Coco Chanel’s Little-Known Flirtation with Golden-Age Hollywood

In 1931, Gabrielle Bonheur “Coco” Chanel was 47 years old and had been
a household name in Europe and America since the age of 30. She had been
raised in an orphanage after her mother died. As a young woman, she had
worked as a shop assistant and a cabaret singer before becoming a
designer of hats, setting her on a path to being the most famous of the
Parisian couturiers. Employing hallmarks of early-20th-century modernism
in her designs—she knew many of the godfathers of modernism, including
Stravinsky, Diaghilev, Cocteau, even Picasso—Chanel reimagined haute
couture. A line of costume jewelry and her famous perfume, Chanel No. 5,
made up the Chanel brand, which became synonymous with high style,
privilege, and good taste. Her signature initials—gold, interlocking
C’s—continue to exert global influence today, well over 100 years
after her birth. Last year, Chanel, valued at $7.2 billion, was No. 80
on Forbes’s list of the world’s most valuable brands. Today, a bottle of
Chanel No. 5—the first synthetic perfume ever created—is sold
somewhere in the world every 30 seconds.

In 1931, Chanel didn’t need Hollywood. Hollywood, however, needed
Chanel. Or so thought movie mogul Samuel Goldwyn, who ran United
Artists. He believed that “women went to movies to see how other women
dressed,” according to A. Scott Berg in his 1989 biography, Goldwyn.
Film designers, unlike couturiers, were really theatrical costumers,
whose designs, it was widely felt, “lacked elegance and mimicked
fashion without being so itself,” in the words of film scholar Kristen
Welch. As movie audiences dwindled after the Wall Street crash of 1929,
Goldwyn was looking for new ways to bring in moviegoers—especially
women. In Chanel he saw his chance. With her designs, Goldwyn felt,
Chanel would bring “class” to Hollywood.

Only the big stars had been actually designed for, and that had not
always gone well. Lillian Gish had rejected the clothes designed for her
by Erté, whom Louis B. Mayer had brought to Hollywood. Greta Garbo had
difficulties with MGM designer Gilbert Clark. But Goldwyn felt that
Chanel would be irresistible, so he offered her a guaranteed $1 million
to come to Hollywood twice a year, to “dress his stars, both onscreen
and off . . . . Chanel was to put the actresses in styles ‘six months
ahead’ of fashion, in order to offset the inevitable delay between
filming and release,” according to Rhonda K. Garelick in her 2014
biography, Mademoiselle: Coco Chanel and the Pulse of History.

With offscreen clothes designed for stars such as Gloria Swanson and
Norma Talmadge, the stars’ images would meld seamlessly with their
screen glamour.

Goldwyn reportedly told French journalists, “I think that in engaging
Mme. Chanel I have not only solved the difficult problem of how to keep
clothes from being dated, but also there is a definite service rendered
American women in being able to see in our pictures the newest Paris
fashions—sometimes even before Paris sees them.”

Samuel Goldwyn and Chanel in L.A., in 1931.

From The Samuel Goldwyn Jr. Family Trust/Academy Of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Glove Story

Like Chanel, “starting at an early age, Samuel Goldwyn invented
himself,” wrote Berg. Born Schmuel Gelbfisz in Warsaw, Poland, in 1879,
he had to support his mother and five siblings after his father died
young. To escape life in the Jewish ghetto and the prospect of
conscription into the czar’s army, Gelbfisz turned his “doleful eyes”
toward America. On New York’s Lower East Side, he found that he had
merely exchanged one crowded ghetto for another, so he took a train to
Gloversville, in upstate New York, a mecca for Jewish immigrants, who
had forged the glove-manufacturing business there. He found success as
the premier salesman for the Elite Glove Company, but it was an alliance
with his brother-in-law, Jesse L. Lasky, of Lasky Feature Play Company,
that brought him into the moving-picture business. By 1924, after
changing his name to Goldwyn, he had become a major movie producer,
among the tough, immigrant moguls who created Hollywood. Unlike Chanel,
Samuel Goldwyn loved the movies.

