Mademoiselle Page 27

  The balls let Coco play at theatrical dress-up and offered a reprieve from the austerity of her usual taste. In costume, Chanel could be outrageous for a few hours. She could allow herself to look like a queen who ruled an empire. “The masked ball unmasks,” Cocteau observed. Coco even designed costumes for other guests, doing a particularly good job for Serge Lifar and Daisy de Segonzac, who went as two eighteenth-century figures—the court dancer Auguste Vestris and Marie Antoinette, respectively—to a 1939 party thrown by the Marchesa Luisa Casati. When Serge, Daisy, and other guests, all dressed as prerevolutionary noblemen, descended to the street, crowds of passersby grew incensed and hurled invective at them.

  Chanel costumed as Queen Victoria, 1934 (illustration credit 9.8)

  But Marianne was the ultimate costume for Chanel. She had always absorbed her lovers’ ideas and styles, and since Iribe was already so much like her, it was very easy to relax into his worldview, which justified her own political prejudices while glorifying her personally. Iribe reflected and confirmed her version of elitism and racial superiority for which noble birth and inherited wealth were not required. In their shared philosophy, they both emerged at the top of the social heap. Such a democratized version of bigotry resolved the contradictions inherent in Chanel’s aristocratic longings and contained within it an apologia for fascism, which Chanel would come to embrace.

  Iribe absorbed Coco as well, subsuming her into a last attempt to resurrect his career, exploiting not only her money but her iconic status and even her physical likeness for his own purposes. Since Iribe viewed the Place Vendôme as a microcosm of all he valued in the French nation, then Chanel—with her apartment at the Ritz (15, Place Vendôme) and her main atelier just around the corner—was the new Napoléon atop the Colonne Vendôme, the dazzling imperial ruler of this “vitrine of France,” as he’d dubbed the Place Vendôme.

  Chanel’s friends were aware of what was going on and expressed dismay. “I have just heard that Iribe is marrying Chanel. Aren’t you appalled—for Chanel?” wrote Colette in 1933 to her friend Marguerite Moreno. After a dinner party at Chanel’s, Paul Morand recounted to a friend that the moment Coco and Paul left the table, those remaining began gossiping about them, especially noting Iribe’s girth: “Last night I was at dinner at Chanel’s. She looked very nice with a little white barman’s vest on. After dinner … they went off to play belote.… At the table, the rest of us could speak of nothing but his weight.” Everyone knew of Chanel’s intolerance for heavy people (“I detest fat,” she was known to say); she had been trying to help Iribe slim down.

  Chanel’s nephew André Palasse also disapproved of Coco’s relationship with Iribe, whom he got to know quite well since, at Coco’s suggestion, Iribe had hired the twenty-eight-year-old Palasse to help him with Le Témoin. The two men spent long hours together working on article texts and layout, and, according to Palasse’s daughter Gabrielle Labrunie, her father always felt uneasy with Iribe’s treatment of Chanel, and worried especially about Paul’s liberal use of Coco’s money.

  “[Iribe’s unpleasantness toward her] was probably the biggest reason why my father thought a marriage between them would never take place,” Labrunie said. “My father found him very much an opportunist. Coco financed everything.” For Labrunie, her aunt’s attachment to Iribe was driven more by the desire to be in a relationship than by desire for Iribe specifically: “She … was … so attached to the idea of being in love again.”

  Coco’s business was still thriving in the summer of 1935, but she was nevertheless beginning to feel the pinch of Europe’s economic crisis. Chanel had also begun for the first time to worry about industry rivals, particularly Elsa Schiaparelli, the Italian designer whose dreamlike, surrealist-inspired creations, so unlike Coco’s in style, were winning great acclaim in Paris. Perhaps to avoid these anxieties, Chanel was spending most of the season at La Pausa.

  One mild September evening, Paul took the Blue Train down to Roquebrune to visit her. Having slept soundly in one of the famous blue and gold compartments, he arrived the next morning rested and ready for tennis. Upon arriving at the villa he went immediately to change before Coco had come downstairs. When she appeared, he was already on the courts, a white robe tied over his tennis gear.

