Coco Chanel

by Justine Picardie

  He would have known, therefore, of her decision to close the House of Chanel, as an immediate consequence of the declaration of war. The summer had passed in a whirlwind of parties, including Count Etienne de Beaumont’s last great costume ball, to which Chanel came dressed as ‘la belle dame sans merci’. She was also a guest at Lady Mendl’s garden party for 750 guests at Versailles, where they were entertained by circus acrobats, clowns and three elephants; in the midst of which mayhem Coco was seen deep in conversation with Wallis Simpson, by then the Duchess of Windsor, and a loyal customer of Chanel. In between the festivities, Chanel was still designing her couture collections – gypsy dresses to dance in, adored by Diana Vreeland at Harper’s Bazaar, who wore ‘the dégagé gypsy skirts, the divine brocades, the little boleros, the roses in the hair’ – and she was also working on the costumes for a new ballet by her friend Salvador Dalí, Bacchanale. Dalí’s production for Les Ballets Russes traced the spiralling delirium of King Ludwig II to music by Wagner, and for all its bizarre Surrealism (a corps de ballet on crutches, a set dominated by a vast white swan with a gaping hole in its breast), it seemed in some sense to capture the mood of the moment. Christian Dior characterised Paris as spinning in that ‘fatal year of 1939 … in a burst of follies, which always seem to precede a catastrophe. Paris had rarely seemed more scintillating. We flitted from ball to ball … Fearing the inevitable cataclysm, we were determined to go down in a burst of splendour.’ Yet the couture houses were still flourishing; Diana Vreeland described Paris in July 1939 as ‘jammed with buyers – frantic, amusing, exhausting and glorious’. And in those final, feverish weeks of freedom, the entire city seemed to be celebrating; for as Janet Flanner observed in The New Yorker, ‘There have been money and music in the air, with people enjoying the first good time since the bad time started in Munich last summer … The expensive hotels have been full of American and English tourists … French workmen are working; France’s exports are up; her trade balance continues to bulge favourably; business is close to having a little boom. It has taken the threat of war to make the French loosen up and have a really swell and civilised good time. The gaiety in Paris has been an important political symptom of something serious and solid, as well as spirited, that is in the air in France today.’

  All of which goes some way to explain why Chanel’s decision to shut down her business in September was such a controversial one. She laid off her employees, aside from a skeleton staff to keep open the boutique only to sell perfume (a decision that was to ensure that her property in Rue Cambon was not requisitioned by the Germans after their invasion of Paris). ‘This is no time for fashion,’ she declared; an announcement that seems in retrospect acceptable, perhaps even honourable, yet at the time was seen as an act of cowardice and betrayal.

  Some of her detractors believed that Chanel was using the war as an excuse to punish her seamstresses for their involvement in the widespread strikes of June 1936, when she had been barred by a picket line from entering her own premises for several days. At one point in the negotiations, Chanel had made an improbable offer to turn the business into a workers’ co-operative, on the condition that she could manage it; the proposal came to nothing, and the strike was settled. In her conversations with Paul Morand after the war, she gave her own bizarre version of the episode: ‘In 1936, like everywhere else, we had a sit-down strike. (Whoever dreamt it up was a genius.) It was cheerful and delightful. The accordion could be heard playing all over the house.’ Her seamstresses, she declared, were better paid than elsewhere, so the strike was not for money, but a heartfelt demand to see more of Mademoiselle: ‘It was a strike for love, a strike for the yearning heart.’

  Given the continuing success of the House of Chanel after the strike – despite mounting competition from Elsa Schiaparelli – it seems unlikely that Chanel would close her business out of revenge or spite, using the war to settle old scores with her employees. When interviewed in later life by her friend Marcel Haedrich, Chanel gave a far more simple explanation: ‘I stopped working because of the war. Everyone in my place had someone who was in uniform – a husband, a brother, a father. The House of Chanel was empty two hours after war was declared.’

