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

  THE CÔTE D’AZUR was an animated, bubbling place to celebrate the holiday season and the New Year. Wealthy Continentals rubbed elbows with the English elite—the Churchills and the Grosvenors, who in the 1920s boom enjoyed unheard of luxury at the watering holes of Monte Carlo, Deauville, and Biarritz in France. The Wertheimers, Pierre and Paul, preferred the racecourses of Tremblay, Ascot, and Longchamp. It had been a bonanza year for the brothers: their investment in Félix Amiot paid off when the French government nationalized Amiot’s firm, earning the Wertheimers an unexpected windfall profit of 14 million francs. (Prophetically, Amiot, a future business partner, would protect the Wertheimer fortune in the bad days ahead.)

  A year before, in 1923, Adolf Hitler organized the Munich Beer Hall Putsch. When it failed, Hitler was arrested, tried, convicted of high treason, and sentenced to serve five years’ imprisonment with eligibility for parole in nine months.

  In cell 7 of the Landsberg Prison fortress, Hitler dictated a part-biographical, part-political treatise to his acolytes. Mein Kampf (although often translated as “My Struggle” or “My Campaign,” its meaning could also be conveyed as “My Fight”) told of Hitler’s “Four and a Half Years [of Fighting] Against Lies, Stupidity and Cowardice.” Released in early 1925, the first volume, a bible for the NSPD, laid out the Nazi creed of nationalism, anti-Semitism, and anti-Communism. That same year Hitler reorganized the Nazi party; his often-brilliant oratory began exciting millions of Germans and Austrians—including many disaffected World War I veterans.

  A few months later, Joseph Goebbels was appointed Nazi district leader of Berlin. As France and Britain celebrated joyfully the Christmas season of 1924, chaos and hyperinflation was devouring the social fabric of the Reich. Riots swept the country as people’s savings were wiped out. In 1919 a U.S. dollar bought 5.20 German marks. By December 1924 the U.S. dollar fetched 4.2 trillion German marks. A loaf of bread in 1924 was now priced, unbelievably, at 429 billion marks. A kilo of fresh butter cost 6 trillion marks. Pensions became meaningless. People began demanding to be paid daily so they wouldn’t see their wages devalued by a passing day. Thousands became homeless and German culture collapsed, destroying the German middle class.

  THREE

  COCO’S GOLDEN DUKE

  Mademoiselle is more than a Grande Dame, she is a Monsieur.

  —FRENCH VOGUE, MARCH 2009

  THE AFFAIR BEGAN when Vera Bate played cupid during that 1923 Christmas season. She begged Chanel to accompany her to dinner with her childhood chum, the Duke of Westminster, aboard his yacht anchored in the harbor of Monte Carlo. (One biographer claimed that the duke paid Vera handsomely for the introduction.) Chanel snubbed the invitation until her friend Grand Duke Dmitri arrived for a visit. He chided Chanel, “It would have amused me to visit the yacht.” A few nights later, Vera and Dmitri, with Chanel in tow—perhaps feigning reluctance—were ferried out to the schooner Flying Cloud. Although the yacht had been built to resemble a seventeenth-century pirate vessel, it was now decked out with glittering Christmas decorations.

  Gypsy violins, hired for the occasion, played on as the duke showed Chanel his four-mast sailing schooner with its decks of scrubbed white oak and pristine white sails. Belowdecks, cabins resembling a small English country home, paneled in pine and oak, were furnished with Queen Anne furniture, upholstery and curtains of hand-blocked fabrics. The ship’s bulkheads sported a collection of fine paintings and prints. The setting befitted Bendor, born Hugh Richard Arthur Grosvenor. Six feet tall and broad-chested, Bendor had been a war hero, a hunter—horseman—slayer of stag and boar, and an ever-charming host with impeccable manners and vast wealth. Slowly, deliberately, the duke set out to capture Chanel’s heart.

  It is easy to imagine why Bendor was attracted to Chanel; she was petite, olive-complexioned, sexy, witty, and brainy, with an acid tongue. At forty-two, she often played a sexy tomboy imposing her own luxurious simplicity. Chanel could more than hold her own with a man who plied his charm with solemn English ladies or easy tarts.

