Sleeping with the Enemy: Coco Chanel's Secret War

by Hal Vaughan

Near Corbère Chanel’s chauffeur Larcher managed to find enough petrol to feed the gas-guzzling Cadillac, and what fuel the tank couldn’t hold was poured into tin cans and stored in the trunk of the car. Accompanied by Marie-Louise Bousquet, Chanel set out for Vichy. Then fourteen, Gabrielle Palasse Labrunie recalled years later and with sadness Auntie Coco’s departure in the limousine. She was struck by Marie-Louise, a chic Parisian society lady who nearly fell off her platform shoes as she walked along the château’s cobblestone courtyard to the car. It would be more than a year before Tiny would receive a pass to travel to join Chanel in Paris. The Palasse family would now live out the next months without ever seeing a German. News from André finally arrived via a Swiss Red Cross postcard: he was alive but ill.

  The girls continued being tutored by Madame Lefebvre, a French refugee from the north. Their days were spent studying for the French national diploma, the brevet élémentaire. Bedtime was 8 p.m. French country people rose with the sun and went to bed early. Later, agents for the German troops, garrisoned at Pau, would come to the château to requisition foodstuffs, rabbits, pigs, and chickens.

  CHANEL REACHED VICHY in late July. Her chauffeur covered the 270 miles (434 kilometers) driving over country roads along the river Allier without event. With the French surrender, the area was now occupied by German tank battalions and infantry. Refugees were returning home, and German troops had orders to be on their best behavior.

  VICHY HAD ONCE BEEN a sleepy watering place on the river Allier. Until the war old men came to gamble at the casino, drink the curative waters, and ogle the pretty hostesses and buy their favors. By July when Chanel arrived, the town swarmed with some 130,000 politicians, diplomats, prostitutes, and secret agents installed in hastily built cubicles in former gambling rooms or in unheated hotel rooms transformed into offices. Their archives, brought from Paris, were stuffed into bathtubs. And everywhere the walls were graced with the likeness of Marshal Pétain, sternly glaring down at the bureaucrats at work.

  When Chanel and Marie-Louise arrived, the town had the air of a tawdry commercial fair, pulsing with energy—sexual and otherwise—where life went on in cabarets, nightclubs, and brothels that served the needs of the civil servants, politicians, and professional hangers-on. A friend of Chanel’s from Paris, André-Louis Dubois, a senior French official, claimed Chanel met Misia Sert in Vichy. Dubois recalled that all three of the ladies lodged in his Vichy hotel room—and not in an attic chamber, as some of Chanel’s biographers have reported. (As it happened his rooms were free because Dubois had just been told to leave Vichy when it was discovered that he had helped Jews obtain visas to travel to America.)

  At Vichy, the ladies took their meals at the Hôtel du Parc. Chanel’s biographers tell how she was shocked by the behavior of a woman dining nearby—laughing and drinking Champagne under a huge hat. For Chanel—and perhaps Misia, too—the merriment was out of place as the French mourned their defeat at the hands of their age-old enemy across the Rhine River. Chanel made a caustic remark: “Well it is the height of the season here!” Hearing this, a gentleman nearby took umbrage; he exclaimed, “What do you insinuate, Madame?” Chanel then backed away with, “I mean everyone is very gay here.” The man’s wife calmed him.

  Chanel had a reason for stopping at Vichy, now the seat of French power. She was determined to move heaven and earth to get her nephew André back from captivity—if she didn’t see Laval personally, she certainly sought the advice of powerful Vichy leaders.

  It must have been heartbreaking for Chanel to learn that André was only one of millions of French soldiers being held in German prisoner-of-war camps called stalags, and as early as 1940 people in the know were sure the Nazis would use those prisoners as bargaining tools. If she were to get André back, it would have to be done through a powerful German official—and she returned to Paris determined to act.

  THE PARIS CHANEL returned to was awash in black-and-red swastika banners strung on the Arc de Triomphe, the Eiffel Tower, above the Parliament and ministries, and above the Élysée Palace. For the next four years Parisians would endure the sights and sounds of the German invader. Daily, Wehrmacht troopers goose-stepped to martial music down the Champs-Élysées to the Place de la Concorde. The Ritz was now a sandbagged fortress. Its entrance was guarded by elite German troopers in gray-green feld-grau uniforms presenting arms to arriving Nazi dignitaries while officers shouted lusty “Heil Hitler”s with outstretched arms.

