Sleeping with the Enemy: Coco Chanel's Secret War

by Hal Vaughan

  TO THE NEW YORK TIMES REPORTER, Chanel seemed “rather bewildered at the scores of interviewers and reception committee members who crowded into her suite.” But rather than bewildered, she was sick. She had come down with influenza, but that didn’t deter her from spraying the reporters and guests with a little atomizer of an as-yet-unnamed—or rather, unnumbered—new scent. She revealed to her guests that she never went to the movies; that real perfume is mysterious; and that men who wear perfume are disgusting. She later suggested, with no explanation: “If blonde, use blue perfume.”

  Chanel soon set out for the West Coast. Goldwyn had made all the arrangements for her triumphant arrival in Hollywood. There would be a special white railroad car to whisk his star to sunny California, a gala reception for the Chanel party on the Los Angeles train platform with Greta Garbo on site to peck her cheek, and then a soiree on the studio lot, where Chanel would meet the Hollywood headliners of the day. As the flashbulbs burst, Chanel was sweet-talked and kissed by Erich von Stroheim, Claudette Colbert, and Katharine Hepburn, who was filming Little Women. In the background, three thousand walk-on faces looked on from gigantic shooting stages.

  With Ina Claire, when Chanel worked in Hollywood dressing Goldwyn’s stars, 1931. (illustration credit 4.1)

  It was all very grand and probably very dull for Chanel, but the newshounds were entranced and gushing. Chanel’s biographer, Paris Match editor Pierre Galante, wrote how they tasted real Champagne, caviar, and “gawked at Paris mannequins and laughed at French wit.” The press cabled fulsome dispatches about Chanel’s entourage and her introduction to Garbo: “Two Queens Meet,” they proclaimed. While Polish-speaking Misia soothed an obsequious Goldwyn—calling Sam “Mother”—Chanel learned the ways of Hollywood. According to Galante, “The star actors and actresses had to be pious, docile and smiling or be banished—with millions of Americans out of work, the studios had imposed a strict code of morality and good conduct—divorce was forbidden and famous names were photographed for the newsreels and movie magazines in simple homes, visiting their church or pastor.” Hollywood casting decreed: “actors [were] strong as policemen, pure as Boy Scouts and temperate as Quakers; yet despite the American ‘Code of Decency’ that studio detectives tried to enforce, behind the layers of veils, debauchery, drug abuse and orgies were a way of life.”

  Gloria Swanson costumed by Chanel, in the 1931 film Tonight or Never. (illustration credit 4.2)

  Robert Greig and Gloria Swanson, dressed by Chanel, in the film Tonight or Never. (illustration credit 4.3)

  Paul Iribe (far right) in 1924 as Hollywood director of the film Changing Husbands. Iribe and Chanel fell in love in 1931 when he helped manage her affairs. He was the director of her right-wing publication Le Témoin that carried his extraordinary illustrations of Chanel. Iribe died with Chanel at his side in 1935. (illustration credit 4.4)

  Coco soaked up and reveled in the behind-the-scenes technical details of making films—the huge soundstages, lighting techniques, and makeup. She designed costumes while her workers dressed the actors, just as she had dressed the principals of many ballet-operas in Paris. Her assistants turned their hands to creating an exuberant fluff the technicians could exploit. She knew her business, but she also knew her limitations. “I never was a dressmaker; I am in admiration of those who can sew; I never learned; I stick my fingers.”

  Chanel had hoped to apply her rigorous standards, and the London Sunday Express correspondent in Hollywood described lounge pajamas as “bad taste and no lady should be seen dead in them.” Yet in 1931’s Tonight or Never, the third Hollywood film Chanel gowned, the first scenes show Gloria Swanson in lounge pajamas. Chanel and her staff admired the Hollywood dressers even if they thought their costuming kitschy. It was obvious from the beginning that Chanel’s Hollywood adventure was bound to fail. She told biographer Charles-Roux: “The Hollywood atmosphere was infantile; one day we were entertained by a famous actor who had painted all the trees in his garden blue in our honor … I laughed at it but it affected Misia. Erich von Stroheim impressed me only because he was taking a personal revenge—a Prussian persecuting Jewish inferiors and Hollywood was mostly Jewish. These Jews from Central Europe found the actor [von Stroheim] a familiar nightmare.”

