by Lisa Chaney
… never appeared anywhere in the hotel with either of them. Nobody gave a damn, but she really worked hard to keep them secret. I knew about them because I had a direct pipeline through the floor maid. She kept me up to the minute. She was envious, not because the Madame was a great couturier — that didn’t mean a thing to her — but living with two impressive guys was her idea of paradise. What luxury!37
In early 1944, Antoinette d’Harcourt was arrested by the Gestapo. She had begun the war as an ambulance driver on the battlefields, but then used the ambulance to ferry people to the border between France and Switzerland, for example. Her son, Jean, says: “After a year she was “burned,” so she had to stop — those activities are probably the reason why she was arrested.”38 The young duchess was treated harshly and placed in solitary confinement for six months in the notorious Fresnes prison, then moved to another one, Romain-ville, also outside Paris. From there she narrowly avoided deportation to Buchenwald concentration camp.
Arletty’s biographer describes Synarchy’s (or Synarchism’s) work as “fairly pro-Mussolini… [it] had as members some of the most powerful figures in the French establishment intent on maintaining national French unity.”39 Preferring, as Jean d’Harcourt says, the idea of “revolution by the elite rather than revolution from the street… Synarchy’s aim was to serve as a link between Pétain and Laval on the one side, and on the other, de Gaulle and Massigly [one of de Gaulle’s senior diplomats] and therefore avoid a bloodbath” when France was liberated.40
When Antoinette’s son, Jean, then only a boy, was permitted to visit his mother, they were both so overcome that for the permitted fifteen-minute visit, they could do no more than remain clasped in each other’s arms. Jean d’Harcourt recalled how “after the war, my mother refused to speak with Chanel and never set foot in her shop again.”41 Before the war, the duchess had been dressed by Gabrielle. Jean also said:
My mother greatly admired Arletty. She considered that her affair with the German was just a sentimental matter… There was never a betrayal on her part… My mother was faithful in her friendships. The only person with whom she broke up because of the war was Chanel, who played a double or triple game.42
While one appreciates Antoinette d’Harcourt’s suspicions about Gabrielle, unfortunately proof will almost certainly never be possible — especially as Antoinette d’Harcourt’s papers were all burned in a fire.
In 1943, Gabrielle was to take part in a bizarre episode. Possibly at von Dincklage’s suggestion, she apparently decided she should help negotiate a peace settlement. Gabrielle was by no means alone in believing that this would be the speediest end to the war. (Her friendship with men of standing, such as Westminster and Churchill, may have encouraged her.) Her first step was to summon Captain Momm to the rue Cambon to lay out her plan. Momm, we remember, was von Dincklage’s friend and the person who had interceded on André Palasse’s behalf to get him out of prison.
Gabrielle’s plan had her act as messenger to initiate peace talks between Churchill and the German High Command. Churchill was due to visit Madrid after the Tehran Conference, and Gabrielle said that he had agreed to see her on his way back. At first stupefied, Theodor Momm was eventually won over and took her “peace proposal” to Berlin. With Momm as her emissary, Gabrielle’s scheme was at first brushed aside. But then the new director of German foreign intelligence, the ambitious young colonel Walter Schellenberg, became interested. Risking execution if discovered, he was himself looking for a way to negotiate with the Allies, and agreed, naming Gabrielle’s mission Operation Modelhut (model hat). Even more extraordinary than that, in early 1944, Gabrielle apparently visited Berlin to meet Walter Schellenberg, with von Dincklage as her escort. (Our one piece of evidence for this is Schellenberg’s testimony in his subsequent trial.)43
Schellenberg decided Gabrielle should travel to Madrid to set up her meeting with Churchill via Sir Samuel Hoare, the British ambassador. As her safety net with the British, however, Gabrielle wanted the Germans to bring along Vera Bate-Lombardi — from internment in Italy — an acquaintance of Winston Churchill’s. At this point, the two women’s stories diverge. Vera afterward claimed that Gabrielle sent a German officer to Italy with a letter asking her to return to Paris and help Gabrielle reopen Chanel.44 Having refused, Vera was subsequently arrested as a British spy. (Vera believed Gabrielle had caused this.) According to Gabrielle, she waded in on Vera’s behalf and got her out of a Roman prison.
