New Coco Chanel biography claims to have proof that fashion icon used drugs, had lesbian affairs and loved a Nazi spy
By Daisy Dumas
UPDATED: 08:21 GMT,
2 August 2011
Coco Chanel's
perfectly set hair, manicured hands, plucked eyebrows and hard stare
are as recognisable as some of her enduring designs.
Less well known are
allegations of drug use, Nazi dealings and even homophobia -
something that contradicts the widespread acceptance of her lesbian
relationships.
Now, a new book
claims to have concrete proof of the fashion icon's dalliances and
vices.
Lisa Chaney's
forthcoming biography, Coco Chanel: An Intimate Life, lays bare hard
evidence of the fashion maven's use of opiates, as well as new
insights into Gabrielle 'Coco' Chanel's bisexuality, multiple affairs
and love with a Nazi spy.
Penguin says:
'Drawing on newly discovered love letters and other records, Chaney's
controversial book reveals the truth about Chanel's drug habit and
lesbian affairs.
'And the question
about Chanel's German lover during World War II (was he a spy for the
Nazis?) is definitively answered.'
WWD goes one step
further, saying the book is able to prove that the lover in question,
Hans Günther von Dincklage, did indeed spy for the Nazis throughout
the Second World War.
Quoting en email
from Ms Chaney's Viking publicist, WWD cites: 'Whether Chanel was
aware of this is unknown, but after that war she lived in neutral
Switzerland for a while, to avoid any proceedings against her.'
In the book, due for
release in November, Ms Chaney uses the newly discovered letters as
well as documents from the Swiss Federal Archives to quell any doubt
as to the truth of some of the less palatable aspects of Ms Chanel's
colourful lifestyle.
Viking says of the
20th Century's most famous fashion designer: 'Her numerous liaisons,
whose poignant and tragic details have eluded all previous
biographers, were the very stuff of legend.
'Witty and
mesmerizing, she became muse, patron, or mistress to the century's
most celebrated artists, including Picasso, Dalí, and Stravinsky.'
Ms Chanel's infamous
life has inspired many a graphic recounting of her rags-to-riches
story.
The re-released
biography, Coco Chanel: The Legend and the Life by Justine Picardie,
which includes illustrations by Karl Lagerfeld, has drawn attention
to Ms Chanel's reliance on opiates before, saying the designer saw
morphine as a 'harmless sedative.'
Successful 2009
movie, Coco Before Chanel, drew criticism for playing down some of Ms
Chanel's less savoury antics, while Coco Chanel & Igor
Stravinsky, also released in 2009, throws a spotlight onto the
designer's love affair with the Russian composer.
Ms Chaney's version
of a story oft misread is, no doubt, set to capture the attention of
yet another generation of Chanel enthusiasts.
Chanel:
An Intimate Life by Lisa Chaney – review
Lisa Chaney has
done much original research for her biography of Coco Chanel but
chooses to ignore unpalatable truths about her subjec
Rachel Cooke
@msrachelcooke
Friday 23 September
2011 11.30 BST
I have a hunch that
Lisa Chaney, Coco Chanel's latest biographer, must be suffering from
an even greater dose than usual of pre-publication anxiety.
Unfortunately for Chaney, her book stalks into the picture a mere
eight weeks after Hal Vaughan's "controversial" Sleeping
with the Enemy: Coco Chanel's Secret War, which suggested that the
designer, already known to have been a "horizontal collaborator"
during the second world war, was also a German spy (Abwehr agent
F-7124, codenamed "Westminster" after her former lover,
Hugh Grosvenor, the 2nd Duke of Westminster). Are Vaughan's claims
credible? I think they are. Apart from anything, he has paperwork to
back them. For Chaney, who does not go so far – Chanel, she
theorises, was a supreme pragmatist, but not, in the end, a traitor –
this must have come as something of a blow.
