Co Co: Couturier, Collaborator
By Gabrielle Birkner
Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel pulled herself up by her bootstraps from her orphanage roots, trading her boots for a pair of two-toned pumps, which she is often credited with popularizing — along with women’s trousers and the little black dress.
“Coco Before Chanel,” director Anne Fontaine’s new biopic, starring Audrey Tautou (“Amélie”) in the title role, moves quickly through Chanel’s hard-knock childhood in a provincial orphanage and her struggles to find work as an entr’acte performer on the cabaret circuit. It lingers on her years as a kept woman: She takes up residence with a wealthy racehorse owner, Étienne Balsan, and has a doomed lover affair with a member of his entourage, Arthur “Boy” Capel, who would eventually bankroll Chanel’s first boutique on Paris’s Rue Cambon. By the time the credits roll, Chanel’s rags-to-bouclé-blazers story is complete: The House of Chanel is on its way to becoming a global fashion empire; its gamine namesake is on her way to becoming a feminist icon for, among other achievements, helping to liberate women from the confines of the corset.
What is nowhere to be found in this visually stunning film, which overemphasizes an un-absorbing romantic storyline, is a single reference to Chanel’s collaborationist activities during the German occupation of Paris. Nor is there a mention of her life in self-imposed exile during the decade following the liberation, not even in the few frames of text that serve as the film’s brief epilogue.
The movie’s official Web site omits from its biography of the designer the 15 years between the eve of the Nazi invasion and Chanel’s comeback fashion show. “In 1939, she closed her Couture house. Then, aged 71, she returned with a legendary fashion show presented on February 5th, 1954,” the site reads.
What happened in the intervening years is worthy of a film all its own, but one unlikely to be made with the collaboration amiable of Chanel, Inc.
For most of what have come to be known as the “Dark Years” of the Occupation, Chanel lived in Paris’s Hotel Ritz, which had been commandeered by the Nazis. She shared a suite with her lover, Nazi officer Hans Gunther von Dincklage. Her choice of von Dincklage, aka “Spatz,” as an Occupation-era paramour was in character for Chanel, who had a history of attaching herself to rich and powerful men. In addition to Balsan and Capel, she was linked romantically to Hugh Grosvenor, the second duke of Westminster; to Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich of Russia, and to the Russian composer Igor Stravinsky; indeed, Chanel’s affair with Stravinsky is the inspiration for Jan Kounen’s forthcoming film, “Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky,” which similarly bypasses Chanel’s wartime collaboration. An early review by Jordan Mintzer in Daily Variety quips: “All that’s missing to complete the trilogy is a controversial account of her affair with an SS officer and ties to the Nazi regime (‘Coco & Hitler,’ anyone?)”
Marlene Strauss, an art historian who has lectured about Chanel’s life and work, told the Forward that the designer seemed more driven by opportunism than by ideology. “Coco Chanel was shrewd,” Strauss said, “and her pattern was this: Go with a man who can help you socially, politically, economically or just to stay alive. She never thought France would fall, but when it did, she soon became involved with a Nazi.”
But Chanel’s collaboration went beyond the horizontal variety.
In 1940, she was involved in an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to exploit German “aryanization” laws to wrest control of Chanel perfumes from the Wertheimer family, to whom she had long ago sold the majority stakes. And, most egregiously, she played a key role in Operation Modellhut (fashion hat), the brainchild of Hitler’s chief of foreign intelligence, Walter Schellenberg. The thwarted scheme involved having Chanel negotiate on behalf of the Third Reich a peace treaty with Winston Churchill, whom the designer had gotten to know years earlier through her relationship with the Duke of Westminster.
After the liberation, Chanel was arrested for war crimes, only to be sprung from jail hours later. She never endured the public humiliations to which other women who had wartime liaisons with Nazis were subjected: having their heads shaved, being paraded naked through the streets of Paris. Biographer Axel Madsen’s 1991 “Chanel: A Woman of Her Own” (Holt) suggests that the British orchestrated Chanel’s release because the designer had information that Churchill did not want out: According to Madsen’s account and others’, she knew that the British prime minister had paid the Germans to maintain the French properties of the Duke of Windsor, thereby violating a wartime trade embargo.
Chanel avoided jail time and corporal punishment, but she could not shake off the collaborationist label that made one a reviled figure in liberated France. She would spend the better part of the next decade, part of it with Spatz, in the seaside town of Lausanne, Switzerland, before staging a comeback show that may have been “legendary,” but was far from well received.
“French papers panned the collection,” said Irene Guenther, author of “Nazi Chic? Fashioning Women in the Third Reich” (Berg Publishers, 2004). “They didn’t say it was because she was a collaborationist; they said the designs were old hat. But the sense was that the French knew she had collaborated, and it doesn’t seem like they forgave her. She ended up relying on foreign buyers well into the 1960s.”
Chanel would defend her relationship with Spatz, famously telling fashion photographer Cecil Beaton, “[A] woman of my age cannot be expected to look at his passport if she has a chance of a lover.” And she would credit herself for doing what French designers like Jacques Fath, Nina Ricci and Marcel Rochas, did not — that is, closing her fashion house on the eve of the war, rather than attempt to profit from it financially. “At least I did that,” she would say.
A two-hour biopic cannot be expected to encapsulate the entirety of one’s life, especially a life as long and full as Chanel’s. And the film — from the title on forward — makes no claim to tell of Chanel’s life beyond her sartorial formation. But, knowing the rest of the story, it feels somehow dishonest to highlight Chanel’s unlikely social charms and professional ascent but bypass the designer’s wartime misdeeds altogether.
