The Truth About Coco Chanel

You know her from the perfume, the little black dress, the double C bag clasp, but who was the woman, Coco Chanel? What even was her real name? From her origin story, through her inspirations and affairs, to her connections to the Nazi party - today we find out more about Chanel. Kate is joined by NYT columnist Rhonda Garelick, author of 'Mademoiselle: Coco Chanel and the Pulse of History' and founding director at Hofstra's Institute for Public Humanities and the Arts. Voting is now open for the Listener's Choice Award at this year's Podcast Awards. Click to place your vote on the Spotify mobile app: https://open.spotify.com/s/xhg6PJa This episode was edited by Tim Arstall. The producer was Sophie Gee. The senior producer was Freddy Chick. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener surveyhere https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/6FFT7MK. All music from Epidemic Sounds. Betwixt the Sheets: History of Sex, Scandal & Society is a History Hit podcast. Voting is now open for the Listener's Choice Award at this year's Podcast Awards! UK & Ireland listeners please place your vote on the Spotify mobile app here: https://open.spotify.com/s/xhg6PJa Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Kate Lister?

  Do you want even more shocking and scandalous history? Like why the ancient Greek statues had such small manhoods? Or what went on behind closed doors in the Georgian era? Well, sign up to History Hit, where you can see me discover the scandalous side of history, as well as hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, covering everything from prehistoric Scotland to the Treaty of Versailles. Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe.

• 0:35Kate Lister?

  Hello, my lovely betwixters. It's me, Kate Lister. Welcome back once again to Betwix the Sheets, the podcast where we root around in the pants of history for our own entertainment and then all pretend that we were just here because we like learning stuff. I know the truth. But before we can go any further together, I do have to tell you, this is an adult podcast book about adults, other adults, about adult things, and adult age, and age and submiss. And you should be an adult too. Right, can you tick all of that off? Okay, then let's get on with this.

• 1:05Kate Lister?

  Tear up the corsets and rip off the frills. Today, we are in our little black dresses. Ah, the LBD is a closet staple all over the world. It is simple, it's practical, it's flattering, and it's easy to wear. And in 1926, it was properly groundbreaking. Turning black from a colour of mourning into a symbol of chic, well, that was really pushing the envelope. And it was all the work of Coco Chanel. What a trailblazer, what a genius, what a pioneer, what an absolutely awful person. Oh, my God. Well, I think we need to find out more. Let's do this.

• 2:08Kate Lister?

  Hello and welcome back to Betwix the Sheets, the history of sex scandalous society with me, Kate Lister. Whatever your style might be, I bet you've been influenced in some way by Coco Chanel. You might not even realise that you've been influenced, but she is here all around us. It might be the simple little black dress, or it might be the shelves of simple perfume bottles. It could be the tweed suits and the quilted bag, or maybe you're rocking a string of pearls. I'm telling you, once you see it, you can't unsee it. The woman's influence is all around us. But just like most historic figures, Chanel has, hmm, what historians like to call a complicated legacy. That's historian talk for, they were an asshole. The issue that all Chanel historians have to grapple with is her closeness to the Nazis

• 2:52Kate Lister?

  in occupied France. Relationships that raised eyebrows even in her own time. So today, we are going to find out more about Chanel. How did she come to be the world's most famous fashion designer? Who helped her on her way? Was her name even Coco? And, we can't induct it, was she a Nazi? Hmm. Well, today, I'm joined by Rhonda Gerlink, author of Mademoiselle, Coco Chanel and the Pulse of History. And if anyone can tell us, she can. So let's get our shades on and let's do it.

• 3:30Kate Lister?

  Well, hello and welcome to Betwix the Sheets. It's only Rhonda Gerlink. How are you doing?

• 3:36Speaker 01

  Hello, Kate. I'm doing really well. Thanks for having me today.

• 3:40Kate Lister?

  Well, I'm just thrilled that you're here because I can't believe the podcast has been going for like four years now and we haven't covered Madame Coco Chanel. Can you even believe that?

• 3:50Speaker 01

  Well, she is a big one, so I'm glad we're getting to her today.

• 3:53Kate Lister?

  And you are a fabulous person to speak to about Coco Chanel, because you are the author of the book Mademoiselle Coco Chanel and the Pulse of History, not to mention the founding director of the Hofstra Institute for Public Humanities and Arts. Wow. What drew you to write a biography of Coco Chanel?

• 4:11Speaker 01

  Well, you know, I wasn't going to. I had a much narrower topic in mind. I was going to write a book about Chanel as a costume designer, which most people don't realise she was for stage, for dance, for cinema. And it was just going to be that. I had found my niche. And as I was working on that, I realised, well, yes, Chanel was a costume designer, but the costumes she was designing were for virtually every woman in the industrialised world, that we were all in a massive pageant costumed by Chanel. And so that became the impetus for a new biography. And there were so many already, I didn't think I could find an angle, but this really was what I wanted to write about.

• 4:53Kate Lister?

  She's one of those people that I suppose the actual woman is kind of lost behind the iconic brand, right? If you say Chanel today, you're not really thinking of a person, you're thinking of the brand, you're thinking of expensive handbags, and you're thinking of perfume, and you're thinking of catwalk fashions. The actual person can get a bit lost in there, I think.

