Mademoiselle Page 33

  Chanel had spent a lifetime insinuating herself in this way into all sorts of privileged realms, from marriages to the upper reaches of the aristocracy to the art world. With lovers she had always been generous and accommodating, giving of herself while absorbing so much from them—social cues, aesthetic sensibilities, and political views. Initially, Chanel must have viewed Fenosa somewhat as she had Reverdy, and assumed she could “enter” his world as easily as she had Pierre’s. Both men were emotional and driven artists; both held progressive and republican views. Both needed and accepted her financial support. But Pierre had his deeply mystical side—his fervent, if erratic, Catholicism. When they’d met, moreover, Coco was still a young woman, not nearly as battered and bitter as she was in 1939. Theirs had been a genuine passion, and it had appealed to the convent girl in her. Their connection remained the most permanent one of her life. Despite his marriage, and even his monastic retreat, Reverdy never fully left Coco. And despite their deep differences, he never rejected her. She regarded him as a lodestar of a purer time and life. His affection proved she was not all bad.

  With Fenosa things were different. Apel-les was seventeen years her junior (Reverdy was only six years younger than she), and far more vital and socially integrated than the reclusive Pierre. Unlike all her many other ruptures with men, this breakup could only signal a rejection of Coco herself. Fenosa did not leave Chanel because of exigencies of social class. He had not died. Apel-les left Coco because of Coco—because her life, her habits, and her personality had become distasteful to him. The elegant world she had so carefully built felt tainted to him, and she knew it.

  Fenosa’s departure coincided with a major turn in Chanel’s professional life. For the first time in more than thirty years, she was no longer designing couture. By closing her house she had removed herself from the creative process, save for a brief stint helping Dalí with his costumes. She was still amassing a fortune from perfume sales, but only via an impersonal, commercial process in which she had little direct participation. There were no models to fit, no fabric to drape, no défilés to stage. Despite her generosity toward him, she had managed to drive away the first lover she had enjoyed in a long while. Coco had hardened considerably, as had her already-severe political opinions. Although she kept her coterie of friends, something in her had shrunk. The Sedol would only have intensified her detachment, numbing whatever empathy or self-awareness might have remained. Such was her state of mind as France slid into its darkest and most morally challenging times.

  In May 1940, the phony war turned into a real one, as the Allies suffered a catastrophic loss in the thirty-five-day Battle of France. The Germans moved through the Ardennes and were making their way south. Air bombings destroyed the Allied outposts at Dunkirk; Neville Chamberlain resigned and Winston Churchill took the reins as prime minister, and French prime minister Edouard Daladier had been replaced by Paul Reynaud, for whom support was very weak. On June 10, just days after enemy bombs fell on the outskirts of Paris, the capital was declared an “open city” into which the Germans were free to march, unopposed. The unthinkable had happened: France had abandoned Paris. The members of Reynaud’s government decamped from Paris to Tours. The Third Republic was ending, and enemy troops were fast approaching. This prompted one of the largest, most chaotic exoduses in modern history.

  In terror, residents of Paris and surrounding cities scrambled to leave. The entire northern part of France emptied as citizens from all backgrounds tried desperately to escape south. Many of Coco’s friends were among the fleeing crowds, including Cocteau, Jean Marais, Picasso, and Salvador Dalí and his wife, Gala. Fenosa left, too, for Toulouse, which his compatriots had long considered a part of Catalonia.

  In the unusually high heat of several June days, the fragrant elegance of a Paris springtime disintegrated into filth, smoke, sweat, and despair. Apartments were packed up overnight, windows shuttered. Luggage and bedding were strapped to the roofs of cars, money and jewelry hastily grabbed. Store shelves were emptied of provisions. Theaters, libraries, and museums all closed. The Louvre took down nearly all its paintings. Friends and neighbors shared overcrowded cars that barely crawled along roads paralyzed by thousands of vehicles. Thousands more left in wagons, trucks, or on bicycles, some even on foot, trudging for miles in exhaustion. In all, about one-fourth of France’s entire population took part in “l’Exode,” nearly ten million people.

