Coco Chanel

by Justine Picardie

  When Momm returned to Paris, the plan began to seem less clear; in part because Chanel now wanted Vera Lombardi to accompany her to Madrid. Vera was still living in Rome – her husband was in hiding in southern Italy – and needed German authorisation to travel to Paris, and thence to Madrid. Her version of subsequent events is at odds with Chanel’s, and it is impossible to be certain which of them was giving the more reliable account. Vera described receiving a letter from Coco, delivered to her in Rome by a German officer, in which her former employer asked her to return to Paris to help her re-open the House of Chanel. She declined the invitation, and three weeks later was arrested as a British spy; for this she blamed Chanel, a charge subsequently levelled at Chanel by her biographer Edmonde Charles-Roux. But Chanel gave a different version, in which she had acted as a faithful friend to Vera, intervening on her behalf to gain her release from prison in Rome.

  Whatever the correct interpretation of their motivations, the two women travelled to Madrid together; once there, Vera was refused permission to leave Madrid and return to Italy. Her claims that she was a loyal British subject, and that Chanel was an enemy spy, seem not to have been given much credence by the embassy staff in Madrid, nor by Churchill’s staff in London. And when one examines the letter that Chanel wrote to Churchill from Madrid, it appears to be nothing more sinister than a straightforward appeal on Vera’s behalf, to allow her to return home to Italy. Nor did it further the cause of Operation Modellhut, which was abandoned without ever really getting started. This was confirmed by Schellenberg’s account of the plot to his British interrogators, although he adds a further layer of confusion by stating that it took place in April 1944.

  In fact, Chanel attempted to make contact with Churchill in early January 1944. Germaine Domenger, who packed her bags for Madrid, appears to have known the specific details of Chanel’s itinerary, and that of the British prime minister, who had fallen ill after the Tehran conference in December 1943: ‘Mademoiselle went to Madrid in the intention of meeting her friend, Monsieur Churchill, who had agreed to see her when he came back from Tehran. She had taken with her Madame Vera Bate who had joined her at the Ritz in Paris. They left Paris together, and together went to the British embassy in Madrid. The ambassador there was Samuel Hoare. The meeting with Churchill could not happen – he was very tired after the Tehran conference, he cancelled his appointments in Spain, and went back to England after stopping in Cairo and Tunisia.’

  Even so, it seems improbable that Churchill had ever agreed to meet Chanel in Madrid, and she did not refer to any such rendezvous when she sent him a letter via the British embassy there. The letter has survived, her handwriting firm on the Madrid Ritz’s headed paper. She did not date it, but when it arrived in the office of Churchill’s private secretary at Downing Street, it was accompanied by a note dated 10th January 1944 from a member of the embassy staff in Madrid. (‘You may like to pass on to the Prime Minister the enclosed letter which we have been asked to forward by Mlle Chanel, who claims to be a personal friend.’) She had addressed Churchill as ‘My dear Winston’, and most of the handwritten letter is in English, although she concluded it in French. In view of the accusations and counter-accusations that were to follow in its wake, the detailed contents of her letter are crucial:

  ‘Excuse me to come and ask a favour from you in such moments as these. My excuse must be that it is not for myself – I had heard for some time that Vera Lombardi was not very happily treated in Italy on account of her being English and married with an Italian officer.

  ‘You know me well enough to understand that I did every thing in my power to pull her out of this situation which had indeed become tragic as the Fascists had simply locked her up in prison! To do this however I was obliged to address myself to someone rather important to get her freed and be allowed to bring her down here with me.

  ‘The fact that I managed to succeed in this has placed her in a difficult position as the passport which is Italian has been visa-ed by the Germans and I understand quite well that it looks a bit suspect – But as you can well imagine my dear after 4 years of occupation in France it has been my lot to encounter many kinds of people!! How I would have pleasure to talk over all these things with you …!!’

  At this point, she reverted to French, to explain that Vera wanted to return to Italy to find her husband, and that a word from Churchill would smooth out any difficulties in Vera’s way. She hoped that his health had improved, and ended the letter on an affectionate note, along with a postscript that suggested she hoped to hear more news from his son, Randolph.

  And there the matter might have ended. However, after Chanel was safely back in Paris, Churchill’s office received further representations from Vera Lombardi. The first was a letter dated 19th February 1944, a plea that she had sent from the Ritz in Madrid to Bendor’s elder daughter, Ursula, and which Ursula had forwarded to Churchill. ‘I’ve written 3 times and wired 3 times to you and Benny to help me with Foreign Office and no reply. I can’t understand it. It is a question of life and death for Berto [Alberto Lombardi] and they have kept me 2 months here. Could you should you get this get W. [Winston] or Anthony [Eden] to help me at once. I want only to return to S. Italy immediately please ask them to OK the permit of the passport control and give a recommendation to hurry. I can’t understand as I am an exceptional case and escaped by miracle why they don’t let me back en plus I can be useful there. And you can imagine what I am going thro not knowing if B[erto] has been caught or not…’

  Churchill responded not to Vera, but to Ursula, with a telegram of brisk efficiency: ‘If her husband is in enemy-occupied Italian territory we cannot interfere in any way. If he is in the liberated part of Italy he cannot be in any danger.’