  Crueler still was the huge banner the Nazis had stuck to the upper façade of the French National Assembly and hung on the Eiffel Tower. In bold, black Gothic letters it read: Deutschland siegt an allen Fronten (Germany everywhere victorious). The Nazi masters piled insults on injuries. They ordered a bust of Adolf Hitler placed front and center of the rostrum, where the president of the French Parliament presided.

  Nazi führer Adolf Hitler on his only visit to Paris after France capitulated, June 1940. (illustration credit 7.3)

  To humiliate the French, the Germans raised the Nazi swastika above the building of the French Interior Ministry in occupied Paris, January 1940. (illustration credit 7.4)

  Parisian streets were crowded with Wehrmacht soldiers and Kriegsmarine sailors. They strolled along the Champs-Élysées, the rue de Rivoli, and rue Royale, gawking in shop windows at luxury goods that they had never seen in their lives. They snatched up souvenirs, paid in French francs bought with inflated reichsmarks. “Thanks to the artificial exchange rate everything was cheaper for the invader.” Formally correct, they would mumble a polite “danke schön, Fräulein” to the shop tenders and wink at passing demoiselles—some all too ready to flirt with the handsome Aryan lads homesick and desperate for female company.

  By the autumn of 1940 some 300,000 German officials and soldiers occupied Paris and towns around the city. They took over villas and apartments, evicting French tenants and owners, opened their own whorehouses, and earmarked their preferred hotels, restaurants, and cafes. Most Parisians came to terms with the occupation. Many would hang Pétain’s portrait on the walls of their offices and homes. The Germans owned France: the grand boulevards, the monuments, even the street kiosks on the city’s corners were festooned with Nazi signage and posters, warning the locals in German and French to obey occupation edicts, rationing laws, and the rigorous curfews—or face punishment.

  Everywhere, Mercedes saloon cars, bumper pennants flapping in the wind, and camouflaged Wehrmacht squad cars scooted about the nearly empty city streets. Nonofficial Parisians put their automobiles in storage, as rationing made it impossible to get fuel, whether to heat homes or drive cars.

  A gathering of German officers, possibly at the Paris Opéra ca. 1940, shows a man who may be Dincklage (top row, second from the left) dressed as a Wehrmacht officer. (illustration credit 7.5)

  Correspondence from German Military Headquarters, Paris, stating the Hôtel Ritz was reserved for senior German officials. Among the foreigners allowed to reside there is “Chanel Melle.” (illustration credit 7.6)

  FOR DINCKLAGE, a German cavalry officer at age seventeen, a veteran of the bloody campaigns on the World War I Russian front, and a German military intelligence officer for over twenty years, World War II was the realization of the German dream for lebensraum—“the space Germany was entitled to by the laws of history … [which] space would have to be taken from others.”

  On a crisp fall morning in 1940 bystanders on the avenue Kléber might have noticed how a German Mercedes military staff car abruptly pulled to the curb. A German officer exited and hailed an old friend he had seen walking along the chic avenue. The uniformed German was forty-four-year-old Baron Hans Günther von Dincklage. He rushed to greet Madame Tatiana du Plessix, who with her husband had known Dincklage from his days on the Côte d’Azur and at the German Embassy in Warsaw. In that split second, Madame du Plessix discovered that the friendly Spatz was not the broken-down journalist he had pretended to be after he left Poland, but a seasoned German intelligence officer.
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  A list of the few civilian occupants the Nazis allowed to room at the Hôtel Ritz. Chanel’s name, room 227–228 is on line two: CHANEL Melle, (FRANZ.) 227.228. (illustration credit 7.7)

  Spatz’s presence startled Tatiana. “What are you doing here?” she asked.

  “I am doing my work,” he answered.

  “And what is the nature of your work now?” Tatiana snapped.

  “I’m in army intelligence.”

  “Tu es un vrai salaud [you are a real bastard]!” Tatiana burst out. “You posed as a down-and-out journalist; you won all our sympathy, you seduced my best friend, and now you tell me you were spying on us all the time!”

  “À la guerre comme à la guerre,” Spatz answered, and proceeded to ask her to dinner.

  “I was vaguely tempted to accept,” Tatiana admitted later. She added, “He had posed as a victim of Hitler’s racism, he had worn rags, he had ridden in a beat-up third-hand car … He had seduced Hélène Dessoffy into an affair because she had a house near France’s biggest naval base, Toulon, and we had all fallen for the bastard’s line.”

  Dincklage was back in France. The French Sûreté and Deuxième Bureau knew of his movements in and out of Switzerland. They knew he had returned to Paris with the German occupation authorities. For the next four years French counterintelligence agents in France and de Gaulle’s Free French in London would be watching and reporting on their old adversary.