  Chanel had no intention of remaining in the city under these conditions. She packed her trunks and, having lost her chauffeur to the exodus, quickly rounded up a friend of a Ritz employee to serve as a substitute driver. The new chauffeur, M. Larcher, counseled against driving Chanel’s conspicuous Rolls-Royce, so with her longtime assistant Angèle Aubert and several other employees in tow they headed out in Larcher’s own, more modest vehicle. Raids being launched on the Riviera by the Italian Army made La Pausa an unsafe option, and so Coco directed her driver to the southwest. They headed for the Pyrenees, to the town of Lembeye, where André Palasse lived. Palasse had been called up for military duty, but his wife and daughters still occupied the house Chanel had bought for the family through Etienne Balsan. (Balsan also owned property in the area, reviving the possibility that Balsan was André’s biological father and wished to live near and help his son.) The Palasse family scrambled to make room for their new guests.

  Momentous events unfolded at breakneck speed. The Germans entered a half-empty Paris on June 14, 1940. On June 16, the Reynaud administration disbanded, replaced by the rule of new premier Marshal Philippe Pétain, the eighty-four-year-old reactionary World War I hero. Two days later, Pétain requested an armistice from the Germans, and two days after that, on June 22, 1940, it was signed in Compiègne, the city where Chanel had once lived with Etienne Balsan. For his vice president, Pétain tapped Pierre Laval, the Auvergne-born former cabinet minister and self-made multimillionaire. Together they established l’Etat Français, “the French State,” in the resort city of Vichy.

  The armistice divided France in two: the occupied and unoccupied zones. The German military now commanded all French forces. Far from trying to protect France from the Germans, as they claimed, Pétain and Laval quickly set up an authoritarian regime largely in line with Hitler’s. L’Etat Français replaced the country’s national motto, “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité,” with a new one, “Travail, Famille, Patrie” (work, family, fatherland). Pétain sought to establish himself as the leader of a messianic cult, after the manner of Hitler and Mussolini. On June 17, upon assuming power, he declared in a radio address, “I give to France the gift of my person to alleviate her misfortunes.” An officially commissioned bust of the marshal would be distributed throughout the municipal buildings of France—the new required replacement for all statues of Marianne. The willowy, feminine allegorical figure of France, in her flowing robes, had morphed into an eighty-four-year-old man in military regalia.

  Unlike the Nazis, who simply replaced religion with fascism, Pétain cloaked much of his repellent politics with doctrinaire Catholic pieties. France’s defeat, he proclaimed, had resulted from the sins of parliamentary democracy. The country would serve penance for its moral decadence. In other words, democracy was to be replaced by a junta government that granted Pétain “almost all legislative, executive, and judicial powers.” One of Pétain’s advisers observed that the maréchal “now had more power than any French leader since Louis XIV.”

  Busts of Marshal Pétain made for town halls and prefectures (illustration credit 11.5)

  Under Pétain, France would build dozens of internment and work camps to house anti-fascists, members of the Resistance, Jews, homosexuals, Gypsies, and anyone else deemed undesirable. Laval, too, proved exceptionally zealous, signing into law the deportation to German concentration camps of all foreign-born Jews found on French soil.

  For vast numbers of people, France grew gravely unsafe as it disintegrated into a satellite of Germany, with ghastly new regulations taking hold. Jews los
t the right to own a business. German censors carefully vetted all cultural materials, banning any works of art, literature, or theater by Jews, or anyone deemed anti-German. To pursue nearly any livelihood or profession—from running a store to composing an opera—meant transacting with the enemy. France wandered into a strange period of limbo. Much of the surface thrum of the quotidian continued, but bedrock assumptions about what it meant to be French had crumbled. “Everything we did was equivocal,” wrote Jean-Paul Sartre. “A subtle poison corrupted even our best actions.”

  The “subtle poison” did not prevent occupied Paris from being restored very quickly—at least in appearance—to its usual, glittering self. The Germans surprised everyone with their good behavior. After moving into the city and requisitioning many of the best homes for their own quarters, they reopened cabarets, music halls, theaters, and restaurants. They behaved with impeccable grace and courtesy in a carefully orchestrated charm offensive. The Nazis didn’t want to destroy Paris; they wanted to turn it into the jewel in their crown, while inciting the least resistance possible. To do that meant enticing its residents back to the city.

