#64 Coco Chanel: Her Life and Secrets

**David Senra** (0:00)
She smiled and kept hold of my hand. I'm very pleased, as you see. There was no big audience, but the people who did come really understand work done well. No one pays me compliments anymore simply to please me. It's my work that I'm congratulated on. And to me, that's the only thing that counts.
So that's a quote from Coco Chanel when she was 71 years old. And I found it in the book that I'm gonna talk to you about today, which is Coco Chanel, Her Life, and Her Secrets.
So let's start at the very beginning where the author is talking about how he came to know Coco Chanel.
And he says, I first met Coco Chanel in 1958 She was 75 years old, a prodigy, beautified, and triumphant. She had imposed her style on the whole world. Because she had succeeded in everything in her life, I urged her to describe her victories into the tape recorder. She murmured into the microphone. I don't even know whether I've been happy. So I'm going to continue in the introduction. I just want to pause here though, because this is one of the strangest books that I've read so far for the podcast. First of all, it's very, very old. It was first published in 1971 And basically, it's a series of interviews that takes over a few years, and it's mostly like a transcription with just random stories intertwined, but it was translated from French. So it's kind of, you'll see some of the language here is a little funny. But I think I did a fairly decent job of pulling out interesting parts so we can understand like, how does a poor, penniless orphan transform herself into one of the most successful and richest people in the world?
So that's really what I'm going to focus on today. More of her personality, the traits, how she thought about business, all that kind of stuff. So let me just continue right back where I left off. So she's saying, you know, I don't even know whether I've been happy. She said she would say, every day I simplify something, because every day I learn something. When I can no longer create anything, I'll be done for.
Only truth has no frontiers. There's only one thing about which I'm still curious. Death. So the author talks about like when you interact with Coco Chanel or when he interacted with her. It's almost like stepping into a monologue. And you'll see that she kind of speaks in these maxims, like only truth has no frontiers, things like that.
Okay, so it says, from the flood of her talk, I sifted the nuggets. So he's talking about setting up the book, like what he's, you know, he's got tons and tons of tape recordings, and this book is basically a distillation of what he thought was important. She spoke rapidly. She intimidated me. I opened my ears. To enter her presence was to step into a monologue.
So I'm going to skip ahead a little bit, but right there, the first few minutes, you can kind of see how the book is written. It's very bizarre, the writing, and she's very bizarre person, obviously. And I mean that, you know, in the most positive way possible. I like the bizarre people. Okay, so this is a little bit more into her personality. You're going to see a lot of the themes that she repeats over and over again. This idea that she doesn't know she's ever been happy, the fact that work is the most important thing to her, that if she's not creating, she's bored to death and she feels empty. And this is something that she says over and over again. She has this phrase. She says, I've had no time for living. So it says, this preemptory empress who acted so very sure of herself was the embodiment of anxiety. She must have spent her life trembling on her tightrope across a void that she herself had created. She seemed poisoned by a secret that she no longer remembered.
I've had no time for living, she said. No one's ever understood this. I don't even know whether I've been very happy. See that she repeats herself a lot too. I've wept a great deal, more than most people do. I've been very unhappy in the middle of great love affairs. I remember only that I've been miserable in a life that from the outside seemed magnificent.
I've always been under pressure. The good thing about the book is you're going to just get a bunch of direct quotes from her. All those are direct quotes. I've always been under pressure. First of all, because I've never wanted to give up the house of Chanel, which is the only thing that's mine in which no one else had any part. The only place where I've ever felt truly happy.