Sleeping with the Enemy: Coco Chanel's Secret War

by Hal Vaughan

  AS THE GERMAN GENERAL STAFF was hard at work on a plan to invade France, including the seizure of parts of North Africa, Dincklage was organizing an espionage network at French naval bases in Tunisia and a black propaganda operation among the North African Muslims. His former agent in Toulon, Charles Coton, had already left Sanary for an assignment at the French naval base at Bizerte, where he would again act as Dincklage’s principal agent.

  French authorities were eager to expel Dincklage. A 1938 Deuxième Bureau report tells, “Since leaving the German Embassy [Dincklage] has been active in anti-French propaganda in North Africa. He has been on missions to North Africa [including] Tunisia—[but] after close surveillance Dincklage has not committed a punishable crime; he is, however, a dangerous subject.”

  “Spatz” von Dincklage and Hélène Dessoffy, his lover, on a small boat off the French Riviera about 1938. Dessoffy was an unwitting member of Dincklage’s espionage operation at the French naval base in Toulon. (illustration credit 5.4)

  By November 1938 Dincklage had taken a new lover and agent. French counterintelligence identified her as “Madame ‘Sophie’ or ‘Dessoffy’ ” (later identified as Baronne Hélène Dessoffy). A French agent in Bayonne reported, “Madame de Sophie or Dessoffy and de Dinkelake [sic] travel frequently between Paris and Toulon. She is the go-between for procuring radio sets ‘Aga Baltic’ on behalf of a certain Dinklage [sic] who is supposed to be an agent of [the company] ‘Aga Baltic’ in Toulon … The two are suspected of espionage against France.” In a report labeled “Urgent Secret,” French authorities warned all agents that “Baron Dincklage, living at villa Colibri, Antibes [one of his accommodation addresses at the time] and carrying a German diplomatic passport (000. 968 D.1880) arrived by the steamer, El Biar, at Tunis without a visa and was asked to leave the Régence [Tunisian territory] immediately. Dincklage was traveling with French Baronne Dessoffy, Hélène, born in Poitiers, 15 December 1900, domiciled at Paris, 70 avenue de Versailles … The couple is now at the Majestic Hotel in Tunis. They occupy adjoining rooms with communicating doors.” The report detailed how Dessoffy had a telephone conversation with a friend, the naval officer M. Verdaveine, stationed at the French naval base at Bizerte. Dessoffy told the man, “I want to travel in southern Tunisia.” Verdaveine then advised her not to travel—and definitely not with the German Dincklage.

  Dincklage was somehow warned off. The report continues, “The couple left Tunis at 10:00 hrs on the steamer for Marseille … We have ordered the S.E.T. [unidentified French service] to determine the relations between Verdaveine and Dessoffy Hélène.”

  A year before the outbreak of World War II, the French War Ministry issued a secret instruction ordering that Dincklage be put under close surveillance. The Ministry was unequivocal: “Even if no direct proof exists to indict Dincklage he should be expelled immediately from France.”

  AND WHAT OF CATSY? The French reported in 1938:

  Despite being separated, Dincklage and wife are on good terms with each other and he sees her in Antibes, Sanary and Toulon … Mme Dincklage [the French apparently did not know of the 1935 divorce] arrived August 9, 1938, at Antibes … she left there September 13 and returned to the villa “Huxley,” where she has stayed before. She is now the lover of Pierre Gaillard.

  In 1939, the French police would report:

  Baronne Dincklage, known to the Sûreté, is living at Ollioles (Var) at a property belonging to one of her friends, the Comtesse [sic] Dessoffy; also known to the Sûreté (Fichier Central: Sûreté files). Baronne Dincklage’s lover is twenty-seven-year-old Pierre Gaillard, an engineer and son of the founder and manager of a company manufacturing cable nets (used in the national defense against enemy submarines and erected at strategic points). Gaillard is presently in Oran [an important and strategic French naval base in Algeria]. Mme Dincklage often corresponds with him; and we fear that Gaillard is constantly charmed by Mme Dincklage; and may unwillingly commit an indiscretion causing harm to the nation’s defenses …,

