Coco Chanel_ An Intimate Life - Lisa Chaney [178]
In the following spring, 1943, we find that von Dincklage made the extraordinary offer—as a secret police document put it—of the “services of Coco Chanel (lesbian), from the famous perfume house” in order to exploit her Anglo-Saxon relations in aid of German intelligence services.36
We will almost certainly never know to what extent Gabrielle was aware of von Dincklage’s activities. In having an affair with a German, she had made all sorts of accommodations. And if, like her friends, she turned a blind eye to much that went on, it is most likely that Gabrielle conducted her liaison with her German in much the same way Arletty conducted hers. Hers was a collaboration of chosen “ignorance.”
Most important, one should bear in mind Gabrielle’s primary motivation during the war: like Colette—and millions of others in France—she was determined to survive. Whatever our thoughts about this, it does not follow that Gabrielle was prepared to spy for the Germans. Did von Dincklage ask her outright? One suspects that he knew she would have refused and, with his accustomed deviousness, was offering her services to his superior without her knowledge. (While in no way proof of her innocence, Gabrielle was always strongly pro-British and had wept when Germany occupied France.)
When she and von Dincklage returned from La Pausa at the end of that summer, 1943, the Maquis (the rural French Resistance) sent word that von Dincklage was now on their death list. Busily consorting with the enemy, the dancer Serge Lifar was also back on the Resistance list. At this point he and von Dincklage secretly moved into the Ritz, where they now lived intermittently with Gabrielle. Although, in the liberal view of Ritz personnel, it was hardly worth more than passing notice that Coco Chanel was living with two men, what gave added spice was that both her men were known to be actively pro-German. The wife of the manager said that Gabrielle
. . . never appeared anywhere in the hotel with either of them. Nobody gave a damn, but she really worked hard to keep them secret. I knew about them because I had a direct pipeline through the floor maid. She kept me up to the minute. She was envious, not because the Madame was a great couturier—that didn’t mean a thing to her—but living with two impressive guys was her idea of paradise. What luxury!37
In early 1944, Antoinette d’Harcourt was arrested by the Gestapo. She had begun the war as an ambulance driver on the battlefields, but then used the ambulance to ferry people to the border between France and Switzerland, for example. Her son, Jean, says: “After a year she was “burned,” so she had to stop—those activities are probably the reason why she was arrested.”38 The young duchess was treated harshly and placed in solitary confinement for six months in the notorious Fresnes prison, then moved to another one, Romain-ville, also outside Paris. From there she narrowly avoided deportation to Buchenwald concentration camp.
Arletty’s biographer describes Synarchy’s (or Synarchism’s) work as “fairly pro-Mussolini . . . [it] had as members some of the most powerful figures in the French establishment intent on maintaining national French unity.”39 Preferring, as Jean d’Harcourt says, the idea of “revolution by the elite rather than revolution from the street . . . Synarchy’s aim was to serve as a link between Pétain and Laval on the one side, and on the other, de Gaulle and Massigly [one of de Gaulle’s senior diplomats] and therefore avoid a bloodbath” when France was liberated.40
When Antoinette’s son, Jean, then only a boy, was permitted to visit his mother, they were both so overcome that for the permitted fifteen-minute visit, they could do no more than remain clasped in each other’s arms. Jean d’Harcourt recalled how “after the war, my mother refused to speak with Chanel and never set foot in her shop again.