Coco at the Ritz, page 20
“Antigone? It’s all about defying authority, about a young girl breaking a king’s law. What will the Germans say?”
“They’re too stupid to understand the symbolism. And they’re hoping some of the glory will blow back at them.” Cocteau’s 1922 adaptation of Sophocles’s tragedy, with sets designed by Picasso and costumes by Coco, had been a huge hit, widely recognized by the critics and the public as a stunning work of art.
“I don’t know.… I’ll think about it,” said Coco.
Cocteau had no time to waste while Coco dithered, so he played the card he knew would bring her to his side. “We’re using the same sets from 1922,” Cocteau said. “Picasso, the genius of the art world, will be at the rehearsals.”
“I was a genius before he was,” Coco snapped.
“I know, my dear.”
Coco thought of the wiry little Spaniard—Max had introduced them decades earlier, and she’d used all her wiles on the painter. Nothing had worked. “Pablo doesn’t like aggressive women,” Max had explained.
During rehearsals for the 1922 production, Coco had thrown extravagant dinners at her apartment on rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, hoping to lure Picasso to spend the night. He would show up for the food—hams and turkeys, caviar and pastries laid out on the table in Coco’s dining room—but he rarely stayed longer than an hour. “Why am I always the one throwing the party?” Coco grumbled to Max one night after the guests had all gone.
“You’ve got the money,” Max said.
“Sometimes, I’d like someone else to pay.… Like Picasso. He’s rich.”
“In his head, he’s still a starving artist,” Max explained.
“You’re the starving artist, Max.”
“You’re starved for love.”
That was cruel. Max apologized, and Coco brushed off the comment.
It had been years since she’d seen Picasso. Coco knew from her friends he’d stayed in Paris, tolerated by the Nazis because of his fame, despite what they considered the degeneracy of his art and his half-Jewish mother. “Oh, all right, I’ll design your damn costumes,” Coco told Cocteau.
He came over and hugged her. “We’ll all be geniuses together again,” he said.
* * *
One afternoon, during the final dress rehearsal of Antigone, as Coco sat at the back of the gilded Opera, Picasso burst through the door and jogged to a seat in the front row.
At the sight of the famous artist, cheers and applause rang through the house—from the actors onstage and from the group of society swells in the balcony who’d been invited to create excitement about the soon-to-open revival.
Coco abhorred being overshadowed by Picasso, especially since his rejection of her still stung. She stood to yell at Cocteau across the seats, half of them empty. “I have a question about costumes.”
Cocteau blinked into the lights. “I can’t be bothered about that now,” he said sharply. “We need to rehearse.”
Coco rushed the stage, making straight for the actress playing Antigone. She grabbed the hat she’d designed—a smart navy cloche with a brown ribbon—off the young woman’s head and threw it on the floor.
Coco removed her own hat—a more structured beige felt model—and plopped it on the actress’s head. “That will make the play,” Coco said, as she strode triumphantly back to her seat.
Coco’s costumes were extravagantly praised in the press, and she felt something she hadn’t in a long time—the pleasant buzz of accomplishment. She attended a couple of performances a week and enjoyed soaking up the audience’s applause. At the same time, the hard right wing heaped scorn on Cocteau. One critic excoriated him for his “effeminate” rendering of a Greek classic, with actors—in skimpier costumes than those worn by the actresses—mincing and gyrating across the stage. On the evening when fifty seats had been reserved for the PPF, the Fascist party, catcalls flew, and two members of the Milice, the French Gestapo, showed up toting machine guns on their shoulders. When the doorman refused them entrance, they punched him in the stomach and walked over his moaning body. Coco happened to be in the audience, but when she saw the Fascist thugs, she grabbed her handbag and fled.
* * *
In the following weeks, Spatz didn’t press her to go out with him, until one night in early February he insisted she join him at a French-themed party at the home of German ambassador Otto Abetz and his wife, Suzanne. A French meal would be served and only French would be spoken. The invitation specified white tie for men and gowns for women—an exception to the government ban on long dresses, which the Reich had ordered to conserve fabric for the war.
