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PARIS August 30, 1944
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When the doorbell rang at eight thirty on that hot, languid morning, Coco knew they’d come to arrest her. She might have wondered for a moment if someone else was at the door—perhaps the laundress with fresh linen or a porter with a glove she’d dropped in the lobby. But she knew.
Though the carpet muffled their footsteps, she sensed them striding down the hall at the Ritz. Coco and her animal cunning. She knew from the fierce jangle of the bell, from the way the maid’s heels clicked so frantically across the floor and the door roared open, she knew.
She crushed her cigarette in an ashtray. Her body trembled, surprising her. Lighting another cigarette, she took a moment to pull herself together. The room was warm, with the white morning sun slanting through the windows, and the air had a stale floral scent, the mixed fragrances of No. 5 perfume, tobacco, and pink roses, which were displayed on the tables in crystal vases.
Until that moment, she hadn’t thought she’d be arrested, though one of her acquaintances, the actress Arletty, had been picked up for living with a high-ranking Luftwaffe officer. Arletty, so famous she needed only one name, had flaunted her relationship, attending movie premieres and opera openings with her lover and showing up with him at parties at the German embassy. Coco and her lover had kept to themselves, rarely venturing to places where they might be recognized.
Now, she began to worry, as she peeked out the bedroom door and saw the soldiers—the two young men from the French Forces of the Interior—standing in her suite with their grim expressions and guns tucked into their belts. Spatz had already fled Paris with the retreating Germans. And Coco was alone, as she’d so often been in life, with her fame and her money and her secrets, which kept anyone from getting too close.
As she rummaged in her bureau for a fresh pair of stockings, Coco silently cataloged the evidence of her innocence: She had closed her fashion house before the Germans arrived, keeping open only the boutique where her perfume was sold. She never attended a party or a luncheon at the German embassy. Unlike Arletty or her friends Jean Cocteau and Serge Lifar, she avoided the most fashionable nightclubs and theaters frequented by the occupiers. She hadn’t gone to the Paris Opera Ballet once in four years, despite urging from Lifar, the company director, who, on a trip to Berlin, actually presented Hitler with a film of himself dancing. True, the Kommandant had allowed her stay at the Ritz. What did that prove? Only that she was smarter than most. She knew how to get what she wanted. The great hotel had been her home since she’d given up her apartment on the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré in 1933. At the Ritz she found the flawless service she craved and the comfort and security of the family life she’d never known.
Of course, the men have come for her because of Spatz. And that wasn’t fair, because her German lover wasn’t really a Nazi. He wasn’t a cold-blooded killer. His mother was English, after all, and he’d lived in Paris for a third of his life. Why should she feel guilty about Spatz? Anyway, she wasn’t going to hide in the closet or jump out the window. She wasn’t a coward.
There was a soft knock on the bedroom door. Coco opened it a crack and saw the maid. “Mademoiselle, what should I do?” the maid whispered.
“Ask them to give me a minute to dress,” Coco said. “If they take me and I’m not back in two hours, tell the manager at the boutique to call Winston Churchill.”
“The prime minister?”
“Yes—his private number is in the book in my desk.”
Coco pushed the door shut and flipped through the hangers in her closet, deciding on her No. 2 suit in navy blue jersey, a more casual version of the No. 1 model she’d worn in her working days. From the jewelry box on her dressing table, she took three strands of pearls and a jeweled-enameled cuff. She looped the pearls around her neck and secured the cuff on her wrist. Then she reconsidered the jewelry. No need to call attention to her prosperity, so she stuffed the pearls and bracelet in a drawer.
Coco was sixty-one, though she looked younger thanks to expertly dyed dark brown hair and good bone structure. In middle age, with many love affairs behind her, she had not gained weight; in fact, she had grown thinner. She could still wear the clothes she’d designed after the first Great War: slim skirts, collarless jackets, evening gowns with thin straps and sleeveless chemise dresses.
Arranging her face in a determined expression, Coco smoothed her skirt and opened the bedroom door. Two ordinary youths dressed in brown slacks and plain white shirts stood in the foyer. She eyed the shiny pistols jammed into their belts. Their shirts flashed armbands emblazoned with “FFI” and the Cross of Lorraine, the symbol of the French Forces of the Interior, the loose band of Resistance fighters, soldiers, and private citizens who’d taken up arms in the aftermath of the Germans’ departure.
