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Title details for Sleeping with the Enemy by Hal Vaughan - Available

Sleeping with the Enemy

Coco Chanel's Secret War

by Hal Vaughan
Susan Denaker
Audiobook
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2 of 2 copies available
“From this century, in France, three names will remain: de Gaulle, Picasso, and Chanel.” –André 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 two thousand 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 Hôtel 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 after, 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 these 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 Günther von Dincklage, “Spatz” (“sparrow” in English), described in most Chanel biographies as being an innocuous, English-speaking tennis player, playboy, and harmless dupe—a loyal German soldier and diplomat serving his mother country and not a member of the Nazi party.
In Vaughan’s absorbing, meticulously researched book, Dincklage is revealed to have been a Nazi master spy and German military intelligence agent who ran a spy ring in the Mediterranean and in Paris and reported directly to Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, right hand to Hitler.
The book pieces together how Coco Chanel became a German intelligence operative; how and why she was enlisted in a number of spy missions; how she escaped arrest in France after the war, despite her activities being known to the Gaullist intelligence network; how she fled to Switzerland for a nine-year exile with her lover Dincklage. And how, despite the French court’s opening a case concerning Chanel’s espionage activities during the war, she was able to return to Paris at age seventy and triumphantly resurrect and reinvent herself—and rebuild what has become the iconic House of Chanel.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    August 16, 2011

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9780307969224
      • File size: 245362 KB
      • Duration: 08:31:10

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      Was Coco Chanel a Nazi agent? The now familiar story of the French waif who became the goddess of haute couture takes on new dimensions in Hal Vaughan's pointed research. One of Chanel's many lovers was a Nazi "master spy" who reported directly to Joseph Goebbels. Chanel herself was arrested and labeled a spy, although she avoided official punishment. Mark Deakins delivers the preface, providing a surprising overview of Chanel and her crowd--their excesses, their snobbery, their bed-hopping, and their politics. Susan Denaker narrates in a cultured, easy-to-listen-to voice. She portrays a Chanel who is homophobic, addicted to morphine, fiercely anti-Semitic, and able to beguile and confound the men she encounters. While some of Vaughan's allegations lack substantial support, the listening is fascinating. S.J.H. (c) AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      July 18, 2011
      Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel's war was not as secret as the subtitle implies. It's well known that during WWII, the celebrated fashion designer took as her lover a much younger Nazi intelligence officer, Hans Günther von Dincklage, and through him developed a mutually beneficial relationship with the Nazis. Journalist, diplomat, and author Vaughan (FDR's 12 Apostles), searching archives in several countries, fills in gaps in the record regarding Chanel's two intelligence missions to Madrid. The first she performed in exchange for the Nazis returning her ailing nephew from a German POW camp. The second, more well-known Operation Modellhut, a German effort to broker a separate peace with Britain, ended disastrously. Vaughan also explains Chanel's mysterious ability to avoid prosecution as a collaborator after the war, and her attempts to destroy or buy off anyone who might have testified against her. Vaughan gives mainly superficial, cliché-ridden attention to Chanel's prewar life, nor does he explore her self-contradictionsâor hypocrisiesâsuch as fiercely asserting her independence while accepting real estate worth millions from one of her serial lovers, the duke of Westminster. Vaughan's at times fascinating but unsatisfying book tarnishes Chanel's aura of glamour, leaving instead a picture of a pathetic, morphine-addicted woman who would do literally anything to have a powerful man by her side.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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