The Secret of Chanel No. 5 (21 page)

In the end, the sale survived. The German investigator, a certain Herr Blanke, decided that Les Parfums Chanel could not be considered a Jewish business. Coco Chanel had lost another battle with her partners. The government–encouraged by a well-placed inducement or two, almost certainly–upheld the new ownership of the company, finding that “the perfume company of Bourjois [of which Les Parfums Chanel was a part] has passed to Aryan hands in a manner that is legal and correct.”
¹²
It was a transfer dated to to the first months of 1941. Even then, not everyone in occupied France was content to let the matter rest. In February of 1942, the case was reopened, and Félix Amiot was once again subjected to a long interrogation
¹³
. In fact, his position throughout the war must have been precarious. He was allowed to run Les Parfums Chanel and to sell No. 5 throughout the Third Reich, despite suspicions. But who knows what was demanded of him. Perhaps unsurprisingly, that was the year Bourjois perfumes released in New York a new fragrance: Courage. Whatever his other sins, Amiot had stood by his old friends in America steadfastly.

Coco Chanel had tried to play dirty, and, surprisingly, given how the deck was rigged during those years, she still lost. The amazing thing is that she didn't lose a great deal more, because, as the war drew to a close in the summer of 1944, her position was growing increasingly tenuous also.

N
o one who lived in Paris in 1944 would ever forget how that summer ended, if only because the city's inhabitants could still remember the uninhibited, alcohol-soaked years before the war, when flappers danced the Charleston late into the night, women smoked cigarettes, and there were boozy drives along the winding back roads of the French Riviera. These years–the 1920s–had been known as
les années folles
–the crazy years–and they had seemed to promise so much at the time.

All that seemed like the distant past now, because the real crazy years had been the decades that followed. First had come the Great Depression, which had tempered the hedonism of the 1920s, and then a second terrible world conflict that destroyed it altogether. Here in the final year of that war, Paris remained occupied, and life under Nazi rule was cruel and unpredictable. Yet in the nightclubs, Édith Piaf still belted out sultry love songs, brothels were doing a fabulous business, and in the palatial Ritz Hotel on the Place Vendôme the party went on. Whatever else happened beyond its walls, at the Ritz there was still champagne on ice until it all ended.

By August of 1944, the wait was nearly over. The liberation began on August 19, Coco Chanel's sixty-first birthday. The week before, there had been rumors that the Allies were advancing on Paris, and, fearing an uprising of the local resistance, the Germans rounded up several thousand suspected French activists and loaded them on the final convoy of trains sent creeping from the industrial western suburbs of Pantin
¹⁴
to the concentration camp at Buchenwald. The trains left not much more than a stone's throw from some of the city's renowned factories, including, coincidentally, the Bourjois factory where Chanel No. 5 had been produced for decades. In the last days of the war, Théophile Bader's son-in-law, Max Heilbronn, was on one of them
¹⁵
. It was a cruel irony: Parfums Chanel was a company his family had helped to found, but under the laws of Nazi-occupied France it could no longer officially be theirs to manage. Its
usine
must have been one of the last things he saw that day in Paris.

Meanwhile, the battle in Paris began in the streets, fought by the other thousands of men and women of the French Résistance, part of the underground Forces of the French Interior–known colloquially as the FFI, or “fifi.” For five days, Paris was an urban war zone. Finally, on the warm Thursday morning of August 25, the sound of gunfire stopped. Out of the silence, the ringing bells of the cathedral of Notre Dame echoed over the Seine
¹⁶
. As the Allies gained control of one neighborhood after another, the other distant bells were added to the chorus. Soon everyone knew that the Germans had surrendered.

As those in Paris that night remembered, what came after was simply the world's greatest party, and the French “swept the [soldiers] into their arms, dancing, singing, often making love to them.
¹⁷
… The lovemaking was so widespread that a Catholic group hastily ran off tracts addressed to Paris's young women,” pleading with them to remember their virtue. It was all in vain. After years of living in an occupied city, restrained celebrations were the last thing on anyone's mind.

