Mademoiselle Page 35

  The couple tried to be discreet. They socialized mostly at private dinner parties and avoided public places, especially upscale watering holes. Often, they stayed at home. Chanel had a small piano installed in her apartment, and she returned to practicing the light songs she had learned long ago. Dincklage would listen to her sing in her reedy voice. Spatz never wore his uniform, only elegant civilian clothes, and he and Chanel spoke in English when out in public. Their social circle included Misia Sert, her husband, JoJo (who was conducting a love affair with Marie-Ursel Stohrer, wife of Hitler’s Spanish ambassador), Jean Cocteau, Serge Lifar, Paul Morand (now a Vichy ambassador), and Maurice Sachs (who was concealing his Jewish identity and working as an undercover Gestapo agent). They dined often at the home of Vichy’s ambassador to occupied Paris, Fernand de Brinon—considered one of the architects of French collaboration. Other frequent dinner companions included the German ambassador to Vichy, Otto Abetz, and his French wife, Suzanne, née de Bruyker, and the many French aristocrats who had spent part of the later 1930s at costume balls, decked out as court figures from eighteenth-century France. Now the occupation seemed to be re-creating in real life the pre-democratic era they craved. Like royalty of the good old days, these die-hard noblemen and women could enjoy outrageous privilege, though misery lay just outside the gates.

  Without her business to run, Chanel had little to do apart from these mondanités, but by late summer of 1941 she had found a new form of employment. Hal Vaughan and others contend that Chanel’s work for the German secret service represented an exchange for the release of André Palasse, and this was likely the original impetus for her activities. But Chanel went beyond the call of family duty in her efforts for the Nazis, probably because she believed in their cause.

  Before she could be sent out on any missions, Chanel needed the approval of the higher-ups in Berlin. Dincklage served as the initial intermediary between her and Reich officials. In early 1941, Spatz traveled from Paris to Berlin, accompanied by a French aristocrat who had already turned into a Gestapo agent: the Baron Louis de Vaufreland (also known by his alias, “Piscatory”), who had been recruited by another German agent based in Paris, Hermann Niebuhr. In Berlin, Hitler and Goebbels personally met with Dincklage—proof that Spatz’s star was on the rise. Whatever else they discussed, we know that Chanel’s future role clearly figured on the agenda, since upon his return to Paris, Dincklage arranged a meeting between his travel companion, Vaufreland, and Coco.

  Vaufreland explained to Chanel how much he could help her, provided she cooperated with him. He could have André Palasse liberated from prison camp and possibly also help Chanel wrest control of her perfume enterprise away from the Jewish Wertheimer family. Chanel must have evinced significant interest, since she next met with Vaufreland’s superior, Hermann Niebuhr, who confirmed that André’s release could be arranged. All Coco had to do was travel to Madrid to obtain information valuable for Germany. Having received her official agent number from the Nazis, F-7124, and her code name, Westminster (in honor of the duke, still her closest ally in the pro-German branch of the royal family), Chanel was ready.

  The name “Niebuhr” (also rendered as “Nieuburg” and “Neubauer”) appears several times in Chanel’s police file. Document #5.455 RG 16.640 contains information obtained from the German secret service, Abwehr. It details an expedition to Madrid taken in late summer of 1941 by Chanel in the company of Baron Louis Vaufreland. On August 5, the two traveled by evening train across the border and on to Madrid. Abwehr officials in Paris had cabled ahead to ensure their safe and comfortable passage, and so they encountered no trouble at any checkpoint. Later, as Chanel settled into her luxurious suite at the Madrid Ritz (Vaufreland stayed elsewhere), she probably did not pause to consider what Apel-les Fenosa might have thought of her five-star visit to Franco’s Spain, courtesy of the Third Reich. (Living out part of the war in Toulouse, Fenosa—unlike many of his fellow artists—refused to participate in any exhibition in France during its years of occupation.)

  Records of Chanel’s activities during her first trip to Spain no longer exist. Little documentation remains of this summer in Madrid apart from a few details surrounding a social visit made to a British diplomat’s home—during which Coco made certain to mention her intimate friends Winston Churchill and the Duke of Westminster. But Chanel must have accomplished something, for by the end of 1941, André—still ill with tuberculosis—was back in France. “My joy was beyond words,” said Chanel to Malcolm Muggeridge about André’s release. “It was as though the bells you heard chiming throughout Paris were all pealing together within me.”

