Coco Chanel

by Lisa Chaney

  On August 29, with the arrival of the U.S. Army’s 28th Infantry Division, diverted en route to Berlin, a combined Franco–American military parade took place, again past the Arc de Triomphe. As the vehicles drove down the city streets, more joyous crowds greeted the Armée de la Libération and the Americans as their liberators.

  With the liberation, the purging of the collaborators began. Before any organized legal trials could get under way, the épuration sauvage, the summary courts, were hastily set up by the Free French, or sometimes by vindictive crowds, initiated as often as not by a personal vendetta. In several thousand cases, these episodes resulted in execution. At the same time, in towns and rural areas across the country, women accused of “horizontal collaboration” were dragged out of their houses and publicly humiliated. Although shaving women’s heads for sexual infidelity wasn’t new, it isn’t clear why between ten thousand and thirty thousand women were treated this way in addition to suffering the added indignity of being paraded naked through jeering crowds. What people expected from these public acts and how they defined collaboration is still being debated. While appalled by the ferocity of this popular retribution, de Gaulle’s fragile government had little effective power and let the vengeance run its ghastly course. These are some of the most terrifying images of the liberation.52

  Gabrielle was a high-profile figure and was to experience an attempt to “cleanse” her when she was arrested by two representatives of the Free French. With an icy dignity, she made her way as quickly as possible out of her room at the Ritz; she didn’t want them to find Serge Lifar, who was hiding in her bathroom. There has been much speculation over the years as to why, following a few hours’ questioning, Gabrielle was released. What did she say in her defense, given that her friend Arletty, who had also lived with a German, was imprisoned for four months, then put under house arrest for a further eighteen ? We have one small piece of information. A “top secret” letter, from the chief of staff of Allied Force Headquarters, was written in December 1944 referring to Vera Bate-Lombardi’s imprisonment in Spain. Following Gabrielle’s Modelhut debacle, she and Vera Bate-Lombardi gave different versions of what had come to pass. They both wrote letters to Winston Churchill, letters which contradicted each other.

  Among several reports and letters from Allied Force Headquarters regarding this episode, there is one recording that “Mme Chanel has been undergoing interrogation by the French authorities since that time”; in other words, throughout December 1944. While Vera was stuck in Spain begging Churchill to help her get back to her husband in Italy, the British were eager to clear up the purpose of the women’s visit and determine whether she or Gabrielle were German agents.53

  Did the Allied forces ever know, however, that Gabrielle had apparently returned to Berlin to inform Schellenberg of the failure of her mission? We don’t know what possessed her to do such a thing. Aside from believing that she was a German agent—for which we have no proof—perhaps there is only one conclusion to be drawn from her visit. While her mission to Spain sprang from a grandiose egotism, her slightly cracked belief that she could take a hand in ending the war may have emerged from a desire to be known for something besides haute couture. Years later, her assistant would say:Every morning she read the papers in great detail, from the short news items to the results of the races. To . . . the head of France Soir’s surprise, she knew everything about international news. She couldn’t help it: Chanel put herself in the place of heads of State. She thought about the decisions to make . . . She felt concerned, both as a national symbol and as a company director. Listening to her, one could even have thought that she was responsible for the situation. Mademoiselle found it regrettable that great men didn’t consult her. Already, during the war, she had taken it into her head to make Churchill sign peace. She had projects for Europe, which Mendès France judged discerning, and she wondered why L’Express didn’t repeat them.54

  Like a handful of thoughtful, rather than merely clever, fashion designers, Gabrielle came to believe that fashion was essentially worthless. Yet she had pinpointed more accurately than almost anyone before her what it was really about.

