Sleeping with the Enemy: Coco Chanel’s Secret War

by Vaughan, Hal

  Chanel thought American customs vulgar, but again, and ironically, she wanted to visit a Texas ranch. A visit to Marcus’s brother’s Black Mark farm was arranged along with a ranch-style dinner and a show of bronco riding and roping.

  Alas, it turned out that Chanel didn’t like the taste of western food, so she dumped her plate of barbecued meat and beans under the table and right onto the elegant satin slippers of another guest, Elizabeth Arden, seated next to her—Coco had struck again.

  Returning to Paris via New York, Chanel was interviewed by a reporter from The New Yorker at the Park Avenue Waldorf-Astoria hotel. The reporter found her “sensationally good looking, with dark brown eyes, a brilliant smile, and the vitality of a twenty-year-old, and when giving a firm handshake said, ‘I’m très, très fatiguée.’ It was the assurance of a woman who knows she can afford to say it.”

  And there were other honors. Years later the Broadway producer Frederick Brisson proposed to do a musical called Coco, with Katharine Hepburn in the title role. It all somehow came together when Hepburn spent a few days with Chanel in Paris. The actress recalled that on her visit to Paris, she accidentally interrupted Chanel’s afternoon nap. “I left Paris knowing I could play Chanel,” said Hepburn.

  INCREDIBLE AS IT MAY SEEM, sometime after 1962, Chanel, aged seventy-nine, took a new beau into her life. François Mironnet was a single man when Chanel hired him as a butler. He apparently bore a resemblance to Bendor, Duke of Westminster. According to Lilou Marquand Grumbach, Coco’s intimate assistant and friend, it was “almost love at first sight.” Mironnet soon became her companion and confidant. He would offer her his arm when she needed help on the stairs, and he’d remind her to take her medications. To reward his loyalty, Chanel taught Mironnet to design jewelry. He was often beside her at her private table in the Ritz dining room. Forgetting the thirty years that distanced the two, Chanel fell in love with François, recalled Grumbach, who saw the couple together every day. According to her, Chanel once asked him to marry her.

  The famous rue Cambon staircase re-created for the Broadway musical Coco starring Katharine Hepburn, 1970. The Chanel suits (tailleurs) as worn by the actresses are authentic Chanel designs. (illustration credit 12.3)

  Janet Wallach, one of Chanel’s biographers, had another take: she believed Chanel feared solitude. “In the last moment of her life she surrounded herself with females … switched her lovers, the fashion world believed, from men to women. Her young and beautiful models, some of them lesbians, all of them modeled in her image, became the object of her affection.” Chanel was simply lonely, and while she may have flirted with her beautiful models, she was desperate for companionship. She needed a man at her side, and François Mironnet was her last male friend.

  Chanel, in spectacles, watches a fashion show from her spiral staircase on rue Cambon. (illustration credit 12.4)

  Claude Delay, French writer, psychoanalyst, and an intimate friend of Chanel’s, had yet another idea: Chanel’s many love affairs, her infatuations, her attentions to François Mironnet were foretold by Chanel’s own words: “No matter the age, a woman who is unloved is lost—unloved she might as well die.” As she aged, Chanel’s expressions mellowed. But she still managed to overpower.

  Chanel posed for Vogue in one of her hallmark suits, with furs and a toque. Despite the careful work of her personal maquilleuse, Chanel at age eighty-one was like a leaf on a withering tree—and even more dependent on her evening injection of morphine.

  Ten months before her death, Cecil Beaton photographed Chanel, and there was that look, that “enduring allure.”

  A CROWNING MOMENT for Chanel came eight months before her death. Claude Pompidou, wife of French president Georges Pompidou, had been Chanel’s client and admirer for many years. In June 1970, she invited the designer to dinner at the presidential home at the Élysée Palace. After the reception, if biographer Pierre Galante is to be believed, Chanel remarked, “In my day one did not invite one’s dressmaker for dinner.”

  Sketch of Chanel. (illustration credit 12.5)

  GABRIELLE “COCO” CHANEL passed away in her rooms at the Ritz on the night of January 10, 1971. She was attended by Jeanne, her chambermaid. Her last words were, “Well, that’s how one dies.”

