by Hal Vaughan
Over the years Misia and Chanel’s friendship would ebb and rise with time; nevertheless, they maintained a twosome sharing innumerable secrets, including the morphine they used to keep going, not to live but to hold on.
AS THE OLD WORLD of privileged aristocracy drew to a close, Chanel became a symbol of a new age. At thirty-five Chanel began inventing Coco—a woman of the Roaring Twenties. She launched her casual or “poor look” line of expensive women’s wear: traveling suits of wool jersey with a tailored blouse, sports dresses, and low-heeled shoes.
The magazines of the day reproduced her creations. It was all about jersey as America discovered Chanel. In 1918, she could afford to pay 300,000 gold francs to purchase a sumptuous villa at Biarritz—the headquarters of her business in the south of France. As early as 1915, Harper’s Bazaar declared, “The woman who hasn’t at least one Chanel is hopelessly out of fashion … This season the name of Chanel is on the lips of every buyer.”
Misia, ca. 1910. (illustration credit 2.3)
If Chanel was on the lips of fashion editors, victory against the Boche was on the minds of the Allies: English, French, Italians, and a host of others. U.S. president Woodrow Wilson entered his second term in office in March 1917 and persuaded the Congress to declare war on Germany in April. The Teddies, as the French called the Yanks, led by General John J. “Black Jack” Pershing, sailed to France as rich Parisians fled to Deauville and Biarritz, flocking to Chanel’s boutiques to try on her women’s wear.
Momentous events rocked Europe. The October 1917 revolution brought Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolsheviks to power; Turkey surrendered to the Allies; and at home, Germans were starving. By 1918 the Allies, reinforced by American troops, stopped the Kaiser’s spring offensive on the Western Front. On November 11, 1918, the Allies signed an armistice with Austria-Hungary and Germany. World War I had come to an end.
As demobilized German troops began the long slog back to their homes, Champagne corks popped in Paris. Chanel was wearing “big loose jerseys that were as simple as a boarding school girl’s frock, and extraordinarily chic.” She was also being driven about in a Rolls-Royce limo while her customers were paying 7,000 francs for a gown—the equivalent of $3,600 in today’s money.
But in Europe inflation was beginning to haunt the Continent’s financial institutions. In simple terms the cost of a loaf of bread in Germany, expressed in U.S. dollars, had doubled from 13 cents a loaf in 1914 to 26 cents in 1919. Thereafter the cost doubled, tripled, and reached an inconceivable level. The German economy was headed for a devastating crash.
TWO GERMAN CAVALRY OFFICERS, thousands of miles from Paris, were struggling to return home. Lieutenants Baron Hans Günther von Dincklage and Theodor Momm, fellow officers and friends serving in Hannover’s elite Königs-Ulanen Regiment, were among the millions of defeated German and Austrian soldiers trying to make a new life after four years of war. Each had fought on the Eastern Front as mounted cavalry officers and later in the mud and gore of the trenches as dismounted “cavalry rifles.” They returned from the east to a defeated homeland and chaotic politics. The Bolshevik Revolution in Russia and a revolt at the German naval base at Wilhelmshaven had spread across the country and forced the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II. A long-standing British blockade brought widespread starvation to the country.
In June 1919, a newly formed German Republic agreed to the terms set out by Britain, France, Italy, and the United States in the Treaty of Versailles. Germans would come to believe that the reparations demanded by the terms of the treaty were the cause of the coming devastating economic and financial hardships. Adolf Hitler would tear up the treaty when he came to power over a Germany scorched by defeat; a nation that hungered for the restoration of German greatness. “A people continually torn by inner contradictions which make them uncertain, unsatisfied, frustrated and anxious to be released from the strain of individual decision and choice. Their greatest luxury is to have someone else make the decisions and take the risks.”
Lieutenant Hans Günther von Dincklage (center) and fellow officers on the Russian front, ca. 1917. (illustration credit 2.4)
Theodor Momm’s wealthy family had owned a successful textile business in Germany and Belgium before the war. Returning to civilian life in early 1919 he took over the firm in Bavaria. Over the years Momm prospered with business ventures in Germany, Holland, and Italy. With the coming to power of Hitler, Momm joined the National Socialist Party of Germany (NSPD)—the Nazi party—and became a supporting member of the paramilitary Schutzstaffel (SS), in 1938.
