Sleeping with the Enemy

von Hal Vaughan

Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel was the high priestess of couture who famously created the look of the modern woman. By the 1920s she had amassed millions and founded an empire. But Chanel's life from 1941 to 1954 has long been shrouded in rumor. Hal Vaughan reveals the truth of her collusion with the occupiers of Paris and her decades-long affair with the supposedly harmless playboy Baron von Dincklage--who turns out to have run a spy ring and reported directly to Goebbels. Vaughan reveals how Chanel became an intelligence operative enlisted in missions for the Germans, how she escaped arrest after the war, and fled to Switzerland with her lover. And how, despite suspicions about her activities, she was able to return to Paris at age seventy and reinvent herself--and rebuild the iconic and powerful House of Chanel, the most famous French brand in the world today.