Coco Chanel (50 page)

Jan 22. Jean Cocteau . . . shows me some great photographs from the old days . . . Gide at fifteen . . . Georges Auric and Raymond Radiguet, stark naked in a small clump of reeds . . . Misia and Coco in ju-jitsu outfits.
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On January 11, Boulos commented on Misia's distress at Sert's departure for Spain and a sojourn with his mistress, and then described going with Cocteau and Marais to an all-night pharmacy “to fill in a prescription.” Marais had almost succeeded in weaning Cocteau off his opium, so this must have been a prescription “for the morphine to which Misia and Boulos were both hopelessly addicted.”

Over the years, Misia and Gabrielle had made numerous trips to Switzerland together, apparently to visit this or that clinic. Almost certainly, one of the major reasons for these trips was in fact to collect not only Misia's new supply of morphine but also Gabrielle's.

In the postwar period, Gabrielle had someone else pick up her “prescription.” Her assistant Lilou Marquand said she knew that “someone would go to Switzerland to get her morphine” with the protection of Chanel Inc.”
¹⁸

 

Parisians were now pretty desperate for distraction from their privations, and entertainment of all kinds—theaters, cinemas, the opera and ballet as well as music halls, cabarets and brothels—were doing a roaring trade. Cafés and restaurants were filled with celebrities, the old rich, the black-market new rich and many Germans keen to sample the famed pleasures of “Gay Paree.” Those revelers unwilling to call a halt to their evening and brave the rigors of the Metro at the eleven o'clock curfew hour—virtually everyone had to use it; private cars were almost unknown—stayed on at the clubs and cafés, frequently open all night. Colette wrote to a friend that the composer Georges Auric, out with Marie-Laure de Noailles and a German officer, had his leg badly injured: “Nightclub, two in the morning, champagne, accident.”
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Intelligent and sensitive though Boulos Ristelhueber was, he could only partly comprehend the history and complexity of the friendships recorded in his diary. Perhaps most complex of all was that between Misia and Gabrielle. Since their meeting in 1917, they had fought, hurt, envied, loved and sometimes hated each other. Gabrielle was drawn to the mad Slav in Misia, who was, like her, as Morand said, extraordinarily rich in “that singular commodity called taste.” And while they each had a gargantuan appetite for gossip and intrigue, these were just as readily used against each other. Each of them was also probably the only woman the other knew to whom she could unfailingly turn. From its initiation, their friendship had been an intensely close one, often provoking gossip. Their many mutual friends were completely divided as to whether Gabrielle and Misia were lovers. At various times, it is almost certain that they were.

Gabrielle and Misia were connoisseurs of women's beauty, and bedding each other—or another woman, for that matter—was not something that would have concerned them in the least. They were libertarians who had lived through an era that was increasingly open to sexual experiment. Gabrielle also spent her working days molding her artistry on women's bodies. As she would say, it was a woman's body itself that was one of the things that inspired her designs. She was also enough of an artist that Coleridge's assertion in many ways applied to her: “A great mind must be androgynous.” In like manner, Virginia Woolf 's conviction was pertinent: “It is fatal for anyone who writes [or makes any art] . . . to be a man or a woman pure and simple; one must be woman-manly or man-womanly.”
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With time, despite loving and wanting to be loved by men, it seems that Gabrielle turned more often to her own sex for both exhilaration and consolation.

In the period immediately before and during the early part of the war, one of her lovers was the woman mentioned above, the duchesse Antoinette d'Harcourt. This beautiful and rather tormented woman apparently needed her beloved opium in order to better express her passion and intelligence. Her son, Jean, remembers Gabrielle visiting them often before the war at the d'Harcourt château in Normandy.
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Gabrielle was apparently having an affair with Antoinette. The younger woman appears to have enjoyed the extra frisson of running another female love affair at the same time. Her second lover was Arletty. One day, it seems that Antoinette misjudged her timing, or perhaps her “mistake” was intentional. As Gabrielle was leaving her tryst with the young beauty, she met Arletty arriving.
²²

In 1943, Salvador Dalí wrote a roman-à-clef,
Hidden Faces
, cataloguing the viciousness and vacuity of much of
le tout
Paris
.
Cécile Goudreau, the sharp-tongued, knowing and witty sophisticate, is, apparently, Gabrielle,
²³
and Dalí depicts her as both a devotee of opium and an enticingly predatory lesbian: “As she spoke Cécile Goudreau stretched herself out and drew up the lacquered table with the smoking accessories set out on a level with her chest. Betka came and lay down beside her, pressing her own body lightly against hers. Then Cécile, with a quick casual movement, passed her arm around her neck.”
²⁴
But before Betka's seduction, Cécile, “with the consummate skill of an old mandarin” introduces her young companion to the rituals of smoking opium.

With time, Gabrielle would become more circumspect about displaying any of these attitudes for public consumption. Indeed, as her legend would become transformed into a myth, she would staunchly deny any sexual or narcotic transgressions. During the war, meanwhile, she continued her affair with her German. Afterward, she would defiantly proclaim, “People believe that I exude rancour and malice. They believe . . . well, they believe anything, apart from the fact that one works, one thinks of oneself and one takes no notice of them.”
²⁵

Gabrielle and Arletty were, of course, only two of the most high profile of many French women who had affairs with German men. These liaisons with the enemy were to become the aspect of collaboration that most exercised the popular imagination, and in the purges that followed the liberation, thousands of women would be accused of “horizontal collaboration.” Notoriously, many would have their heads shaved and swastikas daubed on their skulls. Some were paraded naked through the streets; others were murdered before they reached any formal kind of trial. Prostitutes were treated with particular harshness.

