The Hotel on Place Vendome

by Tilar J. Mazzeo

  Well-connected friends shuttled her off to another apartment. For three days, she hid in a bedroom. Then her hosts came to tell her one afternoon that she had better go and wait just off the Champs-Élysées at the Hôtel Lancaster. No one could help her hide forever. Someone from the French Forces of the Interior would be coming the next morning there to arrest her. It was best to submit to the inevitable. People were already hunting her down.

  Two discreet men came for her, and Arletty was taken without fuss in a car to the Préfecture of Police, under her old name, Léonie Bathiat. Here there would be no star treatment or stage names for Arletty. Her public profile during the war was now her greatest liability. She was a symbol of France’s self-betrayal.

  The large echoing room at the Préfecture filled up that morning quickly. They were the people fortunate enough to have escaped the most savage of the purges taking place still daily in the streets of Paris. Many of them were women.

  In the rooms where they were processed for internment, Arletty met one old friend after another—other actresses and film stars, some socialites, the celebrated Wagnerian opera star Germaine Lubin, and at least one princess and a duchess. All had socialized with the Nazis.

  “How are you, Bathiat?” one acquaintance asked her.

  “Not very resistant,” she responded dryly.

  The trials had not yet begun, but the punishments had. Crammed together in a small room with eighty women, Arletty saw young girls with shaved heads weeping. A frail elderly woman tried to hide with a scarf the swastika that had been crudely tattooed on her forehead. A nun told Arletty at Sunday mass, “Whore, you are done looking at men,” and who knew what that portended. Even in her painfully blunt memoirs years later, Arletty would never say much about what happened.

  Retreating into bitter humor, Arletty would only say afterward, “Don’t worry, ladies! I am a gentleman.” These were humiliations that she was determined to keep private. She wrote of the experience later, however, “One rarely says it: condemned to live. It’s often more harsh than a death sentence.”

  Compared to those who died at Fresnes and Drancy during the war, Arletty, who spent the war at the Hôtel Ritz cavorting with a German lover, got off lightly. Nonetheless, she only ever saw her treatment as a gross injustice and remained bitterly defiant. “After having been the most invited woman in Paris,” Arletty had now “become the most avoided.”

  They came for Jean Cocteau with questions, too, that autumn. The writer was ordered to appear in front of a committee handling épurations for those in the film industry and would soon be called in front of a second committee investigating collaborationist authors. His determined neutrality had not been enough to spare him the interrogation and public scrutiny now.

  Marcel Proust had died long before the war started, but the old Hôtel Ritz denizens Paul Morand and the Princess Soutzo were also charged in absentia with collaboration. Although Morand was posted to the French embassy in London when the war began and could have joined the forces of the Free French without the least bit of effort, he had astonished Charles de Gaulle by returning home at the princess’s urgings and declaring his allegiance to Vichy. Until 1943, they had lived in luxury in occupied Paris. Transferred to the embassy in Switzerland before the liberation, the couple did not return to France until years later.

  But the first person of all the Hôtel Ritz regulars that the men from FFI came to question was Coco Chanel. Her story was the most astonishing of all. It continues, perhaps more than any of the others, to trouble contemporary Parisians and the history of the occupation.

  Coco Chanel rose to fame as a designer in the first and second decades of the twentieth century, after leaving a career—like Arletty’s first forays into public life—as a mediocre and somewhat risqué cabaret performer. As a young woman, Coco was not opposed to making her way in the world as a rich man’s mistress. Some quipped that she had been, in those early days, one of her generation’s grandes horizontales—a grand “horizontal” woman. At any rate, she had been at one point in her youth under surveillance from the French police, suspected of prostitution.

  By the early 1930s, that was all behind her. Coco was a rich and famous woman, recognized on the world stage as a brilliant entrepreneuse and innovator. She drove a snazzy Rolls-Royce and, like her late neighbor Georges Mandel, took up permanent residence on the Place Vendôme. As John Updike in the 1970s famously summarized Coco’s wartime attitude, “all available evidence points to Chanel’s total indifference to the fate of her Jewish neighbors—or indeed the lesser deprivations and humiliations suffered by the vast majority of Parisians. . . . [She was among those who were] happy, in a world in which mountains of misfortune were rising around them . . . in the Jewish quarter, a fifteen-minute walk from the Ritz.”

