Coco Chanel_ An Intimate Life - Lisa Chaney [169]
Sadly, she appears to have found it impossible, really, to conduct a relationship without either dominating or being dominated, and each time this led, eventually, to her frustration. She was remarkably able at managing the practicalities of her own and others’ lives; friends were many, many times deeply grateful for her vital support. But like her great contemporary and semifriend Colette, who so publicly wrestled with squaring the problem of love and independence, Gabrielle found real mutual love nearly impossible. They were two highly intelligent women, whose lives and loves epitomized versions of the same problem: “Is there love without complete submission and loss of identity? Is freedom worth the loneliness that pays for it?”13
In her own way, Colette had arrived at a better accommodation than Gabrielle ever would. Gabrielle remained vulnerable to emotional insecurity and loneliness. With time, suffering and disillusionment, she had become as much the seducer as the seduced. And she had long since learned to enjoy a sexual relationship that didn’t necessarily involve love. But while harboring few illusions, at the same time, she was also vulnerable in that she was alone and wanted to feel loved.
While Gabrielle was a sophisticated and worldly woman, von Dincklage was a suave and practiced Lothario, and a great many women had already fallen victim to his charms. In addition, Gabrielle was no longer young—she was fifty-eight to von Dincklage’s forty-five—and this man left her feeling she was still attractive. Meanwhile, what von Dincklage’s position was in regard to the occupying forces, and what Gabrielle believed it was, obviously has considerable bearing upon the way we judge her collaboration.
If, during the occupation, Gabrielle was seen in public less than before the war, and was careful not to show herself in public places with her German lover, she did not, however, spend the occupation holed up in her room at the Ritz. Yet her powers of denial were as tremendous as those of Colette, who wrote of this period, “A credulity, a forgetful exhaustion endowed me with delusion.”14
Colette needed money to help support herself and her Jewish husband, Goudeket, and was neither among those who refused to write nor those who worked for the Resistance. Indeed, she wrote for “some of the most repellent of the pro-Vichy and pro-German publications and maintained cordial relations with their editors.”15 And when Colette was asked to sign a petition against the arrest of the Jewish director of the Bibliothèque Nationale, she refused on the grounds that it might call attention to her husband. At the same time, the couple socialized at the collaborationist salons of José Maria Sert and Florence Gould.
In August 1941, a mutual friend of Gabrielle and Colette’s, the celebrity singer and actress Arletty, had a small party to celebrate her new apartment. Here she was to live with her lover, a German officer. Among Arletty’s guests were her friends Lili de Rothschild (to die in the Ravensbrück concentration camp), Colette, Maurice Goudeket, Marie Laurencin, Misia and Gabrielle. When Arletty was later challenged, she dismissed the idea that her sexual choices made her unpatriotic with the famous comment: “My heart it is French but my ass is international.” At the liberation, Arletty would be tried and imprisoned as a collaborationist.
Antoinette d’Harcourt’s son, Jean, recently offered the opinion in an interview that Gabrielle’s relationship was “mostly in order to get material advantages. It was different from Arletty’s behavior during the war. Arletty, it was a coup de coeur [literally ‘a blow of the heart’], whereas Chanel, they were coups de portefeuille [‘blows of the wallet’].” While describing Gabrielle’s attitude to von Dincklage as “all about money” is too simple, Jean d’Harcourt’s comment is, nonetheless,