  A bit before seven o’clock on the cold morning of Thursday, January 13, a closed casket bearing Chanel’s body was brought into the magnificent Church of the Madeleine, a few minutes’ walk from rue Cambon and the Hôtel Ritz. It was still dark outside. Paris was nearly silent. About nine o’clock the guests entered the church: Lilou Marquand Grumbach on the arm of Salvador Dalí, six of Chanel’s mannequins dressed in Chanel suits, her old friends Serge Lifar and Lady Abdy, and a host of Chanel’s competitors: among them Yves Saint Laurent and Marc Bohan of Dior. Luchino Visconti sent two wreaths of red roses.

  Claude Pompidou, wife of the President of the French Republic, was a regular client of Coco Chanel. Seen here at the Maison de Chanel in 1962. (illustration credit 12.6)

  After the mass the coffin was put into a Renault hearse and driven to Lausanne, where Chanel had ordered a marble vault bearing the heads of five lions and a simple cross with her name.

  Chanel’s fortune at her death—held in trust by COGA and administered by grand-niece Gabrielle Palasse Labrunie and Swiss attorneys—was estimated to exceed some $10 million, worth about $54 million in 2010. Almost everyone wanted a piece of it.

  On the third Wednesday of March 1973, Chanel’s former attendant—the man supposed to have been her last love, François Mironnet—appeared before the judges at the principal civil tribunal of Paris. Mironnet was claiming a part of Chanel’s fortune. He offered as proof of his claim a letter Chanel left. According to the letter, Chanel had bequeathed Mironnet $1 million, her Lausanne property, and her jewels. His claim was contested by Chanel’s Swiss lawyer and a representative of Union de Banques Suisses on the orders of Gabrielle Labrunie. Still, Mironnet’s claim was supported by a number of Paris celebrities: among them, Jean Cau, former secretary to Jean-Paul Sartre and an award-winning writer for L’Express, Le Figaro, and Paris Match; Jacques Chazot, a friend of Chanel’s and a well-known dancer; and Chanel’s “lady-in waiting and secretary, Lilou Marquand Grumbach.” Lilou claimed that Chanel had read the letter giving Mironnet the fortune to her in May 1968. When the document was exhibited in court, it was declared “false” by Swiss and “authentic” by French experts.

  How did it all end? The matter was settled out of court, according to Gabrielle Labrunie. She did not elaborate.

  Three years later, on the night of March 24, 1976, Dincklage died not far from the führer’s Eagle’s Nest where, in earlier days, Hitler had received the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. Among the last persons to meet Dincklage was a woman he lived with in a village near Berchtesgaden, Schönau am Königssee, Hurberta von Dehn, who came from a Bavarian aristocratic family, and a Dr. Herbert Pfistere. When asked what he remembered about Dincklage’s last years, Dr. Pfistere said that Dincklage told him he had been imprisoned for a short time after the war and that he had been an SS officer.

  Dincklage was cremated in nearby Salzburg, and his ashes were delivered to Hannover—hometown to the Dincklage family for more than a hundred years. There, in a lakeside memorial cemetery, his ashes were interred alongside the Hannover dead of two world wars and victims of Allied bombings. It was a fitting end for a German warrior, a man who had served his country for more than forty years and in two wars.

  Eleven months later, Louis de Vaufreland died at age sixty-five at a villa outside Paris. The Abwehr’s paid agent in wartime Paris and Chanel’s nemesis after the war had a checkered career after being released from prison. He was involved in a number of fraudulent schemes in France and in Ireland, including trying to sell counterfeit $100 bank notes and pretending to be a police officer. He served time at Fresnes and Santé prisons in 1956.

  In 1951 French intelligence sources reported Vaufreland was seen at Donald Maclean’s villa, La Sauvage
onne, near Saint-Maxime on the Côte d’Azur. It was the same moment that Maclean and Guy Burgess, members of the Cambridge Five spy ring, fled Britain for the Soviet Union.

  Gregory Thomas, the retired president of Chanel, Inc., died at eighty-five in Florida. Thomas, a decorated World War II OSS officer and an officer of the French Légion d’honneur, had once gone undercover as Don Armando Guevaray Sotto Mayor to aid the Wertheimer family in occupied France. On retirement, Thomas had been with the Wertheimer family in various senior positions for more than thirty years. As a wine enthusiast, he was a founder and grand maître of the Commanderie de Bordeaux in the United States—an elite group of lovers of the Bordeaux wines.

  EPILOGUE

  And forever shalt thou dwell

  In the spirit of this spell.