  On 8th August 1944, Vera sent another letter from Madrid, this time directly to Churchill. ‘I’ve never dared write and bother you about this interminable and nightmarish wait here, to be allowed to repatriate after my escape from Coco and the Germans,’ she began, and then did precisely that. Her husband had returned to Rome from southern Italy, having regained command of his regiment, ‘or what is left of it’, and had written to Vera in Madrid, saying that he had seen Randolph Churchill. According to Vera, Winston’s son had sent the following message: ‘Tell Vera to write immediately to my father and ask for his permission to go home to Rome. I am certain he will help her immediately.’

  ‘It’s no use writing you the history of my life,’ she continued. ‘You’ve known me so long … Since 1914 my war record was all right 7 medals etc. 16 years of hard work for Coco which was a great training and experience … She kicked me out in 1937. It was rather sordid and sad and I never saw her again until I was forcibly brought to her in Paris in December ‘44 [sic; presumably December 1943] by her orders and by the methods of her German friends and my jailers. I have written a report and given verbally all the information I can think of about the details of my imprisonment and kidnapping and I know no more. I found Coco very changed from seven years ago.’

  Her presence in Madrid was, she said, the result of her outwitting Chanel: ‘I managed to trick Coco into helping me to escape to here. No mean feat as she is pretty foxy even now. But I did it, and I naturally thought my personal difficulties were over.’ Sadly, this was not the case, when she found herself, rather than Chanel, to be the object of suspicion: ‘it couldn’t [sic] occur to me after all I had been thro for my fanatically British attitude that I could be suspected by my own people of doing something traitorish. I can’t believe it even now and beg to be allowed to defend myself. Before I was caught I had fought the Battle of Rome single-handedly with my only friend my dog Tiger beside me. Alberto on his side owing to my attitude poor thing was hounded from one hot spot to another all over the European battlefields. I can honestly say no hand was raised to help either of us …’

  Vera’s plaintive story made no mention of her previous letter to Churchill in which she had urged him to befriend Mussolini; indeed, she now claimed to be
the dictator’s sworn enemy. ‘I was on Mussolini’s own private black list as the English wife of an officer who spread British propaganda all over the Italian Army. I want to tell you Winston, I should never have got thro without your example and little snapshot of you on Benny’s fat horse.’ Despite her claim to have been entirely alone and without aid, Vera had apparently managed to keep up with the news by listening to her radio ‘at the dead of night … hidden under a blanket. And Alberto’s officer friends would creep in to cheer themselves up and get a little hope with the English news and stories about you and England.’ There, beneath the blanket, she supplemented the news on the radio with her own reminiscences, to raise the morale of the poor Italian officers. ‘They never tired of asking if it was really true I knew you well and you stood to us all as England, fair play truth and hope. One of our favourite stories was the one where you and Albert[o] and Benny ate spring onions together at Eaton. They adored that one and I always had to invent how many you had eaten and if you really liked them or had only done it to please Albert[o], because he loves them so … These simple stories did more to raise the Italian Army’s morale than you can ever imagine because you stood for Justice and Fairness, and that my England was something real after all.’

  The other account of these events is that of SS-Brigadeführer Walter Schellenberg himself, as transcribed in the final Allied report of his prolonged interrogation after the war. Unfortunately, his testimony includes the obvious factual error regarding the date of the ramshackle mission; and he has Chanel coming to meet him in Berlin, but is curiously silent about her going to Madrid. It is possible, of course, that she made both trips – for there seems to be no good reason why Schellenberg would invent a meeting with her in Berlin. That said, no other evidence exists for her going to Germany, either in British intelligence records, or in French police files during the Occupation. The latter do, however, include the intriguing detail that Chanel was referred to by German security services under the pseudonym Westminster (which may have fuelled subsequent speculation that the Duke of Westminster was to some degree aware of Chanel’s involvement in the abortive peace mission). The French police intelligence also noted that she was given two visas to travel from Paris to Spain, the first on 17th December 1943; the second on 16th March 1944.

  If one is to believe Schellenberg, Chanel’s only journey was to Berlin. She was originally brought to his attention, he said, through Theodor Momm and one of Albert Speer’s functionaries, SS-Brigadeführer Walter Schieber. ‘This woman was referred to as a person who knew Churchill sufficiently to undertake political negotiations with him, as an enemy of Russia and as desirous of helping France and Germany whose destinies she believed to be closely linked together.’ On Schellenberg’s instructions, Chanel was ‘brought to Berlin and she arrived in that city accompanied by a friend, a certain Herr [Hans] von Dincklage’. Schellenberg told his interrogators that he believed that Dincklage might have had ‘some working connection with the Abwehr’, but he was unable to confirm this fully. When Schellenberg met Chanel – along with Dincklage, Momm and Schieber – it was agreed that ‘A certain Frau Lombardi, a former British subject of good family then married to an Italian, should be released from internment in Italy and sent to Madrid as an intermediary. Frau Lombardi was an old friend of Frau Chanel and had been interned with her husband for some political reasons connected with the latter.’