Asked by the Forward why the film, or at least the epilogue, makes no mention of the designer’s collaborationist activities, Fontaine, in an email, wrote: “I don’t see through which arbitrary leap forward we could have dealt with World War II, given our initial and deliberately limited take on Chanel’s life,” adding that the title cards at the end of the movie “were only meant to touch on what is already evoked in the film — Chanel’s social triumph and her loneliness.”
In response to a question about whether she thought Chanel’s wartime activities were rooted in antisemitism, Fontaine said that because the story she set out to tell ended when Chanel was 30, the filmmakers did not thoroughly research what their subject was doing 25 years later. What they do know of Chanel’s wartime activities, “the film certainly does not speak of or justify, let alone condone.”
“Like a fair number of uneducated French people of that generation, Chanel was probably infected with xenophobic, racist and antisemitic behavior,” she told the Forward. “The actual damage of such behavior seems more difficult to assess.”
Fontaine ended her e-mail with a question of her own about European Jews during World War II: “[W]ould you say they suffered more from Coco Chanel’s wrongdoings than from, for example, the actions of some influential and respected American isolationists such as Joseph P. Kennedy or William Randolph Hearst?”
Gabrielle Birkner is the Forward’s Web editor.
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Hmmm...
Altho’ designed out-of-house, Hugo Boss AG produced the iconic all-black SS uniforms. Boss became the official supplier of uniforms for the SS and SA, and produced the black-and-brown uniforms for the Hitlerjugend [Wikipedia: “Hugo Boss”]. Given Hitler’s fascination with design —considering himself an artist— one wonders if Chanel provided any designs to the Nazis.
The missing fifteen years would have made for a much more compelling drama and had people talking about the film long after, and well beyond those interested in fashion or bedroom aspects.
I guess there are parts of history some people don't like to discuss, but leaving them out is denying younger people part of the knowledge they need.
Regarding the reference to US "isolationists", this is disappointingly weak. Surely a more telling point could be about those US industrialists and business chiefs who did business with the Nazis and did well out of collaboration. They did not have Chanel's background or an occupation as their excuse. For them it was not 'rags to riches' but from riches to even greater riches.
Chanel and her lover Spatz may indeed have spent the "better part of a decade" living in Lausanne, Switzerland, but I'll be damned if I can figure out how it became a "seaside town."
What Chanel's attitude toward Jews was, I have no idea, but it is rather a delicious irony that, after her (ahem) "legendary" comeback show in 1954, she was financially bailed out by the buyers for Sachs and Bergdorf-Goodman's. Her designs were, as usual, of the "simple" but body-restrictive sort that required a slender build and small waist, and were a perfect fit for the slender, slinky but understated look that passed for feminine fashion in America's conformist '50s. (Complete with the addiction to cancer sticks that helped maintain the necessary slimness and, of course, decreased the span of those 'unproductive' later years thanks to cancer and emphysema.) My own impression is that this woman was an opportunist 'par excellence', but, then again, given her background of desperate poverty, that's sort of understandible though it got to be rather unpalatable in the wartime years. C'est la vie.
Why not talk about L'Oreal and Coty, both more infamous collaborators than Chanel?
Memories are short, clouded and selective....forget France for the moment and consider Nazi collaboration, including ACTIVE (as in pulling the triggers)collaboration in the actual murders of European Jews by Croatia and Ukraine (the two worst), Poland, Lithuania, Slovakia, Hungary and the whole panoply of Hitler's little helpers that most Americans know NOTHING about.
Well, what the Hell....I'm off to Hammacher Schlemmer in my Mercedes Benz to pick up my Mont Blanc pen set and a case of Nivea hand creams!
When will this newspaper figure out, or actually admit that almost all Europeans hate Jews. The French hated Coco Chanel because she collaborated with the Nazi's when they occupied the Country. That she did so while at the same time trying to get rid of her Jewish backers and co owners is hardly surprising. France has never admitted that most of its population was collaborationist and not "Underground." Most Europeans would have been quite happy if all of us had been killed. After all, "We Killed Jesus."
to amplify the point about the french and collaboration, only about 2% of the population actively participated in the french underground.
what is completely incredible is how almost 100% of frenchmen today are descended from that 2%!
I don't know to what degree Chanel the company was involved in funding this film, but I suspect it is part of a marketing ploy that seems to exploit the charm of Tatou who just happens to be the current model for the Chanel line of fragrances. Something doesn't smell right.
On Chanel...One is moved to recall Mark Twain's own finding: "The world has been afflicted with war, famine, disease, plague and pestilence...then of course, there are always the French.”
Thank you for this informative piece! And THANK YOU for challenging and calling the director on her omission of this unsavory and "inconvenient" aspect of Chanel's life. Kudos!!!
I wonder if more Jewish consumers would be less eager to purchase Chanel stuff is they knew the backdrop to this woman's life. Then again, not too many individuals hesitate (anymore at least) to buy Mercedes or Volkswagen vehicles.
Yet, bottom line, the genocide of the Jews was all of Europe's crime and pretty much any current commercial/business enterprise that preceded or emerged during WWII is tainted with some form of collaboration/complicity with the Nazis.
Again, thank you. Your piece soured my willingness to go see this movie. I'm upset that people will see a highly stylized (pun certainly intended) version of this woman's life.
Coco may be dead but the total insensitivity is reflected through more recent collections. The handbag celebrating 'Russian Heritage' has badges of the Tsars alongside the communist star with the CC logo inside. What next the Star of David on a bag alongside a Nazi Swasticker with a CC inside that?
Considering the film viewing public seem to have an insatiable appetite for a gritty nazi flick - Black Book, Counterfeiters, Bersterds, Valkirie. I think Chanel the wartime years would make a highly successful film. Infact I think it would smash the takings on the avant chanel film.
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