Anna Mouglalis as Coco Chanel
in
Jan Kounen's Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky (2009)
***
"Tenacious digging into secret wartime records reveals a worsening case for the legendary French designer. Well rendered by Vaughan...a sorry story of wartime collaboration"- Kirkus Review blurbing Sleeping with the Enemy: Coco Chanel's Secret War, posted on the blog the author Hal W. Vaughn created for this book.***
Hullo there, book lovers and bibliophiles! No matter how virulent your urge to acquire useless books happens to be, would you seriously consider spending $27.95 (at bookstores), $18.45 (from Amazon) or $13.99 (from Kindle) on a hardcover blurbed as "tenacious digging the secret" love affair between Marilyn Monroe and JFK, while reviewers are busy telling you there's absolutely nothing new in the book?
If, in spite of red flags raised by reviewers, you still order the book from Amazon or go to the nearest Barnes and Noble to buy it, then you may be afflicted by the double disorder of masochism and bibliomania. You'd be a masochistic bibliomaniac!
(Pardon me for not putting the ampersand between "Barnes" and "Noble" as it's usually interpreted as a program code on Blogger platform; so, allow me the plain "and").
(Pardon me for not putting the ampersand between "Barnes" and "Noble" as it's usually interpreted as a program code on Blogger platform; so, allow me the plain "and").
Well, reading serious reviewers write about the umpteenth biography of Coco Channel released this week, I can't help but think that Hal Vaughn and Knopf (Random House) pulled a fast one on unsuspecting readers. Hell, I'll call a spade a spade: both author and publisher might have perpetrated a swindle, a shake-down of literary consumers!
[UPDATE: comment by Anonymous reader justifies erasure of this part] This even shows in the vacillation of the title of Vaughn's opus. A few months ago the book had the following exploitatively explosive title: Sleeping with the Enemy: Coco Chanel, Nazi Agent. And that's how that dud then appeared on Amazon ads:
I've to confess I made whoopee when I read the review of this dud biography by John Walsh of The Independent--the title of his article "Never-ending stories: Is there anything left for biographers to reveal?" sets the tone of the characteristically restrained British indignation and outrage for the rest of his piece.
I recommend Walsh's piece before you put that junk in your purchase basket on the portal of Amazon or Barnes and Noble.
I was particularly fascinated by Walsh's three-pronged wonderment that captured quite well my own puzzlement:
"One's first response is to wonder whether Ms Chanel ever linked up with Hugo Boss, who designed the Nazi uniform and whose career blithely survived the war despite the taint of fascism. One's second response is to say: I thought we knew this stuff about the Nazi lover already. And a third is to wonder: how much more information about Coco bloody Chanel do I need in my life?"
Well, I would have redacted "bloody" and written "Coco-fucking-Chanel"...
Walsh who at times was at pains to conceal his contempt for this flop and the "vieux-chapeau revelations" it contains also poses a serious question about the downturn of the once-respected literary genre of biography: "The unofficial rules of 'life-writing' used to hold that to publish a biography of a canonical figure (ie, one safely dead and consigned to a generally agreed "place" in history) less than 30 years after the last attempt, is a waste of both time and academic energy."
Walsh who at times was at pains to conceal his contempt for this flop and the "vieux-chapeau revelations" it contains also poses a serious question about the downturn of the once-respected literary genre of biography: "The unofficial rules of 'life-writing' used to hold that to publish a biography of a canonical figure (ie, one safely dead and consigned to a generally agreed "place" in history) less than 30 years after the last attempt, is a waste of both time and academic energy."
Well, that was then. Everyone is a writer nowadays. Even Sarah Palin. And this biographical relentless machine has now been streamlined into the movie genres of biopic, docudrama, or documentary. Biographies of the famous and the infamous are made into movies as easily as they are sloppily written. Which reminds me that I watched and heard earlier this month on Bill Maher's Real Time Stephen K. Bannon, (in)famous in some ideological quarters for his recent much acclaimed (or berated) in the same opposing quarters The Undefeated, a biopic of Sarah Palin. Jeez! How much time one's got to waste in a lifetime to watch such a boring flick?
