Sleeping with the Enemy: Coco Chanel’s Secret War

by Vaughan, Hal

  ELSA SCHIAPARELLI’S NOVEL DESIGNS, her audacious, shocking pinks from Salvador Dalí’s palette, and her use of art by Christian Bérard and Jean Cocteau to make dresses and accessories were now the talk of Paris. (The artists were all Chanel’s friends.) Playwright Anita Loos, author of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and Wallis Simpson, the Duchess of Windsor, wore her creations; Marlene Dietrich donned her Russian furs. Her use of new materials resembling today’s plastic drew clients into her Place Vendôme boutique—right under Chanel’s nose. “Schiap,” as Paris called her, was delightfully excessive with an evening dress composed of a skirt printed with a life-sized lobster and a bodice scattered with a few green motifs to represent parsley. Her handbag was in the form of a telephone; one skirt had pockets with flaps that looked like lips. Shocking pink was in, and Chanel’s sober, refined look was overwhelmed. Some critics thought Chanel had lost her touch when she returned from Hollywood. Even before the strikes, she was sliding from her perch as France’s first lady of fashion, and her diatribes on matters of fashion were now challenged.

  Born of a noble Italian family, educated in Paris, London, and New York, Schiap was a stark contrast to Chanel, whose first boutique had been financed twenty years earlier by her lovers, “because two gentlemen were outbidding each other for my hot little body.” Chanel the orphan, raised in a convent, couldn’t stomach the woman she called “L’Italienne” (an insult in chic Paris). Schiap’s pretensions were simply “enraging.” Schiap, in turn, called Chanel “the hat maker,” infuriating her further.

  Chanel believed that Schiaparelli was simply “that Italian artist who makes clothes.” Schiaparelli didn’t just “irritate” her; she “enraged” her. But Schiap wasn’t Chanel’s only serious threat. Mainbocher, the fashion house founded by Main Rousseau Bocher, the former editor of Vogue who had turned designer, and the houses of Madeleine Vionnet and Germaine Krebs, later Madame Grès, all became Chanel’s fierce rivals. Yet it was Schiaparelli who prematurely announced, “Chanel is finished.”

  In public, Chanel shrugged off l’Italienne and the others. On the arms of her friends Christian Bérard, Étienne de Beaumont, and ex-beau Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich, Chanel dominated the galas, parties, dinners, and press conferences surrounding the Paris Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques held in the summer of 1937. Reporters thought she had never been so radiant and pretty as she posed for photographers and chatted with journalists.

  Misia Sert, her soul sister, knew that behind the smiles, Coco was seriously wounded. She had suffered the death of her lover and business partner, Paul Iribe, two years before. She had been beaten down by the strikes of 1936. And now other couturiers were getting the attention that was rightfully hers. She tried her hand at doing costumes for Cocteau’s Oedipe Roi—swathing the performers, including the young rising star, Jean Marais, in bandages. The result was hideous, and the press didn’t spare Chanel: “Wrapped in bandages, the actors looked like ambulant mummies or victims of some terrible accident.” The costumes were booed as being heavy and outmoded.

  In the months that followed, Chanel disappeared from the rue Cambon. She retreated first to La Pausa and then to Lausanne, Switzerland, where her secret bank accounts held her share of the earnings from the worldwide sales of Chanel No. 5 perfume. She seemed to have lost interest in the business. Biographer Pierre Galante ventured otherwise: “Coco’s supremacy was threatened.” Still, Chanel believed, despite the success of Elsa Schiaparelli, that her work had not yet seen its day—the momentary infatuation with the extravagant Italian would be short-lived: the Chanel style was far from dead.

  Misia Sert, Chanel’s lifetime friend, in a gown by Chanel, 1937. (illustration credit 6.2)

  On January 21, 1936, forty-two-year-old Edward, Prince of Wales, Chanel’s good friend David, ascended to the throne of Great Britain as HRH Prince Edward VIII. The uneasy reign of the still-uncrowned king saw Hitler snatching the Rhineland, occupied by France since 1918, and Mussolini’s armies in Africa capture the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa. On June 9, 1936, more than a million workers went on strike in Spain, marking the beginning of the Spanish Civil War that would bring Spanish general Francisco Franco and a Fascist government backed by Adolf Hitler to power.

