Coco Chanel (49 page)

When she had closed her couture house, her workers had been left without work or compensation. After the armistice, when the German propaganda campaign was intent on having it appear that France was getting back on its feet, educational establishments, businesses, the law courts, et cetera, were reopened. And at this point, Gabrielle's rejected workforce succeeded in taking her to an industrial tribunal. Under the excuse of “act of war” or “emergency action,” Gabrielle had dismissed them without any notice or compensation. The court rejected this plea, and she was obliged to pay her employees the wages they were due.

Gabrielle's second duty was to find her nephew. That September of 1940, when the Germans began releasing most of the three hundred thousand pre-armistice prisoners, her imprisoned nephew, André, was not among them. Preoccupied about his delicate health, his aunt was determined to bring about his release. A young aristocrat of her acquaintance, Louis de Vaufreland, told her he knew a German who might be able to help her. This gentleman was named Hans Günther, Baron von Dincklage. He spoke fluent French and English (his mother was English) and was the archetypal Aryan. Tall, blond, blue-eyed von Dincklage was the embodiment of entertaining charm. He suggested that the person Gabrielle needed was an old friend of his, a cavalry captain, Theodor Momm.
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Momm's family was in textiles, and he had been deputed to mobilize the French textile industries, with a view to siphoning off the profits for the German war effort. Gabrielle's persuasion was effective, and Momm reopened a small textile mill in the north of France. He then convinced his superiors that the owner was the famous Chanel, and that her nephew was the person needed to run the reinstated mill. Gabrielle was hugely relieved when André was at last released.

By this time, Gabrielle and von Dincklage had had cause to meet on a number of occasions. Gabrielle found the German's charm and well-bred attentiveness throughout these proceedings most seductive. If she may have experienced any initial doubts about associating herself with the enemy, they were put aside, and she and von Dincklage became lovers. This affair was to endure for several years.

Gabrielle was careful to appear discreet, confining herself a good deal to her apartment on rue Cambon, her room at the Ritz and visits to an inner circle of friends, including the Serts, Serge Lifar, Jean Cocteau, Antoinette d'Harcourt and Marie-Louise Bousquet. Aside from that, there was her handsome lover. In an occupied city, where it was soon impossible not to take sides, Gabrielle appears to have convinced herself that she could have an affair with a German and live immured. For someone of her intelligence, she cannot possibly have believed that such catastrophic events in her own country and beyond didn't concern her.

But Gabrielle's attitude didn't have much to do with intelligence; it was something more elemental than that. She had learned young to put self-preservation before most other things, and one of her clearest intentions throughout the war was just that: survival. As someone recently observed who was acquainted with her then, when he was a boy: “I don't think it was a question of politics. [She] wanted to serve her own interests and maintain her lifestyle.”
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While this may have been ignoble, there were many who felt the same. Gabrielle and most of her friends were reluctant to ask too many questions about the oppression by their conquerors.

It has often been said that while Gabrielle was very wealthy, if ever the health of her business was in doubt, like many another who had started out poor, she reacted with an irrational fear of returning to that state. And perhaps to salve the guilt she must have had for pleading poverty and cutting off her brothers, she took up various public charitable activities, such as the patronage of Jean Marais's regiment in the first months of war. Gabrielle had time on her hands and threw herself into the project, looking after every last detail. Other examples of Gabrielle's charity were kept strictly private. For example, large sums were donated to a mental home in which the ex-courtesan Liane de Pougy was involved.
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In her later years, she contacted the solicitor at Aubazine and made a secret donation to the convent. (It is also said that over the years, she made occasional very discreet trips to the convent to visit the nuns.)
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Returning to Gabrielle's liaison with her German, one explanation for her actions was that her repeated losses in love had hardened her. Indeed, Cocteau would say that Gabrielle was “a pederast,” that her sexual appetites were virile and that she set out to conquer like a man. This attitude, while serving Gabrielle's sexual needs, did little to ground her emotions. But while she was not without blame in failed loves, Gabrielle had lost love so many times already that she had little faith in the possibility of its enduring.