  Coco saw him and they moved toward each other for an embrace. Before he reached her, Paul clutched his chest, his face contorted in pain, and fell to the ground. He never regained consciousness. On September 25, 1935, in the Menton hospital to which Chanel had rushed him, Iribe died of this massive heart attack. He was fifty-two.

  Yet again, Chanel had lost the man in her life suddenly and tragically. The shock was profound. “He died at her feet. That marks a person,” said Gabrielle Palasse-Labrunie.

  The loss changed her permanently; she grew harder and more spiteful. Her racism and nationalist zeal had been ignited by Iribe, as had her sense of herself as a symbolic heroine of France. His mythmaking had jibed perfectly with her own and, upon his demise, Chanel was left alone again, her memory of Iribe entwined with his abstracted, nearly inhuman view of her. At fifty-two and after so many tragedies, Chanel must have known she would likely never marry now. She turned inward and more extreme in her opinions, subsuming perhaps the caricature into which Paul had already turned her.

  Underneath the glamour of Chanel beats the throbbing pulse of history—the history of fashion and the history of the world.

  –MARIE-PIERRE LANNELONGUE

  Why brilliant fashion designers—a notoriously nonanalytic breed—sometimes succeed in anticipating the shape of things to come better than professional predictors is one of the most obscure questions in history; for the historian of culture, it is one of the most central.

  –ERIC HOBSBAWM

  To delve into Chanel’s life, relationships, and influence during the mid- to late 1930s, as war grew closer, is to approach volatile territory—to enter the debate about whether Chanel spent the war not merely as a Nazi sympathizer or collaborator, but as an enemy agent, a Nazi spy. From 2009 to 2011, no fewer than twelve books about Chanel appeared, and several broached this delicate topic with more candor than it had received before. Certain biographies made headlines with what appeared to be disturbing new information: that Chanel was, at best, what the French call a “horizontal collaborator,” surviving the war using the courtesan’s tactics she’d learned as a girl, or, at worst, an out-and-out Nazi agent.

  The most inflammatory book, Hal Vaughan’s Sleeping with the Enemy, confirmed more information than it revealed about Chanel’s politics and her relationship to the occupying Germans. Vaughan focused his energies primarily on two areas of Chanel’s life during the war: her love affair with Baron Hans Günther von Dincklage, an SS intelligence officer known as “Spatz” who was quartered at the Ritz during the war, and her involvement—via Spatz—in a failed spy mission for Germany known as Modellhut, or “model hat.” Vaughan also wrote of Chanel’s openly anti-Semitic views.

  The world has long known of Chanel’s dalliance with both Spatz and espionage. And she made little secret of her anti-Semitism, especially when in the company of her many like-minded friends. But Vaughan’s access to previously classified intelligence documents provided long-missing, specific evidence not only of the extent of Chanel’s involvement with the Nazis but also of how “official” her status really was—she even received a Nazi code name and agent number.

  Some more sympathetic biographers, among them Justine Picardie (2010) and Lisa Chaney (2011), have argued that Chanel was guilty of little more than poor judgment, having fallen for a dashing younger man without regard for his nationality. Eager to protect its founder’s good name, the Maison Chanel has hewn to this line as well. To dispel the accusations of anti-Semitism, the corporation has repeatedly pointed to Coco’s many long-standing Jewish friends and associates, prime among these the Rothschild family and her business partners the Wertheimers. Some of her favorite billionaires, that is, were Jewish.

  The moral laps
es of brilliant, rich, and glamorous figures never fail to entice us, and the surprising extent of collaboration among midcentury Parisian notables—even such revered figures as Pablo Picasso and Gertrude Stein—has inspired considerable interest. But Chanel’s relationship to fascism extends far beyond her amorous choices or her ill-conceived attempts at espionage—beyond even the realm of traditional biography.

  By the midthirties, the name “Chanel” referred to something far more powerful than any one woman—“Chanel” had become a concept, a movement, a way of life, a vast constellation of visual associations and references instantly recognizable to millions of women in Europe and the United States. Although it had begun in the purely commercial, seemingly frivolous, world of female adornment, the Chanel empire now rooted itself in something deeper: a mythic underpinning, a Weltanschauung. Ultimately, this worldview, let’s call it “Chanelism,” became a political aesthetic—a system of readable symbols—whose scope resonated with and even perpetuated the ideological work of fascism. Yet Chanelism grew quite organically out of Coco’s life, her psychology and taste, the company she kept, and the atmosphere in which she was steeped during the years leading up to the Second World War.

  In the second half of the 1930s, Chanel’s inner life was in turmoil. The months following Iribe’s death were long and painful for her, and she took refuge at Roquebrune throughout the summer of 1935–leaving her business entirely in the care of employees for the first time in her life. Misia rushed down to La Pausa to support her grieving friend, but, characteristically, Coco refused to open up to her. Instead, as she had so many times before, she mourned a lost love inwardly, in silence. Plagued now by chronic insomnia, she began relying on Sedol, a prescription sedative with which she would inject herself nightly for the rest of her life—the likely provenance of her reputed reliance on another similar drug, morphine, to which Misia was already hopelessly addicted. In the fall, despite her sorrow and fatigue, Chanel returned to the Ritz and threw herself into her work.

  No major love affair seems to have marked the years immediately following Iribe’s death. But Chanel was rarely without a suitor of some kind. She may have had a brief affair in the midthirties with one of her most important jewelry designers, Count Fulco di Verdura, and her police surveillance file suggests that Coco was also involved at this time with the married Henry de Zogheb, an Egyptian-born banker and newspaper magnate, seventeen years her junior.

  In 1935, Coco was also frequently seen in the company of the handsome twenty-nine-year-old Luchino Visconti, an Italian count by birth and fairly open about his homosexuality. We don’t know if he made an exception in Coco’s case, but Visconti’s sister Uberta suggests the relationship was more of an intense friendship, dominated by Coco: “Chanel was fascinated by Luchino, but he was holding back.… He found her overwhelming and demanding. Chanel was in love with him, although to say ‘in love’ is such an approximation when one doesn’t know the feelings of a woman who was more mature and accomplished than [he]. By then she was the queen, the undisputed authority in Paris. They [traveled] … Luchino always at her side. He went to stay at La Pausa.” A recollection by Visconti’s other sister, Ida, hints that, with Luchino, Chanel permitted herself some of the extreme, controlling behavior that later became routine for her: “[Chanel] would ring and [she] talked and talked; at times Luchino put the telephone to one side as she went on talking.”

  Part of Chanel’s appeal for Visconti may have derived from her association with fascism, a movement to which he—like so many artists—was very attracted for a time: “When I was in Paris, I was kind of an imbecile, not a Fascist, but unconsciously affected by Fascism, ‘colored’ by it,” he said. Visconti’s was largely an aesthetic fascination. He loved the work of filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, and after a visit to Hitler’s Germany in 1934, had come away enamored of the parades of handsome young soldiers. Fascism also held social appeal, as one of Visconti’s friends pointed out: “The elite people, like Coco Chanel, liked the Nazis.”

  Visconti’s politics would change completely, thanks, ironically, to an acquaintance he made through Chanel. As discerning as ever of talent, Coco introduced Luchino to filmmaker Jean Renoir, who hired the young man as his assistant. Renoir was a committed leftist whose politics would deeply influence Visconti. Chanel, too, would collaborate with Renoir, making the costumes for two of his landmark films, both appearing in 1939: La Règle du jeu (The Rules of the Game), a satire of French social class hierarchies, and La Marseillaise, about the French Revolution. Renoir dedicated La Marseillaise to the recently fallen Popular Front government of Léon Blum. Perhaps tellingly, Chanel’s contribution to the film was restricted to designing clothes for actress Lise Delamare, who played Marie Antoinette.

  • • •

  Still as vast an empire as ever, the House of Chanel employed four thousand workers in 1935 and was turning out upwards of twenty-eight thousand garments per year. Even so, Chanel felt some insecurity in her professional life. The atmosphere in Paris seemed different to her and she was now largely without a love life. The Depression had taken a toll, and Chanel felt ongoing pressure from a number of rivals who had gained momentum during her absence—designers such as Marcel Rochas, Mainbocher, and Italian Elsa Schiaparelli, who was collaborating with Chanel’s friends Jean Cocteau and Salvador Dalí to create fantastical surrealist garments that wowed Paris with their originality. Chanel would also collaborate with Dalí, aiding him with the costuming of his surrealist ballet La Bacchanale in 1939.

