Available:*
Library | Audience | Home Location | Material Type | Shelf Number | Status |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Searching... Central | Adult | Biography | Book | B C456V | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Central | Adult | Biography | Book | B C456V | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Looscan | Adult | Biography | Book | B C456V | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Vinson | Adult | Biography | Book | B C456V | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
"From this century, in France, three names will remain: de Gaulle, Picasso, and Chanel." -André Malraux
Coco Chanel created the look of the modern woman and was the high priestess of couture.
She believed in simplicity, and elegance, and freed women from the tyranny of fashion. She inspired women to take off their bone corsets and cut their hair. She used ordinary jersey as couture fabric, elevated the waistline, and created bell-bottom trousers, trench coats, and turtleneck sweaters.
In the 1920s, when Chanel employed more than two thousand people in her workrooms, she had amassed a personal fortune of $15 million and went on to create an empire.
Jean Cocteau once said of Chanel that she had the head of "a little black swan." And, added Colette, "the heart of a little black bull."
At the start of World War II, Chanel closed down her couture house and went across the street to live at the Hôtel Ritz. Picasso, her friend, called her "one of the most sensible women in Europe." She remained at the Ritz for the duration of the war, and after, went on to Switzerland.
For more than half a century, Chanel's life from 1941 to 1954 has been shrouded in vagueness and rumor, mystery and myth. Neither Chanel nor her many biographers have ever told the full story of these years.
Now Hal Vaughan, in this explosive narrative--part suspense thriller, part wartime portrait--fully pieces together the hidden years of Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel's life, from the Nazi occupation of Paris to the aftermath of World War II.
Vaughan reveals the truth of Chanel's long-whispered collaboration with Hitler's high-ranking officials in occupied Paris from 1940 to 1944. He writes in detail of her decades-long affair with Baron Hans Günther von Dincklage, "Spatz" ("sparrow" in English), described in most Chanel biographies as being an innocuous, English-speaking tennis player, playboy, and harmless dupe--a loyal German soldier and diplomat serving his mother country and not a member of the Nazi party.
In Vaughan's absorbing, meticulously researched book, Dincklage is revealed to have been a Nazi master spy and German military intelligence agent who ran a spy ring in the Mediterranean and in Paris and reported directly to Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, right hand to Hitler.
The book pieces together how Coco Chanel became a German intelligence operative; how and why she was enlisted in a number of spy missions; how she escaped arrest in France after the war, despite her activities being known to the Gaullist intelligence network; how she fled to Switzerland for a nine-year exile with her lover Dincklage. And how, despite the French court's opening a case concerning Chanel's espionage activities during the war, she was able to return to Paris at age seventy and triumphantly resurrect and reinvent herself--and rebuild what has become the iconic House of Chanel.
Author Notes
Hal Vaughan has been a newsman, foreign correspondent, and documentary film producer working in Europe, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia since 1957. He served in the U.S. military in World War II and Korea and has held various posts as a U.S. Foreign Service officer. Vaughan is the author of Doctor to the Resistance: The Heroic True Story of an American Surgeon and His Family in Occupied Paris and FDR's 12 Apostles: The Spies Who Paved the Way for the Invasion of North Africa . He lives in Paris.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel's war was not as secret as the subtitle implies. It's well known that during WWII, the celebrated fashion designer took as her lover a much younger Nazi intelligence officer, Hans Gunther von Dincklage, and through him developed a mutually beneficial relationship with the Nazis. Journalist, diplomat, and author Vaughan (FDR's 12 Apostles), searching archives in several countries, fills in gaps in the record regarding Chanel's two intelligence missions to Madrid. The first she performed in exchange for the Nazis returning her ailing nephew from a German POW camp. The second, more well-known Operation Modellhut, a German effort to broker a separate peace with Britain, ended disastrously. Vaughan also explains Chanel's mysterious ability to avoid prosecution as a collaborator after the war, and her attempts to destroy or buy off anyone who might have testified against her. Vaughan gives mainly superficial, cliche-ridden attention to Chanel's prewar life, nor does he explore her self-contradictions-or hypocrisies-such as fiercely asserting her independence while accepting real estate worth millions from one of her serial lovers, the duke of Westminster. Vaughan's at times fascinating but unsatisfying book tarnishes Chanel's aura of glamour, leaving instead a picture of a pathetic, morphine-addicted woman who would do literally anything to have a powerful man by her side. (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
It's been rather common knowledge that French fashion designer Coco Chanel had collaborationist leanings during the German occupation of France from 1940 to 1944. But the extent to which she participated in Nazi business while her country was being dictated to from the country next door has never before been so thrust into the public eye, in such a bold way, as in this report by an American writer, diplomat, and news correspondent. The big news here is that Chanel's Nazi sympathies went so far as to compel her to become a spy for the Reich and that her affair with a German soldier and diplomat again, information that was not unknown at the time or even after was not as harmless as she and her friends would want history to believe. This man, one Baron Hans Gunther von Sincklage, was actually up to his eyeballs in the German military intelligence machine. The author's heavily researched sources details of her collaboration with the Nazis were hidden for years in French, German, Italian, Soviet, and U.S archives have led him to tell the story of a flamingly anti-Semitic public figure who manipulated people who knew the truth about her into not telling what they knew, to the extent that her four years of collaboration never really became a public issue. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: The sensationalism inherent in this story of French designer Coco Chanel's collaboration with the Nazis will draw readers far and wide.--Hooper, Brad Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
GABRIELLE CHANEL - better known as Coco - was a wretched human being. Anti-Semitic, homophobic, social climbing, opportunistic, ridiculously snobbish and given to sins of phrase-making Like "If blonde, use blue perfume," she was addicted to morphine and actively collaborated with the Germans during the Nazi occupation of Paris. And yet, her clean, modern, kinetic designs, which brought a high-society look to low-regarded fabrics, revolutionized women's fashion, and to this day have kept her name synonymous with the most glorious notions of French taste and élan. Exploring the contradictory complexities of this woman, at once so very awful and so very talented, should make for fascinating and enlightening reading. After all, Chanel's life offers biographers a trove of juicy material. Chanel was a creative genius, her own expertly polished self-presentation perhaps the greatest triumph of her brilliantly inventive mind. She was born in 1883 in a hospice for the poor in the Loire Valley, to unwed parents of peasant stock and, upon her mother's death, was placed at age 12 in a conventorphanage to be raised by Roman Catholic nuns. This left her with a lifelong fear of losing everything. The point is nicely captured by Hal Vaughan in "Sleeping With the Enemy," who quotes her as saying: "From my earliest childhood I've been certain that they have taken everything away from me, that I'm dead." She was put to work as a seamstress at age 20 and took the name Coco from a song she liked to sing in a rowdy cafe patronized by cavalry officers. One ex-officer, the wealthy Étienne Balsan, installed her in his chateau, taught her to conduct herself with high style on horseback and, generally, gave her the skills she needed to make her way up through society. Balsan also introduced her to Arthur (Boy) Capel, a friend who soon became Chanel's first great love, and who also, conveniently, set her up in a Paris apartment and helped her start her first business venture, designing sleekly simple women's hats. It wasn't long before Chanel took Jazz Age Paris by storm, liberating women from their corsets, draping them in jersey and long strings of pearls and dousing them with the scent of modernity, Chanel No. 5. She caroused with Igor Stravinsky and Pablo Picasso, designed costumes for Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes and amused herself with the cash-poor White Russian aristocracy. As her personal fortunes rose, she turned her attention to making serious inroads into British high society, befriending Winston Churchill and the Prince of Wales and becoming, most notably, the mistress of the Duke of Westminster, Hugh Richard Arthur Grosvenor (known as Bendor), reputedly the wealthiest man in England. Bendor's - and Chanel's - anti-Semitism was vociferous and well documented; the pro-Nazi sensibilities of the Duke of Windsor and many in his circle have long been noted, too. All this, it appears, made the society of the British upper crust