Sleeping with the Enemy: Coco Chanel’s Secret
War
By Hal
Vaughan
(Knopf, 279 pages,
$27.95)
Born into abject poverty and raised in an orphanage, she had a
life-long love and hate relationship with a fabulously rich and
creative Jewish businessman, but she was a viciously mean
anti-Semite of the old school, bigoted and scornful and hateful
like the nuns who raised her during the 1890s when anti-Semitism
was common in France. You can say that is not as bad as the new
school, the exterminationists who, beginning in Germany and
continuing to this day in Iran and other Middle Eastern countries,
make the leap from irrational personal hate to rational
state-sponsored mass murder. It is still pretty bad.
She had a 20-year affair with an Abwehr officer (German military
intelligence) who played sports, favored seaside resorts, and
cynically used his own friends, including her. You can argue
sleeping with a German was not the worst a girl could do: there
were more than 50 million of them in those nightmare years and they
were not all creeps. That argument, though, does not get you very
far in the case of a fellow who was not only a handsome playboy
rascal but also a moonlighter for the Gestapo who insisted she do a
little moonlighting of her own for his bosses—the ones in long
black leather coats and polished boots and über-führer prefixed to their ranks.
Where affairs were concerned, she had no inhibitions whatever,
the only question in her mind being what she got in return, and
here she was discriminating, partial to men who were in positions
to help her business, which was to make women look like something
they were not. To the Jew Pierre Wertheimer, the German Hans
Günther von Dincklage, and the French men of power and influence
whom she needed in the worlds of theater, fashion, journalism, and
politics, she added a Russian grandee with a big wallet and an
English royal with an even bigger one, the Duke of Westminster
himself. He was one of the very top toffs in the innermost circle
of the British Empire, a man too big to fail, as we would say
today, too blue-blooded for even Winston Churchill to turn against
him, despite near-treasonous activity during the war when—like the
Duke of Windsor and the social-climbing seductress who led him
astray—he went beyond appeasement (an arguable if misguided policy
until ’39) into overt support of the Third Reich and its mad and
evil leaders.
She, of course, is Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel, the most influential
designer of women’s fashion in history and creator of the most
famous perfume in the world. “Coco” was invented in the pre-Great
War years when, put to work as a seamstress by the sisters who had
raised her, she supplemented her income by working nights in bars
as a singer and perhaps more (in French “cocotte” = call girl). She
had big plans, though, and she realized them. Today, if a woman is
not wearing a Chanel outfit, she is wearing one, most experts in
this field agree, that could not have been made and sold but for
the revolution in dress and scent that Coco led. The revolution’s
watchwords were simplicity, comfort, elegance, and to form a quick
idea of what this means, compare in your mind’s eye Queen Victoria
and Jackie Kennedy. Today, a bottle of No. 5 perfume, which Marilyn
Monroe said was the only thing she wore in bed, is sold somewhere
in the world every 30 seconds.
HAL VAUGHAN, a retired U.S. foreign service officer living in
Paris, France, is not a fashion writer, but rather a keen student
of the World War II years. Following a gripping biography of Sumner
Jackson, an expatriate American doctor who, with his French wife,
joined the French Resistance, and a study of the American foreign
service officers who prepared the invasion of North Africa in 1942,
he turned his attention to the civil war the French lived through
even as they were at war with the Italo-German coalition that had
invaded and occupied their country in 1940. This is a big and
inexhaustible historical issue, like the American Civil War.
The lead character in Vaughan’s book, as he first conceived it,
was the kind of American who, had there been a movie, would be
played by Jimmy Stewart. Handsome and low-key, intellectually
brilliant but unpretentious, handy with tools and weapons, a quick
study who could be dropped deep behind enemy lines and outwit
Gestapo thugs, Gregory Thomas was a New York-born law graduate
educated in Switzerland, France, and Spain as well as America. In
the mid-’30s he went to work for Pierre Wertheimer, the businessman
who transformed the successful but essentially niche couture and perfume boutique that Coco’s
first English lover (the one before the duke, though who knows how
many others there were) had backed into the House of Chanel, icon
of French business creativity, which roared through the booming
’20s and coasted through the depressed ’30s as an, indeed as
the, industry leader, defining the
female look and scent for the rest of the century.
Wertheimer was born in 1888 to an Alsatian Jewish family that
chose France over Germany after the Franco-Prussian War gave
France’s Rhineland provinces to the First Reich in 1871. Pierre was
a visionary entrepreneur, one of the first to see the opportunities
in big stores (he was a founder of the Galleries Lafayette) and in
world-famous brand names. Since, additional to recognizing Coco’s
genius, he happened to be in love with her, he made a deal that
turned over the manufacture and marketing of No. 5 to a new
company, House of Chanel, which he controlled, on terms extremely
generous to her.
It was Thomas rather than Wertheimer to whom Vaughan was
initially drawn, however, because of his deep interest in the World
War II period and the military and intelligence worlds that
fascinate him due to his own experiences. Thomas, with his savvy
and his Continental education, was sent by Wertheimer to retrieve
the secret ingredients for No. 5, available only in Grasse, a town
on the French Riviera known as the perfume capital of the world due
to the quality of its horticulture, notably, in the case of No. 5,
its jasmine. (To this day, the formula for No. 5 is known only to a
handful of individuals in the company and Al Gore, who invented
perfume to counter the stench of global pollution.)