Dincklage, the aristocrat and descendant of two generations of German army officers, joined the German military intelligence service. His grandfather Lieutenant-General Georg Karl had fought in the Franco-Prussian war (1870–1871) when German armies battered the forces of Napoleon III and annexed the territories of Alsace-Lorraine. Dincklage’s father, Hermann, held the rank of major of cavalry, and both father and son fought against the Allies in World War I—Spatz on the Russian front with his Königs-Ulanen cavalry regiment. Dincklage’s English-born mother, Lorry Valeria Emily, was the sister of a senior German naval officer, Admiral William Kutter. The Dincklages shared with many Germans, and certainly the German officer corps, a sense of Völkisch—a nationalistic and racist culture of war, dramatized by the trauma of 1914–1918.
With the execution of Czar Nicholas II and his family in Soviet Russia, the German Revolutionary Communist Workers’ Party was founded in Berlin. Dincklage joined a body of German officers to fight Communists with the far-right Free Corps. In 1919, members of the Free Corps murdered the intellectual leader of the German Communists, Rosa Luxemburg. Later, Hermann Göring would label the Free Corps “the first soldiers of the Third Reich.” Years later when Heinrich Himmler became Hitler’s chief of the SS, he honored the Free Corps, claiming that its officers were spiritually united with his SS.
ACCORDING TO FRENCH COUNTERINTELLIGENCE, sometime after 1919 Dincklage was recruited by German military intelligence as agent No. 8680F, working for the Weimar Republic. This parliamentary regime would last until March 1933, when the newly elected Nazi-run government put an end to the Republic.
Dincklage was the perfect candidate for a career in military intelligence and work as a clandestine agent. He was fluent in English and French, had the impeccable good manners of the old school, used men and seduced women without mercy, and turned his recruits into informers and agents. Blond, blue-eyed, of medium height (five foot eight), graceful in manner, and urbane, Spatz Dincklage had brooding good looks and a warm, outgoing personality that appealed to both sexes. But Spatz was certainly no Aryan playboy, as some biographers have cast him. He was trained by his masters in Berlin to be what every spy must be: resourceful, observant, cool, sensitive, empathetic, and able to blend in with his surroundings. He hid his end game, attracting useful targets to betray their countries by collecting strategic and tactical information and documents useful to German military and naval intelligence.
Although a spy, Dincklage was never really in danger in pre–World War II France or later, in Poland or Switzerland. Operating as a German diplomat, he was shielded by the cloak of diplomatic immunity. The worst thing that could have happened to him in peacetime was expulsion. But neither the French nor the Swiss saw much benefit to be gained from creating a fuss with the prickly Nazi regime by expelling one of its diplomats.
IN THE WINTER-SPRING of 1919–1920, the splendor of Venice cast a spell over Chanel. With its serpentine canals and alleyways opening onto grandiose, often sunny piazze and campi, Venice was a magical place in every season. Misia and José-Maria Sert would recall how Chanel prayed and wept, torn by the sorrow and humiliation of knowing that she had not been alone in Boy Capel’s affections—just as surely as the Italian countess must have wept at the news. Isabelle Fiemeyer described how Chanel prayed under the dome of the seventeenth-century church, the Santa Maria della Salute, while a thousand candles burned and flickered in the gloom under the watchful e
yes of Titian’s five saints.
As winter gave way to spring, Chanel’s spirit returned. Under the spell of the Serts’ good humor and the city’s charm Chanel came out of the dark and brooding mood that had possessed her.
IN THE TURBULENT TRANSITION from war to peace, the automobile became an affordable toy of the rich and a danger for pedestrians. As President Woodrow Wilson was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, prohibition was enacted in the United States; hordes of wealthy Americans bore down on Paris; Benito Mussolini entered Italian politics; and Communism and the Soviet revolution infected Europe, terrifying the middle and upper classes. Meanwhile, at a German military hospital in Pomerania, a little man with a toothbrush mustache was recuperating from wounds to his eyes suffered in an English gas attack at Ypres on the Western Front. His name was Adolf Hitler.
Paris was at the epicenter of the postwar cultural earthquake—a period that the French would call Les Années folles. F. Scott Fitzgerald called it the Jazz Age; Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway, the Lost Generation. Chanel biographer Pierre Galante called this moment in time “The Crazy Years: when artists hungered for glory; and the man on the street sought pleasure; and the joy of being alive after the terrors of the war to end all wars.”
By 1920, Paris was a Mecca for all those who wrote, painted, composed, and sculpted. Artists, musicians, composers, and writers were drawn to this now-jubilant city. They sought to be part of a new era—to drink and taste a life brimming with joy, amusements, and creative inventions. Parisian society met in street cafes, ateliers, and at soirees animated by brilliant conversation, music, and a passion for the arts. The city had “forgotten the black years.” Natives and expats such as Hemingway begged for something new. In painting, sculpture, discourse, and literature, there was a hunger for original work. Painters such as Picasso, Modigliani, Braque, and Marie Laurencin were the rising stars. Le Corbusier offered something brand new in dwellings; Ravel and Stravinsky in music; Diaghilev and Nijinsky in dance; Gide, Cocteau, Mauriac in literature. Jazz symbolized the heedless gaiety of the Années folles; and with the birth of mass industries, automobiles, flapper dancers, radio, and popular sports, utopia was in the air. Rich Europeans developed a credo of progress, unchained individualism, and extravagance. Money jingled and jangled in bourgeois pockets, begging to be spent. In Paris’s Montmartre and Montparnasse neighborhoods, Hemingway drank and dined with fellow expat writer Henry Miller, soaking up the ambience and plugging snapshots of the moment into their work. The F. Scott Fitzgeralds got to France in 1921 and were bored by it all. They never learned to speak but a few words of French, and Zelda and Scott returned home so their baby could be born in America in October 1921. The couple returned to France in April 1924. A year later Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby was published, and the couple settled in Paris, where they would meet Ernest Hemingway in May 1925.
The decade brought joy to some and terror to others. For Chanel, the twenties began with a family tragedy. In a letter from Canada, her younger sister, Antoinette, poured out her distress over a souring marriage to a handsome Canadian officer. The man had brought Antoinette from France to a miserable existence in the hinterland of Ontario. Adored by Chanel, the lovely and fragile Antoinette had helped launch the Chanel boutiques. But now she was begging Chanel for money to return to Paris. Despite Antoinette’s obvious unhappiness, Chanel urged her younger sister to stick with the marriage.
Chanel, 1920, the year her younger sister, Antoinette, died of the Spanish flu. (illustration credit 2.5)
Instead, Antoinette escaped with a young, good-looking Argentinean—of all people, a man Chanel knew in Paris and recommended to Antoinette’s Canadian family. They had taken the man in, and Antoinette fled with him to Buenos Aires in 1920. That same year, Antoinette died in Buenos Aires of the Spanish flu that would eventually kill more than 50 million people worldwide.
Back from Venice with Misia in the autumn of 1920, Chanel soon became a locomotive for Jazz Age fashion, determined to revolutionize women’s wear. She was bent on turning ladies from powdered objects of glamour to lithe silhouettes wearing her little black dresses and a wardrobe of flexible tubular wear like the boa. She would make a fortune as the beacon of women’s ambitions and emancipation: free to earn, to love, to live as they wished; not under the thumb of any man—“liberated from prejudices; and not disdaining homosexual adventures.” Her designer clothes inspired flappers to wear sheer short-sleeved and sometimes sleeveless dresses and to roll down their stockings to just below their knees. French and American fashion magazines such as Mademoiselle, Femina, and Minerva celebrated her creations: “Chanel launches the ravishing dark green sports suit.… Lady Fellowes sports a Chanel raw silk dress at the Ritz … Chanel launches the black tulle dress.… Chanel’s creation for evening: a white satin sheath covered over with an embroidered and beaded cloak.” Still, critics could be ferocious: “Women were no longer to exist … all that’s left are the boys created by Chanel.”
Harper’s Bazaar featured Chanel in a mass of pearls (a gift from Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich) and clad in a short, dark tunic and pleated skirt. In another photograph, she sports black silk pajamas and is biting a pearl on her necklace; and in another, she is running the pearls through her sensuous lips while reclining in the exotic setting she loved: the Coromandel screens, the leather, the silks and satins, all the while watched by a Chinese fawn and bronze lion.