  Edward was determined to marry an American divorcée, Wallis Simpson, who was being described in the French press as the putain royale, or royal whore. The British Parliament was as determined to block the marriage. On the night of December 11, 1936, the uncrowned Edward VIII told the world in a BBC broadcast that he had abdicated. His forty-one-year-old brother Albert now became king and emperor of Great Britain. He would reign over the British Empire as George VI.

  The Duke of Windsor and his bride, the former Wallis Simpson, greeted by Adolf Hitler on a nonofficial visit to Berchtesgaden, Germany, 1936. (illustration credit 6.3)

  Winston Churchill, soon to be a member of Neville Chamberlain’s government, was a regular visitor to Paris throughout 1936. Some three months before Edward’s abdication, he and Randolph dined with Chanel and Jean Cocteau in Chanel’s suite at the Ritz. Churchill still hoped their mutual friend David could be swayed to give up marrying Wallis Simpson.

  Cocteau remembered the dinner very well. He wrote in his journal how Winston had gotten drunk, burst into tears, and sobbing in Chanel’s arms, exclaimed, “A king cannot abdicate.” A few months later, Churchill would help his king and friend David edit his abdication speech. Barely eight months later the exiled Edward, now Duke of Windsor, and his bride, Wallis Simpson, a loyal Chanel customer, stayed in a Ritz apartment not far from Chanel’s suite after returning from a visit with Hitler at Berchtesgaden, the führer’s Bavarian retreat.

  MOST FRENCH BELIEVED war could be averted. Neville Chamberlain, prime minister of Britain, was sure Hitler could be “contained.” In September 1938, Chamberlain returned from Munich waving a copy of his signed agreement with the führer—telling a crowd in front of Number 10 Downing Street, “I believe it is peace in our time.”

  Chanel showed a gold lamé evening dress with a short jacket for the 1938 collections. British Vogue magazine wrote, “Sex appeal is the prime motif of the Paris collection and sex appeal is no longer a subtle appeal.” As Europe teetered between war and peace during 1938–1939, business picked up. The Ritz boutiques by the elevator were thriving, selling Van Cleef jewels, tortoise-shell boxes, and other luxury goods. Chanel’s boutiques were swarming with society women in search of smart suits and gowns, hats, jewelry, accessories, and, above all, that exotic Chanel No. 5 perfume.

  At age fifty-five, Chanel was still beautiful and sexy, her silhouette stunning. She dressed with style and invention, and the photographers loved her. She was seen everywhere—in June 1938 with Spanish painter Salvador Dalí and French composer Georges Auric at Monte Carlo; later with dancer Serge Lifar and composer Igor Stravinsky at a Misia Sert dinner. At an after-theater meeting with French actor Louis Jouvet, she dressed in a sensational Chanel cut from a heavy white crepe fabric. Schiaparelli may have invented “shocking pink” for her 1938 collection, but Chanel trumped her. The Chanel collection of 1939 showed a series of Gypsy dresses that were copied in the United States and around Europe. As the fear of war gripped Europe in the spring of 1939, Chanel featured outfits in patriotic red, white, and blue.

  During that torrid summer of 1939, the Hôtel Ritz was not a bad place to be. In the garden restaurant, Chanel and friends Jean Cocteau and Jean Marais could enjoy a classic Escoffier salade Niçoise caressed with olive oil and vinegar, or perhaps one of the famous chef’s Oriental salads washed down with chilled Beaujolais, followed by an apple tart and coffee. Indeed, Monsieur Ritz maintained a Swiss-run oasis of gentility where “militarists” debated “pacifists” in the Ritz’s Psyche Salon.

  Clare Boothe Luce, wife of Time and Life magazines’ owner Henry Luce, toured Europe’s capital cities in the beginning of 1940. At the Ritz in Paris, Luce mixed with a host of fashionable New Yorkers, including Vogue editor Margaret Case
, who was there to cover the Paris collections. Luce was delighted to see that the Ritz hadn’t lost its splendor: “The same smiling little manager at the reception desk, with his long cutaway coat that almost touched his heels … the same smoothly efficient and omniscient red-mustached concierge, and the gray distinguished Olivier, the great maître d’hôtel of Europe, bowing as always at the end of the corridor to the dining room.” Luce thought they all looked “a little more solemn and pale than of yore.” Nevertheless, she observed, “from the smell of fur and perfume, and the sounds of high bird-babble voices,” the guests at the Ritz hadn’t changed. She and Margaret Case had to put up with the horrid noise of jackhammers as workmen dug an extra bombproof cellar behind the hotel’s garden wall. Case seemed put out, and Luce reassured her friend: “[Darling], I’ve noticed that bombs never make hits on people that live in the Claridges or the Ritz.” With the coming of April, Luce observed: “The loveliest crystal-clear spring had come to Europe.”

