Michel Déon spent a year with Chanel, recording her life story, before destroying the only copy, at her request, writes LARA MARLOWE
MICHEL DÉON had already written Salvador Dali’s memoirs with the Spanish painter when his publisher asked him if he’d be willing to work with Coco Chanel on her autobiography. It was 1952. Déon was an up-and-coming writer, aged 33. Chanel was 69.
Déon spent more than a year with Chanel, taking notes as they travelled from Paris to Monte Carlo, Roquebrune, Milan, Rome and Lausanne, writing up her life story for a monthly salary, breaking off occasionally to pay his rent in Paris or write a magazine article. Angered by his long absences, Déon’s girlfriend left him.
Déon was already living in Co Galway when Chanel died in 1971. The French academician is about to turn 90, but he still cherishes his “marvellous memories” of the grande dame of French couture. For him, she was a symbol of the entre-deux-guerres, the intense creativity of the 1920s and 1930s.
In Pages Francaises, published by Gallimard in 1999, Déon recounts a trip to the Beau-Rivage hotel in Lausanne. He drove his sports car, with Chanel in the passenger seat, “her head veiled in pink gauze, like a motorist of the early 1900s”. Chanel’s liveried driver followed in her Cadillac, “with two maids on the back seat, one of them clutching the famous jewellery box in detergent-worn hands . . .”
Chanel talked constantly, to conquer her shyness. “She invented for herself a childhood she never had,” says Déon. Abandoned by their parents, she and her sister grew up as servants in a girls’ school.
When Déon gave Chanel his 300-page manuscript, she congratulated him on his work, acknowledged she had said everything as quoted, then declined to see it published. Déon dutifully destroyed the sole copy. They remained friends. Chanel sent one of her classic suits to Déon’s bride Chantal, and repeated the gift when each of their two children was born.
Chanel once offered to give Déon some valuable antiques. He was always glad he refused. “Once people accepted something from her, she was suspicious. She told herself, ‘That’s why they love me’,” Déon recalls. “As she aged, she turned a cynical eye on her milieu. So many people took advantage of her.”
Chanel treated her employees well, and was so hurt when they went on strike under the Popular Front government in 1936 that she shut down her couture atelier. After the second World War, Winston Churchill intervened to ensure she was not punished for having had a German lover. But the French press was initially hostile when she started designing again in the 1950s. Rich Americans snapped up her fashions, and, Déon recalls, “In a few weeks, she was again the queen of Paris . . . She didn’t care, because celebrity no longer went to her head. I have rarely seen someone desire victory so much and so disdain its fruits.”
From time to time, Déon went to the rue Cambon to dine with Chanel. He would find her perched on a gold chair in the first-floor salon, snipping excess fabric from a dress worn by a model. “At those times, Coco’s face lit up with pleasure and mischief,” he wrote. “In work, she found peace.”