  At the end of August 1944, before the liberation came to Paris, the couturière was still living in luxury on the rue Cambon side of the Ritz complex. Her old rooms on the top floor of the Place Vendôme building hadn’t been a wartime option. No one except German officers had been allowed to enter that side of the hotel. As a long-term resident, “she paid the hotel to build a low flight of stairs from her two-room suite to a garret bedroom,” and although the bedroom was narrow and a bit cramped, she was perfectly content with the arrangement. She scoffed that it was cheaper this way anyhow.

  More important, these quiet rooms had been a convenient place for her to be with Hans von Dincklage in privacy.

  By the time of the German occupation in 1940, Coco and Hans had known each other for several years. In 1936, von Dincklage was attached to the German embassy in Paris, and he had been a familiar face for several years around the capital. Recently divorced from his aristocratic German-Jewish wife, Maximiliane von Schoenebeck, Hans had become a playboy. Given his extraordinary good looks, it was a successful vocation. He and Coco probably first met each other at a party of mutual friends sometime in 1937 or perhaps the year after.

  At the beginning of the occupation, both of them lived at the Hôtel Ritz and running into each other often was inevitable. Tall, handsome, and looking classically Teutonic, Hans was more than a decade Coco’s junior, but Chanel remained strikingly attractive in her early sixties. The liaison lasted throughout the war and left Chanel—like so many other Frenchwomen with German wartime lovers—in a precarious position after the liberation.

  Coco’s troubles in those last days of August didn’t just come down to her love life, though. For one thing, she had been far more careful than Arletty about keeping her liaison with a German officer a guarded secret. Blanche Auzello remembered it clearly. Blanche had come to dislike Coco Chanel during those years of their living cheek by jowl and was happy to sketch out a character portrait of her to anyone who was interested. It wasn’t a flattering picture. The women had known each other for the better part of a decade by the time the war started, and between the two there was a deep, if unstated, hostility. As Blanche recalled, part of the complication was that, when the occupation started in 1940, Coco Chanel was not just having a love affair with Hans von Dincklage—she was also discreetly juggling another gentleman at the same time.

  “She never appeared anywhere in the hotel with either of them,” Blanche recalled. “Nobody gave a damn, but she really worked hard to keep them a 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 Madame was a great couturier—that didn’t mean anything to her; but living with two impressive guys was her idea of paradise. What luxury!” Blanche worked hard to foster friendly relations with all the hotel floor staff, but even so, the identity of Chanel’s second paramour remains a mystery. But there is no doubt that von Dincklage was her lover.

  Unlike Arletty, though, Coco Chanel had done more than just sleep with a fascist or work with the German authorities to have her Jewish business partners stripped of their assets. Chanel had involved herself with the inner workings of German political machinations. Some still say th
at she was a spy for the Nazi powers.

  It is a murky history, and any claim to the contrary is sadly reductive. What is certain is this: the intelligence services in America and Britain had files on Coco Chanel and investigated her possible activities as a German agent. She visited Berlin twice during the war, once at the end of 1943 and once in the early days of 1944. Those trips were arranged with the help of a German Abwehr agent named Walter Schellenberg—the man who had been sent in February 1944 to replace the secret leader of the German resistance in Paris, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, another of the Hôtel Ritz regulars.

  There were also thick files on Hans von Dincklage and his wartime activities. He was a known German operative and possibly—as Chanel always insisted—a British double agent.

  Baron Hans Günther von Dincklage was born into an aristocratic Prussian family and had been a special attaché to the German embassy in Paris since 1933. Hans was tall and blond, charming and cultivated, and women loved him. Some said he had he earned his nickname “Spatz”—sparrow—for his undeniable skills working a room. The nickname likely had more mundane and ultimately more ominous origins: the code name Staatsanwalt Spatz—a roving legal representative of the German state.