There was no question that had Arthur Capel asked her, all those years ago, Gabrielle would have married him. Quite possibly, in the end, this marriage would have foundered. While always believing in preserving the differences between men and women, Gabrielle also wanted desperately to be taken as an equal. However, her times, her upbringing and her social position, in combination with her powerful personality, had seen to it that this rarely happened. In her youth, women were seldom allowed that kind of scope. And for all Capel's forward thinking, in marriage he had chosen the more traditional woman. Ironically, Diana Wyndham's own position regarding scope was that she hadn't easily accepted her husband's keeping a mistress.

Gabrielle was more than equal to most men, but without the example of an even half-decent parental relationship, where the balance of power—despite its ups and downs—ultimately swings back and forth so that each partner feels loved, needed and found worthy, she had no positive example. Despite her belief that a long-term, stable relationship was what she wanted, in many ways Gabrielle had not developed the emotional maturity to make it happen. When young, she had luxuriated in being feminine and seduced, but this way of being wasn't sufficient, hadn't given enough scope for her intelligence and abilities.

Sadly, she appears to have found it impossible, really, to conduct a relationship without either dominating or being dominated, and each time this led, eventually, to her frustration. She was remarkably able at managing the practicalities of her own and others' lives; friends were many, many times deeply grateful for her vital support. But like her great contemporary and semifriend Colette, who so publicly wrestled with squaring the problem of love and independence, Gabrielle found real mutual love nearly impossible. They were two highly intelligent women, whose lives and loves epitomized versions of the same problem: “Is there love without complete submission and loss of identity? Is freedom worth the loneliness that pays for it?”
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In her own way, Colette had arrived at a better accommodation than Gabrielle ever would. Gabrielle remained vulnerable to emotional insecurity and loneliness. With time, suffering and disillusionment, she had become as much the seducer as the seduced. And she had long since learned to enjoy a sexual relationship that didn't necessarily involve love. But while harboring few illusions, at the same time, she was also vulnerable in that she was alone and wanted to feel loved.

 

While Gabrielle was a sophisticated and worldly woman, von Dincklage was a suave and practiced Lothario, and a great many women had already fallen victim to his charms. In addition, Gabrielle was no longer young—she was fifty-eight to von Dincklage's forty-five—and this man left her feeling she was still attractive. Meanwhile, what von Dincklage's position was in regard to the occupying forces, and what Gabrielle believed it was, obviously has considerable bearing upon the way we judge her collaboration.

If, during the occupation, Gabrielle was seen in public less than before the war, and was careful not to show herself in public places with her German lover, she did not, however, spend the occupation holed up in her room at the Ritz. Yet her powers of denial were as tremendous as those of Colette, who wrote of this period, “A credulity, a forgetful exhaustion endowed me with delusion.”
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Colette needed money to help support herself and her Jewish husband, Goudeket, and was neither among those who refused to write nor those who worked for the Resistance. Indeed, she wrote for “some of the most repellent of the pro-Vichy and pro-German publications and maintained cordial relations with their editors.”
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And when Colette was asked to sign a petition against the arrest of the Jewish director of the Bibliothèque Nationale, she refused on the grounds that it might call attention to her husband. At the same time, the couple socialized at the collaborationist salons of José Maria Sert and Florence Gould.

In August 1941, a mutual friend of Gabrielle and Colette's, the celebrity singer and actress Arletty, had a small party to celebrate her new apartment. Here she was to live with her lover, a German officer. Among Arletty's guests were her friends Lili de Rothschild (to die in the Ravensbrück concentration camp), Colette, Maurice Goudeket, Marie Laurencin, Misia and Gabrielle. When Arletty was later challenged, she dismissed the idea that her sexual choices made her unpatriotic with the famous comment: “My heart it is French but my ass is international.” At the liberation, Arletty would be tried and imprisoned as a collaborationist.