  And her claim to be a maker of “style,” rather than mere fashion, was of particular significance to her because it signified something less ephemeral. She had staked her life on work, and this work had been the creation of a couture house. Without it, Gabrielle would have lost her raison d’être. She was quite right when she said, “I have a boss’s soul,” and she needed to feel significant. The success of her political mission would have put her into the history books in a way she felt was commensurate with her intelligence. Her return visit to a man as powerful as Schellenberg must have been a kind of proof to herself that she had been taken seriously on a far grander scale than merely for the creation of dresses. In company with many exceptional artists, Gabrielle understood her own worth because she lived so wholeheartedly in the present, but she also underestimated the value of what it was she had done for her century. Through dress and her lifestyle, she had made a genuine contribution toward forcing the first century of modernity to face up to what it was, something more than many of those in the political sphere ever managed.

  With almost nothing to go on, we are left to speculate on the reasons for Gabrielle’s prompt release by the Resistance. Remembering Arletty, whose popularity with her compatriots had not been enough to set her free, Gabrielle’s fame alone can’t have been sufficient to procure her release. The routine speculation is probably the closest to the truth: an influential figure let it be known that no proceedings were to be taken against Gabrielle. It is said that when the British forces reached Paris, some officers had been deputed to make sure of her safety. They couldn’t find her. She was no longer at the Ritz or the rue Cambon, and none of the staff were forthcoming. Gabrielle was eventually found, keeping a low profile at a modest hotel on the outskirts of the city. It was said that the orders to discover her whereabouts had come from Churchill himself.55

  Churchill liked Gabrielle, and one of his closest friends, the Duke of Westminster, was her ex-lover, with whom she had remained on close terms. Westminster may have stepped in and asked the prime minister to help her. Churchill’s possible intervention may have been encouraged by the knowledge that Gabrielle might have had things to say about the rumored pro-Nazi sympathies of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, with whom she was acquainted. This would not have gone down well.

  While many of Gabrielle’s compatriots were amazed at how she “got away with it,” a young English journalist, Malcolm Muggeridge, marveled. He wrote:By one of those majestically simple strokes which made Napoleon so successful a general, she put an announcement in the window of her emporium that scent was free for the GIs, who thereupon queued up to get the bottles of Chanel No.5, and would have been outraged if the French police had touched a hair of her head. Having thus gained a breathing space, she proceeded to look for help to right and to left . . . thereby managing to avoid making even a token appearance amongst the gilded company—Maurice Chevalier, Jean Cocteau, Sacha Guitry and other worthies—on a collaborationist charge.56

  Gabrielle’s lawyer, René de Chambrun, as the son-in-law of the Vichy prime minister Pierre Laval, was himself living very discreetly. He advised Gabrielle that she ought to do the same thing, and outside France. Gabrielle knew and liked neutral Switzerland, and that was where she chose to go into voluntary exile.

  Before she left, however, she received a postcard from a young GI who had called on her at the Ritz early in 1945.57 Hans Schilinger told her he had been sent by her friend, the now-celebrated photographer Horst, who had fled France for the United States early in the war. Horst had managed to get his compatriot Hans Schilinger to the States, where the young man then joined the U.S. Army. Horst had told his friend that if he was in Paris, he must “give my love to Coco,” and this Schilinger had done. The story is usually told that Gabrielle, in turn, asked Schilinger, if ever he came across someone called Hans Günther von
Dincklage, to please write to the Ritz and let her know.

  Schilinger had indeed come across von Dincklage, and is supposed to have written Gabrielle a postcard telling her that he had secured his release from a POW camp in Hamburg. In reality, the sequence of events was appreciably different. Gabrielle had given Hans Schilinger the considerable sum of ten thousand dollars, and asked him to “go to Austria, find von Dincklage, give him the money and if possible conduct him to his home in Schleswig-Holstein.” This we know because Schilinger and von Dincklage were arrested by the British military authorities in the spring of 1945. The military recorded that Schilinger “was apparently accompanying Baron von Dincklage with a view to taking him to the latter’s family estate at Gettorf. Von Dincklage was in possession of US dollars 8,948 which were impounded on his arrest.”58 There was no possibility of getting von Dincklage back into France, and with the burden of Gabrielle’s own blackened reputation acting as a spur, by the winter of 1945 she had made her judicious move to Lausanne.

