Sleeping with the Enemy: Coco Chanel's Secret War Read online

  ALSO BY HAL VAUGHAN

  Doctor to the Resistance

  FDR’s 12 Apostles

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2011 by Hal Vaughan

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Vaughan, Hal.

  Sleeping with the enemy : Coco Chanel’s secret war / by Hal Vaughan.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-95703-0

  1. Chanel, Coco, 1883–1971. 2. Fashion designers—France—Biography. 3. World War, 1939–1945—Secret service—Germany. 4. Espionage, German—History—20th century.

  I. Title.

  TT505.C45V38 2011

  746.9′2092—dc23

  [B] 2011020430

  Jacket design by Carol Devine Carson

  v3.1

  This book is dedicated to those French men and women

  who, though bent by the Nazi yoke, refused to collaborate.

  And as always, for Phuong.

  I long to hear the story of your life,

  which must captivate the ear strangely.

  —SHAKESPEARE, THE TEMPEST

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  List of Illustrations

  PROLOGUE

  ONE: METAMORPHOSIS—GABRIELLE BECOMES COCO

  TWO: THE SCENT OF A WOMAN

  THREE: COCO’S GOLDEN DUKE

  FOUR: A HOLLYWOOD DIVERTISSEMENT

  FIVE: EXIT PAUL, ENTER SPATZ

  SIX: AND THEN THE WAR CAME

  SEVEN: PARIS OCCUPIED—CHANEL A REFUGEE

  EIGHT: DINCKLAGE MEETS HITLER; CHANEL BECOMES

  AN ABWEHR AGENT

  NINE: CHECKMATED BY THE WERTHEIMERS

  TEN: A MISSION FOR HIMMLER

  ELEVEN: COCO’S LUCK

  TWELVE: COMEBACK COCO

  EPILOGUE

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgments

  ILLUSTRATIONS

  1.1 Boy Capel, Léon de Laborde, and Chanel, ca. 1908. (Edmonde Charles-Roux collection)

  1.2 Arthur “Boy” Capel with Chanel, Balsan’s Château Royallieu. (Collection Sirot-Angel)

  1.3 Cartoonist SEM’s illustration of Chanel at Boy Capel’s mercy, ca. 1910. (SPADEM, Paris)

  2.1 Misia Godebska, 1905. (Lebrecht Music & Arts)

  2.2 Composer Igor Stravinsky and ballet dancer Vaslav Nijinsky, Paris, 1911. (Lebrecht Music & Arts/Corbis)

  2.3 Misia dressed as a man, ca. 1910. (Lebrecht Music & Arts)

  2.4 Lieutenant Hans Günther von Dincklage and fellow officers, ca. 1917. (Courtesy Michael Foedrowitz)

  2.5 Chanel, 1920. (Pictures, Inc./Getty)

  2.6 Impresario Sergei Diaghilev and composer Igor Stravinsky, Seville. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

  2.7 Jean Cocteau with Lydia Sokolova, Anton Dolin, Leon Woizikowsky, and Bronislava Nijinska, London. (Photo by Sasha. Hulton Archive/Getty)

  2.8 Grand Duke Dimitri, 1910. (RIA Novosti)

  2.9 The hallmark Chanel No. 5 flacon. (Musée Carnavalet/Roger-Viollet)

  2.10 Pierre Wertheimer, 1928. (Keystone/Gamma Rapho)

  2.11 The poet Pierre Reverdy, 1940. (Albert Harlingue/Roger-Viollet)

  3.1 Lady Dunn with Chanel and her dog Gigot. (Condé Nast Archive/Corbis)

  3.2 Bendor, Duke of Westminster, and Chanel at the Grand National racetrack, May 1924. (Hulton Archive/Getty)

  3.3 Chanel and Vera Bate, ca. 1925.

  3.4 Chanel and Sir Winston Churchill at the Duke of Westminster’s Eaton Hall, 1929. (Hugo Vickers Collection)

  3.5 Chanel in hunting dress with Winston Churchill and his son, Randolph, in France, 1928. (UPI/Bettmann News Photos, New York)

  3.6 Serge Lifar, as Vestris, wearing a costume designed by Chanel, June 1939. (Boris Lipnitzki/Roger-Viollet)

  3.7 Maximiliane von Schoenebeck, “Catsy,” the wife of Baron von Dincklage, ca. 1930. (Photo by Walter Bondy. Ville de Toulon, France, Bibliothèque Municipale, Fonds Bondy)

