FOUR

A HOLLYWOOD DIVERTISSEMENT

ONE SUMMER DAY in 1930 in Monte Carlo, Grand Duke Dmitri introduced Chanel to Samuel Goldwyn, who wanted her to design clothes for his stars—Joan Blondell, Madge Evans, and Gloria Swanson. At the height of the American economic depression, with 13 million citizens out of work, Goldwyn offered Chanel a million dollars (about $14 million in today’s money) if she would spend a few weeks in Hollywood. Goldwyn’s offer came at a time when American, French, and German fashion journals were celebrating Chanel couture. Vogue magazine had gone so far as to hire no less than four top fashion photographers—Cecil Beaton, Edward Steichen, Horst, and Hoyningen-Huene—to capture her creations.

It was the right moment for Chanel to leave Paris, to try something new. Her major competitor, Elsa Schiaparelli, was displaying her creations practically under Coco’s nose on the Place Vendôme around the corner from the Chanel atelier on the rue Cambon. “The Italian Wizard” was bent on “clipping Chanel’s wings … with her sudden flash of fantasy, surrealism, and extravagance that marked the 1930s.” Art and photography were major fashion influences, and Schiaparelli had made a mark working with Salvador Dalí to create surreal sweaters and leg-of-lamb felt hats.

Hollywood would be challenging, but a trip to America would be a break from Paris and far from the shadow of Schiaparelli—Chanel was sure of her own skill and talent. She was, after all, a long-established and star purveyor of clothes, jewelry, and perfume, “the best-selling fragrance in the world.” Chanel had taken women “out of fussy clothes and hats … modeling them into jersey sportswear, with nautical details and beach pajamas—ideas she claimed she had stolen from Bendor and other men’s wear.”

But the fashion business was lagging, hurt by the impact of the economic crisis in Europe. Goldwyn offered more than money. He was a publicity genius who might get the House of Chanel a piece of the American ready-to-wear garment trade—without the Chanel Paris label, of course.

Later, Chanel would say, “Hollywood is the capital of bad taste. It was like an evening at the Folies Bergères. Once it is agreed that the girls were beautiful in their feathers there is not much to add—and when everything is super: super sex, super production it all looks alike—and it’s vulgar.” But Chanel couldn’t refuse the package: a cool million, along with Goldwyn’s well-oiled public relations expertise.

Despite her declared distaste for Jews, Chanel signed up for a trial with Goldwyn, born Schmuel Gelbfisz—once an inhabitant of the Warsaw ghetto. One author tells how Goldwyn did his best to keep Jews away from Chanel. Indeed, she was on good behavior, saying at the time: “There are great Jews, Israelites and there are youpins …” (a pejorative French slur for Jews).

The mass-produced “talkies” of the time were quickly outdated and often no longer in synch with the rapidly changing fashions of the day. Knee-length garments and unisex fashions went out overnight and long slinky gowns came in the next day—or so it seemed. “What looked young last year looks old this season as longer fuller skirts, a higher waistline looked right, smart and becoming.” Something had to change. Goldwyn, a master at image building, now created another Hollywood fantasy. His stars were to be dressed by Chanel and his “women [moviegoers] would be able to see in our pictures the latest in Paris fashions.”

CHANEL DECIDED that Marie Sophie Godebska, her aging Polish “Misia,” had to come along to Hollywood, if nothing else to charm Goldwyn in his native Polish. And Misia needed a break. Her troubles were a sordid Paris story of debauchery in the libertine late 1920s. She and her husband, José-Maria Sert, had been in love with a nineteen-year-old delectable Georgian princess and novice sculptress: Roussadana Mdivani, known as Roussy. Exceedingly beautiful and manipulative, Roussy had come to Paris with her refugee parents and was studying art when the fifty-year-old José fell for the teenager. Then Cupid struck again when Misia, too, fell for her charms. Paris tongues began to talk: “An inseparable trio … a sinister threesome … they drug her—use her.” Roussy’s “Tatar charm had captivated the Sert couple.” Chanel had warned her friend to stop playing with fire. Instead, Misia gave José-Maria tacit approval to share Roussy’s bed. Now Paris rumors spread about how Misia was intimate with Roussy—and how Chanel was intimate with Misia. Of the latter, Misia’s biographers stated, “Coco and Misia were seen together so constantly and their relations were so highly charged that it was said they were lovers.”