“Gabrielle Chanel, come with us,” said the taller youth. He had a spray of adolescent pimples on his cheeks, but his fine brown hair was already thinning.
“By whose order?” she asked, louder than she intended.
“The People of France and the victims of Fascism,” said the second youth. He was short and stocky and looked even younger than his partner, with smooth pink cheeks and curly chestnut hair.
The maid was sobbing now, her face buried in her hands. “Do you have any identification?” Coco demanded. They would never see her cry.
“You must come with us,” said the taller youth.
“Who gave you your orders?”
“If you don’t come voluntarily, we’ll take you by force.”
Coco clasped her hands to stop them from trembling. “On what charge?”
The taller boy spoke in a harsh, unflinching voice. “Treason.”
Coco grabbed her purse off the hall table and held her head high as she left the suite, trying to seem as grandly tragic as Joan of Arc but feeling shaken to her core.
The lobby teemed with activity. Men in blue uniforms with gold braid stood stiffly as they spoke to the guests. When Coco appeared between the two FFI youths, all conversations stopped. Guillaume de Lastour, the bald, elderly husband of a woman who’d been one of her most loyal clients, started to doff his hat, but his companion, a portly, middle-aged man, pulled Lastour’s arm down, frowning furiously.
Outside, under the hotel’s blue canopy, the taller youth nodded toward a battered American jeep parked at the curb. Coco rode in the back seat. The day was bright and clear, the streets jammed with cyclists. The jeep whizzed down rue Cambon, past Coco’s boutique at number 31, where already there was an olive drab ribbon of soldiers on the pavement in front. It had been like this every day since she’d put the sign in the window offering free perfume to GIs. “See how popular I am with the Americans?” she said.
The men in the jeep ignored her.
“Where are you taking me?”
The stocky one in the passenger seat looked at her but said nothing.
They passed the Tuileries, where the lawns glistened like green satin and the sandy paths were as bright and gleaming as crushed crystal. The red banners with black swastikas were gone, and tricolors waved once more from the tops of government buildings. Though the coffee in the cafés still tasted like acorns and the Métro only operated a few hours every day, life was gradually returning to normal after four years of occupation. Coco smelled a tang of hope in the air with the white heat of late summer. She was thrilled that the Germans were gone and relieved that they hadn’t destroyed Paris. Instead, they had grabbed whatever they could of the city’s art and culture, her cuisine and tradition of beauty. They would have stolen the Paris spring had that been in their power.
But now these French boys had taken over. Well, she would survive this. That was the story of her life. She had willed herself from poverty and wedged herself into a world of wealth and power. She beat all the odds. And here she was now at the mercy of these unsmiling adolescents. Didn’t they know she had powerful friends who would make them answer for arresting her?
“Do you know how important my name is?” she said to the youths’ backs. “No one has done more than me to uphold the tradition of French couture.” Silence from the front of the jeep. “You’re boys, so I wouldn’t expect you to know how vital fashion is for France. Your mothers will tell you.” She knew she should stop talking. That was her biggest sin. She didn’t know when to keep quiet. But she couldn’t bear silence; she had to fill it with the first thing that came into her head.
She knew she’d said too much in the past. Snippets of conversations they might use against her flared in her mind. The intemperate comments she’d made about de Gaulle a few days earlier, while watching the liberation parade from the balcony of José Maria Sert’s apartment overlooking the Place de la Concorde. She’d worried out loud that the general would turn out to be another demagogue. That was just talk.
She had not been out much recently. The war wasn’t over yet. Just the previous week, German bombs launched from Le Bourget had dropped on the city, killing or wounding hundreds and destroying the Halles aux Vins. Great holes gaped in the pavement where citizens had dug up paving stones to form barricades. Sandbag towers blocked some of the streets, and random gunfire often pierced the air. The Occupation had sparked too much anger and hatred, too much shame and frustration, for the violence to suddenly end. Now, though, it was mostly French fighting French, as it so often was in the nation’s bloody history.
