 |
 Speaking of ...
 |
| Looking south along Fifth Avenue from 56th Street. 12:25 PM. Photo: JH. |
Wednesday, August 3, 2011. Yesterday was sunny and warm and quite bearable in New York. The traffic was fairly light and so were the crowds.
A longtime NYSD reader who now lives in Sante Fe asked me the other day what the mood was like in New York. The Debt Ceiling Debate has been front and center. Its import is unclear but the vibes around it were not. They’re fighting over spilt milk now. This seems obvious to everyone but those who are running the circus. All the elephants are in the living room.
It’s the kind of thing where you’d love a morsel of human gossip just to distract one’s thoughts and fears from a reality that won’t be on BRAVO.
Which, speaking of: Yesterday a friend of mine called me about the piece I wrote about Sonja Morgan on Monday’s Diary (NYSD 8.1.11). My friend who is otherwise a sensitive and thoughtful person went into a rant about poor Sonja, up one side and down the other. She repeated the conversations between the women and what each said to the other. My friend, who is sophisticated and worldly, and as tolerant an individual as anyone I know, was transfixed by the Monday night “reunion” show.
“Why do you watch that?” I asked, as if disdaining.
“I know,” she answered. “I don’t know why; it’s interesting. But those women ....” Then she laughed. I know why she watches it.
 |
 |
| Nancy and Henry Silverman in 2006. |
 |
| Nancy Now. |
|
Yesterday in New York, the Post and today the Daily Mail in London ran a story about the private equity tycoon Henry Silverman who a couple years ago left his wife of thirty years, Nancy, for a much younger woman who was a yoga teacher before love found Andy Hardy.
At the time the move came as a surprise. mainly because Nancy Silverman was the most devoted and attentive wife. She idolized the man. She was with him every inch of the way as he built his fortune. And then comes the yoga teacher and eternal youth springing.
Is it funny? Maybe to some, but to others it's never funny and divorces seem to make everything uglier than the marriage. Why is that?
Henry Silverman is a very congenial fellow and obviously a smart businessman. Not all of these guys are as smart (or don’t seem to be) as you might think, but Henry Silverman is. He’s also a welcoming host (they had a box at Yankee Stadium which is the best invitation in New York during the season). It didn’t seem as if his interest in his wife matched her interest in him, but they were a team, and that is often the way in successful marriages.
For Nancy Silverman, Henry was her Clark Kent. So she was “devastated” when he dropped the bomb. But that was then and she’s recovered. She let her hair down too, as you can see.
Yesterday the State Supreme Court threw out Henry Silverman’s lawyers’ argument that he was rich (all made during the marriage) because he was a “genius” and born that way, long before any Nancy ever came around. At the base of this argument is a greater one: Why should I give her half just because we were married thirty years? What’s thirty years when you’re 65 or 68? Ask Nancy Silverman. Women are usually more realistic about these things.
So here we are, Debt Ceilings restored, billionaires bickering and something in the air that doesn’t look a lot like Christmas.
But now for something far more tantalizing: It may not be news but there is a new biography of Coco Chanel written by Lisa Chaney coming out in November that will reveal new information about her love life and sex life, etc.
None of it will surprise those who knew her and those who knew people who knew her. Her sex life might be interesting if it gave a glimpse into the vulnerable side of this powerful personality. |
|
|
|
| Coco at 24 in 1907. |
Chanel in a Paris nightclub, 1923, age 40. |
|
|
She was a woman of vision. In her private life it has always been said that Coco liked pretty girls. It may or may not be so but in this day and age, it’s irrelevant. We know she had legendary love affairs with men who were very prominent in their time. And rich. And then she was alone. Or so it might seem.
She was above all, a freestanding woman of her time, an artist of the culture which is what a fashion designer ultimately is, as influential as Picasso. She recognized a paradigmatic change expressed in women’s clothes. Everything changed with her, and so it remains.
A couple of years ago I read a great “autobiography” of the woman. A book about what she thinks/thought. Her version of her story. The designer version. The personality captivates. She has power that men recognize as greater than their own and women are in awe of. It was really my introduction to Chanel as a historical figure. I’m sharing it again in case you missed it.
From NYSD 7/6/09: The rest of the weekend was spent in the presence of two books I picked up on Thursday afternoon at Archivia. “Byron In Love” and “The Allure of Chanel.”
The Chanel “memoir” was written at her request by Paul Morand who was a contemporary of Mlle. Coco although five years younger (1888 – 1976 to her 1883 – 1971).
I was attracted to the book by its size and feel. It’s small, the size of the old-time paperbacks, but beautifully wrapped in a soft white cover with a picture of the lady reclining, suit and hat and all on a Recamier in front of her fireplace.
The memoirs were never published and only found among Morand’s papers after his death (five years after the death of Chanel). From this writer’s point of view it is an excellent collaboration in that there are no fingerprints of the writer (Morand).