  Chanel designed costumes for Jean Renoir’s 1939 masterpiece, Rules of the Game, featuring Mila Parély (right) and Nora Gregor. (illustration credit 4.5)

  IN THE END, Chanel saw herself as too refined for the studio glitter of Hollywood, the lavish façades, the tastes of the moguls and their coteries of actors and actresses, and the clash of egos among the silver-screen divas. Her narrow jersey tailored suits with white collars and cuffs were not glamorous enough. Her vision lacked the flagrant sexiness sought by the players and movie directors to enhance their films. The discreet elegance of Chanel’s costumes seemed bland on cinema screens. Diffidently, Chanel said: “I only like ‘cop’ movies.” In fact, her costumes drew little comment, and the films she worked on were not successful.

  From left: Madge Evans, Ina Claire, and Joan Blondel in the 1932 film The Greeks Had a Word for Them. Chanel designed the actresses’ wardrobe. (illustration credit 4.6)

  Before sailing home Chanel returned to New York. The big city amused her. There she met with the two most important fashion editors in America: Carmel Snow of Harper’s Bazaar and Margaret Case of Vogue—women who would dictate what American women would wear for years to come.

  Chanel needed more. She visited Saks Fifth Avenue, Lord & Taylor, Bloomingdale’s, and Macy’s. But the store that really fascinated her was the flagship of ready-to-wear, New York’s S. Klein, On the Square—located at Manhattan’s Union Square.

  There Chanel discovered Klein’s self-service methods: women of all professions and ethnic origins trying one garment after the other under the surveillance of gum-chewing salesgirls and surrounded by signage warning, DO NOT STEAL! OUR DETECTIVES ARE WATCHING! DO NOT STICK GUM UNDER THE WASHROOM SINKS!

  It was an America unknown to Chanel as she surveyed the thousands of dresses cut like French clothes—only the fabrics were different. The big money was made from copying and a massive investment in advertising and promotion. It was Chanel’s lifetime lesson in mass merchandising.

  After barely a month in America, Chanel sailed home on the French ocean liner SS Paris, along with a host of Americans including Franklin D. Roosevelt’s mother. Coco’s short American adventure was sweet and sour. She deposited a handsome fee in her bank account, and the publicity gave her a leg up over her competitors in the American market, even if her Hollywood sojourn was less than a triumph. After all the ballyhoo and PR hype, Chanel dressed Gloria Swanson for Goldwyn’s Tonight or Never, the Goldwyn Girls in the musical comedy Palmy Days, and the three lead actresses, Ina Claire, Joan Blondell, and Madge Evans, in The Greeks Had a Word for Them. According to The New Yorker Chanel left Hollywood in a “huff.” The magazine claimed the movie tycoons thought Chanel’s costumes weren’t sensational enough. “Chanel made a lady look like a lady,” but “Hollywood wants a lady to look like two ladies.”

  FIVE

  EXIT PAUL, ENTER SPATZ

  “Struggling with the devil … who wears the deceitful face of hope and despair.”

  —T. S. ELIOT, “ASH WEDNESDAY”

  RETURNING FROM HOLLYWOOD, Chanel craved an immediate change of scenery and went to London for “a bath of nobility.” Bendor, still under her spell, lent Chanel, rent free, a nine-bedroom eighteenth-century house with ornate plaster ceilings, cornices, and pine paneling at 9 Audley Street to be the headquarters for her growing business in the United Kingdom. He spent more than £8,000 to redecorate the house to her taste, and lent her 39 Grosvenor Square for an exhibition of her designs to raise money for the Royal British Legion. Five to six hundred people came every day to see Chanel’s dresses, even though none were for sale. She was welcomed by the Churchills, including debonair young Randolph, who escorted her to the opening of the Legion’s exhibition.