Coco lit a cigarette and blew a jet of smoke toward the roof of the jeep. “At least tell me where you’re taking me,” she said, with as much forcefulness as she could muster.
“No smoking!” bellowed the stocky youth. He lunged over his seat back and grabbed the cigarette from Coco’s hand.
They drove for twenty minutes to the Prefecture of Police, an immense stone building on the Île de la Cité. A burnt-out Nazi tank squatted in the street, a great charred insect. Nearby, a large, noisy crowd had gathered. A celebration of some kind seemed to be underway. Women in the skimpy dresses and cork-soled shoes they’d worn throughout the war and men in berets laughed and waved their arms. Schoolboys in short pants scurried about, thrilled by the gathering. A little girl in a starched white dress sat on her father’s shoulders, clapping.
As the jeep nudged through the crowd, Coco’s eyes traveled to the landing at the building’s entrance, and she gasped. A pretty young woman in a gray dress sat on a chair while a man wielding large clippers hacked off her hair. Two brutes with rifles strapped to their shoulders held the girl’s thin arms as clumps of gold hair fell to the ground. The girl looked to be no more than fifteen, but she was very brave and didn’t cry.
When it was over, the girl was bald. Blood trickled from the back of her white scalp where the scissors had nicked her. The man holding the girl’s right arm pulled her to her feet and led her away as the crowd jeered: Kraut whore! That’s what we do to traitors! A moment later, another young woman, this one a brunette in her twenties, stumbled forward and was pushed into the chair. The brunette looked around at the crowd with a defiant expression, until the man with the clippers yanked her head back and began snipping.
These poor girls! Why were women always vilified and punished for the sins of men? It was men who’d started the war, men who’d committed war’s atrocities. Coco felt a sinking in her stomach followed by waves of nausea. She was too famous for the mere humiliation of a shaved head. They’d probably torture her and leave her to rot in the same dank prison where Marie-Antoinette had spent her last wretched years. Well, she’d rather die than see all she’d created destroyed.
Coco’s captors led her from the jeep through a side door, up the back wooden stairs, creaky with age, to an interrogation room on the third floor. They nudged her inside, then stepped out, closing the door behind them. She heard the lock turn, then their excited chatter as they clambered down the stairs. Her eyes took in the small, dingy space, furnished starkly with old rickety chairs and a scarred table piled with papers and files.
A big black phone sat at one end of the table. Next to the phone lay a pair of large scissors. They reminded Coco of the scissors she wore every day during her working life to cut away the superfluous froufrous of an outmoded fashion. She’d scissored her way to fame and fortune, and she’d ended up here. She wondered: Were those scissors meant for her?
She heard the lock click, and the door opened several inches, then banged shut. Two men behind the door were talking, and she moved closer to listen.
“If the major shows up, he’ll be furious,” said one man, his voice edged with panic.
“The roads are impossible. He’ll never get here,” said the second man.
“The major told us to wait!”
“I’m in charge now.”
“He wanted to question her himself. You’re not planning… But the order from headquarters—he’ll be furious you ignored it.”
“It’ll all be over by then.”
The door swung open, and Coco stepped back. Two men entered the room. They were dressed like the soldiers who had arrested Coco, in dark pants and white shirts with the sleeves rolled up. Both wore FFI armbands on their left sleeves. One man looked to be in his early thirties. He had a tall, lean build, close-cropped black hair, a black brush mustache, and nervous dark eyes. The other one looked no older than sixteen, a child really, with a thatch of brown hair and a smooth, hairless face. Yet he was much larger than his colleague, with broad shoulders and thick legs.
The older man, the chief interrogator, shot Coco a savage look, while the boy glanced quickly at her from downcast eyes. The men took seats behind the table, and the Interrogator cleared his throat to get Coco’s attention. Her back stiffened, and she stepped forward.
“Your name is Gabrielle Chanel?” he asked.
“You know who I am.” Coco’s hands shook slightly, but her voice was cool and firm.
The Interrogator consulted a file. “You were born on August 19, 1883, in Saumur.”
Coco squirmed at the mention of her birthdate.
“Answer the question, please.”
She turned away, ignoring the Interrogator.
