Coco Chanel sat at her desk, fuming. Her black-rimmed spectacles had fallen down her nose, giving her an owlish look, and her left hand twirled a strand of huge, obviously fake pearls. Underneath the layers of fake pearls were the real ones, the ones that Duke Dmitri had given her. She liked to do that, mix real with the fake. Just like life, she told herself. Just like men.
There was a knock on the closed door. “Yes?” Coco quickly removed her glasses. She avoided, as much as possible, being seen in them. The very thick lenses magnified the lines under her eyes. She sat up straighter, stiffening her spine. Like all children who had grown up cowed by too much adult authority, who had spent as much time as possible huddled over a book to escape into other worlds, her spine rounded when she was relaxed. “Come in.”
The salon manager, a tall, stern woman not easily frightened, hence her ability to work with the famously difficult Coco Chanel, came in.
“Telephone call in the other office,” she said. “Lady Mendl wants to make sure you received your invitation.”
“Elsie knows I did. She’s just nagging. Let her worry a bit. It’s good for business. Tell her I can’t come to the phone, I’m in a fitting with . . .” Coco paused. Better make this one good. “Just say ‘the princess.’ Make her guess.”
“Very well, Mademoiselle.” The door closed again.
In fact, the princess she had in mind, but hadn’t named, hadn’t been in this week, or even this month. She’d been to that Italian woman’s salon, though. She’d defected, just like some of the other customers. Business was still excellent. Mademoiselle was one of the richest women in the world, a household name, a purveyor not just of clothes but of lifestyles, of dreams, the modern woman, slender, free, athletic, independent. Coco Chanel had brought women into the twentieth century, liberating them from corsets and double standards. Me, she thought. I did that. And more.
But now that Italian arrivista was turning women into clowns. Dresses with silly buttons as big as tennis balls, flopping feathers all over the place, trains three yards long, animal embroideries and sequins like circus performer costumes. A coat made of braided copper. Must weigh a hundred pounds. Who could wear it? A hat shaped like a shoe . . . just a joke, of course. But that other hat, that frightful thing she called the madcap that sold in the thousands . . . a knit tube pulled over the head with the points sticking up. Even the heiress Daisy Fellowes had the nerve to wear one into the Chanel salon!
It will not do, Coco told herself. Not at all. Lately, she had just begun to recover her equilibrium, had managed to convince herself that Schiaparelli was a fad good only for a few seasons, and then Ania had pulled that stunt.
“Must go,” she had said, standing so quickly she had dropped the note that had been brought to her a moment before, the message from a telephone call placed through to the boutique downstairs. Ania had raced out without looking at a single dress, without placing a single order. When no one was looking, Coco had bent to retrieve the note. Meeting at Schiaparelli, not Chanel, it had said.
The Italian woman, again.
One or two dresses didn’t matter. Coco could have retired and still earned more money from her perfume, Chanel No. 5, than most people earned in several lifetimes. But Ania mattered. She was a certain type of customer, one of those beauties who turned heads everywhere she went, and she went everywhere. All men wanted her. All women wished they could look like her. If she began wearing Schiaparelli, then others would as well. It was a question of reputation, of fame. And this would not do.
The knock on the door, again. This time Coco did not bother to remove her glasses. It wasn’t as if her assistant hadn’t seen her in them thousands of times. “Yes? Now what?”
“Lady Mendl insists on speaking with you.”
“Tell her I’ll ring her later. I’m busy.”
Alone again, Coco fidgeted with the statuette on her desk, a little male figure by Arno Breker, Hitler’s favorite sculptor. The figure was Apollonian in its neoclassical homage to the male form. Her friend Salvador Dalí, when he had seen it, had fallen to the floor in a faked fit. He had wanted to paint it lime green and pound nails into it, not because he had strong opinions about German politics but because he hated, absolutely hated, neoclassicism.
Dalí was good-looking in that darkly Spanish way but too strange to be considered as a bedfellow. Besides, did he even bed women? He was married, but that meant little.
Coco’s heavy, straight eyebrows moved closer together in a frown. How long since she’d been in love, really in love? Yes, there were lovers. Playthings, really. And former lovers, now old friends, who still shared her bed occasionally.