• 5:13Speaker 01

  Oh, completely.

• 5:14Kate Lister?

  As a starter question, what's her origin story? Because I was quite surprised about where she came from. I thought it was going to be all aristocrats and, you know, high society. But could you just tell us a bit about where Coco Chanel even came from? And what her real name is? Because I don't believe it was Coco Chanel.

• 5:31Speaker 01

  It was not. Her given name was Gabrielle Chanel. And she would love that you had that idea of her life, because she spent her entire life trying to give the impression that she was an aristocrat. Chanel was born to unmarried peasants in an area of France, in the Loire Valley, in Sommeur, France. She was the second of five children to a man who was a peddler. He just sort of sold little trinkets out of a cart all over the region. And his barely out of her teenage years wife, she was orphaned by the time she was 11. And with her sisters, she had two sisters and two brothers.

• 6:13Speaker 01

  The girls were just dumped at a convent orphanage and the boys were shipped off for farm labour. Her mother died exhausted, tubercular. Her father abandoned them and she never saw either parent again.

• 6:27Kate Lister?

  So a really poor background. I mean, this isn't even like lower middle class. This is, this is real survival territory.

• 6:35Speaker 01

  This is barely surviving the worst conditions you can imagine. And in fact, in a terrible way, you could say being orphaned was the salvation for her, because she was raised by nuns in this orphanage. And there, at least, she got some minimal education, some skills. And she also saw a world entirely run by women, which I think was very formative for her.

• 7:00Kate Lister?

  It's kind of sad that when she was an adult, she was desperately ashamed of this stuff, because I think today, you'd wear that like a badge of honour. You'd be like, look, I fought my way up from like really impoverished backgrounds. But she was very ashamed of this.

• 7:15Speaker 01

  Well, she had reason to. It was not crazy for her to feel ashamed, because

• 7:19Kate Lister?

  Oh, no, no.

• 7:20Speaker 01

  Every door she knocked on only opened halfway. She really had to bulldoze her way into life, into her business, into society. And while she got extremely far, obviously, we're talking about her today, she was made to feel almost her entire life like a servant, being a dressmaker. She wasn't, there was no such thing as a fancy couturier back then. There was your dressmaker and you didn't let your dressmaker dine at your table with your friends. And that never really left her.

• 7:48Kate Lister?

  It was a different time, wasn't it? And class was a real issue. And she was, I mean, she wasn't wrong to try and to think that people would judge her for that, because they did.

• 7:58Speaker 01

  They did, and especially as a woman. The way she made her way in the world at the beginning, certainly, she had only certain assets to trade on. And of course, she used them. And that was also very badly looked upon. She was a pretty girl. She learned quickly how to please men especially. And she was using that along with her quick wit and design skills to sort of bulldoze, as I said, her way in. But she never got over the shame.

• 8:23Kate Lister?

  So how does the abandoned orphaned daughter of a wandering itinerant peddler of various charms end up being, that's just a crazy, so you could never have mapped that out for her. She's, she's being raised by nuns. At this point, was there any interest in fashion?

• 8:46Speaker 01

  Well, there wasn't even such a thing as fashion, but but you can find the seeds. So, for example, one of the skills that young girls were expected to learn, especially at a convent orphanage, was sewing. So while she never became very proficient or adept at it, she did learn basic sewing skills. So there was that. The second thing was, the aesthetic world around her was really very interesting. The sort of iconography of the Catholic Church, it's very beautiful, it's very lush, it has great design elements, you know, there were stained glass windows, there were the sisters who were dressed all in black, there were chain link belts on which they wore the heavy keys for the convent. And then the other thing that really influenced her and was a design element, was she was spending her

• 9:30Speaker 01

  youth in a town that was barracks for soldiers, for cavalry. And when she walked around in town on those limited occasions, she saw these handsome young men in their military jackets with the epaulettes and the braiding, and she was fascinated by that. And her first job, right out of convent, was sewing for the officers. She was doing seamstress work in a back room of a little shop, and she and her sister were mending officers' uniforms. And so she got a real tactile, very intimate view of how you make clothes for bodies. And she was talented at that.

• 10:09Kate Lister?

  And so how old is she about at this point, when she's she's making soldiers outfits?

• 10:13Speaker 01

  So she's eighteen, nineteen. And she had also spent a year prior to that, she went from convent to a pension for slightly older girls. And there, she'd been forced to wear a particular uniform because she was so needy. There was a set of girls who couldn't wear the regular clothes. They had to wear all black little simple dresses. So she came from a world of little black dresses, which was a sign of shame, got her first job mending officers' uniforms as a teen, and also then started meeting soldiers and the local guys. And then her first job, along with that, was her attempt to sing in a cabaret.

• 10:52Kate Lister?

  Wow. What kind of relationships was she involved in at this point? Because this sounds like she's she's very vulnerable. This is a young girl with very few prospects or people to look out for her, being surrounded by soldiers. This doesn't sound good.

