Coco Chanel

by Justine Picardie

  Yet Chanel remained uncrushed, apparently indestructible, like her magnificent jewels, with some essential element of herself that remained out of her lover’s grasp. Her past ‘tortured him’; for he was a Basque, she said to Morand, and displayed the jealousy of ‘a real Spaniard’. Thus the domineering French patriot was revealed, at least in Chanel’s account, to be an insecure outsider; a foreigner to his own land, and to the elusive landscape of her past, as well. ‘Iribe wanted to relive with me, step by step, the whole of that past lived without him and to go back through lost time, while asking me to account for myself. One day, he took me to the heart of the Auvergne, to Mont-Dore, to set out on the trail of my youth. We found the house of my aunts … As I walked beneath this avenue of lime trees, I really felt as if I were beginning my life again. I lingered behind. Iribe walked on alone and, on the pretext of finding somewhere to stay, he asked to see my aunts. They had not changed their attitude towards me, after so many years; he was told if I showed my face, I would not be made welcome. He came back towards me, soothed and satisfied, having found everything just as I had described it to him.’

  Of all Chanel’s references to her ‘aunts’, this is possibly the most tantalising, at least in its hint that Iribe might have come closer to her childhood origins than her previous lovers. He had traced the contours of her recent past – her crisscrossing trail from Faubourg Saint-Honoré to Rue Cambon and to and from the Ritz – but if she did take him to ‘the heart of the Auvergne’, then who were the aunts that he found there? An imaginary version of the journey might have Paul Iribe finally setting foot in the abbey of Aubazine, walking up the dark stairs and through the door into the corridor paved with stars and crosses. But there were no witnesses to provide evidence of any such visit; nor did Iribe live long enough to tell his own side of the story.

  In the late summer of 1935, he left Paris on the night train to join Chanel at La Pausa, a holiday retreat that he had enjoyed many times before, sharing with her all the manifold luxuries of the villa, and her bed with its wrought-iron stars. On 21st September, Iribe joined his lover on the tennis court, overlooking the blue expanse of the Mediterranean; half-way through their match, he collapsed with a heart attack, and died. She never used the tennis court again, but let it grow wild with flowers and long grass, as it remains to this day. Chanel grieved in silence, giving little away to anyone; but many years later, she told Claude Delay that with Iribe gone, even her beloved La Pausa could no longer hold her or console her. And while Chanel now appeared to the outside world as hard as her diamonds, perhaps something far more precious inside her had shrivelled and died.

  THROUGH A GLASS, DARKLY

  In the tangle of tales told about Coco Chanel – the gossip and speculation and rumours that have spread from newsprint to the internet – one accusation is invariably repeated. Chanel was a Nazi collaborator, whose wartime affair with a German officer leaves her reputation blemished, and the legacy of her visionary fashion designs forever stained.

  The truth is less clear-cut than that; the facts not black and white, but merging into a blur of grey. That Chanel’s wartime record is imperfect is a reflection both of her own inconsistencies, and the inconsistent recording of them. But her conduct should also be seen in the context of an era of French history marked by a widespread sense of chaos, confusion and uncertainty, as well as terrible tragedy. To acknowledge this is not to act as an apologist for Chanel; and she herself would have been enraged at the very idea, for she declared that she had done nothing wrong in her relationship with the German. Not that he was even German, in her eyes: his mother was English, and he and Chanel spoke English together; an act of solidarity, as if they were setting themselves apart from German-occupied Paris in their own neutral territory, that of Mademoiselle’s private apartment at 31 Rue Cambon.

  Chanel examining her couture on the model Muriel Maxwell (Horst, 1939), the same black jacket and white ruff collar that the designer wore in the portrait of her by George Hoyningen-Huene, 1939 (right).