  —RALPH WALDO EMERSON, WIDE WORLD

  IN THE TWILIGHT YEARS of her life, Chanel was celebrated for her creative genius. André Malraux, French historian and one of Charles de Gaulle’s favorite ministers, ventured, “From this century, in France, three names will remain: de Gaulle, Picasso, and Chanel.”

  For all sorts of reasons the name Chanel remains a worldwide icon. One could count her enormous appeal as a designer by the royalty and distinguished women she dressed and perfumed after her comeback: Madame Georges Pompidou, wife of the president of France; Jacqueline Kennedy, who was wearing a pink Chanel suit on the day her husband was assassinated in Dallas; and actresses Jeanne Moreau, Romy Schneider, Elizabeth Taylor, and Marilyn Monroe, who claimed Chanel No. 5 was the only thing she wore in bed.

  For the 1961 film Last Year at Marienbad, Chanel designed dramatic feather and lace costumes for leading lady Delphine Seyrig. (illustration credit epl.1)

  Louis Malle’s 1958 film The Lovers features actress Jeanne Moreau in Chanel’s “little black dress.” (illustration credit epl.2)

  Jean Cocteau’s take on Chanel is less heroic. “She looks at you tenderly, nods her head, and you’re condemned to death!”

  In the 1962 movie Boccaccio ’70 by director Luchino Visconti, Romy Schneider, in a classic Chanel suit, surrounds herself with expensive trinkets, including Chanel No. 5 perfume. (illustration credit epl.3)

  Two views: one heroic, one demonic.

  Pierre Reverdy, romantic poet and nineteenth-century man, believed women were weak—and in love would fall under the spell of a man, do his bidding. He loved Chanel as well and as deeply as any man and wanted to believe Chanel had fallen under Dincklage’s power—“Spatz was her damnation.”

  Reverdy may have had the measure of Chanel’s solitude and distress. He never knew the depth of her collaboration. As a good Catholic he put aside his disgust for what Chanel had done during the war and absolved Chanel for her weakness and her condemnable acts with the Germans. This Catholic poet believed Chanel needed to be free from guilt.

  Before he died at seventy in 1960 at the Abbaye Saint-Pierre, a Benedictine monastery at Solesmes, Reverdy blessed Chanel in poetry. This determined and dedicated resistance fighter who had fought the German invader and the Vichy regime and had broken with his friends for their collaboration with the Nazis, willed Chanel a final epitaph:

  Dear Coco, here is

  The best of my hand

  And the best of me

  I offer it thus to you

  With my heart

  With my hand

  Before heading toward

  The dark road’s end

  If condemned

  If pardoned

  Know you are loved.

  NOTES

  ABBREVIATIONS

  ADV Archives du Département du Var

  APP Archives de la Préfecture de Police

  ASM Archives de la Ville de Sanary-sur-Mer

  BCRA Bureau Central de Renseignements et d’Action (Central Bureau of Intelligence and Operations)

  BMT Bibliothèque municipale de Toulon

  BNA British National Archives, Kew

  BNF Bibliothèque nationale de France

  BRO Berlin Registry Office

  CARAN Centre d’accueil et de recherche des Archives nationales

  CHADAT Centre historique des archives, département de l’armée de terre, files of the 2ème Bureau, Army Intelligence

  EFP Eidgenössische Fremdenpolizei, branch of federal police in charge of foreigners, Bundesarchiv, Switzerland

  HRC Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin

  HRO Hanover Registry Office

  KEW British National Archives

  LASH Landesarchiv, Schleswig-Holstein

  MDN Ministero della Difesa Nazionale, Rome

  MVN Mairie de la Ville de Nice

  NARA U.S. National Archives

  PVM Paris-Var-Méditerranée

  SB Schweizerische Bundesanwaltschaft

  SSF Services spéciaux français

  USWD U.S. War Department

  VD Vesna Drapac, “A King is killed in Marseille …”

  V1 Vendémiaire article: “Gestapo über alles”

  V2 Vendémiaire article: “La Fébrile Activité …”

  ZO Zones d’ombres 1933–1944, pp. 50–52

  PROLOGUE

  1. “Despite her age”: Paul Morand, The Allure of Chanel, p. 181.

  2. Gabrielle Chanel had barely been laid to rest: Hebe Dorsey, “Looking Back,” International Herald Tribune, September 26, 1972.

