Mademoiselle Read online

  One of [Chanel’s] great loves was Walter Schellenberg.… He was handsome and loved women!… A tall, handsome Aryan … [he] was tender.… Dincklage was not as important to her as Schellenberg. I can’t reveal my sources. But I will say that as a young girl … my aunt Nini Montiam (Isabel Montilla Contessa del Ampudia … she was Spanish) was Franco’s best spy. She was my great aunt; her mother and my grandmother were first cousins. She knew the Windsors, she knew everyone.

  Oblique as it seems, the reference is legitimate. Nini de Montiam had ties to high-ranking military officials, as well as to members of the British royal family, including the Windsors, who were famously frequent visitors to Franco’s Spain and to Berlin. In his memoir, Schellenberg gives a detailed account of his own involvement with the Windsors, when he participated in an abortive attempt by Hitler to “kidnap” the duke, which really meant bribing him with more than 50 million Swiss francs to leave England and work for German interests.

  No other details exist of Chanel’s dalliance with Schellenberg. From Berlin she returned to Paris—and Spatz—without incident and never breathed a word about Modellhut to anyone (save one veiled reference in her interview with Muggeridge, who, as a former MI6 agent, had likely some prior knowledge of the affair). The entire episode evaporated nearly magically. Apart from Schellenberg’s Nuremberg testimony, no other public discussion of Modellhut appeared for decades. No witness ever mentioned seeing the world-famous Coco Chanel in Madrid or Berlin during the months of the operation. No trace remained, despite all the people who surely dealt with Chanel—the countless hotel clerks, waiters, railway employees, and diplomats whose paths she crossed along the way. From this we may infer that Chanel had actually acquired some competence as a spy, learning to keep a low profile and avoid recognition, or that she knew how, if threatened with exposure, to use her fortune to smooth over a tight situation.

  In retrospect, Modellhut seems at best a rather harebrained scheme. Why would high-ranking Nazi officials Walter Schellenberg and Theodor Momm entrust an espionage mission to a French fashion designer and one of her girlfriends? Why would these officers invest months in a plan that depended upon Coco Chanel to circumvent Hitler and save Germany? The answer is a combination of the true panic and desperation setting in among the Germans and the surprisingly influential position that Chanel had attained by the 1940s. However far-fetched it was, the fact that Chanel was permitted—even encouraged—to participate in Modellhut—under the code name “Westminster” no less—testifies to how closely she had allied herself with the pro-Nazi branch of the British royal family, many of whose members participated in other Anglo-German strategies to end the war on German terms.

  On Coco’s side, her willingness to serve as a paid intermediary between the Reich and England demonstrates how the war exaggerated some aspects of her personality. For someone as invested as she was in being a national icon, Modellhut would have seemed irresistible. Chanel surely assumed that the mission had the potential to turn her into a global heroine—the woman who helped end a world war. Success in this domain would have proved definitively that Chanel’s influence—as commander of her own style regiment, as “dictator of fashion”—rivaled that of any actual military leader. Chanel disregarded the inconvenient fact that the mission’s success would have annexed France permanently to the Third Reich. Patriotism had always meant less to her than power.

  Chanel passed the remainder of the war in a more subdued fashion. She did no work save for a brief stint collaborating once more with Cocteau in 1944 on costumes for a revival of Antigone. She socialized with her usual set, seeing Lifar nearly every day. Although she had earlier served as “godmother” to French troops overseas, sending care packages, for example, to Jean Marais’s unit, Coco held herself—with rare exceptions—aloof from the horrors of war.

  In the winter of 1944, Jean Cocteau circulated a petition to release Max Jacob, ill with pneumonia and in Nazi custody, but Chanel—who’d known Jacob well—refused to sign (as did, more shockingly, Picasso). Cocteau continued to work tirelessly for several weeks on Jacob’s behalf. Finally, on March 16, 1944, the German Embassy announced that Jacob would be released from Drancy, the French internment facility for Jews en route to German concentration camps. The announcement came too late. Jacob, the devout Catholic convert, had died of pneumonia on March 5.