In this period, any woman even found in the company of a German risked being accused of horizontal collaboration. To a large extent, while they were sometimes “turned in” by other women, the feeling against them derived as much from the sense of personal and national emasculation felt by French men, living under an occupying army. While postwar prosecution of these women was seen as a kind of cleansing process, they were also used as scapegoats for the sense of impotence their menfolk had experienced during the war.

Whatever the resulting censure, these liaisons nonetheless took place. Frequently, these women were vulnerable in one way or another: they might be young, single or divorced, and their first contact with a German was often in the workplace. By the middle of 1943, approximately eighty thousand women from the occupied zone were claiming support from the Germans for the children resulting from these liaisons. In Gabrielle's case, with a ruthlessness attendant upon her fear of growing old, combined with her underlying loneliness, she, too, had her own particular vulnerability.

Who then, was Gabrielle's German lover, the man who, like her, professed to hate war?

27

Among certain upper sections of Parisian society, Hans Günther von Dincklage had been known for a number of years before the war, as a handsome and engaging German diplomat of eminently respectable pedigree. An acquaintance remembered that “he possessed the kind of beauty that both men and women like . . . His open face indicated an innocent sinner. He was very tall, very slender, had very light hair . . . He danced very well and was a dazzling entertainer.”
¹

Von Dincklage was born in 1896. His mother, Marie-Valery Kutter-Micklefield, was English and his father, Baron Georg-Jito von Dincklage, came from an impoverished but distinguished line. The boy grew up at the family castle in Schleswig-Holstein and, at seventeen, joined his father's cavalry regiment, the King's 13th Uhlans. Hans Günther proved himself a gifted horseman—“his body possessed the suppleness of a rider's”—and he excelled at the game of polo.
²
After fighting on the Russian front during the First World War, he was a senior lieutenant at its conclusion. Lacking any civilian education and without a profession to look forward to, he drifted into a series of occupations. It appears he had few qualms about how principled these were. “At first he was a member of one of those volunteer corps which organized civil war in the Republic and for years threatened it with uprisings . . . then, during the inflation he turned his hand to profiteering.”
³

By 1924, he had joined a textile manufacturer with whom his family had important interests, and he represented the firm in various European countries, including Switzerland. In that same year, von Dincklage had seduced a well-born young woman, Maximiliana von Schoenebeck, into running away with him. Catsy, as Maximiliana was often known, was the daughter of Baron von Schoenebeck, an art-collecting aristocrat whose
Schloss
was at Baden. Catsy's mother was Jewish. Her half sister, the writer Sybille Bedford, described her as “an attractive, happy-natured, life-enhancing, vital young woman,” whose family would come to believe that von Dincklage was “a disaster of lifelong consequences.”
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In 1928, the young couple moved to Sanary, in the south of France. Until a few years before a modest fishing village, Sanary had transformed itself into a select seaside resort. Discovered by a few French artists, including Cocteau, the little town had become particularly popular with von Dincklage's compatriots.

The stock market crash of 1929 saw him lose his partnership in the textile firm and, in 1930, he was describing himself as “an independent merchant” who had acquired a post in Sanary overseeing transport.
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In early 1933, von Dincklage became the national representative for a French cash register firm, and traveled regularly to Germany, ostensibly to study the cash register's manufacture. These trips were in fact a cover for what had become the other source of his employment: the new German government.
⁶

Having helped Catsy go through her considerable inheritance, after Hitler's rise to absolute power, at the beginning of 1933, von Dincklage had “placed his hopes in National Socialism.” As a result, in May of that year, he was resident in Paris with his wife for “the purpose of making contacts.”
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One is drawn to contrast this particular polo player with that other polo-playing lover of Gabrielle's during the previous war. Arthur Capel had suffered from the ennui of his times and had been capable of emotional carelessness. Yet, drawn into the war and finding himself torn between Gabrielle Chanel and Diana Wyndham, despite his ultimate failure, he was a man who appeared to have grown in emotional and moral stature. Capel and von Dincklage could not have been more different.

With Hitler's increased hold over Germany, a number of distinguished German Jews made their escape from the Gestapo to Sanary, where they took up exile. Soon the resort became something of an artistic German colony, acquiring the sobriquet “capital of German literature.” Among its illustrious refugees were Mahler's widow, Alma; Bertholt Brecht; Arnold Zweig; Ludwig Marcuse and the magisterial Thomas Mann and his extended family. A small contingent of English émigrés included Aldous and Maria Huxley, Julian Huxley and his wife, and D. H. Lawrence and his German wife, Frieda.

Catsy's mother (a hopeless morphine addict) had taken up residence in Sanary with her new Italian husband sometime before, and they had befriended a number of important local German figures, including Ute von Stöhrer, whose husband was then German ambassador in Cairo. Unbeknownst to anyone in Sanary, including Thomas Mann and his family, who were staying in the von Stöhrers' villa, von Stöhrer was also in the employ of the German intelligence service.
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In the summer of 1933, von Dincklage was appointed to the post of cultural attaché at the German embassy in Paris. A notoriously vague position, this frequently involved undercover activities. Indeed, by this time, the French Deuxième Bureau, the country's external military intelligence agency, was constructing a file on von Dincklage. By August 1933, he in turn had sent a propaganda report back to his Nazi superiors in Germany.
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At around this time, Catsy's younger sister, Sybille, was made party to a conversation that left her deeply shocked. Sitting with her friend Aldous Huxley in Barcelona, awaiting takeoff in a plane bound for Sanary, they were directly behind a well-groomed German couple. After a few moments, Sybille realized they were talking about her sister and von Dincklage. The woman said: