AN AGING CHANEL was not ready for a pleasant retirement in Switzerland—with or without Dincklage at her side. Years earlier she had told photographer Horst, “I am tired! Naturally, it is a lie. I am well and full of ideas for many things in the future.”
Chanel’s life was far from over. Her collaboration with the Nazis, her visceral anti-Semitism, and her attempt to use Nazi Aryanization laws to harm the Wertheimers were largely now ignored. In the years following her testimony at the trial of Louis de Vaufreland, Chanel led a low-key life in voluntary exile at Lausanne. Dincklage was there. However, there were rumors the couple was estranged. Gabrielle Palasse visited Auntie Coco often. Her father, André, was recuperating at a villa overlooking Lake Leman—a gift from Chanel. Over time his condition improved and he and his new wife moved to a house in Brittany.
From 1945, Chanel began buying the silence of those who had inside knowledge of her relationships with the Abwehr and Schellenberg’s SS. And she continued inventing stories about her childhood, her love affairs, and her wartime activities. When Chanel saw a draft of Louise de Vilmorin’s Mémoires de Coco, she told her biographer Paul Morand, himself a former Vichy official, that she didn’t like what Vilmorin wrote. Instead, from Switzerland, she commissioned another French author, Michel Déon, later elected to the Académie Française on the strength of his fiction writing, to ghostwrite her memoirs. After a year, he produced a three-hundred-page manuscript based on “lengthy dialogues” with Chanel. A month later, this book too “was not to her taste.” Chanel never spoke to Déon but sent word via a friend, Hervé Mille, the editor of Paris Match. Mille told Déon that Chanel wanted him to know that “in these three hundred pages there is not a single sentence that is not hers, but now that she sees the book as it is, she thinks it is not what America is expecting.”
According to Morand, Déon concluded: “Chanel had a childhood fear of abandoning the world of her dreams and confronting the realities of existence.”
EXILED IN SWITZERLAND, Chanel’s spirits were low. As the years slipped by she mourned the loss of one friend after another. In the early fall of 1950 she visited Paris and the ailing Misia Sert. Worn and feeble, still abusing drugs at seventy-eight, Misia recalled that long ago she had been one of the favorite models for Renoir and other French Impressionists. The visit turned into a last goodbye. Misia died with Chanel at her side. Then Bendor passed away shortly after attending Queen Elizabeth’s coronation and Étienne Balsan was killed in a car accident as Boy Capel had been years before.
Chanel still worried about the power others had over her: Vaufreland, her Abwehr partner; Theodor Momm; Walter Schellenberg; and, of course, Dincklage. They were living witnesses to her collaboration with the Nazis.
In June 1951 Chanel heard through Momm that Schellenberg had been released from prison because he was incurably ill with liver disease. His six-year prison sentence, issued by a Nuremberg Military Tribunal for war crimes, had been cut short. While awaiting trial, the incarcerated Schellenberg had written his memoirs. Now he worked at them with a German journalist, rewriting the work into a book about life as SS Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler’s right-hand man. The book was eventually titled The Labyrinth.
Theodor Momm must have told Chanel that Schellenberg was now seeking a publisher for the book, and she realized the danger. She arranged through her COGA Trust (the acronym is a combination of the first letters of Coco and Gabrielle) to finance a comfortable retreat for Schellenberg and his wife, Irene, at a house in the Swiss lake district. But the Swiss authorities didn’t want a convicted war criminal living in Switzerland, and he was evicted. Schellenberg had managed to obtain a false Swiss passport in the name of Louis Kowalki; he then went into hiding with Irene at a villa at Pallanza, Italy, on the shores of Lake Maggiore.
Walter Schellenberg, once Himmler’s right-hand man, seen here after his surrender to Allied agents, 1945. Later, he would be tried and convicted of war crimes. When he was freed, due to ill health, Chanel paid his expenses in exile. (illustration credit 12.1)
From Germany, Momm again alerted Chanel that Schellenberg was being treated for his liver disease in Pallanza and was in desperate need of money to pay his physician, Dr. Francis Lang, and the Italian clinic where he received medical care.
Professor Reinhard Doerries, Schellenberg’s principal biographer, tells what happened next:
Dr. Lang and his wife visited Schellenberg in Pallanza … while talking about financial matters, Doctor Lang must have intimated [to Schellenberg] he was in considerable financial straits since he had covered from his own pocket Schellenberg’s medical and other expenses in the amount of Swiss Fr 20,000. Dr. Lang tells how “Schellenberg then contacted Chanel and explained his dire financial problems … the lady of haute couture soon arrived [at Pallanza] in a black Mercedes, curtains drawn. She gave Schellenberg about Swiss Fr 30,000 [the doctor ventured the sum might have been in French Francs].”
To explain Chanel’s gesture, Dr. Lang said, “During the war Schellenberg had been helpful to her and to others in the fashion world.”
Walter Schellenberg died in Turin at age forty-two on March 31; he was buried there on April 2, 1952. After his death, his wife wrote to Momm: “Madame Chanel offered us financial assistance in our difficult situation and it was thanks to her that we were able to spend a few more months together.” After Schellenberg’s death, Irene returned with her children to Düsseldorf, where she sought a publisher for her husband’s autobiography. Chanel knew of this and may then have received a promise from Irene Schellenberg that Chanel would not be named if her husband’s memoirs were published.
DINCKLAGE, despite being banned from Switzerland for his work as a German spy, lived for several years with Chanel in Lausanne and Davos. According to friends, Spatz still looked the handsome German officer. There is a photograph of Chanel and Spatz taken circa 1949 in Switzerland; Dincklage in a handsome long coat and homburg hat looks the distinguished retired officer. The couple seems relaxed. Those who knew him at the time remembered him as an aging playboy: a man of striking bearing and impeccable good manners.
Chanel’s biographer Pierre Galante wrote that the Dincklage-Chanel idyll continued. “They spent time together at a Swiss ski resort taking short trips to Italy … Mademoiselle’s Swiss friends, her three lawyers, dentist, doctor, rheumatism specialist, and an eye specialist often saw them together—and there were rumors of a possible marriage.” Then one day Chanel’s Spatz vanished.
Dincklage had left Chanel to become a permanent resident of Spain’s Balearic Islands—a sunny resort on the Mediterranean with an agreeable climate not unlike that of Sanary-sur-Mer, the former spy’s 1930 hunting grounds. He lived on a handsome pension paid regularly through Chanel’s COGA Trust. No one seems to know if Chanel and Dincklage met again.
Pierre Galante interviewed Chanel’s friends at the time. Asked to describe her mood following Dincklage’s departure, they painted her as “a charming, simple, lively woman. She entertained friends frequently, either in the hotels where she was staying or in restaurants in ‘old’ Lausanne. Her menu varied very little. She almost always ordered vegetable soup, filet mignon, unbuttered rice, and fruit compote.” They also reported that Chanel danced and shopped with friends, especially at more affordable stores. “She dined out, here and there, quite often with her physician whom she was fond of and later invited him and his wife to stay at La Pausa.”
Chanel and Dincklage, Switzerland, 1949. (illustration credit 12.2)
Chanel hardly spoke of fashion. A friend said, “It was as though it did not interest her anymore. Or almost … One day [a friend] wore a blouse that Coco did not like; Coco could not resist taking a pair of scissors and making a few changes on the spot.”
Photographer Horst offered a different picture in 1951: “Chanel was somewhat lost at that time in her life; she seemed bored. Her hair was different, and she had started to pluck her eyebrows. She didn’t look like the Chanel I had known.”
WHAT WAS THIS extraordinary woman—still brimming with creative ideas and energy—to do next? At seventy, Chanel had one singular and enduring asset: her talent. She continued to garner admiration and affection from Pierre Wertheimer—despite their quarrels over the past forty-some years. Sometime earlier, Pierre Wertheimer had discovered that Chanel was making perfume in Switzerland. It was a clear breach of the 1924 agreement she had signed to sell all rights to her line of perfume and cosmetics to Société des Parfums Chanel, a company of which the Wertheimers owned 90 percent.
In the spring of 1947 Wertheimer and his lawyer called at René de Chambrun’s Paris offices on the avenue des Champs-Élysées. Pierre Wertheimer wanted to make a deal. He offered Chanel $50,000 and a small additional percentage of annual sales of Chanel No. 5. Chambrun then upped the ante, demanding a higher payout on annual sales. Their negotiations would last for most of a day—bickering over what eventually became large sums of money. During the long, drawn-out discussions Chambrun left the room, ostensibly to obtain approval from his client in Lausanne via a private telephone line in a suite a few doors away. In fact, he went outside to talk to Chanel in person. She had waited all day to hear the Wertheimers’ proposals.
Early the next day an agreement was reached: Chanel would get $350,000 in cash and 2 percent of all sales—more than a million dollars a year (equivalent to about $9 million today). The dividends were to be deposited at Chanel’s account at the Union de Banques Suisse. Later, Chanel told a friend, “Now, I’m rich.”
Indeed, back in 1947 Pierre Wertheimer had made a shrewd calculation. Had he sued Chanel in French court, it would have exposed Chanel’s Nazi connections, her relations with Dr. Kurt Blanke, and her attempt to Aryanize the Wertheimer holdings. In court the secret arrangements between the Wertheimers and Félix Amiot might have come out, along with the payment of a large sum of money to Amiot in 1939 and Amiot’s deal to build warplanes for Hermann Göring’s Luftwaffe. Even Gregory Thomas’s secret mission might have become public. The negative press would have damaged the Chanel name; the lucrative trademark the Wertheimer family cherished might be tarnished forever. Wertheimer was protecting the franchise that would bring the family unimagined riches. Years later—by 2008—a bottle of Chanel No. 5 was being sold “every thirty seconds.”
IN 1970, after a relation that lasted thirty years, Chanel fired René de Chambrun. (Later they would be reconciled.) At the time she ventured, “I cannot stand lawyers, police officers and soldiers.” Then, despite her disdain for attorneys, Chanel hired Robert Badinter, a brilliant international lawyer who years later would become famous for having worked to banish the death sentence by guillotine in France.
Biographer Pierre Galante relates how Badinter became Chanel’s attorney: “I’m Jewish,” he said. “Perhaps you do not know that, Mademoiselle.”
“Yes,” Chanel replied, “and it doesn’t bother me at all. I have nothing against Jews.”
Chambrun and his wife, Josée, never said a word about Chanel in public. The couple had escaped punishment after the war because of their immensely powerful connections—just as Chanel had managed to have Winston Churchill save her. For many years, Chambrun had defended Chanel with all his skill. Despite Chambrun’s having personal knowledge of Chanel’s wartime collaboration, he protected her and lied in a BBC retrospective about her relations with Dincklage, and about her 1944 mission to Berlin.
A transcript of the BBC interview, last broadcast in 2009, records Chambrun saying, when asked about Dincklage, “I know that at one point, because she talked to me about him, there was a German tennis player, noble, Dincklage, and I know that she helped him financially. And that’s all I know about all the gossip that has gone around Coco.”
When asked about Chanel’s mission to Spain in 1944, he replied, “I don’t see her interest in the mission. She was, uh—I think if it had been proposed to her, she would have refused it. That’s my Chanel, that’s what I think she would do. It’s none of my business. Her business that I know was that she did help this former tennis player, actually helped him, but all the talk about engineering a separate peace, to me, is ballyhoo.”
Chambrun had been Chanel’s faithful knight for more than thirty years.
IN THE FALL of 1953 Chanel wrote to Carmel Snow of Harper’s Bazaar: “I thought it would be fun to work again … you know I might one day create a new style adapted to today’s living … I feel that this time has come.” Pierre Wertheimer agreed; this would be an excellent way to enhance the Chanel franchise.
The Paris fashion world swirled with rumors. “Mademoiselle Chanel is going to come back! Chanel is returning to couture!” She told the press, “I still have perhaps two or three things to say.” As Christmas 1953 approached, the media reported that “Chanel will make a comeback in February.” Some of the Parisian couturiers congratulated her, while others trembled. She now pulled together a few of her old staff and hired some new people. Her hands were often painful from arthritis; she was, after all, over seventy. Cecil Beaton, the photographer and costume designer, noted that Chanel’s fingers “seemed strong enough to shoe a horse.” She crawled about on hands and knees, pinning hems herself, her straw boater always on to conceal her bald spots, the ever-present Camel cigarette between her lips.
