Coco Chanel_ An Intimate Life - Lisa Chaney [172]
In 1943, Salvador Dalí wrote a roman-à-clef, Hidden Faces, cataloguing the viciousness and vacuity of much of le tout Paris. Cécile Goudreau, the sharp-tongued, knowing and witty sophisticate, is, apparently, Gabrielle,23 and Dalí depicts her as both a devotee of opium and an enticingly predatory lesbian: “As she spoke Cécile Goudreau stretched herself out and drew up the lacquered table with the smoking accessories set out on a level with her chest. Betka came and lay down beside her, pressing her own body lightly against hers. Then Cécile, with a quick casual movement, passed her arm around her neck.”24 But before Betka’s seduction, Cécile, “with the consummate skill of an old mandarin” introduces her young companion to the rituals of smoking opium.
With time, Gabrielle would become more circumspect about displaying any of these attitudes for public consumption. Indeed, as her legend would become transformed into a myth, she would staunchly deny any sexual or narcotic transgressions. During the war, meanwhile, she continued her affair with her German. Afterward, she would defiantly proclaim, “People believe that I exude rancour and malice. They believe . . . well, they believe anything, apart from the fact that one works, one thinks of oneself and one takes no notice of them.”25
Gabrielle and Arletty were, of course, only two of the most high profile of many French women who had affairs with German men. These liaisons with the enemy were to become the aspect of collaboration that most exercised the popular imagination, and in the purges that followed the liberation, thousands of women would be accused of “horizontal collaboration.” Notoriously, many would have their heads shaved and swastikas daubed on their skulls. Some were paraded naked through the streets; others were murdered before they reached any formal kind of trial. Prostitutes were treated with particular harshness.
In this period, any woman even found in the company of a German risked being accused of horizontal collaboration. To a large extent, while they were sometimes “turned in” by other women, the feeling against them derived as much from the sense of personal and national emasculation felt by French men, living under an occupying army. While postwar prosecution of these women was seen as a kind of cleansing process, they were also used as scapegoats for the sense of impotence their menfolk had experienced during the war.
Whatever the resulting censure, these liaisons nonetheless took place. Frequently, these women were vulnerable in one way or another: they might be young, single or divorced, and their first contact with a German was often in the workplace. By the middle of 1943, approximately eighty thousand women from the occupied zone were claiming support from the Germans for the children resulting from these liaisons. In Gabrielle’s case, with a ruthlessness attendant upon her fear of growing old, combined with her underlying loneliness, she, too, had her own particular vulnerability.
Who then, was Gabrielle’s German lover, the man who, like her, professed to hate war?
27
Von Dincklage
Among certain upper sections of Parisian society, Hans Günther von Dincklage had been known for a number of years before the war, as a handsome and engaging German diplomat of eminently respectable pedigree. An acquaintance remembered that “he possessed the kind of beauty that both men and women like . . . His open face indicated an innocent sinner. He was very tall, very slender, had very light hair . . . He danced very well and was a dazzling entertainer.”1
Von Dincklage was born in 1896. His mother, Marie-Valery Kutter-Micklefield, was English