  But that joy was qualified; the war brought suffering on a global scale, and decline and death seemed to be stalking members of Chanel’s closest circle. Misia, now seventy, was emaciated and nearly blind. André was home, but greatly diminished by four years in a POW camp. He lived in Paris while undergoing extended treatment for his TB—paid for by Coco. (He recovered slowly and imperfectly and was never again able to work full-time.) The winter of 1941 brought news that Grand Duke Dmitri was very ill with tuberculosis, for which he’d undergone two lung surgeries in Switzerland. The handsome young noble that Chanel had once whisked off to a Mediterranean tryst was succumbing to the same illness now ravaging André.

  Faced now with this gradual shrinking of life, living through war yet again, Chanel must have felt some of her famous control slipping away. She had always responded to adversity by plunging more deeply into her work. In 1941, though, even “work” as she knew it had changed drastically. Having renounced—ostensibly forever—her career in couture, Coco had restricted her professional life to her stake in the lucrative Parfums Chanel and her new affiliation with the Nazis. Perhaps this is why those two elements came together to form her next project: to wrest control of the perfume business from the Wertheimer family using the Aryanization, or “Jewish,” laws.

  Chanel had long felt ill used by the Wertheimers, despite how wealthy she’d grown with their help. Her partnership with them dated to 1924, when they’d signed the deal that handed the reins of the company to the brothers and a 10 percent profit share to Coco. Over time, the original star fragrance, Chanel No. 5—later joined by No. 22, Gardenia, Bois des Iles, and Cuir de Russie—had become the best-selling perfume in the world. But even as the Chanel brand skyrocketed, Coco’s proportionate share of perfume sales remained the same. To Coco, from within her protective bubble of the Ritz, this looked like the one war atrocity she needed to address.

  Like many wealthy Jewish families, the Wertheimers had fled Paris before the Germans arrived, moving to New York City and setting up an independent subsidiary, Chanel, Inc. They built a perfume factory across the Hudson River in Hoboken, New Jersey, where they resumed manufacturing Chanel No. 5, selling it in the United States and in Europe at American PXs. This new corporation was earning large profits, but Chanel had no legal right to any of it. Furthermore, Coco, assuming that the Wertheimers could not procure the necessary flower essences in the States, feared that the new, rival version of the perfume was an inferior fake, consisting of ersatz ingredients. The idea that the Wertheimers were not respecting the sacred No. 5 formula, or that they were fabricating a lesser perfume under her name, enraged her still more. She wanted revenge.

  Chanel called upon the aid Vaufreland had offered with the Wertheimer matter. Vaufreland sent her to Dr. Kurt Blanke, who dealt with the seizure of Jewish property under Aryanization laws in Paris. But the Wertheimers’ foresight and business savvy proved greater even than the determination of the Third Reich.

  The Wertheimers had long foreseen the peril Hitler posed to European Jews and had taken steps to protect their fortune. In late 1939, shortly before fleeing to the United States, they entered into business with a non-Jewish Frenchman named Félix Amiot, an aviation engineer who built and supplied bombers to France. Amiot received a payment of 50 million francs from the Wertheimers, and shortly thereafter, he apparently took control of Parfums Ch
anel. Via this arrangement, the business would remain in Aryan hands during the war, which protected it from precisely the plot that Chanel hatched.

  Chanel tried to fight the Wertheimers, claiming that they, not Amiot, were still the owners of the business—which would render it susceptible to seizure by the Nazis. She was confident that her Nazi connections would win the day for her. As Patrick Buisson has written, “In a France subjected to the whims of the occupier, it seemed impossible that Mademoiselle would lose this unequal battle.” But the Wertheimers were far from the underdogs here. As with all matters during World War II, battle lines among different factions could become blurry, and the Wertheimers had their own connections. In the eyes of the law, and thanks in part to some well-placed bribes to German officials and antedated stock transfers, Félix Amiot was now the legal owner of Parfums Chanel. The company was indeed safe from Nazi seizure. As one of the Wertheimers’ lawyers later put it: “During the rest of the war, Mademoiselle Chanel had no further say in the matter.” For good measure, the Wertheimers had also appointed to their board of directors Baron Robert de Nexon and several other prominent Gentile figureheads.