  By late 1938, Dincklage knew war with France was imminent. Still, according to his watchers: “He is seen in Toulon … and also visits the shores of Lac Leman.” (The lake borders the French city of Thonon-les-Bains. A regular boat service connects to the Swiss cities of Lausanne and Geneva and their array of banks.) “His lifestyle at Antibes is modest … [Dincklage] receives visitors day and night. Certain [guests] come by automobile; their license plates are …” Finally, French authorities ordered all agents to “watch postal, telephone and telegraph communications made by Mme Dincklage, 12, rue des Sablons, Paris and Mme la Comtesse Dessoffy de Cserneck [sic].” The Deuxième Bureau now requested the head of the Sûreté Nationale to identify the owners of the automobiles licensed in France (autos seen in front of the Dincklage home) and to do the necessary to “immediately expel Dincklage; if it is not possible to indict him for spying.” French counterintelligence services told its agents: “Baron Hans Gunther Dincklage is considered as a very dangerous agent against France” and ordered its agents to seek information about “the relations between Dessoffy and Dincklage.” Another report added a caveat: “Despite her foreign contacts [Dessoffy] is incapable of betraying France. Nevertheless, we advise French officers to exercise great discretion in their relations with the Dessoffys and the Dincklage woman.”

  WORLD WAR II was weeks away when French authorities warned of the Dincklages’ clandestine intelligence work in France. The report is a summary beginning in 1931: the Dincklage couple “had divorced; and Dincklage was supplying his masters in Berlin with information about German refugees in France and intelligence on the national defense works.” Maximiliane von Dincklage “is the daughter of a German Army Colonel in the Imperial Army of the Kaiser … she supports the monarchy” (meaning, autocratic rule).

  In August 1939 France mobilized for war. Dincklage fled to Switzerland. French military intelligence ordered “Baronne Dincklage confined to a fixed residence.” In December of that year, French authorities issued a mandate: “[Maximiliane von Dincklage’s] presence in France represents a danger. [Agent] 6.000 asks [Agent] 6.610 to take all measures to intern this foreigner.”

  Months before the Nazi invasion of France, Catsy, along with some other Germans living in France, was interned at Gurs, a French concentration camp located in the Basses-Pyrénées.

  WHEN QUESTIONED ABOUT Dincklage at the liberation of Paris, Chanel would say, “I have known him for twenty years.” It may be another Chanel exaggeration, and there is no firsthand information about when or where Chanel first met Dincklage. Her grand-niece, Gabrielle Palasse Labrunie, who knew Dincklage well, told the author that she was sure Chanel and Dincklage met in England well before the war. Some anecdotal evidence suggests the couple met in Paris when Dincklage was at the German Embassy and was known to attend evenings hosted by a number of Chanel’s acquaintances and friends, many of whom were members of a pro-German clique in Paris in the 1930s. Among them were Marie-Louise Bousquet, Baroness Philippe de Rothschild, Duchess Antoinette d’Harcourt, and Marie-Laure de Noailles. Pierre Lazareff, who wrote about Chanel and the crème of Paris society, reported that in 1933, when Dincklage arrived at the German Embassy in Paris, this clique of bluebloods had been active in a Paris-based “führer’s social brigade” sponsored by Dincklage’s close friend, the “charming blond, blue and starry eyed” Otto Abetz, who would amuse his listeners with stories of Adolf Hitler. Abetz assured his listeners that Jews were pushing France toward war, but that France need not fear aggression.

  Despite Chanel’s mythmaking and her inventions about tennis-playing, English-speaking Dincklage—whom she and her biographers cast as more English than German—Chanel and her friends knew about Dincklage’s Nazi connections and his espionage work in France. It would have been impossible to miss the gossip in elite circles based on the articles in the weekly newspaper Vendémiaire, or in the 1939 Allard book.

  SIX

  AND THEN THE WAR CAME

  Medieval childr
en playing nasty medieval games.

  —PABLO PICASSO

  FROM HER WINDOW at the Hôtel Ritz overlooking the Place Vendôme, Chanel watched demonstrators marching toward the nearby Place de la Concorde. It was February 6, 1934, and the beginning of her troubles. In an explosion of protests, French right-wing organizations with ties to Italy and Germany mixed with small groups of Communists to overthrow the government.

  Paris Herald newsman William L. Shirer was in the Place de la Concorde that Tuesday afternoon in 1934. He watched Mobile Guards slashing away with their sabers in the Tuileries Garden as mobs attacked the police with stones and bricks. Shirer retreated to the third-floor balcony of the nearby Hôtel de Crillon overlooking the Place de la Concorde. There he watched right-wing youths attempting to break through to the Parliament building across the river Seine. They were driven off by mounted steel-helmeted Mobile Guards.