“A French party? How deluded are they? Don’t they know they’re losing the war?” Coco griped to Spatz.
“A little delusion goes a long way,” said Spatz.
“I’m staying home.”
“Trust me, Coco. You want them to think you’re still their friend.”
Coco and Spatz argued about it for a couple of days. Eventually, she agreed to go, but she told Spatz, “This is the last time.”
On the night of the party, Coco retrieved from her rue Cambon storeroom a dress she had designed in 1939 for her last collection—a flouncy, ivory organdy gown with patriotic red, white, and blue floral embroidery. From a trunk, she pulled out a pair of shoes and an evening bag. She was not looking forward to the evening. The very idea of Germans playacting at being French disgusted her. But Captain Momm would be there, escorting his boss’s mistress, Karin Mertin, and Momm was expecting Coco and Spatz to attend, too. Their failure to appear would be seen as disrespect to German officials. Above all, neither Coco nor Spatz wanted to do anything that might provoke Spatz’s bosses into transferring him to Istanbul, as they continued to threaten.
The Hôtel Beauharnais sat on rue de Lille, where a shiny necklace of black cars blocked the street. Doors opened, and out stepped women in glittering gowns and men in white tie and black tails. Coco and Spatz mounted the elegant stone steps to the entrance, which was flooded with light from torches held by sentries dressed like Napoleon’s soldiers in tall visored hats and blue coats. Inside, a long line of party guests waited at the lift, so Coco and Spatz took the curving staircase to the third floor. When they entered the Abetzes’ apartment, the redheaded ambassador was standing on a gilt chair in the salon giving a toast—in French, of course. “Tonight we celebrate Paris, which stands for beauty and romance. We salute the beauty and romance in our lives.”
As Abetz raised his glass high to spirited applause, Spatz leaned down to speak in Coco’s ear. “No one’s allowed to mention the war tonight,” he said.
“What a relief,” said Coco in a sarcastic tone.
“Or the Occupation.”
“Not a word. Nor will we talk about the German defeat at Stalingrad.”
“Please, Coco, keep your voice down.”
“Or the British dropping several tons of bombs on Berlin. Or all the German ships that have been sunk.”
“Hush.”
The salon was jammed to a standstill with Germans chattering in French, trying to show off their mastery of the language and correcting one another’s grammar. It hurt Coco’s ears to hear beautiful French words spoken in croaking German accents. A sonata played by musicians buried behind a screen of potted palms wafted over their chatter. “Coco!” a voice behind her called out. She turned to see a small, shapely blonde gliding toward her—Suzanne Abetz. “We have the best of Paris here tonight,” said the ambassador’s wife, her eyes glittering. She wore emerald green floor-length satin by Lucien Lelong, head of the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture. “Lucien made this just for me,” she said, holding out the skirt of her dress and twirling. “He’s here, over there.” Madame Abetz pointed her chin to the opposite side of the room.
Coco spotted the couturier, immaculate in his bespoke white tie and tails, talking to a German woman with an ermine stole draped around her marble shoulders. Though Lelong had persuaded the Germans to let high fashion stay in France, the Nazis had chipped away at French couture until there were only a handful of houses left. Recently, they’d ordered the closure of the few that remained.
Now, here was Lelong, chatting up a gorgeously dressed fraulein, as if the war wasn’t happening, as if most of his customers weren’t the wives of Nazis and war profiteers, as if he wasn’t about to be put out of business entirely. Coco thought him arrogant and untalented. “What do men know about dressing women?” she’d often said. In general, she found fault with all designers, men and women. Still, she did not want to see Maison Lelong or any other French fashion house shut down. Paris without couture wouldn’t be Paris.
Suzanne Abetz smiled at Coco and leaned to whisper in her ear. “I still prefer the clothes you made for me to anything Lelong or anyone else does. I wish you’d reopen.” She straightened and spoke normally. “Isn’t this marvelous? You’ll see many of your friends here tonight.”
Coco broke away and found Spatz in the crowd talking to Jean Cocteau. “Did you bring Marais?” she asked.
