Coco Chanel is portrayed as a Nazi collaborator, but Anne de Courcy prefers to sit on the fence 

Chanel’s Riviera: Life, Love And The Struggle For Survival On The Côte D’Azur

Anne de Courcy                                                       Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £20 

Rating:

Can you have too much glamour? On the first page of this book, we learn that Coco Chanel built a ‘glamorous’ villa on the French Riviera. Two pages in, we discover that the Riviera is ‘the glamorous, golden, sun-filled coastline famous for uninhibited enjoyment’.

From then on, glamour rains down thick and fast: there is, one might almost say, a clamour of glamour. The ‘magic coastline’ offers both ‘a glamorous, sun-drenched hedonism’ and a ‘life of privilege, glamour and untrammelled hedonism’.

Since this is a book about Coco Chanel, it would be odd if the word ‘elegant’ failed to put in an appearance. We variously learn that Coco has ‘discreet elegance’, that she is ‘beautiful, elegant, witty and fiercely independent’ and that, furthermore, she is ‘supremely elegant and very rich’. Incidentally, the Paris Ritz, where she resides when she is in town, is ‘known for its smooth, superbly efficient luxury and elegant furnishings’. Before long, you find yourself wanting Worzel Gummidge to pop his head around the door, or Mrs Brown’s Boys to splash about in the sun-drenched, etc, etc, sea.

We variously learn that Coco (pictured above in Paris in 1936) has ‘discreet elegance’, that she is ‘beautiful, elegant, witty and fiercely independent’

We variously learn that Coco (pictured above in Paris in 1936) has ‘discreet elegance’, that she is ‘beautiful, elegant, witty and fiercely independent’

In 1930, the glamorous, elegant Coco, with her ‘alluring looks’ and ‘slender figure’ builds herself a villa on the coast. She does it up all in beige, her bedroom hung in beige taffeta, beige leather sofas in the living room, heavy beige curtains over the huge windows, and even a beige piano. Put down your cappuccino for one second and it could be lost for ever.

‘It is only possible to relax if one is not diverted by colourful backgrounds,’ was one of Coco’s many pronouncements.

Well, a fat lot of good it did her. She was surely one of the most unrelaxed people ever to set foot in that glamorous, sun-drenched, etc, etc part of the world. After an eight-hour working day, the only way she could settle down would be to inject herself with morphine. Her love life was equally restless, encompassing everyone from the portly Duke of Westminster to Pablo Picasso to Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich to ‘Picasso’s friend the married poet Pierre Reverdy’. Anne de Courcy includes Salvador Dali in the list of Coco’s lovers, but this seems to me unlikely, as Dali was well-known as a non-player, who, like Benny Hill, preferred to look but not touch.

Coco graciously threw in the odd civilian for good measure. Every other page includes a sentence like this: ‘She also found time for a brief affair with a rich American, Harrison Williams, ten years older than herself and a self-made man who began life as a streetcar conductor.’

Other biographers of Coco Chanel (above in the French capital in 1959) have portrayed her as a Nazi collaborator, but de Courcy prefers to sit on the fence

Other biographers of Coco Chanel (above in the French capital in 1959) have portrayed her as a Nazi collaborator, but de Courcy prefers to sit on the fence

Her neighbours on the French Riviera were a mixed bunch. They included any number of literary bigwigs, such as Aldous Huxley, HG Wells and Somerset Maugham, who insisted that his lawn was dug up at the end of every spring and replanted every autumn, presumably in an endless quest to stop it going beige.

Posh nymphomaniacs seem to have been drawn to the Riviera, among them the third Lady Furness, who had once, for a dare, slept with all the officers in her husband’s battalion. Or so they say. Five men had apparently killed themselves out of love for her: one blew himself up, another threw himself into shark-infested waters, and another hurled himself under the famous Blue Train. Or were they just trying to avoid her?

