"From this century, in France, three names will remain: de Gaulle, Picasso, and Chanel."
—Andre Malraux
Coco Chanel created the look of the modern woman and was the high priestess of couture. She believed in simplicity and elegance, and freed women from the tyranny of fashion. She inspired women to take off their bone corsets and cut their hair. She used ordinary jersey as couture fabric, elevated the waistline, and created bell-bottom trousers, trench coats, and turtleneck sweaters. In the 1920s, when Chanel employed more than 2,000 people in her workrooms, she had amassed a personal fortune of $15 million and went on to create an empire.
Jean Cocteau once said of Chanel that she had the head of "a little black swan". And, added Colette, "the heart of a little black bull".
At the start of World War II, Chanel closed down her couture house and went across the street to live at the HÙtel Ritz. Picasso, her friend, called her "one of the most sensible women in Europe". She remained at the Ritz for the duration of the war, and afterward went on to Switzerland.
For more than half a century, Chanel's life from 1941 to 1954 has been shrouded in vagueness and rumor, mystery and myth. Neither Chanel nor her many biographers have ever told the full story of those years. Now Hal Vaughan, in this explosive narrative'part suspense thriller, part wartime portrait'fully pieces together the hidden years of Gabrielle 'Coco' Chanel's life, from the Nazi occupation of Paris to the aftermath of World War II.
Vaughan reveals the truth of Chanel's long-whispered collaboration with Hitler's high-ranking officials in occupied Paris from 1940 to 1944. He writes in detail of her decades-long affair with Baron Hans G¸nther von Dincklage, 'Spatz' ('sparrow' in English), described in most Chanel biographies as being an innocuous, English-speaking tennis player playboy and a harmless dupe'a loyal German sold...