particularly appealing to Chanel. As Vaughan notes, after she was lured by a million-dollar fee to spend a few weeks in Hollywood in 1930 - Samuel Goldwyn, he writes, "did his best to keep Jews away from Chanel" - she found herself compelled to run straight back to England, so that she could wash away her brush with vulgarity in "a bath of nobility." It wasn't much of a stretch, then, for Chanel, during wartime, to find herself the mistress of the German intelligence officer Baron Hans Günther von Dincklage, a charming character who had spied on the French fleet in the late 1920s, and who found himself pleasingly single in occupied Paris, having presciently divorced his half-Jewish German wife just before the passage of the Nuremberg Laws. It wasn't any particular betrayal of her values, or morals or ideals either, for Chanel to find herself traveling to Madrid and Berlin to engage in cloak-and-dagger machinations with her country's occupier. The story of how Coco became Chanel has been told many times before over the past half-century, most recently (and, sad to say, much more engagingly) in last year's "Coco Chanel: The Legend and the Life," by the British fashion columnist Justine Picardie. The story of how Chanel metamorphosed from a mere "horizontal collaborator" - the mistress of a Nazi - into an actual German secret agent has been less well known, though earlier writers have reported that she had worked for the Germans. It's here that Vaughan makes his freshest contribution, using a wealth of materials gleaned from wartime police files and intelligence archives, some of which were only recently declassified by French and German authorities, to flesh out precisely how and why she became an agent, and how she sought to profit from her German connection's during the war. Vaughan ably charts Chanel's clever opportunism as she works, first to free her nephew André Palasse from a German prisoner-of-war camp, and later seeks to use the Nazis' Aryanization of property laws to wrest control of her perfume empire away from the Jewish Wertheimer brothers. Yet his account of her one real mission for the Germans - a 1943 covert operation code-named Modellhut ("model hat") in which she was meant to use her contacts to get a message to Winston Churchill from the SS stating that a number of leading Nazis wanted to break with Adolf Hitler and negotiate a separate peace with England - emerges neither clearly nor logically from his highly detailed telling. Too many diplomatic documents are reproduced at too much length. Contradictions are not clearly sorted out. Vaughan seems to have felt as though his rich source materials could speak for themselves, but they don't - and he doesn't succeed in lending authority to the accounts of contemporary witnesses who were, undoubtedly, unreliable. DESPITE her indisputable collaborationist activities, and after a brief period of uncertainty during which she was questioned by a French judge, Chanel eventually got off pretty much scot-free after the war, once again using her wiles to protect herself most expertly. She tipped off the poet and anti-Nazi partisan Pierre Reverdy, a longtime occasional lover, so that he could arrange the arrest of her wartime partner in collaboration, Baron Louis de Vaufreland Piscatory; she paid off the family of the former Nazi chief of SS intelligence Gen. Walter Schellenberg when she heard that he was preparing to publish his memoirs. (It was Schellenberg who had given her the "model hat" assignment.) Vaughan could have done better in providing the context to the seemingly incomprehensible ease of Chanel's reintegration into French fashion and society, telling more, for example, of the widespread desire for forgetting and moving forward that held sway in Charles de Gaulle's postwar France. These weaknesses - of authorial voice and critical judgment - run through "Sleeping With the Enemy." Vaughan, a retired diplomat who has made his home in Paris, has allowed his writing to become a bit too imbued with the reflexive verbal tics and general vive-la-séduction silliness of his adopted country. "Sometimes the kitten, sometimes the vamp, and often the vixen, . . . she must have melted Bendor's knees" is how he captures Chanel in her 40s; "beautiful and sexy, her silhouette stunning," he appraises her in her 50s. (Indeed, his English often sounds like French - the most cloying sort of breathy French - in translation.) Despite all he knows about Chanel, Vaughan often appears to be as beguiled, disarmed and charmed by Coco as were the men in her life - not to mention the countless women who have sought over the decades to cloak themselves in her image. And like them, he never gets beyond the self-protecting armor of her myth. "A bath of nobility": Coco Chanel and the Duke of Westminster at the races in 1924. Judith Warner, a former special correspondent for Newsweek in Paris, is the author, most recently, of "We've Got Issues: Children and Parents in the Age of Medication."
