The Paris spring collections for 1939 continued, meanwhile, with their escapist historical theme. Vogue said that “Paris, the worldly, the sophisticated — Paris, where a woman is hardly considered a passable beauty until she is thirty-five — this Paris has suddenly gone completely innocent, quaint, modest, girlish.” Describing the “modest grace” of the evening clothes, the magazine said, “You can choose between the provoking gypsy modesty of Chanel’s bodice-and-skirt dresses, Mainbocher peasant types, or the eighteenth-century modesty that is in every collection.” Gabrielle’s day clothes remained simple, but for evening, she “did” charming peasants, too, and had full skirts in multicolored taffetas, puff-sleeved and embroidered blouses, short bolero jackets and handkerchiefs tied at the neck. And while her signature (fabric) camellia flowers were pinned to shoulders and necklines, she also had several pieces taking up a tricolor theme, trimming them with red, white and blue. For the first time, Gabrielle was interviewed by the American National Broadcasting Corporation (NBC) in Paris. Schiaparelli was interviewed, too, but separately.
In January 1939, Franco’s fascists’ success had driven almost half a million Republican soldiers and civilians to flee across the border into France; in February, the Republican government had followed them into exile. With the army routed, Madrid was left to the fascists and starvation. In March, Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia; three weeks later, Mussolini invaded Albania, opening up a route into Greece. France’s coalition leader, Edouard Daladier, declared the introduction of emergency powers, and began talks with Britain and the Soviet Union on an alliance to prevent Hitler from invading Poland. To the consternation of London and Paris, Stalin now chose to sign a nonaggression treaty with Germany. This gave him the possibility of regaining territories in the Baltic, Romania and Poland, taken from Soviet Russia at the end of the First World War, and also meant that the balance of power had swung in Germany’s favor.
No sooner had Gabrielle returned to Paris from La Pausa than Daladier called for general mobilization. Shortly afterward, the brilliantly authoritative New Yorker correspondent in Paris for fifty years, Janet Flanner, wrote of a transformed capital:
The greatest emotion was centerd around the Gare de l’Est, where thousands of soldiers have entrained for the northern frontier… Mostly they have been in uniform and steel helmets… Also, mostly their mothers, wives, fathers, and sisters have shed no tears, till the troop trains have pulled out… There are no flags, flowers or shrill shouts of vive la patrie! as there were in 1914. Among the men departing… the morale is excellent but curiously mental. What the men say is intelligent not emotional.”… Let’s stop living in this grotesque suspense and get it over once and for all.”… Few Frenchmen are thrilled to go forth to die… Yet all… seem united in understanding that this war, if it comes, is about the theory of living and its eventual practice.1
Among the millions called up was Gabrielle’s nephew, André Palasse, whom she asked to visit her en route for induction into the army. André’s health had never been robust, and Gabrielle was concerned. As predicted by those in France and Great Britain who believed that appeasement was a waste of time, Hitler now invaded Poland. On September 3, Britain and France together declared war on Germany.
Three weeks later, Gabrielle put into effect a most dramatic response to the announcement of war: she closed down her couture house and laid off most of the workforce. Only the boutique at 31 rue Cambon would remain open, selling the perfumes and jewelry. Gabrielle was now almost unanimously reviled. Many of her workers believed her decision was in retaliation for their strike action in 1936; others felt that she was deserting her “responsibilities.” Some in Paris whispered that she had felt eclipsed by Schiaparelli. Speaking of the plight of her workforce, the trade union tried to dissuade her. When this failed, they appealed to her sense of responsibility to her customers. Gabrielle remained adamant. After a few weeks, the government stepped in and begged her: would she not work “for the prestige of Paris?” She said that no one could make her work against her will. She would not reopen the House of Chanel.
It has been said that having profited from the last war, Gabrielle had decided against it in this one to atone for her guilt. More convincing is her occasional comment that while making her name in the last war, she didn’t feel there would be a place for fashion in this one. She intended tidying up the loose ends of her business, and whenever the hostilities ended, would move on to something else: “I had the feeling that we had reached the end of an era. And that no one would ever make dresses again. [She was referring to haute couture.]2
Gabrielle was no longer young, but her intuitions were still remarkably accurate. With hindsight, one can see that the war was indeed to strike the death knell for the great tradition of haute couture. From the monastery at Solesmes, meanwhile, her friend Pierre Reverdy wrote approvingly of her actions, saying, “The point in life… is to find equilibrium in what is inherently unstable.”3
While soldiers from opposing armies faced one another across the Rhine, Gabrielle heard from her nephew that he was in the first line of defense. Gabrielle now set about severing all but two or three links with her past: she wrote to her brothers, Lucien and Alphonse, saying that she could no longer support them as she had done. She said, “You cannot count on me for anything as long as circumstances stay the way they are.” Lucien was touched by her plight and wrote offering her some of his savings. Gabrielle was, of course, still very rich and had no need of them.
She replaced her chauffeur, who had been called up, kept a car ready just in case and consolidated her rooms at the Ritz. She paid for a staircase to be built from her two-room suite up to a small bedroom in the attic, which was very simple, even austere, and contained little more than her bed. For decoration, there was nothing except the beautiful Russian icon given her by Stravinsky, two statues on the mantel and Arthur’s watch, given to her by his sister, Bertha. It still kept perfect time. On the white walls there were no pictures. She said, “Ah no, none of that here. This is a bedroom, not a drawing room.”4 However, even in her drawing room, Gabrielle had only one picture, a painting of wheat by Dalí. It is often said that Dalí gave it to her. He didn’t; Gala Dalí had connived to make Gabrielle buy it. Gabrielle didn’t need painting the way she needed sculpture. Sculpture was, like her couture, a three-dimensional thing, unlike painting, which only plays with three-dimensional space. Indeed, Gabrielle surrounded herself with sculpture of all kinds, from her small herd of large animals, particularly deer and lions, to the classical busts, the large Buddha and the bust of Arthur’s disgraced priest uncle, Thomas Capel. We don’t know whether Gabrielle kept this link with Arthur in the mistaken belief that Thomas was distinguished, or whether she was amused by his dubious reputation.
With the advent of hostilities, many male servants had been called up, so a good number of the better off closed up their establishments, sent their children to the country and, with their jewels and artworks hidden, moved into hotels. Among those living at the Ritz alongside Gabrielle were Schiaparelli and her beloved daughter, Gogo; the fabulously wealthy society figures Lady Mendl and Reginald and Daisy Fellowes; various aristocrats and women whom nothing would budge from Paris; a number of significant politicians; and the actor Sacha Guitry. In the weeks after war was declared, when there was no fighting and the soldiers were all idle, the hostilities seemed unreal. Gas masks remained unused, and people began to relax; there appeared little need for sacrifice, benefit galas proliferated and most theaters and cinemas reopened. That winter of 1939, when social life almost returned to normal, became known as the Phony War.
By February 1940, Daladier was out and a new French premier, Paul Reynaud, had been voted in. Suddenly the Phony War was over: Hitler attacked and occupied Denmark and Norway, and the Luftwaffe bombed the airfields of northern France. Jean Renoir’s La Règle du Jeu, with the actors dressed by Gabrielle, had had its premiere just prior to the war and had been booed off the screen. The film with its satirization of the upper classes as capricious and self-indulgent, was banned a few weeks into the war as “unpatriotic.”
German tanks crossed into Holland and Belgium, and armored divisions moved on the Ardennes. Neville Chamberlain resigned on May 10, and Winston Churchill, who promised naught but “blood, toil, tears, and sweat,” became Britain’s new prime minister. By the end of May, the Allies had suffered a disaster, causing panic in London and Paris as General Rommel swept across northern France toward the English Channel, driving the Allies ahead of him. Whenever a break in the weather allowed it, the Luftwaffe fired on the hundreds of thousands of Allies hoping for rescue on the beaches of Dunkirk. Between the end of May and the first days of June, in the most famous rescue operation of the war, instead of the thirty thousand or so Churchill had believed were all that could be rescued, more than three hundred thousand were ferried to safety in England by the Royal Navy and a huge flotilla of volunteer boats of all shapes and sizes.