  Over a splendid dinner and late dancing at a Monte Carlo cabaret, Bendor discovered a woman who commanded masculine attention—her nostrils flaring in sudden anger, her gravelly voice rising and then returning to a benevolent lassitude. Sometimes the kitten, sometimes the vamp, and often the vixen, Chanel’s moods shifted. She must have melted Bendor’s knees. She later described him as “a man of great generosity and courtesy like many well-mannered Englishmen—at least until they land in France. The essence of refinement when ladies were present—and when they were not: a guttersnipe and a cunning hunter … he had to be to hold me for ten years.”

  Chanel was in the midst of designing the costumes for Le Train bleu—a Diaghilev-Cocteau dance-opera about to debut at the Ballets Russes in Paris. On board the Flying Cloud with its Christmas decorations in the background, Bendor and guests must have chatted about Cocteau’s imaginary blue train. The opera’s plot had everything to please the duke, who loved both Paris and the Riviera, and who a few months later would see the ballet and admire Chanel’s costumes.

  The real train was run by the French rail system and offered regular service for the British and French elite trying to escape a grim, wet, and cold London or Paris for the sun-drenched Côte d’Azur. Cocteau’s play featured seaside romances, gigolos and their women dressed by Chanel in beach and tennis wear, boating outfits, golf knickers, and striped sweaters. The cast performed to the music of Darius Milhaud with background beach scenery by Henri Laurens. The main curtain was the work of Pablo Picasso. The whole production was intended to be a dip into new art and great fun.

  The holiday soon ended. Chanel and Vera returned to Paris to prepare Chanel’s spring collections and to finish Le Train bleu costumes. Coco insisted she had no time for Bendor, or pretended so to Vera, who was still acting as the duke’s procurer. From Eaton Hall, Bendor’s vast country estate in the village of Eccleston near Chester in England, the duke wooed Chanel with billets-doux carried to Paris by his footmen, along with baskets of strawberries, spring crocuses, gardenias, and orchids, all picked by his hand from the Hall’s hothouses and gardens. He even plied her with fresh Scottish salmon caught on his property and flown to Paris.

  Shortly after their outing with Bendor at Monte Carlo, and despite Bendor’s ardent long-distance wooing of Chanel, Vera arranged for her to meet a handsome, blue-eyed, almost effeminate thirty-year-old friend of Bendor’s, who also happened to be Vera’s cousin and childhood friend—Edward, Prince of Wales. On the eve of Good Friday, Chanel and the prince met at a memorable dinner party hosted by the Marquis Melchior de Polignac and his wife, Nina Crosby, at Chez Henri, a chic Paris restaurant off the Cercle Gaillon behind the Paris Opéra. Chanel struck again. Edward, known to family and close friends as “David” or “Bunny,” was smitten, begging Coco to call him “David.”

  The next evening, hours before another dinner both were to attend, David dropped by Chanel’s apartment for a pre-dinner cocktail. Years later, Diana Vreeland, former editor in chief of Vogue, would insist that the “passionate, focused, and fiercely independent Chanel, a virtual tour de force” and the Prince of Wales “had a great romantic moment together.”

  But Bendor never gave up. The duke, who could defeat even the most hardened adversary, showed up in Paris a few weeks later. It was an early spring evening. Joseph, Chanel’s butler, answered the doorbell and found an enormous bouquet of flowers hiding the face of the deliveryman. Legend holds that the butler, digging for a coin, told the messenger, “Put them down there.” When he turned to tip the man, he recognized the Duke of Westminster. Soon after, no doubt persuaded by Bendor, the Prince of Wales called at Chanel’s apartment on the rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré and pleaded Bendor’s cause.

  Chanel still had reservations about Bendor. She told Lady Iya Abdy: “The Duke frightened me.” Chanel knew all about his sexual escapades; she wished to be loved as an equal. “I am not one of those women who belong to several men.”

 
; Vera Bate introduced Chanel into the glittering social set that revolved around the English royals: Westminster; Edward, Prince of Wales; Winston Churchill; and the crème of English society who had access to Buckingham Palace. Chanel and Bendor, two very different people, worlds apart, often antagonistic, were about to embark on a five-year love affair and adventure. Chanel was “a little like Cinderella … a flirt … pretending to be captivated, when suddenly, pfft!—she seemed to disappear!” Bendor was “the buccaneer searching for adventures … a man who loved his women—but [who], above all, loved to love.”

