That Chanel was spared punishment was all the more fortuitous, given how many others were locked up in the notorious prison of Fresnes, where conditions were said to be worse after the Liberation than under the Gestapo. As an MI6 officer, Muggeridge spent a great deal of time ‘trying to sort out the position of purported British agents who had been arrested as collaborators … For obvious reasons, their work for us had often necessitated their being ostensibly on good terms with the German occupation authorities, for which they now found themselves under the threat of severe punishment, if not execution.’ In Fresnes, he encountered an extraordinary collection of alleged collaborationists, formerly eminent politicians and senior civil servants, dishevelled admirals and generals still wearing their medals and uniforms, diplomats, writers, actors, journalists, locked up with gangsters and prostitutes in squalid overcrowded cells in ‘a kind of Beggar’s Opera scene’, where it was difficult to tell the difference between the innocent and the guilty. As Muggeridge brooded over what he witnessed in Paris, it seemed to him that ‘everyone was informing on everyone else’; and that there was ‘a great deal of working off of private grudges and envies. The truth is that under the German occupation everyone who did not go underground or abroad was in some degree a collaborator and could be plausibly accused as such. The barber who cropped the bullet heads of German soldiers, the greengrocer who sold them fruit, the waiter who served them meals, the whore who went to bed with them, the entertainer who sang to them, the clown who made them laugh, were all collaborating. I felt desperately sorry for the individuals who were picked on for this soi-disant crime, especially when, as sometimes happened, I actually saw the pack going after their victim – shaving the head of some wretched girl … carrying some gibbering, trembling creature off to prison.’
Several of Chanel’s closest friends teetered on the edge of the abyss in the purge that came to be known as the épuration sauvage. Muggeridge was aware that his counterparts in French intelligence had considered the case against Picasso. ‘During the occupation years, it seemed, his Paris studio had been warmed – a rare privilege – and visited by German officers; such minutiae, as I was all too well aware being collected, tabulated and seriously deliberated upon in that strange time.’ Serge Lifar was initially banned for life from the French stage, having been the Vichy-appointed director of the Paris Opéra, a penalty that was then reduced to only a year’s suspension. Cocteau managed to negotiate his way around the fact that he had accepted invitations to the ambassador’s parties at the German embassy during the Occupation; and Marie-Louise Bousquet remained unscathed, despite having entertained ‘nice Germans’ at her weekly Thursday afternoon salons. Indeed, she flourished as the Paris editor of Harper’s Bazaar, and was subsequently described by her friend Cecil Beaton as ‘the brilliant Florence Nightingale of fashion’. But the film star Arletty did not escape retribution for her affair with a German officer. When she was arrested in early September 1944, a rumour spread through Paris that she had had her breasts cut off; the truth was less hideous – her head had been shaved – and she was allowed out of prison to shoot the remaining scenes of Les Enfants du paradis.
During his time in Paris, Muggeridge had dinner with Chanel in her private apartment, and observed her with some fascination, in an encounter that was a curious combination of social visit and intelligence gathering for MI6. He had been taken to Rue Cambon ‘by an old friend of hers, F, who had appeared in Paris, covered in gold braid, as a member of one of the numerous liaison missions which by now were roosting there’. His first impression of her ‘was of someone tiny and frail, who, if one puffed at her too hard, might easily just disintegrate; her powdery frame collapsing into a minute heap of dust, as those frail houses had in the London Blitz. She seemed to have various pieces and shapes of shining metal about her person; like Earl Attlee in old age when he went to a ceremonial dinner, or one of the ancient men-at-arms at Windsor Castle who appear in breast-plate and armour at gatherings of Knights of the Garter. It seemed extraordinary that she should be able to support this extra weight.’
Yet as the evening progressed, he realised that for all the fragility of her appearance, Chanel was well able to defend herself. She gave no impression of uneasiness at the presence of an MI6 officer in her salon, and ‘towards F she adopted an attitude of old familiarity, as though to say: “Don’t imagine, my dear F (she addressed him by his surname), that your being dressed up in all that gold braid impresses me at all. I know you!” Nor had she, as a matter of fact, any cause for serious anxiety, having successfully withstood the first épuration assault at the time of Liberation by one of those majestically simple strokes which made Napoleon so successful a general; she just put an announcement in the window of her emporium that scent was free for GIs, who thereupon queued up to get their bottles of Chanel N°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 à gauche et à droite, and not in vain, thereby managing to avoid making even a token appearance among the gilded company … on a collaborationist charge.’
Muggeridge also observed how Chanel’s past life in England was still present in her conversation: ‘she and F reminisced about old times … I had heard that for a number of years she had been the regular companion of an English duke, and asked if she often saw Churchill in those days. Oh yes, she said, she knew dear Winston well, and used to play piquet with him, making a point, of course, of always losing, as otherwise he’d be in a bad temper.’ Together, the three of them – the gold-braided F, the British spook and Mademoiselle – sat side by side on a soft sofa, in near darkness, dining by the light of two candles. ‘The filet mignon was exquisitely tender, the red wine soft and mellow, the cognac silky, with other delicacies virtually unobtainable in Paris at that time, to all of which F did full justice, while Mme Chanel and I only nibbled …
‘Even in this dim twilight, Mme Chanel seemed immensely old and incorporeal; I had the feeling almost that she might expire that very evening, seated between F and me, and we just tiptoe away, leaving her there with the debris of our meal – the coffee cups, the billowing brandy glasses, the cigarette ends, hers stained a deep red.’
Afterwards, Muggeridge tried to draft some sort of report on Chanel, but realised that there was nothing to say, except that he was sure ‘the épuration mills, however small they might grind, would never grind her – as indeed, proved to be the case’. As he reflected upon his evening, he wondered whether a more rigorous agent might have discovered further details: ‘how she managed to get to and from Spain during the occupation, whether she also offered free scent to the German troops, who were her clients, associates and intimates in those years. Alas, all I had done was to listen; fascinated, and even a little awed, at the masterly way she harpooned and skinned the braided F.’
As the weeks passed after the Liberation, the war seemed to recede from Paris, even though it was still continuing elsewhere. Bank accounts were unblocked, houses un-shuttered, women returned to the streets, the shaved ones now wearing wigs. The Germans had vanished, the GIs no longer crowded into the Chanel boutique for bottles of N°5, and Spatz’s reflection was gone from the mirrored staircase, and his shadow from Mademoiselle’s private salon. She had faced those who accused her, her cunning and courage undiminished, but when danger ebbed away, she was seldom seen at the Ritz or Rue Cambon. Mademoiselle Chanel had not disappeared altogether, but she had certainly retreated, and it seemed to some as if she might never come back.
THE COMEBACK
On 7th July 1945, Hitler’s former chief of foreign intelligence, Walter Schellenberg, was flown from Frankfurt to Croydon airport, on his way to several months of interrogation by the British security services. As his captors observed in their initial intelligence report: ‘the plane which brought Schellenberg to England on a glorious summer day passed over Greater London.’ It was Schellenberg’s first ever view of England, and according to the accompanying Briti
sh officers, he ‘stared spellbound down on the giant living city. His eyes sought anxiously for the wounds inflicted on the centre of the British Empire. He could find no wounds, nor even scars. Giving up the hopeless search, he whispered: “I cannot understand – no destruction at all.”’
If this account is to be believed, then Schellenberg cannot have looked very far; for amongst the many buildings destroyed during the Blitz was a monumental Bourjois factory in Croydon that manufactured beauty products, including those for Chanel. Built in 1934, it produced perfumes, talcs and soaps (over 600,000 bars a month) that were exported all over the world. Its strategic position – close to rail links, roads and airports, including three RAF bases – made the factory a prime target, and on 11th August 1940 it was badly damaged in a direct hit by the Luftwaffe.
At the time, Pierre and Paul Wertheimer, the owners of Bourjois and Coco’s partners in Les Parfums Chanel, were arriving in New York, having escaped there with Chanel working on a model for the first collection of her comeback, 1954. their wives and children from the German invasion of Paris. Both brothers had managed to make the perilous journey by sea, via Spain and Brazil; Pierre disembarked in New York on 5th August 1940, Paul a fortnight later. Despite the dangers of their journey amidst the chaos of war, the Wertheimers had also managed to keep their business interests afloat. Not only did the brothers maintain the production of Chanel perfumes in their factory on the outskirts of Paris, even as the Nazis made attempts to seize their assets (as they did those of other Jewish families), but the Wertheimers somehow retained control of their business empire.