  His name was Hans Gunther von Dincklage, and he was 13 years younger than Chanel. She was not blind to the age difference – she was 58 when their affair began – as was implicit in her famous reply, recorded by Cecil Beaton, to the question of whether she had been involved with a German. ‘Really, sir, a woman of my age cannot be expected to look at his passport if she has a chance of a lover.’ It may also be that Chanel had reached a point in her life when looking into the mirror was troubling – she could not tear it up with the same disregard that she had ripped the date of birth out of her passport – although she told Paul Morand that she saw herself with harsh clarity: ‘The hardness of the mirror reflects my own hardness back to me; it’s a struggle between it and me.’ But perhaps she was unable to see her German lover without obscuring something of the truth, closing her eyes to his past, as well as his passport; just as she had been apparently blind to previous episodes in her own life.

  Von Dincklage was known to his close friends as Spatz, the German for sparrow, a nickname that suggests a swift chirpiness of manner. In fact, he was a tall, blond, distinguished-looking attaché to the German embassy in Paris. Born in Hanover on 15th December 1896, Spatz had arrived in Paris in 1928, where he gained a reputation as a suave playboy. After divorcing his wife in 1935, he had several affairs with smart, rich Parisians, and at some point encountered Mademoiselle Chanel on a social basis, for she claimed to have already known him ‘for years’ before the start of their affair.

  As for his professional activities in Paris: to some observers Spatz was simply an affable, occasionally frivolous, diplomat; to others, a German spy. Certainly, he attracted the attention of French intelligence long before the outbreak of war. According to archives quoted by Edmonde Charles-Roux, one of Chanel’s most assiduous biographers, von Dincklage ‘was under the orders of the Reich Ministry of Propaganda, using a post as press attaché as cover. His activities in Paris were authorised by a private service contract for one year, effective October 17th, 1933.’ Charles-Roux could find no record of any further espionage activities by Spatz. But another of Chanel’s biographers, Pierre Galante, himself a French secret agent for the Allies in the Second World War, was certain that von Dincklage had worked in Paris for the Abwehr, the German military intelligence organisation under the command of Wilhelm Canaris from 1935. If this is true, then the murky circumstances in which von Dincklage operated become even more clouded; Canaris had contacts within MI6 after his involvement in several assassination attempts on Hitler, and was executed by the Nazis in April 1945. Galante was sufficiently sure of his sources to claim that ‘numerous investigations made by the French counter-espionage services showed that Spatz Dincklage was an important Abwehr agent under the orders of Colonel Waag.’ The reference to Waag – a nephew of Canaris – may also have contributed to the unproven rumours that von Dincklage was a double agent, whose loyalties did not lie with Hitler.

  If Spatz’s record is ambiguous, then Coco Chanel’s is even more baffling. The police archives in Paris contain a large dossier on her, dating back to the Twenties, when she first became a target of suspicion. The intelligence on her was often wildly inaccurate – almost comically so, at times – yet also offers the occasional nugget of information. At first, the files contain routine notes of her passport details, in which her date of birth was given as 21st August 1886 (removing three years from her real age, given that she was born on 19th August 1883). In August 1923, the record shows that she successfully applied for a passport to allow her to travel ‘to England and other countries’; this followed previous travel visas granted in 1921 (for Spain on 25th July, Germany on 6th October, Holland on 10th October, and Switzerland on 15th October).

  At the beginning of 1929, Chanel came under further scrutiny, possibly because of her friendship with Vera Arkwright, who had by then divorced her first husband, Fred Bate, and married Colonel Alberto Lombardi. The Lombardis were under surveillance as suspected spies, and by association Chanel w
as also the subject of investigation. On 26th January 1929, a report was filed that described her as an ‘ancienne demi-mondaine’ who had been welcomed into Parisian society, and was now possessed of excellent contacts in the political and diplomatic world. The police intelligence recorded that she had set up in business in 1910, with the help of one of her ‘American’ friends (presumably an incorrect interpretation of Boy Capel’s nationality); that she had been the mistress of the Grand Duke Dmitri from 1921 until 1924; that she had a Rolls Royce, and paid 50,000 francs a year for her apartment at 29 Faubourg Saint-Honoré. There were also several references to the Duke of Westminster, describing his visits to Chanel in Paris, and a slightly prurient suggestion that he was attracted to her seamstresses, or ‘petites mains’, and sent them on holiday every year to his chateau in Mimizan. As it happened, Chanel prided herself on the fact that she provided annual holidays in Mimizan for her employees. ‘I organised a workers’ holiday camp,’ she told Paul Morand. ‘This experiment cost me millions, which I don’t regret. Buildings were constructed to house three or four hundred women. I paid for the travel expenses … with one month’s paid holiday, instead of the legally entitled fortnight.’

