Coco at the Ritz, page 11
Still, she was too fearful to help Reverdy. In the Métro, she’d seen the posters with the names of Resisters who’d been caught and shot. “My feeling about your flyers hasn’t changed. You’ll have to find someone else to distribute them,” Coco said.
“That’s not why I needed to see you.” Reverdy released the mimeograph lever and rubbed his biceps. “You’re on an official blacklist of collaborators.”
“What?” Coco felt her breath catch.
“The Resistance is keeping track.”
“I’m not a collaborator!”
Reverdy sighed heavily. “You’re living with a German. I saw your name on the list that was just released by de Gaulle’s resistance group, the FFI. It came over the teletype in a safe house in Toulouse. I wish you’d take my advice and get out of Paris. And leave him behind.”
Reverdy returned to cranking his machine. “I’ve got to get this done. I have to get out of here myself.”
* * *
In the following days, Coco thought about moving to La Pausa, her country house outside Roquebrun. But she could never stand the country for more than a weekend. By Sunday evening, she’d always be desperate to return to Paris, to the gossip, the glamour, the grittiness. She decided that Reverdy had exaggerated the danger. That was what happened when you lived like a hunted animal. You expected to be killed at any moment. He was projecting his own fears. So what if she was on a Resistance blacklist? Would a Resistant really murder in cold blood one of the most famous women in Paris?
She was no more of a collaborator than any of the other celebrities who remained in Paris, tolerated by the Nazis. Sartre still published books written in his Left Bank apartment. Édith Piaf still sang at the Moulin Rouge. Picasso still sold paintings from his studio on rue des Grands Augustins. Like Cocteau, who never stopped working, the Germans left them all alone. Were they on the blacklists, too? At least she didn’t do business with the enemy.
Nevertheless, Coco decided to lay low, confining herself to one of the shortest commutes in Paris: fourteen steps from her Ritz suite to the elevator; six floors down to the back lobby; twenty-nine steps to the back lobby door; forty-four steps across rue Cambon to the Chanel boutique; three flights up to her apartment.
She continued to decline all invitations. Then, one evening Spatz announced that he’d arranged a private box for the reopening of Longchamp. The racetrack had shut down at the start of the Occupation, but the Nazis were eager to partake of all Paris had to offer, so they’d had it reopened. Spatz knew how much Coco loved horses, and he thought she’d be thrilled. But Coco recoiled. “I won’t go,” she said.
“Why not?” Spatz wanted to know.
The races always drew a gaggle of press and photographers, and Coco didn’t want to be recognized and photographed with Spatz. She did not confide this concern to him, however. Instead, she told him she wasn’t in the mood to have people make a fuss over her, which always happened when she appeared at the track.
“I promise no one will see you,” said Spatz. “We can drive right up to the entrance and slip in and out.”
And so in the end, Coco agreed to go.
When the couple arrived at the track, a light midmorning rain had begun to fall, and umbrellas dotted the lawns and half-empty viewing stands. The sparse crowd was mostly German. Many of the celebrities, journalists, couturiers, and salon hostesses who’d flocked to Longchamp in peacetime were unwilling to mingle in public with the Nazis and stayed away.
In the back seat of the Mercedes on the drive to the track, Spatz had studied the yellow racing form, and he told Coco that Bold Prince had an excellent chance to win in the first race. Coco gave him fifty francs, and he sent his driver to place a bet.
As soon as she was settled in her seat overlooking the finish line, Coco trained her binoculars on the track below where stableboys led the horses onto the course. She scanned the surrounding lawn, and her eyes fell on a group of middle-aged German officers with their heavy stomachs squished against the rail. God, they’re ugly, Coco thought. I have the most handsome German in Paris.
She passed her binoculars to Spatz, who held them to his eyes. “My mother raised horses,” he said as he scanned the crowd. “She kept them at our summer estate near the seaside town of Kiel. She taught me how to ride, starting with a little pony when I was two.” Spatz handed the binoculars back to Coco.