  AT FIRST LIGHT, on September 1, 1939, German forces surged across the Polish border heading toward the cities of Lodz, Kraków, and Warsaw—as they had crossed the Czech border to seize Prague six months earlier. So it was that on the first Wednesday of September, Chanel woke up in the velvet opulence of the Ritz to learn that her country was at war with Germany. At first, nothing seemed to happen. The Brits dubbed the hiatus the “Phoney War”; the French called it a drôle de guerre; Berliners, Sitzkrieg—the opposite of blitzkrieg, the lightning blows that Hitler had dealt to Poland and would soon deliver to France and the Low Countries.

  Chanel—once a penniless orphan, a rich man’s paramour, and now the first lady of fashion—had made a fortune liberating women’s bodies from corsets during the Great War of 1914–1918. Now, in the first days of World War II, self-made Chanel considered war to be men’s business. The war was an opportunity for her to punish her employees for their strike action three years earlier. She fired some three thousand female workers: the artisans who cut her gowns; the little hands that stitched each creation from scratch; and the keepers of her salon. It was closure—the end of the fashion House of Chanel. It was Chanel getting even with the women who, three years earlier, demanded more pay and shorter hours; the women who had locked her out of her workshops and boutiques. It was payback for the massive strikes provoked, in her view, by the Jew Léon Blum’s Socialist-Communist government of 1936. And Chanel was burnt out, convinced the world of fashion had ended with the war. “How could I suppose there would still be people who would buy dresses,” she asked her friend Marcel Haedrich, chief editor of the French fashion magazine Marie Claire, after the war. “I was so stupid, such a dummy about life that it seemed impossible to me … well I made a mistake. Some people sold dresses all during the war. That will be a lesson to me. Whatever may happen hereafter I will go on making clothes. The only thing I still believe in.”

  Chanel believed Blum and Jewish liberal politicians were all Bolsheviks who threatened Europe. Her right-wing political beliefs had been sharpened over the years by her lovers—the men who had lifted her out of poverty and helped to launch her career as a successful Paris couturier.

  Finally, Paul Iribe had fueled her fear of Jews. His anti-Semitism was so blatant that Edmonde Charles-Roux, a Chanel biographer, thought it was “disgusting.” As for Bendor, the duke’s anti-Semitic rants were notorious.

  By the fall of 1939 Hitler and Stalin had crushed Poland. Later, Russia would rule Finland and northern Poland, while Italy menaced the Mediterranean Basin. In England, Chamberlain appointed Churchill to be First Lord of the Admiralty in a desperate bid to shore up the credibility of his appeasement-tainted government.

  Chanel’s ex-lover and friend, Bendor, was desperately trying to free his new mistress, a French woman who had tried to cross into Britain from France to join the duke only to be arrested as a suspected spy. In Rome Coco’s old friend Vera Bate Lombardi was under surveillance by the Italian secret military police known as SIM (Military Information Service). They believed she was a British agent because of her English aristocratic birth and frequent visits to the British Embassy in Rome—despite the fact that Italy had yet to declare war on England.

  Sometime after 1929, Vera had joined her husband, Alberto, a member of the Fascist party, at his villa on via Barnaba Oriani in the exclusive Parioli quarter of Rome. Italian archives tell how Vera had taken Italian citizenship that year and, according to a letter from her husband to the Italian minister of justice, she had joined Mussolini’s Fascist Party.

