EPILOGUE

IN THE TWILIGHT YEARS of her life, Chanel was celebrated for her creative genius. André Malraux, French historian and one of Charles de Gaulle’s favorite ministers, ventured, “From this century, in France, three names will remain: de Gaulle, Picasso, and Chanel.”

For all sorts of reasons the name Chanel remains a worldwide icon. One could count her enormous appeal as a designer by the royalty and distinguished women she dressed and perfumed after her comeback: Madame Georges Pompidou, wife of the president of France; Jacqueline Kennedy, who was wearing a pink Chanel suit on the day her husband was assassinated in Dallas; and actresses Jeanne Moreau, Romy Schneider, Elizabeth Taylor, and Marilyn Monroe, who claimed Chanel No. 5 was the only thing she wore in bed.

For the 1961 film Last Year at Marienbad, Chanel designed dramatic feather and lace costumes for leading lady Delphine Seyrig. (illustration credit epl.1)

Louis Malle’s 1958 film The Lovers features actress Jeanne Moreau in Chanel’s “little black dress.” (illustration credit epl.2)

Jean Cocteau’s take on Chanel is less heroic. “She looks at you tenderly, nods her head, and you’re condemned to death!”

In the 1962 movie Boccaccio ’70 by director Luchino Visconti, Romy Schneider, in a classic Chanel suit, surrounds herself with expensive trinkets, including Chanel No. 5 perfume. (illustration credit epl.3)

Two views: one heroic, one demonic.

Pierre Reverdy, romantic poet and nineteenth-century man, believed women were weak—and in love would fall under the spell of a man, do his bidding. He loved Chanel as well and as deeply as any man and wanted to believe Chanel had fallen under Dincklage’s power—“Spatz was her damnation.”

Reverdy may have had the measure of Chanel’s solitude and distress. He never knew the depth of her collaboration. As a good Catholic he put aside his disgust for what Chanel had done during the war and absolved Chanel for her weakness and her condemnable acts with the Germans. This Catholic poet believed Chanel needed to be free from guilt.

Before he died at seventy in 1960 at the Abbaye Saint-Pierre, a Benedictine monastery at Solesmes, Reverdy blessed Chanel in poetry. This determined and dedicated resistance fighter who had fought the German invader and the Vichy regime and had broken with his friends for their collaboration with the Nazis, willed Chanel a final epitaph: