Before the Wertheimers left France, they had asked their non-Jewish business associate Félix Amiot, an industrialist, to front for them as the new co-owner. Nazi storm troopers brought Amiot in for questioning and accused him of serving as a cover for the Wertheimers. Coco followed up with a letter to the administrator who decided what would happen to businesses left by anyone who had fled France. She insisted that her perfume business was “still the property of Jews” and had been “legally ‘abandoned’ by the owners. I have,” she wrote, “an indisputable right of priority.” However, the Wertheimers had transferred ownership to Amiot before leaving the country, and the arrangement was judged “legal and correct.” So their partnership with Coco remained the same.
Sometimes Coco went to her villa on the Riviera. The architect who had designed La Pausa was a member of the local French Resistance group. Once, he asked her to intervene on behalf of a friend who had been arrested by the Gestapo, the German secret police, and she agreed. Unbeknownst to Coco, the cellars of her villa were used to hide a transmitter and to provide a way station for Jews escaping from France to the Italian border. Today, we still don’t know if she was a Nazi sympathizer or not. But what we do know is that what concerned her most was keeping and building her fortune after a childhood of poverty.
In the summer of 1943, Coco dreamed up a scheme to bring about peace talks. She spoke to Spatz’s colleague Captain Theodor Momm and proposed that she act as a messenger to her old friend Winston Churchill, who was now the British prime minister. Captain Momm later testified that at first he hesitated but then decided to report her idea to the chief of Nazi intelligence in Berlin. Some of the senior commanders secretly wanted to negotiate with the Allies to end the war. Momm arranged for Coco to travel to Madrid, Spain, and meet with the British ambassador and Churchill. News had spread that Churchill would stop in Madrid on his way back from a conference in Tehran, Iran, with U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt and Soviet premier Joseph Stalin.
Coco’s mission was code-named Operation Modellhut (Model Hat). She arrived in Madrid in December and checked into the Ritz hotel. At the British embassy, she learned that Churchill was ill. Word came that he had caught a “bad cold” after the conference in Tehran. But really he had pneumonia. From Tehran he had flown in secret to General Dwight D. Eisenhower’s headquarters in Tunisia. Exhausted and in pain, Churchill suffered a heart attack and stayed in Tunisia to recover. Did he seriously consider meeting Coco? All we know is that the British ambassador in Madrid told her that Churchill could see no one because of his grave illness. So Coco’s plan failed, and she returned home.
At last, on August 25, 1944, French and American troops liberated Paris. Coco had just turned sixty-one. In the streets people laughed and sang “La Marseillaise,” the French national anthem. But those who had collaborated with the Germans were punished. Thousands were imprisoned. Malcolm Muggeridge, a British intelligence officer stationed in Paris, said, “Everyone was informing on everyone else.” Women who had been the girlfriends of Germans had their heads shaved and were paraded through the streets past jeering mobs. Coco, of course, had been romantically involved with a German too.
Muggeridge marveled at her shrewd move to escape punishment. She put up a sign in the window of her boutique announcing that her perfume was free for American GIs. They immediately lined up for bottles of Chanel No 5 “and would have been outraged if the French police had touched a hair on her head.” Booton Herndon, an interpreter in the Army Corps of Engineers, wrote, “There had been a shortage of [perfume] during the Occupation, of course, like anything else, but now suddenly it appeared. At the time the magic words in perfume were Chanel No 5.” An American wartime nurse remembered that she couldn’t bring home “an awful lot” of souvenirs. But there was one thing she treasured: “Chanel, the perfume.”
Still, two men from the Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur arrested Coco and took her in for questioning. Before Coco left with them, she told her maid whom to contact if she didn’t come back immediately. Coco was released three hours later, “after a telephone call from Churchill.” She received an urgent message from someone unknown saying, “Don’t lose a minute . . . get out of France.” Within hours she took off in a chauffeured limousine for the safety of Switzerland.
Dior’s New Look, the “Bar Suit,” designed in 1947 and photographed in 1954
WHAT A HORROR!
After the war officially ended in 1945, Coco divided her time between Lausanne, Switzerland, and Paris and Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, France. For the next few years she led a quiet, leisurely life, taking long walks, shopping, and dining out. “She was deeply bored,” recalled her grandniece Gabrielle, who visited her. Coco began to dictate stories about her life to a biographer, Pierre Galante. Galante interviewed Coco’s friends and listened to anecdotes. Fashion didn’t seem to interest Coco anymore, until one time when she was having lunch with a friend. The woman wore a blouse that Coco didn’t like. Galante recorded that “Coco could not resist taking a pair of scissors and making a few changes on the spot.”
Meanwhile, Elsa Schiaparelli had returned to Paris and was running her couture house again. Her faithful staff had kept the business alive during the war years. But Schiap had a hard time competing with younger designers, mostly men: Christian Dior, Jacques Fath, and Cristóbal Balenciaga. On February 12, 1947, Christian Dior presented his spring collection. The models swished out in feminine dresses featuring nipped-in waists and full skirts made of yards of fabric. Underneath the voluminous skirts they wore tight corsets, padding, and petticoats to achieve the silhouette. Carmel Snow, editor in chief of Harper’s Bazaar, said to Dior, “Your dresses are wonderful, they have such a new look!” The name “New Look” stuck.
Just take a look at me.
Coco read about Dior’s triumph in the Swiss papers. She was furious. “Dressing women is not a man’s job,” she declared. “Fashion has become a joke, the designers have forgotten there are women inside the dresses. . . . Clothes must have a natural shape.” Nevertheless, women loved the sensational outfits. Over the next few years Dior was acclaimed as the most famous designer in the world.
Coco’s devoted friend Misia Sert came to see her in Switzerland. Misia was going blind and had become addicted to drugs. Shortly after a visit in September 1950, Misia went home to Paris, and her condition sharply declined. She became bedridden, and her maid sent for Coco, who arrived in time to sit with Misia as she died. The next morning Coco prepared Misia for the funeral. She did her makeup and hair, dressed her in white, and arranged her on a bank of white flowers—medieval French queens had worn white rather than black to express deepest mourning. Coco said of Misia, “She has been my only woman friend.”
By 1953 Coco’s partners in the perfume business, the Wertheimers, were designing new offices in New York City, where they had relocated and set up a company during the war. They asked Coco to come help them, so she traveled to the United States. Upon her arrival, reporters asked her what she thought of Dior and the New Look. Coco was wearing one of her own suits that she had designed before the war, and she answered, “Just take a look at me.”
For three months she stayed with her friend Maggie van Zuylen. One day Coco saw Maggie “looking as though she’d been trussed into a green satin Dior evening gown, barely able to move.” Coco was appalled. “All her life she had fought against the straitjacket of the corsetry that women had been forced to wear . . . and here were ‘these gentlemen,’ the new big names in fashion, turning the clock back.”
When Maggie’s daughter, Marie-Hélène, brought home a debutante gown for a ball, she tried it on for Coco. The boned and corseted bodice of the strapless dress cut across the young woman’s front. “What a horror!” exclaimed Coco. Right then and there, she grabbed her trusty scissors and created a dress made from a huge red taffeta curtain. At the ball everyone asked Marie-Hélène who had designed her dazzling red gown. “That’s what made [Coco] decide to go for a comeback,” claimed Marie-Hé
lène years later.
I WILL SHOW THEM
In 1953, the Wertheimers agreed to finance Coco’s plan to reopen her fashion house, because they believed it would boost sales of Chanel No 5. At age seventy, Coco sailed home to France and began assembling a team. She corresponded with Carmel Snow at Harper’s Bazaar and wrote, “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.”
Rumors swept through Paris. “Mademoiselle Chanel is going to come back! Chanel is returning to couture!”
Coco told reporters, “I still have perhaps two or three things to say.”
Coco pinning and fitting the shoulder of a coat directly on a model backstage at the Chanel show, 1962
She hired fitters, cutters, pattern makers, and seamstresses. Coco asked some of her former employees to “come quickly.” Manon Ligeour, who had started working for Coco at the age of thirteen and had headed her top workroom during the 1930s, would direct her new atelier. As a young apprentice, Manon had vacationed at Coco’s villa at Mimizan. Now Coco completely trusted Manon, who made the clothes that Coco herself wore. For nearly a year Coco worked on the new collection.
Mademoiselle was a terror.
After a quick breakfast in her old suite at the Ritz, she would dash over to rue Cambon. Models in white smocks would be waiting. “One by one they were called before her, and with her face scrunched in a determined grimace, her scissors on a cord around her neck, a pile of pins nearby, once again she set to work.”
Margot McIntyre, a Seattle-born model, remembered that “once la pose began—the period when the individual dresses are created and re-created—no one left the salon without a very good excuse. Mademoiselle was a terror, commanding, ridiculing, pinching and watching, standing up, sitting down, on her knees, on all fours.”
“You’re already tired?” Coco snapped at the models after several hours.
She was always snipping or taking out sleeves, driving the tailors absolutely crazy.
Coco was obsessed with sleeves. She made them follow the shape of the arm. “A sleeve isn’t right unless the arm lifts easily,” she said.
“Coco was a nut on armholes,” recalled Diana Vreeland. “She never, ever got an armhole quite, quite perfect, the way she wanted it. She was always snipping and taking out sleeves, driving the tailors absolutely crazy.” Every detail mattered.
The stripes on the sleeves of a plaid jacket, for example, had to perfectly match the stripes on the back. The silk linings of the jackets had overstitching to make the garments hold their shape. Coco had borrowed the idea from jackets worn by stable boys at the racetrack. And she added fine chains to the bottoms of the linings to make the jackets hang just right.
Coco seated on her mirrored staircase, watching the reactions of the audience as the models present her fashion show
Some jackets had false cuffs made of the same material as the sleeveless blouse underneath. A woman wearing the outfit would look finished yet not be too warm. Gilt buttons were embossed with one of Coco’s favorite symbols: the double C, camellias, or a lion’s head representing her star sign, Leo.
Skirts had to move easily, with the pockets falling at the right place for hands to slide into. Zippers were concealed in the stripes of a plaid. Chains weighted the hems of the skirts, too, so that they would hang perfectly, like the jackets. On the night before her show, Coco ripped apart seams and redid them to make sure “the underside is as perfect as the outside.” She lay stomach down on the floor and had the models parade in front of her to check that every hem was stitched correctly.
Once you’re faded, it takes more than a name and memories of past triumphs to put you back in the spotlight.
Coco continued to cut her models’ hair as part of the ritual of offering a new collection. But one of her favorite models, Suzy Parker, objected. Although Suzy “worshiped at Chanel’s feet,” and “learned to stand like Chanel” and “wear her clothes with ease, [she] never went so far as to cut off her long, glamorous red hair, which Chanel deplored.”
At last, on February 5, 1954 (once again to coincide with her lucky number), Coco presented her new collection. It included suits for daytime and evening as well as gowns made of black lace and gold brocade. As always, she crouched at the top of the mirrored staircase with a few friends as the models glided through the salon below. Coco was anxious. Fearful. Eager to be loved and accepted through her work as she had never been in her miserable childhood. When the show ended, there was a moment of icy silence. People left. Coco immediately dashed upstairs to her private apartment to avoid visitors. She was devastated. The French were not ready to forgive her for associating with a German during the war. In a note written by Elsa Schiaparelli’s biographer, Palmer White, he recalled France’s “antagonism” toward Chanel because of her “pro-Nazi activities.”
European critics sneered that her clothes were dated.
“Chanel Dress Show a Fiasco!” read the headlines in London’s Daily Express. “How sad are these attempts to make a comeback,” wrote Marge Proops in the Daily Herald. “Once you’re faded, it takes more than a name and memories of past triumphs to put you back in the spotlight.”
French Vogue hated the collection.
Americans, however, loved it.
Life magazine ran a four-page spread about Coco’s comeback. “At 71, 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.”
In March, Bettina Ballard, the Paris editor of American Vogue, featured three pages of Chanel’s clothes. Ballard opened the issue with a navy blue jersey schoolgirl/schoolboy suit and crisp white blouse from the comeback collection. “I wanted this costume for myself,” she said. So she bought it and wore it to a meeting in New York, where retailers saw the latest Paris fashions. Bettina stood up in her Chanel suit and said, “Mark my words; this is the beginning of a new thing.”
And it was. Orders poured in from the United States. Coco said, “I want to go on, go on and win.”
When she presented her second return collection in the summer of 1954, French critics at last applauded her. “Paris Has Rediscovered Her Chanel!” declared one headline. “Chanel Is Once Again Chanel!” said another.
Dior’s New Look faded away. Women were tired of cinched-in waists. They wanted something “graceful and easy” to wear that gave them confidence.
Chanel’s “comeback suit,” 1954, with a cardigan jacket and pocketed skirt
A fashion critic wrote, “Chanel has the secret of making those timeless clothes . . . which always look elegant.”
When an interviewer asked Coco about the poor response she had first received, she said, “I thought, I will show them! In America there was great enthusiasm. In France I had to fight. But I did not mind. I love very much to battle. Now, in France they are trying to adapt my ideas. So much the better!”
Just as Dior had predicted that Paris would “go down in a burst of splendor,” Coco had come back “in a burst of splendor.”
EPILOGUE
A Very Bad Dead Person
During the 1950s, Coco worked on new collections. Never tiring, she kept her models standing in “la pose” for long hours as she draped and pinned cloth. She refined her classic suit, varying details and fabrics, and created iconic accessories.
On February 5, 1955, Coco introduced a quilted leather shoulder bag with a chain strap. She named the bag the 2.55 for the date of its launch. Next she presented sling-back pumps with contrasting toe caps.
Bettina Ballard wrote, “Now there is a whole new generation aware of the good-taste connotations of the ‘Chanel Look.’” Coco’s following included movie stars as well as celebrities such as Princess Grace of Monaco and Jacqueline Kennedy, wife of president John F. Kennedy.
In September 1957, Coco received an award from the Neiman Marcus department store for being the most influential designer of the twent
ieth century. The poor little peasant girl from an orphanage had conquered the world of fashion.
When asked why she had been in retirement for so long, Coco replied, “Never was I really in retirement in my heart. Always I observed the new clothes.”
Chanel’s 2.55 quilted leather handbag with a chain strap designed for comfort
Throughout the 1960s, when Coco was in her eighties, she competed with young designers. “[Yves] Saint Laurent has excellent taste,” she said. “The more he copies me, the better taste he displays.” Despite severe arthritis, she kept wielding her scissors.
Coco said, “I must think of my collection, because that’s the future.” On Sunday, January 10, 1971, she said to her assistant, “I’ll be working tomorrow.”
That evening Coco died. She was eighty-eight. Her maid dressed her in a white suit and blouse. Masses of white flowers covered her casket. She had requested to be buried in Lausanne, Switzerland, because she felt safe there. At the funeral, her models paid tribute to her with a floral sculpture in the shape of a giant pair of scissors that sat on top of the coffin.
Coco had once said, “I would make a very bad dead person, because once I was put under, I would grow restless and would think only of returning to earth and starting all over again.”
Coco Chanel Page 5