  Whatever the details of the seamstresses’ holiday arrangements, the Interior Ministry was sufficiently suspicious of Chanel and the Lombardis to order another police investigation, on 1st October 1930. However, the operation was muddled from the start, given that the instructions were to scrutinise the activities of two married couples: the Lombardis and Monsieur and Madame Chanel. Monsieur Chanel was not identified with a first name, but was allegedly the joint owner of the House of Chanel; and both couples supposedly owned neighbouring properties in Cap Martin on the Riviera. Nothing in the subsequent police report clarified these obvious errors, even though it was hardly a secret that Mademoiselle Chanel was not married. As for the Riviera properties: the most cursory of enquiries would have established that Chanel was the sole owner not only of La Pausa but also of the smaller house in the garden, where the Lombardis often stayed.

  Despite these bungling efforts, the police did uncover some intriguing aspects of the Lombardis’ lives in Paris and elsewhere. Alberto Lombardi was an Italian cavalry officer, born in August 1893, and therefore eight years younger than his wife, Vera. She had come to France in September 1914 and met Fred Bate during the First World War, while she was working as a volunteer nurse at the American Hospital in Neuilly, and he was an officer in the US army. They were married in 1916, and their daughter Bridget was born in November the following year. The marriage ended in divorce in June 1929, by which point Vera was already involved with Lombardi. Their wedding took place a few months later, on 6th November 1929; Alberto’s witness at the ceremony was the military attaché for the Italian embassy in Paris; Vera’s was Gabrielle Chanel.

  Further reports in the dossier suggest that the French police suspected the Lombardis of spying, possibly for more than one espionage service. They reported that the couple had a German housekeeper, and they made frequent telephone calls abroad – Lombardi rang Munich, Geneva and London on a daily basis, while Vera’s international calls occupied her every morning from 6 until 11. They always spoke German or English during these telephone conversations, which were sufficiently lengthy to cost between 1000 and 1200 francs a month; an unusually large expense, although the police report revealed that Vera had a substantial income from Chanel – 30,000 francs a month (at a time when a police superintendent’s salary was a tenth of that). She and her husband entertained the Duke of Westminster, amongst other European aristocrats, at their dinner parties; and Vera appeared to have useful connections with several foreign embassies, and an American diplomatic passport. They owned a Chrysler car, which she drove, and travelled frequently to London, Turin and elsewhere. The police investigation also noted that when Lombardi was at home in Paris, he spent his evenings studying and drawing maps of the French capital and its environs.

  On 20th January 1931, the Minister of the Interior himself sent a confidential letter to the head of the police service in Paris, ordering a close and discreet surveillance operation into the Lombardis and Chanel. The investigation was to be conducted with extreme vigilance, given ‘the nationality of the suspects and the nature of their actions’. But despite their best efforts, the police came up with little in the way of proof of any wrongdoings. They reported that Chanel had financed Paul Iribe’s satirical political journal, Le Témoin; and then another magazine, Futur, regarded (by the police, at any rate) as being left-wing. There was also some vague speculation that Chanel had been the mistress of a writer and financier named Henri de Zogheb (his name does not appear in any other accounts of Chanel, although his wife was a regular couture client at Rue Cambon); and a more accurate reference, in 1934, to her friendship with Winston Churchill.

  That long-standing friendship was to be of considerable significance to Chanel in the Second World War, as were Vera’s relationships with Churchill and Chanel. Both women were to call on Churchill for help, as well as offering their own help to him, which he was unlikely to have required. Some evidence of their dealings lies in the vaults of the Churchill archive in Cambridge; letters of little consequence when read in the broader context of the global events of the war, yet nevertheless fascinating in their subtle details of past friendships and divided loyalties.