In fact, many of the city's inhabitants had long ago jettisoned sexual discretion. Only one-in-four Parisian residents had enough food during those years
¹⁸
, but nobody could ration life's most simple pleasures. On the streets of occupied Paris throughout the war, Frenchwomen watched as scantily clad German soldiers performed daily calisthenics in the city's parks, and, small surprise, there were tens of thousands of war babies. Some have called the occupation not the crazy years but
les années érotiques
–the erotic years–instead.
¹⁹

Ernest Hemingway would always claim that he was among the soldiers who personally liberated the bar at the Ritz Hotel that summer day. He was there as a war correspondent, writing for
Collier's
magazine, and, when the bells began ringing throughout Paris, what he remembered was the hard-drinking life of youthful abandon, when he and F. Scott Fitzgerald and a generation of American expatriates had imagined the city as their playground. On this of all days, he wanted to celebrate with a cocktail at the Ritz. When he arrived, the Germans were already in retreat, however, so he fired a few rounds of gunfire from the roof, freed from their imprisonment in the cellars several good bottles of Bordeaux, and made his way to the bar, where he greeted his old friend Bertin, the bartender, whose dry martinis were legendary.

From the bar at the Ritz Hotel, the view faced onto rue Cambon, where, at number 31, everyone knew they could find one of France's most famous landmarks: the flagship boutique of Coco Chanel. In those heady days, as soldiers poured into the capital and the American troops liberated Paris, “there was one souvenir of the city they all wanted
²⁰
. An average G.I. only had to enter a perfumery and hold up five fingers, to buy Chanel's classic.” Later, one British newspaper journalist claimed, “Not only was it the only French perfume the American G.I. had ever heard of, it was the only one he could pronounce
²¹
.” At the end of the First World War, French perfume had first become a souvenir symbolizing victory and elegance. At the end of the Second World War, it was simply Chanel No. 5 that everyone wanted. A year later, even the American president, Harry S. Truman, went looking for it
²²
. In a letter to his wife, Bess, written from Potsdam, Germany, in 1945, he wrote that he had purchased for her many pretty souvenirs–but he was sorry, he couldn't find her anywhere a bottle of Chanel No. 5.

In the months to come, Coco would discover why Chanel No. 5 had become something even an American First Lady coveted. The reason would make her wildly furious. That night, however, she had other things on her mind. At the Ritz Hotel in the days after the liberation, it was a scene of joy and wine and drunken celebration. Although she lived upstairs, Coco Chanel was not among the revelers. She hated the war and was glad that it was over. She loved France and its culture. But she was also proud, and, like a good number of other women in Paris, she had reason to be just a little bit worried.

Before the celebrations had even ended,
les épurations
–the purges–began,
²³
and from the beginning it was a kind of wild and indiscriminate vigilante justice. Those who had helped the Germans during the occupation were attacked by mobs and sometimes summarily executed in the streets. In those weeks after the war ended, as many as twenty thousand women were accused of “horizontal collaboration"–of having slept with the enemy. As punishment, their heads were shaved, and their identity cards were revised to list their occupation as prostitutes. They were then forced to walk, barefoot and often stripped naked, through the streets of Paris, reviled and ridiculed, with swastikas marked on their foreheads.

It was whispered that Christiane, the daughter of Coco Chanel's old friend and now archrival, François Coty, was among those brutalized
²⁴
. Although Coty's grandson, Henri, had fought for the French resistance and was deported to the camp at Buchenwald at the end of the war for his efforts, what people remembered were the politics of her father. Before his death in the 1930s, François Coty had purchased controlling shares in two newspapers,
L'Ami du Peuple
and
Le Figaro,
and he used both as bully pulpits for his pro-fascist and anti-Semitic principles. They were painful times, and Christiane Coty was just one among thousands targeted.

