Coco Chanel (53 page)

Gabrielle and Lifar saw the last German tank roll away down the rue de Rivoli, heard the last street fighting between the Germans and the Free French, and saw firefighters hoist the first French flags up over the Théâtre de l'Opéra. The supreme allied commander in Europe, General Eisenhower, hadn't regarded Paris as a primary objective. The German forces were retreating toward the Rhine; the aim was to reach Berlin before the Red Army, and there put an end to the conflict. And while Eisenhower had thought it was premature for any battle for Paris, de Gaulle would now force his hand. In de Gaulle's determination to be seen to “free” Paris, he threatened the Allies that he would order the French 2nd Armored Division into the capital.

As the seat of government, Paris was the prize sought by the numerous Resistance factions, and despite a large anti-Gaullist Resistance wing, expelling the Germans united them. To this day, opinion is divided over the military governor General Dietrich von Choltitz's claim that he was “the savior of Paris.” Despite repeated orders from Hitler that the city “must not fall into the enemy's hand except lying in complete ruins,” von Choltitz disobeyed, and on August 25, he surrendered at the Meurice hotel, the newly established headquarters of the Free French.
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On the following day, when de Gaulle marched his troops through the place de la Concorde to the Arc de Triomphe, and half of Paris turned out to welcome them, José Maria Sert gave a party for fifty to watch the triumphant parade from his balcony. Gabrielle, Lifar and Etienne de Beaumont were there, alongside many of their fellow “collaborator” friends. As de Gaulle was getting into his car, a shower of sniper's bullets shattered Sert's windows, and his guests leaped for cover under tables and behind doors. When they finally dared to emerge, they hear Sert apologizing for the “inconvenience.” As a typical mark of his bravura, he had remained on the balcony.

On August 29, with the arrival of the U.S. Army's 28th Infantry Division, diverted en route to Berlin, a combined Franco–American military parade took place, again past the Arc de Triomphe. As the vehicles drove down the city streets, more joyous crowds greeted the Armée de la Libération and the Americans as their liberators.

With the liberation, the purging of the collaborators began. Before any organized legal trials could get under way, the
épuration sauvage
, the summary courts, were hastily set up by the Free French, or sometimes by vindictive crowds, initiated as often as not by a personal vendetta. In several thousand cases, these episodes resulted in execution. At the same time, in towns and rural areas across the country, women accused of “horizontal collaboration” were dragged out of their houses and publicly humiliated. Although shaving women's heads for sexual infidelity wasn't new, it isn't clear why between ten thousand and thirty thousand women were treated this way in addition to suffering the added indignity of being paraded naked through jeering crowds. What people expected from these public acts and how they defined collaboration is still being debated. While appalled by the ferocity of this popular retribution, de Gaulle's fragile government had little effective power and let the vengeance run its ghastly course. These are some of the most terrifying images of the liberation.
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Gabrielle was a high-profile figure and was to experience an attempt to “cleanse” her when she was arrested by two representatives of the Free French. With an icy dignity, she made her way as quickly as possible out of her room at the Ritz; she didn't want them to find Serge Lifar, who was hiding in her bathroom. There has been much speculation over the years as to why, following a few hours' questioning, Gabrielle was released. What did she say in her defense, given that her friend Arletty, who had also lived with a German, was imprisoned for four months, then put under house arrest for a further eighteen ? We have one small piece of information. A “top secret” letter, from the chief of staff of Allied Force Headquarters, was written in December 1944 referring to Vera Bate-Lombardi's imprisonment in Spain. Following Gabrielle's Modelhut debacle, she and Vera Bate-Lombardi gave different versions of what had come to pass. They both wrote letters to Winston Churchill, letters which contradicted each other.

Among several reports and letters from Allied Force Headquarters regarding this episode, there is one recording that “Mme Chanel has been undergoing interrogation by the French authorities since that time”; in other words, throughout December 1944. While Vera was stuck in Spain begging Churchill to help her get back to her husband in Italy, the British were eager to clear up the purpose of the women's visit and determine whether she or Gabrielle were German agents.
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Did the Allied forces ever know, however, that Gabrielle had apparently returned to Berlin to inform Schellenberg of the failure of her mission? We don't know what possessed her to do such a thing. Aside from believing that she was a German agent—for which we have no proof—perhaps there is only one conclusion to be drawn from her visit. While her mission to Spain sprang from a grandiose egotism, her slightly cracked belief that she could take a hand in ending the war may have emerged from a desire to be known for something besides haute couture. Years later, her assistant would say:

Like a handful of thoughtful, rather than merely clever, fashion designers, Gabrielle came to believe that fashion was essentially worthless. Yet she had pinpointed more accurately than almost anyone before her what it was really about.

