Mademoiselle
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151 “Women no longer exist”: Quoted in Madsen, 116.
152 “Fashion,” wrote Jean Cocteau: Cocteau, “From Worth to Alix.”
153 “schoolgirl’s uniform”: Vogue, June 1937.
154 “brass buttons”: “Paris Carries On,” Vogue, December 1, 1939, 86–87, 150.
155 resistance to the red flag: See Weber, 376.
156 “The ideas … of Iribe”: Haedrich, 122.
157 ribbon shoulder straps and piping: This gown also partakes of Chanel’s “Gypsy” style influence of the late 1930s, which included a number of tight little jacket and long skirt combinations.
158 unusually “busy” and distracting print: Chanel told Claude Delay that in 1938 Williams asked her to run off with him, complaining that his wife, Mona, was “just a mannequin.” “One year earlier, I would have followed him. He had a yacht, that’s the best way to run away to begin a romance,” she said, clearly recalling her Westminster days. Delay, 180.
159 “sign of youth and femininity”: Pierre de Trévières, “Paris et ailleurs,” Femme de France, March 10, 1935.
160 “sugar and spice”: “Sugar and Spice in the Paris Collections,” Vogue, March 1938.
161 “glamour dress of the season”: Vogue, August 1938.
162 a new “Air of Innocence”: “Out of the Paris Openings: A New Breath of Life—the Air of Innocence,” Vogue, March 1, 1939, 1–24.
163 a younger, less dangerous time: There is also a visual echo here of Chanel’s celebration of prerevolutionary France, in the elaborately ruffled costumes she designed in 1939 for Serge Lifar and Daisy de Segonzac (Nazi sympathizers both), when they attended a costume ball disguised as Auguste Vestris and Marie Antoinette. See chapter 9.
164 “[Coco] chose … grey”: Fiemeyer and Palasse-Labrunie, 169. Palasse-Labrunie goes on to explain that an anxious Coco later arranged for a male chaperon to accompany young Gabrielle on the train: fellow summer houseguest Pierre Reverdy, whose religious exile did not enjoin the occasional Riviera weekend.
165 “Cuir de Russie evokes”: “Advertorial” in Votre Beauté, February 1936, clipping from Conservatoire Chanel.
166 firmness of her tiny derriere: Personal conversations with Danniel Rangel.
167 sun-bronzed, disciplined athlete-soldier: Fashion historian Danièle Bott lays it out clearly: “Sport for [Chanel] represented a discipline and a strength synonymous with the virtues that she revered and demanded of herself.” Danièle Bott, Chanel (Paris: Editions Ramsey, 2005). Eugenia Paulicelli discusses the importance of suntanning in the Italian fascist aesthetic of the body: “[A] suntanned body [had] started to become a synonym for being both sexy and modern. The link to sport … explains how this [tanning] had become one of the most important leisure activities encouraged by fascism.” Paulicelli, 58–59.
168 androgynous, even lesbian chic: George Mosse has written of the way Nazis in particular strove to deflect any possibility of homoeroticism in their focus on male beauty. See Mosse, Image of Man. See also Carlston, Thinking Fascism. Carlston writes, “German fascist ideology and aesthetics make, in fact, what seem oddly contradictory uses of (homo) eroticism: creating a cult of virility that emphasizes male bonding while despising homosexual effeminacy.” Carlston, 38.
169 her “Total Look”: According to Marie-Louise de Clermont-Tonnerre, the term “total look” was invented in the early 1920s. Personal interview, May 2011.
170 “One adores [Chanel style]”: Claude Berthod, “Romy Schneider pense tout haut,” Elle, September 1963: 130–32.
171 “protected the [Aryans’]”: “The dream of Nordic humanity in Hellas was the most beautiful of all.… A true aristocratic, constitution-prohibited miscegenation. Nordic strength, diminished by continual struggle, was continuously revived through sea migrations. Dorians and then Macedonians protected the creative blond blood until even these tribes were exhausted.” Rosenberg, 47.
172 “imposing diplomats and international wits”: Sylvia Lyon, “Gabrielle Chanel,” Fashion Arts (Winter 1934–35), 28–29.
173 “indelibly fixes the scene”: Advertisement, Stage magazine, November 1937. The ad echoes Lacoue-Labarthe’s explanation of how the Nazi myth operated: “[as] the understanding of life as art, as well as the body as art, the people as art … that is, as the accomplishments of will, as successful identifications with the dream image.” Lacoue-Labarthe, 64–65.