Some of these ladies aged better than others. The most successful hostess was the ‘former actress and legendary beauty’ Maxine Elliott, who so enjoyed a good tuck-in at her daily lunches for 25 to 40 guests, followed by hot buttered scones for tea, that she became too large for the waterchute from her pool to the sea. Her architect, seeking to widen it, pretended to see something in the water below. As she bent forward to see what it was, his assistant whipped out a tape and discreetly measured her bottom.

Other society hostesses found different ways to deal with the rich creamy food. At one of her glamorous, etc, etc, house parties, Elsa Maxwell employed a young live-in nurse to give over-indulgent guests colonic irrigations. ‘I was kept busy with my apparatus for two days,’ she recalled.

IT’S A FACT 

The first advert to be shown on the newly launched TV station Channel 5 in 1997 was… for Chanel No 5. 

De Courcy stuffs the first half of Chanel’s Riviera full of rich, creamy anecdotes like this, leaving all but the hardiest reader feeling a little bloated. Sometimes, you start to wonder if she might not have been better off switching her two favourite adjectives, ‘glamorous’ and ‘legendary’ with others more suitable, such as ‘gruesome’ and ‘entitled’.

No book about the Thirties is complete without a ‘Cooo-eee!’ from the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. Sure enough, they arrive on the French Riviera on page 82, in their version of style, with the duke chartering a yacht, and then removing all the books from its library to give himself extra space for all the golf balls he wants to hit out to sea. They then buy a chateau on the Riviera, full of naff – or should that be ‘elegant’? – luxuries such as a gold-plated bath shaped like a swan.

A hundred pages in, there is an abrupt change of gear. Just as everyone is busy debating the vexed issue of whether to call the downgraded Duchess of Windsor ‘Your Royal Highness’ or ‘Your Grace’, Hitler decides to invade. ‘When she heard this, Chanel went to her room and wept,’ writes de Courcy, but Coco is nothing if not adaptable. She closes her fashion line, but does a roaring trade in selling her Chanel No 5 perfume to Nazi officers.

She also takes on a real-life Nazi, Baron Hans Günther von Dincklage, as her chief lover. Thankfully, the baron has ‘open-faced blond good looks’ and is ‘exquisitely mannered and charming’. Sadly, his exquisite manners do not extend to Jews. Nor do they stop him ditching his wealthy wife ‘saying it was because she was Jewish’, having first spent her fortune.

De Courcy tries to excuse the baron, saying that ‘judging by his past, he was an opportunist rather than a convinced Nazi’. However, in the early days his lack of conviction does not prevent him spying on Jewish exiles in the South of France, and sending back weekly reports on them to Berlin.

He and Coco are happy to live it up in the Ritz along with other Nazi top dogs while the rest of Paris is starving. ‘As for Chanel, her antisemitism largely took the form of words,’ de Courcy writes, as though this indicates an admirable restraint.

Other biographers of Coco Chanel have portrayed her as a Nazi collaborator, but de Courcy prefers to sit on the fence, with a lot of ‘on the one hand… but on the other’. ‘Although strongly pro-British, Chanel had no moral scruples over seeking help from the conquerors,’ she says. Though she was ‘vociferously antisemitic’, ‘several of her closest friends and best clients… were Jewish’. To me, this makes her behaviour almost more revolting, particularly as she then tried to take advantage of the new anti-Semitic laws to force her Jewish business partners to relinquish control of her perfumes. But de Courcy is more forgiving, citing that old get-out clause, ‘a nature both complex and full of contradictions’.

When France was finally liberated, Coco nimbly changed her tune. The ever-canny Malcolm Muggeridge saw through her ploys. ‘By one of those majestically simple strokes which made Napoleon so successful a general, she just put an announcement in the window of her emporium that scent was free for GIs, who thereupon queued up to get the bottles of Chanel No 5 and would have been outraged if the French police had touched a hair of her head.’

In this way, she avoided being condemned as a collaborator. And this is why, to this day, she is remembered not for toadying up to the Nazis, but for her matchless elegance and – that word again! – glamour. 

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