“I worry about my mother. There’s been a lot of bombing around Kiel,” Spatz said. He’d once shown Coco a picture of Lorry von Dincklage—a slim, delicate-featured blonde still beautiful in her seventies. “I’ll take you to Kiel someday. We’ll ride together on the beach.”
Coco wondered what Madame von Dincklage, now a widow, would think of her son’s romance with a dark little French dressmaker more than a decade older than her child—probably not much. “My aunts, the ones who raised me, bred Arabian horses that they sold to the military,” said Coco. “I used to worry on the day every year the cavalry officers came to make their selections that they would pick my favorites.”
Spatz looked sideways at her, and Coco realized he knew she was lying. She’d forgotten for a moment that Spatz had met her brother Alphonse. But her love of horses was true. As a young woman, Coco’s life had opened up as she rode near Royallieu along the path behind her lover Étienne Balsan’s château, then into the forest. The gleaming horses and earthy scent rising from the track sharpened her memory. She half expected to see visions of her youthful self galloping bareback while clutching her horse’s mane, stopping by a stream and dismounting by sliding over the horse’s tail, picnicking with Étienne in a clearing near a copse of dense pines, racing her horse across an open field—first with Étienne by her side on his own spirited stallion and later with Boy Capel.
She loved the elegance and beauty of the horses, the way they threw their legs in front as they ran and leapt over fallen logs with balletic grace. It occurred to her that the only time she’d ever been truly happy was on horseback. It was on those horses, for the first time, that she had felt hopeful about the future. She did not feel hopeful now. What if someone recognized her? She didn’t want to be seen in this sea of Nazis.
The starter’s bell rang, and the horses shot from the gate. The race was over in a flash. “Look!” Spatz said. He pulled Coco to her feet and pointed to the board posted above the track. Coco saw that Bold Prince had won, and she was four hundred francs richer. It seemed like a good omen. Then, her gaze traveled to the seats below her. Two men, one gripping a large camera, the other holding a reporter’s notebook, had turned and were staring hard at her. Coco slumped in her seat and pulled her hat low over her forehead.
The rain had stopped, and sunshine bathed the track in a golden glow. Near the winner’s circle, Géneviève Fath, the beautiful blond wife of the couturier Jacques Fath, had appeared like a vision from another world in a sumptuous blue silk dress with a flouncy tiered skirt. An ermine stole draped across her lunar shoulders; on her head perched a towering confection of faux flowers and lace. Soon, she was joined by mannequins from other couture houses, all similarly swathed in opulent fabrics, furs, and jewels. Paris couture continued to operate at a vastly diminished level. The extravagant materials on display here were probably all that the Nazis had allotted the few houses still open.
Before the war, it was de rigueur for couturiers to parade their mannequins in the latest fashions at the racetrack. But these couturiers might as well have had “COLLABORATOR” stamped on their foreheads. Coco was glad she’d closed her house and kept a low profile.
Spatz noticed the intent look on her face and misinterpreted it as longing. “You could be out there with your own mannequins. It’s not too late to reopen,” he said.
Coco noted with satisfaction that most of Paris’s esteemed designers, such as herself and Cristóbal Balenciaga, had either shut their ateliers or, like Mainbocher, who was living in New York, had fled Paris. Mainly, the mediocrities remained. Their mannequins vamped for photographers from Le Figaro, Ce Soir, Le Matin, and the German magazine Signal, as flashbulbs popped. Jacques Fath and a handful of other couturiers smiled from the sidelines, occasionally scurrying up to adjust a neckline or hem.
It was as if the war weren’t happening, as if ordinary dressmakers didn’t have to close shop because they couldn’t get fabric and thread. As if there were no propaganda billboards on buildings emblazoned with pictures of bloody French soldiers over captions that read, C’est Angleterre Que a fait cela; and concierges on the streets at dawn scrubbing away the phrase Vive de Gaulle! that had been scrawled in desperation in black chalk on house fronts during the night. No banners with giant swastikas hanging from the monuments, and no invaders patrolling the streets during blackouts, greeting every yellow cube in the windows with pistol shot. It was as if there were no masterpieces being looted from the museums, no posters in the Métro warning Resistance fighters that their families would be executed, no Jews disappearing.
