Coco at the Ritz, page 17
These troubling thoughts occupied Coco as she passed André a large box of Ladurée macarons; he selected a chocolate one but laid it on his plate without taking a bite. “I don’t want to see you go to jail,” he said.
“I’m not going to jail!”
“No? What do you think will happen when this is all over?”
“What if the Germans win?”
“Open your eyes, Aunt Gabby. The Germans are never going to win.”
ELEVEN
Coco prided herself on having a sixth sense about events, but she felt wracked by uncertainty about the war’s outcome. She’d closely followed the Nazis’ march from triumph to triumph at the start of the war, but recently, it looked less likely they’d take over the world. There were many signs of trouble for the Third Reich: the Americans had entered the war with all their power and determination; the Royal Air Force of Britain had begun relentlessly bombing German cities; the Allies were holding the Nazis back in Africa and the Soviet Union. She let herself imagine a future in which Paris would be Paris again and she could forget the Occupation. She refused to think about where this would leave Spatz.
At the same time, Coco saw the war draw closer in Paris. Resistance fighters shot German soldiers on the street and in the Métro. The Nazis retaliated by executing French prisoners. Tanks lumbered up the boulevards, their open gun turrets manned by middle-aged soldiers—most of the young Nazis had been sent to fight on the Russian front. Allied bombing in the Parisian suburbs had destroyed train lines and airports and made it nearly impossible to send food and other supplies to the city. Coco watched her vendeuse Angeline grow thinner and thinner, despite the chocolate, bread, steaks, and eggs Coco bought her on the black market. “I’m sharing it with my neighbors, and there’s not a lot to go around,” Angeline told her one day, as Coco handed the young woman a tin of cookies.
It was May 1942, the chestnut trees fluffed with pink, and families strolled the gravel paths in the Tuileries, where Coco had gone for some fresh air. She marveled at the good looks of one young couple she passed—the man, tall and lanky, his intelligent face framed by shiny dark curls; and his pretty companion, ginger-haired, mannequin-slender, and dressed in a chic navy wool crepe dress. The first thing Coco had noticed about her, though, was the yellow star sewn on her dress above her left breast. It was a vile mustard color as big as the palm of a hand with JEW written in black Gothic letters. Now, Coco couldn’t help looking at the chests of everyone she passed. On the way back to the Ritz, she saw two more yellow stars—one on a man in his forties, the other on a teenage boy.
“It’s barbaric!” Coco told Spatz when she saw him later that evening. “Why are you doing this, labeling people?” She had said vulgar things, yes. She had her feud with Paul and Pierre Wertheimer, yes. But this?
“I’m not doing anything,” Spatz snapped, and went back to reading his newspaper.
* * *
As the spring and summer wore on, the German noose tightened. In retaliation for Resistance violence, the Nazis moved up the curfew earlier and earlier. Parisians who defied the order and walked around the city without an ausweis were as likely as not to be shot on the spot. Coco read several papers a day. All were controlled by the Germans, who specialized in lies and spreading phony stories. One day she read that the RAF had bombed the Vatican, another day that the Soviets were about to surrender to the Nazis. It was impossible to know the truth.
For Parisian Jews, life became darker and more perilous, as one after another of their civil liberties were stripped away. By the summer of 1942, Jews were forbidden even from waiting in food lines to redeem their ration tickets. One hot morning in July, Coco stood in front of the closed iron grille at Atelier Schwartz, the jeweler on rue des Capucines around the corner from her boutique, where she’d left a necklace for repair. She rang the buzzer again and again, finally holding it in with her thumb and causing a harsh, steady noise to fill the air. The shutters above the shop flung open, and an old woman in a faded floral housedress leaned out the window. “The Germans took Schwartz away with his wife yesterday,” she said.
“Where?” asked Coco.
“I don’t know. I was here cleaning the apartment and watching their son.” She moved aside, and a pale little boy stepped out of the shadow, clutching a toy truck. He glanced at Coco and buried his face in the housekeeper’s apron. “I heard the commotion outside and saw the soldiers with their guns drawn,” she said. “Thank God, Alexi isn’t yet six, so he doesn’t have to wear the yellow star. When the soldiers came upstairs to search the apartment, I told them he was my grandson, and from the way the poor thing clung to me, they believed me.” She crossed herself and held her hands together in prayer for a moment. “The Germans are monsters. They’d shoot a child in his bed as soon as they’d shoot a dog in the street.”
