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 going to 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 in 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

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 most and richest people in the world so that's really where I'm going to focus on

...