You could have seen much of it from the windows of the Ritz Hotel, and Coco Chanel, whether she wanted to believe it yet or not, had a problem. Christiane Coty had been humiliated on the grounds that she had simply socialized with German officers
²⁵
–not unlikely, since the Coty mansion on Avenue Raphaël in Paris had been requisitioned as the personal residence of one of Hitler's generals, Hans von Boineburg, during the war.

If Christiane Coty had appeared too tolerant of the occupiers, Coco Chanel had fallen in love with one of them, an elegant and well-connected gentleman. His name was Hans Günther von Dincklage, and he was a German officer of the fascist regime and probably a spy, and, of course, also Coco Chanel's wartime companion
²⁶
. Some say they met by chance in the lobby of the Ritz Hotel in the summer of 1941, which had already been taken over by the Germans, and that the affair had begun when she asked him to help to arrange the safety of one of her nephews. Others insist that she had known him for years and been his lover before the war began. Whatever the case, she was in the good graces of the Germans, and Chanel No. 5 was sold freely throughout the Third Reich.

Now, after the liberation, Coco Chanel had no idea where Hans von Dincklage was, and all she could think to do in the days that followed was to ask a German-American soldier if perhaps he would help her.
²⁷
He was a fresh-faced G.I., and she guessed that his knowledge of the German language might mean he would be assigned in the coming days to intelligence and interrogation. She was looking for someone, a friend, she told him. If he ever found him among the prisoners of war, would he be kind enough to let her know. All the young man ever needed to do was to send a postcard. Address it simply to Coco Chanel, The Ritz Hotel, Paris. It would reach her. As thanks, she did the only thing she could imagine. She filled his duffel bag with bottle after bottle of her Chanel No. 5 perfume. With it, he could buy anything on the black markets. It was as good as giving him gold and worth a small fortune.

For days, Coco kept to herself, and all was quiet. Then, one day in early September came the inevitable knock on the door of her room at the Ritz. There were officers waiting, agents of the purges. She was, in the idiom of the time, a suspected
collabo,
and they asked that she come along for interrogation. When friends had warned her that the liaison with von Dincklage was dangerous
²⁸
, she had indignantly dismissed them. His mother, she insisted, was English. If he were a double agent, that might have mattered. All that mattered now at the end of the war was that von Dincklage was a German and an officer. What if he was German, she insisted. She couldn't see how it mattered. At her age, she wryly announced, when she had the chance of a lover she was hardly going to inspect a man's passport
²⁹
. About his politics, she never commented.

The possibility of being paraded through the streets as a collaborator and whore was grim enough, but Chanel was, in fact, in far greater danger. She had done more during those years than simply carry on a romance with a German officer
³⁰
in Nazi-occupied Paris. Just that past spring, in April of 1943, when there were whispers of talks between Germany and the Allies, she had traveled to Berlin with von Dincklage and played a high-stakes game of what she considered covert diplomacy. There she met with Theodore Mumm, an S.S. officer named Schiebe, and Walter Friedrich Schellenberg–the powerful German officer best known to history for his memoirs of Nazi Germany, written after his conviction for war crimes. Declassified documents show that Coco returned to Berlin again in December of 1943
³¹
. Remembering those meetings, Mumm later declared that she had “a drop of the blood of Joan of Arc in her veins
³²
.” From her perspective, she was trying to help broker a separate peace between Germany and Britain. With emotions running high in Paris, a wartime trip to Berlin might have looked to others like treason.

And even that wasn't everything. There had also been that spring an ugly complication involving the German gestapo and Coco's former employee Vera Lombardi, an Englishwoman with connections to the royal Windsor family. Vera's husband was an Italian colonel now in fascist custody, and, thinking she would help the situation, Coco Chanel worked some high-level German contacts and–according to top secret memos sent between the United States government and the office of Winston Churchill–deliberately exaggerated her old friend's use to German intelligence.
³³
Coco may have seen this as assistance, but, after her interrogation at the hands of the Gestapo, Vera saw things in a starkly different light. She wrote to Churchill, a family relation, that summer protesting Coco's treachery.
³⁴