Coco at the Ritz, page 9
Spatz came in just after three, still wearing his baggy golf knickers and sporty tweed jacket. “Bonjour, darling,” he said pleasantly.
Coco hung back, waiting for the guillotine blade to fall.
“Is everything all right?” he asked. “Did your brother bring bad news?”
“No. Nothing like that.”
Spatz came over and put his hands on her shoulders, looking down into her face. “Your brother is an interesting character,” he said.
Was it possible Spatz didn’t care? “Yes, interesting. Not at all like me,” said Coco.
Spatz kissed her forehead and laughed. “Every family has a few interesting characters. They embarrass us, but we still love them.”
Coco sank into the sofa and felt her fear deflate with the cushion. “I’m sorry he made that remark about the Germans.”
“Sometimes I feel the same way, darling.” Spatz smiled. “Now, let me go across the street to get cleaned up, and we’ll have a drink before dinner.”
“I’ll join you in a minute,” said Coco. “I’ve some correspondence to tend to.”
She sat at her desk and opened the middle drawer, where she kept her documents. The evening before, when she’d written Alphonse his check, everything was in its place. Now, however, she saw that her address book, which she always kept on the right side of the drawer divider, was on the left side underneath some insurance papers. Someone had tampered with it. Spatz? What was he looking for? The addresses of people who were possible enemies of the Reich? Or sympathizers he could enlist in his cause? Coco shook off these thoughts. She was imagining things, letting Misia’s suspicions infect her.
Later, as she sat on her settee at the Ritz sipping wine with Spatz, she said, “I was so rattled by my brother showing up last night that I stuck my address book in the wrong place in my desk. It took me a minute to find it.”
“But you did find it,” said Spatz. An almost imperceptible cloud crossed his face.
He had snooped in her address book. Certainly, he had.
SIX
Spatz knew Coco didn’t like to be seen with him in public, so after a while he stopped coming home with tickets to the opera and the ballet. One evening, however, as he walked through the door of her suite, tossing his hat on the entry table, Coco announced, “We’re going out tonight.”
“Really? I was looking forward to a quiet night with just you.” Spatz put his arms around her and drew her close, nuzzling her neck.
Coco pulled away. “It’s the opening of Cocteau’s play, La Machine à écrire. It’s a light comedy about a typewriter. Harmless stuff. We’re due at the theater in an hour. I promised him.”
Spatz regarded her with a lascivious glint. “There’s no time for…”
Coco cut him off with a playful swat at his shoulder and retreated to the bedroom. “I’ll just be a minute,” she called to him as she changed into her new blue silk chiffon dress. She’d decided not to wait for the war’s end—an impossibly distant, even improbable event—to wear it.
“Beautiful,” said Spatz, when she was twirling in front of him.
* * *
At the Théâtre Hébertot, the Germans had bought out the best seats. When Coco and Spatz arrived, almost the entire orchestra section was filled with Nazis in uniform and their female companions in gaudy evening dresses and furs. As Coco and Spatz took their seats in the first row of the balcony, Coco spanned the crowd, her eyes fixing on Otto Abetz, the German ambassador, in the middle of the fourth row. Next to him sat his wife, Suzanne, the black satin straps of what Coco recognized as a Chanel gown hugging her white shoulders.
As soon as the lights dimmed, Spatz fell asleep, his chin tucked against his collar. Coco herself fought to stay awake through the first scene of frothy dialogue. Suddenly, a commotion erupted at the back of the theater, the double doors burst open, and a group of French thugs rushed down the center aisle, flinging stink bombs onto the stage. Screams rang out as the stench of rotting food and animal excrement filled the theater. One thug sprayed black ink into the face of the actress playing the lead, then pushed an actor standing next to her into the orchestra pit. Gagging, Coco and Spatz fled to the street.
The air was frigid. Coco pulled her fur around her body as Spatz lit a cigarette. He placed it between Coco’s lips, and she drew in a lungful of smoke. Spatz took the cigarette, now ringed with red lipstick, and puffed on it as his eyes wandered up and down the street. “Where’s the goddamn driver? I told him to wait.”