Antoinette d'Harcourt's son, Jean, recently offered the opinion in an interview that Gabrielle's relationship was “mostly in order to get material advantages. It was different from Arletty's behavior during the war. Arletty, it was a coup de coeur [literally ‘a blow of the heart'], whereas Chanel, they were coups de portefeuille [‘blows of the wallet'].” While describing Gabrielle's attitude to von Dincklage as “all about money” is too simple, Jean d'Harcourt's comment is, nonetheless, interesting. “You know, she kept a car, and a driver, and petrol throughout the war: that was most unusual, unless you were a Minister from the Vichy government but, otherwise, no one had that!”
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Gabrielle fairly regularly attended events in support of friends working under, if not directly for, the enemy, such as Serge Lifar, who ran the Opéra and also socialized with others who were in the habit of consorting with the Germans. André de Segonzac made a tour of Germany and Austria in the company of a party of French artists. Sacha Guitry entertained for the Germans on the stage, at their receptions and their dinners. On other occasions, Gabrielle dined with the Morands, where guests might include Cocteau; the right-wing poet Jouhandeau and his wife, Caryathis; the writer Louise de Vilmorin; Misia and José Maria Sert and a smattering of the German command. One of the favorites at French gatherings was Gerhard Heller, important in the literature section of the Propaganda-Abteilung. Almost ubiquitous at Parisian salons, Heller cast his spell of utter charm. Seducing many French writers into believing he wasn't intent on destroying French cultural hegemony, Heller would again hoodwink large sections of the French public with his memoirs, in 1981.

In 1941, Misia was almost seventy and began dictating her memoirs to Boulos Ristelhueber, Sert's young secretary. In addition to Boulos's extreme thinness, his pallor was deathly and to conceal it, he wore dense makeup. Sadly, this only added to the bizarreness of his appearance. He and Misia had a number of friends in common, shared an equal passion for music, and Misia found this painfully delicate creature a gentle and sympathetic companion. Their friendship was an unexpected boon for the aging muse, whose loss of sight was rapidly narrowing her world. Boulos Ristelhueber greatly admired Misia and, during the war, saw her almost daily.

While Misia had never stopped loving Sert, after the young Roussadana's death, he had been desolate. Misia once again took on the role of hostess at her ex-husband's table, and while he supported her financially, they did not return to living in the same apartment. Sert, meanwhile, violently anti-German and hating the occupation, found little difficulty in accommodating himself, becoming Franco's ambassador to the Vatican, no less. Misia hated the occupation, too. Yet though fiercely pro-Jewish, she also closed her eyes to some of Sert's and her friends' questionable activities.

Boulos Ristelhueber's diary gives us a glimpse of Gabrielle and her friends' occupied Paris:

Dec 17. Paris sadder than ever. An atmosphere of catastrophe. False rumors running wild. One knows nothing, nothing!

Dec 19. Serge Lifar speaks about the concert tonight . . . [The great conductor Herbert von Karajan, penalized at the end of the war for his notorious membership in the Nazi party, was conducting.]

Dec 20. Dined with Misia on her bed. Picasso sinks onto it and speaks of his unhappy divorce from Olga . . .

Dec 21. Rather sad lunch with Jean Cocteau . . . I deposited him at Colette's . . . and went to see Jean Marais. At four o'clock called on Coco Chanel, so nice to me that she did me good . . .

Dec 27. the anti-Jewish laws . . . turn Paris into a prison . . .

Dec 28. At last night's dinner at the Barnes's, Misia . . . confronted an important German official ...

Dec 29. Spent the evening at Misia's with Coco Chanel and François d'Harcourt. Coco goes into a tirade against the Jews. The conversation is dangerous, given Antoinette's origins [Antoinette d'Harcourt was a Rothschild] and the presence of the Duke. [Duke François d'Harcourt was Antoinette's husband] . . . Sert's chauffeur drove me home in such blackness that half the time we were on the pavement.

New Year's Day 1942. Thick snow. Paris covered in white: grey-green uniforms everywhere. With its deserted streets—just a few horses and men pushing hand carts—Paris looks like a city in East Prussia.