  3.8 French naval lieutenant Charles Coton and wife, Léa, mid-1930s. (Courtesy Walter Bondy)

  4.1 With Ina Claire, Hollywood, 1931. (Bettmann/Corbis)

  4.2 Gloria Swanson in Tonight or Never. (United Artists/Photofest)

  4.3 Robert Greig and Gloria Swanson in Tonight or Never. (United Artists/Photofest)

  4.4 Paul Iribe, 1924. (Paramount Pictures/Photofest)

  4.5 Mila Parély and Nora Gregor in Rules of the Game, 1939. (Cine Classics Inc./Photofest)

  4.6 Madge Evans, Ina Claire, and Joan Blondel in the 1932 film The Greeks Had a Word for Them. (United Artists/Photofest)

  5.1 Suzanne and Otto Abetz with René de Chambrun, September 1941. (Roger-Viollet)

  5.2 Baron von Dincklage, ca. 1935. (Courtesy Mme Edmonde Charles-Roux.)

  5.3 Le Témoin illustration.

  5.4 “Spatz” von Dincklage and Hélène Dessoffy, the French Riviera, ca. 1938. (Photo from Them, by Francine du Plessix Gray)

  6.1 Chanel’s employees struck and closed her business, 1936. (Keystone/Gamma-Rapho)

  6.2 Misia Sert, 1937. (Photo François Kollar)

  6.3 The Duke of Windsor and his bride, the former Wallis Simpson, greeted by Adolf Hitler, 1936. (Courtesy Archives Ullstein Bild)

  7.1 Chanel’s grand-niece Gabrielle Palasse. (Mme Gabrielle Palasse Labrunie private collection)

  7.2 André Palasse, Chanel’s nephew, Paris. (Mme Gabrielle Palasse Labrunie private collection)

  7.3 Nazi führer Adolf Hitler, Eiffel Tower, June 1940.

  7.4 The Nazi swastika above the building of the French Interior Ministry in occupied Paris, January 1940. (Ullstein Bild/Roger-Viollet)

  7.5 German officers, Paris Opéra, ca. 1940. (Keystone France/Gamma-Rapho)

  7.6 Correspondence from German Military Headquarters, Paris. (Archives nationales, Paris, AJ/40/871)

  7.7 List of civilians allowed by Nazis to room at the Hôtel Ritz. (CARAN AJ/40/871)

  7.8 Dining room of the Hôtel Ritz, 1939. (Roger-Viollet)

  7.9 Starving Parisians searching for food and scraps in the garbage, September 1942. (LAPI/Roger-Viollet)

  8.1 French document revealing Vaufreland was “an intimate friend of Chanel.” (Centre historique des archives)

  8.2 Dincklage’s protégé, Baron Louis de Vaufreland. (French National Archives)

  8.3 Police intelligence report showing Chanel’s Abwehr agent number and code name. (Préfecture de Police, Paris, BA1990, “Chanel”)

  8.4 Sonderführer Albert Notterman, 1947. (Private collection)

  9.1 H. Gregory Thomas, World’s Fair, New York, 1939. (New York World’s Fair 1939–1940 records, Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.)

  10.1 Abwehr major Theodor Momm, ca. 1947. (Courtesy Michael Foedrowitz.)

  10.2 German Abwehr agent Count Joseph von Ledebur-Wicheln, 1944. (National Archives, Kew)

  10.3 SS headquarters, Berlin. (Courtesy Michael Foedrowitz)

  10.4 SS general Walter Schellenberg, Himmler’s chief of SS intelligence. (Courtesy Michael Foedrowitz)

  10.5 Document from Chanel’s police file. (Préfecture de Police, Paris, France. BA1990, “Chanel
”)

  10.6 SS captain Walter Kutschmann in civilian dress. (From the private collection of Michael Foedrowitz)

  10.7 Letter from Henry Hankey forwarding Chanel’s letter to Winston Churchill’s personal secretary, January 1944. (Charwell Trust 20/198)

  11.1 German officers, Paris, August 1944. (Keystone/Getty Images)

  11.2 Two women bearing Nazi swastikas on their shorn heads. (Three Lions/Getty Images)

  11.3 Top secret personal telegram from Winston Churchill in Moscow, October 1944. (The Sir Winston Churchill Archive Trust, CHAR 20/198A)

  11.4 Top secret dispatch from British diplomat, December 1944. (The Sir Winston Churchill Archive Trust, CHAR 20/198A)

  11.5 Letter from Allied Force Headquarters, Paris, reporting to London, December 1944. (Chartwell Trust)

  11.6 Dincklage, 1944. (Swiss National Archives)

  11.7 Index card from French archives with Chanel’s name handwritten. (French National Archives)

  11.8 A jury trial in session, Palais de Justice, Paris. (Albert Harlingue/Roger-Viollet)

  11.9 Rosencrantz estate near Kiel. (Courtesy Michael Foedrowitz)

  12.1 Walter Schellenberg, 1945. (U.S. National Archives).

  12.2 Chanel and Dincklage, Switzerland, 1949. (Bridgeman Art Library)

  12.3 The rue Cambon staircase from the Broadway musical Coco, 1970. (Cecil Beaton—Camera Press London)

  12.4 Chanel, in spectacles, watches a fashion show from her spiral staircase on rue Cambon. (Photo 12/DR)

  12.5 Cecil Beaton sketch. (National Portrait Gallery, London)

  12.6 Claude Pompidou, 1962. (Jean Mounicq/Roger-Viollet)

  epl.1 Delphine Seyrig in Last Year at Marienbad. (Astor Pictures Corp./Photofest)

  epl.2 Jeanne Moreau in Louis Malle’s 1958 film The Lovers. (Zenith International Films/Photofest)

  epl.3 Romy Schneider in Boccaccio ’70. (Embassy Pictures Corp./Photofest)

  PROLOGUE

  DESPITE HER AGE she sparkles; she is the only volcano in the Auvergne that is not extinct … the most brilliant, the most impetuous, the most brilliantly insufferable woman that ever was.

  Gabrielle Chanel had barely been laid to rest in her designer sepulcher at Lausanne, Switzerland, when the city of Paris announced that France’s first lady and Chanel’s admirer and client, the wife of French president Georges Pompidou, would open an official exhibit celebrating Chanel’s life and work in Paris in October 1972. Shortly before, Hebe Dorsey, the legendary fashion editor of the International Herald Tribune, reported the “homage to Chanel” probably would be canceled or, at the very least, postponed. Dorsey revealed that Pierre Galante, an editor at Paris Match, would soon expose shocking documents from French counterintelligence archives. Dorsey alleged that Chanel had had an affair during the German occupation of Paris with Baron Hans Günther von Dincklage: “a dangerous agent of the German information service—likely an agent of the Gestapo.”

  Chanel, the epitome of French good taste, in bed with a Nazi spy—worse yet, involved with an agent of the hated Gestapo? To the French, and especially to French Jews, veterans of the Resistance, and survivors of SS-run concentration camps, German collaborators were pariahs or, worse, fit to be spat upon. Granted, for years fashionable Paris had gossiped that Chanel had shacked up during the occupation with a German lover called Spatz—German for sparrow—at the chic Hôtel Ritz where Nazi bigwigs like Hermann Göring and Joseph Goebbels were pampered by the Swiss management. But the Gestapo? Hadn’t Chanel dressed Mme Pompidou? Hadn’t she been honored at the Élysée Palace? How could such an icon of French society have bedded a “German spy”? It was hard to believe. Even though tens of thousands of French men and women collabos had escaped punishment, being a willing bedmate and helpmate of a German officer still reeked of treason in 1972. Their liaison would last over ten years, leading one observer to wonder if Chanel “cared about political ideology but wanted instead to be loved and to hell with politics.”

  The timing for the proposed national celebration of Chanel’s life and work could hardly have been worse. On top of everything else, the U.S. publisher Alfred A. Knopf had just released Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940–1944 by American historian Robert O. Paxton. This study of the Vichy regime under Marshal Philippe Pétain left many French scholars chagrined and upstaged on their own academic home turf. Based on material from German archives—because the French government had forbidden access to the Vichy archives—Paxton’s book proved that Pétain’s collaboration with this particular cohort of full-blooded Nazis had been voluntary rather than forced on Vichy.

  For the Pompidou political machine facing an election in just twenty-four months and for the Chanel organization confronting allegations that its founder had been linked to the Gestapo, postponement of the “homage to Chanel” was the only option. There was also solid and damning evidence of her collaboration in an upcoming biography by Pierre Galante—scheduled for publication in Paris and New York. A former resistance fighter and husband of English actress Olivia de Havilland, Galante claimed his information was based on access to French counterintelligence sources.

