Coco Chanel_ An Intimate Life - Lisa Chaney [2]
The reminiscences of those who had known her were invaluable, but other sources were also critical. An introduction to the American Russianist William Lee, for example, brought about his translations of a number of Duke Dmitri Pavlovich’s diary entries, sent to me via installments over several weeks. These have revised our understanding of Dmitri and Gabrielle’s affair. They reveal quite a different relationship from the one traditionally described, which has Gabrielle the man-eater being mooned over by the young aristocrat.
My confirmation of Gabrielle’s rumored bisexuality and drug use is important. Other discoveries were perhaps even more so, because they opened up deeper, sometimes disturbing questions about her.
After months of searching, one day I sat with the son-in-law and grandson of Arthur Capel, unquestionably the great love of Gabrielle’s life. His family had no more than snippets of information about their elusive forebear. This included the complex triangular relationship involving him, Gabrielle and the woman he would marry instead, Diana Wyndham. But what I heard that day set me on the trail of this extraordinary man—who Gabrielle said had made her—and the discovery of the poignant details of their affair.
During part of the Second World War, Gabrielle lived in occupied Paris at the Ritz with Hans Günther von Dincklage, a German. The other “guests” were German officers. It was already established that von Dincklage had done some prewar spying for his government. On meeting Gabrielle, according to the standard story, this had ceased and he had become “antiwar.” Gabrielle and von Dincklage’s affair, and his wartime activities, have been only partially known. However, a cache of documents about von Dincklage in the Swiss Federal Archives, some in the French Deuxième Bureau and yet more information in other unlikely places have made it possible to give a fuller account of this reprehensible man than ever before. A master of seduction and deception, he was without question a spy. Yet while Gabrielle was undoubtedly a survivor, I don’t believe she ever knew this. Nevertheless, after the war she thought fit to remove herself to neutral Switzerland so as to avoid any possible proceedings against her.
Having closed her couture house during the war, in 1954 she returned to it. At first a failure, in time she once again became a world-class couturier. Her myth, which she nurtured, grew until it was sometimes impossible to distinguish it from the real woman. As one of the pioneers of modern womanhood Coco Chanel personified one of its greatest dilemmas: fame and fortune versus emotional fulfillment. Her myth was sometimes a substitute; by the end of her life she had little else. Her carapace of inviolability, her wall of self-protection raised up over the years, meant that few were able to reach her. In her last years, increasingly autocratic, she remained formidable. Her loneliness was sometimes tragic.
After her death, Chanel continued with increasing success, constantly reinventing her themes. As a result, the mythic Coco Chanel is now a global icon far outstripping what she was in her own lifetime. I make no claim to have uncovered everything or to have solved all of the mysteries Gabrielle Chanel left behind. But in illuminating some of them, and in presenting her without sentimentality yet with all of her pathos and seductive complexity, I hope I have helped humanize this deeply complex character, one of the most remarkable women of the last century.
Gabrielle Chanel moved to Switzerland after the Second World War. It was there that she asked a friend, the writer and diplomat Paul Morand, to take down her memoirs. She left behind no diaries and only a handful of letters, but after her death, Morand was persuaded to publish the notes from those evenings in Switzerland. No other primary source gives as much insight into Gabrielle’s