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Books Of Style

The Many Faces of Coco

From left: "Sleeping With The Enemy: Coco Chanel's Secret War" By Hal Vaughan, 279 pages, Alfred A. Knopf, $27.95; "Coco Chanel: An Intimate Life", By Lisa Chaney, 448 pages, Viking, $27.95; "Coco Chanel: The Legend and The Life" By Justine Picardie, 343 pages, HarperCollins, $40.Credit...Patricia Wall/The New York Times (center)

LET the Coco catfight begin.

“I have to be careful not to trash another writer,” said Lisa Chaney, the author of “Coco Chanel: An Intimate Life,” a new biography of the French fashion icon. Then she proceeded to throw down the gauntlet. (One imagines a tweed-embellished lambskin glove from Chanel’s fall/winter collection.) Over the phone from her home in York, England — and in a press release from her publisher — she ticked off a litany of beefs with another recent Chanel book, Hal Vaughan’s “Sleeping With the Enemy: Coco Chanel’s Secret War.”

Mr. Vaughan’s biography, which posits that Chanel was a Nazi agent during World War II, “is written in a highly inflammatory style,” Ms. Chaney declared. “From the first few pages, it’s insinuation and leaping to conclusions. It’s pretty underhanded, what I think he’s done.”

 Mr. Vaughan said he thought that it was Ms. Chaney who was leaping to conclusions.

“I’m surprised that Chaney would say such a thing,” he said. “I find it quite shocking.” Down came another gauntlet: “Say, ‘Produce the damn document,’ ” Mr. Vaughan challenged, “and I will produce it.”

Mr. Vaughan, an American who lives in Paris, said he had not yet read Ms. Chaney’s book; he was waiting for Amazon to deliver it. But he had questions about a third new biography, “Coco Chanel: The Legend and the Life,” by Justine Picardie, which reads to him, he said, as if it were written to please the late designer’s namesake company. “I don’t know whether it was subsidized, but it’s clearly a Chanel book,” he said.

Ms. Picardie, a British writer, had her own potshots for the other biographers.

“I presume it was Lisa Chaney who said to you that my book is authorized by Chanel,” she said. As for Mr. Vaughan’s book? “The title is an instant sound bite.”

At least seven Chanel books have been published in the past 18 months. It was almost inevitable that the books would end up pitted against one another in reviews, but now some of the authors are going after each other in real life. At stake are not just sales or bragging rights. The true battle is over what Mr. Vaughan contended is an almost institutionalized refusal to delve into Chanel’s dark side.

“The thing that really bothers me is that no one will address the facts,” he said.

What the writers do not dispute is that Gabrielle Chanel (1883-1971), known as Coco, was a fascinating, prickly character, equal parts diva, social climber, femme fatale and genius. She was born into poverty and abandoned to an orphanage. Through hard work, talent and a series of affairs with rich, well-placed men, she rose to become arguably the most important fashion designer of the 20th century.

All three writers also agree on something uglier: in Nazi-occupied France during World War II, Chanel was a collaborator — a loaded wartime term for a citizen who cooperated with the enemy. It’s the degree of Chanel’s collaboration that is at issue.

Mr. Vaughan’s book details Chanel’s long love affair with Baron Hans Günther von Dincklage, a Nazi spy, and her dealings with Nazi higher-ups. Chanel, Mr. Vaughan writes, was a willing agent for the enemy, introducing Germans to her well-placed friends. In 1944, Chanel embarked on a mission to deliver a message to her friend Winston Churchill, the British Prime Minister, that said some high-ranking German officers wanted to end hostilities with Britain.

In return, he writes, she expected — and got — favors. Those included the release of her nephew from a German prisoner-of-war camp, and an apartment in the luxurious Ritz hotel in Paris during the German occupation of France. She also appealed to the Nazis to help her wrest control of her perfume business from the brothers to whom she had sold a majority stake years before.

 “Chanel was the consummate opportunist who was going to get what she wanted,” said Mr. Vaughan, who also paints his subject as a lifelong anti-Semite. “She knew exactly what she was doing. She didn’t see any harm in it.”

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Coco Chanel.Credit...Evening Standard/Hulton Archive via Getty Images

Ms. Chaney and Ms. Picardie write about the affair with Dincklage, as well, but they interpret Chanel’s behavior differently.

“There’s no question she was a collaborator of sorts, in that she had a lover who was a German, and he had an association with Nazis,” Ms. Chaney said. The question to her is how much Chanel knew, or chose to know, about Dincklage’s doings. Ms. Chaney suggested that her subject may have been blinded by love. At the start of their relationship, in 1940, Dincklage was 44 and Chanel was 57. “She was very conscious that this was a late affair,” the author said.

For her part, Ms. Picardie said Chanel “was involved in a German plot — but the German plot was to try and bring an early conclusion to the Second World War.”

Which account is accurate? Valerie Steele, director of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, said she had read the Vaughan and Chaney books (and “glanced” at Ms. Picardie’s) and supported Mr. Vaughan’s theory.

“Chaney implies that Chanel was just guilty of horizontal collaboration; I think it was definitely more,” she said.

Ms. Steele and all three sparring authors agreed that it was unwise to judge Chanel’s wartime behavior without putting it in context.

Ms. Chaney said: “Chanel’s position in general was pretty reprehensible. But think about what it was actually like living in an occupied country. There are levels of collaboration. You could say everyone who stayed in France was a collaborator.”

The Chanel company is unsurprisingly vague about its founder’s wartime activities. A spokeswoman, Iana dos Reis Nunes, referred to Dincklage not as a Nazi but as “a German aristocrat.”

“The timing of this romance with a German was unfortunate even if Baron von Dincklage’s mother was English and she met him before the war,” Ms. dos Reis Nunes said via e-mail. The conflicting accounts, she added, “go to show the difficulties in differentiating fact from fiction.”

Both Ms. Picardie and Ms. dos Reis Nunes said that Chanel Inc. had neither authorized nor subsidized Ms. Picardie’s book. But Karl Lagerfeld, the current designer for Chanel, contributed an original drawing to the book.

In the end, determining whose version is the definitive one may not matter, said Rhonda Garelick, a professor of English at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln and a Chanel scholar. She said she believed that Americans’ interest in this chapter of Chanel’s history had more to do with the current climate of political, social and economic upheaval.

“We have Occupy Wall Street — the 99 percent versus the 1 percent of super-elite multimillionaires — and we’re finally taking stock of what it means to have such discrepancy of wealth,” Ms. Garelick said. “We’re looking at an episode of Chanel’s life when people were picking through garbage looking for food, while she was living in the Ritz hotel as one of the richest women in the world. If during that period she was also betraying her country, that’s what piques our interest.”

It’s a good thing readers are so interested. Make room on the bookshelf for another biography of Chanel: “Antigone in Vogue,” by Ms. Garelick. She is working on her manuscript now.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section ST, Page 2 of the New York edition with the headline: The Many Faces of Coco. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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