Lisa Chaney - Coco Chanel - An Intimate Life

Intelligent and sensitive though Boulos Ristelhueber was, he could only partly comprehend the history and complexity of the friendships recorded in his diary. Perhaps most complex of all was that between Misia and Gabrielle. Since their meeting in 1917, they had fought, hurt, envied, loved and sometimes hated each other. Gabrielle was drawn to the mad Slav in Misia, who was, like her, as Morand said, extraordinarily rich in “that singular commodity called taste.” And while they each had a gargantuan appetite for gossip and intrigue, these were just as readily used against each other. Each of them was also probably the only woman the other knew to whom she could unfailingly turn. From its initiation, their friendship had been an intensely close one, often provoking gossip. Their many mutual friends were completely divided as to whether Gabrielle and Misia were lovers. At various times, it is almost certain that they were.

Gabrielle and Misia were connoisseurs of women’s beauty, and bedding each other — or another woman, for that matter — was not something that would have concerned them in the least. They were libertarians who had lived through an era that was increasingly open to sexual experiment. Gabrielle also spent her working days molding her artistry on women’s bodies. As she would say, it was a woman’s body itself that was one of the things that inspired her designs. She was also enough of an artist that Coleridge’s assertion in many ways applied to her: “A great mind must be androgynous.” In like manner, Virginia Woolf ’s conviction was pertinent: “It is fatal for anyone who writes [or makes any art]… to be a man or a woman pure and simple; one must be woman-manly or man-womanly.” 20With time, despite loving and wanting to be loved by men, it seems that Gabrielle turned more often to her own sex for both exhilaration and consolation.

In the period immediately before and during the early part of the war, one of her lovers was the woman mentioned above, the duchesse Antoinette d’Harcourt. This beautiful and rather tormented woman apparently needed her beloved opium in order to better express her passion and intelligence. Her son, Jean, remembers Gabrielle visiting them often before the war at the d’Harcourt château in Normandy. 21Gabrielle was apparently having an affair with Antoinette. The younger woman appears to have enjoyed the extra frisson of running another female love affair at the same time. Her second lover was Arletty. One day, it seems that Antoinette misjudged her timing, or perhaps her “mistake” was intentional. As Gabrielle was leaving her tryst with the young beauty, she met Arletty arriving. 22

In 1943, Salvador Dalí wrote a roman-à-clef, Hidden Faces , cataloguing the viciousness and vacuity of much of le tout Paris. Cécile Goudreau, the sharp-tongued, knowing and witty sophisticate, is, apparently, Gabrielle, 23and Dalí depicts her as both a devotee of opium and an enticingly predatory lesbian: “As she spoke Cécile Goudreau stretched herself out and drew up the lacquered table with the smoking accessories set out on a level with her chest. Betka came and lay down beside her, pressing her own body lightly against hers. Then Cécile, with a quick casual movement, passed her arm around her neck.” 24But before Betka’s seduction, Cécile, “with the consummate skill of an old mandarin” introduces her young companion to the rituals of smoking opium.

With time, Gabrielle would become more circumspect about displaying any of these attitudes for public consumption. Indeed, as her legend would become transformed into a myth, she would staunchly deny any sexual or narcotic transgressions. During the war, meanwhile, she continued her affair with her German. Afterward, she would defiantly proclaim, “People believe that I exude rancour and malice. They believe… well, they believe anything, apart from the fact that one works, one thinks of oneself and one takes no notice of them.” 25

Gabrielle and Arletty were, of course, only two of the most high profile of many French women who had affairs with German men. These liaisons with the enemy were to become the aspect of collaboration that most exercised the popular imagination, and in the purges that followed the liberation, thousands of women would be accused of “horizontal collaboration.” Notoriously, many would have their heads shaved and swastikas daubed on their skulls. Some were paraded naked through the streets; others were murdered before they reached any formal kind of trial. Prostitutes were treated with particular harshness.

In this period, any woman even found in the company of a German risked being accused of horizontal collaboration. To a large extent, while they were sometimes “turned in” by other women, the feeling against them derived as much from the sense of personal and national emasculation felt by French men, living under an occupying army. While postwar prosecution of these women was seen as a kind of cleansing process, they were also used as scapegoats for the sense of impotence their menfolk had experienced during the war.

Whatever the resulting censure, these liaisons nonetheless took place. Frequently, these women were vulnerable in one way or another: they might be young, single or divorced, and their first contact with a German was often in the workplace. By the middle of 1943, approximately eighty thousand women from the occupied zone were claiming support from the Germans for the children resulting from these liaisons. In Gabrielle’s case, with a ruthlessness attendant upon her fear of growing old, combined with her underlying loneliness, she, too, had her own particular vulnerability.

Who then, was Gabrielle’s German lover, the man who, like her, professed to hate war?

Among certain upper sections of Parisian society, Hans Günther von Dincklage had been known for a number of years before the war, as a handsome and engaging German diplomat of eminently respectable pedigree. An acquaintance remembered that “he possessed the kind of beauty that both men and women like… His open face indicated an innocent sinner. He was very tall, very slender, had very light hair… He danced very well and was a dazzling entertainer.” 1

Von Dincklage was born in 1896. His mother, Marie-Valery Kutter-Micklefield, was English and his father, Baron Georg-Jito von Dincklage, came from an impoverished but distinguished line. The boy grew up at the family castle in Schleswig-Holstein and, at seventeen, joined his father’s cavalry regiment, the King’s 13th Uhlans. Hans Günther proved himself a gifted horseman—“his body possessed the suppleness of a rider’s”—and he excelled at the game of polo. 2After fighting on the Russian front during the First World War, he was a senior lieutenant at its conclusion. Lacking any civilian education and without a profession to look forward to, he drifted into a series of occupations. It appears he had few qualms about how principled these were. “At first he was a member of one of those volunteer corps which organized civil war in the Republic and for years threatened it with uprisings… then, during the inflation he turned his hand to profiteering.” 3

By 1924, he had joined a textile manufacturer with whom his family had important interests, and he represented the firm in various European countries, including Switzerland. In that same year, von Dincklage had seduced a well-born young woman, Maximiliana von Schoenebeck, into running away with him. Catsy, as Maximiliana was often known, was the daughter of Baron von Schoenebeck, an art-collecting aristocrat whose Schloss was at Baden. Catsy’s mother was Jewish. Her half sister, the writer Sybille Bedford, described her as “an attractive, happy-natured, life-enhancing, vital young woman,” whose family would come to believe that von Dincklage was “a disaster of lifelong consequences.” 4In 1928, the young couple moved to Sanary, in the south of France. Until a few years before a modest fishing village, Sanary had transformed itself into a select seaside resort. Discovered by a few French artists, including Cocteau, the little town had become particularly popular with von Dincklage’s compatriots.