By the way, I just learned from John Walsh's review that there are still countless other penpushers and "mercenaires-de-la-plume" (literary mercenaries, if you will) out there scribbling in a frenzy other upcoming biographies of Coco Chanel! Are you kidding me? For chrissake, enough already!
In his Daily Beast review whose title is as much as risqué as the title of the dud ("Fascist Fashionista") though temperate in tone, Michael Korda quotes this passage from the book: "Fiercely anti-Semitic long before it became a question of pleasing the Germans, she became rich by catering to the very rich, and shared their dislike of Jews, trade unions, socialism, Freemasons, and communism."
This is what the French would call a "lapalissade" or stating the shockingly obvious. Which reminds me of the tale a New York-born Jewish scholar and university professor, who's done his share of debunking French intellectuals who had collaborated in their wartime writings with the Nazis, once told me at Boston University about the antisemitism rampant in Europe in past centuries. He told me to picture a German Rip Van Winkle who'd have gone to sleep in, say, the 1890s. This German Rip Van Winkle then wakes up in, say, December 1945 and people tell him about the atrocities of the Shoah, without mentioning the European country where it had occurred. The German Rip Van Winkle would exclaim in shock: "Mein Gott! French bastards! These bloody Franzmänner did it this time for real!" This means that antisemitism was widespread in Europe, just as racism was in the U.S.
Though shocking as this may sound, according to the same scholar, French women felt liberated for the first time under German Occupation. [Updated: And German occupiers frowned upon wife-beating and all forms of domestic violence against women then so endemic in France]. Under the Nazis, French female intellectuals and artists were suddenly given free reign to pursue their creative endeavors. There were now female filmmakers, playwrights, and novelists--including Simone de Beauvoir who first published under Nazi occupation. This explains why the witch-hunt for "whores" was all the more vicious at "Libération"... when most women--including those who'd risked their lives in the resistance--were quickly sent packing back to their kitchens!
Collaboration with the Nazis was also a survival strategy. Still according to the scholar I'm referring to, it was common in German-occupied France that a group of friends would decide to do casting among themselves as to who would join the resistance, and active or passive collaboration with the Nazis. Would you blame them? No one knew the outcome of the war... If these instances of drawing straws were so common in the upper classes of society, what would one expect from a Picaresque survivor like Coco Chanel, who willed herself from rags to riches? Who would throw the first stone at her for choosing "horizontal collaboration"? Furthermore, most collaborators in France were right-wing patriots who felt they had to defend Country, God and Family against French "Bolsheviks" of the Resistance who were under Stalin's thumb. And to achieve that they'd ally themselves with the very devil himself...
This gives me an idea for a pitch to Hal Vaughn: I just read in your biography on Amazon (quoting Wikipedia) that you were a spook and a Public Affairs Officer for Vice-President Hubert Humphrey. You still have entries in higher places, contacts with past historical figures, and access to the bountiful archives of wartime America and Europe. Why don't you investigate the wartime pro-Nazi lobby and movement in America? Hey, I'd even cut out the work for you... Hmm! Let's see: why don't you write an exposé, after tenacious digging into secret wartime records, about Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy's crazy episode of attempted flirt with Hitler just weeks before Germany bombed the daylight out of London! Going needlessly after Coco Chanel, whose wartime role was so peripheral in comparison to Kennedy's, makes your endeavor gratuitous (in light of the mountain of biographies already written on her) and turns you into a dirty old man. Plain and simple! I look at your biography and I learn that you were born in 1928. Amazingly, at 83, you can still find the time to write 304 pages on a useless biography of Coco Chanel while peeking now and then at her glossy half-naked black-and-white pictures. A latter-day onanist, as it were!
Anyway, despite this cloddish installment by a recreant writer in the serial biographies and swarming biopics of Coco Chanel, the latter's contribution to women's clothing liberation is seminal. As a father of two daughters who're great fans of Coco Chanel, I consider as one of her many signature griffes the liberation of women from the damn corset!
And Hal Vaughn be damned!
Hal Vaughn
"Latter-day onanist"
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