“He’s on the terrace, fending off a mob of women,” Cocteau said.
She glanced across the salon through the French doors and glimpsed Jean Marais, resplendent in a black tailcoat, signing autographs on cocktail napkins and gloves shoved at him by bejeweled, manicured hands. The actor’s most recent film, L’Éternel Retour, had caused a sensation when it opened in Paris in October. It was a modern retelling of the Tristan and Isolde myth written by Cocteau, and Marais had played the doomed lover, Tristan.
Fans mobbed Marais wherever he went. Recently, a group of students, recognizing him in the Bois de Boulogne, had torn the actor from his bicycle and carried him to the Porte Dauphine Métro station, where Marais caught a train home.
“There’s one particularly avid fan who keeps showing up at our apartment leaving letters and presents for Jeannot,” said Cocteau. “Not only is she madly in love with him, but she wants him to help her become an actress. She’s a silly little German named Karin Mertin.”
“Oh, no.” Spatz emitted a deep, unhappy sigh.
“You know her?” asked Cocteau.
“She’s the mistress of his best friend’s boss,” said Coco. “Jeannot better watch out—she’s here somewhere.”
“Does the best friend know what she’s up to?”
“Captain Momm? I doubt it,” said Spatz. “Karin’s only been in Paris a couple of weeks.”
“Maybe you can tell us what to do. She comes over at all hours of the day and night. Disturbs the entire building.”
“Coco will speak to her.”
“I will?” Coco looked at Spatz as if he’d asked her to climb to the top of the Eiffel Tower.
“We’ll discuss it later, my dear.”
Coco and Spatz got champagne at the bar and strolled out to the large, glass-walled winter garden overlooking the grounds. Outside, bright moonlight suffused the black satin sky. The room was warm and jumping and filled with the siren smell of perfume mixed with the scents of exotic plants. German couples wandered in and out. They all seemed to know one another, and they laughed lightly as they spoke (in German, ignoring the party’s French theme) about their children, their weekend plans, their country schlosses in the motherland. They acted as if they owned the world.
The party made Coco uncomfortable. She should have stayed home and dined with Misia in her Ritz suite, as her friend had suggested. Misia made a point of not attending German parties, but Coco’s other friends were happy to be included. At least Coco wasn’t as cozy with the Germans as Cocteau or Serge Lifar. Earlier, Coco had spotted the ballet master on the dance floor pushing an old German dowager around the parquet.
Dinner was a five-course feast served in the wedding cake dining room painted frosting white. Gilt boiserie drifted up the walls and around the ceiling. Paintings by Rembrandt, Velázquez, Rubens, and Titian, stolen from a Rothschild château, decorated the panels. “At least the Nazis have good taste in some things,” Coco grumbled.
“You promised to be nice tonight,” Spatz reminded her.
The guests sat on silk cushioned chairs at oval tables. Much to her dismay, Coco was seated next to the blustery, paunchy German Consul General Rudolf Schleier. He brushed the back of Coco’s hand with his prickly ginger mustache, bowing low and rattling the collection of medals on his breast pocket.
When the food arrived—potages à legumes, followed by fillet de sole—the general ate heartily. “In times like these, to eat well and eat a lot gives one a feeling of power,” he said in gravelly bad French.
Coco took a bite of her sole, discovering it to be overcooked, and pushed her plate toward the center of the table so aggressively that she scrunched the white linen tablecloth and almost toppled her wineglass.
“There are far too few evenings like this,” said Schleier. “It’s a pleasure to see so many women in beautiful dresses.” General Schleier paused long enough to shovel a pile of potatoes rissolés into his mouth. “I suppose they’d all be in Chanel if you hadn’t retired.”
“I’m never in retirement in my heart,” said Coco.
“You should reopen in Berlin. As you might have heard, we’re shutting down couture completely in Paris,” said General Schleier.
“Are you also paving over the vineyards in Bordeaux and setting fire to the perfume fields in Grasse?” asked Coco. She smiled insincerely.
The general took a gulp of wine. “Mademoiselle Chanel, have you heard the German word Lebensraum? It means the space Germany is entitled to by the laws of history. It includes France.”