174 reincarnating this mythic heroine: See, for example, Georgina Safe, “Chanel Opens Shop in Melbourne,” Sydney Morning Herald, October 31, 2013; Jennifer Ladonne, “New Paris Boutique for Chanel,” France Today, June 7, 2012; or Amy Verner, “The Newest Chanel Boutique Is like Stepping into Coco’s Closet,” The Globe and Mail, May 26, 2012.
175 “A loveless childhood”: Vilmorin, 40.
176 “In France, an unknown”: Ibid., 68.
177 “I wanted to escape”: Ibid.
178 “The creation of a luxury brand”: Gilles Lipovetsky, Le Luxe éternel (Paris: Gallimard, 2003), 93.
179 “genocidal projects of Europe’s purification”: Roger Griffin, Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning Under Mussolini and Hitler (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 59.
180 “a necessary cleansing operation”: Morand, L’Allure de Chanel, 178.
11. LOVE, WAR, AND ESPIONAGE
1 “It was odd”: Josep Miquel Garcia, Biography of Apel-les Fenosa (El Vendrell, Spain: Fundació Apel-les Fenosa), 2.
2 might be of Jewish descent: Ibid.
3 “I just threw myself”: Xavier Garcia, “Interview with Apel-les Fenosa,” El Correo Catalán, October 2, 1975, Fundació Apel-les Fenosa.
4 “Without him I would have died”: Interview, Fundació Apel-les Fenosa.
5 “All arts were modern”: Rabat interview, quoted in Garcia, Biography, 77.
6 a legal visa for Apel-les: Josep Miquel Garcia, Amic Picasso, exhibition catalog (El Vendrell, Spain: Fundació Apel-les Fenosa, 2003), 41. In July 1939, Cocteau wrote a brief note to his old friend André-Louis Dubois, an official in Paris’s Ministry of the Interior (the Foreign Office): “Permit me to recommend to you most highly, Fenosa. He is not ‘a sculptor’ but according to Picasso and myself, the only one that counts. Your kind attention will help us all in assisting him.” Fundació Apel-les Fenosa. See also Fundació Apel-les Fenosa, Cocteau-Fenosa: Relleus d’una Amistad/Reliefs d’une Amitié (Barcelona: Ediciones Polígrafa, 2007), 19. Fenosa would later say that the contact with André-Louis Dubois made it possible for him to help countless other Spaniards fleeing Franco find safe haven in France.
7 “He fascinated me”: “I was swept away by a passion for [him],” Coco told Marcel Haedrich about her early encounters with Picasso. “He fascinated me. He would look at you like an eagle about to swoop down on his prey. He frightened me. When he entered a room, even if I couldn’t see him, I could feel his presence.” Haedrich, 89. Chanel kept a room at her Faubourg Saint-Honoré apartment just for Picasso’s use, and some accounts suggest that they did, in fact, have a brief dalliance. Picasso biographer John Richardson insists they did not: “Chanel was too much of a celebrity, and not submissive enough,” he writes. John Richardson, A Life of Picasso: The Triumphant Years, 1917–1932 (2007; repr., New York: Knopf, 2010), 190.
8 “She was very intelligent”: Josep Miquel Garcia, Apel-les Fenosa i Coco Chanel, exhibition catalog (El Vendrell, Spain: Fundació Apel-les Fenosa, 2011), 11.
9 gold cuff links set with topazes: Josep Miquel Garcia, interview with Nicole Fenosa, Fundació Apel-les Fenosa, 2005.
10 nine months of relative calm: Historian Julian Jackson dubbed the period “a parenthesis between war and peace.” Julian Jackson, France: The Dark Years: 1940–1944 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 113.
11 thousands of arrests and imprisonments: See John F. Sweets, Choices in Vichy France: The French Under Nazi Occupation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). See also Jackson, 112–15.
12 “I take refuge in beige”: Delay, 192.
13 ensconced among the glitterati: See Meredith Etherington-Smith, The Persistence of Memory: A Biography of Salvador Dalí (New York: Da Capo Press, 1992), 235.
14 “It bothered me”: Garcia, interview with Nicole Fenosa, 59.
15 “One day, he found himself”: Garcia, Biography, 35.
16 bout of double mastoiditis: See Julian Jackson for a description of French conditions and morale during the drôle de guerre.
17 “Fifty-two Coromandel screens!”: Garcia, Apel-les Fenosa i Coco Chanel, 10.
18 she fired all 2,500: This irony was not lost on Time magazine: “Mme. Gabrielle (Coco) Chanel … now patriotically wears nothing but the French national colors—red, white, and blue—but less patriotically has closed her famous Paris style shop.” “Women at Work,” Time, February 12, 1940.
