue de Varenne, where, as an elegant older woman, her cosmopolitan Parisian friends will warmly welcome her.
But, all at once, as she raises and lowers her arms in the water, she feels dizzy. She slowly climbs out of the pool, and abruptly staggers and falls to the ground. Suddenly helpless, to her own surprise the fear overtakes her and she weeps. The hotel staff surround and comfort her; they call her assistant and an ambulance. Ambassador Harriman is having a massive stroke and will die that evening in hospital.
It’s still 1997, a fateful year for the Ritz, but now the seasons have shifted again and it’s late summer. Diana, Princess of Wales, is eating a meal in the famous dining room with her lover, Dodi Fayed. At thirty-six years old, tanned and toned, dressed simply in a dark jacket and white pants, she is beautiful. She looks like a model, but she is actually a social revolutionary. She has rejected the throne of England and has set up an alternative court – a court of public opinion – in which she plans to rule as the Queen of Hearts. After their meal, Dodi and Diana slip out the rue Cambon entrance to avoid the paparazzi. A massive car accident, less than a mile away, kills Dodi immediately; Diana dies on her way to hospital.
Sitting here in the Ritz Bar, I think of the will and determination of each of these women. Coco Chanel bursting out of retirement to save her legacy of fashion liberation. Pamela Harriman transforming herself from courtesan to Ambassador. Diana evolving from self-conscious teenager to Queen of Hearts.
And here in the Ritz each of these women spent her last waking hours. Not one of them was nice, particularly, or even good. But they were fighters, all three of them. And Paris was where they won their greatest victories.
I raise my champagne glass in silent salute. And the honeyed perfume of Chanel No. 5 rises up around me like incense.
Later I walk through heavy glass doors and along the hotel’s elongated corridors. It’s quiet and discreet but you can smell the money, and the power behind it. And I recall the times I made my way through Australia’s own corridors of power. I would accompany the Deputy Prime Minister to meetings in Parliament House. He was a big man, with a long and anxious stride. We were always in a hurry. My heels clacked unevenly on the parquet floor as I shifted the papers and pen and mobile phone in my hands. The Minister striding in front, his adviser – hurried, deferential – behind.
But here’s the crazy thing. Whenever we reached a set of heavy Parliamentary glass doors, the Minister would pull up abruptly, swing open the doors and stand chivalrously to one side as his female staff member, mortified, head down, hurried through. Then I would jump to one side so that my powerful boss could resume his long march through the House. And once again I would take up my proper place and scurry behind. We formed an antiquated double helix of power, the boss–servant relationship and the male–female one.
Wherever we were going, we almost always arrived early. One time we arrived in a sunny conference room well ahead of a Korean trade delegation. The Deputy Prime Minister was in an expansive mood. He had been meeting with a former colleague – a former premier married to a beautiful and dynamic younger wife – and relationships were on his mind.
‘There’s a lot of blokes who marry very young women the second time around,’ he said. ‘Gee, that’s a lot of work. A bloke gets older and he just wants to relax.’
‘But, what?’ I prompted.
‘But the young wives, they don’t want their husbands to slow down. They think they’ll turn into old men.’
‘So what happens?’
‘The old bloke gets bullied by his wife into taking up appointments and running inquiries and going on boards. The women get the whip out.’
I formed a rapid mental image of some old political warhorse reclining peacefully on his sunny garden deckchair, the newspaper rising and falling on his slumbering face. And then a blonde with taut features rushes out the kitchen door to lash him back into public life.
‘But surely these men could just say no?’ I suggested.
The Deputy Prime Minister looked incredulous. ‘Oh no they couldn’t,’ he said.
It’s dusk as I emerge onto Place Vendôme, and the whole world has changed. The sky is an intense, deep blue. The sun has disappeared, but the moon and stars are not yet out. It’s l’heure bleue. Suspended between day and night, the Place Vendôme takes on a different aspect. Its formal perfection reveals itself under the low, deep square of sky. The blue hue of the buildings deepens as the first lamps illuminate the square. I begin to understand its beauty.
Here, each day between 1878 and 1894 a woman would emerge from number 26 to take a turn in the evening air. She was draped and swathed in black veils so that no one could see her face. But everyone knew who she was: Madame La Castiglione, one-time femme fatale, mistress to Napoleon III and well-known narcissist, who asked photographers to produce no less than 434 portraits in tribute to her beauty. Unable to bear the demise of her looks, unable to cope with the inevitable ravages of time, she lived reclusively in her apartment in semi-darkness; the walls were painted black and mirrors were banned. Three locked doors barred the entrance. La Castiglione had defined herself by her feminine beauty alone, and when it died, then somehow her will to live died as well. She didn’t have what it took to reinvent herself: she just gave up.
I leave the Place Vendôme. Ugly? Beautiful? I really don’t know. But I feel its power.