The day felt sad, and when she thought of her bedroom, all those nights alone, it felt sadder yet. None of her lovers had measured up to Boy Capel, the first of the great ones. He’d been the most handsome, most generous, most understanding. He’d gotten her started in business, and his beautiful English blazers had helped her create the Chanel Look. How she’d loved rummaging through his wardrobe, the crisp shirts and pleated trousers, silk ties by the dozen, the riding coats and boots, all bespoke, all perfect down to the last detail.
She’d never really recovered from his death, twenty years ago. Two decades? Not possible. It felt like yesterday; there was still that knife twisting in her gut whenever she thought of it. He’d died in a motorcycle accident, on his way to rendezvous with her for a Christmas holiday.
And then Paul Iribe, the artist who had used her face for so many beautiful illustrations, the second of her great loves, had died three years ago. Again, suddenly, playing tennis at her house in the south, La Pausa. She loved exercise, riding and swimming and tennis, but every time she held a tennis racket she saw him again, crumpling to the ground. So much death. It stalked her, had done since she was eleven and her mother had died, poor and abandoned by her husband. One night, in the tiny rented attic room where she had slept with her mother and sister, Coco—she was still Gabrielle then—had listened to her mother’s rasping, asthmatic breath grow slower, lighter, then cease completely.
Too long ago, Coco told herself now, going to her mirror to apply fresh lipstick. Why think about that now? She saw herself looking back at her, lips red and glistening, eyes large, dark.
She hadn’t been in love since Iribe’s death. Plenty of sex, plenty of parties. But she’d always felt alone, not just after but during, as well, when the silk sheets were still being tousled and twisted, when the champagne corks were still popping, she’d been alone. And it made her feel old.
No, this will not do. She stood and straightened her skirt, pulled back her shoulders, and went to the door.
“Charlotte!” she shouted for one of her assistants. “Get Lady Mendl on the phone. Tell her I’m free to speak now. I want to ask her something.”
Would Baron Hans Günther von Dincklage be there tonight? They’d met at several dinner parties but talked only briefly. Like Boy Capel, he was a man of extraordinary male beauty and culture. At the races at Longchamp she’d felt his eyes on her and grown warm, sensing his desire. She hadn’t encouraged him. Hadn’t let their eyes meet and linger, hadn’t touched his hand when accepting a cigarette from him, hadn’t stood a fraction of an inch closer to him than other people at the cocktail party.
She knew instinctively he was not a man to toy with, not a lover who’d expect only a weekend with her. If she took him on, it would mean something. If he took her on. What if . . . She could still have her choice of lovers, boys and men, and women as well, when the mood struck. But she had arrived at an age when she no longer took her power to attract, to hold, for granted.
He was younger. He was powerful and important in the Abwehr, German intelligence. Could she still hold a man like that, a man who could have his pick of the beauties of Paris?
She’d find out. She felt the old energy flowing through her, the electricity of desire for both the trophy and the fight leading to it. Today, she’d leave her office a little earlier than usual, go to her Hotel Ritz suite and take a long bath, dress carefully, make sure her maquillage was perfect.
Tonight.
“No dinners out for me next semester,” Charlie pretended to grumble when we were back on the street. “Though I admit the dress suits you. Schiaparelli, hey? A good designer, I think.”
“And what do you know about designers and clothes?” Ania teased.
“Only how you look in them.” His eyes devoured her. “I like those new things.”
“And you don’t like my old things?” Ania pretended to pout, forcing her mouth into a sulk, but her eyes sparkled with amusement.
“I think I like these better. You look happier in them.”
“Then tonight I will wear the new sequined satin. For you. I will buy all Elsa Schiaparelli.”
“How did an Italian woman come to be named Elsa?” I asked, reminding them I was there.
“Her parents wanted a son so much that when she was born they let the nurse name her.” Ania stared into Charlie’s baby blues and leaned toward him. “Or that’s the story she tells. Who knows?”
Her uniformed chauffeur appeared from around the corner, checking his watch and throwing a half-smoked cigarette to the curb. He walked with authority, not subservience. He works for the husband, not the wife, I thought. Charlie and Ania jumped a guilty arm’s length away from each other. The chauffeur opened the passenger door of the roadster. “See you tonight?” Ania asked Charlie, her voice light, almost cold.
