Sleeping With the Enemy: Coco Chanel’s Secret War by Hal Vaughan

(Knopf, $28)

The portrait of Coco Chanel that emerges from Hal Vaughan’s astonishing biography is “not a pretty picture,” said Marie Arana in The Washington Post. Readers may have encountered many a story before about a cunning beauty “unafraid to employ sex for political ends.” But start with a siren who’s a fashion legend, “ally her with Nazis,” and “make her a spy and a Jew-hater,” and the drama becomes “startling all over again.” Vaughan’s “compelling chronicle” reveals in new detail how the iconic designer shifted allegiances without apparent conscience as she rose to wealth and fame. “She became a friend to Winston Churchill, mistress to the Duke of Westminster, intimate of Picasso.” And “when Hitler overran Paris, she didn’t hesitate to consort with the Gestapo, too.”

Those war years “are detailed as never before” in Vaughan’s book, said David D’Arcy in the San Francisco Chronicle. Chanel was a vociferous anti-Semite long before the German invasion, and Vaughan makes a convincing case that her alliance with the Nazis went far beyond her decision during the occupation to hole up at the Paris Ritz with a German intelligence officer. Relying on recently declassified documents, Vaughan shows that Chanel ran missions for the Germans, including writing to her friend Churchill in 1944 about the possibility of entertaining a negotiated peace with Hitler. The intrigues “are as camera-ready” as a Quentin Tarantino screenplay, and “just as hard to forget now that they’re exposed.”

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Count me unsurprised by Vaughan’s revelations, said Michael Korda in Newsweek. In collaborating with the enemy, “Chanel had plenty of company” among the French creative elite. During wartime, “people often do things that may later prove difficult to explain,” especially if they’re faced with “ferocious punishments” for acts of even mild opposition. Chanel’s anti-Semitism is unforgivable, but it also doesn’t erase the fact that she was “a genius who changed the whole way in which women dressed and thought about themselves.” To his credit, Vaughan understands this, which makes his book “that rarest of good reads.” It’s comprehensive, yet still delivers “a surprise on every page.”