Coco Chanel got her start in hats. She had a flair for knowing exactly what to do with a single feather or silk flower. Her first establishment was on the Boulevard Malesherbes, in the Paris apartment of her first lover, Étienne Balsan, diffident aristocrat, passionate breeder of thoroughbreds, and flaunter of convention. Balsan’s family had made their fortune in textiles. His younger brother married a Vanderbilt… but Étienne was a rule breaker. He fancied aging courtesans and black-eyed waifs with nothing to offer but spunk.

Balsan spied Chanel singing at a caf’conc in Vichy. Or he made her acquaintance at a tea party, where they discussed horses and fate. Or he met her when he brought his trousers in to be tailored at the shop where she worked to make both ends meet. Accounts differ. With Chanel, accounts always differ, in part because she was a master of misinformation, which is a nice way of saying she compulsively lied about her past…

When Chanel met Balsan she was perhaps 22 and… hoping to become a singer. It was a completely understandable, run-of-the-mill aspiration, the early twentieth-century version of hoping to make it on American Idol...

Chanel must have already known that her future didn’t lie in show biz, so when Balsan asked her to come to Royallieu, his chateau/thoroughbred-breeding operation, she said, “Pourquoi pas?” Why not? There, she was installed as Balsan’s second-string mistress, his first-string mistress was the world-class courtesan Émilienne d’Alençon, also installed at Royallieu. Before becoming a demimondaine, d’Alençon enjoyed a very short career in the circus where, dressed in a skimpy clown outfit, she performed an act with trained rabbits… Chanel liked her immensely, but even by French standards the whole arrangement was pretty weird.

Chanel spent most of her days at the stables with the horse trainers and grooms. She loved Balsan’s thoroughbreds, but had no aptitude for the indolent kept-woman lifestyle generally practised by mistresses of wealthy men. Her main job seemed to be to entertain Balsan’s pals with her extreme youth (next to the big ’’ blowsy Mae Westian d’Alençon, Chanel looked like an underfed street urchin), sass, and ability to jump on the back of a barely broke two-year-old stallion and gallop off through the forest…

Balsan set Chanel and her hat business up in his little-used Parisian apartment to humour her. Like most people born into wealth, Balsan was mystified by his petite amie’s desire to “do” something. What he never bothered to figure out was that the woman who would one day say “Fashion is made to become unfashionable” knew full well that after a few years she would go out of fashion with him, as d’Alençon had, and then where would she be?...

Chanel’s first customer was none other than Émilienne d’Alençon, who wore a Chanel creation to the races at Longchamp. D’Alençon had recently left Balsan for a jockey. The gossip couldn’t be more delicious. And what was that marvellous and strange hat on d’Alençon’s head?

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The romance novel-reading part of Chanel may have wanted to marry, but in the pie chart of her personality that desire was sliver-sized compared to the part that commanded 2,400 forewomen in 56 workrooms, created two collections a year, launched a perfume empire, invented the concept of costume jewellery, learned to fly-fish, and bred racehorses, while at all times looking fantastic…

Chanel had one great love, and at the risk of sounding like my mother, she should have considered herself lucky: some people (even those who’ve enjoyed successful marriages) never get any. Chanel and Boy “Arthur” Capel met sometime around 1905. She had been living at Royallieu for several years when the dashing English polo-player and old friend of Balsan’s showed up one day to look at his horses and was immediately smitten by Chanel. Unlike Balsan, who’d turned a deaf ear to Chanel’s ambitions — hadn’t he done enough setting her up in her silly hat business? — Capel listened to her. He was intrigued. He was a man of the world, an industrialist from Newcastle who’d made a small fortune exporting coal and would make an even larger fortune during World War I, supplying the Allies with fuel…

As Chanelore has it, Chanel made the switch from Balsan to Capel one evening in the drawing room at Royallieu. The three of them were enjoying their port and Chanel, feeling bold from the wine and Capel’s attention, brought up the subject of opening a boutique... Balsan rolled his eyes, so tired was he of her refusal to be happy with what she had. Capel took him to task, arguing for Chanel’s talent, her brilliant mind, her ability to make a business work. He was in love.

In some French and utterly urbane manner, the change was negotiated…

The young lovers moved to Paris, where they lived quietly on the elegant Avenue Garbiel… Could they have married and lived happily ever after? Capel was an enthusiastic philanderer, but Chanel wasn’t the jealous type. She considered his fooling around to be a disgusting habit on a par with avid cuticle chewing…

In the winter of 1918, Capel became engaged to the young, uninteresting (by Chanel’s standards) Diana Lister Wyndham… Capel continued to see her after their wedding.

Several days before Christmas, 1919, on his way from Paris to Cannes, the tire in Capel’s new car blew, and he was killed in the fiery crash that followed. He was 38 years old. A mutual friend arrived in the middle of the night to deliver the news. Chanel dressed and ordered the car around. Her instincts were always tactile; she needed to touch something to know it. The crash had happened on the road from St Raphael. Chanel and her driver arrived at the site just as the sun was coming up over the Cote d’Azur. No one had moved the wreckage. Chanel got out and placed her hands on the fender. Then she sat down and cried.

Diana Wyndham was the official widow, but Chanel felt like one… To console herself she made the widowed Madame Capel (who eventually remarried and became Countess of Westmoreland) her client.

Extracted from The Gospel According to Coco Chanel
by Karen Karbo;
Om Books International;
Price: Rs 295