  3. “a dangerous agent”: Ibid.

  4. “… to hell with politics”: A comment by Knopf senior editor and V.P., Victoria Wilson, December 2010.

  5. Paxton’s book proved: Robert O. Paxton, Vichy France, Old Guard and New Order, 1940–1944.

  6. “was not in the Gestapo”: Milt Frudenheim, “Chanel’s Past Haunts Exhibit,” The Salt Lake Tribune, September 29, 1972.

  7. “loved eating”: Dorsey, International Herald Tribune, September 26, 1972.

  8. “He is not German”: Ibid.

  9. Years later: When I briefed Chanel biographer Edmonde Charles-Roux on my findings and showed her French counterintelligence documents in the spring of 2009, she admitted that in 1974, when she was finishing the Chanel biography (L’Irrégulière), she had been manipulated into believing Dincklage was a playboy by Chanel’s lawyer, René de Chambrun.

  10. Boches: “Boches” was a pejorative term for Germans used by the French in World Wars I and II.

  11. Chanel was released: Gabrielle Palasse Labrunie, telephone interview with author, Yermenonville, France, November 8, 2009.

  12. During the postwar process: Ousby, Occupation, p. 310.

  13. French police had identified: CARAN Z/6/672 greffe 5559. German Abwehr personnel document: Personalalbogen, 159, Paris, den 9. Juni 1941. Also Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, p. 1044.

  14. Serre, forty-eight years old: Annuaire de la Magistrature, n.p.

  15. Slowly, Serre, a painstaking investigator: CARAN Z/6/672 greffe 5559. APP BA 1990. SSF. CARAN: An index card, inscribed “Gabrielle Chanel” with the mention art. 75 I 4787 signifying: “an investigation of Chanel is opened under the French penal code, article 75: dealing with the enemy.”

  16. But French police and court documents: CARAN Z/6/672 greffe 5559.

  17. Serre would never learn: SSF document.

  18. Nor did he know that Dincklage: Ibid; BNA, KV2/159, Ledebur file.

  CHAPTER ONE: METAMORPHOSIS—GABRIELLE BECOMES COCO

  1. “If you’re born without wings”: As quoted in Sylviane Degunst, Coco Chanel: Citations, pp. 8, 44.

  2. The added “s”: There are numerous examples of the s and other letters being deleted in French family names or words, such as Surène for Suresne and Quénel for Quesnel. Chasnel was and still is a not-uncommon French family name.

  3. “From my earliest childhood”: Edmonde Charles-Roux, Chanel (London: Jonathan Cape, 1976), p. 40.

  4. “Why Moses?” Marcel Haedrich, Coco Chanel, p. 120.

  5. “I only fear Jews”: Ibid.

  6. “What followed”: Paul Morand, The Allure of Chanel, pp.
54–55.

  CHAPTER TWO: THE SCENT OF A WOMAN

  1. “Neglect taught Misia independence”: Arthur Gold and Robert Fizdale, Misia, p. 26.

  2. For the next few years: Ibid., p. 38.

  3. “enthroned at his [Diaghilev’s] side”: Ibid., p. 4.

  4. “[I] was drawn”: Ibid., pp. 197–198.

  5. “I remained forever”: Morand, The Allure of Chanel, p. 65.

  6. 300,000 gold francs: $769,000 in today’s money. Henry Gidel, Coco Chanel, p. 131.

  7. “The woman who hasn’t”: Ibid.

  8. Chanel was wearing: Axel Madsen, Chanel: A Woman of Her Own, p. 82.

  9. 7,000 francs: Ibid.

  10. In simple terms the cost: A 2010 Union Bank of Switzerland analysis of inflation.

  11. Two German cavalry officers: Landesarchiv (LASH), Büro für Kriegstammrollien, SW 29 (Berlin, Germany) Military Government of Germany, Fragebogen, undated document. Schleswig-Holsteinisches (Schleswig, Germany) “Dincklage” file.

  12. Each had fought: U.S. War Department, Histories of the German Army 1914–1918, p. 729.

  13. “A people continually torn”: Shirer, Berlin Diary, p. xiii.

  14. Theodor Momm’s wealthy family: The official name of the firm was Th. Momm & Co. Baumwoll-spinnerei und Weberei (Michael Foedrowitz’s e-mail to author, August 2008).