Initially, Chanel refused Goldwyn’s generous offer. She had a number of
reservations. First and foremost, she didn’t want to be seen as
Goldwyn’s employee or as a United Artists contractee. When, after a
year, she finally accepted, she made it clear to the press that she was
an autonomous agent, telling The New York Times that she wasn’t becoming
a “costume designer,” and that in Hollywood she would “not make one
dress. I have not brought my scissors with me. Later, perhaps when I go
back to Paris, I will create and design gowns six months ahead for
actresses in Mr. Goldwyn’s pictures.”

She arrived in New York in early March of 1931 and, before continuing on
to Hollywood, holed up at the Pierre hotel with a bad case of “the
grippe.” Nonetheless, she endured a press reception in her honor in a
suite bursting with flowers. Greeting reporters in a rose-red jersey
with a white knit blouse and a long string of pearls looped around her
neck, she brought out an atomizer and generously spritzed the group with
a not yet numbered new scent, according to Chanel biographer Hal
Vaughan. (Chanel numbered rather than named her perfumes, because she
thought naming them vulgar.) Not an avid moviegoer, she told the press
she was heading to Hollywood to work on an idea, not a dress. When asked
by The New York Times what she expected to find in Hollywood, she
answered, “Nothing, and everything. Wait and see. I am a worker, not a
talker, and I am going to my work.”

With her were two traveling companions: Misia Sert, a well-known patron
of avant-garde artists, who had posed for Toulouse-Lautrec, Bonnard,
Renoir, and Vuillard, and had been painted in prose by Proust (she was a
model for Madame Verdurin and Princess Yourbeletieff in Remembrance of
Things Past); and Maurice Sachs, a young writer and secretary to the
avant-garde artist Jean Cocteau. The three boarded a luxury
express-train car to Los Angeles, commissioned just for them, with an
all-white interior, for the nearly 3,000-mile, four-day journey, amid
buckets of champagne.

When Chanel arrived at Union Station in Los Angeles, Greta Garbo was
there to greet her, with a European kiss on both cheeks. But Chanel
eventually found herself more impressed with a haughty, angular,
auburn-haired beauty named Katharine Hepburn.

At a reception in Chanel’s honor held at Goldwyn’s lavish, Italianate
house in Hollywood, there to greet her were such local luminaries as
Marlene Dietrich, Claudette Colbert, Garbo again, Fredric March, and
directors George Cukor and Erich von Stroheim, who clicked his heels
while kissing Chanel’s hand, asking, “You are a . . . seamstress, I
believe?” according to Axel Madsen in his 1991 book, Chanel: A Woman of
Her Own. (She forgave him that remark, later uttering, “Such a ham, but
what style!”)

VIDEO: The Evolution of Chanel

The New York Times generally welcomed Chanel to America, whereas the Los
Angeles Times got its back up at the implied suggestion that Hollywood
needed European fashion to give it a boost. The local press was devoted
to the idea that Hollywood was already a major influence on American
fashion. Who needed Paris? WORLD’S STYLE CENTER SHIFTS FROM EUROPE TO
LOS ANGELES was how the newspaper announced Chanel’s visit to Hollywood.
The implication was that Chanel was coming to Hollywood not to lend her
brand of chic to the industry but because Hollywood had replaced Paris
as the center of fashion, and its gravitational pull had brought her to
its shores.

United Artists set up a lavishly decorated salon equipped with a sewing
machine and dress mannequins for Chanel to use, in the hope that she
would be making a long-term commitment to Hollywood. But she refused to
use it, a situation the local press picked up on, describing her as a
snob disdainful of Hollywood, rather than the exemplar of European
sophistication that Goldwyn had thought he was buying.

The future director Mitchell Leisen and his assistant, Adrian, were both
assigned to help Chanel on Palmy Days, her first film for Goldwyn.
Adrian, born Adrian Adolph Greenberg, affected a French name and
Continental manners, but he was sure to be found out by a true
Frenchwoman. However, it didn’t matter to Chanel—a shape-shifter
herself—because she saw that Adrian was quite a good designer, and she
respected that. She particularly admired the wardrobe he’d designed for
Garbo in Mata Hari, in 1931, which seemed to anticipate Chanel’s own
collection for that year.