  All three of them were linked, in different ways, by their affection for the Duke of Westminster, whose name also crops up often in the meticulously filed correspondence and diaries of the Churchill archives. It was on the Duke’s Scottish estate that they had fished and played card games together; at Mimizan that they had hunted boar; on his yachts that they cruised the Mediterranean; and at Eaton that they enjoyed house parties, horse riding, and pheasant shoots. Thus they possessed shared memories, as well as shared attachments; their pasts were entwined, even when the present looked ever more uncertain, and the future too dark to behold.

  Inevitably, there were times when politics overrode friendship; though Churchill was skilled at navigating the hazardous ground that divided the two. In September 1939, for example, when Bendor made a statement opposing the war against Germany, Churchill wrote to him expressing the gravest concern. ‘I am sure that pursuance of this line would lead you into measureless odium and vexation.’ Churchill did not refer directly to Bendor’s membership of The Link (a right-wing, pro-German movement), or to his reputation for anti-Semitism, but he did succeed in bringing him back into line. Thereafter, the Duke’s patriotism was to the fore, and he proved himself ready to answer Churchill’s call to do ‘all that was necessary for winning the war’. Eaton was placed at the disposal of the army, and Bendor’s allegiance to his country was never again questioned.

  The same could not be said of Vera Bate Lombardi. If Vera and her husband were double agents – as the French security services believed – then it was difficult to be certain which sides they shifted to and from. In June 1936, for example, Vera wrote to Churchill from an address in Rome, urging him to meet Mussolini, ‘the Big Man’, freshly triumphant after the Italian invasion of Ethiopia. ‘My dear Winston,’ she began, ‘How I wish you were here. I feel that in one hour you would settle everything. Pop out here disguised with a thick black beard and come and see the Big Man! I am afraid none of the English living here see things as they are because they never mix with the Italians and therefore I don’t think they quite know what is going on.’ The Italians were ‘100% positive’ in their support of Mussolini, she continued, and she strongly advised Churchill to take action. ‘This is the moment please believe me to make friends with him. He is ready to do it now and ready if approached by someone who would bring him back …’ There is no proof that Vera knew that Mussolini had been given a helping hand at the beginning of his career in politics with a weekly wage of £100 from MI5 (the payments were authorised in 1917 by Sir Samuel Hoare, the Conservative politician who served as an MI5 officer during the First World War, and who had a team of 100 British intell
igence officers in Rome at the time). Nor is there any evidence that she was aware that Hoare’s appointment as Foreign Secretary on 7th June 1935 would lead to his negotiations with the French prime minister, Pierre Laval, over territorial concessions to Italy in Ethiopia.

  Nevertheless, Vera’s own views about Mussolini were set out clearly in her letter to Churchill, despite the giddiness of her tone. ‘The important point is he is against Bolchevism [sic] so are we.’ It was, she said, in Mussolini’s interests ‘to be friends – if it is done at once with England.’ Vera was conscious of the security issues in writing to Churchill, but she was confident of getting her message to him. ‘I wish I could explain this to you but I can’t on paper. A friend of mine is taking this to you, don’t quote me just send me a postcard to say you got it.’

  On 13th June, a letter was dispatched from Churchill to Vera in Rome: ‘Thank you so much for your most interesting letter. I hope things will get a little better now.’

  Vera continued to work for Chanel in Paris until 1937, when, for reasons that remain uncertain, their working relationship ceased. ‘She kicked me out,’ Vera later wrote to Churchill. ‘It was rather sordid.’ Churchill, however, continued to see Chanel when he visited Paris, and their friendship appears to have remained as warm as it had been when she was the mistress of his friend, the Duke of Westminster. Thus it was that Coco witnessed at close hand Winston’s dismay during the crisis surrounding the abdication of King Edward VIII. Cocteau recorded in his journal that he dined with Churchill and Chanel at her suite in the Ritz towards the end of 1936. Churchill got drunk, and lamented the king’s decision to marry Wallis Simpson. His visits continued even after the outbreak of war on 1st September 1939. Chanel still had her suite overlooking Place Vendôme, and the Ritz archives record that Churchill came on a monthly basis before the German invasion of Paris, and always called on her.