&nbs
p; Chanel was beginning to show her age. Her face had hardened, her neck was taut; overwork and incessant Camel cigarettes along with middle age left their mark. Vain and slightly cross-eyed, she refused to wear glasses in public. (In a rare photograph by Roger Shall, we see Chanel wearing spectacles while watching one of her fashion shows from the steps of rue Cambon, sometime in the 1930s.) Yet fashion icon Diana Vreeland thought Chanel in the 1930s was “bright, a dark golden color—wide face with a snorting nose, just like a little bull, and deep Dubonnet red cheeks.” No matter her looks, Chanel was now a queen enjoying her power; aggressive in speech, chattering, and scoffing: “I am timid. Timid people talk a great deal because they can’t stand silence. I am always ready to bring out any idiocy at all just to fill up silence. I go on, I go on from one thing to another so that there will be no chance for silence. I talk vehemently. I know I can be unbearable.”

  Age had not weakened Chanel’s taste for making money. In 1931, Janet Flanner wrote in a New Yorker profile how “each year [Chanel] tries not only to beat her competitors but to beat herself … Her last annual chiffre d’affaires [turnover] was publicly quoted [not by her] as being one hundred and twenty million Francs, or close to four and a half million dollars” ($60 million now). Flanner’s reporting encountered obstacles: “Because she sensibly never talks, never gives interviews, or admits anything, and because she cannily distributes her money in a variety of banks in several countries, it is impossible accurately to approximate the fortune Chanel has amassed. But London City rumors it at some three millions of pounds [around $230 million in today’s money] which in France, and for a woman, is enormous.”

  More definite figures lacking, perhaps the closest estimate of her financial genius is contained in a statement accredited to the banking house of Rothschild, a European establishment discerning enough to have made a fortune even out of the battle of Waterloo. “Mademoiselle Chanel,” they are reported as solemnly saying, “knows how to make a safe twenty-percent.”

  CHANEL COULDN’T COUNT without using her fingers, but she was sure the Wertheimer brothers were cheating her out of her share of profits from the sale of her perfumes. She increasingly resented the deal she had made in 1924, when the Wertheimers took control of Société des Parfums Chanel—the company that owned her fragrance and cosmetic businesses. For the next twenty-five or so years her litany became: “I signed something in 1924. I let myself be swindled.” Her accountants tried to assure her that the accounts of Société des Parfums Chanel were in order and that the penury of dividends was not due to chicanery but rather to the massive investment necessary to make Chanel No. 5 a world brand. But she was convinced that she was being robbed by pirates—Jewish pirates.

  Suzanne and Otto Abetz with René de Chambrun (in the middle), seen here walking away from a hospital in Versailles in September 1941 after visiting Pierre Laval when the minister was recovering from the attempt on his life. (illustration credit 5.1)

  She hired a young French-American attorney, René de Chambrun, to fight the Wertheimers. A direct descendant of the Lafayette family, Chambrun had dual U.S.-French citizenship. In 1930, Chanel asked him to initiate a series of lawsuits aimed at harassing the Wertheimers—a feeble effort to regain control of the company. The trials would drag on for years, and Chanel would lose. Chambrun would be her friend and attorney for the next fifteen years and throughout World War II. An accused Nazi collaborator, Chambrun would play a major role in Chanel’s wartime adventures during the German occupation.

  CHANEL’S CREATIVITY never waned. She abandoned the tweeds, the sportswear, and the garçonne look, championing feminine dresses for afternoon wear. She appeared at her sumptuous evening parties in vaporous combinations of tulle and lace. Despite the world economic crisis, Chanel launched a collection of costume jewelry inspired by Bendor’s gifts of real jewels. It was a tribute to her ingenuity, the good taste of Étienne de Beaumont, Count Fulco della Verdura, and Parisian artisans she hired. Years earlier, Beaumont, a French aristocrat of the highest order, had invited her to come to his opulent Paris soirees, but some of the high-society women in attendance had slighted her. Later, she told the painter Marie Laurencin: “All those bluebloods, they turned their noses up at me, but I’ll have them groveling at my feet.” In fact, while ridiculing these women, she envied them.

  Beaumont and Fulco della Verdura soon launched a line of dazzling Chanel costume jewelry. Out of the vault came some of her lovers’ glittering gifts. The gems were removed from their settings and used to design a line of Chanel jewelry, including a copy of a Russian antique necklace with multiple strands of pearls set off with a rhinestone star medallion; clusters of sapphire-blue glass and turquoise studs attached to gold metallic chains; an enamel cuff in black or white studded with glass stones; and an Indian bib of red beehives, green glass balls, green leaves, and pearls imitating the rare rubies and emeralds of a Bendor gift. The line was a smashing success. Chanel now instructed wealthy society women: “It’s disgusting to walk around with millions around the neck because one happens to be rich. I only like fake jewelry … because it’s provocative.” When the costume jewelry sold well, she brought out a line of real jewels in diamonds, diamond broaches, necklaces, bracelets, and hair clips.

  ADOLF HITLER, founder and leader of Germany’s Nazi Party, became German chancellor in January 1933. He moved swiftly to consolidate his power, to become “dictator” in March of that year, and to fill key posts with devoted Nazi Party followers. Hermann Göring, on the führer’s orders, created a Nazi secret police, the Gestapo, and later a modern German air force, the Luftwaffe. Germany’s next most powerful man was a thirty-six-year-old “relentless Jew baiter and burner of books” Joseph Goebbels—the master propagandist for the Nazi Party. Goebbels now became the Reich Minister for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, giving one man control of the communications media: radio, press, publishing, cinema, and other arts.

  In early 1935, Hitler appointed Admiral Wilhelm Canaris to head the Abwehr, the German military espionage service. Canaris cooperated with his Nazi bosses—proposing that Jews be forced to wear a yellow star as a means of identification. Later, Himmler’s SS organization under Walter Schellenberg swallowed the Abwehr.

  One of the first appointments Goebbels made was to name Abwehr master spy Baron Hans Günther von Dincklage as a “special attaché” at the German Embassy in Paris. Operating under diplomatic immunity, Dincklage set about building a Nazi propaganda and espionage network in France. He would retain his diplomatic status until after World War II.

  The French intelligence and police establishments knew about Dincklage and had been collecting information since 1919 about his work as Abwehr agent F-8680, operating on the Riviera since 1929. Their reports told of how Dincklage, returning from Warsaw, Poland, joined Catsy to employ their good looks and charm in recruiting new agents to penetrate the French naval establishment at Toulon, France, and Bizerte, Tunisia. By 1932 the Dincklages were settled at “La Petite Casa” in Sanary-sur-Mer.

  Writing about Dincklage’s power of attraction, Catsy’s half sister Sybille Bedford ventured, “Spatz Dincklage’s secret charm appeared nonchalant … and he had a beauty that pleased both women and men.” Catsy soon seduced Spatz’s tennis partner, French naval officer Charles Coton, into a long-term intimate relationship. Later she would set her sights on French naval engineer Pierre Gaillard, who spied for the Dincklages at the strategic French naval base at Cap Blanc, Bizerte, Tunisia. The two naval officers became the backbone of the Dincklage espionage network in the Mediterranean, and Coton became the Dincklages’ secret courier between Sanary-sur-Mer, Toulon, and Paris.

  WITH HITLER INSTALLED as Reich chancellor, Dincklage took up official duties at the German Embassy in October 1933—he was now driving a gray two-seater Chrysler roadster, and he and Catsy were settled in an apartment in one of Paris’s chic neighborhoods. It was a new adventure for Dincklage. He now had offices at the German Embassy on the rue Huysmans. Under diplomatic cover,
Dincklage went about building a black propaganda campaign and espionage operation financed by Berlin. The embassy provided direct and protected communication to and from his masters in Berlin, and the diplomatic courier service handled the voluminous reports and news clippings that all spies must pouch to headquarters. It didn’t take long for the Dincklages to settle in. Within weeks of arriving in Paris, two Berlin moving vans delivered furniture to an apartment. Their German maid (an Abwehr-trained agent), Lucie Braun, joined the couple. She was issued a French identity card stating that she worked for an accredited diplomat at the German Embassy.

  A handsome Baron von Dincklage, ca. 1935, at the German Embassy in Paris when he worked with the Gestapo. (illustration credit 5.2)

  French police and military intelligence observed the Dincklages’ new lifestyle: two apartments located in very chic and expensive sections of Paris—hardly affordable to the Austrian refugee that Dincklage sometimes claimed to be. In 1934 the Sûreté of the Ministry of the Interior labeled Dincklage a Nazi propagandist with agents buried in the German office of tourism (located on the avenue de l’Opéra). Dincklage had also planted German engineers as technicians in French factories in Paris suburbs to collect industrial intelligence.