• 11:09Speaker 01

  Nothing we would recommend to any young girls we know. And she was very closed mouth about this. But so what we can infer is that she started having friendships, shall we say, with a number of these guys. She would appear on stage. She wasn't very good at singing, but she was charming and cute, and the guys liked her. And in some ways, her great good fortune was meeting a man at probably this cabaret, known as Etienne Balsin. And Balsin was her first great patron and lover. And he was an athlete, a polo player, tennis player, incredibly rich, but not an aristocrat, and that matters. He

• 11:49Speaker 01

  was the son of a very wealthy man. He had an estate. And he befriended Chanel, and he had a kind of stable of pretty girls, some quite accomplished singers themselves, some of the more well-known courtesans of the time loved him. He was very charming. And he brought her into his chateau, the Chateau Royal Lyre. And she was sort of a second tier. I wouldn't even call her a girlfriend. She was kind of a background player.

• 12:18Kate Lister?

  Okay.

• 12:19Speaker 01

  But that was very, that was protection. And she started watching all the more grand ladies dress and prepare themselves for social occasions. And she was, if nothing else, scrappy, quick witted, and very adaptable. She was a chameleon, Kate. She could watch and learn. And she adapted their styles for herself.

• 12:42Kate Lister?

  It must be very difficult to research this part of her life, especially as later on, she did almost everything she could to cover it up, to lie about it, to deflect attention away from it. How'd you go about recovering the past when someone's made so much effort to pretend that none of that happened?

• 13:00Speaker 01

  That's an excellent question. It took me many years, and I stand on the shoulders of the many biographers who came before me. Although I will say that my approach is more to remember always that you cannot lie to your psychoanalyst or to your biographer. By which I mean, of course, that her lies were very telling. And even though they changed over the years, there were certain clues, certain things she would insist on, for example, which gave you often the clue that you should look for the inverse. So, for example, she claimed that she lived with wealthy aunts in the countryside, and that they fed her lavish, so much lavish food, she could barely eat another bite, and she would say, please,

• 13:39Speaker 01

  no more food. So from that, I think I infer correctly that she was hungry. Balsin's descendants were kind enough, once I tracked them down, to provide me with some photographs. There are also the archives and correspondence of people who surrounded her. And so my approach for most of it was to go via these many other relationships, because a lot of those people were quite well known and had established correspondence. I spent time in archives all over the world. I had people translate Russian diaries for me when necessary. It became its own sort of detective job.

• 14:15Kate Lister?

  I bet it did. So she is with Etienne.

• 14:20Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 14:20Kate Lister?

  And she is kind of one of his little, I don't want to say harem, but yeah, I can't think of a better word, one of his kind of girlfriends that he's supporting, I suppose, a bit in a sort of a Hugh Hefner Playboy bunny type of way.

• 14:33Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 14:34Kate Lister?

  Is she going by Coco at this point?

• 14:36Speaker 01

  Probably yes, because that was a name acquired in the Café Concert, in the cabaret. The provenance is a little bit big. Yeah, it was a stage name that people gave her because she had a song, apparently, about a dog named Coco. And she would sing the syllables Coco, Coco, and they thought that was cute, because it also sounds like cocotte, which is what she was. So she was probably Coco by then, hanging around at the estate, although she was not allowed to attend the dinners when the really aristocratic or prominent people came to dinner. Etienne would make her stay in her rooms.

• 15:09Kate Lister?

  It's weird. It's weird. But okay, all right. And I can see what you say, that like she's absorbing all of like this influence from these aristocratic women. When does she start designing her own clothes?

• 15:21Speaker 01

  Well, it was, in fact, right around then. For one reason, she had nothing to wear. And the other women at this estate were dressed lavishly and gorgeously and had jewels. Most of them had lovers, patrons who were supporting them. But Etienne, as nice as he was to her, was not especially generous. He didn't give her jewels and beautiful clothes. But what he did was he took her to his tailor to get her a riding costume, because all of the people on the estate had to go riding and do sports. So her first outfits there were really man tailored riding clothes, simple things, athletic things. And she looked really good in those, because unlike the ladies of the time who were considered beautiful,

• 16:01Speaker 01

  who had big bosoms and, you know, long hair, she was this skinny mini and very straight. And she started playing that up. She realized that that was her advantage. And then she started making hats for herself, out of the little straw hat that she managed to get. And she did have an aunt who had helped her learn to make hats, the one relative who stayed in touch with her. So she had very minimal skills about attaching, you know, some plastic or, you know, artificial fruit and flowers to a straw hat. But she was very, she had a lot of flair. So she started doing that. And the other women at Royal Lyre started saying, hey, that's cute. Can you make me one? And slowly, by osmosis, they influenced

• 16:43Speaker 01

  her, and she influenced them. And she became known for making charming hats in her little apartment at the estate.

• 16:49Kate Lister?

  Wow. I think one of the things that we forget about Chanel as well, especially when I did the iconic Chanel brand, and it's, I say this like I could ever afford Chanel, but like it's kind of mainstream but designer fashion, is we forget just how rebellious she was with what she was doing. And she really did change things. She's not just making pretty clothes, is she?

• 17:12Speaker 01

  Actually, not at all. And while I agree, I think Chanel is exorbitantly priced, and I don't have, almost I have one or two tiny things. But if you look at you and me right now, we are wearing the after image of Chanel. You have some kind of large pearl

• 17:31Speaker 01

  Necklace on, right? I'm wearing smaller pearls. I'm wearing giant black glasses. We're both wearing black. None of that was normal before Chanel. Chanel invented all of those things. And if you look around, not just couture, not just the ridiculously overpriced stuff, but the everyday wear of almost everyone, everywhere, on the bus, in the city, at your office, all your friends, hanging around, are all these little accoutrements that she either invented or popularized, and often out of necessity, because she didn't have the money for real pearls. So she wore paste pearls. She was in mourning when she started popularizing black and thought, let's put everyone in black.