  The addition of Robert de Nexon represented a Wertheimer coup de grâce. Not only was Nexon a member of Chanel’s extended family by marriage—first cousin of Adrienne’s husband—he was also a very old friend of Etienne Balsan’s and someone Chanel had known in her long-ago past as a kept woman.

  How had the Jewish Wertheimers managed to find their own German connection to bribe for this subterfuge? The answer is that, during World War II, Félix Amiot was an equal opportunity supplier of aircraft and armaments, transacting with Germany as well as with France. Put simply, the Wertheimers saved their company from the Nazis by paying off a French Nazi collaborator. Amiot had worked closely with Hermann Göring, commander in chief of the Luftwaffe, the German air force. No case better exemplifies this war’s murky politics, the way it blurred the line between treason and patriotism, and, most striking of all, the power of money to short-circuit (sometimes) the Nazi machine.

  The Wertheimers’ new company, Chanel, Inc., continued to flourish in the United States, largely through its sales of No. 5, which, contrary to Coco’s assumptions, still featured the finest floral essences from France and the all-important synthetic aldehydes. Proving yet again their astonishing talents for both business and backstage machinations, the Wertheimers had dispatched their own corporate spy to Grasse, France, to procure the jasmine, ylang-ylang, and other flowers needed for Chanel No. 5.

  Through their daring, the Wertheimers had not only successfully escaped France with lives and fortune intact; they established a new, even more profitable American company.

  As the New York division of Chanel, Inc., grew, Chanel’s percentage of profits from sales of products bearing her name went ever downward. The Wertheimers owed 10 percent of their U.S. profits to Parfums Chanel, and 10 percent of that figure—hence only 1 percent total of U.S. proceeds—then went to Coco. Never did she acknowledge the implications of having tried to invoke the heinous Nazi Aryanization laws against her own business partners. That she had been outsmarted by these Jewish brothers in a financial matter could only have intensified her belief in Jewish avarice.

  In his memoirs, Jacques Chazot reported a dinner party at which Coco indulged her animus against Jews, addressing herself to a female dining companion:

  [She said], “My dear, do you know why Jews love and understand painting so much better than they do music?” The woman was mutely astonished, a general silence fell. Chanel returned to her subject, sure of her dramatic effect, “Paintings sell better.” She then continued along in the same vein: “Don’t forget either that there are three categories: the Jews, who are my friends that I adore and I have proof of this! The Israelites—whom you must be very wary of and avoid like the plague, and the Yids, who must be exterminated altogether.”

  The last remark was hardly original. For many years, French anti-Semites had nuanced their bigotry with these famous “three categories” of Jews. In Chanel’s case, the first, “acceptable” category would normally have included the Wertheimers, but at the time she spoke these words, even they would have fallen into one of the other, lesser categories.

  Verbal anti-Semitism was not unusual among Chanel’s set, but Coco tended to step over the line of genteel bigotry. More disturbing, though, are several instances of Coco’s public behavior.

  The dapper Prince Jean-Louis de Faucigny-Lucinge could trace his family back to the eleventh century. His wife, the angularly beautiful Liliane, or “Baba” (née Erlanger, of partially Jewish descent), had worked as a fashion model and was dressed by some of Paris’s top couturiers, including Chanel. Together, the couple were glamorous fixtures of the Paris beau monde of the 1930s and ’40s, and known for their lavish parties. Even their impeccable social status and wealth could not fully protect the Faucignys, though. The prince’s autobiography, Un gentilhomme cosmopolite (A Cosmopolitan Gentleman), contains a story hinting strongly that Chanel’s idle dinner party anti-Semitism led, at least once, to real-world—and potentially horrific—action.