A few weeks before the show, she told Vogue: “I will start with a collection … About one hundred [pieces] … It won’t be a revolution … It will be a collection made by a woman with love.” Chanel’s first postwar show opened on February 5, 1954—once again the fifth because she was convinced five was her lucky number. It wasn’t this time. The Paris cognoscenti nodded politely through Chanel’s careful choreography staged in her opulent renovated salon. A reporter from the major French daily L’Aurore wrote, “Everyone had come hoping to find again the atmosphere of the collections that had bowled over Paris in the years gone by. But there is nothing of that left, only mannequins who parade before an audience that cannot bring itself to applaud.” The reporter added: “A rather melancholic retrospective.” Lucien François of Combat (at one time Camus’ newspaper) wrote a devastating piece about Chanel’s first collection after the war: “Her dresses were good for cleaning offices.” Chanel’s models were “likened to a herd of geese.”
After the show, Pierre Wertheimer visited Chanel at her rue Cambon showroom. He found her on her knees, pinning hems on dresses. He stayed there, watching her work, and then walked her back to the Ritz. “You know, I want to go on,” she told him. “I want to go on and win.”
“You’re right,” he responded. “You’re right to go on.”
But despite the ho-hum French press reaction and a slap from the Brits, who thought her show was a flop, the American media was impressed. Life reported, “[Chanel] has influenced all of today’s collections. At seventy-one, she brings us more than a style—she has caused a veritable tempest. She has decided to return and to conquer her old position—the first.” Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue agreed. Marlene Dietrich came to the rue Cambon and ordered several suits—among them the tailored suits, tailleurs Chanel, that would become famous by 1956.
Chanel’s creations may have been successful but Chanel’s fashion business was in deep financial trouble. Her comeback had cost some 35 million francs (equivalent to almost $800,000 in 2010). The company was broke. Chanel’s guardian angel, Pierre Wertheimer, stepped in again. In the spring of 1954, Chanel and the Wertheimer organization signed a final business deal: she sold the Wertheimers her fashion company, her commercial real estate, and all her holdings bearing the Chanel name. The Wertheimers would pay all of her expenses: her rooms at the Ritz, her domestic help, telephone bills, postage, and other costs of living. All she had to do was assist with the development of new perfumes and run her couture house. It was a priceless deal for Chanel. In the years to come, it would turn out to be a money machine for the Wertheimers.
In the fall of 1956 Chanel presented another collection to warm reviews. The New York Times reported from Paris: “[Chanel’s] return to the couture scene last February led the fashion world to expect a startling revolution on her part, [but] it did not materialize. She designed in the same spirit as she displayed before the war, but in the last eight months the eye of fashion has become accustomed to the Chanel look. Its ease, casualness and understatement meet a need in the life of many women today.”
Chanel was back in business—and blessed again. That year she introduced her famous tailleurs Chanel. And that same year, the English edition of Schellenberg’s memoirs, The Labyrinth, appeared with an introduction by British historian Alan Bullock, who later wrote an influential and critically acclaimed biography of Hitler. There was not a word about Chanel.
Once again, Coco could breathe a sigh of relief.
As befitting a fashion queen, Chanel was invited to Dallas, Texas, by the dynamic and innovative Stanley Marcus, renowned for displaying outlandishly expensive items in his Dallas store. In his Christmas catalogues he offered his-and-hers matching bathtubs, his-and-hers airplanes, and miniature submarines. In 1957 Chanel arrived in Dallas to receive a Neiman Marcus award for Distinguished Service in the Field of Fashion—ironically the executive accompanying Chanel to Dallas was H. Gregory Thomas, now president of the Chanel perfume company.
Chanel thought American customs vulgar, but again, and ironically, she wanted to visit a Texas ranch. A visit to Marcus’s brother’s Black Mark farm was arranged along with a ranch-style dinner and a show of bronco riding and roping.
