*A version of the book is subtitled "Nazi Agent" Was her
"Secret War" to keep her business?
Gabriella "CoCo" Chanel
1882 - 1971
In June of 2011, I elected CoCo Chanel, as Mistress of the Month. Here she is again, this time as a possible spy for Nazi Germany. She grew up in a convent where she'd been left as a child when her mother died by a father who didn't want his children. Her way out of being the equivalent of a foster child who had to make it alone was to sing for her supper, and become a Mistress. Lovers financed her attempts at business, as a hat maker and then as a revolutionary and renown fashion designer who became wealthy from sales of her signature perfume Chanel No. 5 and had over 2500 employees, mostly women, when the Nazis took over Paris. She never had a marriage or children herself, but she was generous to her family, the education of her sister's children. She also is known to have financed men she was interested in, having achieved independence and unusual success "for a woman."
Chanel succeeded through enterprise and creativity, and though she rose up in society to have both the exiled Duke of Windsor and his wife, the Duchess Wallis Simpson, and hero Winston Churchill as friends.
The author of this book, Hal Vaughan, exposes her relationship with spy Baron Hans Gunther Von Dincklage, called Spatz, and we wonder how much did she know. I don't believe she ever forgot what it was to be impoverished, orphaned, or living in the class system that made men choose more suitable well born women as wives. But consider CoCo often said and was quoted as believing that it was essential for a woman to have a man in her life, to be in love, to love. She had many disappointments and heartbreaks before she ever met Spatz, a charming younger man living in the South of France, with a half Jewish wife, who came across as more Upper Crust English than German. She was in her fifties and he in his forties when they became involved.
As you may know from reading my blog, I read every book I feature from cover to cover, and in the last year or so have been reading some books as audio books. Doing so has opened the time I have to read and I especially love it when an author reads their own work. However, I must tell you upfront that this book as an audio book was a total turn off. The woman reader (Why when the author is a man?) had such condemnation of CoCo in her sneering attitude and intonations that I couldn't bear to continue to listen to her. It gave the impression that this "International Best Seller" existed condemn and give an unbalanced account of CoCo. I winced hearing this aggressively negative voice.
I decided to give reading the old fashioned text a try, and found this was a story that built and had much research to it. But I was not swayed to the point that I might think that CoCo should have been tried as a war criminal just because while designing costumes very briefly in Hollywood in 1931 (including Gloria Swanson) that she noticed it was run by Jews.
That Hollywood films were and are made by Jewish people, particular male studio heads was in fact true in her era (and still is dominated by Jewish people), and perhaps this truth spoken is misinterpreted as Anti-Semitism. For if she really were, would she have lent her name? Or is it being implied that she herself was just greedy and irresponsible to her contract? If she was truly anti-Semitic then she probably would have not accepted the commission from a Jewish studio boss. She was paid very well - a million - but didn't need the money. If truly anti-Semetic she probably would not have made a deal on her perfume with a Jewish company in the first place. (Her costumes were not successful and she considered Hollywood too glittery and false.)
Nor do I ever find convincing generalizations that Catholics and Christians were raised to believe that Jews killed Jesus. I never heard that personally from any pulpit or in school or out of the mouth of anyone I knew; some people may have thought that but then they are ignorant of the Roman-occupied culture during Jesus' time.
That she felt ripped off by the Jewish-owned perfume company that made most of the profit on her perfume, is true. She legally battled with them but eventually let them buy her out, so to speak. She might have done so of any business partner. In a 1924 deal to have her perfume produced to meet great demand, she soon felt swindled and spent the next 25 years saying so, but her perfume is what provided her most of her wealth.
What I wanted was the cold hard facts of CoCo's involvement with Nazi's sans the Baron. Can be believe he admitted to her that he was a spy and asked her to work with him? That the Baron was a special man to her as a woman, that's where CoCo may have been played. He was known to be a seducer. He was there in the South of France to infiltrate society that lived there, as did CoCo live some of the time. He was there to report on Naval operations. That was his secret job. Frankly if I knew someone had married a Jewish or half-Jewish woman I would not assume they were a Nazi.