  As night fell a large group of right-wing World War I veterans paraded into the Place de la Concorde behind a mass of tricolored flags. They were headed for the Concorde Bridge, which was already jammed with people. Shirer wrote, “If they get across the bridge … they’ll kill every deputy in the Chamber [the French House of Representatives].” Deadly rifle fire stopped the mob.

  On the Crillon balcony a woman suddenly slumped to the floor with a bullet hole in her forehead, barely twenty feet away from where Shirer stood.

  “Shooting came from the bridge and the far side of the Seine … automatic rifle fire, and nearby the Crillon smoke poured out of the Ministry of Marine building. As the fire brigade brought their hoses to fight the blaze, the mob got closer and slashed at the hoses.” Shirer went down to the lobby to phone the Herald and discovered several wounded lying there, receiving first aid.

  About midnight the Mobile Guards got the upper hand. The police were in control. Shirer managed to write a couple of columns before deadline in which he reported the official figures: sixteen dead, several hundred wounded. The next day the government resigned.

  IN THE MONTHS that followed left-wing demonstrations raged as Communist and Socialist groups fought with the Fascist Right for power. Barely two years later a Popular Front French government led by the first Jewish prime minister, Léon Blum, provoked industrial protests. Workers, backed by some newly elected Socialists and Communists, struck for higher wages and benefits.

  The violence terrified Chanel. The unrest left the lovely Place Vendôme choked with tear gas and burning rubbish. The streets behind the Ritz—her neighborhood—were stained with blood. Chanel and her friends were panic-stricken. What was on the horizon as the chaotic years of the Great Depression gripped France? What was to happen to her twenty-five hundred employees—many of them leftists?

  Worse was to come. On May 1, 1936, thousands of workers celebrating May Day marched along the tree-lined boulevards of Paris under gigantic red banners singing the anthem of international socialism, “The Internationale.” Chanel must have felt the excitement—heard the workers singing and seen the banners from the French windows of her Ritz suite. David Seymour, a news photographer, captured their grim faces as they chanted, “It’s our last fight!”—words from the marching song—and clutched poster sketches bearing the faces and names of France’s humanists and artists: Honoré Daumier, Molière, Voltaire, Émile Zola, and a gaunt-faced Paul Signac.

  For Chanel and for the privileged of Europe—indeed, for much of the French middle class that had toiled and saved for years—the 1936 strikes that closed French industry were scandalous and heralded the coming of Bolshevism. The French elections of April 26, 1936, brought a Popular Front parliamentary coalition of Communists and Socialists to power. A month later Léon Blum’s coalition took over.

  Emboldened by their victory at the polls, labor unions began a general strike in Le Havre on May 26, accompanied by factory occupations to prevent lockouts, which quickly spread to Paris. By June, the Ritz boutiques surrounding the hotel’s elevator had closed, their owners having declared bankruptcy.

  Chanel’s salesgirls at the rue Cambon boutique and the “little hands” seamstresses who manned her ateliers followed suit. Some four thousand of her workers went on strike. When, early one June morning, Chanel’s personal accountant, Madame Renard, discovered she had been barred from her office, she slipped away and entered the Ritz through the back entrance, taking the elevator to Chanel’s suite of rooms. In a trembling voice, Renard told a sleepy Chanel that her little hands had locked her out. Startled, Chanel wondered if her workers had gone crazy. She later remarked, “I tell you in 1936 they were mad.” Madame Renard thought the city was in the hands of thieves. She begged the designer to leave Paris. Chanel declared that her little hands and saleswomen were infected by an American invention—“le sit-down!”

  The seamstresses, the artisans, meant business. That same morning they tacked a hastily written sign on the Chanel employee entrance: OCCUPIED. They crossed their arms and planted themselves in the workrooms and boutique—and waited. For Chanel, it was a stab in the back. Her workforce—“my girls” (mes filles), including her first hands and senior staff—had, as she saw it, “betrayed” her despite her generosity. She offered good pay for a day’s labor and vacations (for most, unpaid). Manon, one of Chanel’s top artisans, had proclaimed when returning from a vacation at Chanel’s retreat: “The first time I saw the sea was at Mimizan.”

  All Paris seemed to be on strike. As Prime Minister Blum pleaded for calm, shopgirls at Au Printemps and Les Galeries Lafayette—the Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s of Paris—answered by pushing “shrilly protesting, gesticulating shoppers and patrons out the doors.” It was a French version of the American sit-down strike, and “[the girls] danced in the aisles and picnicked in the elevators.” Shirer reported on it, “the good humor of the strikers a sinister sign.” Sinister indeed: L’Écho de Paris told how salesgirls on the boulevard Haussmann were striking: walking out or locked in and laughing. Chanel and her clients, the elite of Paris, feared a civil war.

