Lisa Chaney - Coco Chanel - An Intimate Life

One day, in the summer of 1942, the Ritz was suddenly “alive with German soldiers” deployed outside the entrance; inside, they had been ordered to search every room. Early that morning, two Resistance fighters had appeared and kidnapped Gabrielle from her suite. According to the management, their entry was a mystery (in fact, the manager’s wife was a Resistance sympathizer), and Gabrielle, who had been blindfolded, had no idea where she was taken. Three hours later, having been questioned about her relationship with Lifar and von Dincklage, she had been brought back to her room. The Resistants had told her that collaborators could face disfigurement or death, and instructed her to change her ways: “You are a French woman, and an important one. You are good for France, and France has been good to you.” 33

Von Dincklage was furious at Gabrielle’s treatment and, with General Carl-Heinrich von Stülpnagel, demanded an explanation from the Ritz director. He said he could give none.

Meanwhile, a woman who worked in the Chanel boutique, and who had met von Dincklage on a number of occasions, recalled that she had never seen him in a uniform. Perhaps in Tatiana du Plessix’s anger she misremembered von Dincklage’s outfit. If, however, he did wear a uniform, he took care never to do so when he visited Gabrielle at her apartment on rue Cambon. The couple also spent time together outside Paris. Holidaying in Switzerland more than once, they traveled through to the occupied zone to stay at La Pausa. In the autumn of 1942, the architect Robert Streitz, a member of an important Resistance network, asked von Dincklage to intercede on behalf of a Jewish physicist, arrested by the Gestapo. Apparently, von Dincklage tried to help, but someone else would be more successful in bringing about the physicist’s release. 34

Contrary to the impression that Gabrielle had nothing to do with any Germans except von Dincklage, the son of her previous lover Antoinette d’Harcourt remembers going several times to rue Cambon with his mother for entertainments given by Gabrielle. At these gatherings, there were a number of German officers present: “I don’t know exactly what their ranks were but they were very senior officers. Most people spoke in French, not German, but they had a German accent.” 35It appears that on these occasions, Antoinette d’Harcourt was intent on gathering information for a nationalist organization, the Synarchist Empire Movement (Mouvement Synarchique d’Empire), a secret right-wing anticommunist movement, launched in 1922.

In the following spring, 1943, we find that von Dincklage made the extraordinary offer — as a secret police document put it — of the “services of Coco Chanel (lesbian), from the famous perfume house” in order to exploit her Anglo-Saxon relations in aid of German intelligence services. 36

We will almost certainly never know to what extent Gabrielle was aware of von Dincklage’s activities. In having an affair with a German, she had made all sorts of accommodations. And if, like her friends, she turned a blind eye to much that went on, it is most likely that Gabrielle conducted her liaison with her German in much the same way Arletty conducted hers. Hers was a collaboration of chosen “ignorance.”

Most important, one should bear in mind Gabrielle’s primary motivation during the war: like Colette — and millions of others in France — she was determined to survive. Whatever our thoughts about this, it does not follow that Gabrielle was prepared to spy for the Germans. Did von Dincklage ask her outright? One suspects that he knew she would have refused and, with his accustomed deviousness, was offering her services to his superior without her knowledge. (While in no way proof of her innocence, Gabrielle was always strongly pro-British and had wept when Germany occupied France.)

When she and von Dincklage returned from La Pausa at the end of that summer, 1943, the Maquis (the rural French Resistance) sent word that von Dincklage was now on their death list. Busily consorting with the enemy, the dancer Serge Lifar was also back on the Resistance list. At this point he and von Dincklage secretly moved into the Ritz, where they now lived intermittently with Gabrielle. Although, in the liberal view of Ritz personnel, it was hardly worth more than passing notice that Coco Chanel was living with two men, what gave added spice was that both her men were known to be actively pro-German. The wife of the manager said that Gabrielle

… never appeared anywhere in the hotel with either of them. Nobody gave a damn, but she really worked hard to keep them secret. I knew about them because I had a direct pipeline through the floor maid. She kept me up to the minute. She was envious, not because the Madame was a great couturier — that didn’t mean a thing to her — but living with two impressive guys was her idea of paradise. What luxury! 37

In early 1944, Antoinette d’Harcourt was arrested by the Gestapo. She had begun the war as an ambulance driver on the battlefields, but then used the ambulance to ferry people to the border between France and Switzerland, for example. Her son, Jean, says: “After a year she was “burned,” so she had to stop — those activities are probably the reason why she was arrested.” 38The young duchess was treated harshly and placed in solitary confinement for six months in the notorious Fresnes prison, then moved to another one, Romain-ville, also outside Paris. From there she narrowly avoided deportation to Buchenwald concentration camp.

Arletty’s biographer describes Synarchy’s (or Synarchism’s) work as “fairly pro-Mussolini… [it] had as members some of the most powerful figures in the French establishment intent on maintaining national French unity.” 39Preferring, as Jean d’Harcourt says, the idea of “revolution by the elite rather than revolution from the street… Synarchy’s aim was to serve as a link between Pétain and Laval on the one side, and on the other, de Gaulle and Massigly [one of de Gaulle’s senior diplomats] and therefore avoid a bloodbath” when France was liberated. 40

When Antoinette’s son, Jean, then only a boy, was permitted to visit his mother, they were both so overcome that for the permitted fifteen-minute visit, they could do no more than remain clasped in each other’s arms. Jean d’Harcourt recalled how “after the war, my mother refused to speak with Chanel and never set foot in her shop again.” 41Before the war, the duchess had been dressed by Gabrielle. Jean also said:

My mother greatly admired Arletty. She considered that her affair with the German was just a sentimental matter… There was never a betrayal on her part… My mother was faithful in her friendships. The only person with whom she broke up because of the war was Chanel, who played a double or triple game. 42

While one appreciates Antoinette d’Harcourt’s suspicions about Gabrielle, unfortunately proof will almost certainly never be possible — especially as Antoinette d’Harcourt’s papers were all burned in a fire.

In 1943, Gabrielle was to take part in a bizarre episode. Possibly at von Dincklage’s suggestion, she apparently decided she should help negotiate a peace settlement. Gabrielle was by no means alone in believing that this would be the speediest end to the war. (Her friendship with men of standing, such as Westminster and Churchill, may have encouraged her.) Her first step was to summon Captain Momm to the rue Cambon to lay out her plan. Momm, we remember, was von Dincklage’s friend and the person who had interceded on André Palasse’s behalf to get him out of prison.

Gabrielle’s plan had her act as messenger to initiate peace talks between Churchill and the German High Command. Churchill was due to visit Madrid after the Tehran Conference, and Gabrielle said that he had agreed to see her on his way back. At first stupefied, Theodor Momm was eventually won over and took her “peace proposal” to Berlin. With Momm as her emissary, Gabrielle’s scheme was at first brushed aside. But then the new director of German foreign intelligence, the ambitious young colonel Walter Schellenberg, became interested. Risking execution if discovered, he was himself looking for a way to negotiate with the Allies, and agreed, naming Gabrielle’s mission Operation Modelhut (model hat). Even more extraordinary than that, in early 1944, Gabrielle apparently visited Berlin to meet Walter Schellenberg, with von Dincklage as her escort. (Our one piece of evidence for this is Schellenberg’s testimony in his subsequent trial.) 43