  As it happened, Chanel chose this moment to cut herself entirely loose from her own brothers, Lucien and Alphonse; not that they had ever been part of her life in Paris. She had remained loyal to her sisters, although they were both long dead, and to her aunt Adrienne (now married to her baron and finally a respectable woman); but she had separated herself from her brothers, aside from supplying generous financial support, as long as they kept well away from her. In October 1939, Coco wrote a letter to Lucien, who was still living with his wife in the house near Clermont-Ferrand that she had bought for him a decade earlier. ‘I am very sorry to have to bring you such bad news. But now that the business is shut down, here I am nearly reduced to poverty myself … You cannot count on me for anything so long as circumstances stay the way they are.’ She sent Alphonse a similar letter, to the remote village where he lived in the Cévennes, and did not see either of her brothers ever again. Lucien died of a heart attack in March 1941, Alphonse after the war; and according to Edmonde Charles-Roux, when Alphonse’s daughters, Antoinette and Gabrielle, came up to Paris in an attempt to visit their famous aunt at Rue Cambon, they were turned away, and never returned.

  For a time, Chanel continued to live at the Ritz, as before, although Paris was becoming increasingly deserted. The editor of Harper’s Bazaar, Carmel Snow, wrote in her final dispatch for the October 1939 issue: ‘The city had become, almost overnight, an empty city. The taxis disappeared. All the telephones were cut off. You can walk for miles without seeing a child. Even the dogs – and you know how Parisians love their dogs – have been sent away.’ Noël Coward, who was posted to Paris as a British liaison officer, reported that the Ritz was still open, and that Coco Chanel could be seen going into the hotel’s air-raid shelter when warnings were sounded, followed at a discreet distance by her servant carrying her gas-mask on a cushion. Lady Mendl was also ensconced in the Ritz, along with several other socialites; as was Cocteau, in a room paid for by Chanel, and Elsa Schiaparelli, who had kept her business going. ‘I wonder if people fully realized the importance as propaganda for France of the dressmaking business at this time,’ wrote Schiaparelli in her memoir, Shocking Life, describing couture as ‘the opposition of feminine grace to cruelty and hate’. Other fashion designers took the same view, including Molyneux, Lanvin and Lucien Lelong, the head of the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture (although Christian Dior, who worked for Lelong alongside Pierre Balmain, observed that the couture houses remained open ‘as much to provide employment for thousands of workers as out of patriotic pride’). Schiaparelli’s wartime collection remained as surreal as in previous years, when she had been inspired by Salvador Dalí, but all the more surprising given her declaration of its practicality: ‘There was an evening dress camouflaged to look like a day dress. When one emerged from the subway at night to attend a formal dinner, one merely pulled a ribbon and the day dress was lengthened into an evening dress. There were the Maginot Line blue, the Foreign Legion red, the aeroplane grey, the woollen boiler suit that one could fold on a chair next to one’s bed so that one could put it on quickly in the event of an air-raid driving one down to the cellar. There was also one in white which was supposed to withstand poison gas.’

  But nothing withstood the German invasion of France in May 1940, and as the soldiers of the Third Reich approached Paris in early June, Schiaparelli joined the great exodus from the city. At the Ritz, Chanel packed her belongings into several trunks marked with her name, which she stored at the hotel, and paid her bill two months in advance. Her chauffeur had been drafted into the army, and she was advised by his replacement that it would be unwise to make her escape in her Rolls-Royce, so it was in her driver’s own car that she left Paris. She was accompanied by several of her female employees, including a Madame Aubert, who had worked for Chanel fro
m the very start, and had known her even before then, from the days when Coco emerged at Moulins. Somehow, the women made the long and arduous journey to the Pyrenees, to the house that Chanel had bought for her nephew André Palasse, close to where her former lover Etienne Balsan was living in quiet retirement. André had already departed, having joined the French army at the start of hostilities, and was soon to be captured as a prisoner-of-war and sent to a detainment camp in Germany. But his daughter Gabrielle clearly remembers her aunt’s arrival in the Pyrenees. ‘She came in the car with her maid, and a few other women – one of them was Madame Aubert – so it was quite a job finding places for all of them to stay. Auntie Coco had somehow managed to send on her entire gold dressing table set which been given to her by my godfather, the Duke of Westminster, and that came to our house separately.’ What seared itself most vividly onto her memory was Chanel’s terrible grief upon hearing of the French surrender to Germany: ‘She was already staying with us by the time the Armistice was signed – we listened to the news on the radio, and she wept bitterly.’

  Gabrielle was 13, and old enough to understand the significance of the capitulation. The Armistice was signed on 22nd June 1940 in the forest of Compiègne, where her aunt had ridden Etienne Balsan’s horses over 30 years before; the humiliating French surrender orchestrated by Hitler to take place in the very same spot where Germany had been forced to sign the previous Armistice in 1918, accepting defeat in the First World War.

