Coco Chanel: An Intimate Life

by Lisa Chaney

  Since his arrest by the British in 1945, von Dincklage had been living in Schleswig-Holstein (British zone) with his aunt, Baroness Weber-Rosenkranz.16 But in September 1949, we find him once again in Switzerland, staying at the Hôtel Beau-Rivage in Lausanne. Between December 1949 and January 1950, Gabrielle was also at the hotel.17 Von Dincklage and she had somehow arranged to meet. With Gabrielle, von Dincklage was able to enjoy a well-appointed lifestyle, while Gabrielle didn’t have to send for the “duty policeman” so as not to dine alone, or fend off the idea that “if I let myself slip, I know that melancholy awaits me, open-mouthed.”18 Von Dincklage was still an attractive man who retained his unctuous charm. Even if there was a modicum of sincerity in his feelings for Gabrielle, it is difficult to believe it was much more than convenience that put him at her side.

  Meanwhile, Gabrielle, who was as powerful and forthright as she was vulnerable and alone, said she would recall Arthur Capel’s comment to remember that she was a woman and to remind herself, she would stand in front of the mirror where she saw her

  two menacing arched eyebrows, my nostrils that are as wide as those of a mare, my hair that is blacker than the devil, my mouth that is like a crevice out of which pours a heart that is irritable but not selfish… My dark gypsy-like skin that makes my teeth and my pearls look twice as white; my body, as dry as a vine-stock without grapes; my worker’s hands…

  The hardness of the mirror reflects my own hardness back to me… it expresses what is peculiar to myself, a person who is efficient, optimistic, passionate, realistic, combative, mocking and incredulous, and who feels her Frenchness. Finally, there are my gold-brown eyes which guard the entrance to my heart: there one can see that I am a woman. A poor woman.19

  This same “poor woman” believed she had been put here for a purpose and said, “That is why I endured, that is why the outfit I wore to the races in 1913 can still be worn in 1946, because the new social conditions are still the same as those that led me to clothe them.” Remembering the revolution she had initiated, she described how “I was working toward a new society.” She described clothes until then as being for women who were “useless,” who did nothing for themselves or with their lives. Saying she designed for busy working women, she added that “a busy woman needs to feel comfortable in her clothes. You need to be able to roll up your sleeves.”20 And in the drive to fulfill her destiny, and her deep urge for independence, Gabrielle also understood, and regretted that “I belong to that breed of foolish women, women who think only of their work.”21

  While saying that she had never really known happiness, she also said, “I have never had the time to be unhappy, of existing for another human being, or having children. It is probably not by chance that I have lived alone.”22

  Asking herself where she would go now, Gabrielle continued looking forward: “I don’t know, but I’m going somewhere and it’s not over.” Saying that her reaction to being told that Europe was in ruins made her think that while she felt that Europe was her mother, if it was lagging behind in the world, she would readily leave it behind, as she had done her family, and begin her new life: “I want to be part of what happens. I will go wherever is necessary for that… It will be necessary to do something else. I am ready to start all over again.”23

  This refusal to be bowed by circumstance, as well as the willingness to “start all over again,” was most impressive in a woman of sixty-three. For all her tenacity and verve, however, Gabrielle didn’t have quite the same energy she had possessed thirty years earlier. And yet the icon Coco Chanel had become so intertwined with whoever Gabrielle was, she was unable to relinquish it. As it turned out, what she would take up wasn’t as novel as she might have envisaged when she spoke these words in 1946.

  When Gabrielle had agreed with her lawyer, René de Chambrun, that she should leave France and live in Switzerland for a while, she also asked him if he would help her in taking on her partners, the Wertheimers. Gabrielle believed that during the course of the war they had once again defrauded her, and she told Chambrun, “I want revenge.”24

  For several years before the war, convinced that their initial agreement had been a bad one, Gabrielle had intermittently skirmished with the Wertheimers. In the early thirties, for example, they had begun making Chanel perfumes with their own company, Bourjois. They gave sales rights to foreign subsidiaries they had created; from these they also gave Gabrielle her 10 percent profit. This infuriated her. As the business had grown, Gabrielle was increasingly frustrated by what she saw as a reduction of quality in her creation, and had insisted on being released from the original agreement. While the war had interrupted Gabrielle’s initiation of a lawsuit, the conflict between her and her partners only intensified.