Ever on the prowl for male conquests, Chanel set her sights on Igor Stravinsky, Pablo Picasso, the Russian Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich, and the man she would love and be loved by for a lifetime, Pierre Reverdy. It’s a shame that Chanel and Ernest Hemingway never got together. Her fingernails might have popped Papa’s inflated macho ego. For however independent, Chanel, the creative dynamo, needed admiration and to be loved. She had to have a man at her side, always seeking love yet never finding satisfaction. In one of her maxims she wrote: “not to feel loved is to feel rejected regardless of age.”
Misia Sert viewed her friend as an enigma: “For the wealthy woman she imposed an expensive simplicity … and made millions doing it. Chanel’s genius, her generosity, the façade of the self-made woman, her devastating sarcasm, and her ferocious capacity for destruction terrified and intrigued everyone.”
Terrified or not, Paris celebrated her genius for creating women’s high fashion, costumes for ballet and amusements, decorations, and jewelry. Ever the innovator, Chanel created a feminine personage not seen before on the stage of Paris society.
She mastered the art of social climbing—and Parisians delighted in it. “An orphan denied a home, without love, without either father or mother … my solitude gave me a superiority complex; the meanness of life gave me strength, pride; the drive to win and a passion to greatness … and when life brought me lavish elegance and the friendship of a Stravinsky or a Picasso I never felt stupid or inferior. Why? Because I knew it was with such people that one succeeds.” Such was the self-made image Coco had of herself and the legend she wanted the outside world to believe—that of a heroic Marianne audaciously battling daunting odds to achieve fame, wealth, power, and acceptance by the elite.
By the early 1920s Chanel was no longer a well-known trades-person—she was now a celebrated patron of the arts. She underwrote Le Sacre du Printemps, a ballet choreographed and produced by Serge de Diaghilev, and took into her new house, Bel Respiro in the Paris suburb of Garches, the family of Igor Stravinsky, the Russian composer and pianist. When Chanel wasn’t dallying with Misia at her new apartment, a stone’s throw from the Champs-Élysées, she enjoyed flirting with Stravinsky. The swank flat at 29, rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré was decorated by Chanel and Misia in tones of “beige, white and chocolate brown.” In her designer residence with gardens stretching to the avenue Gabriel, Chanel created a center for Parisian cultural life—quite a step up from her days as just a clever playgirl in the Royallieu follies staged by Étienne Balsan. The crème de la crème of Paris—artists, aristocrats, the very rich and oft
en notorious characters from the demimonde—mixed at her lunches, dinners, and soirees. Chanel’s set often began the evening imbibing at the Boeuf sur le Toit (Ox on the Roof), a Right Bank night spot located on the rue Boissy-d’Anglas, just a few hundred meters from Chanel’s residence. From the moment the Boeuf opened in 1922, it was “the place,” boasting the smallest stage, “but the greatest concentration of personalities per square meter.” The Boeuf became a Mecca for the Parisian creative elite, “a place where people threw their arms about each other to say hello while glancing over each other’s shoulders to see who else was there … and where wit was as compulsory as Champagne: ‘One cocktail and two Cocteau’s.’ ” Later, Chanel and her entourage headed for supper chez Chanel or to dance at the Count de Beaumont’s. “Love affairs between writers and artists (real or fake) and millionaires started and ended during those evenings. They drank, they danced, and loved.” And Chanel held her own among them, including the Serts, the Beaumonts, Stravinsky, Picasso, Cocteau, Diaghilev, and Pierre Reverdy, a down-and-out modern poet of the day admired by artists and writers Jean Cocteau, Max Jacob, Juan Gris, Braque, and Modigliani. Chanel’s newfound friends appreciated her “talent, wit and intelligence … her minimalist approach to fashion was not far from their abstract ideas of art.”
Sergei Diaghilev with Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971) in Seville during their Ballets Russes collaboration, ca. 1923. (illustration credit 2.6)
Between 1921 and 1926 Chanel began an on-again off-again love affair with Pierre Reverdy. In time their relations matured into deep friendship that would endure more than forty years. She often served as the poet’s inspiration: “You do not know dear Chanel how shadows reflect light; and it is from the shadows that I nourish such tenderness for you. P.”