  Blanche Auzello called Hans “Spatzy.” She couldn’t stand Coco Chanel, but despite Claude’s skepticism, she thought Hans was fabulous. He had first arrived in Paris with another attaché, a certain Joachim von Ribbentrop. Their mission had been to broker a political deal between France and Germany during the years of appeasement. They cozied up in Paris to rich pro-fascist journalists and politicians like Fernand de Brinon and Pierre Laval—both of whom would be ringleaders in the Vichy quisling government several years later.

  Throughout the occupation, von Dincklage was among the hotel’s permanent residents. There was no doubt that he had been sent to France on an intelligence-gathering and propaganda mission. After all, he was an attaché of the German government.

  From there, however, the knots of the tale become difficult to untangle. Hans’s mother was British. Coco Chanel insisted he was a covert British double agent. It is not impossible.

  After all, the Abwehr, especially under the Paris leadership of Wilhelm Canaris, did tend to be a hotbed of German resistance. And aristocratic Prussians from military families like Hans were among those most likely to oppose the megalomania of Adolf Hitler in Germany.

  On the other hand, if there are British files on Hans von Dincklage as a double agent, they have not yet been released or discovered. And everyone in the story had a motive for inventing exculpatory postwar stories.

  Coco Chanel herself was undeniably both anti-Semitic and an Anglophile—and, in the upper reaches of British society, anti-Semitism was no more uncommon than in the French or German aristocracies. In the 1920s, she was the lover of Hugh Richard Arthur Grosvenor, Duke of Westminster, an English aristocrat who retained his staunch pro-German politics well into the 1940s. She knew socially the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, fascist sympathizers who stayed at the Hôtel Ritz the summer before the occupation started. In fact, Coco reputedly knew some of their embarrassing political secrets.

  She certainly knew how distressing her friend Winston Churchill had found the king’s abdication and his marriage to the former Mrs. Wallis Simpson. In the autumn of 1936, Winston Churchill, his brother Randolph Churchill, and Jean Cocteau had all come for dinner at her suite in the Hôtel Ritz. After too many glasses of French wine, Winston cried on her shoulder over the scandal. Afterward, the duke and duchess were shipped off to Bermuda for the war’s duration because they couldn’t be trusted not to conspire with the Germans. Even from their island retreat they collaborated actively.

  For Coco Chanel in the days after the liberation, her fate depended, whether she knew it or not, on who could write the more persuasive letter to Winston Churchill—Coco or an old friend and former employee named Vera Bate Lombardi. Vera was the British prime minister’s relative, the English-born wife of an aristocratic fascist Italian colonel, and in Monte Carlo in 1923 she had first introduced Coco Chanel to another of her relatives, the Duke of Westminster. According to Hans von Dincklage, Vera had also been Coco’s lesbian lover.

  By the spring of 1944, the two women were in a high-stakes game of espionage and betrayal. It could only end with at least one of them being suspected as a fascist agent. Vera Lombardi was determined that person would not be her.

  Coco Chanel knew as the liberation approached that there were going to be some red flags on the record. She had been caught up the last winter of the occupation in an attempt to open the channels of communication between Churchill and some of the Germans who wanted to negotiate a separate peace between the two countries. Her close connections to the British leadership and aristocracy meant that she was well placed to advise the Germans on who to contact and how to approach the situation.

  In fact, in the lead-up to the July 20 attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler, some of the aristocratic Abwehr agents had spent the winter of 1944 trying through back channels and double agents to negotiate advance terms with Britain if a German coup d’état were successful. If the German resistance assassinated the Führer and Hermann Göring, Churchill was asked, what would be the terms for ending the war? Churchill replied bluntly: “unconditional surrender.” One of those rogue Abwehr agents was Wilhelm Canaris, who was coordinating in Paris that winter a number of German aristocrats acting as British double agents. Were Coco Chanel and Hans von Dincklage part of that circle at the Hôtel Ritz that included Carl von Stülpnagel, Caesar von Hofacker, and Hans Speidel? Admiral Canaris had run von Dincklage as a spy in the 1930s and still ran him as late as 1943, and it is distinctly possible.