  AT AGE FIFTY-SEVEN, Chanel was ready to fall in love again, and in 1940, a great romance unfolded as Dincklage, now a senior officer of the German occupation forces, stepped into her life to play the willing cavalier. It would be Chanel’s last great love affair. There remains only one living eyewitness with intimate knowledge of the Chanel-Dincklage romance in the war years. Gabrielle Palasse Labrunie met Dincklage in occupied Paris in late 1941, when she was fifteen years old and visiting her Auntie Coco. She recalls, “Spatz was sympa, attractive, intelligent, well dressed, and congenial—smiled a lot and spoke fluent French and English … a handsome, well-bred man who became a friend.” She saw how he captivated Chanel: “He was the pair of shoulders she needed to lean on and a man willing to help Chanel get André home.”

  For the next few years, Dincklage would manage Chanel’s relations with Nazi officialdom in Paris and Berlin, and he would be involved in arranging for the German High Command in Paris to grant Chanel permission to live in rooms on the seventh floor of the Cambon wing of the Hôtel Ritz. It was a convenient location, as the back entrance and exit of the hotel gave onto the rue Cambon—a few yards from her boutique and the luxurious apartment she set up at 31, rue Cambon. The bizarre story of how, upon returning to Paris, a German general saw a distressed Chanel in the Ritz lobby and spontaneously ordered that she should be lodged at the hotel could only be another charming Chanel myth. Only Dincklage or some other senior German official could have made the complicated arrangements for her to have rooms in the Ritz’s Privatgast section, reserved for friends of the Reich. One only needs to read the German diktat: “On orders from Berlin the Ritz was reserved exclusively for the temporary accommodation of high-ranking personalities. The Ritz Hotel occupies a supreme and exceptional place among the hotels requisitioned.” In fact, only certain non-Germans (Ausländer) were privileged to stay at the Ritz during the occupation. Chanel’s rooms (227–228) were near German collaborator Fern Bedaux (243, 244, 245); the pro-Nazi Dubonnet family (263) and Mme Marie-Louise Ritz (266, 268), wife of the hotel’s founder, César Ritz, lodged on the same floor.

  Everyone entering or leaving the Ritz had to be identified to sentries posted day and night at sandbagged entrances. Hitler’s heir apparent and commander in chief of the Luftwaffe and head of all occupied territories, Hermann Göring, was installed in the Royal Suite. Other luxurious rooms were reserved for Nazi Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop; Albert Speer, Reich Minister of Armaments and War Production; Reich Minister of the Interior Dr. Wilhelm Frick; and a host of senior German generals.

  For those allowed entry into the Ritz, the German High Command had “strict” orders about the dress of their compatriots: “No weapons of any sort were allowed inside the establishment” (an area near the entrance was set aside for depositing arms), and “manners had to be perfectly correct and no subaltern officer was allowed.” Non-Germans had to be invited before entering the hotel.

  What was it like in 1940 at the Ritz? A printed decorative menu for June 14, the day German officials occupied the hotel, survives. In this desperate moment for the French as hundreds of thousands of French families fled the German onslaught, the Ritz’s first wartime Nazi guests were offered a sumptuous menu. Lunch included grapefruit—in wartime, a rare treat—and a main course of either filet de sole au vin du Rhin (sole cooked in a dry German wine, and an obvious flattering choice from the vanquished to the conqueror) or poularde rôtie, accompanied by potatoes rissolées, fresh peas, and asparagus with a hollandaise sauce. For dessert, there was an assortment of fresh fruit.

  Later, when French families were near starvation, senior German officials and their guests would go on dining at the Ritz restaurant. One German officer in the early days of the occupation wrote: “In times like these, to eat well and eat a lot gives a feeling of power.”

  Cocteau, Serge Lifar (the Ukrainian-born ballet artist), and René de Chambrun were permitted by the Nazis to dine at the Ritz. They enjoyed a regular lunch and dinner there, often as Chanel’s guest at “her” table—rubbing shoulders with the Nazi elite including frequent visitors from Berlin: Joseph Goebbels, Dincklage’s former chief, and Hermann Göring, Lifar’s patron and admirer. Lifar, the former lover of Sergei Diaghilev, founder of the Ballets Russes, lived part-time at the Ritz. Hitler had met Lifar on the führer’s only trip to Paris, immediately after France’s defeat. Göring then appointed Lifar head of the Paris Opéra corps de ballet. Chanel believed “the Germans are more cultivated than the French—they didn’t give a damn what [men such as] Cocteau did because they knew that his work was a sham.”

  Another guest was Dincklage’s protégé, Baron Louis de Vaufreland Piscatory.

  The winter of 1940–1941 was bitterly cold—but not so at the Ritz. Chanel “was seen everywhere with … Spatz Dincklage.” Writer Marcel Haedrich claims that Chanel told him, “I never saw the Germans, and it displeased them that a woman still not bad looking completely ignored them.” Haedrich repeats yet another myth: “Chanel took the Metro. It didn’t smell bad, the Germans feared epidemics and saw to it that Crésyl [a strong antiseptic] was spread everywhere.” (Hardly possible; as the mistress of a German senior officer, Chanel would have had an automobile at her disposal.)

  For the privileged few, Chanel and her entourage, wartime Paris was really no different than in peacetime. High society went on much as before: nightclubs and cabarets thrived. Dincklage dined often at Maxim’s, where German officers and officials nightly enjoyed the best of French haute cuisine. Chanel and Dincklage were guests at Serge Lifar’s opera and at his Nazi-sponsored black-tie-and-tails evenings there. Lifar, Cocteau, and Chanel were frequent guests at candlelight dinners (because of the power shortages) at the Serts’ apartment at 252, rue de Rivoli. Jojo (Sert) amused his guests with tales of British and American spies in Madrid. Sert was a frequent visitor to Madrid. In 1940 he had arranged to acquire from the Franco government a diplomatic post as the Spanish ambassador to the Vatican, but based in Paris. The Serts and their friends relished the array of food shipped to them via the diplomatic pouch from neutral Spain.

  Dining room of the Hôtel Ritz, 1939. During the “Phoney War” the Paris elite dined in luxury from gourmet menus prepared by the hotel’s chefs. (illustration credit 7.8)

  Chanel preferred hosting intimate dinners at her apartment on the rue Cambon, where her treasured objects and her precious Coromandel screens were displayed. Meals were prepared by her cook and served by her faithful maid Germaine, who had returned to Paris. On those evenings with beau Dincklage, Chanel would sing and pla
y the piano for her friends. Then, as the guests amused themselves, she and Dincklage would cross the rue Cambon to the back entrance of the Ritz to her third-floor apartment with its whitewashed Aubazine-like starkness.

  A common sight during the Nazi occupation—starving Parisians searching in the garbage for food and scraps, September 1942. (illustration credit 7.9)

  Nazi collaborator Fern Bedaux, Chanel’s neighbor at the Ritz, reported to Count Joseph Ledebur-Wicheln, her Abwehr contact, how Dincklage (who Bedaux may not have known was an Abwehr agent, too) visited Chanel every day. Bedaux also told Ledebur that Chanel was a drug abuser.

  Chanel’s close friend, Paul Morand, who would dub her “the exterminating angel of the nineteenth-century style,” was an important Vichy official during the occupation. He and his “pro-German” wife, Hélène, hosted Parisian soirees where Chanel dined with her small circle of friends: the omnipresent Cocteau, writer Marcel Jouhandeau, and his once-beautiful, eccentric, and erotic ballet dancer wife, Caryathis. Chanel’s old friend and dance instructor prior to World War I, Caryathis was now an aged but intimate friend of André Gide.

  But for a truly amusing evening, Chanel would dine with Dincklage’s onetime intimate friend, Francophile Reich ambassador in Paris, Otto Abetz, and his beautiful French wife, Suzanne. Their sumptuous dinners at the ambassador’s residence, the Hôtel de Beauharnais, 78, rue de Lille in Paris (behind what was then the Gare d’Orsay) were the envy of the crème de la crème of Paris and Nazi-occupation society. Abetz’s salons were furnished with handsome paintings stolen from the Rothschild family apartments.

  After Abetz, former lawyer and journalist Ferdinand de Brinon, now the Vichy ambassador to the German government in Paris, was the preferred host of the Paris elite, and Chanel dined often at Brinon’s Parisian townhouse. Prize-winning author Ian Ousby, historian of the German World War II occupation, was brutal about Chanel’s comportment at mealtime: “Coco Chanel … indulged in anti-Semitic diatribes” at the Abetz and Brinon dinners. An invitation to such an event was a passport to social intimacy with top Nazis. Pierre Laval’s daughter, Josée, a longtime friend of Chanel’s, and her husband, René de Chambrun, were regular guests of Abetz at the German Embassy evenings. René, nicknamed “Bunny,” was noted for his cutting remark when his father-in-law, Laval, and Marshal Pétain came to power at Vichy, repeating Laval’s words: “That’s the way you overthrow a republic.”