The boy began to whimper, and the old woman banged the shutters shut.
Coco hurried back to the Ritz. “Was there a round-up of Jews yesterday?” she asked Spatz.
He looked at her over the top of his newspaper. “Of foreign Jews, yes.” Spatz downed the last drops of his coffee and poured himself another cup from the silver pot on the coffee table.
“Henri Schwartz and his wife aren’t foreigners. They’re French,” said Coco. “His family has owned that jewelry store since Napoleon’s day. Still, the Germans picked them up.”
“I don’t know what to tell you, darling,” said Spatz.
“Where are they?” demanded Coco.
Spatz sighed. “I heard that the foreign Jews are being relocated to an agricultural colony in the East. I’m sure it was a mistake that they took Schwartz.” He shook out his paper, rattling the pages, and returned to reading.
* * *
“A mistake? Is that what he told you?” cried Misia over the phone that evening. “It was a mass arrest of thousands of Jews. Entire families are being held in the Vel d’Hiver stadium. Sert told me they’re being transported in buses to the prison at Drancy, and from there, who knows!”
“Spatz says an agricultural community in the East.”
“You ask him about murder, and he talks to you about farming?”
“No one’s talking about murder.”
“The Germans aren’t talking. They’re doing it!”
“You don’t know that.”
“Do you think we’ll ever see those people again?”
Coco hung up the phone. She had let Misia rant, interjecting a few gentle “Nos” and “That can’t be trues,” assuring her friend that she was misinformed. But Coco wondered. When weeks passed and the Schwartzes never returned, she began to fear that something terrible had happened to them. The same thing, no doubt, that had happened to Max’s relatives. Coco pressed Spatz to make inquiries, but he insisted he was powerless to help the couple. “My office has nothing to do with the persecution of the Jews. It doesn’t concern us. We hold ourselves aloof from it!”
TWELVE
One night in November 1942, while Spatz was in the bathroom preparing for bed, Coco turned on the radio and heard a BBC reporter announce that British and American forces, after storming the beaches of North Africa, had taken control of Algiers and Morocco. “This is an important breakthrough for the Allies,” came the clipped British voice through the speaker. “The prime minister will now address the nation.”
“Turn it up,” said Spatz. He appeared in the doorway with his toothbrush in his hand. Though the Nazis forbade the French from tuning in to the BBC, Coco often hunted for their broadcasts. Who would report her—Spatz?
Coco raised the volume and sat on the edge of the bed with an unlit cigarette. “This is not the end,” boomed Winston Churchill through the scratchy airwaves. “It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is perhaps the end of the beginning.”
Spatz clicked off the radio. “This is awful for Germany,” he admitted.
Coco lit her cigarette and, as she puffed, considered her situation. The war seemed to be turning against the Nazis. They were stretched thin in Russia. The Americans were just starting to unleash the full potential of their power. The Allies might yet win. Misia had warned Coco constantly: any woman who lived with a German would be marked for vengeance. Reverdy had told her she was already on a blacklist of collaborators. Coco felt her chest tighten. The cost she might have to pay for loving Spatz took her breath away. In the past, she had overcome every obstacle that was placed in her path. She always thought she could outsmart the universe if she had to. Now, she wasn’t so sure.
Spatz was too restless to sleep, so he grabbed a newspaper and went to the salon to read. Coco downed a couple of narcotic pills, and as she started to drift off, she thought about Churchill. Wasn’t she still his good friend? She recalled the admiring way Churchill looked at her the last time they’d dined together right before the war. How he laughed at her witty remarks…
The next thing she knew, Spatz was shaking her shoulder in the dark bedroom. “Coco, wake up,” he said.
She opened her eyes. Her head felt like it was stuffed with cotton. “What time is it?” she asked.
“Four thirty.” Spatz turned on the bedside lamp. “Teddy Momm is here.”
“Momm?” She was sitting up now and rubbing her eyes.
“He needs to talk to us.”