  Now Coco Chanel was alone in Paris. In the days leading up to the Allies’ arrival, von Dincklage left along with the rest of the German diplomatic corps, and Coco had no idea where to find him. With the war less than a hundred miles from the city and with chaos everywhere, she was worried about his safety and wanted to know what became of him. That week, she gave a young German-speaking American soldier who was heading east with the troops a valise full of precious bottles of Chanel No. 5 perfume—worth its weight in gold and a fortune on the brisk black market. She simply asked that, if he found himself in the days to come interrogating German prisoners of war and could find Hans, would he send her a postcard? He only needed to address it to Mademoiselle Chanel, Hôtel Ritz, Paris. Everyone knew how to find her.

  Chanel also played her cards carefully with the Americans. She knew that the wind was blowing in a new direction, and Coco was nothing if not a survivor. A British intelligence officer with the MI-6 division later spoke of Coco’s sense of timing with frank admiration: “By one of those majestically simple strokes which made Napoleon so successful as a general,” the agent reported, “she just put an announcement in the window of her emporium that scent was free for G.I.s, who thereupon queued up to get the bottles of Chanel No. 5, and would have been outraged if the French police had touched a hair on her head.”

  Then she temporarily fled her suite at the Hôtel Ritz—where another regular wanted by the FFI for arrest as a collaborator, Serge Lifar, was hiding in a closet—and decamped to rooms above her atelier as an added measure.

  In the end, none of it mattered. At the end of the first week of September, men with guns appeared and asked Mademoiselle to accompany them for an interrogation. They were from FFI. She had spent the war living at the hotel with her German lover, and for that alone she would have to account for her collaboration. Far worse had happened already to other women in her position. Defiant to the last, she quipped sarcastically to her captors that, when a woman had a chance of a lover at her age, she was hardly going to ask to see what was on the gentleman’s passport.

  A few hours later—to the astonishment of everyone at the Hôtel Ritz—Coco Chanel was back in her suite. And she was packing. The rumor spread: the order for her release had come from the highest reaches of the British government. Lucienne Elminger heard the st
ory. Years later, she still remembered that it was the letters from Winston Churchill “assuring her of support and friendship” that had been the deciding factor.

  Released from detention and advised by Churchill to flee swiftly to exile in Switzerland, Coco Chanel remained under active Allied investigation all autumn. She would be repeatedly questioned in the capital by “invitation.” In the end, whatever the truth of her covert activities during the occupation and whatever the truth about Hans von Dincklage’s status as an agent, the Allies decided that the story had too many obscure angles ever to comprehend fully.

  In the Churchill archives today at the University of Cambridge, there are a series of declassified top-secret files in which the French, British, and American governments each alternatively considered where justice in the matter rested: Was Coco Chanel a Nazi spy and a war criminal or was she innocent of everything except horizontal collaboration? Was Hans von Dincklage, like his boss Wilhelm Canaris, a secret MI-6 agent or was he something more pedestrian and ominous? Or was the truth lost somewhere in the shadows? The files in the French justice department on Coco Chanel have disappeared.

  But in 1944 and 1945, when it was all still fresh in memory, the Americans and British alike came in the weeks that followed the liberation to a single, shared conclusion: there was just no way of telling. Among the stories of the occupation that were lost before the war even ended—among the myths and legends, evasions, counter-evasions, and sometimes even brave secrets—these kinds of tangled records were often the hardest to unravel.

  Ironically, that long, high-level government inquiry—and her sexual discretion as an experienced woman of sixty—likely saved Chanel from the more savage purges. The charges brought against her were so infinitely more serious than those of simple “horizontal collaboration” or “intelligence with the enemy” that a tedious process of examination had been set into motion. Her political connections with the British leadership were so intimate that no one wanted to make an error. But by the time the Allies came to the conclusion that there was no way to know for sure what Chanel had or hadn’t done precisely and that, at any rate, there wasn’t enough evidence to convict her as a war criminal, the period of wild vigilante justice in Paris was over.