• 18:14Speaker 01

  An unusual person of tremendous influential power despite having nothing. That's why I thought she was worthy of another biography, because there's a personality like that is once a century.

• 18:25Kate Lister?

  And she, like you said, she changed the color palette of pretty much everybody, because suddenly black became something that you could wear. She altered hemlines, she altered cuts. Am I right in thinking, and please do correct me, is that, I want to say it's comfortable, but she made fashion much more like it's, it's more wearable than it was?

• 18:47Speaker 01

  Well, that's true, although I would nuance that somewhat. Yes, she changed the color palette and she made things much simpler. And she was very much, she was very much influenced by the modernist art movement of her era. At the same time, though, if you try to wear Chanel, whether it's a dress or skirt, you actually need a certain kind of figure to carry it off. And that is a hard figure to maintain. She was naturally extremely slim. She was very small bosom. She had no hips. She was built like a boy, which of course now we say, oh, perfect for fashion. That wasn't the case. That's because of her. She made her body the new template for the aesthetic look.

• 19:30Speaker 01

  And so she dressed herself and then basically said, okay, women, figure out how to do it yourself. Women wore corsets. She did not like the corset, although she was not the first to stop using a corset. She was the most popularizer of that. But what started happening was women had to internalize the corset. And we have that to this day. We now talk about our core and doing pilates and having muscles. Women didn't have muscles.

• 19:54Kate Lister?

  So we have Chanel to thank for that, do we?

• 19:57Speaker 01

  We do. I'm sorry. It's true.

• 20:00Kate Lister?

  But again, it is revolutionizing what fashion was to take, you know, I know she wasn't the first, but to take the corset out and to, you know, use the body in a different way. And it's so radically different. At what point did she start to gather success in her life? And were there people reacting to this going, I beg your pardon, no corset and a black dress? What on earth are you thinking?

• 20:23Speaker 01

  All of the above. So when it really took off for her was when she found the great love of her life, Arthur Capel, who was also known as Boy Capel, who had actually been a friend of Etienne's. And she fell really deeply in love with Capel. It was mutual. It was a great love affair. And Capel helped her set up her first stores. And she opened a boutique in Deauville, later in Biarritz, she had one in Paris. And this was right before and at the beginning of World War I. That's when her personal life and her business life just exploded like a meteor. And with the help of her influential friends like Capel, powerful women started really

• 21:07Speaker 01

  liking the aesthetic. And it had everything also to do with war, because materials were scarce, because people were feeling more sober, because there was a desire to sort of honor the young men who were dying and disappearing. And so dressing simply militarily, more androgynously and cheaply, well, not cheaply by her prices, but the materials were very meager, was absolutely in keeping with the spirit of the age. So I would never say war is a happy occasion, but for her purposes, her talents and her life and the war converged to form an exceptional moment.

• 21:49Kate Lister?

  We'll be back with Rhonda after this short break.

• 22:02Kate Lister?

  In case you weren't aware, World Mental Health Day takes place in October. And I don't know about you, but I'm taking this as a reminder to practice some proper self-care, saying no to plans I don't want to go to, guilt-free snacking and Halloween movie marathons. It's also the perfect time to check in with yourself and your mental health. For many, it can mean taking that step and speaking to a professional who can help and guide you through any difficulties you're having. But often when you try to do that, it's still way harder than it should be. A lot of online therapy platforms don't accept insurance at all, which means even during a month focused on mental health, you're stuck paying out of pocket or signing up for an expensive monthly subscription.

• 22:46Kate Lister?

  This is where Rula comes in. They partner with over 120 insurance plans, making the average copay just $15 per session. That's real therapy from licensed professionals at a price that actually makes sense. Because the whole point of World Mental Health Day is making sure people actually get help, not just think about it. And Rula sticks with you throughout your journey, checking in to make sure your care is actually helping you move forward. With World Mental Health Day this October, it's a good reminder that taking care of your mental health can start with one step. Visit rula.com/shets to get started. That's R U L A dot com slash S H E E T S.

• 23:28Kate Lister?

  You deserve mental health care that works with you, not against your budget.

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• 24:43Kate Lister?

  It all sounds so great, which kind of makes the point that we have to move on to all the more just like, damn it, Chanel, why did, damn, why did you do that? Because like it's, you know, the First World War happens and she's getting a name for herself and, you know, we can have objections around what she's doing was good or bad, what she was doing with women's bodies, but you know, she was out there doing it. Second World War hits and then she was dating Nazis, Rhonda. What on earth is going on here?

• 25:14Speaker 01

  Where to begin? Chanel was not a particularly humane, compassionate or attentive person to other people's feelings. This is not to excuse her at all, but her personality was more of a carapace than it was a touchy feely, human, emotional thing. She was about protection. She was about me first. She was about saving herself at all costs. And she'd had a long life of trying to protect herself from every possible kind of harm and making common cause with whomever she found to be victorious or powerful.