“Now, in the middle of the night?”
“Yes, now.” A note of panic had edged into Spatz’s voice.
“Let me get dressed.”
“No time for that.” He stood by the bed holding open her white silk bathrobe. “Come on, get up.”
In the salon, a balding, blue-eyed man in a gray suit sat in an armchair by the fireplace. He was Abwehr Captain Theodor Momm, a close friend of Spatz’s since their days fighting together on the Russian front in 1917. Coco had had dinner with him a couple of times at Bignon’s and found him intelligent and easy to talk to. Momm sat with his feet planted firmly on the carpet and his fingertips frantically tapping his knees. When Coco and Spatz entered, he jumped up. “I’m sorry to disturb your sleep like this, but I’m on my way to Berlin, and it was crucial I talk to you before I left,” he said. “It’s no longer safe for either of you in Paris.”
Momm’s light blue eyes bored into Spatz. “You should leave as soon as you can for Turkey. You can work with my brother at the Abwehr headquarters in Istanbul. More agents with your charm and polish are needed, if we’re ever going to seduce the Turks to our side.”
“Istanbul is the last place I want to go.” Spatz plunked down on the settee and ran his hands through his hair. His bathrobe had come undone, and he wore nothing underneath but a stained white T-shirt and striped cotton shorts. Coco had bought him several pairs of silk pajamas, but he insisted on sleeping in his underwear. Growing up in a mansion in Saxony, Spatz was used to luxury and order, so Coco expected nothing from him but discipline and elegance. Usually, it annoyed her when he behaved like an ordinary slob. Looking at him now, she felt a rush of tenderness.
“British intelligence has reports on you,” Momm said. “They know about your activities on the Côte d’Azur and your meeting with Hitler.”
Coco gasped. He’d never told her he’d met Hitler. “You talked to the Devil himself?” she asked.
“At a dinner in Berlin on that trip I made last year. I spoke to him for only a few minutes.”
“Germany is doomed as long as he’s in power,” said Momm.
“Hitler is a madman,” said Spatz.
Coco looked from one man to the other. She’d never heard Spatz speak so harshly about Hitler to a fellow German. The war must be getting even worse for them than she’d assumed.
“And we’re not the only ones who think so,” added Momm. “There’s a growing number of officers in the high command who’d love to see the Führer gone.”
Momm lowered his eyes. When he lifted them again, he looked hard at Coco. “As for you, Mademoiselle, I’d go to Switzerland while you still have the chance.” He took from his briefcase a copy of Life and handed it to her. “Look at page eighty-six.”
The American magazine had published a Resistance blacklist of thirty-nine Frenchmen “condemned… for collaborating with Germans: some to be assassinated, others to be tried when France is free.” Coco scanned the list quickly. When she didn’t see her name, a current of relief shot through her. First on the list was Mistinguett, a music-hall star who’d performed in Germany and was the mistress of Maurice Chevalier, also on the list. The third and fourth names were Corinne Luchaire and Nicole Bordeaux, both actresses and mistresses of the German ambassador Otto Abetz’s. Others included Maréchal Pétain, Pierre Laval, a smattering of lower-level Vichy officials, and several right-wing journalists and politicians. Coco’s heart sank when she saw the name of René de Chambrun, the son-in-law of Pierre Laval and for many years Coco’s lawyer. “Chambrun is here,” she said grimly.
“It won’t be long ’til you’re on the Resistance blacklist, too,” said Momm with conviction.
Coco didn’t tell him she already was. Life just hadn’t discovered it.
“The axe is falling,” said Momm, as he stood and headed toward the door.
* * *
“Maybe I should go to Istanbul,” said Spatz, when Momm had left.
“And leave me here to the wolves?” Coco clutched the lapels of her robe as she paced the room.
“God, don’t be so dramatic.” Spatz moved toward Coco and put his arms around her. “Let’s get some sleep. We can talk about it later.”
