Sleeping with the Enemy

July 18, 2011
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 Günther 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, cliché-ridden attention to Chanel's prewar life, nor does he explore her self-contradictionsâor hypocrisiesâsuch 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.

July 15, 2011

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 news—his 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 café 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 (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

August 1, 2011

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 anticommunist, 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

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

August 1, 2011
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 diplomatagain, information that was not unknown at the time or even afterwas 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 sourcesdetails of her collaboration with the Nazis were hidden for years in French, German, Italian, Soviet, and U.S archiveshave 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.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)