Alas, it turned out that Chanel didn’t like the taste of western food, so she dumped her plate of barbecued meat and beans under the table and right onto the elegant satin slippers of another guest, Elizabeth Arden, seated next to her—Coco had struck again.
Returning to Paris via New York, Chanel was interviewed by a reporter from The New Yorker at the Park Avenue Waldorf-Astoria hotel. The reporter found her “sensationally good looking, with dark brown eyes, a brilliant smile, and the vitality of a twenty-year-old, and when giving a firm handshake said, ‘I’m très, très fatiguée.’ It was the assurance of a woman who knows she can afford to say it.”
And there were other honors. Years later the Broadway producer Frederick Brisson proposed to do a musical called Coco, with Katharine Hepburn in the title role. It all somehow came together when Hepburn spent a few days with Chanel in Paris. The actress recalled that on her visit to Paris, she accidentally interrupted Chanel’s afternoon nap. “I left Paris knowing I could play Chanel,” said Hepburn.
INCREDIBLE AS IT MAY SEEM, sometime after 1962, Chanel, aged seventy-nine, took a new beau into her life. François Mironnet was a single man when Chanel hired him as a butler. He apparently bore a resemblance to Bendor, Duke of Westminster. According to Lilou Marquand Grumbach, Coco’s intimate assistant and friend, it was “almost love at first sight.” Mironnet soon became her companion and confidant. He would offer her his arm when she needed help on the stairs, and he’d remind her to take her medications. To reward his loyalty, Chanel taught Mironnet to design jewelry. He was often beside her at her private table in the Ritz dining room. Forgetting the thirty years that distanced the two, Chanel fell in love with François, recalled Grumbach, who saw the couple together every day. According to her, Chanel once asked him to marry her.
The famous rue Cambon staircase re-created for the Broadway musical Coco starring Katharine Hepburn, 1970. The Chanel suits (tailleurs) as worn by the actresses are authentic Chanel designs. (illustration credit 12.3)
Janet Wallach, one of Chanel’s biographers, had another take: she believed Chanel feared solitude. “In the last moment of her life she surrounded herself with females … switched her lovers, the fashion world believed, from men to women. Her young and beautiful models, some of them lesbians, all of them modeled in her image, became the object of her affection.” Chanel was simply lonely, and while she may have flirted with her beautiful models, she was desperate for companionship. She needed a man at her side, and François Mironnet was her last male friend.
Chanel, in spectacles, watches a fashion show from her spiral staircase on rue Cambon. (illustration credit 12.4)
Claude Delay, French writer, psychoanalyst, and an intimate friend of Chanel’s, had yet another idea: Chanel’s many love affairs, her infatuations, her attentions to François Mironnet were foretold by Chanel’s own words: “No matter the age, a woman who is unloved is lost—unloved she might as well die.” As she aged, Chanel’s expressions mellowed. But she still managed to overpower.
Chanel posed for Vogue in one of her hallmark suits, with furs and a toque. Despite the careful work of her personal maquilleuse, Chanel at age eighty-one was like a leaf on a withering tree—and even more dependent on her evening injection of morphine.
Ten months before her death, Cecil Beaton photographed Chanel, and there was that look, that “enduring allure.”
A CROWNING MOMENT for Chanel came eight months before her death. Claude Pompidou, wife of French president Georges Pompidou, had been Chanel’s client and admirer for many years. In June 1970, she invited the designer to dinner at the presidential home at the Élysée Palace. After the reception, if biographer Pierre Galante is to be believed, Chanel remarked, “In my day one did not invite one’s dressmaker for dinner.”
Sketch of Chanel. (illustration credit 12.5)
GABRIELLE “COCO” CHANEL passed away in her rooms at the Ritz on the night of January 10, 1971. She was attended by Jeanne, her chambermaid. Her last words were, “Well, that’s how one dies.”
