Coco at the Ritz, page 12
Goering had a red, beefy face and a barrel chest glittering with medals. His black-brimmed hat sat high on his head like a crown, and his shiny black boots clicked across the floor in the manner of a man who knew people would do what he wanted. He smiled coldly at Coco as Abetz introduced them.
“So nice to meet you, Maréchal Goering, and to see you again, Ambassador,” said Coco. She could feel beads of moisture blooming on her forehead under her bangs. Her armpits were soaked.
“I was hoping to meet you last night,” said Goering.
Coco lowered her eyes. “I’m afraid I wasn’t feeling well.”
Abetz’s icy blue eyes held her in his sight. “I brought Maréchal Goering here so he could see an example of what’s created by French genius,” he said.
“I closed my couture house. I sell only perfume now and a few scarves,” said Coco.
Goering shifted his feet, clattering his medals. “I’d like to bring something back to my wife in Germany,” he said. The French words in heavily accented German filled the air like a bubble of Nazi evil.
Coco turned to Angeline. “Can you check the storage room?”
“My pleasure” said the vendeuse. She curtsied slightly and scurried off.
A few minutes later—a seeming eternity during which Coco made small talk about the weather with Goering and Abetz—Angeline returned carrying an armload of clothes, which she dropped on the counter.
Goering pawed through the sweaters and silk blouses and pulled out a smart little mink jacket. “Emmy will love this,” he said.
It was the most expensive item in the pile. “Are you sure?” asked Coco. “It’s from several years ago and isn’t the most up-to-date model.” Coco thought the jacket wouldn’t fit Madame Goering, who looked like a large, raw-boned woman from the pictures Coco had seen of her—including one in which she and Eva Braun were scowling at each other at a Nazi rally.
“It’s perfect,” said Goering. He made a great show of patting his jacket and pants pockets, as he stared at the ceiling. “I’m afraid I have no money on me.”
Coco caught Abetz’s eye, but the ambassador abruptly looked at the floor. “That’s all right,” Coco said to Goering. “Angeline will wrap it, and you can pay later.”
“Would Madame Goering also like some perfume?” asked Angeline, holding up a bottle with a shaking hand.
“How about two bottles?” said Goering.
* * *
When they’d left, Angeline started to cry. “What do I do if they come back?” she asked, as Coco put an arm around her and squeezed her shoulder.
“Let’s hope they don’t,” Coco said.
* * *
That evening, Coco met Spatz at Bignon’s. The couple sat at their usual spot in front of the fireplace and were served by their usual slim, dark-haired waiter. “The La Tâche,” said Spatz, handing the waiter the wine list.
When he’d left, Coco lit a cigarette. “Goering came to my boutique today to buy a present for his wife,” she said, blowing smoke out of the side of her mouth.
“He went to the right place,” said Spatz, taking Coco’s hand and kissing it.
“Isn’t that an amazing coincidence? I don’t show up at the party, then I get a visit from a high-ranking Nazi, who acts like he has the right to loot what’s left of my fashion house?” Coco’s voice was hard with sarcasm. “Goering took the most expensive thing I had left—a mink jacket. But he had no money on him. He also got away with two free bottles of perfume.”
The waiter returned with the wine, poured Spatz and Coco each a glass, and stood by their table, hovering. Coco looked sharply at Spatz and opened her eyes wide, signaling him to say something to dismiss the waiter.
Spatz cleared his throat loudly, and the waiter stepped even closer to the couple’s table.
“The lamb chops,” said Spatz.
The waiter hurried away. Leaning across the table, Coco spoke in a low voice. “You tell Goering he owes me fifteen thousand francs.”
“Let it go, darling.”
“Let it go? Goering has enough money to buy all of France!”
“Do you really expect me to ask him to pay you?”
“No.” But another man would, Coco thought. Another man would stand up for her and not let her be taken advantage of by a brutal thug.