“Why not.” He gave her a quick kiss on the cheek, and I understood that this aloofness, this public nonchalance, was a performance. After Ania had gotten into the automobile and the chauffeur had pulled away from the curb and into traffic, Charlie took my arm and we went to the corner to hail a cab.
“Where did you meet her?” I asked.
“Here, in Paris. After your accident, when you were in the hospital . . .”
“And Allen was dead,” I said.
“. . . and Allen was dead, when you didn’t want to see anybody, I thought I’d spend some time here, closer to you than if I’d been in New York. Just in case. I spent the summer studying at the Sorbonne Medical College. Brushing up on my French and anatomy at the same time. And one day I saw Ania in the park, this beautiful woman who just took my breath away. We talked. One thing led to another. And when I went back to New York, she just stayed on my mind. So I came back this summer, looking for her. And I found her. Same park.”
“Thank you for staying close, even though I didn’t know it. And for the dress, Charlie.”
“So I don’t eat for weeks and can’t afford books next semester. Think nothing of it. Schiaparelli did give us an awfully good discount, though. Ania has that effect on people.” A cab pulled up, and we climbed in.
“Schiaparelli’s daughter was a student at the school,” I said.
“That explains the hat she gave you.” He gave the driver my hotel address.
In the taxi, he put his arm around my shoulder again. “You’ve had a tough time of it,” he said. “I’m glad you came. Let’s see if we can get you smiling again. I’ve really missed you, Lily. Life has missed you. You disappeared. Come back. It’s time.”
My room was the cheapest the hotel had, with a cot-sized bed, a straight-backed chair, a three-drawer dresser, and a torn silk screen with a washing basin behind it. It was on the fourth floor under the eaves, and I could barely stand up straight in it. But the window faced east. I would see the sun rising over the red rooftops of the Left Bank.
I unpacked, hanging up the few clothes I had brought, placing my hairbrush on the washstand and Allen’s photo on the little table next to the bed.
On the rue des Beaux Arts, below me, women swept their stoops, the Latin Quarter students rushed by, and children in their blue school uniforms bounced balls, played tag. If I leaned out the window, I could see Notre Dame and its stained-glass rose window sparkling with all the colors of the saints.
There was so much color. The red striped awning of the patisserie, the window boxes of pink geraniums and green ferns, the pinks and yellows of women’s summer frocks, the dusty charcoal of men’s berets. I fell asleep to the rusty rhythm of the creaking bedsprings, drifting in and out of all the colors like a bee sipping nectar.
I woke up once, startled by a clattering in the street, the sound of a screaming child, a mother shushing him. Only half-awake, I thought I was in the hospital again, screaming for Allen, that the scream had been my own; I imagined I felt the plaster cast on my broken leg, the bandages on my burnt left hand.
The environment of illness, those austere white rooms, is like a colorless desert, barren and overheated, a place where people tiptoe through the drying concrete of guilt and grief, where voices are never raised. In the hospital, to negate all that whiteness, I dreamed in vivid colors, all the shades of blue and red and yellow, swirling in and out and around one another, turning into every other color and then separating again.
Blue. The color of sickness, of doom, the color of both air and water, day and night. When I was bed-bound, if I concentrated hard enough, I could stare at the white nurses’ uniforms, and they would turn blue and I would feel alive with that simple act of creation and then memory would turn everything white once again. I would force myself to remember the secret of the primary colors, that they cannot be obtained by admixtures.
Blue, red, and yellow cannot be faked or forced. They are for themselves, of themselves. Variable, like moods, yet always themselves. Perfect. Allen had been the human equivalent of a primary color.
When I woke up hours later in my hotel room I reached across the bed, to Allen, my hand seeking the familiar comfort of his shoulder, his back. Panic seized me when I remembered where I was and that I was alone. Death is a fact that is only slowly assimilated. There were still three or four moments of every day when I forgot, and therefore had to realize all over again, that Allen was dead. Waking up was one of them.
A moment later there was a knocking at the door and the porter called through the keyhole.
“Box for you, Madame.”