  Chanel was acutely aware of how conventional French society viewed and maligned her. To them, she was “the former demimondaine” who kept the Grand Duke Dmitri, while also publicly carrying on with French politicians, the Prince of Wales, and, according to a French police report, Lord Rothermere, Harold Harmsworth, owner with his brother Alfred of the London Daily Mail. In one of her more sarcastic moods, Chanel told friends, “I wanted to be a woman of a harem, and between my three ‘guys,’ the Prince of Wales, Grand Duke Dmitri, and the Duke of Westminster, I chose the man [Bendor] who would protect me—the simplest of men.”

  Bendor and Chanel secretly slipped aboard the Flying Cloud, anchored at Bayonne harbor on the Bay of Biscay in the late spring of 1924. She would say of their first days together: “He had a yacht, and that’s the best thing for running away to start a love affair. The first time you’re clumsy, the second you quarrel a bit, and if it doesn’t go well, the third time you can stop at a port.” Those first days must have been magical in the enchanted world Bendor created. When they reached the Mediterranean, an orchestra from Monte Carlo was brought aboard the ship so they could dance every night—something Bendor loved. He showered Chanel with precious jewels and other gifts; and Chanel told a confidante: “I loved him or I thought I loved him, which amounts to the same thing.”

  Bendor’s extraordinary wealth surely enhanced his attractiveness for Chanel. This cousin to King George V owned outright Eaton Hall, an estate of some 11,000 acres where legions of gardeners cultivated roses, carnations, orchids, and exotic fruits and vegetables all year round. A railroad spur on the estate connected it to the main line. Bendor even owned a private train to go from Eaton Hall up to London, where he owned Grosvenor House (later leased to the U.S. government for its embassy) and Bourdon House, plus income-producing properties around London’s Kensington Gardens and vast holdings in Australia and Canada.

  Lady Dunn with Chanel and Gigot, ca. 1926. (illustration credit 3.1)

  For Bendor’s sea voyages, he could choose between the Cutty Sark, a converted naval vessel, and the spacious schooner Flying Cloud. There were stables of horses; hunting lodges in Scotland and France; Rolls-Royce and Bentley automobiles. The family jewels included the Westminster tiara and the Arcot diamonds.

  Bendor, like his lifelong friend Winston Churchill, was born into a world where British noblemen were considered (and considered themselves) little less than godlike. He and the other scions of the great landed aristocracy entered manhood knowing their destiny was to rule the greatest empire the world had ever seen.

  One of Bendor’s chums, a fellow lord, described the duke as “a good-humored fellow, like a Newfoundland puppy, much given to riotous amusements and sports, with horses, motors, and ladies. The fast life clearly suits him, for he looks the model of health and strength.” Churchill thought Bendor “excelled at hunting and knew everything about the habits of wild game … in war and in sport an intrepid companion … little given to self expression and public pronouncements; he was a man who thought deeply with a rare quality of wisdom and sound judgment. I always held his opinion in high esteem.”

  A French lady described Bendor as “a pure Victorian who had eyes for his shotgun, his hunters, jumpers and race horses, his dogs—while English women, of his day, had only to give birth to children and please their masters … a man who played at dropping a bit of sugar in its paper wrapper into hot coffee and with a chronometer in hand, timing how long it took to melt … a man who enjoyed hiding diamonds under the pillow of his mistresses … a man who could brutalize women …”

  Whatever Chanel’s views on Bolshevism before 1925, Bendor tutored her on the evils of Communism and confirmed her antipathy toward Jews. He shuddered at the word “Marxism.” He was also notoriously homophobic. When his homosexual brother-in-law advocated free trade unions as a leader of the Liberal Party, Bendor revealed him to be gay to the king, George V, ruining his sister’s marriage and the man’s political career.

  Chanel could match Bendor’s homophobia. She is quoted as telling Paul Morand while in exile in Switzerland in the winter of 1946 at St. Moritz, “Homosexuals? Are they not always hanging around women: ‘my beauty, my little one, my angel’—continually strangling them with flattery? I have seen young women ruined by these awful queers: drugs, divorce, and scandal. They will use any means to destroy a competitor and to wreak vengeance on a woman. The queers want to be women—but they are lousy women. They are charming!”