• 25:57Speaker 01

  She was always about associating herself with what she thought the winner would be. So she was well primed by the time the war came around to find whoever she thought was going to help her. And frankly, at the time that she met Spatz or the Baron von Dinklager, who is the main Nazi in question, it was very likely to everyone in Europe that the Germans were going to be ruling Europe, including France, Paris. They were, they'd already taken over half of France and she was living at the Paris Ritz exceptionally as a French person when it was actually a Nazi barracks at that time.

• 26:29Kate Lister?

  Wow.

• 26:30Speaker 01

  So she, yeah, you know, there were swastika flags all over the Place Vendôme and right down Rivoli. And she was allowed for some reason to have rooms at the Ritz. And it was then probably that she met this Nazi SS officer.

• 26:48Kate Lister?

  Let's talk about him. Who was he?

• 26:51Speaker 01

  Yes, so the Baron von Dinklager, as his name suggests, was an aristocratic German. He was 45 and she was about 56 at the time. He was very handsome. He was a champion tennis player. He was tall and blonde. And he had been a spy long before the war and long before he became Chanel's lover. He had been a spy who'd been sent to France and had been living in the south of France for quite a while, learning about the habits and the needs of French women in particular. He'd been trained.

• 27:22Kate Lister?

  Oh, had he now.

• 27:23Speaker 01

  Yeah. He'd been trained to infiltrate French society specifically through wealthy women.

• 27:30Speaker 01

  And every implication is that he was quite talented at that, if you know what I mean. And

• 27:36Kate Lister?

  What a terrible assignment to have been given.

• 27:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, poor, poor guy.

• 27:41Kate Lister?

  Bet he fought it with everything he had.

• 27:43Speaker 01

  It's incredible that there's a whole world of training and candidates for such things that, you know, most of us just are oblivious to, but this still exists and he was very good at it. He'd been married, but he got divorced to a partly Jewish woman who just sort of disappeared. And by the time Chanel met him, he was well ensconced in the Nazi effort. And we do not know exactly how it worked, but she was connected to the Vichy government and had ties to Pierre Laval, who was high up in the Vichy government. So they met and she was hanging around the Ritz and so was he. And they had a real and long love affair.

• 28:25Speaker 01

  And what Chanel used to say is, how can you ask me about him being a Nazi? A lady my age finds a lover, I don't look at his passport.

• 28:34Kate Lister?

  She said. Oh, Coco, no, it's, oh, but you know what that suggests to me, though? That suggests that even at the time, people were questioning this. For her to have even said that, people, people must have been like, could you, could you please explain what on earth you think you're doing?

• 28:51Speaker 01

  I think some people did. Her prior lover, she'd had just recently a passionate affair with the poet Pierre Verdi, who became a member of the French Resistance, who was a deeply committed leftist progressive. And he was heartbroken to know this about Chanel. At the same time, right before that, she had been with a crazed nationalist who was a total Nazi wannabe. So as I said, she really was not a woman of conviction. She just blew with the wind wherever she thought she could best advance herself. And I think she was very titillated, honestly, to be with the Baron, because he was a high official. He was handsome and young, and that led to some very disturbing things, which I'm sure you're going to ask me about.

• 29:35Kate Lister?

  I am, I'm afraid. It, um, I suppose the question is that we've kind of got to wrestle with is like, or at least the question I was going to bring to you. And I hope, I hoped maybe that you were going to go, oh, no, she didn't know anything about it. But it just doesn't sound like that. It doesn't sound like we can give her that excuse. Like, like, how could you not have been aware of what was going on here?

• 29:53Speaker 01

  Oh, she indeed knew. She, she knew a great deal and she was very smart, let's not forget. And she was extremely anti-Semitic and that was normal. I certainly don't excuse this, I deplore it. But I also understand that in this time period, and given the education she had in the part of France she did, where she was, it was as normal as breathing to think Jews were the Antichrist, had killed Christ, were terrible, you know.

• 30:20Kate Lister?

  Anti-Semitism was rife.

• 30:22Speaker 01

  Yes, everywhere. And she said some very terrible things, just in casual conversation about Jews all the time. That said, who were her business partners who made her one of the richest women in the world? But the Vertheimers, who are a Jewish family that owned lion's share of her company and with whom she dealt all her life. She also tried to oust them from their own business, using what was called the Aryanization laws of France at the time. Yeah.

• 30:49Kate Lister?

  Oh, I mean, she, she's all over the place with this. She's like, it's, she's dating Nazis, but she's also dating radical leftists. And she's saying horrible things about Jewish people, then also going into business with Jewish people. It's like, she just doesn't seem to have any, like, central firm belief beyond what's best for me to do at this point.

• 31:08Speaker 01

  That is exactly it. That is her firm belief. It, she, she was never able to form a kind of moral conscience. And I don't think she felt the need for one. By the way, she also likely had a long love affair with one of the Vertheimer brothers, who were her business partners, Pierre, who was the, the sort of good looking, dashing brother.

• 31:27Kate Lister?

  Wow. So, but the question then that we've got to ask of biographers is, what, like, okay, so she's dating a Nazi and there's no way that she can't know exactly what's going on here. And she's saying some very anti-Semitic things, but she's often accused of being a Nazi collaborator and a Nazi spy. What's your thoughts on that?

