Coco Chanel - The legend and the life by Justine Picardie

"I invented my life by taking for granted that everything I did not like, would have an opposite, which I would like"

Coco Chanel

(1883-1971)

Yesterday afternoon I was invited along with a group of eight bloggers for some afternoon tea at Claridges, my favourite hotel, to meet the author Justine Picardie and talk about her new biography of Coco Chanel - The legend and the life.

Being rather partial to all things Chanel, of course I went along.  I'm very glad I did, it was fascinating and I cannot wait to read the book.

I love the Art Deco splendour of the place

That has to be the biggest bouquet of roses I've ever seen

 

Photography by Linda Brownlee

About the author

Justine Picardie is the author of four books, including her critically acclaimed memoir, If The Spirit Moves You and her most recent novel Daphne, about Daphne du Maurier.  The former features director of British Vogue and editor of the Observer magazine, Justine is currently a columnist for the Telegraph's Stella magazine and writes for many other publications including the Sunday Telegraph, Harpers Bazaar and Red.

Justine Picardie has spent a number of years painstakingly researching Coco Chanel - The Legend and the life.  The definitive Coco Chanel biography it includes many previously unseen pictures and has been beautifully put together.

Justine talked to us for a few hours and was wonderfully eloquent and passionate about her subject, explaining her journey and the huge amount of work that went into this book.  She told me that researching the life of Coco Chanel - a woman so desperate to reinvent herself she destroyed her own birth certificate and hid her past - was "Like putting together the most enormous and extraordinary jigsaw puzzle."  Luckily Justine's Miss Marple skills have paid off.

Chanel's life spanned two world wars, the Belle Epoque, the jazz age, the Wall Street crash, the depression, the Fifties, the Sixties, mini skirts, the death of JFK - There is a direct link with Jackie Kennedy in the book - much more complicated than simply wearing the pink Chanel suit when her husband was shot.  Coco Chanel lived a fascinating and often turbulent life which is very worthy of this book.

Justine was inspired to write the book in 1997 when she visited Chanel's apartment in Rue Cambon, where everything is preserved just as it was left.  She also interviewed Karl Lagerfeld for the first time and they talked a lot about Coco Chanel.  Karl told her there was still a lot of Chanel's story left untold.  Justine said Karl was enormously encouraging about the book, gave up his time to help and simply told her "Just tell the truth."

Justine built a relationship over a long period of time with the innermost sanctum of Chanel, allowing her access to their amazing archives.  She also managed to get unprecedented access to the British Archives including those of the British military, the Secret Service, Winston Churchill's private archives and a private (unnamed) archive where she found an incredible series of photographs of Chanel with with the Duke of Westminster.

Chanel with her lover Hugh Grosvenor, the Second Duke of Westminster

When Chanel was twelve years old her mother died of tuberculosis and poverty and her father abandoned her and her brothers and sisters at Aubazine a Roman Catholic orphanage run by nuns, where she remained for six years.  No one has ever been in touch with Aubazine before.  Justine contacted them, and even slept there to gain a sense of Chanel's childhood.  No one had ever been in touch before or attempted to trace her early life.  The rooms where the orphans lived are still there.  A incredibly austere place entirely decorated in black and white with not a single mirror.  By contrast Chanel's Rue Cambon apartment is absolutely filled with mirrors.

Justine found some interesting parallels from that time - The iconic Chanel logo is black and white.  The nuns wore white with black and no adornments.  The medieval stained glass in the monastery has what looks like interlocking C's just like her logo.  Even Chanel's bedroom at The Ritz was a monastic styled room with white walls - Justine thinks that Chanel chose to sleep in a grand hotel because she didn't like to be alone, another symptom of her early life, Justine says "In a hotel you are in your own cell - in this case a luxurious room, but you're still sleeping with people all around you."

The book tells the true story of Chanel's life, her lovers, her time in Paris during the Nazi occupation, which no one has been willing to talk about before and which covers a hugely important part of French history.  Justine followed the real trail of what happened rather than the whispers Chanel left behind her. 