It's also that she may have played him and others with one objective which may sound selfish, but that is to survive as her world crumbled around her, to continue her business that she had to shut down and leave, to keep her employees, to continue to help her family. When she finally got out of Paris before the occupation, her employees mostly having fled to the countryside, people starving and in the streets, in bitter cold without heat, it was to her family that she fled. So what if she could afford a chauffer and a Rolls Royce? Wasn't she just as entitled to be afraid for her life?
And so if we focus on what the author dug up about the Baron, who was no doubt a spy for Nazi Germany, we can start there.
In the 1930's CoCo was worth in today's money about $230 million dollars. In the mid 1930's Adolph Hitler's second in command, Joseph Goebbels - who controlled all media - approved Baron Hans Gunther Von Dincklage as a special attaché to the German Embassy in Paris. French intelligence as well as Swiss intelligence was watching him. He was part of a "cell" of several hundred Nazi intelligence people in France. But intelligence may have been keeping an eye on the Baron while CoCo may have been one of many kept ignorant - at least for a while. The Baron's wealth was not close to hers. He was set up and being paid by Germany.
In Paris the Ritz Hotel became an island of wealth where the elite people moved to live as if there were no war. Chanel lived there as well as having a workspace and apartment across the street from the back door. The author makes the case that Chanel and some of her dear friends were morphine addicts for much of their lives, and that Chanel used the drug due to the depression she felt when yet another man she loved died suddenly - though this is repeated in the book as fact, it didn't seem to be substantiated, however, let's accept it and think "OK she had weaknesses."
During World War I, one tenth of French men died fighting. No one wanted to believe another World War would begin but in 1939 when panic hit Paris, there were no taxis, no telephones, and 4 million French fled south, often on foot, ahead of the German army. By then a lot of people were sorting through garbage cans outside of restaurants to solve their hunger pangs.
Dincklage divorced his wife Maximiliane a few months before the Nuremberg laws of 1934 deprived her of her citizenship. No one knows for sure when Chanel met Dincklage, but he was married then and he did not divorce for CoCo but to be in compliance with the Nazi regime according to the author. She testified when questioned after the war that they knew each other for 25 years.
The political and economic conditions in Europe had people choosing sides, even sides that were not winning. People thought that Communists, Socialists, and Fascists wanted to take over France. Germany and England were not so much considered the enemy but Russians - Bolsheviks - many who were Jewish - were. People feared a Russian Revolution scenario in France. As a friend to the exiled Duke of Windsor, who had given up his Kingship for the woman he loved, his Mistress Wallis Simpson, CoCo had taken to meeting up with them and other friends in Switzerland. Winston Churchill and his son Randolph were also visitors and friends - in England - and in France - and in Switzerland. Hitler promised that he would reinstall the Duke of Windsor as the British King when Germany won the war. The Duke and Duchess went to meet Hitler and famously photographed happily shaking hands. If you are social with such people, who are of a more elite status than you, would you follow their lead?
Seven years ago in June 2011 CoCo Chanel, the woman said to have been responsible for dramatically changing the fashion and style of womens' wear, was our Mistress of the Month. You might want to go back to that month for an overall more balanced view. As for other Nazi Mistresses, I spent a whole month on them in November 2017.
This book seems to make the case that CoCo was, rather than once in her twenties a love sick woman who struggled with the early limitations of desperate poverty, a more of an experienced and worldly Mistress of more men than previously revealed in films and books. Throughout her adult life she had relationships, she loved, she was sexual. Her men were of various ethnic backgrounds that influenced her designs. Instead of thinking that the early heartbreaks left her focused only on designing clothes, and perfume, we can think of CoCo who was a woman of business with a sense of responsibility to her employees and family, not just herself. The most convincing part of the book is that she took a trip to Germany and indeed met a Nazi leader herself.
A little later in this month of posts, I'll write more about the relationship CoCo had with the Nazi Spy that I learned from this book. I would like my readers to ask themselves if they have kept a relationship going with a man after learning something negative about how he conducts business or treats other people.
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