The Paris debut of Diaghilev’s ballet, “Rite of Spring,” caused a riot in 1913. Coco Chanel was in the audience and she, for one, was delighted by the uproar. Although she was famously a woman of taste and style, the irreverent Chanel was also from a humble background who enjoyed a bit of society outrage.
Seven years later, at a Paris dinner party, Diaghilev introduced Chanel to the composer of that piece — Russian musician Igor Stravinsky — and the sparks flew again. But while the clothier was successful and rich at the time, Stravinsky was struggling financially following his exile from Russia.
A sympathetic Chanel offered him patronage in the form of room and board for him — and his wife and four children — at her spacious villa outside Paris. It was an artist’s dream: freedom to work on his music without worrying about rent.
And there was another benefit: A few weeks after the gawky Stravinsky moved in, Chanel seduced him. She simply doffed her clothes one afternoon — a white linen suit of her own design. Soon, their affair was obvious to the composer’s consumptive wife, bedridden upstairs, who became suspicious upon noticing his piano-playing stop at the same time each day, “only to pick up a little more jauntily about half an hour later.”
Igor felt almost entitled to the tryst. He hadn’t felt passion for his wife, who was scandalously also his first cousin, in some time.
But the imperious Chanel aroused in him not only lust but class consciousness. During their first fight, Stravinsky let slip that he didn’t consider Chanel an artist like himself, but “a shopkeeper” and hinted that her patronage of him served to advance her own ambitions.
When Chanel finally realized that Stravinsky would never leave his wife, she took up with a new guest in revenge — a Russian military man who was Stravinsky’s opposite in every way. The composer left her villa at the end of the summer, and the fling burned out.
The real testament to their affair, however, was the work they accomplished during it. Stravinsky achieved the heights of fame with a successful re-staging of “Rite of Spring,” composed during his time at Coco’s villa and bankrolled by her donations. And Coco, of course, went on to launch a strangely seductive new fragrance called Chanel No. 5.
Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky
by Chris Greenhalgh
Riverhead Trade