  As the summer passed, Chanel fretted to return to Paris, and eventually conceived a plan to make the homeward journey with another friend who had washed up in the Pyrenees, Marie-Louise Bousquet, whom she had last seen at Count Etienne’s costume ball. The two women travelled first to Vichy, where the collaborationist French government of Marshal Pétain and Pierre Laval had established itself. ‘Everyone was laughing and drinking champagne,’ Chanel recalled, in conversation with Marcel Haedrich. The women were wearing flamboyantly big hats, and the seaside resort seemed to be in full swing. ‘“Well,” I said, “it’s the height of the season again.”’

  The hotels were so packed with guests that Marie-Louise had to sleep on a chaise longue in a linen room, while Chanel was given an airless attic garret. After a night of very little rest, they managed to replenish their supply of petrol, and set out for Paris, only to discover that the roads were blocked. Finally, after several detours, they ended up in the mountain spa resort of Bourbon-l’Archambault. The hotels were deserted, and Chanel was able to book a bedroom with an ensuite bath. There, she soaked away the dirt of the journey – ‘the water was black when I got out,’ she told Haedrich – but by the time she finally reached Paris, in August 1940, Chanel felt dirty again. Dirt was to be a recurring image in her subsequent account of what happened when she returned to the Ritz; indeed, it was how she characterised the entire era of the German occupation of Paris to Pierre Galante: ‘That period was singularly lacking in dignity – it was a filthy mess.’

  As soon as she approached the main entrance of the Ritz, she was confronted by the sight of German sentries at the door and uniformed officers in the lobby. The main part of the hotel, including her suite overlooking Place Vendôme, had been requisitioned for senior military personnel and high-ranking Nazis, among them Marshal Goering. (The hotel manager’s wife would never forget the sight of Goering opposite the porter’s desk, showing off his new diamond-studded baton by Cartier.) Chanel’s story of what happened next varied slightly in different accounts, but she gave the most detailed version to Haedrich. An assistant manager informed her that she must go to see the German Kommandatur, to which she replied: ‘What do you mean? All dirty like this? I must change …’ She instructed the assistant manager to find her a room where she could wash herself. ‘Then you go to the Kommandatur! Say that Mademoiselle Chanel has arrived. I’ll go when I’m clean. I’ve always been taught that it’s better to be clean when one is asking for something.’

  After some negotiation, a small bedroom was found for Mademoiselle on the top floor of the Rue Cambon wing of the hotel – much lowlier in status than the Place Vendôme building, which was reserved solely for the Germans. The military were not permitted to pass into the Rue Cambon side, and nor could the civilian residents enter the Nazi-occupied section of the Ritz. Meanwhile, a small Resistance network was formed amongst a section of the hotel staff, which noted the movements of the Nazi leaders between Berlin and Paris.

  Von Dincklage was not sufficiently senior to be billeted at the Ritz, and it may have been elsewhere in the city that Chanel encountered him again. But whatever the circumstances of that meeting, she had sought his help in arranging the release of her nephew, André, who was still detained in an internment camp. Spatz was unable to do this – a sign, perhaps, of his lack of influence – but nevertheless, Chanel embarked on her love affair with him at some point in 1941. Her maid, Germaine Domenger, who worked for Chanel from 1937 until 1966, was later outraged by suggestions that this relationship was tantamount to collaboration. ‘Mademoiselle refused to re-open her couture house and work with the Germans!’ she declared, in a letter she wrote defending Chanel from such accusations after her death in 1971. Twelve other couturiers remained open for business, including Balenciaga, Madame Grès and Lucien Lelong, who as president of the Chambre Syndicale resisted the German threat that all the leading designers were to be moved, along with their staff, to Berlin. The suggestion had been that Germany would become the centre of fashion in the New Europe, whereas Lelong declared that ‘Paris’s haute couture is not transferable, either en bloc, or bit by bit. It exists in Paris or it does not exist at all.’ In the event, the designers stayed in Paris, but in doing so, were inevitably showing and selling couture to the wives and mistresses of German officers, alongside an unsavoury assortment of black marketeers, racketeers and collaborators.