  Throughout this period, Chanel played to her strengths. Her collections consisted largely of sleek, simple, elegant dresses and suits that eschewed ostentation in favor of such subtle details as jacket linings of glossy printed silk and fine gilt chains sewn into hemlines to keep skirts properly weighted. American Vogue characterized Chanel’s 1937 spring line as “dignified elegance … [which] brings us down to earth” and applauded her 1938 midseason collection for being “un-sensational, subtle, wearable—[with] no tricks … short-jacket suits [in] wine, plum, navy blue, brown; jackets fitted at the waist or belted in.”

  With another war looming, and Paris increasingly somber and anxious, Coco’s trademark restraint seemed downright patriotic once again, and she became something of a standard-bearer among her colleagues. Taking the pulse of their clientele, French designers focused increasingly on wearability, practicality, even modesty—traits famously associated with Chanel. “The couture is swinging back to the great age of Chanel simplicity,” announced Vogue in 1937.

  The grim external climate seemed to mirror the upheaval of Chanel’s personal world. The rocky period inaugurated by the stock market crash of 1929 had not abated, and France faced continual crises both within the nation and abroad. The birthrate had dropped precipitously, unemployment continued to rise, and nationwide strikes disrupted countless services and industries. France’s instability was such that the country went through five prime ministers in the four years between 1936 and 1940. Above all, France watched with dread the encroaching menace of Italian and German military aggression, as well as General Francisco Franco’s coup in Spain and the onset of the Spanish Civil War. Unstable domestically, and sensing a looming war for which it was ill prepared, France felt dangerously adrift, demoralized. As often happens, such troubled conditions inflamed long-smoldering resentments and racial tensions.

  For many years after the Second World War, popular wisdom held that the French had heroically resisted their occupiers and Nazism in general. The truth was far murkier. While France never tipped over entirely into becoming a fascist state, fascist ideology did find acceptance in many sectors. In the later 1930s, Hitler’s Final Solution and the Nazi occupation were still several years away, but an ominous current of anti-Semitism had already taken root in France, preparing the way for Vichy and collaboration. Work by historians and critics from the 1970s onward, especially Americans such as Robert Soucy, Eugen Weber, Alice Kaplan, Jeffrey Mehlman, and Robert Paxton, has demonstrated the m
yriad ways in which large numbers of French citizens accepted, even welcomed, an alliance with Nazi Germany. Some people had purely practical reasons for such views, seeing Hitler as the only alternative to communism. For others, making common cause with Germany represented a last, desperate attempt to avoid revisiting the horrors of the first Great War. And even when war did come, some degree of French collaboration consisted, arguably, of sheer need—a desire to survive.

  But many also felt deeply drawn to Nazism for political or philosophical reasons. “French fascism had generic roots.… There may have been a native French fascism,” wrote historian John Sweet. These generic roots had been planted at least half a century prior, when the Dreyfus affair plunged the country into years of bitter racial and political division. Hannah Arendt believed that the groundwork for Hitler and the Final Solution was laid at this time, writing, “At the end of the Dreyfus affair the slogans, ‘France for the French,’ and ‘death to the Jews’ were seen to be almost magical formulas for reconciling the masses to the existent state of government and society.”

  Nearly fifty years later, fascism transformed the racial hatred and xenophobia behind such slogans into a coherent mythology whose appeal extended beyond Germany and into France. Fascism confirmed that, like Germany, France was a sick patient in need of care to nurse its body politic back to health. The treatment would restore Europe to an earlier and purer state, a prelapsarian golden—and Jewless—age. In the years just before the war, the political tumult in France awoke these long-standing tendencies, igniting France’s domestic fascism. Of life in France in the years preceding the war, historian Tony Judt has written: “[It was] fundamentally nasty … [distinguished by] public hatred … personal attacks … [and] racial and xenophobic vitriol … hard to grasp today … and everywhere there was anti-Semitism.”