The character, Coco, as she refers to herself, is so powerful, with a voice is so powerful, that you quickly forget anyone else had anything to do with the book. Her words command a response be it laughter or awe or amazement or scorn. In several places she refers to herself quite openly as a “monster,” a matter about which no doubt she could find plenty of agreement. Although to hear her tell it, and it is quite possibly so, she was very generous with herself and her assets. |
|
|
|
|
|
| Coco with an aunt Adrienne in front of her shop on the rue Cambon in 1912. |
Arthur "Boy" Capel, Coco's first lover. |
Coco in the New Chanel. |
I’d read in one of the Cecil Beaton Diaries (edited by Hugo Vickers) books that said Coco later on in her life was a difficult person to be around. Beaton mentioned stopping in front of her atelier on rue Cambon and looking in the window. She spotted him and invited him in. After that he was a prisoner.
She’s better in a book, perhaps. Coco has oodles of certainty, determination, and is as unsentimental about herself as she is about others. But not without charm, and full of common sense, as well as some uncommon nonsense which we will have to chalk up to personality. |
| Coco, performing with Jean Cocteau. |
The new Chanel. |
Morand was a diplomat and writer and popular literary figure in the years leading up to the War. When Hitler came to power, and the Nazis occupied Paris, however, Morand chose to follow Marshal Petain and the Vichy government which rewarded him with diplomatic posts. Many attribute his fateful choice to his Roumanian-born wife Helene, who was also anti-Semitic.
Morand survived the war but not the disgrace. He was exiled for survival to Switzerland. Chanel offered him this opportunity (to write the memoir). It looks as if she did it mainly to give a man another opportunity to work since she never bothered to publish it.
He was brought into the project after the Second World War was ended. Chanel had remained in Paris during the war, and was seen by many to be a Nazi sympathizer because she remained – although she removed herself to Switzerland after the defeat of the Nazis.
|
|
|
|
She was clever and wise about restoring her legendary reputation among the French, avoiding the punishment doled out to many women and men who lived in Paris and befriended the enemy. None of this is dealt with in her version of her life.
It’s an interesting memoir because it’s all about what she thinks not what she did. She rightfully assumed we all know what she did. She is simply a compelling character to be around. She was very sharp, and sharp with herself too – to a degree. We all can fall for self-delusion every now and then over certain subjects or areas of interest.
When you read what she thinks, you can understand while all these decades later, after her death, almost a century after her starting her business, there is still a CHANEL. It’s Coco; she’s still breezing around in its ether. |
|
|
|
|
The text is full of observations of a wise if somewhat cranky character, young or old. Such as:
Bemoaning one’s fate is to cradle complacently the child that continues to live within every one of us, and who is of no interest to anyone.
Or, her opinion about beauty versus vanity:
As for the real secret, which is to transform physical beauty into moral beauty, it’s the one trick which most women are incapable of performing.
Or:
A woman who is growing older must be in fashion; only a young woman can be in her fashion. |
 |
|
|
|
|
She lived in the great age of Paris in the first quarter of the 20th century, in the presence of friends and acquaintances such as Picasso, Toulouse-Lautrec, Renoir, Marie Laure de Noilles, Satie, Stravinskyk, Nijinksy, Diaghilev, Serge Lifar, Pavlova, Misia Sert, Poulenc. It seemed as if she knew whomever she wished to know.
In her youth she had rich, famous lovers, such as Arthur “Boy” Capel who died early in an auto accident, and “Bend’or,” the 2nd Duke of Westminster and one of the richest men in Britain. Bend’or’s gifts to her were legend. In one story he hid an enormous uncut emerald at the bottom of a crate of vegetables for her to accidentally find.
If these are her words in this memoir, she was not kind about gay men or straight women who befriended them. There is some irony to this concerning her long whispered reputation for being sapphically inclined herself. |
 |
When it came to herself, she could be as brutally frank:
Boy Capel would often say to me: “Remember that you’re a woman ...”
So as to remind myself I stand in front of a mirror: I see myself with my two menacing arched eyebrows, my nostrils that are as wide as those of a mare, my hair that is blacker than the devil, my mouth that is like a crevice out of which pours a heart that is irritable but unselfish, crowning all that, a great knot of a schoolgirl’s hair set above the troubled face of a woman who spent too much time at school! My dark, gipsy-like skin that makes my teeth and my pearls look twice as white; my body, as dry as a vine stock without grapes; my worker’s hands with cabochons that resemble an imitation American knuckle-buster.
The hardness of the mirror reflects my own hardness back to me; it’s a struggle between it and me: it expresses what is peculiar to myself ... Finally there are my gold-brown eyes which guard the entrance to my heart: there one can see that I am a woman.
A poor woman.
I was telling my friend Schulenberg about the book last night. He sent me the following message:
“I met Chanel, in passing, in Paris, in the early 60s. I had been introduced by her secretary Jacques Iskander. I was leaving the boutique, having visited Jaquie (as he was known) and at a distance, I saw this woman striding down the Rue Cambon. I noticed she was dressed from head to toe in Chanel and as she got closer, I realized that she was, head to toe, Chanel herself!
“She came up to us and Jacquie introduced us; she shook hands and, wasting no time, said ‘Viens, Jacquie!’ (‘Come’!)
“My impression was that even at 83, she was a very tough broad!
“Elegant - but tough!
“But elegant.” |
| |
Comments? Contact DPC here. |
|
|
|
|
