Sleeping with the Enemy, Hal Vaughan
Sleeping with the Enemy, Hal Vaughan
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Sleeping with the Enemy
Coco Chanel's Secret War

Author: Hal Vaughan

Narrator: Susan Denaker, Mark Deakins

Unabridged: 8 hr 31 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 08/16/2011


Synopsis

“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.

About The Author

Hal Vaughan was a newsman, foreign correspondent, and documentary film producer who worked in Europe, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia since 1957. He served in the U.S. military in World War II and Korea, and held various posts as a U.S. Foreign Service officer. Vaughan was the author of Doctor to the Resistance: The Heroic True Story of an American Surgeon and His Family in Occupied Paris, FDR's 12 Apostles: The Spies Who Paved the Way for the Invasion of North Africa, and Sleeping with the Enemy: Coco Chanel's Secret War. He died in 2013.Susan Denaker’s extensive theatre credits include numerous plays in the West End of London, national tours, and many English Rep companies, including a season with Alan Ayckbourn’s company in Scarborough. More recently in the United States, Susan has appeared in Our Town and Sweet Bird of Youth, both at the La Jolla Playhouse, and Breaking Legs at the Westport Playhouse.Mark Deakins’ television appearances include Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Star Trek®: Voyager. His film credits include The Devil’s Advocate and Star Trek®: Insurrection. He is the writer, director, and producer of the short film The Smith Interviews.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Barbara Barna on September 30, 2011

I wish the writing was better - read almost like a long term paper - because the historical implications are fascinating. Although long known that Coco Chanel lived through WWII in luxury with her German lover at the Paris Ritz and that Winston Churchill interceded on her behalf at the end of the wa......more

Goodreads review by Amy on October 10, 2011

Within the first 50 pages, I loathed Chanel. I didn't even need to get to her missions on behalf of the Nazis. Her anti-semitism, homophobia, drug addiction, and just general hypocrisy . . . so talented, but so despicable. If this book could have been written in the late 1950s or early 1960s, it woul......more

Goodreads review by Danna on January 28, 2012

I was excited to read this biography of Coco Chanel because I heard it was filled with juicy history and fashion. However, I found it a little too dense on the history side, and lacking on the personal side. At many times throughout the book, I felt like I was reading a book about WWII, not Coco Cha......more

Goodreads review by Nicole on September 13, 2017

I remain conflicted in regards to my feelings about Coco Chanel, the brand. This book, however, makes it impossible for me to have any admiration for the woman. Coco was an anti-Semite, a homophobe, an addict and a person who was willing to compromise anything to maintain her entitled presence, even......more

Goodreads review by KOMET on October 08, 2011

In this book, Vaughan sets out to prove that Coco Chanel --- the famous Paris couturier who revolutionized 20th century women's fashions and created a perfume that remains a popular icon today (Chanel No. 5) --- collaborated with the Germans during their occupation of France (1940-1944). Chanel, lik......more


Quotes

“[Hal Vaughan] ably demonstrates that Chanel was far from an innocent victim of circumstance during the second world war but a fully fledged Abwehr (German secret service) agent with her own number and codename: Westminster (no doubt a nod to her one-time lover, the Duke of Westminster).  . . Vaughan, who writes with welcome economy and flair, deserves a lot of credit for finally unraveling the strands of Chanel’s deeply deceptive personality.”
—Tobias Grey, Financial Times

“[Sleeping with the Enemy]
distinguishes itself from the many other Chanel biographies by tackling the dicey subject of Gabrielle Chanel’s activities during World War II . . . This is a frank and unsentimental portrait of a figure that fashion writers are nearly incapable of criticizing. .  . While Vaughan’s discussions of Chanel’s contributions to fashion add nothing new to the extensive literature on her, he more than makes up for it with his impressive research and the never-before-seen information that he has unearthed about her wartime activities. . . . What Sleeping with the Enemy offers is a more rounded look at a figure who has been over-studied and under-examined.”
Isabel Schwab, The New Republic online 

“[A] compelling chronicle of Coco Chanel . . . a different Chanel from any you’ll find at the company store . . . by no means the account of an emerging style but a tale of how a single-minded woman faced history, made hard choices, connived, lied, collaborated and used every imaginable wile to survive and see that the people she cared about survived with her . . . Vaughan has gleaned many of the details of Chanel’s collaboration from documents that were scattered for years throughout European archives . . . It’s an astonishing story . . gripping . . . provocative . . . riveting history.”
 —Marie Arana, The Washington Post
 
 “Chanel’s war years, as explored by Hal Vaughan, are as camera-ready and as neck-deep in melodrama as Quentin Tarantino’s “Inglourious Basterds,” and just as hard to forget now that they’re exposed.”
—David D’Arcy, San Francisco Chronicle

"Hal Vaughan has done a stupendous job of research . . . Vaughan draws a brilliant portrait . . a terrific and fascinating story. . . wonderfully told, and full of great characters. . . Vaughan brings her to life so vividly that we understand why no less a judge than André Malraux said that "from this century in France only three names will remain: de Gaulle, Picasso, and Chanel.". . . It is that rarest of good reads, a biography about a famous person with a surprise on every page. Nancy Mitford, I think, would have loved it, and written a wonderful letter to Evelyn Waugh about it!"
  —Michael Korda, The Daily Beast