  28

  Exile

  While Gabrielle’s life had been one of almost perpetual motion for decades, her Swiss exile launched her on an empty nomadic period. For several years before the war, she had spent her days in the rue Cambon and her nights across the road in the Ritz. Forever on the move, she also regularly left Paris for a few days, staying in the house of a friend, at resort hotels, or at La Pausa in the south of France. However, in leaving Paris for Switzerland, Gabrielle had lost something more important to her than any dwelling place—she had lost her business, her all-important work. At the rue Cambon it had always been possible to distract oneself from too much thought. Either a collection was in progress or it was the aftermath of the one just gone. There were the new season’s textiles, braids, buttons, shoes, hats, jewelery and other accessories to be discussed with the appropriate craftsmen and women; the hours with the models on which all ideas must be tried out; the friends, sycophants, and employees proffering queries and comments. Endless activity.

  Gabrielle’s lack of occupation during the war had been frustrating enough, but in Switzerland, she didn’t even have the consolation of rue Cambon nearby. Aside from a handful of friendships, for more than twenty-five years, her work had represented the one permanent fixture in her life. Her lovers, her friends, her family, where she lived—these were forever changing. Gabrielle was almost a caricature of the Heraclitean notion that the essence of life is flux, and to resist this change is to resist the heart of our existence.

  Whatever she might have sometimes said to the contrary, she had chosen change as her life, and would say, “I am scared only of becoming bored.” Constant movement was the one thing that would keep this fear at bay. She also knew that moving on, carrying no baggage from the past, was the climate out of which she was best able to create. Gabrielle came closest to being a revolutionary when understanding that, within her there was a “deep taste for destruction and evolution.” This was what she meant when she said, “Fashion should express the place, the moment . . . fashion has a meaning in time but none in space.”1

  Without her business—both the building and the exercise of designing—as the fixed point in her life, Gabrielle’s incessant movement had lost its meaning and acquired an aimlessness that did not suit her. Leaving Lausanne, she wandered from one grand Swiss hotel to another and back again. With her energies previously harnessed creatively, she now had no outlet for her restlessness and “revealed a certain weariness,” a disenchantment with life, as her old friend Paul Morand put it.

  Morand, who had worked for the Vichy government, had recently taken refuge in Switzerland with a number of other political exiles like himself, so as to avoid any legal judgments being meted out by his homeland. He had lost almost everything. As an impoverished and vilified ex-member of the French literary establishment, in the winter of 1946 he took up Gabrielle’s invitation to visit her in Saint Moritz. There, at Badrutt’s Palace Hotel, they sat together over the course of several evenings, and Gabrielle told Morand her story. With nothing to do, with her youth now behind her, inevitably, she looked back.

  (These were the evenings referred to at the beginning of this book, and the record of which, years later, Morand would publish as Gabrielle’s “memoir,” The Allure of Chanel. In his introduction, Morand would recall that “with nothing to do for the first time in her life,” Gabrielle was “champing at the bit.”) Reflecting on her heart, which “unburdened the secret of a taciturn disposition,” Morand remembered Gabrielle’s voice “that gushed forth from her mouth like lava, those words that crackled like dried vines, her rejoinders, simultaneously crisp and snappy . . . a tone that was increasingly dismissive, increasingly contradictory, laying irrevocable blame, I heard them all.”2 He heard her doubts about when to return to the rue Cambon, and how she felt both “trapped by the past and gripped by time regained.” She was part of an age which was suddenly “foreign to her . . . black bile flowed from eyes that still sparkled, beneath arched eyebrows increasingly accentuated by eyeliner.”3 And although Morand’s Gabrielle was formidably alert and well informed, her star was no longer in the ascendant.