Schiaparelli had kept her word. I opened the box reluctantly and folded back layers of tissue. Even in the box, the dress looked beautiful. What a waste. I’d probably wear it only once. I splashed water from the basin on my face and hands, dropped the gown over my head, and combed back my hair, all without glancing in the cracked mirror over the washstand.
Then I turned and looked at myself. The dress fit perfectly, the white chiffon hem fluttering around my calves, the red printed roses enclosing my shoulders and throat like a picture frame. The roses on the white chiffon gave a hint of pink to my olive skin. The neckline showed off my shoulders, my throat. I wished Allen were there, to see me.
“Swell,” Charlie said when I met him later in the hotel lobby.
“I thought it needed to be magnificent,” I teased him.
“Close enough.
“How long are you staying, by the way? I may have to go into training to fight off the wolves.” Charlie put up his fists and made a jab at an invisible opponent.
“Not funny,” I said. “I’m not interested in wolves, or even nice men.”
“Eventually, Lily, you have to let yourself recover. You have to start again.”
“I’m staying a week.”
“Is that all? I’ll be here till the end of the month. I was hoping you might stay longer. I would like you to stay longer. Please?”
“I get it. You want me to pose as a chaperone for you and your girl.”
“It would help. We could spend more time together and there’d be less talk. And I’d like you to get to know her. Think about it. I mean, what are you going back to?”
Charlie pulled my arm through his and out we went, into the pale June twilight. He was dressed in le smoking, all black and white with a red carnation in his buttonhole, his top hat tilted at a stylish angle, and passersby stared at him, that beautiful young man in evening dress.
“You look like you need time away from that school,” he said. “I’ll never understand why you decided to stay there after Allen’s death, rather than going back to New York.”
“I’m closer to Allen there.” How could I leave the place where I had been so happy with Allen, where every table, every room and garden path, reminded me of him?
Charlie read my thoughts. “He isn’t there, Lily. He’s gone. I know your heart broke, I know you loved him. But this is a kind of emotional suttee, and I won’t allow it. Be heartbroken, but live. Don’t lock out anything and anyone that might bring some happiness. And in all honesty, the future isn’t looking that great in Europe right now. France may end up at war, and if France does, England probably will, too. Who knows where Hitler will stop, and when.”
“Now you’re being alarmist. No one really believes that, certainly not Gerald.” The few conversations I’d had with Allen’s brother in the last two years had been as impersonal as a newspaper.
“Yes, well, I wonder if Gerald might be a little admiring of Hitler and his law and order and trains on time. Quite a few in England, including the Duke of Windsor and his wife, seem frankly sympathetic. But you, Lily. You’re too thin, your hair needs a good styling. I bet you’ve even stopped painting.”
“I try. Once in a while.”
We paused at the river, Charlie leaning on the balustrade, me leaning on Charlie. There was a washing barge somewhere beneath us in the darkness, and we could hear the women chattering at each other, smell the bleach from the day’s work. There was a clank and clatter, and a bottle was thrown into the river.
“I think they are relaxing with a little wine. Could use some myself,” Charlie said. “Lily, it saddens me to see you so sad.”
“You are the only thing I love in this world, little brother. And right now, I’m more than a little worried about you.”
We turned away from the river and continued our walk to the Place Vendôme, both of us a little shy for having confessed that mutual adoration. Love can be an easy thing to take for granted, but when it’s voiced it fills you, the street, the city; it becomes its own destination, something always followed by small talk because the most important thing has already been said.
“How come we had to walk, Charlie? Where’s the automobile?”
“Spoken for, at this hour.”
So is Ania, I didn’t say.
“Chin up. You look great,” Charlie said when we were in front of the Ritz. The Place Vendôme was already lit with dozens of streetlamps, round circles of light dancing through the darkening evening. There had been a gentle rain in the afternoon, and the pavement shimmered. The floodlight directed at the statue of Napoleon, standing on his tall column, was turned on and made a streak of white through the night, as if a fallen star had left a permanent record of its descent.
The huge hotel, with its façade of columns and arched windows, was large enough to house an entire village. You couldn’t see it all in one glance; you had to turn your head, left and right, to see it from end to end. Ania later told me that five hundred people worked there.