  Le Tout-Paris was talking about the book before it was even published. Edmonde Charles-Roux, a Goncourt Prize–winning novelist, was outraged by Galante’s revelations. She labeled his claims nonsense: [Dincklage] “was not in the Gestapo.” Spatz and Chanel, she maintained, just enjoyed an amorous friendship. (Madame Charles-Roux was also writing a Chanel biography and presumably did not have access to Galante’s sources.)

  Marcel Haedrich, an earlier Chanel biographer, claimed that Spatz was merely a bon vivant who “loved eating, wines, cigars, and beautiful clothes … thanks to Chanel he had an easy life … he waited for her in her salon … he would kiss Chanel’s hand and murmur: “ ‘how are you this morning?’ ”—and because the two spoke English together she would say, “He is not German, his mother was English.”

  Asked by Women’s Wear Daily, the New York garment industry paper, in September 1972: “[W]as Chanel, Paris’s greatest couturière, really an agent for the Gestapo?” Charles-Roux replied, “[Dincklage] was not in the Gestapo. He was attached to a commission here [in Paris] and he did give information. He had a dirty job. But we must remember, it was war and he had the misfortune to be a German.” Years later, Charles-Roux learned that she had been duped—manipulated by Chanel and her lawyer, René de Chambrun.

  THE LIBERATION OF PARIS in August 1944 began with bloody street fighting, pitting German troopers against a scruffy, ragtag band of General Charles de Gaulle’s irregular street fighters called Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur (the FFI), which Chanel would dub “les Fifis.” They were joined by Communist fighters, Francs-Tireurs et Partisans (FTP), and civilian police officers. Facing German forces, some resistants were armed only with light police weapons; others had World War I–vintage revolvers and rifles; a few had Molotov cocktails and weapons seized from dead Boches. The street fighters were often young students, their sleeves rolled up on bony arms and wearing sandals. Their FFI, FTP, and police armbands served as uniforms.

  In the last week of August the U.S.-equipped Free French Army, led by General Leclerc, nom de guerre for Philippe de Hauteclocque, relieved the Paris insurgency, and the German garrison surrendered. After four years of often-brutal occupation, Paris was liberated—free from the threat of arrest, torture, and deportation to concentration camps. Church bells rang, whistles blew; people danced in the streets. Except for some provinces, such as Alsace and Lorraine, France was under General Charles de Gaulle’s Free French.

  A thirst for revenge gripped the nation in the last days of August. Four years of shame, pent-up fear, hate, and frustration erupted. Revengeful citizens roamed the streets of French cities and towns. The guilty—and many innocents—were punished as private scores were settled. Many alleged collaborators were beaten; some murdered. “Horizontal collaborators”—women and girls who were known to have slept with Germans—were dragged through the streets. A
few would have the swastika branded into their flesh; many would have their heads shaved. Civilian collabos—even some physicians who had treated the Boche—were shot on sight. The lucky were jailed, to be tried later for treason. Finally, General de Gaulle’s soldiers and his provisional magistrates put a stop to this internecine war.

  The twentieth-century monstre sacré of fashion, Chanel was among those marked for vengeance. The French called it épuration—a purge, a cleansing of France’s wounds after so many had died and suffered under Nazi rule.

  Within days after the last German troopers left Paris, Chanel hurried to give out bottles of Chanel No. 5 to American GIs. Then the Fifis arrested her. Truculent young men brought her to an FFI headquarters for questioning.

  Chanel was released within a few hours, saved by the intervention of Winston Churchill operating through Duff Cooper, the British ambassador to de Gaulle’s French provisional government. A few days later, she fled to Lausanne, Switzerland, where she would later be joined by Dincklage—still a handsome man at forty-eight. Chanel was sixty-one years old.

  DE GAULLE’S government soon ordered Ministry of Justice magistrates to use special courts to try those suspected of aiding the Nazi regime—a crime under the French criminal code. Among the first to be tried were Vichy chief Philippe Pétain and his prime minister, Pierre Laval. Both were found guilty of treason and sentenced to death. De Gaulle spared Pétain because of his old age, but Laval was shot.

  During the postwar process of cleansing, French military and civilian courts tried or examined 160,287 cases in all. While 7,037 people were condemned to death, only about 1,500 were actually executed. The rest of the death sentences were commuted to prison sentences.