Goldwyn had chosen Palmy Days, an Eddie Cantor-Busby Berkeley musical,
as Chanel’s first assignment because frothy song-and-dance movies were
wildly popular during the Depression, as moviegoers sought escape from
their troubles in cinematic fantasies. It was Chanel’s job to design
dresses for Palmy Days’ star, Charlotte Greenwood, as a “physical
culturist,” i.e., a gym instructor. As sportswear was one of Chanel’s
métiers, that wasn’t a problem, but the Busby Berkeley production
numbers featuring the Goldwyn Girls—especially in a pre-Code,
rollicking gym routine called “Bend Down, Sister”—stole the show.
Though the wobbly tale was one of the most popular musicals of the year,
Chanel’s small contribution played little part in its success.

Adrian tried to explain to Chanel that film wardrobes had to be
“photogenic” and that subtlety would not translate to the screen.
There was another difference: in couture, the mannequins were meant to
enhance and show off the design; on-screen, the design was meant to show
off and enhance the actresses.

Gloria Swanson in a Chanel-designed
gown in 1931’s Tonight or Never.

From Photofest; Digital Colorization by Lee Ruelle.

French Leave

Chanel found more acclaim with her next picture, Tonight or Never,
starring Gloria Swanson as an opera diva. Swanson was already celebrated
as one of “the Top Ten Best-Dressed Women in the World,” but there was
a problem: the actress already had a designer she preferred to work
with, René Hubert, and she resisted Chanel. Goldwyn pointed out to
Swanson that she didn’t have the contractual right of refusal, so Chanel
was brought in. With the imperious Swanson as her mannequin, Chanel
designed a wardrobe that managed to be both beautiful and understated,
particularly a stunning white gown. But by then Chanel was no longer in
Hollywood.

If the couturier had been trumped by the costumer, Chanel would be
reassured of her importance when she returned to New York on her way
back to France. She toured the city’s major department stores—Saks
Fifth Avenue, Macy’s, Bloomingdale’s—but was most impressed by what
she saw downtown on Union Square. Arriving at the discount store S.
Klein there, she found cheap knock-offs of her designs being sold in
warehouse-like surroundings, where women pawed through merchandise
without the help of salesladies and tried on dresses straight off the
rack. A designer dress that sold for $20 on Fifth Avenue could be had
for $4, in cheaper fabric, at S. Klein. In huge, communal fitting
rooms, women tried on dresses beneath signs that warned, “Don’t Try to
Steal. Our Detectives Are Everywhere,” posted in several languages.
Most of her contemporaries would have been appalled, but seeing that
piracy was the ultimate compliment paid to success, Chanel loved it.
Then, she decamped to Paris. She had been unimpressed by the luxuries of
Hollywood—“Their comforts are killing them,” she would later say,
according to Garelick—and she may have harbored a vestigial resentment
against America because that is where her father had drifted when he
abandoned the family. “[Hollywood] was like an evening at the
Folies Bergère,” she said. “Once it is agreed that the girls were
beautiful in their feathers there is not much to add.”

Goldwyn believed that “women went to movies to see how other women
dressed.”

Back in Paris, Chanel modified the terms of her agreement with Goldwyn,
telling him that she would be designing for Hollywood from Paris, and
that his female stars would simply have to travel to Europe. Swanson was
already in London at the time, so it was easy for her to be fitted at
Chanel’s atelier on the Rue Cambon, this time for an orchid-hued gown
trimmed with mirrors. However, when Chanel discovered that the actress
had gained weight between fittings, she was furious and demanded Swanson
lose five pounds. What she soon found out was that Swanson was secretly
pregnant by her Irish lover, playboy Michael Farmer. The actress
insisted on wearing a stiff rubber corset to hide her pregnancy, which
Chanel thought would destroy the lines of the dress, but the designer
managed to conceal the weight gain and was able to introduce her
signature look to American audiences by dressing Swanson not only in
gowns but in ropes of pearls worn over a tailored suit. In some scenes,
the dark-haired Swanson even “bears a striking resemblance to Chanel
herself,” as Kristen Welch has observed, turning Swanson “into the
embodiment of the Chanel ideal.”

Tonight or Never was meant to take Swanson from being a silent-movie
star into the era of sound. Photographed by the great Gregg Toland
(Citizen Kane) and directed by Mervyn LeRoy (Little Caesar), the movie
didn’t garner the attention Goldwyn had hoped for, in part because the
sensational news of Swanson’s personal life—her divorce from Henri,
Marquis de la Falaise de la Coudraye and rushed marriage to Michael
Farmer—overshadowed the publicity for the movie. But Chanel’s designs
won acclaim.