Coco lay in bed next to Spatz, listening to him snore softly. She felt comforted with him by her side. A woman who wasn’t loved was lost. She’d always believed that, built her career on the notion. After all, the true subject of fashion was romance—alluring women in alluring clothes. She was no different than any other woman. She needed to be cherished. Especially in these perilous times, she didn’t think she could face old age without a man to make her feel young. Spatz wasn’t brilliant like Boy Capel or fabulously connected like the Duke of Westminster. He didn’t speak to her creative soul like Pierre Reverdy. But he kept her profound loneliness at bay. She couldn’t bear the thought of being separated from him.
A few days later, Coco decided to go to La Pausa to escape the pressures weighing on them. Spatz said he had business to attend to in the city, and he would join her on the weekend. Coco was in the middle of packing when Céline called. “The Germans are here!” the maid shouted over the phone.
“In the house?” asked Coco. She was about to fold a silk blouse she’d just removed from a hanger.
“No, in town,” said Céline. “I was at the pharmacy when an entire regiment of them arrived with their tanks!”
Coco sat on the bed, the blouse crumpled in her lap. “Merde,” she muttered.
In response to the Allied invasion of North Africa, Hitler had ordered that all of France be occupied. Coco put her suitcase away. Now there would be no point in rushing off to La Pausa to hide.
* * *
For Coco and Spatz, the winter passed in a fog of worry. Conditions in Paris worsened, even at the Ritz. The heat and electricity went in and out. The menu at the restaurant shrunk. There was no steak, no cream, no fresh vegetables or fruits. Beyond the hotel, people had trouble getting enough food to survive. The reports Coco heard from her vendeuse Angeline were grim. Children were dying of hunger; the elderly were freezing in their beds at night. The icy cold continued into spring, and snow blanketed the city well into March.
As Coco pondered the bleak situation, an idea began to bloom in her mind. A bizarre, crazy idea, but one she believed might actually work. She told Spatz about it one night in April as they sat in her salon at the Ritz sharing a bottle of red wine. “What if I could get to Winston Churchill and convince him to negotiate with the Germans to end the war and stop the killing?” she said.
Spatz’s eyes widened. “You’re not serious,” he said.
“I am.”
“How in the world would you do it?”
“Through Samuel Hoare, the British ambassador in Madrid. He’s an old friend.”
Coco took a gulp of wine and placed her glass on the coffee table. “The British might not know there are people like you and Teddy Momm, and those even higher up in Berlin, who want Hitler gone. Churchill has insisted he’ll accept nothing but total surrender from Germany. But what if I could persuade him to soften his position and initiate peace talks?”
Spatz stared into his glass, swirling his wine, as Coco pressed her argument.
“You know if Germany collapses, the Soviets pose a severe threat to all of Europe. The British aristocracy fears a communist Europe even more than a fascist one,” said Coco.
Spatz shook his head. “It’s too dangerous.”
Coco urged him to take her plan directly to the dissident officers in the Nazi high command who’d lost confidence in their Führer, if they ever had any. With their backing, she would approach Churchill. Negotiations would go on behind Hitler’s back, culminating in a coup. If the plan worked, Churchill would save lives and enhance his legacy. It would also make Coco a global heroine—the woman who ended a world war!
Even discussing the idea risked death, and Spatz balked at suggesting the plan to his superiors. Coco saw this as more evidence of his weakness. Her previous lovers had been men with ideas and ambition—men she could learn from. She knew she was much smarter than Spatz. But he’s so handsome! And he’s good to me, she thought with a stab of tenderness whenever she looked at him. What did it matter that she couldn’t respect him? He was by her side, and that was enough for now.
She kept bringing up her idea, and, eventually, Spatz warmed to the plan. Finally, he agreed to talk about it directly to Teddy Momm. The Abwehr captain was skeptical, too, but despite the risks, he agreed to pass Coco’s plan along. He even gave the venture a name: Modellhut, or Fashion Hat. When Momm broached Coco’s scheme to the German secretary of state in the foreign office in Paris, however, he was rebuffed. At Coco’s and Spatz’s urging, Momm next approached Major Walter Schellenberg, the head of the Nazi SD intelligence service, whom Momm knew was eager to see Hitler gone. At thirty-three, Schellenberg was one of the youngest high-ranking Nazis and a glamorous, dynamic man. Schellenberg thought Coco’s idea intriguing. He asked Momm to send her to Berlin so he and Coco could discuss the proposed mission.