  Vera led a leisurely life in Rome. With cavalry officer Alberto, she competed in numerous equestrian events and reveled in la dolce vita. She enjoyed her role as the wife of a senior Italian officer pledged to Mussolini. Alberto and his family were favorably known to Benito Mussolini and esteemed in Fascist circles; and Alberto was promoted to head a cavalry regiment. But Vera’s very English habits and frequent attendance at British Embassy events made her suspect to the Fascist police and various intelligence services. In 1936, the chief of staff of the Italian Political Investigation Service sent the following report to the Italian Interior and War Offices:

  Mrs. Lombardi: the lively and quite mysterious life of Mrs. Lombardi, wife of Major of Cavalry Alberto from the Tor di Quinto Cavalry School, gives rise to suspicions … It seems she has relationships with some of Prince of Wales’ friends and she has many acquaintances amongst the British political and financial circles … she has frequently worked for the Chanel fashion company whose owner was for many years the lover of the Duke of Westminster … This lady’s mysterious and varied lifestyle makes us suspect she is in service for Great Britain without the knowledge of her husband, who is a highly respected person and sincere patriot … Lombardi frequently talks on the phone with London, it won’t be difficult to monitor her calls coming from her place on via Oriani.

  One week later, investigators were ordered to suspend tailing Vera “because she is a military officer’s wife and because the SIM had investigated Vera for some time, reviewing all her mail without any success.” But Vera’s problems with the Italian Fascist police and counterintelligence services were not over. For the next few years and throughout World War II, she would be suspected by the Italians of espionage for the British. Her later relations with Chanel during wartime would bring Vera to the attention of the British intelligence service MI6.

  THE CONSTANT WAR NEWS and the air-raid drills grated on Chanel’s nerves, and she fretted about nephew André Palasse. In 1939, André had been mobilized, leaving his wife and two daughters—Gabrielle, the oldest, who was named after “Auntie Coco,” as she called her, and the younger, Hélène—at their property at Corbère in southern France. André was serving on the front at the Maginot Line fortifications that guarded the strategic border between France and Germany. From the time he was mobilized Chanel looked after his family’s needs, keeping grand-niece Gabrielle with her as often as schooling allowed.

  Often alone, Chanel missed being in love or feeling that she was in love—which was the same thing to her. There had been no serious romances since the death of Paul Iribe, and Chanel needed to feel that she was loved by a man, perhaps as compensation for her lonely childhood. Now as she waited to see what war would bring, she brooded over a long string of betraying lovers: Étienne Balsan, her first master; Boy Capel, her first serious love affair; Igor Stravinsky, the passing flirt; Dmitri, Grand Duke of Russia, a prized lover; the Duke of Westminster, her ultra-rich mentor. And still later: the poet Pierre Reverdy, who resembled her lost father. But most of all, she missed and mourned Iribe—a man whom she had trusted and admired. None of her suitors could commit to her completely, in large part because she refused to commit to them, or they had left to marry others. In the case of Iribe, who had crumbled before her eyes from a massive heart attack, she felt he had betrayed her by his death—just as her father’s sudden disappearance forty years earlier had left her abandoned. Serge Lifar, the ballet master and Chanel’s close friend, was shocked to hea
r Chanel say, “Oh, Iribe! He’s finally dead, that one! He won’t be seen anymore.”

  It was bravado. The men Chanel had loved were now either dead or out of reach. She told a number of authors, “There is nothing worse than solitude. Solitude can help a man realize himself; but it destroys a woman.” She counseled women to “follow conventional standards if they want to be happy in life; otherwise … [they] will pay the terrible price of solitude.”

  Bitter in the midst of war, her heart empty, her hands idle, she wrote her brothers, Lucien and Alphonse, that their regular stipends were ending. “I’ve closed the business … and I fear living in misery … don’t count on me anymore.” It was a petty letter written in frustration. Though her income was cut with the closing of her fashion business, Chanel was still wealthy. Income flowed to her Swiss accounts from Chanel No. 5’s worldwide revenues and from the sale of perfume and accessories at her boutiques on the rue Cambon, at Deauville, and at Biarritz. She could always be sure that women would want her perfume, and in wartime, sales of her fragrances in France, neutral Spain, and Switzerland would become a major source of income.

  A challenge emerged. After firing her employees, Chanel wanted to leave everything nice and tidy, and do something else. Her poet lover Reverdy agreed. In 1939 he told Chanel, “war was a time to hide, lie low and keep quiet.” But the French bureaucrats who regulated the fashion business—and the lords of high fashion, the Chambre syndicale de la haute couture—saw it otherwise. They were furious when she closed her mirrored salon on the rue Cambon and accused her of outright “treason.” Her employees joined the French labor union, Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT), and the Chambre syndicale in an attempt to force her to stay open. It was a question of the prestige of Paris. Even the other couturier houses, her competitors, protested. What would Paris wartime galas in support of the soldiers be worth without Chanel?