And her claim to be a maker of “style,” rather than mere fashion, was of particular significance to her because it signified something less ephemeral. She had staked her life on work, and this work had been the creation of a couture house. Without it, Gabrielle would have lost her raison d'être. She was quite right when she said, “I have a boss's soul,” and she needed to feel significant. The success of her political mission would have put her into the history books in a way she felt was commensurate with her intelligence. Her return visit to a man as powerful as Schellenberg must have been a kind of proof to herself that she had been taken seriously on a far grander scale than merely for the creation of dresses. In company with many exceptional artists, Gabrielle understood her own worth because she lived so wholeheartedly in the present, but she also underestimated the value of what it was she had done for her century. Through dress and her lifestyle, she had made a genuine contribution toward forcing the first century of modernity to face up to what it was, something more than many of those in the political sphere ever managed.

With almost nothing to go on, we are left to speculate on the reasons for Gabrielle's prompt release by the Resistance. Remembering Arletty, whose popularity with her compatriots had not been enough to set
her
free, Gabrielle's fame alone can't have been sufficient to procure her release. The routine speculation is probably the closest to the truth: an influential figure let it be known that no proceedings were to be taken against Gabrielle. It is said that when the British forces reached Paris, some officers had been deputed to make sure of her safety. They couldn't find her. She was no longer at the Ritz or the rue Cambon, and none of the staff were forthcoming. Gabrielle was eventually found, keeping a low profile at a modest hotel on the outskirts of the city. It was said that the orders to discover her whereabouts had come from Churchill himself.
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Churchill liked Gabrielle, and one of his closest friends, the Duke of Westminster, was her ex-lover, with whom she had remained on close terms. Westminster may have stepped in and asked the prime minister to help her. Churchill's possible intervention may have been encouraged by the knowledge that Gabrielle might have had things to say about the rumored pro-Nazi sympathies of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, with whom she was acquainted. This would not have gone down well.

 

While many of Gabrielle's compatriots were amazed at how she “got away with it,” a young English journalist, Malcolm Muggeridge, marveled. He wrote:

Gabrielle's lawyer, René de Chambrun, as the son-in-law of the Vichy prime minister Pierre Laval, was himself living very discreetly. He advised Gabrielle that she ought to do the same thing, and outside France. Gabrielle knew and liked neutral Switzerland, and that was where she chose to go into voluntary exile.

Before she left, however, she received a postcard from a young GI who had called on her at the Ritz early in 1945.
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Hans Schilinger told her he had been sent by her friend, the now-celebrated photographer Horst, who had fled France for the United States early in the war. Horst had managed to get his compatriot Hans Schilinger to the States, where the young man then joined the U.S. Army. Horst had told his friend that if he was in Paris, he must “give my love to Coco,” and this Schilinger had done. The story is usually told that Gabrielle, in turn, asked Schilinger, if ever he came across someone called Hans Günther von Dincklage, to please write to the Ritz and let her know.

Schilinger had indeed come across von Dincklage, and is supposed to have written Gabrielle a postcard telling her that he had secured his release from a POW camp in Hamburg. In reality, the sequence of events was appreciably different. Gabrielle had given Hans Schilinger the considerable sum of ten thousand dollars, and asked him to “go to Austria, find von Dincklage, give him the money and if possible conduct him to his home in Schleswig-Holstein.” This we know because Schilinger and von Dincklage were arrested by the British military authorities in the spring of 1945. The military recorded that Schilinger “was apparently accompanying Baron von Dincklage with a view to taking him to the latter's family estate at Gettorf. Von Dincklage was in possession of US dollars 8,948 which were impounded on his arrest.”
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There was no possibility of getting von Dincklage back into France, and with the burden of Gabrielle's own blackened reputation acting as a spur, by the winter of 1945 she had made her judicious move to Lausanne.

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While Gabrielle's life had been one of almost perpetual motion for decades, her Swiss exile launched her on an empty nomadic period. For several years before the war, she had spent her days in the rue Cambon and her nights across the road in the Ritz. Forever on the move, she also regularly left Paris for a few days, staying in the house of a friend, at resort hotels, or at La Pausa in the south of France. However, in leaving Paris for Switzerland, Gabrielle had lost something more important to her than any dwelling place—she had lost her business, her all-important
work
. At the rue Cambon it had always been possible to distract oneself from too much thought. Either a collection was in progress or it was the aftermath of the one just gone. There were the new season's textiles, braids, buttons, shoes, hats, jewelery and other accessories to be discussed with the appropriate craftsmen and women; the hours with the models on which all ideas must be tried out; the friends, sycophants, and employees proffering queries and comments. Endless activity.

Gabrielle's lack of occupation during the war had been frustrating enough, but in Switzerland, she didn't even have the consolation of rue Cambon nearby. Aside from a handful of friendships, for more than twenty-five years, her work had represented the one permanent fixture in her life. Her lovers, her friends, her family, where she lived—these were forever changing. Gabrielle was almost a caricature of the Heraclitean notion that the essence of life is flux, and to resist this change is to resist the heart of our existence.