Lisa Chaney - Coco Chanel - An Intimate Life

While the Wertheimer brothers had played rough with Gabrielle during the war, they were also distinguished losers, and the terms of the new agreement were most favorable to Gabrielle. She had the right to make Mademoiselle Chanel perfumes anywhere in the world — a serious threat to her partners she never acted upon; she was to be paid substantial damages, with interest, for the sales of Parfums Chanel in the United States, Britain and France; she was to have a kind of monopoly conceded to her in Switzerland—“her fief, her kingdom”—and she would be paid a royalty of 2 percent on all gross sales of Chanel perfumes throughout the whole world.

At the conclusion of this intense legal battle, in which Gabrielle had joined with righteous indignation, tremendous enjoyment and considerable low cunning, she was left a multimillionaire. After the agreement had been signed, she took the Chambruns back to rue Cambon for a celebration. “My dear Bunny,” she said to Chambrun, “I have already made a great deal of money in my life, but, as you know, I’ve also spent a lot. Now, thanks to you, I shall never have to work again… I’m not going to do anything anymore.” That was in 1947.

After the Nuremberg war trials for the twenty-four major criminals, in the Ministries trials, Walter Schellenberg was given the lightest penalty. In 1951, he telephoned Gabrielle. He had not long since been released from prison, and he and his wife would live in Switzerland under assumed names. Schellenberg had no money and was going to publish his memoirs. Because he was the former head of Hitler’s foreign intelligence, he was approached by a number of literary agents, and had indicated that he would provide a full record of his experiences during the war. Whether Schellenberg told his agent, or the man discovered for himself the connection between Gabrielle and Schellenberg, is not known, but the agent blackmailed Gabrielle into paying him a “large sum of money” to keep her secret.

The Swiss now told Schellenberg he wasn’t welcome there. The Schellenbergs then moved to Italy and a house on Lake Maggiore, where, apparently, all their expenses were paid by Gabrielle. Schellenberg had developed cancer, and by early 1952, he was dead. His wife would write to von Dincklage’s friend Captain Momm that “Madame Chanel offered us financial assistance in our difficult situation and it was thanks to her that we were able to spend a few more months together.” 25When Schellenberg’s memoir, The Labyrinth , was published, there was no mention of Gabrielle or any reference to the mission to Spain with Vera Bate-Lombardi, christened Operation Modelhut by Schellenberg . At the end of 1952, von Dincklage went to visit Mrs. Schellenberg in Düsseldorf in order to collect two “objects’ she wanted to give Gabrielle. We have no evidence, but these “objects” may well have been documents.

With time on her hands in Switzerland, Gabrielle had turned to thoughts of safeguarding the myth of Coco Chanel. As she was no longer perpetuating it in her couture, she wanted someone to take down a more formal record of her life than her earlier conversations with Morand. Her choice of ghostwriter was the poet and novelist Louise de Vilmorin, a formidable character with a distinguished literary reputation. Among her numerous affairs, after the war, Vilmorin became the lover of both the British ambassador Duff Cooper and his wife, Diana. In her last years, she was the companion of the writer André Malraux, by then the French minister of culture. Gabrielle admired Vilmorin’s cleverness, her urbanity and her irony, and in 1947, they sat down together in Venice to work through Gabrielle’s life.

Notwithstanding Vilmorin’s lack of moralizing, she was unable to subsume her own personality sufficiently to permit her subject to settle into the foreground. Vilmorin was also driven mad by Gabrielle’s inability to be straight about her early years. Gabrielle wasn’t pleased with Vilmorin’s account, especially when it failed to find sympathy with any of the American publishers. Their friendship did, however, weather this episode. Next, Gabrielle tried out one of the extraordinary Kessel brothers, Georges, the suicidally depressed ex-lover of Colette, whose opium-cocaine-morphine habit left him wasted before his time. This, too, was a failure. Undaunted, for the rest of her life Gabrielle tried to coax a succession of writers into helping her construct and reconstruct her legend.

Soon after Kessel, there was the journalist and novelist Gaston Bonheur, then came the young novelist Michel Déon, who had recently helped Salvador Dalí with his memoirs and brought out his own successful first novel. Michel Déon, who spent a good part of 1951 to 1953 in her company, recently described Gabrielle as an “exceptional, and at the same time exasperating and brilliant woman.” Traveling with her from Paris to Lausanne, from Roquebrune to Rome to New York, he faithfully noted down her stories. Déon’s mode was not to query what she said. She talked; he listened, and then wrote.

Déon is now a youthful nonagenarian and one of the grand old men of French literature. His irony and sly wit are countered by a prevailing warmth, and one can imagine Gabrielle being charmed by the young writer. In conversation, he alludes to a novelist’s material-gathering. Describing himself as “a robber,” Déon was fascinated by her “complexity and seductiveness.”

Telling how he listened happily to this woman forty years his senior, “who had seen and experienced everything,” he was moved by her admission that “timid people talk a great deal because they can’t bear silence in company. I’m always ready to bring out any idiocy at all just to fill up a silence. I go on, I go from one thing to another, so that there’ll be no chances for silence. When people don’t enjoy my company… I feel it right away. I have a kind of nervous flow. I talk vehemently. I know I’m unbearable.” 26

Gabrielle made a remarkable admission to a young Jean Cau, then Jean-Paul Sartre’s secretary, that in fact everyone intimidated her, from her mannequins to minor employees to the delivery boy. And she added, “Fortunately no one or almost no one knows this.”

Déon was both sufficiently observant and imaginative enough that in spite of the flaws, he found Gabrielle sympathetic and tantalizing. She asked him to come with her to Switzerland in her Cadillac, but he preferred to remain independent, making the journey in his own car, a black MG. Gabrielle traveled “with two black Cadillacs, one for her, driven by her chauffeur in livery, and another carrying her two personal maids, one of them clutching the famous jewelry box in detergent-worn hands. Traveling in convoy like this, halfway she stopped her car and got into my convertible, her head veiled in pink gauze like a motorist from the early 1900s.” 27The young novelist was paid a monthly salary by Gabrielle and occasionally returned to Paris to write an article or pay his rent. In the end, Déon spent so much time away from Paris listening to her that his girlfriend got tired of waiting and dumped him.

On several occasions, Déon met von Dincklage in Switzerland and describes how Gabrielle “continued with the pretense that he hadn’t had anything to do with the war on France.” (In 1950, a Swiss police report stated that “Today, VD still comes across as a very cold man and tries to impose his will on every occasion.”) Meanwhile, Déon wryly tells a story demonstrating how much the older man, by then aged fifty-seven, still retained his looks and his ability to ensnare. One night, Gabrielle had retired early to bed, and Déon and von Dincklage set off for a nightclub. There they met Déon’s new German girlfriend, a club dancer. Von Dincklage worked his charm so effectively that Déon was amazed at the speed with which his girl dropped him for the older man. 28