“Couture is dead,” Coco said sourly. “The Germans have killed it.”
Spatz frowned at her. “You mustn’t talk like that.”
“The Americans will probably take over now. They’re go-getters. They’ll fill the vacuum.”
“If the Allies win,” muttered Spatz.
The couple left before the last race, hurrying from the viewing box to the waiting Mercedes. The photographer and reporter Coco had caught staring at her skulked by the car. The camera was in her face, then it drew back. Click, click, click, click. It didn’t stop until the car had lurched from the curb.
The next day, Coco’s picture with Spatz at Longchamp surrounded by Nazis splashed across the society page of Ce Soir next to a photo of Géneviève Fath in the latest gown from her husband’s atelier.
Coco felt as embarrassed as if the photographer had snapped her nude getting out of the tub. She folded the paper and stuffed it in her desk, returning to it several times during the day to stare at the Longchamp picture, as if the more she looked at it, the less offensive it would be. She blamed Spatz—she never should have let him talk her into going to the track.
* * *
To show her loyalty to France, she decided to go to Misia’s Bastille Day party at José Maria Sert’s apartment. Spatz had not wanted her to go—the Germans had outlawed the holiday. Coco waited until he’d left the Ritz to meet a friend for dinner, then she slipped out.
Sert was in Madrid visiting his mistress, and while he was away, Misia had moved into his apartment overlooking the Place de la Concorde. As neutral Spain’s ambassador to the Vatican, Sert enjoyed a wealth of privileges, including abundant supplies of fine food and wine that he was happy to share with his ex-wife. Through a doctor friend in Madrid, Sert also had access to morphine, which he supplied to Coco and Misia every month. The little vials of clear liquid cost four times as much as they had before the war, but Coco and Misia didn’t think twice about paying the exorbitant black-market price.
* * *
Misia had been careful not to call her party a Bastille Day celebration, but of course everyone knew the significance of the day, July 14, the anniversary of the Revolution. Coco arrived at the Place de la Concorde to find a crowd of men and women marching around the square holding lit candles and waving French flags. She looked frantically about for German soldiers. None were visible at the moment, but she knew it wouldn’t be long before Nazis arrived to put a stop (most likely violently) to this flaunting of French patriotism. Entering Sert’s building, she made her way to the artist’s apartment, where Cocteau and Serge Lifar were lounging on the cushy red sofa, smoking cigarettes. “Why are you monopolizing Lifar?” Coco said to Cocteau. He slid to the far end of the sofa to make room for Coco’s bony, silk-clad rear.
“Did you see those people with French flags in the street?” she asked, frowning.
“Vive Bastille Day!”
Coco looked up to see a tiny elderly woman with a nest of dyed black hair and a tricolor flag in sapphires, diamonds, and rubies pinned to her cream linen dress. She was Countess Virginie de Fontenay, and before the war she’d written a popular column, “Carnet d’un Mondain,” that ran every Friday on the front page of Le Figaro. She’d been born into a grand aristocratic family that had lost all its money (while hanging on to some of its jewels), and she’d never married. She’d often interviewed Coco.
Virginie took out a notebook and pen and began scrawling notes. “A story about Bastille Day is the last thing you’ll get past the censors,” Coco warned.
“I wouldn’t in a million years write for the papers now!” cried Virginie. “I’m working on a memoir about the Occupation. I’m calling it The Darkest Days I’ve Known.”
“I hope you aren’t planning to go outside to interview those people in the street,” sounded a male voice at Coco’s side. It belonged to her old acquaintance, the lawyer Michel Pelissier, dressed impeccably as usual in a navy blue suit and light blue shirt with a red-and-blue-striped Hermès tie. Cocteau and Lifar exchanged glances. “Come on, let’s see if there’s caviar at the buffet,” Cocteau said to the ballet master. The two men rushed away with Virginie de Fontenay following as she scribbled in her notebook.