• 31:45Speaker 01

  Uh, well, she was a kind of Keystone Cops version of a Nazi spy, if you know what I mean. She was kind of ridiculous attempt. So she, while she was involved with von Dinklager, he inducted her into this crazy spy espionage attempt, which later came to have the name modelhood or model hat in German. And their idea was that Chanel was prominent enough, and remember, von Dinklager was an expert at finding prominent women to do things, that she was prominent enough that she could maybe convince the Germans and the, and the Allies to come to a separate peace, to broker a separate peace, sort of around the back of Hitler.

• 32:27Speaker 01

  They were trying to end the war and they thought, because Chanel actually did have a sort of acquaintance, friendly acquaintance with Winston Churchill, they thought they could use her to convince Churchill to broker a separate peace. In retrospect, it's madness. A, because nobody was going to turn Coco Chanel, a designer, into a global diplomat. B, because it's insane, but you can see the desperation that they might have felt at this time. B, because Chanel was basically lying about how friendly she was with Winston Churchill. She did know him, yes, he'd been a friend of the Duke of Westminster, who'd been also her lover and was also a terrible anti-Semi. But she was not besties with Churchill.

• 33:11Speaker 01

  Nonetheless, she was very titillated by this. And I have to add, her nephew, the only person I think she truly loved with all her heart, was a young man, whose name was Andre Palas, who was called her nephew, I do believe was likely her biological son.

• 33:29Kate Lister?

  Oh, interesting.

• 33:31Speaker 01

  Yes, and probably if that's the case, he was the son of Etienne Bausson.

• 33:36Kate Lister?

  Okay.

• 33:36Speaker 01

  But that's a whole other sub-story. Whether he was her sister's child or her child, she loved him and raised him as her own. He had been taken prisoner of war. He was a member of the French army. He was in a prison camp. And the likely story is that they told Chanel, you do this for us, we'll release your nephew.

• 33:55Kate Lister?

  Okay.

• 33:56Speaker 01

  So she did. And she went to Spain on two separate occasions with the Baron and then with other people involved. She tried to meet with Winston Churchill, who was supposed to be at a certain place. He was not there. The British said, under no circumstance are we connecting you with Prime Minister Churchill.

• 34:15Kate Lister?

  It's nuts. It's an insane plan. It's like saying, could we get the person from Primat to go and speak to the, the, you know, NATO? It's just like, it's such a weird plan.

• 34:25Speaker 01

  You're right, but if you look at contemporary politics today, especially in my country, you might well think, you know, getting celebrities who know nothing to pretend to run the world actually turned out to be a policy.

• 34:43Kate Lister?

  Sorry, I was looking at that with my rational head on. No, you're completely right.

• 34:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was sort of a precursor to things that are unfortunately happening today. But it was shut down and Chanel was sent back to Paris. And it was, that was hushed over. But very quickly after that, at the war's end, she high-tailed it out of France and went into a kind of extended exile in Switzerland, where a lot of collaborators hung out for a good long time, until the heat was sort of dissipated.

• 35:14Kate Lister?

  So she was a collaborator then, like a crap spy perhaps, but definitely a collaborator.

• 35:20Speaker 01

  She sucked at being a spy, although, as I do say in the book, she couldn't have been that bad at it, because at the time, there was no trace of this episode. And yet she had to travel from Paris to Madrid, which during wartime, which meant she was on trains and she was in hotels and she was with busboys and waiters and conductors and attendants. And nobody, and she was a huge celebrity and nobody said, I just saw Coco Chanel. No. So she was, she was probably paying people off as she went and keeping a low profile.

• 35:52Kate Lister?

  Okay.

• 35:53Speaker 01

  And she was collaborating in other ways as, as well too. She was benefiting from black market rations. She also did a little despicable shopping spree at the home of some Jewish French people, just taking their furniture out of their home, which was a thing people did.

• 36:08Kate Lister?

  Yeah, there was. What happened to von Dinkelberg?

• 36:14Speaker 01

  Von Dinklager actually shows up in Switzerland with Chanel. For years, there are photographs of them just sort of being tourists in Switzerland together, hanging around. He remained connected to her, probably because she paid him.

• 36:30Kate Lister?

  Right.

• 36:30Speaker 01

  She had a lot of people on the payroll. And then he just kind of floated away and he moved to a tropical island to paint.

• 36:40Kate Lister?

  Interesting. Okay. Do we know what happened to him? Did he just stay on an island painting?

• 36:46Speaker 01

  Um, yes, he, I believe he died on that island and that island was the place he could be with, to avoid imprisonment. I mean, he managed to escape Nuremberg.

• 36:56Kate Lister?

  I see, okay.

• 36:57Speaker 01

  He was just seized with artistic desire.

• 37:00Kate Lister?

  As, as you are, yes. The fact that you're not going to be extradited is, is merely a bonus to the artistic endeavor. I suppose the core question then is, is was Coco Chanel a Nazi?

• 37:12Speaker 01

  She was not, insofar as she was never a member of the Nazi party. I believe her sympathies and not just her sort of casual sympathies, or perhaps her, the expedient thing she did to release her nephew, or because she was kind of clueless. She was very sympathetic to the cause, but as soon as the war was over, she kind of swung back the other way and never spoke about it. So.