Homosexual and heterosexual affairs were common among Chanel’s clique, as was the use of morphine, cocaine, and other drugs. The Serts; Cocteau and his new lover, French film actor Jean Marais; Serge Lifar; Étienne de Beaumont; painter Christian Bérard; and artist and editor Paul Iribe were all substance abusers. Indeed, by 1935 Chanel herself would be dependent on morphine-based sedol. Inconstant and whimsical, she paid the medical expenses to wean Cocteau off the drug, and yet in a magazine interview, she described him as “a snobbish little pederast who did nothing all his life but steal from people.”

ALTHOUGH BOTH WERE fervent Catholics, José-Maria Sert divorced Misia in a civil court proceeding. The middle-aged José ran off with then-twenty-two-year-old Roussy after arranging a civil marriage in The Hague. Misia was devastated.

To the beat of Goldwyn’s star-making drums, Chanel took a heartbroken Misia and a battalion of models, assistants, and seamstresses to the New World in the spring of 1931 aboard the Norddeutsche Lloyd SS Europa. Embarking from Calais, the luxury liner sailed the great circle route at 27.5 knots, landing in New York five days later. The ship’s manifest noted Chanel’s birth date as 1889 instead of 1883. She had somehow arranged to shave six years off her life; it would not be the last time she would lie about her age.

At a suite in the Hotel Pierre overlooking Central Park on Fifth Avenue, Chanel spoke to the press, in the words of the New York Times, “not as an animated picture star but as a shrewd businesswoman.” Dressed in a simple rose-red jersey sport ensemble with a white knit blouse and a very Chanel collar and cuffs of white piqué, “a slight, charming brunette with bobbed hair told reporters [through an interpreter] long hair would be coming back into general fashion soon. If a few smart women wear their hair long the rest will follow.”

Astute as ever, charming, and very French, she subtly tried to sell her costume jewelry: “a long string of pearls were looped several times about her throat and she wore a bracelet of multicolored semi-precious stones. She likes costume jewelry, she explained, with many eloquent gestures … She likes to wear plenty of it with daytime dresses, but thinks very little jewelry should be worn with formal costumes.”

TO THE NEW YORK TIMES REPORTER, Chanel seemed “rather bewildered at the scores of interviewers and reception committee members who crowded into her suite.” But rather than bewildered, she was sick. She had come down with influenza, but that didn’t deter her from spraying the reporters and guests with a little atomizer of an as-yet-unnamed—or rather, unnumbered—new scent. She revealed to her guests that she never went to the movies; that real perfume is mysterious; and that men who wear perfume are disgusting. She later suggested, with no explanation: “If blonde, use blue perfume.”

Chanel soon set out for the West Coast. Goldwyn had made all the arrangements for her triumphant arrival in Hollywood. There would be a special white railroad car to whisk his star to sunny California, a gala reception for the Chanel party on the Los Angeles train platform with Greta Garbo on site to peck her cheek, and then a soiree on the studio lot, where Chanel would meet the Hollywood headliners of the day. As the flashbulbs burst, Chanel was sweet-talked and kissed by Erich von Stroheim, Claudette Colbert, and Katharine Hepburn, who was filming Little Women. In the background, three thousand walk-on faces looked on from gigantic shooting stages.

With Ina Claire, when Chanel worked in Hollywood dressing Goldwyn’s stars, 1931. (illustration credit 4.1)

It was all very grand and probably very dull for Chanel, but the newshounds were entranced and gushing. Chanel’s biographer, Paris Match editor Pierre Galante, wrote how they tasted real Champagne, caviar, and “gawked at Paris mannequins and laughed at French wit.” The press cabled fulsome dispatches about Chanel’s entourage and her introduction to Garbo: “Two Queens Meet,” they proclaimed. While Polish-speaking Misia soothed an obsequious Goldwyn—calling Sam “Mother”—Chanel learned the ways of Hollywood. According to Galante, “The star actors and actresses had to be pious, docile and smiling or be banished—with millions of Americans out of work, the studios had imposed a strict code of morality and good conduct—divorce was forbidden and famous names were photographed for the newsreels and movie magazines in simple homes, visiting their church or pastor.” Hollywood casting decreed: “actors [were] strong as policemen, pure as Boy Scouts and temperate as Quakers; yet despite the American ‘Code of Decency’ that studio detectives tried to enforce, behind the layers of veils, debauchery, drug abuse and orgies were a way of life.”