19 share his own meager savings: During her years with Westminster, Chanel had hoped that Lucien’s retirement from peddling shoes would keep the press from uncovering the ignominy of having such a poor relation. She had also established Alphonse’s pension at that time, hoping he, too, would stay away from reporters. See chapter 8.
20 Lucien died in 1941: Charles-Roux, L’Irrégulière, 536–38.
21 “to play dead”: Ibid., 533.
22 They could not move her: Madsen, 228–29.
23 “I had the feeling”: Galante, 170. The same words appear in Delay’s biography as well.
24 family members being shipped off: Haedrich, 127.
25 Serge agreed emphatically: Ibid., 134.
26 “I never really lived up”: Garcia, Biography, 63; Garcia, Apel-les Fenosa i Coco Chanel, 12.
27 “ferocious partner of her solitude”: Delay, 176.
28 “The workers were all very glad”: Garcia, Biography, 59.
29 “We all carry within us”: Jean Cocteau, Opium: The Diary of His Cure, trans. Margaret Crosland (1930; repr., London: Peter Owen Publishers, 1990), 58. In a letter to Max Jacob, dated December 16, 1928, Cocteau mentions having been in another three-month “cure” for opium addiction, and that Chanel had paid for it. Max Jacob and Jean Cocteau, Correspondance 1917–1944, ed. Anne Kimball (Paris: Editions Paris-Méditerranée, 2000), 575.
30 “I never [tried it]”: Garcia, Biography, 69.
31 “my dear little squirrel”: Fundació Apel-les Fenosa.
32 Cocteau’s social drug world: Lisa Chaney believes otherwise. As evidence that Chanel smoked opium she cites Hidden Faces, Salvador Dalí’s 1943 roman à clef, which includes a character, Cécile Goudreau, based on Coco. Cécile smokes opium in the novel, although this seems insufficient documentation. Chaney, 313. Fenosa is very clear that the drug in question is injectable morphine.
33 “It was morphine”: Garcia, Apel-les Fenosa i Coco Chanel, 10.
34 “It was the drugs”: Interview with Nella Bielski, Fundació Apel-les Fenosa.
35 “She was brilliant, very brilliant”: Garcia, interview with Nicole Fenosa.
36 the wives of her lovers: Antoinette Bernstein wore a blue Chanel jersey suit on the day of her wedding to Henry, who was Coco’s lover during the Bernsteins’ marriage. “Coco would play a big role in our life,” wrote the Bernsteins’ daughter, Georges Bernstein. Georges Bernstein Gruber and Gilbert Marin, Bernstein le magnifique (Paris: JC Lattès, 1988), 157.
37 thirty-five-day Battle of France: During this battle, two million French soldiers were taken prisoner by the German army, “the largest number of prisoners ever captured in such a short period of time,” or one in every seven Frenchmen between the ages of twenty and forty, according to historian Sarah Fishman. Fishman, “Grand Delusions: The Unintended Consequences of Vichy’s Prisoner of War Propaganda,” Journal of Contemporary History 26, no. 2 (April 1991): 229–54.
38 decamped from Paris to Tours: Historian Frederic Spotts captures the symbolic importance of these events: “The City of Light … incarnated not just France but modern Western culture. To seize this precious object, to take it from its people, to subject it to harsh foreign rule, was worse than mere occupation.… [It was] a stripping away of the very French-ness of France.” Frederic Spotts, The Shameful Peace (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2008), 10–11.
39 Fenosa left, too, for Toulouse: Spotts, 12–14.
40 France’s entire population took part: Spotts, 6. See also Robert Gildea, Marianne in Chains: Daily Life in the Heart of France During the German Occupation (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2002). Author and reconnaissance pilot Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (The Little Prince), viewed the chaos from his plane and recalled seeing: “fires everywhere, supplies scattered helter-skelter, villages devastated, everything a shambles—a total shambles.” Quoted in Spotts, 7.
41 “I give to France the gift”: Quoted in Milton Dank, The French Against the French: Collaboration and Resistance (New York: J. B. Lippincott, 1974), 13. Originally published in Henri Amouroux, La Vie des français sous l’occupation (Paris: Fayard, 1961), 64.
42 eighty-four-year-old man in military regalia: Michèle Cone discusses “l’Art Maréchal,” in Artists Under Vichy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992), 66ff. See also Julian Jackson on the Vichy department dedicated to creating and orchestrating images of Pétain. Jackson, 307.