Kirkus Review
Tenacious digging into secret wartime records reveals a worsening case for the legendary French designer.That Chanel took a German officer as a lover during the French Occupation is not newshis status allowed her to keep her luxury apartments in the Ritz Hotel during the war and pass freely among restricted areas. Yet the extent of her collaboration has been vigorously denied for years. Questioned before a French tribunal right after the war, Chanel was swiftly released by the beneficent intervention of Winston Churchill, her old friend, and warned to get out of town. Relocated to Switzerland, she was soon joined by the very German lover in question: Baron Hans Gunther von Dincklage, an agent for the German military espionage service, who had been stationed in Paris since the mid-'30s to build a Nazi propaganda network in France. Roving journalist and diplomat Vaughan (FDR's 12 Apostles: The Spies Who Paved the Way for the Invasion of North Africa, 2006, etc.) sifts through the shifting lives of Gabrielle Chanel, born in 1883 to a poor mother and itinerant father, and farmed off to a Catholic orphanage by age 12. She continually remade herself, from seamstress to caf singer to mistress of rich, worldly men, who set her up in business. Her most influential paramour (for her postwar career) would prove to be the profligate Bendor, the Duke of Westminster, and Churchill's good friend. Together, Bendor and Chanel could indulge their anti-Semitic, pro-German views. Cooperating with the Nazis helped free Chanel's nephew from a German POW camp, while the newly instated Aryanizing of Jewish businesses promised the chance to wrest her lucrative perfume firm from the hands of the Wertheimer family, to whom she had sold it years before. Well rendered by Vaughan, the details grow continually more sordid, from Chanel and Dincklage's trip to Madrid and Berlin to try to influence high-level British circles in 1943, to Chanel's drug addiction.A sorry story of war-time collaboration, exacerbated by the lack of reckoning during her lifetime.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
This is an absorbing expose of a mystery that has long intrigued. Paris-based veteran journalist Vaughan (FDR's 12 Apostles) is unequivocal in his argument that there were two sides to the elegant Coco Chanel. Using information from French counterintelligence sources as well as other documents hidden for years in French, German, Italian, Soviet, and U.S. archives, he unmasks her activities during the war years; she embarked on a romance with a senior German officer in occupied Paris and cooperated with German military intelligence agents. Her reasons were personal, political, and financial, as Vaughan makes clear. While Chanel's secret life is the central focus here, other little-known details of her life and career are also -included to present a complete biography of this worldwide celebrity whose fashion genius transformed the way modern women dress. Staunchly right-wing, anti-Semitic, and anti-communist, Chanel was also lucky in love and politics, and these factors enabled her to escape postwar retribution and punishment when thousands of "collabos" like her were executed. A decades-long friendship with Winston Churchill may have been key to shielding her from prosecution. VERDICT Engrossing and accessible, this is recommended for general readers interested in fashion celebrity, espionage, or World War II.-Marie M. Mullaney, Caldwell Coll., NJ (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
PROLOGUE De s p i t e h e r age she sparkles; she is the only volcano in the Auvergne that is not extinct . . . the most brilliant, the most impetuous, the most brilliantly insufferable woman that ever was. Gabrielle Chanel had barely been laid to rest in her designer sepulcher at Lausanne, Switzerland, when the city of Paris announced that France's first lady and Chanel's admirer and client, the wife of French president Georges Pompidou, would open an official exhibit celebrating Chanel's life and work in Paris in October 1972. Shortly before, Hebe Dorsey, the legendary fashion editor of the International Herald Tribune , reported the "homage to Chanel" probably would be canceled or, at the very least, postponed. Dorsey revealed that Pierre Galante, an editor at Paris Match , would soon expose shocking documents from French counterintelligence archives. Dorsey alleged that Chanel had had an affair during the German occupation of Paris with Baron Hans Günther von Dincklage: "a dangerous agent of the German information service--likely an agent of the Gestapo." Chanel, the epitome of French good taste, in bed with a Nazi spy--worse yet, involved with an agent of the hated Gestapo? To the French, and especially to French Jews, veterans of the Resistance, and survivors of SS- run concentration camps, German collaborators were pariahs or, worse, fit to be spat upon. Granted, for years fashionable Paris had gossiped that Chanel had shacked up during the occupation with a German lover called Spatz--German for sparrow-- at the chic Hôtel Ritz where Nazi bigwigs like Hermann Göring and Joseph Goebbels were pampered by the Swiss management. But the Gestapo? Hadn't Chanel dressed Mme Pompidou? Hadn't she been honored at the Élysée Palace? How could such an icon