By June 4, the Germans were bombing the outskirts of Paris. The government instructed everyone who was able to leave the city to do so. Ahead of an advancing German army, millions of men, women and children, in any vehicle to be found, or otherwise on foot, were now fleeing Paris. Along the big west and south highways, motor and horse-drawn vehicles were “piled high with babies’ cribs, luggage, pets, bedding and food, all under a hot summer sun.”5 “The exodus,” as it came to be known, was followed ten days later by the government, itself fleeing south to Tours in a convoy of limousines.
After war had been declared, Dalí wrote to Gabrielle from a villa at Arcachon, not far from the Spanish border, to which he and Gala had withdrawn. He was concerned about Gabrielle, saying he had
sent you two telegrams and we are constantly waiting for a sign from you to know that you are running your little face somewhere. I imagine that you are snowed under with worries, for you cultivate such a “fanaticism of responsibilities’ in everything!… Only enormous and very “important” things will be “visible” in the times that will follow… When will we meet, where?
Then, in another letter, he tells her about the night bombings at Arcachon and regrets not being able to look at her: “How sweet it is to grab you on the corner of a tablecloth… Whatever you do, be careful, I know that you have a crazy and useless carelessness, that you run like a cockerel without being scared of anything.”6
In the first week of June, along with most of Paris, Dalí’s “crazy” Gabrielle escaped, just ahead of the advancing German army. On closing her couture house and laying off all her workers except those in the boutique, Gabrielle had instructed her director, Georges Madoux, to remove all the accounts and archives and take them to a makeshift office he was to set up in the Midi. Madoux, however, had been called up and decided his first priority was to save his family and his own possessions before the administrative hub of the House of Chanel.
Stories differ as to Gabrielle’s precise movements in those hazardous days, but we know she left Paris with a hastily recruited driver in his own car. Petrol had been rationed, and fear walked abroad. Gabrielle decided against her own house, La Pausa, as a refuge. In response to a Royal Air Force attack on Turin, the Italians had declared war on the Allies and begun bombing the Riviera. Cocteau had fled to Aix-en-Provence with the Aurics, but Gabrielle decided not to go there.
Having managed the long journey down through France, she reached Pau, in the Pyrenees, before turning off farther into the mountains and the small village of Corbères-Abères. Here André Palasse had his château, and Gabrielle came to a halt there for a few weeks. She had bought the château for André in 1926—the sale was negotiated by Gabrielle’s old lover Etienne Balsan, living nearby — and, most summers, Gabrielle had spent time there with André and his family.
Other refugees soon began to arrive. Gabrielle Labrunie, André’s daughter, tells how these were her great-aunt’s employees who had nowhere else to go. In all, there were about fifteen. Madame Labrunie remembers that some of them “were rather lost, confused… they were quite old… and no longer able to work… We’d heard that Paris was going to be very dangerous, so they all came to Corbères.”7 One of the refugees was a pregnant girl called Annick. She was the daughter of Madame Aubert, the redhead who had been Gabrielle’s right-hand woman for so long. Another of those who ended up at Corbères-Abères was Gabrielle’s friend the socialite Marie-Louise Bousquet.
On June 14, the Germans occupied Paris; Reynaud’s coalition government then collapsed, and Marshal Pétain was chosen as France’s new premier. On June 16, he requested an armistice. At dawn, a week later, Hitler arrived in Paris accompanied by his entourage, including his architect, Albert Speer, and the neoclassicist sculptor Arno Breker. With them he made his notorious lightning tour of the defeated city. Stopping at the Opéra, the party continued down the Champs-Elysées and on to the Trocadéro. Hitler posed for the infamous photograph in front of the balustrade overlooking the Seine and the Eiffel Tower. At Les Invalides, he stood musing over Napoléon’s tomb. He was impressed by the proportions of the Panthéon but was uninterested in other monuments signaling the illustriousness of Paris. The rue de Rivoli, however, delighted him, and the military governor of Paris requisitioned the Hôtel Meurice there for himself and his associates.