43 with doctrinaire Catholic pieties: Pétain did not hesitate to compare himself, implicitly, to Christ. Vichy propaganda about Pétain’s birthday, which was a holiday to be celebrated even by French soldiers in prison camps, referred to the festivities as if to a Catholic church ritual: “Our captive compatriots will also participate in this communion.” Quoted in Fishman, 236.
44 “almost all legislative, executive”: Quoted in Jackson, 133. Pétain played the role of “a military hero … a father-grandfather figure, and even a substitute king wrapped up in one,” as Sarah Fishman has written. Fishman, 235.
45 of all foreign-born Jews: Although permitted by Germany to exempt Jewish children, Laval overrode this exception and insisted that all children be deported to the camps with their parents. Later, Vichy would begin reversing the naturalization papers for many Jews, stripping them of their French citizenship and thereby rendering them “foreign,” and hence deportable.
See Pierre Blet, Pius XII and the Second World War, trans. Lawrence J. Johnson (New York: Paulist Press, 1999), 232–34.
46 ghastly new regulations taking hold: For an excellent study of what historian Robert Gildea describes as “the grey areas,” the countless compromises and nuances involved in living as an occupied nation during wartime, see his Marianne in Chains. Through his vast numbers of interviews with survivors of the era, Gildea discovered, for example, that many Frenchmen would take pains in public to praise the efforts of the Resistance, but in private reveal serious misgivings about the antifascist movement, whose actions often jeopardized the lives or livelihoods of local citizens. See also Julian Jackson on the problems of the “ordinary”: “Was it possible to live outside politics in the peculiar conditions of the Occupation when ‘ordinariness’ has implications it would not have in other circumstances?” Jackson, 239.
47 German censors carefully vetted: Books by the likes of Thomas Mann, H. G. Wells, André Malraux, W. Somerset Maugham, Sigmund Freud, and Charles de Gaulle were destroyed, among thousands of others. See John B. Hench, Books as Weapons: Propaganda, Publishing, and the Battle for Global Markets in the Era of World War II (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2010), 30. See also Spotts, 57–59.
48 “Everything we did was equivocal”: Quoted in Spotts, 4.
49 a carefully orchestrated charm offensive: “German soldiers … [behaved] less like foreigners than tourists,” writes Frederic Spotts, “spending their time sightseeing, photo-snapping and shopping.” Spotts, 18.
50 “A close relative”: Interview accessed online at http://www.chanel-muggeridge.com/unpublished-interview/, courtesy of the Société Baudelaire. Muggeridge refers to this conversation of September 1944 in an unpublished letter to Jacques Soustelle, dated August 28, 198
2, a copy of which was sent to me for authentication by Isée St. John Knowles of the Société Baudelaire; private correspondence with author, February 2013.
51 “[Coco] admitted to me”: Fiemeyer and Palasse-Labrunie, 174.
52 “What happened to your son?”: Muggeridge, interview with Chanel, September 1944.
53 she carried in her wallet: Fiemeyer and Palasse-Labrunie, 18.
54 contacts within the highest Nazi circles: It must be acknowledged, however, that while her love for André was genuine, the only known time Chanel ever admitted to her dealings with the Reich (in her interview with Muggeridge), she disingenuously exploited her relationship with her nephew, using it to explain away all of her subsequent dealings with the Third Reich. The facts suggested otherwise.
55 “I will arrive Monday evening”: Fundació Apel-les Fenosa.
56 a stiflingly hot hotel attic: Hal Vaughan says that André-Louis Dubois (the official in the French Foreign Office who had helped Fenosa obtain a French visa, and a friend of Chanel’s as well as Cocteau’s) had given the ladies his own hotel room to use for the night. According to Vaughan, Chanel and Bousquet had met Misia Sert in Vichy and she, too, shared the hotel room with them. Vaughan, 124.
57 “Everybody was laughing”: Quoted by Haedrich, 127.
58 “The first time I saw Pierre Laval”: Elsa Maxwell’s Party Line: “Laval Spelled Backwards,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, August 11, 1945.
59 had frequently hosted Laval: See René de Chambrun, “Morand et Laval: Une amitié historique,” Ecrits de Paris, no. 588 (May 1997): 39–44. Morand also rushed to Vichy in the summer of 1940 and was quickly appointed ambassador to Bucharest. In April 1942, Morand wrote a letter to Josée Laval de Chambrun, expressing his desire to receive another diplomatic appointment: “Tell your father that … I consider it my duty to offer leaving France. I would like to show all my friends abroad that I stand behind your father, because there is no other policy for France.” Quoted in Gavin Boyd, Paul Morand et la Roumanie (Paris: l’Harmattan, 2002). This letter is also reproduced in René de Chambrun’s article above, p. 41.