Sex, Lies and Tailor’s Tape
“The New Look,” an Apple TV+ series, takes great liberties with the intertwined life stories of Christian Dior and Coco Chanel. The truth is just as interesting.
By Gioia Diliberto
Gioia Diliberto is the author of the novel “Coco at the Ritz.”
Published March 5, 2024Updated March 7, 2024
In the twenty-six years she lived after World War II, Coco Chanel never publicly apologized for her treacherous behavior during the Nazi Occupation of Paris. While living at the Ritz Hotel with a handsome German spy, she had tried to use the Nazi race laws to wrest control of her perfume company from her Jewish partners. She also had embarked on a Nazi-authorized scheme to broker a separate peace with Winston Churchill, and she was overheard making ugly, antisemitic remarks.
“The New Look,” an Apple TV+ series about how couturiers Chanel and Christian Dior spent the war, accurately depicts Chanel’s defiant lack of remorse, while casting her somewhat sympathetically as a victim of Nazi intimidation. But in converting Chanel’s experiences into a TV production “inspired by true events,” the show’s creators have mangled or lost much of the actual truth, which is more complicated than what’s portrayed onscreen. (Warning: Spoilers ahead.)
The real Chanel story is elusive, in part because she lavished financial gifts on several people who had firsthand knowledge of what transpired. A recent blockbuster exhibit of Chanel fashion at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London even features two documents claiming to place her in the Resistance, an unlikely assertion that further clouds her biography.
A few things are indisputable. For one, throughout the occupation of France, Chanel enjoyed a romance with Hans Gunther von Dincklage, a blond, elegant German known to many as Spatz, who, at 44 in 1940, was 13 years her junior. Chanel had probably met von Dincklage in the 1930s when he worked in Paris as a propaganda officer for the German Embassy. Later, he served as a spy with the Abwehr, the military’s intelligence organization.
“The New Look” portrays von Dincklage as a violent thug, whom Chanel paid off when he threatened to kill her beloved nephew. In reality, their relationship endured for almost a decade after the war. Von Dincklage escaped imprisonment after being briefly detained at a checkpoint in a British zone of Germany and soon after joined Chanel in her exile in Switzerland, where the couple lived quietly until breaking up amicably in the early 1950s.
During the war, von Dinklage introduced Chanel to Baron Louis de Vaufreland, a French aristocrat and ruthless Nazi collaborator who in 1941 was already responsible for the deaths of a group of Gaullist résistants in Casablanca. Vaufreland facilitated the release of Chanel’s nephew André Palasse, a French soldier taken prisoner by the Germans and suffering from tuberculosis. In exchange, Chanel joined Vaufreland as his cover on an espionage trip to Madrid. The Abwehr designated her agent F-7124 with the code name Westminster, and her assignment was to socialize with her friends in the diplomatic community while Vaufreland tried to recruit people to spy for Germany.
In his 2011 book “Sleeping with the Enemy,” the journalist Hal Vaughan reprinted the report of a dinner with the British diplomat Brian Wallace in August 1941, which was attended by Chanel and Vaufreland. The report indicates that Chanel did most of the talking.
Two years later, Chanel and von Dincklage cooked up a harebrained scheme to have Chanel meet Churchill in Madrid on his way back from the Tehran Conference. She had been friendly with Churchill, the British prime minister, since meeting him in the 1920s when she was the lover of the Duke of Westminster, at the time, one of the wealthiest men in the world. Churchill was fond of Chanel and continued to see her after she and the duke broke up.
Churchill had said he would never negotiate with Hitler, but Chanel arrogantly believed she could get him to relent. To arrange the mission, which the Germans called “Modelhut,” meaning fashion hat, Chanel traveled to Berlin and met with Walter Schellenberg, the Nazi chief of foreign intelligence. She also lured her friend Vera Bate Lombardi to accompany her to Madrid. An English aristocrat who was married to an Italian, Lombardi was much closer to Churchill than Chanel was, and Chanel reasoned that she might be of use in securing a meeting with the prime minister. (A character called Elsa Lombardi in “The New Look” bears little resemblance to the real Lombardi, while her drug addiction seems borrowed from Chanel’s closest female friend, the arts patroness Misia Sert, who isn’t depicted in the show at all.)
The scheme collapsed when Lombardi betrayed Chanel by denouncing her as a German agent to British authorities. Chanel returned to Paris, and the two women never saw each other again. After the war, Schellenberg was convicted of war crimes at Nuremberg, but served only two years of his six-year sentence because he was suffering from cancer. Chanel paid expenses for his treatment and subsequent funeral, according to Mr. Vaughan and the biographer Rhonda Garelick in “Mademoiselle: Coco Chanel and the Pulse of History.” There’s no mention of Chanel in “Labyrinth,” Schellenberg’s doorstop autobiography that was published after his death.