  The occupation of Paris started to disintegrate when the Allied forces stormed the Normandy beach on D-Day, June 6, 1944. As the Allied armies drew nearer to Paris, Chanel and her collabo set began to lose their footing. No longer certain of being on the winning side, and growing anxious about reprisals, Chanel decided a preemptive strike was in order. She tried to switch sides and ally herself with the now-likely victors of the war.

  She called the one member of the French Resistance she knew she could trust—Pierre Reverdy—and informed him of the whereabouts of a known Nazi collaborator, her own former houseguest and traveling companion, Baron Louis de Vaufreland. Reverdy acted on the tip and quickly arrested Vaufreland, who’d been hiding in the apartment of a French aristocrat, Count Jean-René de Gaigneron. Vaufreland was sent to prison and later to the camp at Drancy. He served six years. Chanel had sent one of her own accomplices to prison in an attempt to save herself.

  But Vaufreland’s arrest did not keep the French government from noticing Chanel’s wartime activities. In mid-August 1944, as twenty thousand German soldiers and French fascists attempted to flee Paris in advance of the liberating Allied forces, Spatz begged Coco to leave with him, but she refused. In late August, two agents of the FFI (Forces françaises de l’intérieur; Coco called them the “Fifis”) knocked on the door at the Ritz at eight o’clock in the morning to arrest her on suspicion of collaboration. Chanel, wearing only a light dressing gown and sandals, immediately followed them out silently, hoping that her regal dignity would keep them from searching the premises and finding the less-dignified Serge Lifar, who was hiding in her walk-in closet.

  “Coco behaved like a queen, like Marie Antoinette being led to the scaffold,” Lifar told an interviewer, recalling this set’s fondness for prerevolutionary France. Similarly, Theodor Momm likened Chanel’s postwar stoicism to that of another famous French heroine of the Right: “Her heroic silence permits us to think that a drop of Joan of Arc’s blood coursed through her veins.” Momm keenly grasped Chanel’s psychology. A remark of that sort, had it been made directly to Coco, would surely have propelled her into almost any folly.

  Most suspected collaborators endured rough and humiliating treatment at the hands of the “épuration” or “purification” committees. Women were sometimes stripped naked, shaved bald, and paraded through Paris. But Chanel suffered no such indignities. She later complained that the worst part for her was the boorish behavior of the Fifis, who dared to use the informal pronoun tu to the doorman at the Ritz as they escorted her through the lobby. She was fingerprinted and released after only a few hours of interrogation and permitted to return to the hotel. “They made me laugh,” she scoffed about her interrogators.

  Female collaborator taunted by members of the French Resistance, August 1944 (illustration credit 11.13)

  Speculation abounds about how Chanel managed to avoid being indicted and tried as a spy, but she most likely owed her gentle treatment to intervention from her British connections, especially Churchill. Gabrielle Palasse-Labrunie recalls Chanel saying “Churchill had me freed.” If that is so, the prime minister may have been concerned about the compromising material Chanel could divulge about certain members of the British royal family and their Nazi sympathies, prime among them Bendor and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.

  Mark Weitzman of the Simon Wiesenthal Center believes that Churchill feared specifically that Chanel would expose the details surrounding the Paris apartment kept by the Duke of Windsor during the war and paid for by Churchill himself. Keeping such a residence in enemy-occupied territory was an infraction of British law, which therefore meant the prime minister had serv
ed as accessory to a treasonous crime on behalf of the royal family.

  While Chanel had landed on her feet, she knew better than to press her luck. She understood that she needed to disappear in order to avoid further investigation into her case, so she packed her bags to leave. But before she left town Coco engineered one last publicity move: In the window of her Cambon boutique she placed a sign offering free bottles of Chanel No. 5 to all American GIs. Just as the Germans had before them, the American soldiers happily queued up to nab these treasures for their sweethearts back home.

  Chanel might have been trying to buy time with this perfume giveaway. Who would dare disturb the peace or safety of a benevolent French fashion icon making such a goodwill gesture? Or she might simply have wanted the Americans’ last memory of her to be favorable. In either case, it was a brilliant decision. Despite the chaos all around her, Coco enjoyed two uninterrupted weeks in Paris to arrange her move.

  In September 1944, Coco piled her luggage into her Mercedes and had her chauffeur drive her to Lausanne, Switzerland. She would remain there, in self-imposed exile, for eight years.

  • • •

  Although Chanel escaped all charges, the matter of her collaboration did resurface briefly after the war. In May 1946, Judge Roger Serre of Paris initiated a suit against Chanel on the charge of espionage and she was required to appear before the court. When confronted with the facts of Modellhut, as well as her attempt to use her Nazi connections to take Parfums Chanel away from the Wertheimers, Chanel simply denied everything. When pressed, she offered only transparent lies and excuses, insisting, for example, that she knew no one in the German military at all. The court was well aware of her untruths: “The answers Mlle Chanel gave to this court were deceptive,” reads the transcript. But nothing ever happened. Chanel returned to Switzerland, unscathed. No press coverage of these proceedings exists.

  For decades, no other accounts of Modellhut appeared anywhere else, either—a historical omission due at least partially to Chanel’s liberal pocketbook. When Walter Schellenberg, suffering with terminal liver cancer, received a compassionate early release from prison in 1950, Coco paid all of his medical expenses. She continued to support Schellenberg (and his wife, Irene) for the remaining years of his life, which he spent in exile in Italy. When he died at the age of forty-two, Chanel paid all his funeral expenses. “Madame Chanel offered us financial assistance in our difficult situation and it was thanks to her that we were able to spend a few more months together,” wrote Frau Schellenberg in a letter to Theodor Momm. After her husband’s death, Irene published his memoir, The Labyrinth. It contained no reference whatsoever to Operation Modellhut or to Coco Chanel.

  They said that I was old-fashioned, that I was no longer of the age. Inwardly, I was smiling, and I thought, “I will show them.”

  —COCO CHANEL

  When Chanel left Paris for Switzerland in 1944, she disappeared from the world’s stage as suddenly and completely as she had burst upon it thirty years earlier—entering a long and idle stretch of her life about which she later said little. Her official retirement from fashion had already begun, of course, five years earlier, in 1939, when she shuttered her couture house at the onset of World War II. For nearly fifteen years thereafter, from the age of fifty-six, Coco Chanel essentially vanished, abandoning both the practice of fashion and the high-profile life that had come with it. Voluntarily taking refuge in Switzerland, Chanel managed—with the likely help of well-placed friends—a graceful escape from the political repercussions that might otherwise have befallen her.

  Coco melted into the expatriate circles of Switzerland, a discreet community of people who needed a quiet place to bide their time while waiting for the heat of the world’s displeasure to cool. She bought a stucco three-story hillside villa in Lausanne, which she furnished in her usual style, outfitting it with Coromandel screens, gilt mirrors, Louis XV antiques, and lacquered furniture. But she spent the bulk of her time elsewhere, keeping the house largely to retain the tax privileges of Swiss home ownership.

  In Switzerland, as in Paris, Coco preferred the life of a luxury hotel dweller. Although she had owned a number of very grand houses, hotels had always appealed deeply to Coco. Some advantages were obvious: Hotels were easy, offering round-the-clock staff, meals at any hour, and dining rooms and lounges for entertaining friends. Most important, hotels meant freedom, lightness, and the option of packing up and leaving on a whim—a benefit that still resonated for the girl once locked away in an orphanage. “Luxury is liberty.… I never settle in anywhere,” Chanel told Claude Delay. “I’ve chosen liberty.” And so she “camped out,” as she put it, traveling among the wealthy resort towns of St. Moritz, Klosters, Lausanne, and Davos, taking up residence at her favorite hotels, the Lausanne Palace, the Central, or the Royal in Lausanne, the Beau-Rivage in Ouchy on Lake Geneva. Since she was not officially barred from France, she sometimes traveled back to spend time at La Pausa in Roquebrune. Occasionally, she made brief, discreet visits to Paris.

  Coco was not alone, exactly. Until around 1950, Spatz, who’d escaped prosecution, remained her frequent and sometimes live-in companion. Even after he left her (apparently to paint nudes on an island off the coast of Spain), Dincklage continued to enjoy Chanel’s largesse, supported by the generous lifetime pension paid to him through the trust Coco established after the war, known as COGA (for “Coco” and “Gabrielle”).