• 37:37Kate Lister?

  Opportunistic thing again, isn't it?

• 37:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I don't, she was, I like to say amoral rather than immoral. And this is not at all to excuse her.

• 37:46Kate Lister?

  Interesting.

• 37:47Speaker 01

  But I do think that in order to be the person she was, she had to sort of cordon herself off from any kind of reflection. And that's a terrible way to be. I think this is a catastrophic thing for her personally. But it is, it makes it harder to ascribe political blame. Although, you know, if you think of Hannah Arendt's writings on Eichmann, it's, it's sort of, it's about the banality of evil, I suppose.

• 38:20Kate Lister?

  I'll be back with Rhonda after this short break.

• 38:31Kate Lister?

  Hello Betwixters, I am jumping in here because I have some very exciting news. Betwixt the Sheets has set up camp on YouTube. That's right, it took us a while, but we are there now. So if you are the kind of person who likes to see your podcasts as well as hear your podcasts, you can now go and find us right there. And the link is in the show notes. And please remember to like and subscribe because the people in charge of the money really do like that. Right, let's get on with it.

• 39:14Kate Lister?

  How does she get like a comeback then? Because in post-war France, there was a huge reaction against anyone, especially women that they thought were collaborators. There's footage and photographs of them dragging women, normally sex workers, out into the streets and shaving their heads. And it's brutal. So how does she, or maybe she was subjected to that, I don't know.

• 39:36Speaker 01

  No, she was not. And you're right that there was a, the so-called Purgation Committees of France made it their business to go after all collaborators. And women were especially harshly treated and yes, shaved bald and paraded through the streets. And what happened to Chanel was that she was arrested briefly and brought in for questioning. She was questioned for about an hour politely. She complained about that, of course, and felt they did not treat her respectfully enough. Then they released her to her apartment, whereupon she packed up her belongings. And she took her butler and a few friends and driving one of her servants' cars in order not to have her expensive Bentley be seen in the streets. She drove with this caravan of people to Switzerland and stayed there.

• 40:21Speaker 01

  Probably thanks in part to Winston Churchill, who was enough of a friend of hers to help her keep quiet about this. But that's largely because she had the goods on the British royal family's collaboration.

• 40:35Kate Lister?

  Ah, right. Now that makes sense now.

• 40:38Speaker 01

  Right. And the Brits were very concerned about not letting anyone know that a good portion of the royals were on the wrong side of the war. And Chanel had been friendly with some of those folks. So they kind of let her go. She had her apartments in Switzerland, she moved around. And in Switzerland, she kind of cooled her heels for a while, but then she got antsy and she wanted back in. And the way she returned and had her famous comeback was via the United States. And I like to say that's because Americans are really amnesiac. And America has no memory.

• 41:18Speaker 01

  And by the time we're in the mid 1950s, early to mid 1950s, America would never have been able to even put two and two together. This was a former Nazi collaborator. And she started making inroads through the American press. Carmel Snow, who was a famous journalist here, she was able to start putting together collections. And the American press, although not immediately, but soon, started saying, wow, this feels so fresh and new. Why Chanel is very American. And it was true because the look had been Dior, right? Post-war fashion was this ridiculous kind of beautiful, but crazed, over-the-top Baroque excess.

• 41:59Speaker 01

  And Chanel came back with her little suits and her little collars and her little hats and it seemed athletic and modern and fresh and American. And everyone said, Chanel, it's the latest, newest, you know, girl next door look. And poof, she was back on top, bigger than ever.

• 42:16Kate Lister?

  Wow. Was there anybody at the back just going, hang on, I have a question about, about, about this? Like, or was it just, I suppose the thing is, like, you sort of forget, like, immediately after the war, something that you hear a lot is that no one wanted to talk about it. Like, it takes time for people to get that distance to be able to reflect on what was actually happening. People just don't want to talk about it. Maybe that was part of the mix of just no one would, they just didn't want to, you know, everything's great, Chanel's back, hurrah, move on.

• 42:47Speaker 01

  There is a lot of that, you're right. There were whispers, when she first came back on the French side, there were, there was grousing. There were people in France saying, you know, what on earth does she think she's doing? We know what she did. But she had moved herself and her interests much more to the American side. And I don't think the Americans at all were concerned about this because the Americans had won the war. And they considered themselves responsible for winning the war. And so what do you do when you're the victor? Is you gather up all the spoils of the great stuff of the world that you admire. And the Americans had never gotten over their sort of cultural worship of France. American, let's face it, Americans just are still crazy for anything Parisian.

• 43:31Speaker 01

  And so here it was that, you know, who's more Parisian than this? And it took off. And then, once that happened, the French wanted in and the rest of the world wanted in because it's money, baby. You know, it's just a fortune. And the perfume alone had continued to sell all through the war and after. And that sustained her business. That kept her tied to the Vertheimers and everybody wanted it.

• 43:54Kate Lister?

  Chanel Number Five.

• 43:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:56Kate Lister?

  Do you like Chanel Number Five?

• 43:57Speaker 01

  I do not.

• 43:58Kate Lister?

  I don't like it either, no.

• 44:00Speaker 01

  No, it's not for me. Some of the newer fragrances are a little lighter. I always find it very, to me, it smells almost, it's a terrible word, but elderly. I, it's heavy elderly, I don't love it.