This was despite the best efforts of the woman whose name was such a crucial element in the success of the perfumes, yet who felt her own financial interest in the perfume company to have been wrongfully diluted. And therein lies the key to the most troubling episode of Coco Chanel’s history. Her legal manoeuvres against the Wertheimers were immensely complicated, but in essence she attempted to use the anti-Jewish laws of the German Occupation to oust her business partners; a strategy that proved unsuccessful, and gravely tarnished her reputation.
Since then, the question of whether this tactic was fuelled by anti-Semitism or pragmatism has continued to be raised in a debate that shows no signs of being definitively resolved. It is difficult to produce any firm evidence of Chanel making anti-Semitic statements – the accusations against her are rarely backed up by reliable sources; as with the bizarre encounter described in Brando Unzipped, a florid biography by Darwin Porter, which has Coco Chanel wearing blue jeans (an unlikely thought in itself) meeting Marlon Brando in Paris in 1949. Brando is quoted as saying, ‘Chanel was the single most fascinating woman I’ve ever met. I detested every word that came from her mouth but was hypnotized by her … Even when she blamed the Jews for the weakened franc, she continued to be mesmerizing.’
A more authoritative account comes from Chanel’s friend Claude Delay, who gives some sense of the contradictions inherent in Mademoiselle’s professed lack of prejudice. ‘She loved her Jewish doctor better than all her family,’ and remained loyal to him, amongst others. ‘“I prefer my Jewish friends to lots of Christians, the St Cretin variety,” she used to say. “There are the great Jews, the Hebrews in general, and the Yids. But all we’ve got are tramps …”’
Quite what Chanel might have meant by that final remark is unclear; and a similarly disquieting ambiguity is apparent in her comments to Paul Morand about Misia. These have subsequently been cited as anti-Semitic, although her true intent remains obscure. Misia was a Catholic, but one of Chanel’s more irrational monologues about her friend concluded with the following curious observation: ‘What allowed her to retain her Jewish soul were the Jews themselves.’
There is more clarity to be had from Boulos Ristelhueber, Misia’s great friend (and Sert’s secretary), whose diary during the first winter of the German Occupation gives some context to Misia and Coco’s differing views. On 21st December 1940, Boulos recorded a ‘rather sad lunch’ with Jean Cocteau. ‘At four o’clock called on Coco Chanel, so nice to me that she did me good. She has great hopes that her perfume business will soon be straightened out.’ Six days later, he visited Misia, who was ‘beside herself about all the anti-Jewish laws that turn Paris into a prison, the exact negation of what our city is. She is so right!’ The following evening, he spent the evening at Misia’s with Chanel and the Duc d’Harcourt, whose wife, Antoinette, was Jewish (a Rothschild). ‘Coco goes into a long tirade against the Jews. The conversation is dangerous, given Antoinette’s origins and the presence of the Duke. Fortunately she was sidetracked …’
In fact, Chanel appeared to have no problem doing business with the most famous of Jewish dynasties, nor in socializing with them (an inconsistency that has often been perceived in the French and British upper classes). Her friends and clients included Rothschilds; indeed, Baroness Diane de Rothschild had been one of her earliest supporters, shopping at the Chanel boutiques in Paris and Deauville before the First World War, and Marie-Hélène de Rothschild has been credited as playing a part in persuading Chanel to return to couture in 1954. These and other paradoxical prejudices were to emerge in her conversations with James Brady, a young American correspondent for Women’s Wear Dally in Paris, befriended by Chanel in 1961. ‘She was a biased mass of contradictions,’ he wrote, long after her death. ‘If the vintages failed, the franc weakened. “C’est les Juifs. It’s the Jews.” Yet her closest friend was the Baroness Marie-Hélène de Rothschild. She complained that blacks smelled different and then rhapsodized about a certain black prizefighter. “That man and I … how we danced.”’