EIGHT
The incident with Goering convinced Coco she had to get out of Paris. Reverdy was right. It was impossible to lay low enough to avoid all unwanted notice. It disconcerted her that the Nazis seemed to be aware of her every move. She couldn’t stand to feel she’d lost her privacy. She’d feel safer and calmer at her country house near the Spanish border in the unoccupied zone.
“I won’t stay long, and you can visit me,” Coco told Spatz.
“You’ve packed for six months!” he said, eyeing the four large suitcases lined up in the entry of her rue Cambon apartment. The truth was, Coco didn’t know how long she’d be away. That morning, she had gone through the clothes she stored in a small room off the salon and decided to take enough things to last a couple of seasons. They filled two suitcases. A third suitcase held books, and the fourth contained a stash of cigarettes, champagne, perfume, makeup, soap, shampoo, and face cream.
“It’s really not that much,” Coco said.
“I thought you didn’t like the country for more than a weekend.”
“I have to get away.”
“Do you really think decamping to La Pausa will fool people that we’re not together?”
I hope so, Coco thought.
She called Marceau Larcher, the chauffeur who’d driven her to Lembeye in June, and a few hours later he picked her up at the Ritz in her car. It was the first time since the start of the Occupation that the black Rolls-Royce, tricked out with mirrors, a collapsible bar, lights, and a spare tire in a snug black leather case, had left the garage. Cars were verboten for French citizens. Coco decided to risk being stopped by German soldiers, confident that a call to Spatz would prevent her Rolls from being confiscated.
The trip turned out to be uneventful. They drove for nine hours and reached Roquebrun after dark.
La Pausa sat a few miles outside town, high on a ridge overlooking the curvy shoreline of Monaco. The house was dark except for a large lamp over the front door that cast the entry in a pool of welcoming light. The maid Céline greeted Coco. “Soup’s on the stove, if you’re hungry, Mademoiselle,” she said. Céline was a slight, seventy-year-old woman with a tight salt-and-pepper bun. Her real name was Marthe. Coco called her Céline because she believed it a more suitable name for the servant of a grand lady in a grand house.
“Thank you for waiting up. But I’m too tired to eat. I’m going straight to bed,” said Coco.
Céline handed her a lantern, and Coco made her way to her bedroom in a far corner of the house.
La Pausa drew its name from Gallic legend. When Mary Magdalene fled Jerusalem after Christ’s crucifixion, she is said to have traveled through Roquebrun. The lovely flower gardens and olive trees lured her to rest for a few moments of contemplation at a spot next to what would someday become Coco’s property. Coco thought it the perfect place to pause her own eventful life.
The white stucco villa had three wings framing a brick courtyard and sat on nine acres of flower and olive gardens. Coco had built the house in 1928 during the dying days of the Jazz Age and her waning affair with the large, blustery Duke of Westminster. She had entertained Winston Churchill here, when he was staying with British friends at a nearby villa. This was where she had tried to conceive a child with Bendor, as the duke was known by his intimates, though she could never become pregnant after her miscarriage with Boy in 1918. Her next lover, the bookish illustrator Paul Iribe, had died suddenly of a heart attack one summer afternoon while playing tennis with Coco on the villa’s tree-shaded court. They were in the middle of a game when Iribe lowered his sunglasses to look at Coco across the net and fell dead. A maid inside the house heard Coco scream and called an ambulance. Coco laid her head on Iribe’s chest and felt life leave him. How quickly he was no longer there. By the time the medics removed his body, he was as gray and cold as stone.
So much loss, so much death.
In her bedroom, Coco padded across the plush brown carpet and drew the beige satin drapes. She undressed, slipped on her pajamas, removed her makeup, and brushed her teeth. Before getting into bed, she took a thick book bound in green leather from her suitcase. Misia had given it to her a few days earlier, after Coco told her about Hélène Dessoffy’s visit to rue Cambon and Spatz’s insistence that he wasn’t a spy. “Don’t fool yourself,” Misia said.
She handed the book to Coco with a few pages marked by torn pieces of paper. The title stamped on the cover in gold leaf read, When Hitler Spies on France.