Still, she can at
least console herself with her own discoveries (and it is a wonder,
when some 60 books have already been written about Coco Chanel, that
there is anything left to find out). Chaney has seen a previously
unknown cache of letters from Arthur "Boy" Capel, the
English businessman who was the love of Chanel's life, and she is the
first biographer to have had access to the diaries of Dmitri
Pavlovich, another lover. In combination, these documents suggest
that Chanel was not always the cold-hearted prune she later became;
that she had her vulnerabilities. She adored Boy, and must have been,
for all her modern views, agonised by his dithering – the extent of
which is now fully clear – over the matter of whether he would
marry an aristocratic English rose called Diana Wyndham. Pavlovich,
the exiled "heir" to the Russian throne, usually gets short
shrift in Chanel biographies, largely because the designer herself
characterised him as a spoony young man with whom she went to bed
only as a favour. Chaney, though, makes it clear that she needed and
enjoyed his companionship; in 1919, Boy had been killed in a car
crash, a blow from which Chanel was struggling to recover. Worth
noting, too, is Chaney's discovery that Bel Respiro, the French
country house bought by Chanel in 1920, was the same property that
Boy had purchased for his new wife. I have always wondered about her
grief at Capel's loss: was it just more role-playing? But this
suggests that it was both real and extremely painful (Chaney says
that in the months Coco spent living in this shrine, she was
"half-cracked").
Elsewhere, though,
we are on familiar ground. Gabrielle Chanel – she took the nickname
"Coco" as a young woman from a song she liked to sing in a
cafe patronised by cavalry officers – was born in 1883,
illegitimate and poor, in the Loire. Her father, absent, was a market
trader. Her mother died when she was 11, at which point Chanel was
placed in a convent in Aubazine, Corrèze, where the nuns taught her
to sew. Chaney is good on the early years – though she makes no
connection between the garb of the nuns, and Chanel's famous palette
of beige, black and white. In particular, it had not occurred to me
before that Chanel would have grown up speaking patois – a fact
that reminds you all over again how daring it was of her to promote
unloved fabrics such as jersey, and cheap fur such as rabbit: a less
self‑confident woman, once funds were available, would have
been in thrall to silk and mink.
Ah, yes. Those
funds. Chanel was a good businesswoman and as she moved from making
hats to couture and then, finally, to jewellery and perfume, she
amassed a pile of money. But in the beginning, she made good use of
other people's fortunes. In Vichy, where she headed after leaving the
convent, she met an ex-officer, Étienne Balsan, who installed her in
his chateau as his mistress. Balsan introduced her to Boy, who helped
her to finance her first shops (her triumphantly successful Deauville
boutique opened in 1913). When Boy died, and following affairs with
Stravinsky and Pavlovich, she took up with the Duke of Westminster,
known as Bend'Or to his friends, the richest man in Britain. This
relationship clearly worries Chaney. She refuses to believe that
Bend'Or was a boor and a thicko, asking: "Why would she have
associated herself with someone who was utterly obnoxious?"
(Answer: women sleep with obnoxious men all the time.) She also omits
to mention his well-documented antisemitism.
The author is just a
little timid, too, about the second war (during the first, Chanel had
cashed in, her new "practical" designs suddenly appealing).
Having shut up the House of Chanel – though she cannily kept the
perfume business going – Coco moved in to the Ritz, and took up
with a German intelligence officer, Baron Hans Günther von
Dincklage, a charmer who had presciently divorced his half-Jewish
wife shortly before the passing of the Nuremberg laws. Chaney
carefully puts Chanel's convenient new relationship in context.
Thousands of Frenchwomen, she says, took up with German soldiers
during this period; in wartime, a girl does what she has to do. I
think this is – up to a point – a fair argument. The difficulty
in the case of Chanel was that, first, she was rich and famous enough
not to need the protection of a German lover, and second, that she
continued the relationship in Lausanne after the war.
So where, among the
rows of Chanel books, does this one fit? I'm not sure. There is no
doubting Chaney's tenacity as a researcher, and her attitude to the
work comes as a relief: she admires it without ever making it seem –
as fashion writers are apt breathlessly to do – more revolutionary
than it was. (She notes that it was Poiret, not Chanel, who first
suggested women ditch their corsets, and she makes the very good
point that, ironically, most women needed a corset more than ever
before if they were to get away with wearing Chanel's narrow, less
structured frocks.) But there is something desultory about her
narrative, and she sometimes struggles to say what she means. She
also – a classic error, I think – mistakes taste for
intelligence. Chanel was exceptionally chic, and as wily as a fox.
But she was not a thinker, for all that I agree with her about
miniskirts (yuck). Perhaps this is one reason why her conscience
seemed hardly ever to trouble her – though as Chaney also reminds
us, at the end of her life (she died in 1971) her sleepwalking was so
bad, her staff would tie her to her bed. "I am not a heroine,"
Chanel told Paul Morand, the author of her famous "memoir",
and I believe that on this matter, if nothing else, she was speaking
from the heart.
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