It reads like a Who's Who of the Twentieth century, among the people in the book are Winston Churchill, Salvador Dali, Pablo Picasso, The Duke and Duchess of Windsor, The Duke of Westminster, Luchino Visconti, Marcel Proust, Jean Cocteau, Christobel Balenciaga, Christian Dior, Elsa Shiaparelli, Yves Saint Laurent, Lauren Bacall, Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Marilyn Monroe, Claude Debussy, Ernest Hemingway, Katharine Hepburn, Cole Porter, Mussolini, Rasputin, Elizabeth Taylor, Grace Kelly, Gloria Swanson, Diana Vreeland, Nancy Mitford, Dorothy Parker, Jackie Kennedy and a number of members of the English aristocracy.

Ritz Hotel, Paris

Justine told us about two women who were invaluable to her in creating this book.  The first is Gabrielle Labrunie was Chanel's great neice (or possibly her granddaughter - much more in the book) who is her only living relative.  Gabrielle was born in 1926, grew up in Mayfair, London and was given a British upbringing.  Justine visited Gabrielle a number of times and was shown her amazing collection of Chanel's books and clothes, some of which she was allowed to try on.  Justine told us that Gabrielle's involvement in the book was tremendously important.

The second is Claude Delay, a psychoanalyst.  Claude met Chanel when she was a young woman in the Sixties.  Claude was able to tell Justine about Chanel's dreams and aspirations and was a huge help in understanding her.

Photography by Carl Purcell

Coco Chanel in the Imperial Suite at the Ritz, 1960

Here's a wonderful story Justine told us which I recorded on my iPhone.

"I ended up staying in the bedroom at the Ritz where Chanel died.  Not the Coco Chanel suite which is rented out for lots of money, a very small room on the Sixth floor on the Rue Cambon side, quite a modest room by Ritz standards.

The first night I'd seen Gabrielle Labrunie and Claude Delay.  Claude had not been in the room since Chanel had died, almost forty years earlier.  

We sat there together as dusk fell and tears came to her eyes because she hadn't been there since Chanel's death .  She just talked and talked to me about Coco Chanel and the loneliness she had felt at end of her life.  After Claude left, Amanda Harlech (Karl Lagerfeld's muse), who I know quite well, came up to the room.  Amanda always stays at The Ritz when she's in Paris but had never been to this room before and didn't know that this had been Chanel's room since after the Second World war.  Amanda sat with me and we talked about her too.  All three women who'd visited me were wearing Chanel clothes and scent.

Finally I went to bed.  I suppose having people in the room, and this intense conversation about Chanel,    if ever one was to feel a ghostly presence, it was then.  I didn't see a ghost though.

I'd switched the lights off and I was lying there dozing.  Then something odd happened with the lights.  They went on and off and on again without me touching them.  I switched them off again.  Then suddenly this bulb from a crystal chandelier wall sconce looked like it hurled itself towards me.  I know I sound mad!  But I swear, it literally went up and outwards as if it had been thrown, and then fell straight on my bed.

I made a kind of pledge that night that I would do everything I could to find out the truth and honour Chanel.

At this point I couldn't get the lights to go on at all.  I didn't know whether to go downstairs to the concierge in my dressing gown and tell him about it or to just go back to sleep.  I ended up falling asleep and in the morning I got someone to look at the lights  and they said "No, no everything's absolutely fine."  

Then a chambermaid came to the room.  I told her it was very strange here last night and she said "Ah, did Mademoiselle come?"

Everyone in the room immediately got goose bumps!

Photography by Horst P. Horst from the Conde Nast Archive

Coco Chanel - The legend and the life

Is published by Harper Collins this Thursday

Justine Picardie is giving talks on the following dates:

Thursday 23rd September at Waterstones, Kensington

Friday 15th October at The V&A, London

Tuesday 26th October at the Chester Literary Festival

www.justinepicardie.blogspot.com