A bit before seven o’clock on the cold morning of Thursday, January 13, a closed casket bearing Chanel’s body was brought into the magnificent Church of the Madeleine, a few minutes’ walk from rue Cambon and the Hôtel Ritz. It was still dark outside. Paris was nearly silent. About nine o’clock the guests entered the church: Lilou Marquand Grumbach on the arm of Salvador Dalí, six of Chanel’s mannequins dressed in Chanel suits, her old friends Serge Lifar and Lady Abdy, and a host of Chanel’s competitors: among them Yves Saint Laurent and Marc Bohan of Dior. Luchino Visconti sent two wreaths of red roses.
Claude Pompidou, wife of the President of the French Republic, was a regular client of Coco Chanel. Seen here at the Maison de Chanel in 1962. (illustration credit 12.6)
After the mass the coffin was put into a Renault hearse and driven to Lausanne, where Chanel had ordered a marble vault bearing the heads of five lions and a simple cross with her name.
Chanel’s fortune at her death—held in trust by COGA and administered by grand-niece Gabrielle Palasse Labrunie and Swiss attorneys—was estimated to exceed some $10 million, worth about $54 million in 2010. Almost everyone wanted a piece of it.
On the third Wednesday of March 1973, Chanel’s former attendant—the man supposed to have been her last love, François Mironnet—appeared before the judges at the principal civil tribunal of Paris. Mironnet was claiming a part of Chanel’s fortune. He offered as proof of his claim a letter Chanel left. According to the letter, Chanel had bequeathed Mironnet $1 million, her Lausanne property, and her jewels. His claim was contested by Chanel’s Swiss lawyer and a representative of Union de Banques Suisses on the orders of Gabrielle Labrunie. Still, Mironnet’s claim was supported by a number of Paris celebrities: among them, Jean Cau, former secretary to Jean-Paul Sartre and an award-winning writer for L’Express, Le Figaro, and Paris Match; Jacques Chazot, a friend of Chanel’s and a well-known dancer; and Chanel’s “lady-in waiting and secretary, Lilou Marquand Grumbach.” Lilou claimed that Chanel had read the letter giving Mironnet the fortune to her in May 1968. When the document was exhibited in court, it was declared “false” by Swiss and “authentic” by French experts.
How did it all end? The matter was settled out of court, according to Gabrielle Labrunie. She did not elaborate.
Three years later, on the night of March 24, 1976, Dincklage died not far from the führer’s Eagle’s Nest where, in earlier days, Hitler had received the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. Among the last persons to meet Dincklage was a woman he lived with in a village near Berchtesgaden, Schönau am Königssee, Hurberta von Dehn, who came from a Bavarian aristocratic family, and a Dr. Herbert Pfistere. When asked what he remembered about Dincklage’s last years, Dr. Pfistere said that Dincklage told him he had been imprisoned for a short time after the war and that he had been an SS officer.
Dincklage was cremated in nearby Salzburg, and his ashes were delivered to Hannover—hometown to the Dincklage family for more than a hundred years. There, in a lakeside memorial cemetery, his ashes were interred alongside the Hannover dead of two world wars and victims of Allied bombings. It was a fitting end for a German warrior, a man who had served his country for more than forty years and in two wars.
Eleven months later, Louis de Vaufreland died at age sixty-five at a villa outside Paris. The Abwehr’s paid agent in wartime Paris and Chanel’s nemesis after the war had a checkered career after being released from prison. He was involved in a number of fraudulent schemes in France and in Ireland, including trying to sell counterfeit $100 bank notes and pretending to be a police officer. He served time at Fresnes and Santé prisons in 1956.
In 1951 French intelligence sources reported Vaufreland was seen at Donald Maclean’s villa, La Sauvageonne, near Saint-Maxime on the Côte d’Azur. It was the same moment that Maclean and Guy Burgess, members of the Cambridge Five spy ring, fled Britain for the Soviet Union.
Gregory Thomas, the retired president of Chanel, Inc., died at eighty-five in Florida. Thomas, a decorated World War II OSS officer and an officer of the French Légion d’honneur, had once gone undercover as Don Armando Guevaray Sotto Mayor to aid the Wertheimer family in occupied France. On retirement, Thomas had been with the Wertheimer family in various senior positions for more than thirty years. As a wine enthusiast, he was a founder and grand maître of the Commanderie de Bordeaux in the United States—an elite group of lovers of the Bordeaux wines.