  The report of Schellenberg’s interrogation continues: ‘Lombardi’s task would be to hand over a letter written by Chanel to the British Embassy officials in Madrid for onward transmission to Churchill. Dincklage was to act as a link between Lombardi in Madrid, Chanel in Paris, and Schellenberg in Berlin.

  ‘Accordingly a week later Lombardi was freed and sent by air to Madrid. On her arrival in that city, however, instead of carrying out the part that had been assigned to her she denounced all and sundry as German agents to the British authorities … In view of this obvious failure, contact was immediately dropped with Chanel and Lombardi and Schellenberg does not know whether any communication was subsequently handed to Churchill through this woman.’

  Long before Schellenberg’s interrogation, Churchill’s staff had gone to some trouble to establish their own view of the muddled affair, taking into account Vera’s letter to Churchill, and a further representation made on her behalf by Lady Charles, the wife of the British ambassador in Rome, Sir Noel Charles. After several months of top-secret correspondence between senior officials in the prime minister’s office, the Foreign Office and Allied Forces Headquarters, intelligence reports came to the following conclusions in December 1944: ‘While there is no indication … that Mme Lombardi was sent to Madrid on a specific mission by the German Intelligence Service, it is equally clear that Mme Chanel deliberately exaggerated Mme Lombardi’s social 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 herself seems to have had some curious notion of trying to arrange peace terms.’ It was also noted that while in Madrid, ‘Mme Lombardi received letters from Rome by clandestine means.’ Finally, while her exclusion from Italy was no longer considered to be necessary, she was deemed ‘by no means anti-Fascist’, and could not be ‘completely cleared of all suspicion’; a view that was communicated to the British ambassador in Rome. He was warned that ‘she is still under a cloud’, and should be treated as such.

  Meanwhile, Chanel herself had been questioned in Paris after the Liberation in August 1944 by the Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur (FFI). There has been much speculation about why she was quickly released, at a time when other women who had consorted with the Germans – ‘les collaborations horizontales’ – were savagely treated, their heads shaved and their clothes stripped, before being paraded naked through jeering mobs on the streets, and in some cases, tortured and beaten. It has generally been assumed that Churchill somehow intervened on Chanel’s behalf (although a lurid conspiracy theory has also circulated that links her release to the British Royal Family, purportedly to prevent revelations of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor’s unsavoury Nazi connections).

  But according to her maid Germaine Domenger, the questioning was brief, and Chanel was released without the intervention of any powerful protector. Domenger was with Chanel in her room at the Ritz when the message came that two men were waiting to question Mademoiselle. She remembered that Chanel asked her the time – it was 8.30 a.m. – just as the men came upstairs to escort her from her room. ‘They were perfectly correct, and asked Mademoiselle to come with them. She went to the bathroom to dress, and said, ‘Germaine, if I don’t come back immediately, ask Madame [at Rue Cambon] to tell Monsieur Churchill.’ Germaine waited at the Ritz for a little while, in a state of high anxiety, but by the time she reached Rue Cambon, Chanel had already arrived there, having been swiftly released by the FFI. There had been no need for anyone at Rue Cambon to ring Churchill, at least according to her maid, ‘because there was nothing very important with which to reproach Mademoiselle Chanel.’

  The wife of the Ritz’s manager – a woman who generally knew everything that had taken place in and around the hotel – was sure that Chanel had produced letters from Churchill, assuring her of his friendship and support, to dismiss accusations of collaboration. Even so, her circumstances in Paris remained dangerous. Malcolm Muggeridge, who had arrived in the city as a British intelligence officer on the day of its Liberation, described it in his memoir as being in ‘a virtual state of breakdown. The police, heavily tainted with Pétainism, if not collaboration, were lying low for the time being … By day, it was not so noticeable, though even then in places like the Palais de Justice and the prisons, which I had occasion to visit, there was total confusion; the judges having mostly disappeared or been arrested themselves, and the prisons being glutted with alleged collaborateurs, brought along by no one knew who, and charged with no one knew what. It was when darkness began to fall that one became aware of the breakdown; with no street-lighting, a
nd the tall houses all silent and locked and boarded up, like sightless eyes. Inside them I imagined cowering figures, hopeful of surviving if they remained perfectly still and hidden. Then, as night came on, sounds of scurrying feet, sudden cries, shots, shrieks, but no one available, or caring, to investigate. It is unknown to this day how many were shot down, had their heads shaved, piteously disgorged their possessions in return for being released, but certainly many, many thousands.’

  Muggeridge spoke with some experience, having spent several evenings with an FFI group that had taken over a large apartment formerly occupied by the Gestapo. Their leader was later discovered to have had a collaborationist record, and his second in command was ‘probably a figure from the underworld’. Yet they operated with absolute authority, arresting and interrogating suspects, and even carrying out executions. ‘If a door was not opened to them, they would batter it down; everyone cowered before them, and did what they were told … they behaved with horrifying callousness, arrogance and brutality, recalling a saying of Tolstoy to the effect that revolutionaries in authority always behave worse than those they replace because they come fresh to it.’