Vera next came to Paris, and later said that instead of reopening her salon there, Gabrielle told her that it was in Madrid she wanted help with a salon. Vera went along with this, although, as it turned out, neither she nor Gabrielle trusted each other. When they arrived in Spain, Gabrielle apparently went to see the British ambassador to present him with her plan. He informed her that Churchill was not now visiting Spain; he was unwell and returning to England via Cairo and Tunisia. (It is highly unlikely that Churchill had ever agreed to meet Gabrielle in these times.) Meanwhile, in Gabrielle’s discussion with the ambassador, she omitted telling him that Vera was also in Madrid. This was a mistake because Vera, meanwhile, had arrived at the embassy and was in another room denouncing Gabrielle as a German agent.45
Vera’s request to be returned to Italy was refused, and she duly wrote to Churchill. Telling him she wasn’t a spy but a loyal British subject, she begged for his assistance. Gabrielle also wrote to Churchill, explaining that she had been “obliged to address someone rather important to get her [Vera] freed and be allowed to bring her down here [Madrid] with me.” She went on to tell Churchill that she realized that this had put Vera in a compromising position; her Italian passport had a German visa on it and Gabrielle understood “quite well that it looks a bit suspect.” She suggested that a nod from Churchill would facilitate Vera’s return to Italy, where she wanted to find her husband. Gabrielle signed herself affectionately, and asked about his health and that of his son, Randolph.46
Information on Gabrielle’s bungled mission is somewhat muddled. She appears now to have returned to Paris. But Vera was kept in Madrid, from where she sent various missives to Churchill begging him to help her. The British had, however, already been suspicious of Vera Bate-Lombardi. She had remarried in the twenties; Colonel Lombardi was an Italian, and for some time before the war the couple had been suspected of spying by the French Interior Ministry. As one of their associates, from 1929 Gabrielle had also come under investigation. While much of the information in the final dossier on Gabrielle was ludicrously inaccurate,47 the French suspected the Lombardis of being double agents.48 While another investigation was ordered in 1931, in the end, the French didn’t have enough concrete evidence against the Lombardis, and nothing against Gabrielle.49
The British Foreign Office, Allied Force Headquarters and the prime minister’s office conducted an investigation. After several months, in December 1944, they concluded that while there was no indication that Vera was “sent to Madrid by the German Intelligence Service, it is equally clear that Mme Chanel… exaggerated Mme Lombardi’s… position in order to give the Germans the impression that if she were allowed to go to Madrid she might be useful to them. Mme Lombardi seems to have had some curious notion of trying to arrange peace terms.” While the prime minister’s office concluded that Vera should be allowed to return to Italy, she was, nonetheless, “by no means anti-Fascist,” had not been “completely cleared of all suspicion,” and was “still under a cloud.”50 Whatever the lost details of this murky episode actually were, and whether the megalomaniac scheme to be involved in ending the war was really Vera’s or Gabrielle’s, it had come to naught.
While fashionable Paris persevered in its refusal to face the tide of events, there was no longer any pretense by the authorities of Franco-German cultural exchange. Meanwhile, the theaters were full, and Cocteau and Gabrielle set to work on the restaging of his Antigone. Gabrielle also moved herself back to her apartment in the rue Cambon. Was she taking care to separate herself f
rom any connection to the German command?
On the morning of June 6, 1944, D-day, the Americans, the Canadians, British and the Free French began the phenomenal Normandy landings. Over a stretch of fifty miles of beaches, this was the launch of the Allied invasion of France. More than 150,000 men were landed in what was to be the most complex and largest amphibious invasion ever undertaken. Brigadier Simon Fraser, Lord Lovat, the son of Arthur Capel’s sister-in-law, Laura — in other words, Arthur’s nephew — was among those on the Normandy beaches. In defiance of recent orders not to permit such foolhardy action in battle, Lord Lovat, wearing the kilt his father had donned in the First World War, famously ordered his personal piper, young Bill Millin, to pipe the men ashore. Lovat then led his commando brigade in what became one of the most iconic images of these famed landings. The Germans later said the only reason they hadn’t shot Billy was because they thought he was mad. This piece of bravado would have appealed to Arthur Capel.