Ignoring the crème brûlée a server had placed in front of her, Coco lit a cigarette and puffed on it distractedly, as General Schleier turned to chat with the woman on his left—the white-haired, elderly wife of a German colonel. A few moments later, he spoke again to Coco. “It’s wonderful to see so many figures from French culture here tonight, embracing the nation of Goethe and Wagner,” Schleier said. “I include yourself of course, Mademoiselle Chanel.”
The lyrical notes of a waltz floated into the dining room. Spatz touched Coco’s elbow and stood. “Let’s dance, darling.”
In the salon, Spatz pulled Coco to his chest and spun her across the room. “You were about to start an argument with the general, weren’t you?” he said.
Coco tilted her head up to look into Spatz’s eyes. “How can he be so smug?”
“He’s a powerful man.”
“I’m not afraid of him.”
“You should be. His niece is Fraulein Lichten.”
Coco dropped her hands from Spatz’s shoulders. “So?”
“Every time I run into her, she asks me if you’ve been back to Saint-Benoît to visit your friend, the monk.”
The waltz ended, and the little orchestra slid into a tango. Spatz reached for Coco’s waist, but she stood like a statue. “Why is that suspect?”
“She doesn’t believe Max is really a monk.”
“Who does she think he is?”
“A Resister. I told her she was mistaken.”
“Good.”
“It’s not good,” said Spatz angrily, as he led Coco off the dance floor. “She knows it was a lie.”
FOURTEEN
Soon after the Abetzes’ party, Coco decamped to La Pausa. She was eager to lose herself in the peace and beauty of the countryside. Since all of France was now occupied, however, signs of the Nazis were everywhere: in the checkpoints manned by uniformed guards, in the swagger of the tall, fair-haired German soldiers strolling the dirt lanes with pretty French girls, in the swastika banners hanging from the front entrances of humble village halls, in the haunting emptiness of the homes and shops of those who had disappeared.
A few miles outside Roquebrun, Coco’s car came upon a truck lying on its side in the middle of the road with the engine still smoking and the driver dead behind the wheel. A group of Nazi soldiers surrounded the truck. Their own jeep was parked a few yards away. Was the dead man a Resister delivering weapons or transporting Jews across the border? Had the Nazis run him off the road and shot him? She thought of Reverdy, of the British parachute buried in her garden, and his transmitters, which she’d flung into the river. She told herself she’d done that as much to protect him as herself and Céline. Where was he? Was he safe?
A wail of sirens filled the air, and a cavalcade of French police cars appeared at the crest of the road. The vehicles screeched to a halt by the truck. Coco’s driver slowed down to get a closer look. “Move on!” she ordered.
As the Rolls speeded up, Coco looked over her shoulder and saw the Germans remove the body from the truck and lay it on the ground. That the dead man could have been Reverdy hit her with a jolt. Then she recalled she’d never seen him drive a car. She didn’t think he even had a license. It wasn’t Reverdy. It couldn’t be. She wouldn’t let herself imagine more disasters.
* * *
At La Pausa, the phone was ringing when Coco walked through the door. Cocteau was on the other end, asking if he and Marais could visit. The actor’s crazed fans continued to stalk him day and night, and the couple wanted to escape the city. “Stay as long as you like,” Coco told Cocteau. “It’s quiet, and you’ll be able to write.”
On a cool Tuesday afternoon, Coco’s driver fetched Cocteau and Marais from the Roquebrun train station. Winter still enveloped the Riviera, and the bare brown branches of the olive trees stretched against a gray sky. Cocteau and Marais found Coco in the large, white-walled salon, reclining on a sofa, reading a book. “My two Jeans!” she cried, jumping up to greet them. She was dressed in beige, wide-legged trousers, a black sweater, and flat shoes. “I’ve set up a writing studio for you next to your room,” Coco told Cocteau. “There’s everything you need—typewriter, paper, pens, ink. I ask only that you write something that requires costumes by Chanel.” Designing for the Antigone revival had left her hungry for more work.