  Chanel, in marked contrast, led a quiet life, avoiding all social contact with the Germans, apart from Spatz. He visited her at her apartment in Rue Cambon, rather than the Ritz (presumably to avoid the attention of more senior Germans, as well as to obey the rule that kept civilians separate from the military in the hotel). According to Germaine Domenger, who referred to Spatz as Baron von Dincklage, ‘He was a gentleman … Mademoiselle had first met him years before, in St Moritz … He came often to see Mademoiselle at Rue Cambon, but we never saw him in a uniform … I can swear that Mademoiselle never received any Germans, except Baron von Dincklage.’

  Whenever they were visited by Chanel’s closest and most trusted friends – Misia Sert, Serge Lifar, Jean Cocteau – she and Spatz openly declared their loathing of the war, and continued in their habit of speaking English to one another. They made several trips to La Pausa together, where they were contacted by Robert Streitz, the villa’s architect; he was now a member of the local Resistance, and when he asked for Chanel’s help in intervening on behalf of a friend, a physics professor who had been arrested by the Gestapo, she willingly agreed. Perhaps unbeknownst to her, the Resistance was also using the extensive cellars at La Pausa as a hiding place from which to send covert messages via a hidden transmitter, and its gardens as a staging post for Jewish refugees escaping from France to the Italian border.

  But for the most part, Chanel behaved as if the Germans simply didn’t exist. Marcel Haedrich – who was not afforded the opportunity of such lofty disregard, given his own detainment as a French officer in a German prisoner-of-war camp – nevertheless expressed some sympathy for Chanel’s apparent refusal to acknowledge the enemy presence in Paris. Chanel would never have done business with Nazi dignitaries, he said, unlike Cartier, who sold jewellery to Goering: ‘let no one think Mademoiselle Chanel would have spoken to him, or smiled. She did not see them, she declared, and I am sure she was telling the truth. “That did something to them,” she told me, “when a woman who still has something left ignored them completely.”’

  And yet her avoidance was far from complete; Spatz, after all, was a German, however much he tried to keep a
low profile during the Occupation. Nor was he the only German that Chanel had dealings with. A catastrophic error of judgement led her to become embroiled with another, far more senior Nazi officer; a relationship that would lead to a misguided trip to Madrid, the consequences of which were to prove markedly compromising. The catalyst for this appears not to have been Spatz, but a friend of his, Captain Theodor Momm, who had spent his childhood in Belgium, where his family ran a textile business, before returning to Germany. Momm was an army officer, possibly connected to the Abwehr, and sufficiently knowledgeable to have been assigned to Paris to supervise the local textile industry under German administration. When Spatz proved unable to get Chanel’s nephew out of the prisoner-of-war camp, she turned to Momm for help (a painfully slow process, given that André was released only after four years’ imprisonment in Germany). But at some point in Chanel’s negotiations with Momm, as the war dragged on through 1943, a bizarre plan began to take shape: that she would act as a messenger to Churchill, and thereby initiate a peace process.

  The opening lines from a private letter Chanel wrote to Winston Churchill during World War II.

  There were many extraordinary aspects of this implausible strategy – Chanel’s total lack of political or diplomatic experience; the unlikelihood that the British would respond to such an advance – but perhaps the most obvious challenge was whether anyone in the German high command would consider it seriously Yet when Momm went to Berlin with the proposal in the autumn of 1943, he found a receptive audience in the form of Walter Schellenberg, the Nazi chief of foreign intelligence. Schellenberg, like the Abwehr commander Wilhelm Canaris, was already searching for ways of covert negotiation with the Allies, despite the fact that to do so was to risk execution by Hitler, who had forbidden any such overtures. In retrospect, when Schellenberg was interrogated by the British after the German defeat, he indicated that he had hoped Chanel might at least give Churchill a message that senior German commanders were at odds with Hitler, and were seeking an end to the war. And his choice of the manner by which she would do so was significant: his strategy was to send her to Madrid to meet the British ambassador, Sir Samuel Hoare, with whom she was already acquainted. Schellenberg had long nursed an ambition to establish contact with Hoare – he had first conceived the idea in July 1942 – and was therefore swift to settle upon Chanel as the means to move forward. The mission was code-named Operation Modellhut (‘model hat’); and for all the pantomime frothiness of the title, the participants appear to have embarked upon it with serious intent.