  Coco also took good care of André, who, still suffering from tuberculosis, could no longer work. Chanel made sure that Palasse and his family could stay near her, buying for them a series of three homes in Switzerland to which she would sometimes repair as well: a house in the wine region of Lavaux, an apartment in nearby Chexbres, and a villa in the woods of Lutry, in the canton of Vaud. No other member of the Chanel family benefited from such largesse, however. While all of Coco’s siblings had died, a new generation of Chanel children had since been born into poverty.

  Chanel with Spatz in Switzerland, c. 1950 (illustration credit 12.1)

  Yvan, the son of Coco’s brother Alphonse, died, leaving behind several orphaned children. These children, Coco’s great-nieces and nephews, were entrusted to the care of two of their aunts, Alphonse’s daughters Gabrielle and Antoinette—named, obviously, for the elder Chanel sisters. The children’s situation offered an eerie parallel to the fictional tale Coco had so often told of her own early life: orphans being raised by two aunts. If she saw the similarity, it failed to move her. Chanel did nothing to intervene or help. Aside from Aunt Adrienne, now the Baroness Nexon, André Palasse, and his daughters, Chanel’s extended family held no interest for her. She had permanently severed all ties.

  The companions of her years in exile included a few of her intimates from France, among them writer and former Vichy official Paul Morand and his wife, Hélène, whose reasons for fleeing to Switzerland were much the same as Chanel’s. Their financial situations, though, differed dramatically. Chanel had always kept a large portion of her fortune in Swiss banks and elsewhere abroad. She remained independently wealthy. But Morand found himself nearly penniless, the French government having frozen his book royalties and revoked his civil service status. Always a generous friend, Chanel invited the couple to be her guests at the Badrutt’s Palace Hotel in St. Moritz. There, in the winter of 1946, Coco and Paul sat down for the series of interviews that Morand hoped to turn into a biography of Chanel.

  For some reason the transcripts of their conversations languished for nearly thirty years. In 1976, they finally appeared as L’Allure de Chanel—the oddly compelling book in which Morand cedes his own voice to Coco’s, reproducing uncritically even her most far-fetched fabrications. Perhaps it was Morand’s way of thanking Chanel for the friendship she offered during his period of disgrace. Morand later returned to France and reestablished his career.

  Her old friend Luchino Visconti visited Coco in Switzerland, as did Misia Sert, who was deteriorating badly, falling ever more deeply into her morphine depend
ence. Misia came to Switzerland not only to see Coco but also to buy drugs. The 1945 death of JoJo Sert had taken a devastating toll on her. Despite their having divorced in 1927, when Jojo left Misia for the much-younger Roussy, he had always remained the love of her life. In the summer of 1950, Chanel was vacationing at Roquebrune and Misia came to visit. Then, on October 15, 1950, shortly after Misia’s return to Paris, she died, at the age of seventy-eight. Upon hearing the news, Coco jetted immediately up to Paris.

  Arriving at Misia’s home, she insisted on time alone with her old friend, to prepare her for burial. Coco, the child who’d sought companionship amid the dead in cemeteries, felt completely at ease working with Misia’s lifeless body.

  Several hours passed; a crowd gathered outside the closed doors in the drawing room. Finally, the doors opened and Chanel emerged from the bedroom; the assembled guests peered past her and gasped. Lying in state upon her Louis XIV bed, which was covered with white flowers, Misia had traveled fifty years back in time. Resplendent in white lace, her hair loosely gathered in a chignon, her face smooth, Misia was once more the rosy young woman in Renoir’s portrait. Coco had selected her dress and fitted it to her perfectly; she had colored and curled her hair, and applied her makeup; she’d even manicured her nails. “She did this out of affection—so that no one would see Misia looking ugly,” says Gabrielle Palasse-Labrunie. But that wasn’t all. Chanel had also performed a bit of makeshift plastic surgery, expertly pulling back Misia’s jowls and loose facial skin, which she secured—like so much excess fabric—behind her ears with dressmaker’s pins—a designerly gesture of mingled love and cruelty perfectly summing up the thirty-year friendship of two eternal cocottes. Unsurprisingly, Chanel sometimes told friends she might have liked to be a surgeon.