I looked up at one of the second-floor balconies and saw a woman standing there, twirling a strand of pearls and leaning lightly on the railing. She was alone, and I don’t simply mean there was no one standing beside her; she was alone in every sense of the word. Solitude could be seen in her posture, in the way she stared into the distance. That was my first glimpse of Coco Chanel, that solitary woman who seemed as alone as I was.
She must have sensed my looking at her. She looked down at me, then, with a shrug, disappeared indoors.
“Ready?” Charlie danced a quick little shuffle and cocked his arm for me to put mine through.
Arm in arm, we climbed the steps of the Ritz. The future is always just two or three steps ahead of us. We stepped into the future, with its joy, its danger, its crowding memories. I felt Allen there with us, the light pressure of his hand on my neck, rubbing where it got stiff after a day of painting. Two years since you’ve been gone, I told him. Two minutes, two seconds. All the same.
It was already evening when Elsa Schiaparelli kicked off her heels, rubbed her pinched toes, and put her feet up on her cluttered desk. She should be dressed by now, but she wanted to savor the victory of the afternoon.
A coup. That was what the afternoon with Madame Bouchard had been. Nothing less. One of Chanel’s most famous, most admired clients had just ordered a season of Schiaparelli outfits. One of the last holdouts in Paris had crossed the couture border, and tonight she would be wearing one that hadn’t needed to be altered because Madame Bouchard was a perfect model’s size, as perfect in shape as that American goddess, Bettina Ballard, for whom the gown had originally been cut. Bettina hadn’t grumbled much about having her bespoke gown sold out from under her, not when she learned who had bought it.
“And she’s wearing it tonight,” Schiap had told her.
“This will drive Chanel insane! Her best customer, now wearing Schiaparelli!” She and Bettina had danced around the room a bit, and then Bettina had gone off to meet her husband for dinner.
In the narrow hall outside her studio, Schiap—that was how she referred to herself, that was how she instructed her friends to call her—could hear the grisettes bustling back and forth with bolts of fabric, putting away the afternoon’s working materials, getting ready for the evening, for the various cafés and dance halls and beds in which they would end their long day.
She paid them as well as she could; there was a solid foundation for the rumors of her Bolshevik tendencies. But there was a tradition in Parisian sewing rooms that the grisettes added to their income with paying evening customers, and who was to judge? Coco had started out as a grisette; she’d probably had paying customers after her long hours in the sewing room.
Schiap, she had married. And what a disaster that had been, in every way except one: it had given her Gogo, the daughter she loved above all things.
She had worked compulsively, to acquire wealth for her daughter. She had courted some of the most famous, most important people of Europe to make the right connections for her daughter. And now she would make certain that no matter what happened, she would be able to get Gogo out of Europe before disaster struck.
The sun slipped low behind the roofs and steeples of the city, making the dark studio even darker. There were larger, brighter rooms at 21 Place Vendôme, but Schiap preferred this one, where she could see and hear everything that went on in the square outside.
A few hours before, the handsome American boy and his sister had stood there with Madame Bouchard, waiting for Madame’s driver to appear. “Beautiful!” Madame Bouchard had said of her new dresses. “Why hadn’t I come here before? I’ll buy the whole collection!” Schiap had heard every word. Heard, and rejoiced.
She knew, though, why Madame Bouchard hadn’t come in before: her lover . . . not that American boy, the other one, the German . . . didn’t approve of Schiaparelli. Schiaparelli, who during the General Strike two years ago had negotiated with her workers rather than try to throw them into the street, the way Chanel had. Well, better Bolshevism than fascism. That was how the world, how France, was dividing: fascist or communist. At some point, everyone would have to choose a side. And she had made hers clear. Thumbs down to the fascists and Nazis.
That will show them, she thought. Madame Bouchard will be wearing Schiaparelli tonight at Elsie’s party. Let Mussolini put that in his pipe and smoke it. Mussolini, who thought he could frighten her by sending his thugs and spies around to her mother’s apartments in Rome.