• 44:14Kate Lister?

  Yeah, but it's, it's very, like, it kind of clings in the back of your nostril. Like, it's not for me, but some people, like Marilyn Monroe, loved it, right? I mean.

• 44:22Speaker 01

  She said that's all she slept in was a few drops of Chanel Number Five. It works for some people, but really more than the scent is the whole geste, the bottle, the number, the idea that you could sort of embody this free person, a kind of sexy independence in a fragrance. Nobody had done that. She also thought of that, you know, so.

• 44:44Kate Lister?

  She did. And at no point was anyone going, oh, I think I might smell like a Nazi. Nobody wanted to talk about it. No one wants to talk about that.

• 44:53Speaker 01

  Nobody talked about that.

• 44:54Kate Lister?

  But she lived a long life, right? She died in 1971. Was that just of old age?

• 45:01Speaker 01

  Yes, she died working. She, oh, she worked seven days a week and she hated the weekend because she couldn't get people to come to work. And so it's not surprising she died on a Sunday and she was still working on a collection. I mean, she was declining, she was infirm, she had severe, severe arthritis. Her fingers were terribly gnarled and stiff and, and she was becoming a little bit addled, honestly. She was becoming very eccentric. Her staff was doing most of the work. She would then be flying into a rage and say, you've done it wrong. And she would tear apart a garment and then they would go back and re-sew it exactly as it had been. Bring it back to her and she would say, ah, at last you have listened to me. But it was unaltered in any way.

• 45:46Speaker 01

  So she was being handled by then.

• 45:49Kate Lister?

  Yeah, yeah. And so I suppose the question that we've got to finish on is what's the legacy of this? Because it's, the word that historians like to use is complex whenever you're dealing with somebody like this.

• 46:03Speaker 01

  I will definitely not use it. The legacy is very profound, though. For one thing, there has not been since, I think, a designer who's imprinted his or her personal identity on people in this way. I cannot think of one. There are many who try.

• 46:20Kate Lister?

  McQueen, maybe?

• 46:21Speaker 01

  Well, McQueen is a genius, but nobody's trying to be Alexandra McQueen.

• 46:26Kate Lister?

  I see your point. Yes, okay.

• 46:28Speaker 01

  There are people like Donna Karen, Tory Burch, Ralph Lauren, who have created immersive lifestyle brands where people aspire to being like them somewhat. But I cannot think of a, it would have to be a woman also, because for women's fashion, I cannot think of a single woman who has impressed her, her creative persona on others. But Chanel's is still going strong and the level of emulation, you know, you walk into any high street shop to Zara, to H and M, Shein, the Chanel influence is instantly visible. There is nothing that is not touched by her. To me, the only person we can compare Coco Chanel to is actually Steve Jobs.

• 47:13Kate Lister?

  Wow. Yeah, yeah, I can see the comparison, actually. So how do we wrestle with this kind of, with the Nazi association? I mean, maybe it's just one of those things of like, we've just, all of these things can be true at the same time.

• 47:29Speaker 01

  Well, for certain, holding two opposing thoughts in your mind at the same time is supposed to be the mark of genius, right? But I think the legacy, what I tell my students when I think about this is we have to remember how powerful cult personalities are. And how, how powerfully people want to follow not just a leader, but an aesthetic movement that seems to give their life meaning. Chanel's aesthetic was very consonant with the Nazi aesthetic, which I think is more important to remember than her dalliances with a Nazi lover or her misguided attempts at espionage. The idea of wearing a uniform, of wearing a CC logo that gives you prestige.

• 48:14Speaker 01

  The designer logo phenomenon is still going strong. There's someone on TikTok and Instagram whose entire content is about selling Hermes bags. I don't know if you've seen this, just over and over and over, a discussion of these $30,000, $100,000 bags. And the desire we all have to kind of give ourselves status and meaning through stuff, branded stuff, through a person who tells us it's good, might be the destruction of all of civilization. So I, I don't think it's too, it's, I don't think that's an exaggeration. So I would say the legacy is not so much about fashion, but about wrestling with the human frailty for finding meaning through scary ideology that absolve you from thinking.

• 48:59Kate Lister?

  Oh, Rhonda, you have been fantastic to talk to. Thank you so much for coming by. If people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you?

• 49:06Speaker 01

  They can find me at the Institute for Public Humanities and the Arts at Hofstra University, or through my column in the New York Times called Face Forward, where I write about fashion and politics.

• 49:15Kate Lister?

  Thank you so much for coming by. You've been absolutely wonderful.

• 49:18Speaker 01

  It's been a delight to speak with you. Thank you so much, Kate.

• 49:23Kate Lister?

  Thanks for listening and thank you so much to Rhonda for joining us. And if you like what you heard, don't forget to like, review and follow along wherever it is you get your podcasts. Coming up, we will be meeting Eloise and Abelard. Their love letters transcend the centuries. So were they star-crossed lovers or was it just something a bit creepy? And how does castration come into this? If you'd like us to explore a subject or if you just wanted to say hello, then you can email us at [email protected]. This podcast was edited by Natasha Hughes, Tim Arstall and Hannah Theodorov, and produced by Sophie G. The senior producer was Freddy Chick. Join me again, Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal and society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.