“I’m not surprised about this,” said Coco. “The French fascists hate Cocteau. That right-wing critic from Je Suis Partout has been attacking him in print as a degenerate homosexual.”
Spatz snorted. “But Cocteau’s friendly with Germans. I’ve seen him at lunch at the embassy. And he’s a member of the Group Collaboration, the consortium of French and German artists.”
“None of that counts in the face of his relationship with Jean Marais.”
Suzanne and Otto Abetz emerged from the theater and ducked into a shiny navy blue limousine. Coco and Spatz watched the sleek car speed away. “Abetz will shut down this play for sure,” said Spatz.
“Isn’t there something you can do?” asked Coco. Their car pulled up, and Spatz threw his cigarette on the pavement, crushing it with the toe of his shoe. He nudged Coco into the back seat and settled in next to her. As the Mercedes lurched from the curb, Spatz shot Coco a severe look. “Don’t expect me to solve all the problems your family and friends are having with the Reich.”
He wasn’t solving any of them. Though Spatz had repeatedly assured Coco that he was “investigating the situation” with André, Coco had heard nothing about when her nephew might be freed from the stalag where he’d languished for almost a year. Her sense that Spatz didn’t have much influence with the Occupiers continued to grow along with her disappointment. Spatz was ineffectual. He didn’t seem to care about getting ahead. Coco couldn’t understand a man who lacked ambition. She’d never before had a lover who wasn’t driven in some way—by power, or money, or artistic achievement. Sometimes she was completely at a loss for why she lived with Spatz. For André, she would tell herself. And for all else she valued. She must get through this war with no losses, with her perfume business, her wealth, her reputation, her friends intact. Above all, she must get André home.
* * *
As Spatz predicted, the next morning the Nazis closed La Machine à écrire. “There will be no more performances,” said Jean Marais, who called Coco in a panic later in the day. “I’m in Toulouse filming. I heard it from my director—news travels fast among actors. As soon as he told me I tried Jean. But he’s not answering the phone. Will you check on him?”
Coco threw on her fur coat, took the clanking lift to the ground floor, and walked out into the cold day. Snow fell silently, dusting the city in ghostly white. A few cyclists pedaled along, unmindful of the icy pavement. Occasionally, a black Mercedes whizzed past. On rue de la Sourdière, a handwritten sign announcing “Milk Here” had been tacked to the front door of a funeral parlor that was doubling as a distribution center for rationed goods. Below the sign, a poster depicting a French family—father, mother, and two children—asked, “Are your papers in order?” A line of forlorn citizens stretched around the block: men in threadbare coats; women in cork-soled shoes, their dirty hair hidden under turbans; and scrawny children clutching the hands of the adults. There was no soap, no shampoo, no butter, no meat. Glancing into the alley, she saw a group of adolescents pawing through dirty bins overflowing with garbage, scrabbling for something salvageable.
At Cocteau’s apartment in the Palais-Royal, Coco banged on the door. When there was no answer, she asked the concierge to unlock it. Entering the foyer, she walked into a thick blue cloud and took in the rich, sweet smell of opium. “Cocteau!” she called. No answer.
She found him in the bedroom, lying on his side under a brown satin quilt in the big brass bed. Opium paraphernalia littered the bedside table: a box of sticky black liquid, a silver stick for stirring, a small lamp, matches, an amber pipe. Cocteau appeared to be in a deep sleep. Coco shook his shoulder but couldn’t rouse him. Placing an ear in front of his mouth, she felt his soft breath. “Thank God, you’re alive!” she said, and reached for the telephone.
The ambulance arrived fifteen minutes later and rushed Cocteau to the hospital. When she told Spatz about it later, he arranged to have Cocteau transferred to a private clinic outside Vichy in the unoccupied zone. “I pulled a few strings to get him in,” Spatz said, “but you’ll have to pay for it.”
It wasn’t the first time Coco had bankrolled Cocteau’s rehabilitation. Twice before she’d sent him to clinics to kick his habit. The cures worked for a while, but Cocteau always relapsed. Coco feared he’d die, and she couldn’t let that happen. She needed him in her life. They’d been friends since Misia introduced them more than two decades earlier, and he was one of the few artists in Paris who treated her as an equal. She saw her best, creative self reflected in his eyes.
