.From this century, in France, three names will remain: de Gaulle, Picasso,
and Chanel.. .Andre Malraux

Coco Chanel created the look of the modern woman and was the high priestess
of couture.

She believed in simplicity, and elegance, and freed women from the tyranny
of fashion. She inspired women to take off their bone corsets and cut their
hair. She used ordinary jersey as couture fabric, elevated the waistline,
and created bell-bottom trousers, trench coats, and turtleneck sweaters.

In the 1920s, when Chanel employed more than two thousand people in her
workrooms, she had amassed a personal fortune of million and went on
to create an empire.

Jean Cocteau once said of Chanel that she had the head of .a little black
swan.. And, added Colette, .the heart of a little black bull..

At the start of World War II, Chanel closed down her couture house and went
across the street to live at the Hotel Ritz. Picasso, her friend, called
her .one of the most sensible women in Europe.. She remained at the Ritz
for the duration of the war, and after, went on to Switzerland.

For more than half a century, Chanel.s life from 1941 to 1954 has been
shrouded in vagueness and rumor, mystery and myth. Neither Chanel nor her
many biographers have ever told the full story of these years.

Now Hal Vaughan, in this explosive narrative.part suspense thriller, part
wartime portrait.fully pieces together the hidden years of Gabrielle .Coco.
Chanel.s life, from the Nazi occupation of Paris to the aftermath of World
War II.

Vaughan reveals the truth of Chanel.s long-whispered collaboration with
Hitler.s high-ranking officials in occupied Paris from 1940 to 1944.
He writes in detail of her decades-long affair with Baron Hans Gunther
von Dincklage, .Spatz. (.sparrow. in English), described in most Chanel
biographies as being an innocuous, English-speaking tennis player,
playboy, and harmless dupe.a loyal German soldier and diplomat serving
his mother country and not a member of the Nazi party.

In Vaughan.s absorbing, meticulously researched book, Dincklage is
revealed to have been a Nazi master spy and German military intelligence
agent who ran a spy ring in the Mediterranean and in Paris and reported
directly to Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, right hand to
Hitler.

The book pieces together how Coco Chanel became a German intelligence
operative; how and why she was enlisted in a number of spy missions;
how she escaped arrest in France after the war, despite her activities
being known to the Gaullist intelligence network; how she fled to
Switzerland for a nine-year exile with her lover Dincklage. And how,
despite the French court.s opening a case concerning Chanel.s espionage
activities during the war, she was able to return to Paris at age
seventy and triumphantly resurrect and reinvent herself.and rebuild
what has become the iconic House of Chanel.

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