
Sleeping with the Enemy
Coco Chanel's Secret War
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Narrated by:
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Susan Denaker
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Mark Deakins
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By:
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Hal Vaughan
About this listen
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 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 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 70 and triumphantly resurrect and reinvent herself - and rebuild what has become the iconic House of Chanel.
©2011 Hal Vaughan (P)2011 Random HouseListeners also enjoyed...
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Coco remains a mystery
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Surprisingly engaging.
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I would recommend this book if you have an interest in Chanel, the woman. The book touches on her relationships with friends, family, her many romances but also on her relationship with the perfume makers of Chanel No. 5 which I found very interesting.
Chanel was such a complex woman!
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Wonderful, Insightful Book
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What really bothered me was the sympathy and admiration with which Chanel was portrayed. Takeaway message seemed to be: “She was a remarkable woman of great talent who became a Nazi collaborator because the men she loved happened to be Nazi sympathizers.” Utterly mundane and uninspired.
Meh
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Very well documented
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If we all knew how things went...
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Informative but very dry
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Fascinating under the covers look at Coco Chanel
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I have been interested in fashion my entire life. I was 5 years old when I saw a 255 hanging on its plain gold chain from the closet door of my older cousin. I was hooked for life. Well, not so much lately. As a brand Chanel has lost the plot, somewhat.
But that is another story.
This book is a fascinating tale about an outsized character who operated during an outsized period of modern history. All of the players had everything to gain, and just as much to.lose and lived that way. Well researched from French, Russian, and American archives, the author paints a picture of a not so lovely woman. The book lifts the veil off some of the sanitized biographies of Mademoiselle CC.
The narrator is superb. She needs to throw off a phrase in foreign tongues from time to time and does so excellently.
I could not stop listening, except when I had to for sleep and other telephone tasks.
I highly recommend to anyone with an interest in the machinations of quite a few players leading up to and during the WWII era.
Behind Every Successful Woman Is a Wealthy Man.
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