The book had been the talk of the salons when it first came out in 1936. Coco remembered seeing it on a table in Misia’s salon and chatting with her about some of their acquaintances named in its pages. But she’d never read the book. Now Coco turned to the first page Misia had marked and read that the author, a respected intelligence agent named Paul Allard, had uncovered reams of classified documents, including dispatches from German agents. Among the papers were Spatz’s correspondence with his superiors in Berlin. The book included excerpts, mostly advice on how the Germans could best win the hearts of the French. In one, Spatz reported:
My many society friends in France have allowed me to form an ever-growing group of French sympathizers, which will allow me, I believe, to do my best in the tasks entrusted to me.… Our influence will only spread slowly, and we will not see… immediate results. I ask you for articles in the major French newspapers about the “bourgeois life” of the SS. It would be good to include photographs showing, for example, Nazi officers doing their marketing, to prove with this that the S.A. officer is not a savage but a citizen.
Coco flung the book to the floor and lit a cigarette. That proves nothing! After the first Great War, there was an epidemic of spy-itis. The French thought every foreigner was suspect. Spatz’s job as an embassy attaché required him to come up with ideas to improve relations between the French and the Germans. It was propaganda, exactly as he’d told Coco. He wasn’t doing anything sinister.
Coco tried to comfort herself with this thought before falling asleep.
* * *
A day after Coco arrived at La Pausa, she got a call from Cocteau, asking if he could come down for the weekend. Marais was home—he was between movies—and Cocteau found it impossible to work in their small Paris apartment. He was trying to finish a new play, and he needed a quiet place to write with no distractions. Coco’s driver fetched Cocteau from the Roquebrun train station on a Friday afternoon, and twenty minutes later, Cocteau stood in the white-walled salon at La Pausa, his eyes sparking with glee. “I had nothing to do with this!” he said, as he handed Coco a copy of the latest issue of Aux Écoutes, the venerable journal of French culture. Coco had been reclining on the fawn leather sofa reading a book. She sat up and laid the book aside. “Read the top of page four,” said Cocteau as he crossed the salon to the bar cart, where he poured himself a generous glass of red wine.
Coco opened the journal and read out loud:
Jean Cocteau, the prolific writer and director, and Coco Chanel, the famous fashion designer, were married last weekend at l’Eglise St. Roch. The couple, who have been close for many years, apparently decided the time was right to tie the knot. Monsieur Cocteau would confirm no details, but when asked about the marriage, he did not deny it. Mademoiselle Chanel, who has made glorious wedding gowns for some of the most gorgeous women of Paris, was married, our sources tell us, in a simple beige jersey suit. The Cocteaus will make their home at the Ritz, where Mademoiselle Chanel has lived for many years.
Coco doubled over in laughter and tossed the journal onto the coffee table next to a crystal ashtray. It was full of lipstick-ringed butts and ashes that overflowed onto the leather top. Late afternoon had come, and outside the light was fading, turning the sky as deep red as the wine in the half-empty bottle on the cart.
“The news of our marriage was also picked up by Le Petit Parisien and Le Figaro. No one besides Aux Écoutes, though, claimed to have spoken to me.”
“Did they?”
“No! They never even tried.”
Cocteau said his mother had alerted him to the item in Aux Écoutes in a phone call the evening before, and he’d rushed out to buy the journal and the afternoon papers at a kiosk near his apartment. “Maman said, ‘Why don’t you admit it to me, Jean, since it’s in the papers.’ I didn’t protest too much. She’s old and ailing and it gives her peace of mind to think I’m not like my father.” Cocteau père, a doctor and secret homosexual, had shot himself when Jean was just eight. “Did you plant the item?” he asked Coco.
“Me? Why would I?” said Coco through a puff of laughter.
Cocteau shrugged. “I don’t know. To deflect attention from you and Spatz, perhaps.”
Though she had nothing to do with the item, it struck Coco that the false story might actually help her—people who read it were likely to believe it and discount the rumors they might have heard about her living with a Nazi.
“It must have been one of your friends—to stifle talk about you and Marais,” said Coco.