of French society have bedded a "German spy"? It was hard to believe. Even though tens of thousands of French men and women collabos had escaped punishment, being a willing bedmate and helpmate of a German offi cer still reeked of treason in 1972. Their liaison would last over ten years, leading one observer to wonder if Chanel "cared about political ideology but wanted instead to be loved and to hell with politics." The timing for the proposed national celebration of Chanel's life and work could hardly have been worse. On top of everything else, the U.S. publisher Alfred A. Knopf had just released Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order , 1940--1944 by American historian Robert O. Paxton. This study of the Vichy regime under Marshal Philippe Pétain left many French scholars chagrined and upstaged on their own academic home turf. Based on material from German archives-- because the French government had forbidden access to the Vichy archives-- Paxton's book proved that Pétain's collaboration with this particular cohort of full- blooded Nazis had been voluntary rather than forced on Vichy. For the Pompidou political machine facing an election in just twenty-four months and for the Chanel organization confronting allegations that its founder had been linked to the Gestapo, postponement of the "homage to Chanel" was the only option. There was also solid and damning evidence of her collaboration in an upcoming biography by Pierre Galante-- scheduled for publication in Paris and New York. A former resistance fighter and husband of English actress Olivia de Havilland, Galante claimed his information was based on access to French counterintelligence sources. Le Tout-Paris was talking about the book before it was even published. Edmonde Charles-Roux, a Goncourt Prize--winning novelist, was outraged by Galante's revelations. She labeled his claims nonsense: [Dincklage] "was not in the Gestapo." Spatz and Chanel, she maintained, just enjoyed an amorous friendship. (Madame Charles- Roux was also writing a Chanel biography and presumably did not have access to Galante's sources.) Marcel Haedrich, an earlier Chanel biographer, claimed that Spatz was merely a bon vivant who "loved eating, wines, cigars, and beautiful clothes . . . thanks to Chanel he had an easy life . . . he waited for her in her salon . . . he would kiss Chanel's hand and murmur: " 'how are you this morning?' "--and because the two spoke English together she would say, "He is not German, his mother was English." Asked by Women's Wear Daily , the New York garment industry paper, in September 1972: "[W]as Chanel, Paris's greatest couturière, really an agent for the Gestapo?" Charles-Roux replied, "[Dincklage] was not in the Gestapo. He was attached to a commission here [in Paris] and he did give information. He had a dirty job. But we must remember, it was war and he had the misfortune to be a German." Years later, Charles- Roux learned that she had been duped-- manipulated by Chanel and her lawyer, René de Chambrun. The liberation of Paris in August 1944 began with bloody street fighting, pitting German troopers against a scruffy, ragtag band of General Charles de Gaulle's irregular street fighters called Forces Françaises de l'Intérieur (the FFI), which Chanel would dub "les Fifis." They were joined by Communist fighters, Francs-Tireurs et Partisans (FTP), and civilian police offi cers. Facing German forces, some resistants were armed only with light police weapons; others had World War I--vintage revolvers and rifles; a few had Molotov cocktails and weapons seized from dead Boches. The street fighters were often young students, their sleeves rolled up on bony arms and wearing sandals. Their FFI, FTP, and police armbands served as uniforms. In the last week of August the U.S.-equipped Free French Army, led by General Leclerc, nom de guerre for Philippe de Hauteclocque, relieved the Paris insurgency, and the German garrison surrendered. After four years of often- brutal occupation, Paris was liberated-- free from the threat of arrest, torture, and deportation to concentration camps. Church bells rang, whistles blew; people danced in the streets. Except for some provinces, such as Alsace and Lorraine, France was under General Charles de Gaulle's Free French. A thirst for revenge gripped the nation in the last days of August. Four years of shame, pent-up fear, hate, and frustration erupted. Revengeful citizens roamed the streets of French cities and towns. The guilty-- and many innocents-- were punished as private scores were settled. Many alleged collaborators were beaten; some murdered. "Horizontal collaborators"--women and girls who were known to have slept with Germans-- were dragged through the streets. A few would have the swastika branded into their fl esh; many would have their heads shaved. Civilian collabos --even some physicians who had treated the Boche--were shot on sight. The lucky were jailed, to be tried later for treason. Finally, General de Gaulle's soldiers and his provisional magistrates put a stop to this internecine war. The twentieth-century monstre sacré of fashion, Chanel was among those marked for vengeance. The French called it épuration -- a purge, a cleansing of France's wounds after so many had died and suffered under Nazi rule. Within