by Hal Vaughan
Chanel’s life was far from over. Her collaboration with the Nazis, her visceral anti-Semitism, and her attempt to use Nazi Aryanization laws to harm the Wertheimers were largely now ignored. In the years following her testimony at the trial of Louis de Vaufreland, Chanel led a low-key life in voluntary exile at Lausanne. Dincklage was there. However, there were rumors the couple was estranged. Gabrielle Palasse visited Auntie Coco often. Her father, André, was recuperating at a villa overlooking Lake Leman—a gift from Chanel. Over time his condition improved and he and his new wife moved to a house in Brittany.
From 1945, Chanel began buying the silence of those who had inside knowledge of her relationships with the Abwehr and Schellenberg’s SS. And she continued inventing stories about her childhood, her love affairs, and her wartime activities. When Chanel saw a draft of Louise de Vilmorin’s Mémoires de Coco, she told her biographer Paul Morand, himself a former Vichy official, that she didn’t like what Vilmorin wrote. Instead, from Switzerland, she commissioned another French author, Michel Déon, later elected to the Académie Française on the strength of his fiction writing, to ghostwrite her memoirs. After a year, he produced a three-hundred-page manuscript based on “lengthy dialogues” with Chanel. A month later, this book too “was not to her taste.” Chanel never spoke to Déon but sent word via a friend, Hervé Mille, the editor of Paris Match. Mille told Déon that Chanel wanted him to know that “in these three hundred pages there is not a single sentence that is not hers, but now that she sees the book as it is, she thinks it is not what America is expecting.”
According to Morand, Déon concluded: “Chanel had a childhood fear of abandoning the world of her dreams and confronting the realities of existence.”
EXILED IN SWITZERLAND, Chanel’s spirits were low. As the years slipped by she mourned the loss of one friend after another. In the early fall of 1950 she visited Paris and the ailing Misia Sert. Worn and feeble, still abusing drugs at seventy-eight, Misia recalled that long ago she had been one of the favorite models for Renoir and other French Impressionists. The visit turned into a last goodbye. Misia died with Chanel at her side. Then Bendor passed away shortly after attending Queen Elizabeth’s coronation and Étienne Balsan was killed in a car accident as Boy Capel had been years before.
Chanel still worried about the power others had over her: Vaufreland, her Abwehr partner; Theodor Momm; Walter Schellenberg; and, of course, Dincklage. They were living witnesses to her collaboration with the Nazis.
In June 1951 Chanel heard through Momm that Schellenberg had been released from prison because he was incurably ill with liver disease. His six-year prison sentence, issued by a Nuremberg Military Tribunal for war crimes, had been cut short. While awaiting trial, the incarcerated Schellenberg had written his memoirs. Now he worked at them with a German journalist, rewriting the work into a book about life as SS Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler’s right-hand man. The book was eventually titled The Labyrinth.
Theodor Momm must have told Chanel that Schellenberg was now seeking a publisher for the book, and she realized the danger. She arranged through her COGA Trust (the acronym is a combination of the first letters of Coco and Gabrielle) to finance a comfortable retreat for Schellenberg and his wife, Irene, at a house in the Swiss lake district. But the Swiss authorities didn’t want a convicted war criminal living in Switzerland, and he was evicted. Schellenberg had managed to obtain a false Swiss passport in the name of Louis Kowalki; he then went into hiding with Irene at a villa at Pallanza, Italy, on the shores of Lake Maggiore.
Walter Schellenberg, once Himmler’s right-hand man, seen here after his surrender to Allied agents, 1945. Later, he would be tried and convicted of war crimes. When he was freed, due to ill health, Chanel paid his expenses in exile. (illustration credit 12.1)
From Germany, Momm again alerted Chanel that Schellenberg was being treated for his liver disease in Pallanza and was in desperate need of money to pay his physician, Dr. Francis Lang, and the Italian clinic where he received medical care.
Professor Reinhard Doerries, Schellenberg’s principal biographer, tells what happened next:
Dr. Lang and his wife visited Schellenberg in Pallanza … while talking about financial matters, Doctor Lang must have intimated [to Schellenberg] he was in considerable financial straits since he had covered from his own pocket Schellenberg’s medical and other expenses in the amount of Swiss Fr 20,000. Dr. Lang tells how “Schellenberg then contacted Chanel and explained his dire financial problems … the lady of haute couture soon arrived [at Pallanza] in a black Mercedes, curtains drawn. She gave Schellenberg about Swiss Fr 30,000 [the doctor ventured the sum might have been in French Francs].”
To explain Chanel’s gesture, Dr. Lang said, “During the war Schellenberg had been helpful to her and to others in the fashion world.”
Walter Schellenberg died in Turin at age forty-two on March 31; he was buried there on April 2, 1952. After his death, his wife wrote to Momm: “Madame Chanel offered us financial assistance in our difficult situation and it was thanks to her that we were able to spend a few more months together.” After Schellenberg’s death, Irene returned with her children to Düsseldorf, where she sought a publisher for her husband’s autobiography. Chanel knew of this and may then have received a promise from Irene Schellenberg that Chanel would not be named if her husband’s memoirs were published.
DINCKLAGE, despite being banned from Switzerland for his work as a German spy, lived for several years with Chanel in Lausanne and Davos. According to friends, Spatz still looked the handsome German officer. There is a photograph of Chanel and Spatz taken circa 1949 in Switzerland; Dincklage in a handsome long coat and homburg hat looks the distinguished retired officer. The couple seems relaxed. Those who knew him at the time remembered him as an aging playboy: a man of striking bearing and impeccable good manners.
Chanel’s biographer Pierre Galante wrote that the Dincklage-Chanel idyll continued. “They spent time together at a Swiss ski resort taking short trips to Italy … Mademoiselle’s Swiss friends, her three lawyers, dentist, doctor, rheumatism specialist, and an eye specialist often saw them together—and there were rumors of a possible marriage.” Then one day Chanel’s Spatz vanished.
Dincklage had left Chanel to become a permanent resident of Spain’s Balearic Islands—a sunny resort on the Mediterranean with an agreeable climate not unlike that of Sanary-sur-Mer, the former spy’s 1930 hunting grounds. He lived on a handsome pension paid regularly through Chanel’s COGA Trust. No one seems to know if Chanel and Dincklage met again.
Pierre Galante interviewed Chanel’s friends at the time. Asked to describe her mood following Dincklage’s departure, they painted her as “a charming, simple, lively woman. She entertained friends frequently, either in the hotels where she was staying or in restaurants in ‘old’ Lausanne. Her menu varied very little. She almost always ordered vegetable soup, filet mignon, unbuttered rice, and fruit compote.” They also reported that Chanel danced and shopped with friends, especially at more affordable stores. “She dined out, here and there, quite often with her physician whom she was fond of and later invited him and his wife to stay at La Pausa.”
Chanel and Dincklage, Switzerland, 1949. (illustration credit 12.2)
Chanel hardly spoke of fashion. A friend said, “It was as though it did not interest her anymore. Or almost … One day [a friend] wore a blouse that Coco did not like; Coco could not resist taking a pair of scissors and making a few changes on the spot.”
Photographer Horst offered a different picture in 1951: “Chanel was somewhat lost at that time in her life; she seemed bored. Her hair was different, and she had started to pluck her eyebrows. She didn’t look like the Chanel I had known.”
WHAT WAS THIS extraordinary woman—still brimming with creative ideas and energy—to do next? At seventy, Chanel had one singular and enduring asset: her talent. She continued to garner admiration and affection from Pierre Wertheimer—despite their quarrels over the past forty-some
years. Sometime earlier, Pierre Wertheimer had discovered that Chanel was making perfume in Switzerland. It was a clear breach of the 1924 agreement she had signed to sell all rights to her line of perfume and cosmetics to Société des Parfums Chanel, a company of which the Wertheimers owned 90 percent.
In the spring of 1947 Wertheimer and his lawyer called at René de Chambrun’s Paris offices on the avenue des Champs-Élysées. Pierre Wertheimer wanted to make a deal. He offered Chanel $50,000 and a small additional percentage of annual sales of Chanel No. 5. Chambrun then upped the ante, demanding a higher payout on annual sales. Their negotiations would last for most of a day—bickering over what eventually became large sums of money. During the long, drawn-out discussions Chambrun left the room, ostensibly to obtain approval from his client in Lausanne via a private telephone line in a suite a few doors away. In fact, he went outside to talk to Chanel in person. She had waited all day to hear the Wertheimers’ proposals.