Brady did not damn Chanel for these remarks; nor deny what he saw to be good in her. ‘She taught me most of what I know about fashion, much of what I know about life.’ Yet unlike some others of her friends and admirers, he did not keep silent on the subject of her bigotry, in the hope that it would thereby disappear. For there is no escaping the ugly truth of her attempt to take advantage of an anti-Jewish regime; a fact duly noted by Time magazine, even as it named Chanel as one of the hundred most important people of the twentieth century, and by John Updike in The New Yorker: ‘her attempted exploitation of the Holocaust was not becoming.’
That said, the possibility remains that Chanel’s tactics against the Wertheimers may have had less to do with her own anti-Semitism than with her increasingly passionate belief that Pierre had done her an injustice by giving her only a 10 per cent share in the perfume company. Certainly, she had been engaged in sporadic skirmishes against the Wertheimers long before the Nazi invasion of France, in an effort to increase her income from Les Parfums Chanel. But she was further enraged by Pierre’s arrangements for the company when he fled Paris in 1940, whereby the Wertheimer shareholdings were taken over by Félix Amiot, a French aeroplane manufacturer, in return for a putative stake in his aviation business. By signing Les Parfums Chanel over to Amiot, who was not Jewish (and therefore regarded by the Nazis as an Aryan owner, albeit one who would return it to the Wertheimers at the end of the war), Pierre hoped to protect the business from German requisition. But his actions also thwarted Chanel’s efforts to have the company declared abandoned when he and his brother left France, and to seize control of it herself.
It is a measure of her adversaries’ swift and adept tactics that they managed to outwit both Chanel and the Nazis. Yet the long-term consequences were not straightforward. Amiot was later accused of co-operation, if not collaboration, with the Germans, while Chanel perfumes were sold throughout the Nazi-occupied territories with as much success as in the Allied nations. The perfume company’s wartime archives show that stocks of N°5 continued to be exported from Paris to the rest of Europe, along with Chanel’s other leading scents: Cuir de Russie, Bois des Iles, Gardénia and N°22. At the same time, the Wertheimers were actively opposing Hitler from their position as businessmen in New York, as is evident from an advertisement taken out by Bourjois in the July 1943 issue of Harper’s Bazaar, urging readers
to buy war bonds in support of the Allied forces: ‘Give us tank for tank, plane for plane, gun for gun – and we’ll beat the Japs and the Nazis.’ Bourjois also launched a patriotic new scent in 1942, Courage, which was packaged in the red, white and blue of the Union Jack and the Stars and Stripes, with an advertising campaign that declared it to be: ‘A fragrance attuned to the times … stirring as martial music … reflecting the gallant spirit of today.’ A subsequent advertisement evoked the mood of a Hitchcock spy movie, with a black-and-white photograph of a woman looking over her shoulder at a shadowy man, and the strap line: ‘It takes courage to be yourself.’
This slogan might have had an altogether different meaning for Coco, who became intent upon launching her own scents, labelled in bold red as Mademoiselle Chanel, to circumvent the Wertheimers. By 1946, according to her lawyer, she had succeeded in producing samples of perfumes that were good enough to rival those produced by Bourjois, naming them Mademoiselle Chanel N°1, N°2, and N°31. The lawyer was René de Chambrun, a not uncontroversial figure himself, as a loyal son-in-law of the French wartime prime minister, Pierre Laval, who was executed in 1945 as a Nazi collaborator. He had advised Chanel since the early Thirties, at the start of her first unsuccessful legal battle against the Wertheimers. Chambrun had spent the war years with his mother’s American relatives in the United States, but on his return to France, he continued to act for Chanel. When interviewed by Pierre Galante, the lawyer recalled that Chanel’s perfume samples were sufficiently convincing to provoke a response from the Wertheimers. The brothers had by then invested massively in their US company Chanel, Inc., spending a million dollars on advertising alone; an investment that would have been undermined by a competing range from Mademoiselle Chanel. As Chambrun explained to Galante, Chanel had already sent samples of her red-label scents to ‘her old friends Bernard Gimbel and Stanley Marcus [who between them owned the most powerful American department stores, including Saks Fifth Avenue] – people well-entrenched in the US perfume trade. A few days passed. Then one afternoon, Pierre and Paul Wertheimer, accompanied by their entire management staff, burst into my office. “Exactly what does she want?” they asked in chorus.’
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