By 9:00 a.m., Hitler had finished his tour. He told Speer, “It was the dream of my life to see Paris. I cannot say how happy I am to have that dream fulfilled.” He later told Speer that he had often considered destroying the city, but it was clear that instead they must continue with the new buildings of Berlin, so that “when we are finished Paris will only be a shadow.”
France had agreed to accept its military defeat. On June 21, in a clearing in that same forest of Compiègne that Gabrielle had ridden through many times with Etienne Balsan and their friends, and in the same carriage in which the Allies had watched the Germans sign their defeat in the First World War, the Germans now dictated their terms to the French delegation. On hearing the news in the faraway Pyrenees, Gabriele Labrunie tells how her great-aunt shut herself up in her room for several hours and wept, scandalized at Pétain’s surrender without a fight.
After a few weeks of hiding in the hills, Gabrielle decided it wasn’t for her. Dalí was right: she wasn’t really “scared of anything”—with one exception: being abandoned. On July 14, she sent a telegram to a Spanish sculptor friend of Picasso’s, Apelles Fenosa, who had fled Paris for Toulouse, and told him that she would be “reaching Toulouse Monday afternoon. Please find me somewhere to stay… Greetings. Gabrielle Chanel.”
Apelles Fenosa was an exiled Spanish Republican sculptor who had arrived in Paris in 1938 with nothing. Picasso had helped him escape from Spain, and Cocteau had introduced him to Gabrielle in early 1939. By this time, Fenosa’s work was selling well, and Gabrielle commissioned him to sculpt her. (For some time, Picasso had failed to persuade his friend to sculpt him, but Gabrielle finally encouraged Fenosa to do so.)
Fenosa was a dynamic, attractive character, and not long after their meeting, he and Gabrielle were launched into an affair. She offered to move Fenosa into the Ritz, where she was already living, but the communist sculptor found himself uncomfortable in the bourgeois confines of the hotel, so Cocteau made a deal with him. He would swap his apartment in the place de la Madeleine with Fenosa, and Cocteau would take the room offered by Gabrielle at the Ritz. In the late autumn, Fenosa was diagnosed with double mastoiditis, and Cocteau told his boyfriend, the matinee idol Jean Marais, away in the army, that Gabrielle’s doctors were looking after Fenosa, who was very ill. Away from Paris, Gabrielle had telegrammed asking for news of his health.
The affair between the couturier and the sculptor continued for a year or more, and they were said to be very close. Dalí had intuited correctly that he had “been left a widow.” Fenosa felt great admiration for Gabrielle and would later say that “she was highly intelligent, she was good for me. She never left anything to chance.” But in the end, it was he who felt driven to break off their affair, saying there were two reasons for their separation. Apparently, “there were two or three stories about men around her, as was often the case with her… but mostly it was drugs!” Fenosa was vehemently against drug use. Adamant that he didn’t want to become habituated to them himself, he said, “It was drugs that pulled us apart. If you love someone who takes drugs, either you take them yourself or the other person quits.” Fenosa had told Gabrielle, “Either you quit drugs, or I leave!” He left.8
After the war, Gabrielle railed against some of those she knew, such as the writer and future statesman André Malraux, who were “destroying” themselves with drugs. But while Gabrielle denied those things she didn’t wish others, or herself, to believe about her, as her future assistant would say, “This didn’t stop her from lying a lot.”9 While Fenosa objected to Gabrielle’s using drugs at all, Gabrielle was able to convince herself that she didn’t because she was always able to keep it under control.
Gabrielle stayed at André Palasse’s château for a few weeks and then made her way to Toulouse. Fenosa contacted several of their mutual friends, such as Cocteau, who were not far away, and ordered them to come to Vernet-les-Bains, where they spent time at the house of friends. Cocteau was relieved at the arrival of Jean Marais, demobilized after the collapse of France, and Pétain’s armistice. Marais had starred in Cocteau’s Oedipus Rex in 1937, for which Gabrielle had designed the costumes.