  IN THE SUMMER OF 1924, when Violet Rowley formally separated from Bendor, he brought Chanel to Eaton Hall for a season of soirees, tennis parties, riding in the English countryside, and lounging about the splendid gardens. The autumn was given to hunts in France and salmon fishing in Scotland. Pictures taken during this period show a range of Chanel cameos: smiling broadly, she was forty-one years old to his forty-seven. Wearing her version of a Fair Isle sweater, she appears confident of her ability to charm the greatest English lords and ladies. In another picture, taken by Baron Adolf Gayne de Meyer, creator of American fashion photography, Chanel poses for a portrait wearing an “exquisite” necklace of pearls—a gift from Bendor. In a Vogue photo, Chanel smiles wearing a classic jersey suit with a cardigan jacket, her beautiful neck draped in ropes of pearls. In one rare photo, she is smoking a cigarette—a habit she never broke. (She smoked Camels “incessantly” when she could get them.) Another snapshot shows Chanel and Vera Bate dressed in baggy pants and heavy tweeds for fishing. The two are caressing a hunting dog as Chanel clutches a fishing gaff, its point protected by a cork. There is also a delightful November 1929 snapshot of Winston Churchill and Chanel, arm in arm at a hunting party at Eaton Hall.

  Bendor, Duke of Westminster, and Chanel at the Grand National racetrack, May 1924. Chanel’s love affair with Bendor lasted five years, their friendship a lifetime. Both feared Communism and were anti-Semitic and pro-German. (illustration credit 3.2)

  A smiling Chanel (left) and Vera Bate (later Vera Lombardi), ca. 1925, after fishing on Bendor’s Scottish estate. Vera told Winston Churchill how she betrayed Chanel as a Nazi agent to the British at Madrid, 1944. (illustration credit 3.3)

  Bendor and Chanel frequently returned to Paris for gala evenings and the opera. When the duke showed up at a rehearsal of Le Train bleu, a gossip columnist for The Star wrote in October 1924: “Rumor is busy with the future of the Duke … when trouble between the duke and his duchess first began, it was said that the next duchess would be a very good-looking girl whose parents have become prominent … Now gossip has it that she will be a clever and charming Frenchwoman who presides over a very exclusive dressmaking establishment in Paris.”

  With Sir Winston Churchill at the Duke of Westminster’s Eaton Hall estate, early winter 1929. Their friendship would last a lifetime. (illustration credit 3.4)

  What the duke willed he got, and nothing Chanel wanted was denied her. “My real life began with Westminster,” she said in a moment of weakness. “I’d finally found a shoulder to lean on … he didn’t know the meaning of the word ‘snobby.’ He was simplicity itself.” Some thirteen years earlier, Chanel and Étienne Balsan had enjoyed riding the forest paths at Compiègne, where she lived for three years as a courtesan at the Château de Royallieu. Now, Coco was received as the unofficial mistress of Eaton Hall. Vera Bate was often there, helping her friend with English ways and manners. But in typical Chanel fashion she made everyone speak French—even B
endor, who spoke it with an atrocious accent—while she secretly studied English.

  Life with Bendor, for a time at least, amounted to an everlasting holiday celebration. They were gracious hosts to royal cotillions with fifty or sixty guests often in attendance. At these musical dinners, an orchestra in red coats and patent leather slippers played far into the night. A battalion of valets and femmes de chambre, butlers, cooks, kitchen staff, gardeners, and attendants for every sport worked around the clock for the pleasure of the duke’s guests—no guest needed to lift a finger at Eaton Hall. Its fifty-four bedrooms, stables, and seventeen Rolls-Royces were ruled over by Bendor’s stern and commanding steward, Percy Smith. He held responsibility for the staff, the hall, and the masterpieces by Rubens, Raphael, Rembrandt, Hals, Velázquez, and Goya that decorated the walls.

  Chanel in hunting dress with Winston Churchill and his son, Randolph, in France, 1928. Churchill’s friendship and admiration for Chanel lasted some thirty years; historians claim Churchill saved Chanel from trial as a German collaborator when Paris was liberated in 1944. (illustration credit 3.5)

  Chanel shared Bendor’s love for riding, hunting, fishing, sailing, and gay parties. In their headlong pursuit of pleasure, Chanel and Westminster ignored the mass labor unrest of the mid- and late 1920s and the Great Depression of the 1930s—it was all too tedious. She was, after all, now a member of the privileged class. For the duke, Chanel, and their set, the band played on, including taking parties to the ultra chic and exclusive Embassy club to dance to Ambrose’s orchestra and where the maître d’hôtel, Luigi, always reserved a table for Bendor and Chanel with its view of the balcony and curved wooden staircase.