  At the onset of the war, before leaving France for America, the Wertheimers had cleverly entrusted their business to a cousin, who in turn cleverly appointed a non-Jewish industrialist, Félix Amiot, to be the front for the family. He had continued marketing the Chanel perfumes during the occupation. At the same time, the Wertheimers had set up production of Chanel № 5 in America, where they made yet more perfumes, using natural essences from the south of France, that didn’t follow the original formulas.

  These activities, for which Gabrielle was given ridiculously small royalties, continued after the war. Chambrun and the president of the French Bar Association, called in to assist him, advised Gabrielle that “an amicable settlement will bring you much more than litigation.” But relishing the thought of a fight, Gabrielle would not agree. The Wertheimers argued that they had made a major financial contribution to Parfums Chanel, had built it into a worldwide business and that Gabrielle’s contribution was no longer relevant. She was no longer a public figure, and was too old to offer the talent, youth and celebrity she had possessed when she had launched Nº 5. Gabrielle was incensed: “So I’m too old! They think I’m too old, those — bastards!”

  In the two months before the case came to trial, Gabrielle was very busy. Eventually, she handed Chambrun several tiny phials and asked him to give these to his wife. Could she make up phials like this from her own home? Chambrun said she could, with the proviso that they must be presents. Josée de Chambrun declared the perfume exquisite, as did a Russian “nose” called in to confirm her opinion. Gabrielle then instructed the perfumer in Switzerland to make up a hundred bottles of her various perfumes. The bottles were not the same design as the originals and were prefixed with the word “Mademoiselle,” making them “different” perfumes, too. Gabrielle then sent them as “gifts’ to all the smartest department stores in New York. The Wertheimers asked her lawyer, “But what does she really want?” Not long afterward, they made a settlement out of court.

  While the Wertheimer brothers had played rough with Gabrielle during the war, they were also distinguished losers, and the terms of the new agreement were most favorable to Gabrielle. She had the right to make Mademoiselle Chanel perfumes anywhere in the world — a serious threat to her partners she never acted upon; she was to be paid substantial damages, with interest, for the sales of Parfums Chanel in the United States, Britain and France; she was to have a kind of monopoly conceded to her in Switzerland—“her fief, her kingdom”—and she would be paid a royalty of 2 percent on all gross sales of Chanel perfumes throughout the whole world.

  At the conclusion of this intense legal battle, in which Gabrielle had joined with righteous indignation, tremendous enjoyment and considerable low cunning, she was left a multimillionaire. After the agreement had been signed, she took the Chambruns back to rue Cambon for a celebration. “My dear Bunny,” she said to Chambrun, “I have already made a great deal of money in my life, but, as you know, I’ve also spent a lot. Now, thanks to you, I shall never have to work again… I’m not going to do anything anymore.” That was in 1947.

  After the Nuremberg war trials for the twenty-four major criminals, in the Ministries trials, Walter Schellenberg was given the lightest penalty. In 1951, he telephoned Gabrielle. He ha
d not long since been released from prison, and he and his wife would live in Switzerland under assumed names. Schellenberg had no money and was going to publish his memoirs. Because he was the former head of Hitler’s foreign intelligence, he was approached by a number of literary agents, and had indicated that he would provide a full record of his experiences during the war. Whether Schellenberg told his agent, or the man discovered for himself the connection between Gabrielle and Schellenberg, is not known, but the agent blackmailed Gabrielle into paying him a “large sum of money” to keep her secret.

  The Swiss now told Schellenberg he wasn’t welcome there. The Schellenbergs then moved to Italy and a house on Lake Maggiore, where, apparently, all their expenses were paid by Gabrielle. Schellenberg had developed cancer, and by early 1952, he was dead. His wife would write to von Dincklage’s friend Captain Momm that “Madame Chanel offered us financial assistance in our difficult situation and it was thanks to her that we were able to spend a few more months together.”25 When Schellenberg’s memoir, The Labyrinth, was published, there was no mention of Gabrielle or any reference to the mission to Spain with Vera Bate-Lombardi, christened Operation Modelhut by Schellenberg . At the end of 1952, von Dincklage went to visit Mrs. Schellenberg in Düsseldorf in order to collect two “objects’ she wanted to give Gabrielle. We have no evidence, but these “objects” may well have been documents.