Once she knew that the Germans wouldn’t bomb Paris, she wanted to return, and soon set off with Marie-Louise Bousquet and a female doctor on a journey busy with event. Bousquet knew someone who had forty-five or so liters of petrol, which they had to carry with them in the sweltering summer heat. Reaching Vichy, the women were down to their last liter of fuel. Now that Vichy was the capital of the southern half of France, which Hitler had chosen not to occupy, the travelers were obliged to stop there for papers in order to be allowed to cross into the occupied northern sector of the country, and Paris. Pétain and Pierre Laval’s government was ruling Vichy France from a series of the spa town’s hotels. (Laval had two terms as head of the Vichy government, signing the deportation papers of many Jews to the death camps, for which he would be executed after the war.) The U.S. ambassador, William Bullitt, talked with the new government officials, then sent a dispatch to President Roosevelt, saying:
The French leaders desire to cut loose from all that France has represented during the past two generations. Their physical and moral defeat has been so absolute that they have accepted completely for France the fate of becoming a province of Nazi Germany… the simple people of the country are as fine as they have ever been. The upper classes have completely failed.10
This failure, of course, had been the implication in Renoir’s satire, hence its banishment from the screen. As someone who remained ambivalent toward this class, it seems appropriate that Gabrielle had designed the film’s wardrobe.
In Vichy, Marie-Louise and Gabrielle ate at the Hôtel du Parc, where they were taken aback by the general air of celebration. Gabrielle said, “Everyone was laughing and drinking champagne.”11 Her ironic comment on this festive atmosphere provoked a man to confront her, and his wife had to calm him down.
Where were the travelers to spend the night? “A gentleman offered me his bed on condition that I share it with him. I managed to persuade the owner of the hotel and they put me up in the garret where the heat was killing. I got up every hour and went into the bathroom just to breathe.” Marie-Louise had a chaise longue placed in a linen room for her.12
Assisted by the prefect of police, they managed to obtain more petrol, and Gabrielle, Marie-Louise and the doctor set off once more for Paris. Reaching a roadblock, no one was allowed through except Belgians returning home. The women attempted side roads, but these were jammed with cars trying to do the same thing. Moving forward slowly, wherever they stopped they could find nothing to eat. Finally reaching another spa town, where everyone was very jittery because the hotels were all booked but no one had turned up, the travelers were offered three large rooms, each with its own bath.
Gabrielle went out for a walk and was duped by a child into giving him some money. This he immediately gave to his mother and told Gabrielle, “Now we’ll be able to eat tonight.” The woman had another child with her and was pregnant. When she revealed her almost empty purse, Gabrielle was struck by her destitution.
When the travelers finally reached Paris, on the rue de Rivoli and place de la Concorde they could see only German soldiers. A swastika was flying above the Ritz, as it was from all the major hotels. The MBF, the Wehrmacht military command in France, had its seat in the Hôtel Majestic on avenue Kléber. Here was centerd the administration, the management of the economy and the maintenance of order. Here, too, Joseph Goebbels had his Propaganda-Abteilung (Propaganda Division) immediately begin its work. Posters were up everywhere announcing that “the English and the Jews have brought you to this sorry pass.” Food and cigarettes were distributed, as was a poster of a Nazi soldier caring for some little children that bore the slogan: “Abandoned peoples, put your trust in the German soldier.” German street signs, instructions and banners were everywhere.
A large number of overlapping organizations now ruled the French. Many Nazi officers worked in France under direct orders from Berlin, while inin Paris itself, the MBF was always skirmishing with Ribbentrop’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs — in this case, the German embassy. Eventually, Ribbentrop’s protégé, Otto Abetz, became arguably more important than the MBF, and was dubbed King Otto I.
All requisitioned hotels had armed soldiers posted at their doors. Gabrielle was barred entry to the Ritz without an Ausweiss (permit) and was told she must seek permission from the commandant. There are several versions of what happened next, but eventually Gabrielle was given leave to remain at the Ritz. However, her grand suite of rooms was now inhabited by German officers. She was offered one small room on the rue Cambon side of the hotel. She agreed.