The American woman, the schoolteacher, had brought in Madame Bouchard, so she would have to do something nice for her. A favor repaid, when she could, something more than a reduced price on a gown. There were a few women she dressed for free because they went everywhere and looked so good in her clothes. You couldn’t really say that about the American girl. She carried sadness with her like Atlas balancing the world on his shoulders, and sadness is not attractive.
Schiap stood, stretched, lit a cigarette, and danced a little jig of delight around the studio. She rang a bell. Her assistant came in, already dressed in her street clothes, a red skirt and jacket, and threw up her hands in alarm.
“Madame! Really!” Schiap’s pagan dance had ended in the middle of her studio in a pile of discarded ideas and experiments, a tidal wave of color and texture—red satin, woven gold braid, brown flannel, orange twill silk, things that had looked right on paper but wouldn’t fold or hang or pleat the way she wanted once attempted in fabric. The huge pile of discarded fabrics made her look even smaller than usual, like a misbehaving child, an illusion strengthened by the mischievous grin on her face.
The assistant wagged her finger and took away Schiap’s cigarette, moving slowly so that the ash wouldn’t fall before she found an ashtray.
“What should I wear tonight?” Schiap asked the walls, knowing her assistant would never answer such a complicated question. “It must be something special and eye-catching but not too outré. You know how conservative these people can be.” Schiap knew. She knew that many people found her garments to be more appropriate for costume parties than sensible wardrobes, that they were often described as bizarre. Surreal. And so? Fashion is art, not just craft. Why not surreal? It worked for Dalí, Man Ray, and Magritte. Of course, they were men and therefore artists. Because she was a woman, she was merely a dressmaker, not an artist? No and no!
“Something waterproof, in case it rains tonight,” her assistant said.
“You think my dresses are jokes?”
“The world always needs a good laugh, doesn’t it?”
Schiap picked up a book from the table near her and made as if to throw it at her. The assistant, knowing better, didn’t duck or put up her arms. “Put it down, or I won’t have your coffee ready for you tomorrow morning.”
“Tonight,” Schiap said, dropping the book. “Tonight, once and for all and forever, I will show the world who is the number one designer. Tonight, there will be more women wearing Schiaparelli than Chanel. Oh, if only Gogo were here.”
“Where is Gogo?” The assistant pulled the curtain shut, getting ready to lock up for the evening.
“London, I think.” Schiap tilted her hat over one eye, glaring at herself in the mirror. “Or maybe that was last week. Cannes? You know Gogo. Doesn’t like to stay in one place too long.” That was how she’d gotten her nickname as a baby; even before she could walk she was always on the move, scuttling over floors, clambering on chairs and sofas.
And then, when it had been time to walk, then, when Schiap, visiting her toddler, who had been sent to a country nurse, outside noisy, unhealthy New York, then Schiap had seen that her daughter wasn’t walking or even crawling as well as she should have been.
Polio. Her husband had broken her heart when he abandoned her, but it had been nothing like this. The guilt, the fear, the despair. Oh, the despair.
Her daughter’s illness didn’t break her, not the way foolish love for a man can. Instead, it turned her core to steel, to a determinism that bordered on the miraculous in her belief that she would make Gogo well again. And she had. At a price. The doctors, the surgeries, the therapies, the special schools, more surgeries. There had been a time, in her childhood, when she saw her daughter’s face cloud over with fear when she saw her mother approaching, because it meant some new therapy, a new doctor, a new exercise, maybe even another surgery.
That was the mother’s price she had paid, the cost of the love she had given.
“Well?” Schiap straightened her jacket. “I’ll wear the new mustard-yellow dress tonight. You don’t think it makes me look too olive, a little on the green side?”
“No. It is a good color for dark brunettes. You will glow, like a candle, like fire.”
Elsa pretended to spit three times. Ptu, ptu, ptu. “Don’t mention fire when you’re wearing red. Bad luck. Go call a cab. And if Gogo calls . . .”
“I’ll get the number and tell her you’ll call later.”
When the office door was locked behind her, Schiap gave it a little pat for luck, for love.
“Don’t forget to lock all the doors and windows in the rooms,” she said.
“I have never forgotten, Madame.”
“I know. But I have a feeling.”
“Madame often has feelings. All will be locked.”
Schiap touched the door three more times to make four, her lucky number.