“Those two don’t want anything to do with me,” said Pelissier with a laugh. “I make them feel guilty.”
Months before, Pelissier had chastised Lifar for dancing at a ceremony at the German embassy to celebrate the Nazi triumph over France. Later, at a dinner party, Pelissier had cornered Cocteau and berated him for attending receptions at the German embassy.
Pelissier had the courtly manners and elegant looks Coco admired in men, but she found him pompous and judgmental. Still, this was the first time she’d seen him since running into him at Bignon’s, and gauging by his friendly manner, he didn’t seem to hold her relationship with Spatz against her. She assumed he made a distinction between Lifar’s and Cocteau’s activities with the Nazis and her more innocent horizontal collaboration. Pelissier also made an exception for Sert, who had helped save Colette’s Jewish husband, Maurice Goudeket. Misia had prevailed on Sert, who prevailed on his mistress, the wife of the German ambassador to Spain, to prevail on her husband to arrange for Goudeket’s release from a German deportation camp.
“I’m worried about those people down there in the street,” Coco said, accepting a glass of champagne from Pelissier. “They’re going to get shot.”
“I’m worried, too. I’ll go down in a minute and see if I can talk some sense into them,” said the lawyer.
“I wouldn’t,” said Coco. “They’ll shoot you, too.”
He shrugged. “Did you hear de Gaulle’s speech on BBC Radio this morning?” Coco shook her head. “It was very moving. He talked about France’s need to persevere, about our hope, our pride, our honor.”
Pelissier looked hard at Coco, and she wondered if he was delivering a rebuke to her, a more indirect version of the censure he’d directed at Lifar and Cocteau. “All your friends are here tonight—your French friends,” said Pelissier.
“Not everyone,” said Coco.
“No. Not Max Jacob. Have you heard from him?”
“He’s getting by.”
Voices singing “La Marseillaise” rose up from the street, at first softly but growing louder as they reached the most stirring verse and the one most likely to provoke the enemy: “Aux armes, citoyens! Formez vos bataillons! Marchons, marchons…”
“They’re going to end up dead,” said Coco, nodding toward the windows.
“I’ll talk to them,” said Pelissier. He had just drained his champagne glass when gunfire rang out, followed by the sound of shattered glass. Coco dropped to the floor and sprawled on the carpet under the coffee table, inches away from Pelissier’s pomaded gray head.
Stray bullets shattered the windows in the salon and dining room. Sert’s jade lamps and gold plates filled with sausages, hams, and fruit from Spain had careened to the floor and smashed to pieces. Bottles of wine lay on their sides, leaking black circles into the carpet.
Misia slumped on the sofa with a dazed expression. “Are you hurt?” asked Coco.
Misia shook her head, and Coco patted her arm.
* * *
The following night Coco refused to go with Spatz to a party at the home of the German ambassador, Otto Abetz. She feigned a headache and climbed into bed with a glass of wine and her cigarettes. She was starting to drift off when the door creaked open.
“You can’t hide forever.” Spatz stood in the doorway dressed in black tie and tails, his camel cashmere overcoat draped over his shoulders.
“I’m sick.”
“Abetz will be disappointed.”
“If I don’t show, it makes you look bad,” Coco said harshly. She was wide-awake now.
“Don’t start a fight.”
“Abetz wants to show he’s got the French in his pocket. Isn’t that your job?” Her tone was bitter.
“I have to go.” Spatz turned on his heel, closing the door behind him with a loud click.
* * *
The next day, Spatz failed to appear for breakfast. Coco assumed he spent the night at his own apartment, probably to avoid waking her by coming in late. She ate her croissant and drank her coffee alone, dressed quickly, and headed across the street. She found Angeline restocking the shelves with a fresh supply of Chanel No. 5. It was nine o’clock. The boutique wouldn’t open for another hour. “I’ll be in my apartment, if you need me,” Coco said. She started for the staircase when the front door opened. Otto Abetz walked in with a tall, bulky man Coco immediately recognized as Hermann Goering, the commander of the Luftwaffe.