  The Nazis succeeded in their plan. The population of Paris had plummeted in June, from two million to about seven hundred thousand. But by late July many thousands of Parisians had returned, including much of the social and cultural elite. Chanel prepared to return home from Lembeye. While reassured by reports that Paris was again inhabitable, she was desperately worried now about her beloved nephew André, who, she’d learned, had been taken prisoner and was languishing—sick with tuberculosis—in a German detention camp.

  Chanel was grief-stricken at the possibility of losing forever the young man she considered (or who actually was) her son. She spoke rarely of the depth of her attachment to him, but in a little-known 1944 interview with British journalist and former MI6 agent Malcolm Muggeridge, Coco let down her guard emotionally: “A close relative whom I treated like my own son, and who was in poor health, had been taken prisoner by the Nazis.… If that boy had perished in a Nazi compound I could never have gone on living. I would have killed myself.”

  Gabrielle Palasse-Labrunie recalled her aunt saying much the same thing: “[Coco] admitted to me that she could not have borne it if he had disappeared, that she would have committed suicide.” The threat of suicide was revealing. Many people Coco had loved had perished tragically, but André was different. He was the only person for whom she’d ever felt responsible, the one she’d always protected. The prospect of his dying appears to have provoked a different kind of sorrow—one tinged with self-recrimination, with guilt that she would have proved unable to save him. It was the reaction of a mother—a conclusion Malcolm Muggeridge himself seems to draw during their conversation. Although Chanel carefully refers to André as a “close relative,” Muggeridge pointedly ignores this distinction and asks, “What happened to your son?” Chanel replies without correcting the mistake, seeming to accept its implication: “He was eventually released.”

  Nothing short of a DNA test could ever settle the question of André’s birth, but whatever the biological facts, André’s illness and imprisonment only intensified Coco’s maternal attachment to him. (Gabrielle Palasse-Labrunie recalls that, after the war, for the rest of Coco’s life, she carried in her wallet photographs of André in military uniform.) With a combination of grief and steely determination, Chanel set out to rescue Palasse—a task that would entail cultivating and exploiting close contacts within the highest Nazi circles.

  Saying good-bye to André’s wife and daughters, Coco took to the road, along with her chauffeur, her employees, a woman doctor she’d encountered in town, and a friend she had also run into—the celebrated society hostess Marie-Louise Bousquet. Bousquet gained fame soon after for hosting weekly Franco-German luncheons, where Nazi officials mingled with French artists and aristocrats. After the war she became editor of Harper’s Bazaar in Paris.

  The Chanel caravan headed north in July. Coco sent a telegram to her recent ex, Fenosa, now in Toulouse. Bearing the date of July 13, 1940—Bastille Day Eve—the cable read:

  I will arrive Monday evening Toulouse. Try to find me a place to sleep. If not Monday, I will surely be there Tuesday.

  Regards, Gabrielle Chanel.

  They had clearly traveled a long emotional distance, and the days of “tenderly Coco” were over. Still, Fenosa would hardly have refused a request to help his former mistress.

  The next stop for these reverse refugees was Vichy itself, where the new Pétain government had set up offices in the city’s hotels. Lodging was very tight, and Chanel and Marie-Louise were obliged to suffer through the night in a stiflingly hot hotel attic. Amazingly, some of the crowds consisted of wealthy vacationers, taking the waters. Even amid all the political chaos, Vichy had maintained its upper-class resort ambiance that July.

  “Everybody was laughing, drinking champagne.… I said, ‘Tiens! it’s the high season,’ ” recalled Chanel. That exclamation, “Tiens!”—meaning “How do you like that?” or “Imagine that!”—contains Chanel’s own acknowledgment of the situation’s irony: How could people be enjoying themselves during such a crisis? But the French upper classes continued to disport themselves during Vichy and the occupation, Coco and Marie-Louise among them.

  Telegram from Chanel to Fenosa (illustration credit 11.6)

  This quick overnight in Vichy reveals something key about Chanel’s political status during these years. Biographers have paid scant attention to the trip. Axel Madsen notes only that “a government official” helpfully sold Chanel some gasoline. Hal Vaughan mentions that Chanel “visited friends” in Vichy. But who were these officials and friends, and what was the point of the visit? Vaughan believes that Chanel had gone to plead for the release of André Palasse, and that is probably correct. Elsewhere he points out (as does Pierre Galante) that Pierre Laval counted among Chanel’s friends. But the extent and duration of this friendship merits further consideration. Vaughan believes that Coco had met Laval through her lawyer René de Chambrun, who was Laval’s son-in-law.