While Parisians anticipated the arrival of their liberators, a fierce battle was taking place in Normandy. But in Vichy, as Pétain proclaimed that “the battle which is taking place on our soil does not concern us,” the Allies moved slowly toward Paris, fighting all the way. By June 26, de Gaulle had landed and proclaimed a new government, and by early July, the Americans were on the outskirts of Chartres, fifty-six miles southwest of Paris. With de Gaulle’s master plan, the notoriously divided Resistance agreed that there was no question: Paris must be seen to liberate itself.
Yet while German troops had begun a sporadic retreat, they had also continued arresting and deporting people to the camps, and the swastika still flew over the senate in the Luxembourg Gardens. Within a day or so, the major institutions were in the hands of the liberators, but a week later there were still some Germans in Paris.
As von Dincklage left with his compatriots in retreat, apparently he asked Gabrielle to come with him. He told her they could quietly slip away to neutral Switzerland, but Gabrielle refused. She was defiant, and would face whatever happened. By August 17, the most senior collaborators were being evacuated by the German army: more than twenty thousand French militia and fascists fought their way onto the retreating trains and trucks. At intervals, these were bombed by the Allies and sabotaged by the Free French, who were staging an uprising against the Germans in Paris. The Resistance and de Gaulle were determined that it would be the French who liberated their own capital, and not the advancing Allies. Serge Lifar heard that he was to be evacuated with the Germans, and sought refuge with Gabrielle in the rue Cambon. With the remnants of the Vichy government, Pétain, who claimed he was a prisoner, was taken by the Germans to the Hohenzollern castle of Sig-maringen, near Stuttgart. Paul Morand was already there.
Gabrielle and Lifar saw the last German tank roll away down the rue de Rivoli, heard the last street fighting between the Germans and the Free French, and saw firefighters hoist the first French flags up over the Théâtre de l’Opéra. The supreme allied commander in Europe, General Eisenhower, hadn’t regarded Paris as a primary objective. The German forces were retreating toward the Rhine; the aim was to reach Berlin before the Red Army, and there put an end to the conflict. And while Eisenhower had thought it was premature for any battle for Paris, de Gaulle would now force his hand. In de Gaulle’s determination to be seen to “free” Paris, he threatened the Allies that he would order the French 2nd Armored Division into the capital.
As the seat of government, Paris was the prize sought by the numerous Resistance factions, and despite a large anti-Gaullist Resistance wing, expelling the Germans united them. To this day, opinion is divided over the military governor General Dietrich von Choltitz’s claim that he was “the savior of Paris.” Despite repeated orders from Hitler that the city “must not fall into the enemy’s hand except lying in complete ruins,” von Choltitz disobeyed, and on August 25, he surrendered at the Meurice hotel, the newly established headquarters of the Free French.51 On the following day, when de Gaulle marched his troops through the place de la Concorde to the Arc de Triomphe, and half of Paris turned out to welcome them, José Maria Sert gave a party for fifty to watch the triumphant parade from his balcony. Gabrielle, Lifar and Etienne de Beaumont were there, alongside many of their fellow “collaborator” friends. As de Gaulle was getting into his car, a shower of sniper’s bullets shattered Sert’s windows, and his guests leaped for cover under tables and behind doors. When they finally dared to emerge, they hear Sert apologizing for the “inconvenience.” As a typical mark of his bravura, he had remained on the balcony.
On August 29, with the arrival of the U.S. Army’s 28th Infantry Division, diverted en route to Berlin, a combined Franco — American military parade took place, again past the Arc de Triomphe. As the vehicles drove down the city streets, more joyous crowds greeted the Armée de la Libération and the Americans as their liberators.