Misia’s dinner party in honor of Cocteau and his new play had been planned for that evening, and she had no intention of calling it off, even though the play had been cancelled and the guest of honor hospitalized for a drug overdose. “What am I going to do with all the food? And the wine? It cost me a fortune on the black market,” she told Coco over the phone.
Coco agreed to attend with Spatz, but she couldn’t shake her anxiety over Cocteau. She was in a foul mood throughout the dinner. Spatz didn’t help things by flirting with one of the guests, Antoinette d’Harcourt, a lovely, dark-haired aristocrat in a sable-trimmed velvet dress, a leftover gem from Coco’s 1928 fall collection. During the soup course, Coco overheard Spatz at the other end of the table complimenting Antoinette, his voice going all soft and silky. “That neckline suits you; it shows off your beautiful clavicle.”
It made Coco feel old, as if she was losing her allure. And it resurrected unpleasant memories of Emile Weisberg, the furrier who’d provided Coco with the trim for Antoinette’s dress—he was Jewish. Bile rose within her. “Weisberg is a money-grubbing invert, like all of his kind, a worshipper of gold above all else,” Coco blurted. Coco had drunk several glasses of wine, and she slurred her words.
The table fell silent. Spatz glared at her, and Misia shook her head with indignation. Antoinette and the others—her husband, Duke François d’Harcourt; the journalist Boulos Ristelhueber; and Serge Lifar—stared at their plates.
Coco didn’t stop. “Weisberg overcharged me,” she fumed. “I knew what he was up to. He gave me inferior skins, saving the best ones for that phony Jean Patou. He had a big crush on Patou.” The unfairness of it all. Coco’s anger was still fresh, and so the ugly words had tumbled out of her mouth.
Misia cleared her throat loudly. “Catherine d’Erlanger had to sell her jewelry,” she said in a desperate attempt to change the subject. “You know that ‘stop and go’ necklace of ruby and emeralds, the one Catherine’s husband gave her for their tenth anniversary that cost him millions of francs? Well, now the d’Erlangers are broke. So, Catherine took the necklace to Cartier for an appraisal, and it turns out the rubies and emeralds are nothing but bits of red and green glass!”
“Baron d’Erlanger was always an idiot,” said Coco. She was only momentarily distracted, however. A beat later, she was back on Weisberg. “That damn furrier cheated me for years. He and his—”
Spatz stood abruptly, interrupting her. “We need to go, darling. I’ve an early meeting.”
Sitting beside Coco in the back of the Mercedes on the way home, Spatz lashed out. “Your tirade against the Jewish furrier was ugly and embarrassing,” he said.
Coco ignored him and stared out the window at the quiet Seine.
They were driving fast toward the Ritz. The boulevards were empty and dark. To conserve energy, the streetlamps had been turned off by German command, and the buildings flashed purple in the car’s bright headlights.
“I don’t understand how you could be so vulgar,” said Spatz.
Coco bit her lip and picked at the cuticle on her thumb. She should have kept her mouth shut. She hadn’t meant to rage on so about Weisberg. Truth be told, she had nothing against him for being Jewish or a homosexual. What rankled was his shady business dealings. Once the snake of nastiness had bit Coco, though, the venom released had to run its course. Watching Spatz flirt with another woman had sparked the darkness in Coco that so easily flamed up.
As the Mercedes crossed the Pont de la Concorde, Spatz asked, “Were you aware that Antoinette d’Harcourt’s maiden name was Rothschild?”
“I know who she is,” said Coco.
“Then you know her tribe.”
“The Rothschilds are a tribe of their own.”
“I wish you’d try to control yourself.”
“I’m the one with Jewish friends.”
“That doesn’t excuse your behavior.”
“I’ve heard you say Jews were shirkers and profiteers in the first war, that they got rich instead of fighting on the front with you and the other golden Aryans.”
Spatz stared out the window at the black street. “Sometimes you embarrass me,” he said.
“And sometimes you embarrass me!” Coco snapped back.
Spatz turned slowly and looked at her. “Why, because I’m German?”