He pressed. “Is your birthdate correct?”
“Yes.” Coco sighed heavily.
“Before the war you made dresses?”
“Yes…” Coco hesitated. “Actually, I revolutionized fashion.”
The Interrogator nodded toward the chair in front of Coco. “Take a seat.”
“Do you have the authority to detain me? You’re not part of the official army,” said Coco. As she sat, she removed her hat and gloves and set them on top of her purse on the floor. She started to feel less panicked. She’d sized up the Interrogator. He was an adult—unlike the two who’d arrested her and the second soldier here—but he had a stiff manner. She sensed he was someone who didn’t see nuances. She would have to be careful with him.
“I am a captain in the French Forces of the Interior of the Republic of France,” said the Interrogator.
“How nice for you.” Coco pointed her chin toward the boy, who took notes furiously in a small notebook. “If I had a gun, I’d be a confident bully, too.”
The boy stopped writing and raised his head, a look of innocent terror on his face. He was wearing sandals, and Coco noticed that his feet were filthy.
The Interrogator reached into his files, pulled out a photograph, and pushed it across the table toward Coco. It was a snapshot of her lover—handsome, blond, and impeccably dressed in a suit, camel overcoat, and black fedora. “Do you know this man?” he asked.
Coco studied the photograph for a moment with a softened expression, then rearranged her features into a neutral mask. “I’ve known him for years.”
“He’s much younger than you, isn’t he?”
“A little.”
Her lover was thirteen years younger than she. Ordinarily, if anyone brought up the age difference, her cheeks burned with anger. Now she felt a cold tremor.
“Do you know where he is now?” the Interrogator asked.
“No. I haven’t seen him in a week.”
“He didn’t say where he was going? He didn’t say good-bye?”
“He did come to say good-bye because he’s a gentleman.”
“He’s gone back to Germany, hasn’t he?”
“Possibly.”
The Interrogator cocked his head to consider Coco. She saw that his mustache needed trimming. He played with the edges of it with his lower lip. “Seeing as you slept in this man’s bed for four years, I would have expected you to join him and the other Nazis when they fled Paris,” he said.
“Spatz slept in his own bed, and I slept in mine.”
“Spatz?”
“That’s what his friends call him. It means little sparrow.”
“His real name is Hans Günther von Dincklage, correct?”
Coco nodded.
The Interrogator leaned across the table so close to Coco she could smell the fruity staleness of his worn shirt. “Ironic, isn’t it, because from the picture, he looks like a big strapping guy. Not a little sparrow.”
“It’s a childhood nickname—he was a small, sickly boy.”
Coco thought with a stab of longing of the first morning she and Spatz had awakened together in bed. Gold light seeping through the curtains had grazed Spatz’s long, athletic form, and Coco’s heart had swelled with delight. She’d never before slept with such a beautiful man.
The Interrogator glanced at the photograph. “He looks to me like the perfect specimen of Aryan manhood.”
“If you say so. His mother is English.” Coco took a cigarette case—rose gold with a diamond clasp—out of her pocket. It had belonged to a real Englishman, Arthur Capel, the only man she’d ever truly loved, dead now for twenty-five years. Why did these marvelous men always die or abandon her? Of course, she could take care of herself. But she’d grown so tired of doing it.
Coco removed a cigarette from the case and placed it in the corner of her mouth. She looked at the Interrogator, and he stared back at her, making no move to light it. As she fumbled in her handbag for a lighter, the Interrogator said, “Von Dincklage is German. That didn’t bother you?”
Coco lit her cigarette and blew a jet of smoke toward the Interrogator. “Do you expect me to look at a man’s passport before I agree to be his lover?”
The Interrogator closed his eyes for a moment to avoid the smoke. “Tell me where von Dincklage is, madam.”
“Mademoiselle.”
The Interrogator looked Coco up and down, as if he was examining an ancient artifact or an old car, checking for scratches and dents. “Mademoiselle?”
“I am La Grande Mademoiselle. Talk to anyone in fashion, they’ll tell you.”
“We’re not here to talk about fashion. I want you to tell me how I can find your Spatz.”
“I have no idea.”
“Did you ever see von Dincklage in uniform?”