  With time on her hands in Switzerland, Gabrielle had turned to thoughts of safeguarding the myth of Coco Chanel. As she was no longer perpetuating it in her couture, she wanted someone to take down a more formal record of her life than her earlier conversations with Morand. Her choice of ghostwriter was the poet and novelist Louise de Vilmorin, a formidable character with a distinguished literary reputation. Among her numerous affairs, after the war, Vilmorin became the lover of both the British ambassador Duff Cooper and his wife, Diana. In her last years, she was the companion of the writer André Malraux, by then the French minister of culture. Gabrielle admired Vilmorin’s cleverness, her urbanity and her irony, and in 1947, they sat down together in Venice to work through Gabrielle’s life.

  Notwithstanding Vilmorin’s lack of moralizing, she was unable to subsume her own personality sufficiently to permit her subject to settle into the foreground. Vilmorin was also driven mad by Gabrielle’s inability to be straight about her early years. Gabrielle wasn’t pleased with Vilmorin’s account, especially when it failed to find sympathy with any of the American publishers. Their friendship did, however, weather this episode. Next, Gabrielle tried out one of the extraordinary Kessel brothers, Georges, the suicidally depressed ex-lover of Colette, whose opium-cocaine-morphine habit left him wasted before his time. This, too, was a failure. Undaunted, for the rest of her life Gabrielle tried to coax a succession of writers into helping her construct and reconstruct her legend.

  Soon after Kessel, there was the journalist and novelist Gaston Bonheur, then came the young novelist Michel Déon, who had recently helped Salvador Dalí with his memoirs and brought out his own successful first novel. Michel Déon, who spent a good part of 1951 to 1953 in her company, recently described Gabrielle as an “exceptional, and at the same time exasperating and brilliant woman.” Traveling with her from Paris to Lausanne, from Roquebrune to Rome to New York, he faithfully noted down her stories. Déon’s mode was not to query what she said. She talked; he listened, and then wrote.

  Déon is now a youthful nonagenarian and one of the grand old men of French literature. His irony and sly wit are countered by a prevailing warmth, and one can imagine Gabrielle being charmed by the young writer. In conversation, he alludes to a novelist’s material-gathering. Describing himself as “a robber,” Déon was fascinated by her “complexity and seductiveness.”

  Telling how he listened happily to this woman forty years his senior, “who had seen and experienced everything,” he was moved by her admission that “timid people talk a great deal because they can’t bear silence in company. I’m always ready to bring out any idiocy at all just to fill up a silence. I go on, I go from one thing to another, so that there’ll be no chances for silence. When people don’t enjoy my company… I feel it right away. I have a kind of nervous flow. I talk vehemently. I know I’m unbearable.”26

  Gabrielle made a remarkable admission to a young Jean Cau, then Jean-Paul Sartre’s secretary, that in fact everyone intimidated her, from her mannequins to minor employees to the delivery boy. And she added, “Fortunately no one or almost no one knows this.”

  Déon was both sufficiently observant and imaginative enough that in spite of the flaws, he found Gabrielle sympathetic and tantalizing. She asked him to come with her to Switzerland in her Cadillac, but he preferred to remain independent, making the journey in his own car, a black MG. Gabrielle traveled “with two black Cadillacs, one for her, driven by her chauffeur in livery, and another carrying her two personal maids, one of them clutching the famous jewelry box in detergent-worn hands. Traveling in convoy like this, halfway she stopped her car and got into my convertible, her head veiled in pink gauze like a motorist from the early 1900s.”27 The young novelist was paid a monthly salary by Gabrielle and occasionally returned to Paris to write an article or pay his rent. In the end, Déon spent so much time away from Paris listening to her that his girlfriend got tired of waiting and dumped him.