“Because it’s been almost a year, and André is still in prison. I keep telling my friends that you’re working on it, and they keep asking.”
Whenever Spatz dared criticize her, Coco threw the matter of André back at him. She worried about her nephew and was desperate to get him home, but she also used André as a weapon against Spatz, a way of proving her continuing independence.
“I’ve told you before,” Spatz said slowly, “these things are complicated. I’m doing all I can.”
They rode in silence the rest of the way. When the Mercedes stopped at rue Cambon, Spatz told Coco he’d be spending the night in his own apartment. “Bonne nuit,” he said coldly, when the driver had opened the door for her.
She stepped out and stormed upstairs, injected herself with morphine, and promptly fell asleep.
* * *
The next morning, she awoke with a headache, but her anger had passed. At eight, Spatz showed up at the Ritz with the newspapers. “Bonjour, darling,” he said. “I’m sorry I was harsh with you.”
“It was my fault. I got carried away,” said Coco.
They shared a pot of coffee and, having resolved the tension between them, chatted casually about their plans for the day. Spatz said he had a meeting at the German embassy and lunch with a small gathering of French and German businessmen who were working together. He left Coco with a kiss.
His manner was so affable and suave that it reinforced the impression that had been building with Coco for weeks—that despite appearances, Spatz really didn’t hold much sway with the Nazis, that he didn’t have the influence or strength of character to help André. She had only a vague understanding of how power flowed among the Germans in Paris. The ambassador, Otto Abetz, was an imperious man weakened by his overwhelming vanity. She’d met Spatz’s friend, Captain Theodor Momm, who was not as handsome as Spatz but, it seemed, considerably more hardworking. The other ranking Germans she met seemed much alike—cold, officious, impersonal. She wondered if this ambitious crew didn’t really take Spatz seriously.
Maybe he was simply too polite, which might explain his outburst the previous night over her comments about Weisberg. Though Spatz never said anything against the Jews, Coco never heard him deplore their deportation, the seizure of their property, or the race laws that so circumscribed their lives. When she told him that Veronique had quit because her Jewish husband had lost his job and he didn’t want his wife working for someone who lived with a German, Spatz just shook his head. He simply accepted the Nazi way and didn’t object when other Germans made anti-Semitic remarks. She was never sure if Spatz held the same anti-Semitic views as the other Nazis she met in Paris. Perhaps he was just too elegant to openly express his ugliest opinions.
* * *
“Spatz has corrupted you completely!” shouted Misia over the phone later that afternoon. “I never heard you say such terrible things about Jews before you took up with him. I wouldn’t like him, even if he wasn’t a Nazi. He’s a stupid lug. Boy Capel must be rolling in his grave.”
“Did you just call to berate me?” Coco asked.
“And think how Max would feel.…”
Coco shut her off by slamming down the receiver on the phone. Dinner was more than three hours away, but Coco went to the bar cart and poured herself a glass of red wine, then retreated to the sofa. By mentioning Boy, Misia had dropped her in a soak of memory. And next to Boy, Spatz and every lover faded.
Who could compete with him? Boy was a rich, brilliant Englishman, owner of a thriving oil-tank business, educated at Oxford, a lover of poetry and art. He’d met Coco in 1909, when she was making and selling hats out of the Paris apartment of her first lover, Étienne Balsan. Unlike Balsan, Capel had recognized Coco’s talent and took her dreams seriously, giving her the money to set up a boutique on the Parisian street that would forever be associated with her name.
They were lovers for more than a decade. And with André, whom the couple had taken charge of after Julie’s death, Boy was the closest Coco ever got to having a family of her own. She had yearned to bear his child. Until she’d spent time with André, Coco had never thought much about becoming a mother. But the skinny, doe-eyed child had fascinated her. Coco and Boy had sent André to boarding school at Beaumont, Boy’s alma mater in the English countryside. But on his vacations, André went to work with Auntie Coco. She recalled his serious little face as he played on the floor of her atelier with his toy train and his impatience at the long hours he had to wait for Coco to finish so they could go out for ice cream. “How long does it take to make a stupid dress?” André had often protested. Coco laughed now at the memory.