Early the next day an agreement was reached: Chanel would get $350,000 in cash and 2 percent of all sales—more than a million dollars a year (equivalent to about $9 million today). The dividends were to be deposited at Chanel’s account at the Union de Banques Suisse. Later, Chanel told a friend, “Now, I’m rich.”
Indeed, back in 1947 Pierre Wertheimer had made a shrewd calculation. Had he sued Chanel in French court, it would have exposed Chanel’s Nazi connections, her relations with Dr. Kurt Blanke, and her attempt to Aryanize the Wertheimer holdings. In court the secret arrangements between the Wertheimers and Félix Amiot might have come out, along with the payment of a large sum of money to Amiot in 1939 and Amiot’s deal to build warplanes for Hermann Göring’s Luftwaffe. Even Gregory Thomas’s secret mission might have become public. The negative press would have damaged the Chanel name; the lucrative trademark the Wertheimer family cherished might be tarnished forever. Wertheimer was protecting the franchise that would bring the family unimagined riches. Years later—by 2008—a bottle of Chanel No. 5 was being sold “every thirty seconds.”
IN 1970, after a relation that lasted thirty years, Chanel fired René de Chambrun. (Later they would be reconciled.) At the time she ventured, “I cannot stand lawyers, police officers and soldiers.” Then, despite her disdain for attorneys, Chanel hired Robert Badinter, a brilliant international lawyer who years later would become famous for having worked to banish the death sentence by guillotine in France.
Biographer Pierre Galante relates how Badinter became Chanel’s attorney: “I’m Jewish,” he said. “Perhaps you do not know that, Mademoiselle.”
“Yes,” Chanel replied, “and it doesn’t bother me at all. I have nothing against Jews.”
Chambrun and his wife, Josée, never said a word about Chanel in public. The couple had escaped punishment after the war because of their immensely powerful connections—just as Chanel had managed to have Winston Churchill save her. For many years, Chambrun had defended Chanel with all his skill. Despite Chambrun’s having personal knowledge of Chanel’s wartime collaboration, he protected her and lied in a BBC retrospective about her relations with Dincklage, and about her 1944 mission to Berlin.
A transcript of the BBC interview, last broadcast in 2009, records Chambrun saying, when asked about Dincklage, “I know that at one point, because she talked to me about him, there was a German tennis player, noble, Dincklage, and I know that she helped him financially. And that’s all I know about all the gossip that has gone around Coco.”
When asked about Chanel’s mission to Spain in 1944, he replied, “I don’t see her interest in the mission. She was, uh—I think if it had been proposed to her, she would have refused it. That’s my Chanel, that’s what I think she would do. It’s none of my business. Her business that I know was that she did help this former tennis player, actually helped him, but all the talk about engineering a separate peace, to me, is ballyhoo.”
Chambrun had been Chanel’s faithful knight for more than thirty years.
IN THE FALL of 1953 Chanel wrote to Carmel Snow of Harper’s Bazaar: “I thought it would be fun to work again … you know I might one day create a new style adapted to today’s living … I feel that this time has come.” Pierre Wertheimer agreed; this would be an excellent way to enhance the Chanel franchise.
The Paris fashion world swirled with rumors. “Mademoiselle Chanel is going to come back! Chanel is returning to couture!” She told the press, “I still have perhaps two or three things to say.” As Christmas 1953 approached, the media reported that “Chanel will make a comeback in February.” Some of the Parisian couturiers congratulated her, while others trembled. She now pulled together a few of her old staff and hired some new people. Her hands were often painful from arthritis; she was, after all, over seventy. Cecil Beaton, the photographer and costume designer, noted that Chanel’s fingers “seemed strong enough to shoe a horse.” She crawled about on hands and knees, pinning hems herself, her straw boater always on to conceal her bald spots, the ever-present Camel cigarette between her lips.