  The Chambrun marriage took place in 1935; therefore, in 1940, Chanel could only have had, at most, a five-year acquaintance with Pierre Laval, and even then, how close was she likely to be with her lawyer’s father-in-law? In truth, Chanel and Pierre Laval had known each other far longer—for at least fifteen years. And their friendship existed independently of the Chambrun marriage. Proof of Chanel’s long-standing acquaintance with Laval can be found in Elsa Maxwell’s August 11, 1945, Party Line column, which she devoted to Laval:

  The first time I saw Pierre Laval, French Judas Iscariot and Hitler’s lackey, was about twenty years ago. I had gone to tea with Chanel, the great French designer, and as I was ushered into her luxurious salon, I noticed there a squat, swarthy man dressed like an undertaker—all in black with the exception of a thin, white voile necktie. I mistook him for Pablo Picasso, the prominent Spanish painter, until Chanel entered and introduced the “Honorable” Pierre Laval, member of the French chamber of deputies. Chanel observed humorously that M. Laval, a country lawyer from her birthplace in the Auvergne, had been elected to the Chamber by the Labor vote.

  Maxwell’s piece confirms that in or around 1925, Chanel already knew Laval well enough to invite him to tea. Laval and Coco were exact contemporaries (he, too, was born in 1883) and his father owned a café in the region where Chanel grew up. She might have known him as a girl; she might also have met him through Etienne Balsan, since Laval seems to have had a connection to the prominent Balsan family, or she might have encountered him through the Duke of Westminster, her lover at the time of the Elsa Maxwell tea party. Finally, Chanel might easily have met Laval through his close friend Paul Morand. Paul and his wife, Hélène, had frequently hosted Laval at their Paris dinner parties.

  Laval and Chanel were natural allies. Despite beginning his career as a socialist, as he amassed his fortune, Laval gradually moved to the Far Right. He owed his wealth, furthermore,
to his investment in the Baccarat company—makers of fine French crystal. Involvement in this field would have placed Pierre Laval among the right-wing, pro-fascist luxury goods magnates of Paris (including Pierre Taittinger and François Coty) with whom Chanel socialized through the interwar years. Like a number of these men, Laval also owned a newspaper, Le Moniteur. That Coco, according to Elsa Maxwell, made a “humorous” remark about Laval’s election by the Labor party proves her awareness of the irony of Labor supporting a politician who worked actively against the interests of workers. Maxwell goes on to explain:

  I thought him a slippery, unpleasant customer, and watched with amazement his remarkable rise to fame. He amassed a fortune of 80,000,000 francs in ten years and when I asked a French politician “How come?” he answered, “Why he plays both ends against the middle. He represents labor in the Chamber and in private life takes care of his rich industrial friends by settling their labor problems through political contacts.”

  This penchant for duplicity would emerge later, with far graver consequences, when Laval ruled Vichy.

  It is highly likely then that Coco made a beeline for Vichy in July 1940 because she knew she could gain access to the new deputy prime minister. Undoubtedly she implored Laval’s aid in liberating André Palasse, but subsequent events suggest that Coco was also looking after her own interests.

  Chanel returned to Paris to find the Ritz transformed into living quarters for officers of the Reich. This quintessentially French luxury hotel—designed by Louis XIV’s royal architect, Jules Hardouin-Mansart—now bore the Nazis’ identifying logo; a swastika flag flew above the cream silk awnings. Uniformed sentries stood at the entrance.

  No precise record remains of Coco’s exchange with the officials guarding what had been her home, but somehow, she received permission to resume living at the Ritz, with one caveat: Chanel would have to trade her 1,700-square-foot two-bedroom with its view of the Place Vendôme for a couple of adjoining maids’ rooms on the rue Cambon side, numbers 227 and 228, in the section for Privatgast, the private guests of the Nazis. Coco complied readily, although Misia scolded her for ceding too easily to these lesser quarters.