Thomas’s adventures, and his later service in the OSS, seemed to
Vaughan a natural sequel to his book on the legendary Sumner
Jackson. However, his research turned up long-suppressed evidence
of Chanel’s recruitment as an Abwehr agent by her lover Dincklage.
While it was not a secret that Coco, like quite a few others in
France, had been a “horizontal collaborator,” her active and
deliberate contribution to the German side was known only to narrow
overlapping circles of friends, family, and associates among French
and German survivors of the war. “Spatz” Dincklage, a teenage
cavalry officer during World War I, went to great length to cover
up his own service in the intelligence and secret police services
of the Third Reich. Vaughan found previously unpublished
documentary evidence of the chain of command leading up to Himmler,
the head of the Nazi secret police, in which Dincklage
operated.
THE DINCKLAGE-CHANEL RING, such as it was, failed completely.
The idea was that Coco’s connections to the Duke of Westminster
might facilitate negotiations leading to a separate peace in the
West. Vaughan’s thorough research and his subtle understanding of
the psychological and political atmosphere in France in ’43 and ’44
show that the scheme was by no means insane, but on the contrary
reflected a certain point of view on what was at stake in the war
and how it might end. It was quite possible in the France of those
years, despite or perhaps because of the oppressive Occupation,
with its massive deportations of Jews (and others “recruited” for
forced labor), with the absent POWs a source of strain and fear,
with the ruthless Wehrmacht and Gestapo repression of the several
ill-equipped resistance movements, with sketchy and distorted news
of the war’s progress, to believe in a long stalemate on the
Western front. It was possible to conclude from this that life just
had to go on with some form of French-German collaboration. To be
sure, it was also possible to conclude that life was not possible
under such conditions; this was the point of view adopted, for
example, by Pierre Reverdy, one of the great poets of that era and
a Resistance leader, who had been intimate with Coco in the ’20s
and stayed in love with her all his life.
Chanel’s own point of view was that of a crafty, extremely
narrow-minded peasant woman, interested only in who would end up
with the farm when the shooting stopped. The extraordinary thing,
however, was that she was also the Jazz Age sophisticate who was on
intimate terms with Westminster and friendly ones with Churchill,
whose personal lawyer was the son-in-law of the Vichy leader Pierre
Laval and whose bed and soul mate (for the time being) was a
ranking Nazi spy, even as she stayed in touch with the poet who
loved her and who, in a perfect illustration of the adage that love
is blind, basically saved her ass in the wild days of the
Liberation in the summer of ’44 when his men were prepared to kill
her.
Chanel used the “Aryanization” laws to try to steal Wertheimer’s
majority stake in the company. The Thomas mission was meant to
allow Wertheimer to manufacture No. 5 in New Jersey (he had fled
France ahead of the German invasion). As it happens, the French
Catholic Wertheimer associate who under a legal subterfuge was
watching over the House’s interests during Wertheimer’s exile in
New York was able to stall (he challenged Wertheimer over ownership
after the war and lost, but though shabby it was not the brazen
larceny Coco attempted).
Following the war Coco was briefly detained as a suspected
collaborator, but the magistrate declined to press charges. Others
who had consorted with the occupiers were punished, many were not;
Chanel used money and influence to ensure that the few who knew of
her Abwehr activities and might spill the beans when put on trial
kept their mouths shut. Vaughan suggests Churchill, busy as he was,
may have sent the word along to discourage prosecution, as he did
not see the point of dragging out the dirty Westminster-Windsor
laundry.
PRUDENTLY, Chanel left France for a comfortable Swiss exile with
Dincklage. After a few years, Wertheimer suggested a re-launch of
the House of Chanel’s fashion business, which had ceased operations
during the war. Aging but ever restless and brimming with new
fashion ideas, Chanel accepted his terms (which once again were
very generous to her), and she was back in business, creating the
famous tailleurs (skirt and
jacket outfits) that characterized women’s clothes in the ’50s and
’60s the way the “little black dresses” and other “simple”
innovations had marked the ’20s.
Neither Wertheimer nor Thomas, who eventually succeeded him at
the head of the Chanel powerhouse, discussed the reasons for the
deep-pocket rescue, but Vaughan points out that from a business
angle it was reasonable.
Although she halted production during the war and immediate
post-war years, Chanel was still the most famous name in fashion.
Wertheimer saw that with a fresh injection of capital, he could
make more money than he had ever made in the interwar years. Which
he did. He needed to keep the brand name clean, however, and
despite what she had done to him, he saw no percentage in a legal
battle that would publicize Coco’s wartime behavior, of which he
knew only too much. He therefore made sure she got the deal she
wanted. He probably wanted that for her. For despite what she had
done to him, she was still the beautiful Coco Chanel whom Pierre
Wertheimer loved.
As my father’s old buddy Irwin Shaw used to say, go figure.