A few weeks before the show, she told Vogue: “I will start with a collection … About one hundred [pieces] … It won’t be a revolution … It will be a collection made by a woman with love.” Chanel’s first postwar show opened on February 5, 1954—once again the fifth because she was convinced five was her lucky number. It wasn’t this time. The Paris cognoscenti nodded politely through Chanel’s careful choreography staged in her opulent renovated salon. A reporter from the major French daily L’Aurore wrote, “Everyone had come hoping to find again the atmosphere of the collections that had bowled over Paris in the years gone by. But there is nothing of that left, only mannequins who parade before an audience that cannot bring itself to applaud.” The reporter added: “A rather melancholic retrospective.” Lucien François of Combat (at one time Camus’ newspaper) wrote a devastating piece about Chanel’s first collection after the war: “Her dresses were good for cleaning offices.” Chanel’s models were “likened to a herd of geese.”
After the show, Pierre Wertheimer visited Chanel at her rue Cambon showroom. He found her on her knees, pinning hems on dresses. He stayed there, watching her work, and then walked her back to the Ritz. “You know, I want to go on,” she told him. “I want to go on and win.”
“You’re right,” he responded. “You’re right to go on.”
But despite the ho-hum French press reaction and a slap from the Brits, who thought her show was a flop, the American media was impressed. Life reported, “[Chanel] has influenced all of today’s collections. At seventy-one, she brings us more than a style—she has caused a veritable tempest. She has decided to return and to conquer her old position—the first.” Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue agreed. Marlene Dietrich came to the rue Cambon and ordered several suits—among them the tailored suits, tailleurs Chanel, that would become famous by 1956.
Chanel’s creations may have been successful but Chanel’s fashion business was in deep financial trouble. Her comeback had cost some 35 million francs (equivalent to almost $800,000 in 2010). The company was broke. Chanel’s guardian angel, Pierre Wertheimer, stepped in again. In the spring of 1954, Chanel and the Wertheimer organization signed a final business deal: she sold the Wertheimers her fashion company, her commercial real estate, and all her holdings bearing the Chanel name. The Wertheimers would pay all of her expenses: her rooms at the Ritz, her domestic help, telephone bills, postage, and other costs of living. All she had to do was assist with the development of new perfumes and run her couture house. It was a priceless deal for Chanel. In the years to come, it would turn out to be a money machine for the Wertheimers.
In the fall of 1956 Chanel presented another collection to warm reviews. The New York Times reported from Paris: “[Chanel’s] return to the couture scene last February led the fashion world to expect a startling revolution on her part, [but] it did not materialize. She designed in the same spirit as she displayed before the war, but in the last eight months the eye of fashion has become accustomed to the C
hanel look. Its ease, casualness and understatement meet a need in the life of many women today.”
Chanel was back in business—and blessed again. That year she introduced her famous tailleurs Chanel. And that same year, the English edition of Schellenberg’s memoirs, The Labyrinth, appeared with an introduction by British historian Alan Bullock, who later wrote an influential and critically acclaimed biography of Hitler. There was not a word about Chanel.
Once again, Coco could breathe a sigh of relief.
As befitting a fashion queen, Chanel was invited to Dallas, Texas, by the dynamic and innovative Stanley Marcus, renowned for displaying outlandishly expensive items in his Dallas store. In his Christmas catalogues he offered his-and-hers matching bathtubs, his-and-hers airplanes, and miniature submarines. In 1957 Chanel arrived in Dallas to receive a Neiman Marcus award for Distinguished Service in the Field of Fashion—ironically the executive accompanying Chanel to Dallas was H. Gregory Thomas, now president of the Chanel perfume company.
Chanel thought American customs vulgar, but again, and ironically, she wanted to visit a Texas ranch. A visit to Marcus’s brother’s Black Mark farm was arranged along with a ranch-style dinner and a show of bronco riding and roping.
Alas, it turned out that Chanel didn’t like the taste of western food, so she dumped her plate of barbecued meat and beans under the table and right onto the elegant satin slippers of another guest, Elizabeth Arden, seated next to her—Coco had struck again.
Returning to Paris via New York, Chanel was interviewed by a reporter from The New Yorker at the Park Avenue Waldorf-Astoria hotel. The reporter found her “sensationally good looking, with dark brown eyes, a brilliant smile, and the vitality of a twenty-year-old, and when giving a firm handshake said, ‘I’m très, très fatiguée.’ It was the assurance of a woman who knows she can afford to say it.”