Coco Chanel

Few guests have become as inseparable from a hotel as Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel from the Ritz Paris, where she lived for more than three decades and where she died in 1971. Between a convent orphanage in the Corrèze and the Place Vendôme, her life traced a map of the resorts of her age, Deauville, Biarritz, Cannes and the Riviera, each one a stage in the invention of modern fashion.

From Saumur to Moulins

She was born in Saumur on 19 August 1883, the daughter of a laundrywoman, Eugénie Jeanne Devolle, and of Albert Chanel, a travelling street vendor; a clerk even misspelt the family name as “Chasnel” on her birth record. Her mother died when Gabrielle was eleven, and her father left her and two of her sisters at the convent orphanage of Aubazine. She spent some six years there and learned to sew, a skill that would outlast every other lesson of that austere childhood.

At eighteen she moved to a Catholic boarding house in Moulins and sang at a cabaret called La Rotonde, where a popular song of the day gave her the nickname “Coco”. In 1906 she tried her luck on the stage in Vichy, serving the spa water at the Grande Grille while waiting for engagements, then gave up the idea. Through Étienne Balsan, a textile heir, she lived for about three years at his château of Royallieu near Compiègne; from 1908 the Englishman Arthur “Boy” Capel became the great love of her life and the backer of her first shops, until his death in a car accident on 22 December 1919.

The resorts as a laboratory

Licensed as a milliner in 1910, she opened her first boutique at 21 rue Cambon in Paris. In 1913, with Capel’s money, she rented a shop in Deauville on the rue Gontaut-Biron, between the casino and the Hôtel Normandy. There, for two summers, the fashionable crowd of the Normandy coast discovered her hats, then her jackets and skirts in supple jersey, clothes designed for walking on the boardwalk rather than posing in a salon.

In 1915 she moved south to Biarritz and opened, in the Villa Larralde facing the casino, her first true couture house; by 1916 she had repaid Capel’s investment. The resort owed its fortune to Empress Eugénie, whose former summer residence had become the Hôtel du Palais. It was in Biarritz that Chanel met Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich, an exiled cousin of the last Tsar, with whom she shared a romance and a long friendship. In 1918 she bought the building at 31 rue Cambon, which still houses the maison today.

Cannes, a perfume and a duke

In the late summer of 1920, in Cannes, Dmitri helped the perfumer Ernest Beaux, born in Moscow in 1881 and settled in Paris since 1919, obtain a meeting with her. Beaux presented two numbered series of samples and she chose the fifth. About a hundred bottles of what became N°5 were offered to her best clients at Christmas 1921, before the scent went on sale in her shops in 1922. In Cannes itself, the Carlton, opened on 30 January 1911 by the Swiss hotelier Henry Ruhl, had been partly financed by Grand Duke Michael Mikhailovich, a Romanov relative of Dmitri.

In Monte Carlo in 1923, her friend Vera Bate Lombardi introduced her to Hugh Grosvenor, 2nd Duke of Westminster, known as “Bendor”, then one of the richest men in Britain. Their affair lasted about ten years. He showered her with jewels and in 1927 gave her land at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, where she built La Pausa, whose staircase recalled the cloister of Aubazine. It was also through Bendor that she met Winston Churchill in 1927. A photograph published on this site is captioned as showing the couple on the tennis court of the Carlton.

A suite at the Ritz

Chanel had stayed at the Ritz since the 1920s, and around 1937 she took a suite there for good. The hotel, installed on the Place Vendôme since 1898, backs onto the rue Cambon, a few steps from her maison, and she habitually came and went through the staff entrance on that side. She received in a small apartment above her salons, but went back to the Ritz to sleep: for thirty-four years, the palace was her home.

The war darkened this chapter. She closed her couture house in 1939, putting some 4,000 employees out of work, and stayed on at the Ritz during the Occupation, when the hotel was the favoured residence of senior German military staff. There she had a liaison with Baron Hans Günther von Dincklage, a German diplomat linked to intelligence services; declassified files studied by the historian Hal Vaughan connect her to German intelligence and to a failed peace overture planned in late 1943 or early 1944. Questioned in September 1944 and released, she left for Switzerland in 1945 and spent the next decade around Lausanne, where she kept a suite at the Beau-Rivage Palace on the shore of Lake Geneva.

Return and legacy

In 1954, at seventy, she reopened her house with the backing of Pierre Wertheimer. The French press was cool, mindful of her wartime record, but American and British buyers were won over. She died in her suite at the Ritz on 10 January 1971, aged eighty-seven, and was buried in the Bois-de-Vaux cemetery in Lausanne.

The Ritz has kept her memory alive. Among the suites named after famous guests, the Coco Chanel Suite, about 188 square metres, displays sketches and photographs not shown anywhere else. The house she founded has kept its ties with the grand hotels of her youth: in 2012 Karl Lagerfeld photographed Chanel’s spring-summer campaign at the Hôtel du Cap-Eden-Roc in Antibes. A few steps from the Ritz, the rue Cambon still houses her maison, and every bottle of N°5 carries a trace of that late-summer meeting in Cannes.

Sources Wikipedia (EN), “Coco Chanel” · Wikipedia (FR), “Coco Chanel” · Wikipedia (EN), “Ernest Beaux” · Wikipedia (EN), “Carlton Hotel, Cannes” · Wikipedia (EN), “Hugh Grosvenor, 2nd Duke of Westminster” · Wikipedia (FR), “Hôtel du Palais” · South China Morning Post, “Why Coco Chanel stayed at the Ritz Paris for over 30 years” · Ville de Biarritz, “Villa Larralde” · Swissinfo, “How Coco Chanel spent her exile in Switzerland” · Luxuo, “Chanel Spring 2012 Campaign”