The Duplicitous Coco Chanel

Not long ago, my friend Ruby Lee stated her admiration for women’s fashion designer and perfume maker Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel. Ruby is a smart person whose opinions I respect, so I went in search of information about Chanel. That’s not to say I was completely ignorant of this diminutive Frenchwoman whose life began in 1883 (she claimed 1893) and ended in 1971 when I was a senior in high school. Who has not heard of Chanel No. 5, far and away the most popular fragrance in the world? First developed in the early 1920s from a secret recipe of rose, jasmine, orris root, natural musks and aldehydes, its scent appealed to “respectable” women and flappers alike; a lady could wear it to church or while dirty dancing with strangers in a jazz club. Chanel, who always waited until the fifth of a month before putting her newest fashions before the world, believed the number 5 had mystical significance. Among the women she dressed were Gloria Swansen, Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Marilyn Monroe, Jackie Kennedy, Audrey Hepburn, Romy Schneider, Brigitte Bardot and Catherine Deneuve.

She came from near the bottom of French society as it stood in the late 19th century (dad sold used clothes, mom was a washerwoman) and was consigned to an orphanage for six years. That’s where she learned the humble art of sewing—but also something about style. Chanel just had a sense of what did and did not look good on a woman. Once outside the walls, she moonlighted by singing for soldiers (and dabbling in prostitution). Although she had a passable voice, it was soon clear that her future was not on the stage but designing women’s clothes, hats, bags and jewelry, along with that heady perfume. Her interlocking “CC” brand epitomized haute couture in France and really, the entire Western world.

A celebrity by the mid-1920s, Chanel had affairs with textile heir Étienne Balsan, Igor Stravinsky, Pablo Picasso and the Duke of Westminster, among many others. Never pretending to be a feminist, she was happy to glom onto powerful men. None was more important than Pierre Wertheimer, head of a rich Jewish family in Paris. He set up and operated the businesses that produced, marketed and sold those clothes and fragrances, making her quite wealthy. A vociferous anti-Semite, she often complained about Wertheimer and accused him of ripping her off, although her accountant could prove it was not true.

This chain-smoking, morphine-injecting woman had a dark past. I refer to her being a traitor and spy for the Nazis during World War II and copulating with a Gestapo officer named Hans Gunther von Dincklage. They shared a suite at the Ritz Hotel, headquarters for the German army in France. While other Parisians had to endure rationing, she was living it up at fancy dinner parties and having fun. Chanel joined the Nazi military intelligence division, the Abwehr, and was given agent number F-7124. Her main action on behalf of “the Boche” was a hopeless effort in 1943 and 1944 to contact her old friend Winston Churchill, seeking to arrange favorable peace terms. This was done without Adolf Hitler’s permission as the Führer continued to think his Aryan soldiers would prevail. Deutschland über alles, and all that. Churchill refused to see her, but he came through after the German surrender on May 7, 1945. He made sure she got favorable treatment from Allied soldiers. Despite being arrested, Chanel was released after a few hours of gentle questioning.

Perhaps you know what happened to many Frenchwomen who were suspected of having engaged in sexual liaisons with Germans in the war years. They were shorn of their hair, painted with swastikas and paraded down the street, to the jeers and taunts of neighbors. The unlucky ones were stripped to their undies, some completely naked. Most of those women came from the lower classes and did not have rich and aristocratic protectors as did Coco Chanel.

Called as a witness in the 1949 collaboration trial of fellow Abwehr agent Louis de Vaufreland, she lied through her teeth about her own involvement. The judge, Fernand Paul LeClercq, saw the holes in her testimony but chose to ignore them. He may have been following the dictates of Charles de Gaulle who felt it was important to maintain the façade that all of France’s intellectual and artistic elite had stood firm against the Nazis. But there is abundant evidence that Maurice Chevalier, Edith Piaf and Léonie Marie Julie Bathiat (also known as “Arletty”)—and, of course, Chanel—were culpable to varying degrees. Following were decades of ambiguity and denial about what had really happened in the early 1940s.

Chanel took up residence in a Swiss chateau and was joined, shamelessly, by Dincklage. They kept a low profile for a few years and returned to Paris (the Ritz, in fact) in 1953. Never seeing a need to apologize or explain, she used her wiles to get back to the top of the fashion world.

The subject of more than 80 books, three movies and a Broadway musical (Coco, starring Katherine Hepburn), she certainly has a complex legacy. There’s plenty to dislike about her. I am not aware of Chanel ever expressing concern, much less sorrow or indignation about the 72,500 French Jews who were killed in Nazi death camps. Nonetheless, I went with my girlfriend today to a high-dollar mall in Seoul’s Jamsil district and bought her a bottle of Chanel No. 5.