Coco Chanel_ An Intimate Life - Lisa Chaney [180]
Information on Gabrielle’s bungled mission is somewhat muddled. She appears now to have returned to Paris. But Vera was kept in Madrid, from where she sent various missives to Churchill begging him to help her. The British had, however, already been suspicious of Vera Bate-Lombardi. She had remarried in the twenties; Colonel Lombardi was an Italian, and for some time before the war the couple had been suspected of spying by the French Interior Ministry. As one of their associates, from 1929 Gabrielle had also come under investigation. While much of the information in the final dossier on Gabrielle was ludicrously inaccurate,47 the French suspected the Lombardis of being double agents.48 While another investigation was ordered in 1931, in the end, the French didn’t have enough concrete evidence against the Lombardis, and nothing against Gabrielle.49
The British Foreign Office, Allied Force Headquarters and the prime minister’s office conducted an investigation. After several months, in December 1944, they concluded that while there was no indication that Vera was “sent to Madrid by the German Intelligence Service, it is equally clear that Mme Chanel . . . exaggerated Mme Lombardi’s . . . position in order to give the Germans the impression that if she were allowed to go to Madrid she might be useful to them. Mme Lombardi seems to have had some curious notion of trying to arrange peace terms.” While the prime minister’s office concluded that Vera should be allowed to return to Italy, she was, nonetheless, “by no means anti-Fascist,” had not been “completely cleared of all suspicion,” and was “still under a cloud.”50 Whatever the lost details of this murky episode actually were, and whether the megalomaniac scheme to be involved in ending the war was really Vera’s or Gabrielle’s, it had come to naught.
While fashionable Paris persevered in its refusal to face the tide of events, there was no longer any pretense by the authorities of Franco-German cultural exchange. Meanwhile, the theaters were full, and Cocteau and Gabrielle set to work on the restaging of his Antigone. Gabrielle also moved herself back to her apartment in the rue Cambon. Was she taking care to separate herself from any connection to the German command?
On the morning of June 6, 1944, D-day, the Americans, the Canadians, British and the Free French began the phenomenal Normandy landings. Over a stretch of fifty miles of beaches, this was the launch of the Allied invasion of France. More than 150,000 men were landed in what was to be the most complex and largest amphibious invasion ever undertaken. Brigadier Simon Fraser, Lord Lovat, the son of Arthur Capel’s sister-in-law, Laura—in other words, Arthur’s nephew—was among those on the Normandy beaches. In defiance of recent orders not to permit such foolhardy action in battle, Lord Lovat, wearing the kilt his father had donned in the First World War, famously ordered his personal piper, young Bill Millin, to pipe the men ashore. Lovat then led his commando brigade in what became one of the most iconic images of these famed landings. The Germans later said the only reason they hadn’t shot Billy was because they thought he was mad. This piece of bravado would have appealed to Arthur Capel.
While Parisians anticipated the arrival of their liberators, a fierce battle was taking place in Normandy. But in Vichy, as Pétain proclaimed that “the battle which is taking place on our soil does not concern us,” the Allies moved slowly toward Paris, fighting all the way. By June 26, de Gaulle had landed and proclaimed a new government, and by early July, the Americans were on the outskirts of Chartres, fifty-six miles southwest of Paris. With de Gaulle’s master