  Sitting in the palatial opulence of the Swiss hotel, she talked. Far too intelligent not to be self-aware, she said of herself, “I lack balance . . . I talk too much,” but she added, “I forget quickly, and furthermore . . . I like to forget. [Emptying her mind enabled her to create.] I throw myself at people in order to force them to think like me.”4 The contradictions came thick and fast, and while she did always forget, this woman of paradox also declared, “I have never forgotten anything.” Saying that “aging is Adam’s charm and Eve’s tragedy,” Gabrielle now had more time than she wished to contemplate the possibility of her own decline. On the one hand, she despised women who faced aging without dignity, and on the other, she was unable to comprehend the thought of her own nonexistence. She would say that the idea “of youth is something very new, who talked about it twenty years ago?”; she also said that 1939 was the first time it had occurred to her that she was no longer young: “It hadn’t occurred to me that I could grow old. I’d always been among bright, pleasant people; friends. And all at once I found myself alone, separated from everyone I liked. Everyone I liked was on the other side of the ocean [she means those who had fled to the States].”5 But there were distractions. A few old friends, such as Visconti, visited her in Switzerland; there was a handful of new Swiss friends, and a new female companion, Maggie van Zuylen.

  Marguerite Nametalla was an Egyptian (it was said she had been a violet seller) married to the diplomat Baron Egmont van Zuylen, whose home was the immense medieval De Haar Castle, in the Netherlands. Maggie was elegantly beautiful, with pale skin and green eyes, and enjoyed dramatizing her “unwealthy origins.” Her son-in-law, Guy de Rothschild, described her as “witty and gay, lively and provocative, she combined audacity and fantasy. Completely natural and devoid of timidity, her sense of humor . . . her repartee, her gift for imitation, made her seem like a character in a play.”6 André Malraux would proclaim that “Chanel, General de Gaulle and Picasso are the three most important figures of our time,” and of Maggie van Zuylen, he said, “Hers is intelligence in its purest state, since it is unencumbered by any intellectual baggage.”

  “Maggie could participate in any conversation, for while conscious of her lack of culture, she never gave it a second thought.”7 Her vivacity was seductive, and Gabrielle felt renewed in the company of this worldly and vital younger woman. She also became her lover. In the winter of 1945–46, they entertained each other uproariously with their sparkling and acid wit. Writing many years later in his journal, Paul Morand would say that before Gabrielle “became exclusively lesbian, I lived with her and Mme. de Zuylen at the Beau Rivage, shared their private life . . . in Lausanne. They didn’t hide when I found them in bed together.”8

  Gabrielle had so far outwitted her demons by “never resting.” Still on the move from everything she found too painful, she was obliged to
use her hotel hopping as a new method of forgetting.

  Did she make herself forget, too, the mounting deaths of her friends, lovers and family that reminded her of time passing? Her two brothers, whom she had cut off so peremptorily at the beginning of the war, were both dead, Lucien felled by a heart attack early in the war, and without seeing their sister again. Gabrielle rarely referred to her family. She was one of those who had so outgrown their roots that in doing so she had rejected them, left them far behind. When they pulled her back, they did nothing but remind her of a childhood that she said she remembered every day and that she spent her whole life trying to avoid. Either through a sense of social inadequacy or a genuine impatience with the roots that were of no use to her emotionally, psychologically or financially, Gabrielle had made the decision and ruthlessly thrust them aside.

  Excising almost all her family from her life, Gabrielle appears to have retained only her aunt Adrienne and her nephew, André Palasse, and his family. She brought André and his family to Switzerland in an attempt to improve his health, but André would eventually die of tuberculosis.

  In 1942, Gabrielle’s friend Max Jacob had died in the appalling Drancy internment camp, in Paris’s outer suburbs; his sister and brother had already been sent to be gassed in Auschwitz. That same year, Duke Dmitri Pavlovich had died in another kind of prison, a sanatorium in Switzerland, where for more than a year he had struggled with tuberculosis. In 1948, Vera Bate-Lombardi died in Rome. But before Vera, Gabrielle’s old friend José Maria Sert’s death was announced. Theirs had been what Gabrielle called a relationship “with all the ripples that the clash of characters as entrenched as ours can stir up.” Sert was “as munificent and as immoral as a Renaissance man,” who had done nothing to curb the pace of work, food, drink and the drugs that his doctors had said would kill him. One day, in November 1945, while laboring on his huge mural in the cathedral of Vichy, he dropped dead.