days after the last German troopers left Paris, Chanel hurried to give out bottles of Chanel No. 5 to American GIs. Then the Fifi s arrested her. Truculent young men brought her to an FFI headquarters for questioning. Chanel was released within a few hours, saved by the intervention of Winston Churchill operating through Duff Cooper, the British ambassador to de Gaulle's French provisional government. A few days later, she fl ed to Lausanne, Switzerland, where she would later be joined by Dincklage--still a handsome man at forty-eight. Chanel was sixty- one years old. De Gau l l e 's government soon ordered Ministry of Justice magistrates to use special courts to try those suspected of aiding the Nazi regime-- a crime under the French criminal code. Among the first to be tried were Vichy chief Philippe Pétain and his prime minister, Pierre Laval. Both were found guilty of treason and sentenced to death. De Gaulle spared Pétain because of his old age, but Laval was shot. During the postwar process of cleansing, French military and civilian courts tried or examined 160,287 cases in all. While 7,037 people were condemned to death, only about 1,500 were actually executed. The rest of the death sentences were commuted to prison sentences. It took nearly two years after the Liberation before a French Court of Justice issued an "urgent" warrant to bring Chanel before French authorities. On April 16, 1946, Judge Roger Serre ordered police and French border patrols to bring her to Paris for questioning. A month later he ordered a full investigation of her wartime activities. It wasn't Chanel's relations with Dincklage that attracted Serre's attention. Rather, the judge had discovered that Chanel had cooperated with German military intelligence and had been teamed with a French traitor, Baron Louis de Vaufreland. French police had identifi ed the baron as a thief and wartime German agent who was tagged as a "V- Mann" on German Abwehr documents-- meaning, in the parlance of the Gestapo and German intelligence agencies, that he was a trusted agent. Serre, forty-eight years old and with more than twenty years of experience as a magistrate, grilled Vaufreland for months. Serre also learned from French intelligence offi cers how Vaufreland and Chanel had collaborated with the German military. Slowly, Serre, a painstaking investigator, turned up details of Chanel's Abwehr recruitment, her collaboration with Vaufreland, and how she and the German spy had embarked on an Abwehr mission to Madrid in 1941. During her interrogation and testimony, Chanel would claim Vaufreland's stories were "fantasies." But French police and court documents tell another story: while French Resistance fighters were shooting Germans in the summer of 1941, Chanel was recruited as an agent by the Abwehr. Fifty pages of minute detail describe how Chanel and the trusted Abwehr agent F- 7117-- Baron Louis de Vaufreland Piscatory-- were recruited and linked together by German agent Lieutenant Hermann Niebuhr, alias Dr. Henri Neubauer, to travel together in the summer of 1941 on an espionage mission for German military intelligence. Vaufreland's job was to identify men and women who could be recruited, or coerced, into spying for Nazi Germany. Chanel, who knew Sir Samuel Hoare, the British ambassador to Spain, via her relations with the Duke of Westminster, Hugh Grosvenor, was there to provide cover for Vaufreland's work. It is doubtful that Judge Serre ever learned the extent and depth of Chanel's collaboration with Nazi offi cials. It is unlikely he saw the British secret intelligence report documenting what Count Joseph von Ledebur-Wicheln, an Abwehr agent and defector, told MI6 agents in 1944. In the fi le, Ledebur discussed how Chanel and Baron von Dincklage traveled to bombed- out Berlin in 1943 to offer Chanel's services as an agent to SS Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler. Ledebur also revealed that Chanel, after visiting Berlin, undertook a second mission to Madrid for SS general Walter Schellenberg, Himmler's chief of SS intelligence. Serre would never learn that Dincklage had been a German military intelligence officer since after WWI: Abwehr agent F- 8680. It is also unlikely that Judge Serre ever discovered the depth of Chanel's collaboration with the Nazis in occupied Paris or that she was a paid agent of Walter Schellenberg. Nor did he know that Dincklage worked for the Abwehr and the Gestapo in France and for the Abwehr in Switzerland and, later, during the occupation of Paris. Excerpted from Sleeping with the Enemy: Coco Chanel's Secret War by Hal Vaughan All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.Table of Contents
List Of Illustrations | p. xi |
Prologue | p. xv |
1 MetamorphosisGabrielle Becomes Coco | p. 3 |
2 The Scent Of A Woman | p. 10 |
3 Coco's Golden Duke | p. 36 |
4 A Hollywood Divertissement | p. 61 |
5 Exit Paul, Enter Spatz | p. 71 |
6 And Then The War Came | p. 90 |
7 Paris Occupied Chanel A Refugee | p. 116 |
8 Dincklage Meets Hitler; Chanel Becomes An Abwehr Agent | p. 158 |
9 Checkmated By The Wertheimers | p. 147 |
10 A Mission For Himmler | p. 156 |
11 Coco's Luck | p. 180 |
12 Comeback Coco | p. 204 |
Epilogue | p. 220 |
Notes | p. 223 |
Bibliography | p. 251 |
Acknowledgments | p. 267 |
Index | p. 269 |