In one of Chanel’s most dishonorable moments during the war, she denounced her Jewish partners, the brothers Pierre and Paul Wertheimer, to Kurt Blanke, the German in charge of seizing businesses from Jews. In 1924, she’d signed an agreement with the brothers, giving them 80 percent of the profits of Les Parfums Chanel, while Chanel and another investor each owned 10 percent. To her astonishment, Chanel No. 5 became the world’s best-selling perfume, and Chanel unsuccessfully sued the Wertheimers to gain a larger share. When the Nazis took power in France, she saw her chance.
In her appeal to Blanke, Chanel demanded that all shares in Les Parfums Chanel revert to her, a Christian Frenchwoman. But before fleeing to New York at the start of the war, the Wertheimers had transferred their shares in the company to a French aviation engineer, Felix Amiot, who was building bombers for the Third Reich. The Wertheimers also paid Amiot 50-million francs to return the shares to them if the Allies won. In turn, they would vouch for him as a true patriot who had been forced into working for the Nazis.
As a consequence, the Germans never gave the company back to Chanel. During the war, as Tilar J. Mazzeo notes in “The Secret of Chanel No. 5: The Intimate History of the World’s Most Famous Perfume,” the Wertheimers produced Chanel No. 5 out of a factory in Hoboken, N.J., further infuriating Chanel. She bad-mouthed the scent to anyone who would listen, and, in violation of her contract with the Wertheimers, produced rival perfumes in Switzerland, including Mademoiselle Chanel No. 1, which is still available, though since renamed No. 19.
Sometime in late summer 1944, just days after the liberation of Paris by the Allies, two members of the French Forces of the Interior (F.F.I.), the loose band of resistance fighters, ex-soldiers and private citizens who’d taken up arms after the Nazis fled, arrested Chanel at the Ritz. At the time, F.F.I. members were grabbing women suspected of romances with Germans, shaving their heads and parading them through the streets. This épuration sauvage, or savage purge, continued until Charles de Gaulle returned to Paris from exile in September 1944 and set up official courts to try those who were accused of collaboration.
A few hours after her arrest, Chanel was released unharmed and soon afterward she fled to Switzerland. Remarkably, almost nothing has come to light about this incident. Some observers have speculated that Churchill intervened on her behalf, as Chanel herself reportedly told her maid, though it’s hard to imagine he had time to deal with Chanel’s troubles in the late summer of 1944. Others have wondered whether Chanel’s friend and one-time lover, the poet Pierre Reverdy, a bona fide résistant, interceded. The answer remains a mystery.
But justice in that period fell unevenly. Arletty, a celebrated actress and a casual acquaintance of Chanel’s who had a wartime affair with a Luftwaffe colonel, was arrested and imprisoned for two months while awaiting trial. After her conviction, she was placed under house arrest at a friend’s home for 18 months.
Before the war and during the Occupation, Arletty and Chanel were part of an extraordinary social set from across the arts and political spectrum. Right-wing and antisemitic views dominated the politics of this group. The French journalist Boulos Ristelhueber reported in 1940 that Chanel had gone into “into a long tirade against the Jews” during a dinner. Unlike some in her circle, however, Chanel didn’t embrace Nazi ideology. Above all, she was an opportunist.
Still, given Chanel’s involvement with the Nazis, it’s hard to believe two curious documents that surfaced recently “attesting” to her participation in the French Resistance. The documents, one of which is referenced by Justine Picardie in a new edition of her book, “Coco Chanel: The Legend and the Life,” are on display at the Victoria and Albert Museum as part of a blockbuster exhibit, “Gabrielle Chanel: Fashion Manifesto,” which closes on March 10.
Guillaume Pollack, a French historian who examined the documents in military archives in Vincennes, said he has “serious doubts” about Chanel’s actual involvement in the Resistance. Mr. Pollack, who wrote “L’Armée du Silence,” a history of Resistance networks, told France 24, the state-controlled international news source, that most resistance files overflow with testimony detailing the exact role and activities of the resistant in question. But Chanel’s file had “not a single trace” of corroborating evidence. He thinks Chanel somehow secured the attestation in an attempt to restore her tarnished reputation in the 1950s after reopening her fashion house, which she had closed in 1939 on the eve of war.
By this time, the Wertheimers had settled with Chanel over ownership of her namesake company, paying her millions of dollars and agreeing to bankroll her return to designing clothes. Today, the grandsons of Pierre Wertheimer own the privately held firm, which continually evokes Chanel as an avatar of chic and independence. The official Chanel website proclaims her “an inspiration for all women,” while completely ignoring her dark past.
In the final episode of “The New Look,” the Pierre Wertheimer character asks Chanel to apologize for denouncing him and his brother to the Gestapo. “I will not apologize! I was cornered just like you!” she shouts — as if the risk of diminished perfume profits were equivalent to the risk of losing one’s life in a Nazi concentration camp.
The real Chanel, though hardly a nice woman, was smart enough to know the difference.
I had no idea she was such a busy little,thing.