  On several occasions, Déon met von Dincklage in Switzerland and describes how Gabrielle “continued with the pretense that he hadn’t had anything to do with the war on France.” (In 1950, a Swiss police report stated that “Today, VD still comes across as a very cold man and tries to impose his will on every occasion.”) Meanwhile, Déon wryly tells a story demonstrating how much the older man, by then aged fifty-seven, still retained his looks and his ability to ensnare. One night, Gabrielle had retired early to bed, and Déon and von Dincklage set off for a nightclub. There they met Déon’s new German girlfriend, a club dancer. Von Dincklage worked his charm so effectively that Déon was amazed at the speed with which his girl dropped him for the older man.28

  Sometime around 1953–54, von Dincklage disappeared from Gabrielle’s life. All we know is that Gabrielle continued giving him an allowance; he eventually settled on a Spanish island, and there he devoted his time to painting erotica.

  After considerable perseverance, by the end of 1953 Michel Déon had produced a manuscript of three hundred pages recounting Gabrielle’s life story. He waited for her judgment, but none came. Then, Gabrielle sent word through her friend Hervé Mille, editor of Paris Match and one of the arbiters of postwar Parisian taste: “In these three hundred pages there is not a single sentence that is not hers, but now she sees the book, she thinks that it is not what America is expecting.”

  Michel Déon understood Gabrielle’s message. He had written down her words just as she had spoken them, without interpretation and with all the fantasies intact. He understood that in her heart she knew the truth perfectly well, that the fantasies that helped her survive were fine to expand on in conversation but, as he says, “not to read black on white.” As a writer, Déon was sensitive to the very powerful hold her imagination had upon her. “What I found truly moving about her was her constant call to this strange, imaginary, quality of existence,” he said, “her charming impulses, a very delicate generosity — when one did not ask for anything — a remarkable intuition in music, poetry, drama.”29

  Rather than criticize her fantasy life—“this strange, imaginary, quality of existence — he understood that she could not have survived without it. He also appreciated her respect for the integrity of writing. Thus when she said to him, “Michel, it is my voice, but I don’t want to hear it,” he told her he understood, and they remained friends. He then destroyed his manuscript. Asked why, Déon said, “I knew that one day I would be approached to use it and, if I didn’t have that unique copy, then I couldn’t.”30 In Michel Déon, Gabrielle had found a true ally: someone who appreciated her blend of understanding exactly what truth is, and her emotional nee
d to fantasize. In this, Déon did not judge her. Rather, he felt great sympathy for her childlike fears, her “inability to abandon her dreams in order to face reality.”

  29. Return: 1954

  In the spring of 1953, Gabrielle traveled to the United States. For three months, she was the guest of Maggie and Egmont van Zuylen in New York. On weekends, they mostly socialized with people Gabrielle already knew. Out on Long Island, for example, she spent time with the photographer Horst. Then there was Mona Williams, later von Bismarck.

  Mona had been named by several designers, including Gabrielle, the best-dressed woman in the world; her fame had triggered Cole Porter’s lines “What do I care if Mrs. Harrison Williams is the best-dressed woman in town?” Her husband (who would die that year) was reputedly the wealthiest man in America. Gabrielle had often been a visitor at the Harrisons’ villa on Capri, originally belonging to the emperor Tiberius. Before the war, she and Harrison had had a brief liaison. He had told Gabrielle that his beautiful socialite wife — most famously photographed by Cecil Beaton in Chanel—“is a fashion model, just a model,” and had attempted to capture Gabrielle for himself. She said if he’d asked her a year earlier she would have gone. As it was, “It felt too late.”

  Gabrielle’s visit to the States was in part motivated by the prospect of work. Chanel Parfums New York had asked for her assistance in redesigning their new offices. Gabrielle relished the challenge and created a luxurious yet restrained interior. To accompany the group of signature Coromandel screens she had brought with her from France, Gabrielle included another signature: her beige carpets. These worked as soothing background to the honey-colored straw-cloth walls and the warm wood of the antique pink-beige leather-covered French chairs. Around the rooms was a mixture of African bronzes and paintings by Renoir and Henri Rousseau.