Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky Read Online Free

She has to start somewhere and is glad of the opportunity to be involved. For Coco then, tonight is a kind of debut.
    Seated next to her, Charles is gentle and attentive. He’s an actor, and she has long enjoyed his performances and admired him from afar. Meeting him up close, though, he’s not as spontaneous as she’d supposed. She finds him quite ordinary, in fact. Without a script, he has little of brilliance to say. And if he intends to make an impact, it’s too late. He’s been upstaged.
    Already tonight, Coco has felt herself on the edge of a sensation. For Caryathis has arrived hatless, and with her hair severely cropped. Scarcely able to contain her delight, Coco asks, “My dear, what have you done?”
    Caryathis explains. A few days previously, rejected by a man to whom she was rashly attracted, she had attacked her hair with a pair of scissors. Then, feeling compelled to make a gesture, she’d tied the tresses in a ribbon, and hung them from a nail on the man’s front door.
    â€œIt was too long anyway. It just got in the way.”
    Coco says, “But you look like Joan of Arc!”
    â€œI know, and I’m going to play the part to the full.”
    Coco is thrilled by the reaction Caryathis elicits from the gathering throng. The trajectories of most opera glasses confirm her as the focus of a thousand eyes. Sitting next to her, Coco glories in the attention. There’s something about the two of them together that invites scandal, she knows. She’s quick to grasp the impact they have on those around them.
    On her other side, Dullin already feels superfluous: a bit-part player, an extra. She was meant to be his escort. Now it’s beginning to seem like the other way around.
    Coco asks him to hold her program. She knows she is being watched. And while Caryathis whispers into her ear, she fans herself languorously, training her lorgnette on the company below.
    Eventually the buzz of conversation distills into a hush. Coco sees Serge Diaghilev, impresario of the Ballets Russes, seat himself in the front row to applause. The conductor and principal violin are greeted warmly. Soon the lights are dimmed.
    From the darkness float the haunting tones of a bassoon. Six high notes reiterate a simple motif. The notes dissolve quickly into birdlike twitterings, thin scratches and scrapes. Blind flurries come from the woodwind, followed by scurryings on the strings, and then the entry of thumping brass. Great swerves of sound.
    The transitions are so abrupt that Coco jumps. The instruments come together in choppy, dissonant chords. The spastic rhythms alarm her. She’s heard nothing like it before. The notes collide at odd angles and set the air vibrating strangely. Warned to expect something different, she has not prepared for this.
    Then, against a painted backdrop of rolling steppes and sky, twelve flaxen-haired nymphs in black disport themselves and resolve into a provocative tableau. Adopting primitive positions—knees touching and elbows clamped to their sides—the dancers lurch awkwardly in time to the beat.
    One of them makes an obscene gesture. Coco is shocked. Other spectators let out howls and shrieks. People stamp their feet. As the nymphs join in the crude movements, many in the audience begin to hiss. Not far from Coco, an old lady stands, her tiara almost slipping from her head. “This is a disgrace!”
    Onstage the dancers continue, whirling around and coming together in startlingly ardent friezes. They leap about in splendid abandonment. The music harshly accents the movement of their hands.
    â€œAll very Slavic!” Caryathis remarks.
    One of the foreign ambassadors, seated in a box to their right, begins to laugh out loud at the spectacle. Coco takes a mischievous delight in watching the scene unfold.
    A man rises to his feet and appeals for silence. A lady in a nearby box slaps a neighbor, who is hissing, across the face. Enraged,