The hard right-wing that abhorred homosexuality had continued its relentless attacks on Cocteau for his “unnatural” relationship with the dazzling actor. The vitriol against him had not let up in the Fascist press.
“It doesn’t matter. It won’t stop my enemies,” said Cocteau.
“At least you made your mother happy.”
“For a few minutes.”
“These days even a few minutes of happiness should be prized.” Coco poured herself more wine. “To better days,” she said, raising her glass high.
“To better days,” said Cocteau.
* * *
Coco was enjoying the peace and beauty of the countryside and her time away from swastika banners, gray-green uniforms, and the German language. She missed Spatz terribly, but it wouldn’t be long before he came for a visit. In the meantime, she had Cocteau and then Misia, who arrived on Monday night, a few hours after Cocteau departed.
No sooner had Misia stepped through the door with her suitcase than she told Coco that Max Jacob’s sister Delphine had died. “She’d been in a stupor of grief since her husband’s death in a German prison last year. I just got a letter from Max about the funeral in Quimper,” she said. “He’s in a bad way. We should check on him.”
“In Saint-Benoît? That’s a six-hour drive, and you just got here,” said Coco.
“Max is despondent. Thanks to the Nazis’ latest anti-Jewish laws, he’s lost the copyright to his books, and he can no longer receive royalties. It was only a tiny sum, but he depended on that money. I’m worried about him. And you should be worried, too.” She shot a look at Coco.
They left the next morning in Coco’s Rolls. Though they passed no checkpoints along the way, and the Rolls wasn’t stopped, the trip was hardly pleasant. Coco and Misia bickered through the six-hour drive, sitting in the back seat and picking at each other, while the driver ignored them, his eyes relentlessly fixed on the road. They loved each other and couldn’t live without each other, yet they couldn’t spend two hours together without fighting. Misia never stop nagging Coco about the shamefulness of her affair with Spatz. Coco didn’t see how her romance was any more deplorable than Sert’s relationship with a German woman, which Misia tolerated without complaint.
Max wasn’t home—he rented a second-floor room in a modest brick house on Place du Martroi—so Coco and Misia set out looking for him. The two women drew stares in their identical beige jersey Chanel suits. When Coco had an outfit made up for herself, she often had a duplicate sewn for Misia. In town, huge flags emblazoned with swastikas flew from the government buildings. The street signs had been newly painted black with yellow lettering in German. Nazi soldiers in impeccable uniforms and shiny black boots paraded down la grand rue, the principal commercial street in town.
The women found Max on the riverbank sitting under a chestnut tree shaded by fragrant pink blossoms. “Max! We’ve been looking everywhere for you,” said Coco. She eyed his monk’s cassock and the cross on a long chain around his neck. “I see you’re still dressing the part.” She kissed him on each cheek. “We’d have been here sooner, but I couldn’t get Tante Brutus here out of bed.”
“It’s pointless to get out of bed these days,” said Misia in an imperious tone. “Except to see you, dear Max.”
“I’m sorry about Delphine. I hope you’re feeling better.”
“A bit,” said Max.
“Was it a nice service?” asked Misia.
“Gorgeous. It was the first time I’d been in Quimper in many years, and after we buried Delphine, I spent a couple of hours marking the scenes of my past. I stopped at the café where I used to hold court, reciting poems for the local literary men. They were young, intelligent, and beautiful—and they admired my work!” Max shook his head ruefully. “Those days are over. It’s very different now in Quimper. At the café, there were only old men sitting at the marble-topped tables. I drank a coffee and felt a poem coming on. So, outside, on the street, I performed my old ritual. I forced myself to conjure a new image each time I reached a lamppost. If no image came, I stood until inspiration struck. This method had always worked for me. And it worked for me that day, too.” Max closed his eyes and recited the first lines of the poem he’d written for Delphine:
No flowers you said no wreaths
But April doesn’t feel that way
They’re a gift from the Lord
Look! You’re already in Paradise
“Did Picasso show up for the funeral?” asked Coco.
