BIOGRAPHY: Sleeping with the Enemy: Coco Chanel, Nazi AgentBy Hal Vaughan Chatto and Windus, 279pp. £20
FIVE YEARS AGO I called into Galignani, a bookshop on Rue de Rivoli in Paris, and asked for Alicia Drake's The Beautiful Fall.This work entertainingly chronicles French fashion during the 1970s and in particular the relationship between two of the era's most distinguished designers, Yves Saint Laurent and Karl Lagerfeld. It transpired that Galignani did not stock the book, and nor did any other outlet in France: Lagerfeld was then in the process of suing Drake, ostensibly for invasion of privacy but really, it was whispered, because she had exposed his background as being less aristocratic and more middle class than he had led the public to believe.
In the event, Lagerfeld lost his case and was obliged to pay the defendant's legal costs. The Beautiful Fall, having benefited from several months' free publicity, duly appeared on the shelves of French bookstores.
Since 1983 Lagerfeld has been head designer and creative director at Chanel, whose owners must be even more dismayed at the appearance this month of another book, one detailing their company’s founder’s distasteful behaviour during the second World War. Image matters a great deal in the world of fashion, and the House of Chanel has gone to a lot of effort over recent decades to present itself as the epitome of quiet refinement, the kind that can be acquired by the rest of us only after the expenditure of a great deal of money.
Meanwhile, the personal history of Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel has undergone a similar overhaul, exemplified by the 2009 film Coco Before Chanel, in which our heroine, played by the eternal moppet Audrey Tautou, was portrayed pluckily battling against the odds to fulfil her ambition of liberating women from the restraint of corsets. Naturally, the Chanel business was happy to co-operate with this enterprise.
I suspect Hal Vaughan received no support from the company during the research for this book: Chanel SA is conspicuous by its absence among the author’s acknowledgments. And no wonder: what he has to say about Gabrielle Chanel reflects badly not just on her but on the business she set up.
At least part of his narration has long been public knowledge. It is no secret that in 1939 Chanel closed her atelier, moved into the Ritz Hotel and there entertained a German lover 13 years her junior, Baron Hans Gunther von Dincklage. “Really, sir,” she is supposed to have told Cecil Beaton by way of justification for her actions, “a woman of my age cannot be expected to look at his passport if she has a chance of a lover.”
At the end of the war, having been quizzed by the French judiciary about her behaviour, the designer found it expedient to settle in Switzerland, where she remained until 1953, the year she relaunched her couture business.
All this information has been readily available, but Vaughan has taken the trouble to investigate further. He reveals that Chanel’s wartime record was more nefarious than hitherto realised. In particular, he has discovered archive material indicating that the designer was recruited as agent F-7124 into a German military intelligence organisation called the Abwehr. Chanel’s actions can be explained, if not excused, by the fact that her beloved nephew had joined the French army and, following his capture by the Germans, been interned in a prisoner-of-war camp, where he was known to be gravely ill. To ensure his release Chanel had to offer something in return, hence her involvement with the Abwehr, for which she undertook a mission to Madrid in 1941.
Later she again offered to work for the Germans, this time trading on her friendship with Winston Churchill to see if it were possible to enter negotiations for a settlement between the German and British governments.
At the same time, Chanel used her association with the German authorities in France in an attempt to gain control of the company that produced her bestselling perfume, Chanel No 5. Many years earlier, in 1924, keen to ensure worldwide distribution, she had agreed to give majority ownership of the company responsible for its manufacture to a successful businessman, Pierre Wertheimer. Being Jewish, Wertheimer and his family were obliged to take refuge in the US, but not before transferring apparent ownership of their interests to an Aryan partner, thereby putting them beyond the reach of the Nazis.
When the war ended, and Chanel fled to Switzerland, the Wertheimers returned to Germany and regained control of their perfume business. And when the designer wished to restart producing clothes, she turned to the same source for support. The result is that today Chanel is fully owned by the Wertheimers, who, according to Forbes, were last year worth $7.5 billion (€5.3 billion).
Hal Vaughan will never win plaudits for his literary style, and his narrative is frequently muddled. Especially when venturing into unfamiliar territory, such as fashion, he is inclined to seek the comfort of cliche. But he is right to point out the less attractive aspects of Chanel, who, throughout her life, had a tendency to indulge in casual anti-Semitic remarks. What he fails to note is the final bitter irony: that the present Jewish owners of Chanel are the beneficiaries of a business established by someone who gave support to the Nazis. This, it seems to me, is infinitely more embarrassing than the disclosure of middle-class origins.
Robert O’Byrne’s most recent book is a biography of Desmond Leslie, published by the Lilliput Press