Gloria Swanson costumed by Chanel, in the 1931 film Tonight or Never. (illustration credit 4.2)

Robert Greig and Gloria Swanson, dressed by Chanel, in the film Tonight or Never. (illustration credit 4.3)

Paul Iribe (far right) in 1924 as Hollywood director of the film Changing Husbands. Iribe and Chanel fell in love in 1931 when he helped manage her affairs. He was the director of her right-wing publication Le Témoin that carried his extraordinary illustrations of Chanel. Iribe died with Chanel at his side in 1935. (illustration credit 4.4)

Coco soaked up and reveled in the behind-the-scenes technical details of making films—the huge soundstages, lighting techniques, and makeup. She designed costumes while her workers dressed the actors, just as she had dressed the principals of many ballet-operas in Paris. Her assistants turned their hands to creating an exuberant fluff the technicians could exploit. She knew her business, but she also knew her limitations. “I never was a dressmaker; I am in admiration of those who can sew; I never learned; I stick my fingers.”

Chanel had hoped to apply her rigorous standards, and the London Sunday Express correspondent in Hollywood described lounge pajamas as “bad taste and no lady should be seen dead in them.” Yet in 1931’s Tonight or Never, the third Hollywood film Chanel gowned, the first scenes show Gloria Swanson in lounge pajamas. Chanel and her staff admired the Hollywood dressers even if they thought their costuming kitschy. It was obvious from the beginning that Chanel’s Hollywood adventure was bound to fail. She told biographer Charles-Roux: “The Hollywood atmosphere was infantile; one day we were entertained by a famous actor who had painted all the trees in his garden blue in our honor … I laughed at it but it affected Misia. Erich von Stroheim impressed me only because he was taking a personal revenge—a Prussian persecuting Jewish inferiors and Hollywood was mostly Jewish. These Jews from Central Europe found the actor [von Stroheim] a familiar nightmare.”

Chanel designed costumes for Jean Renoir’s 1939 masterpiece, Rules of the Game, featuring Mila Parély (right) and Nora Gregor. (illustration credit 4.5)

IN THE END, Chanel saw herself as too refined for the studio glitter of Hollywood, the lavish façades, the tastes of the moguls and their coteries of actors and actresses, and the clash of egos among the silver-screen divas. Her narrow jersey tailored suits with white collars and cuffs were not glamorous enough. Her vision lacked the flagrant sexiness sought by the players and movie directors to enhance their films. The discreet elegance of Chanel’s costumes seemed bland on cinema screens. Diffidently, Chanel said: “I only like ‘cop’ movies.” In fact, her costumes drew little comment, and the films she worked on were not successful.

From left: Madge Evans, Ina Claire, and Joan Blondel in the 1932 film The Greeks Had a Word for Them. Chanel designed the actresses’ wardrobe. (illustration credit 4.6)

Before sailing home Chanel returned to New York. The big city amused her. There she met with the two most important fashion editors in America: Carmel Snow of Harper’s Bazaar and Margaret Case of Vogue—women who would dictate what American women would wear for years to come.

Chanel needed more. She visited Saks Fifth Avenue, Lord & Taylor, Bloomingdale’s, and Macy’s. But the store that really fascinated her was the flagship of ready-to-wear, New York’s S. Klein, On the Square—located at Manhattan’s Union Square.

There Chanel discovered Klein’s self-service methods: women of all professions and ethnic origins trying one garment after the other under the surveillance of gum-chewing salesgirls and surrounded by signage warning, DO NOT STEAL! OUR DETECTIVES ARE WATCHING! DO NOT STICK GUM UNDER THE WASHROOM SINKS!

It was an America unknown to Chanel as she surveyed the thousands of dresses cut like French clothes—only the fabrics were different. The big money was made from copying and a massive investment in advertising and promotion. It was Chanel’s lifetime lesson in mass merchandising.

After barely a month in America, Chanel sailed home on the French ocean liner SS Paris, along with a host of Americans including Franklin D. Roosevelt’s mother. Coco’s short American adventure was sweet and sour. She deposited a handsome fee in her bank account, and the publicity gave her a leg up over her competitors in the American market, even if her Hollywood sojourn was less than a triumph. After all the ballyhoo and PR hype, Chanel dressed Gloria Swanson for Goldwyn’s Tonight or Never, the Goldwyn Girls in the musical comedy Palmy Days, and the three lead actresses, Ina Claire, Joan Blondell, and Madge Evans, in The Greeks Had a Word for Them. According to The New Yorker Chanel left Hollywood in a “huff.” The magazine claimed the movie tycoons thought Chanel’s costumes weren’t sensational enough. “Chanel made a lady look like a lady,” but “Hollywood wants a lady to look like two ladies.”