With the liberation, the purging of the collaborators began. Before any organized legal trials could get under way, the épuration sauvage, the summary courts, were hastily set up by the Free French, or sometimes by vindictive crowds, initiated as often as not by a personal vendetta. In several thousand cases, these episodes resulted in execution. At the same time, in towns and rural areas across the country, women accused of “horizontal collaboration” were dragged out of their houses and publicly humiliated. Although shaving women’s heads for sexual infidelity wasn’t new, it isn’t clear why between ten thousand and thirty thousand women were treated this way in addition to suffering the added indignity of being paraded naked through jeering crowds. What people expected from these public acts and how they defined collaboration is still being debated. While appalled by the ferocity of this popular retribution, de Gaulle’s fragile government had little effective power and let the vengeance run its ghastly course. These are some of the most terrifying images of the liberation.52
Gabrielle was a high-profile figure and was to experience an attempt to “cleanse” her when she was arrested by two representatives of the Free French. With an icy dignity, she made her way as quickly as possible out of her room at the Ritz; she didn’t want them to find Serge Lifar, who was hiding in her bathroom. There has been much speculation over the years as to why, following a few hours’ questioning, Gabrielle was released. What did she say in her defense, given that her friend Arletty, who had also lived with a German, was imprisoned for four months, then put under house arrest for a further eighteen? We have one small piece of information. A “top secret” letter, from the chief of staff of Allied Force Headquarters, was written in December 1944 referring to Vera Bate-Lombardi’s imprisonment in Spain. Following Gabrielle’s Modelhut debacle, she and Vera Bate-Lombardi gave different versions of what had come to pass. They both wrote letters to Winston Churchill, letters which contradicted each other.
Among several reports and letters from Allied Force Headquarters regarding this episode, there is one recording that “Mme Chanel has been undergoing interrogation by the French authorities since that time”; in other words, throughout December 1944. While Vera was stuck in Spain begging Churchill to help her get back to her husband in Italy, the British were eager to clear up the purpose of the women’s visit and determine whether she or Gabrielle were German agents.53
Did the Allied forces ever know, however, that Gabrielle had apparently returned to Berlin to inform Schellenberg of the failure of her mission? We don’t know what possessed her to do such a thing. Aside from believing that she was a German agent — for which we have no proof — perhaps there is only one conclusion to be drawn from her visit. While her mission to Spain sprang from a grandiose egotism, her slightly cracked belief that she could take a hand in ending the war may have emerged from a desire to be known for something besides haute couture. Years later, her assistant would say:
Every morning she read the papers in great detail, from the short news items to the results of the races. To… the head of France Soir’s surprise, she knew everything about international news. She
couldn’t help it: Chanel put herself in the place of heads of State. She thought about the decisions to make… She felt concerned, both as a national symbol and as a company director. Listening to her, one could even have thought that she was responsible for the situation. Mademoiselle found it regrettable that great men didn’t consult her. Already, during the war, she had taken it into her head to make Churchill sign peace. She had projects for Europe, which Mendès France judged discerning, and she wondered why L’Express didn’t repeat them.54
Like a handful of thoughtful, rather than merely clever, fashion designers, Gabrielle came to believe that fashion was essentially worthless. Yet she had pinpointed more accurately than almost anyone before her what it was really about.
And her claim to be a maker of “style,” rather than mere fashion, was of particular significance to her because it signified something less ephemeral. She had staked her life on work, and this work had been the creation of a couture house. Without it, Gabrielle would have lost her raison d’être. She was quite right when she said, “I have a boss’s soul,” and she needed to feel significant. The success of her political mission would have put her into the history books in a way she felt was commensurate with her intelligence. Her return visit to a man as powerful as Schellenberg must have been a kind of proof to herself that she had been taken seriously on a far grander scale than merely for the creation of dresses. In company with many exceptional artists, Gabrielle understood her own worth because she lived so wholeheartedly in the present, but she also underestimated the value of what it was she had done for her century. Through dress and her lifestyle, she had made a genuine contribution toward forcing the first century of modernity to face up to what it was, something more than many of those in the political sphere ever managed.