  Chanel’s employees struck and closed her business, 1936. A delegation of her workers gathers in front of the rue Cambon employee entrance—the same entrance used by Chanel employees today. (illustration credit 6.1)

  It was just as Chanel’s former lover, Bendor, had predicted: the Bolsheviks and the Jews wanted to rule Europe and promote war between Britain and Germany. Bendor, the richest landowner in Great Britain and the man whom Chanel’s grand-niece, Gabrielle Palasse Labrunie, called “Uncle Benny,” wanted England to back Hitler and Mussolini against Russian Communism. The keystone to peace in the world was Anglo-German friendship, the duke insisted. Indeed, Germany should attack Russia, the country that threatened the West.

  Blum’s Socialist-Communist parliamentary bloc terrified the wealthy. Eighty-five percent of French voters had supported Blum’s Front Populaire. The haves were terrified of a Communist takeover of Europe. The price of gold soared as the rich rushed to buy it up. In Paris, some of the well-to-do sent their treasures to Swiss banks. Others packed up and fled to the security of their country homes. They ordered their mécanicien (Chanel’s word for a chauffeur) to load their Rolls-Royce and Delaunay limousines (she owned both) with precious works of art, jewels, and silverware. Those who remained double-locked their doors, loaded their shotguns, and filled their bathtubs with water. They feared that utility services might be cut. It was as if the sans-culottes, the revolutionaries of 1789 who worshiped the guillotine, were loose again on Parisian streets.

  Chanel’s workforce would not be bent. Seamstresses are by nature meticulous, focused creatures, so Chanel was facing a band of defiant women struggling for increased wages and hoping for a paid vacation for the first time in their lives. A group of them can be seen assembled in front of the Chanel boutique at 31, rue Cambon, and at the workshop entrance at 29, rue Cambon, posing for news photographers. Nameless in the photo captions, the ladies are clad in smart dresses and tailored women’s suits. One striker, dressed in a Chanel outfit, timidly waves to
the camera. Another smiles and shows a determined fist. Still another holds up the traditional strikers’ collection box. One and all are smiling but stand solid and resolute.

  Days of recriminations followed. Chanel’s rue Cambon boutique and workshop remained shut. Chanel decided to try a new stratagem: if the women wanted Communism, she would give it to them. She offered to turn over her fashion business to her workers as long as she was appointed to run the business. The offer was refused.

  In the end Blum and the French labor movement won a major battle. In the first week of June, Blum signed a pact forever known as Les Accords de Matignon (from the Hôtel Matignon, the official residence of the French prime minister), and French workers were granted a forty-hour workweek, paid vacations, collective bargaining rights, and compulsory schooling to age fourteen.

  July and August slipped away. As the leaves of Paris’s chestnut trees turned from green to rusty brown, most of the city returned to work. Chanel’s advisors begged her to concede, to be reasonable, and to think about the fall collections. She hesitated. It was against her very essence to capitulate. Still, her prestige was involved. Large sums of money were tied up in overhead, fabrics, and machines. Business came first. Finally, she came around. The workshops hummed again, the massive street-level shutters on the rue Cambon boutique were raised, and the crème de Paris returned to be served by genteel Chanel employees.

  ELSA SCHIAPARELLI’S NOVEL DESIGNS, her audacious, shocking pinks from Salvador Dalí’s palette, and her use of art by Christian Bérard and Jean Cocteau to make dresses and accessories were now the talk of Paris. (The artists were all Chanel’s friends.) Playwright Anita Loos, author of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and Wallis Simpson, the Duchess of Windsor, wore her creations; Marlene Dietrich donned her Russian furs. Her use of new materials resembling today’s plastic drew clients into her Place Vendôme boutique—right under Chanel’s nose. “Schiap,” as Paris called her, was delightfully excessive with an evening dress composed of a skirt printed with a life-sized lobster and a bodice scattered with a few green motifs to represent parsley. Her handbag was in the form of a telephone; one skirt had pockets with flaps that looked like lips. Shocking pink was in, and Chanel’s sober, refined look was overwhelmed. Some critics thought Chanel had lost her touch when she returned from Hollywood. Even before the strikes, she was sliding from her perch as France’s first lady of fashion, and her diatribes on matters of fashion were now challenged.