“Never! He wore bespoke suits from a London tailor and shirts from Charvet.”
“He’s a Nazi, and he’s a peacock.” The Interrogator uttered a short laugh.
“He wasn’t a Nazi; he just wanted them to think he was. He was only trying to get by, to get through the war like everyone else.”
“Exactly how did he get by?”
“I don’t know what he did when he wasn’t with me. He was an embassy attaché when I first met him, but don’t ask me what an embassy attaché does.”
“Promotes Nazi ideology.”
“You think we sat around discussing that?”
“What did you discuss?”
“What we were going to have for dinner. What most people discuss.”
The Interrogator squeezed out a brief, insincere smile. It was the smile, Coco thought, of someone who rarely made use of that expression. She demanded, “Why have I been arrested?”
“For traitorous collaboration with the enemy.”
“I love my country,” Coco said in a soft voice. “I’m not guilty.”
“That’s what we’re here to discuss.” The Interrogator rapped the table with his fingers. “You were either with the Nazis or against them.”
Coco gave him a pointed look. “I’m afraid, young man, things weren’t so black and white.”
Coco arrived in Paris on a warm Wednesday in July, six weeks after the Germans occupied the city. Though early evening, it was eerily dark. Paris now operated on German time, which meant pushing the clock forward an hour. The streets were empty and silent, the only sound the hobnailed boots of Nazi soldiers strolling the boulevards.
At the Ritz, a giant red flag with a black swastika hung over the massive double doors. Coco’s driver dropped her off at the entrance with her suitcase and sped away in his rusted-out Cadillac. She watched him careen onto rue Saint-Honoré, narrowly missing a big black Mercedes. Through the Mercedes’ back window, Coco glimpsed a bloodied man between two helmeted soldiers. In the distance, a rifle shot rang out, followed by the strew of a machine gun. Was someone being executed? Coco shuddered.
Since she didn’t have an ausweis, a German permit, the armed Nazi at the Ritz door refused her entrance. Charlie Ritz, the hotel owner, however, saw her and let her into the lobby. “I’ve been traveling for two days, and I’m exhausted,” she told him, as she started for the stairs.
“You can’t go up there. It’s reserved for Germans,” said Charlie.
“Nonsense. All my things are there!”
“Stop! Don’t go any further!”
Coco brushed past Charlie and handed her suitcase to a porter. “Bring that to my suite,” she ordered.
“I’m warning you, Mademoiselle. Your suite is unavailable.” Charlie’s voice boomed. Everyone stared. The lobby teemed with uniformed Germans, and Coco recognized what Charlie was up to: hoping to impress the Nazis with what a big, strong man he was, pushing around little Coco.
The assistant manager appeared and spoke to Charlie. The sink in Himmler’s suite was clogged, and the Nazi commander was demanding new quarters. Charlie scurried off to handle the emergency, and Coco climbed the grand, winding staircase. Were the French really barred from the upper floors of the Ritz? She should have called ahead, given the staff a chance to get things ready for her. She’d returned too hastily.
But her nephew André Palasse had been taken prisoner by the Germans while fighting for the French on the Maginot Line, the concrete fortress on the border of France and Germany. Coco had promised André’s wife, Catharina, that she’d appeal to the enemy now in control to have the young soldier released. She couldn’t do that from André’s home in Lembeye, where she’d fled in June, as soon as the first Nazi bombs hit Paris. Coco had bought the large stone house as a vacation home for her nephew and his family, whose main residence was Lyon, where André worked as director of Chanel Silk Establishments. Coco enjoyed taking walks through the woods behind the house with her two school-age great-nieces, but there was little else to do. Mostly, she’d been bored out of her mind. Still, she was determined to stick it out, at least until the bombing stopped. Then one night, while relaxing in the salon with André’s family and listening to a Mozart symphony, the tinny voice of World War I hero Maréchal Pétain interrupted the music. “With a heavy heart I tell you today what is necessary to do to stop the fighting,” intoned the scratchy voice through the mesh speaker. France had surrendered to Germany. Pétain would become head of a new government at Vichy allied with the Nazis. The nation would henceforth be divided in two: the zone occupied by the Germans, ...
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