  Faucigny recalled a Riviera evening during the war when he and his wife encountered their friends Stanislao Lepri, the Italian consul for Monaco, and Leonor Fini, the noted surrealist painter, who had just returned from a dinner at La Pausa. Visibly agitated, Lepri and Fini reported that throughout dinner Chanel had indulged in particularly vituperative remarks about the Jews and the war, claiming that “France had only gotten what it deserved”—a sentiment commonly voiced by the extreme Right, implying that the country’s moral decline and passivity toward Jews and Communists had brought on its troubles. Lepri and Fini noted Spatz’s presence at this dinner, referring to him as Chanel’s “German lover,” and added that even he was alarmed and “tried to moderate” her tone somewhat. Spatz was too polished an SS officer to permit himself such vulgarities.

  Faucigny’s story then takes a darker turn: The following day, his wife, Princess Baba Faucigny, and Chanel happened to cross paths in the lobby of Monte Carlo’s Hôtel de Paris. Coco moved toward Baba to kiss her in greeting, but Baba, still deeply upset by what she’d heard of Chanel’s anti-Semitic outburst of the previous night, turned sharply away, refusing the kiss. Soon after thus publicly snubbing Chanel, Princess Faucigny found herself hunted by the Nazis. She was obliged to flee her home and go into hiding for the remainder of the war. She successfully evaded the Nazis but died unexpectedly in 1945 at the age of forty-three. In his book, Prince Faucigny—who had once been a good friend of Chanel’s—makes plain that he suspected a causal relation between his wife’s encounter with Chanel and the Nazis’ subsequent targeting of Baba:

  Gabrielle Chanel was not a woman to forget this sort of affront. But could her anger drive her to denouncing someone to the Nazis? The hypocritical ideology of the era, its moralism, chauvinism, anti-Semitism … encouraged Chanel to give these dangerous speeches. Where is the border between a sentence spoken into the air and a specific denunciation? A group of dubious people loitered around her, including a certain Vaufreland, the wayward son of a good family, a notorious collaborator believed to be a Gestapo informant. It is not impossible that Chanel … spoke imprudently about my wife [to Vaufreland] and that it was this parasite who drew the attention of the German agents to this supposed Jewish woman.

  Faucigny never knew for sure whether Chanel had denounced his wife to Vaufreland, and he makes a grave accusation here. Near the end of his life, in 1990, Faucigny spoke to a journalist who asked him about Chanel. His response was a blend of anger tempered with psychological insight: “She was such a nasty woman, a horrible woman! And she conducted herself very badly during the war.… I recognize that she was very generous. She [was] a strange mixture of a woman, nasty, envious.… She had every kind of success, everything one could imagine, and yet she was very ill at ease [mal dans sa peau], keeping a sort of resentment and bitterness toward people, which came from her difficult youth.�
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  Faucigny touches on an important quality in Coco—her inability to feel satisfied, her craving always for more—particularly for more security and more proof that she had arrived, that she was an insider. Paris during the war would only have aggravated this tendency in Chanel, since insiders and outsiders were so sharply delineated. By allying herself with the Germans, who looked for a time like the future masters of the universe, Chanel demonstrated that she had attained the ultimate status—she had entered the sanctum of the Reich.

  This insatiable hunger for belonging may explain a story about Chanel’s behavior during these years, which has never come to light before now. In 2011, James Palmer, a London-based attorney whose company, Mondex, specializes in the restitution of Jewish property stolen by the Nazis, contacted me with information about Chanel’s surprising intervention in the life of a French-Jewish family during the war. Palmer put me in touch with two sisters, the late Viviane Forrester of Paris, eighty-six at the time of our conversation—a highly respected journalist and author—and Lady Christiane Françoise Swaythling, called “Ninette,” then eighty-three, of London. Born into a German-Jewish family, the sisters bore the maiden name of “Dreyfus.” Interviewed separately, they told exactly the same story.

  Viviane and Ninette were young girls when the Germans invaded Paris and upended their comfortable life. They stayed in the city as long as they could, but eventually the family was forced to separate and go into hiding in the South of France to avoid arrest and deportation to the camps. In addition to constant fear, the sisters—like so many of their compatriots—endured terrible hunger, which Forrester described movingly in her memoir, Ce Soir, après la guerre (Tonight, after the war): “I was so hungry during that time that my teeth seemed to ache with the lack. In this time of rationing, to chew, to swallow—became an obsession. Ninette and I used to draw pictures for each other of our favorite foods.”