But there were arguments from the start. When the company was first established, Chanel herself owned 10 per cent, the Wertheimers 70 per cent with the final 20 per cent going to Théophile Bader, owner of Galeries Lafayette, who had brokered the introduction. But Bader was subsequently bought out by the Wertheimers. Chanel regularly tried to get a greater percentage, which Pierre Wertheimer just as regularly resisted. But even though the perfume was so profitable that Chanel had security and independence for life, the 10 per cent continued to rankle. In 1940 the Wertheimers had to flee Paris and, in order to aryanize the perfume company, handed it to Félix Amiot, a French Christian businessman in whose aviation business they had had a 50 per cent share which they now returned. Chanel was infuriated by the Wertheimers’ successful aryanization, since it prevented her from using the opportunity of the Occupation to seize control herself. After the war, Amiot immediately returned the company to the Wertheimers,* which prompted Chanel to initiate legal battles, once again to win a greater share of the company for herself.
So in 1946 she decided to produce samples of her own perfumes with names such as Mademoiselle Chanel No. 1 and No. 2. This obvious challenge to the Wertheimers could not be ignored, and a deal was eventually struck which made her ‘unassailably rich’. After May 1947, Chanel received 2 per cent of the gross royalties of perfume sales throughout the world, in the region of $1 million a year. She also received a sum calculated to cover past royalties … She was, as one of her biographers put it, now ‘wealthy enough to need never work again’.
The return of Jewish companies to their legitimate owners provided plenty of work for lawyers. As part of the long process of regularizing the affairs of Van Cleef & Arpels, on 3 June 1946 the body of Renée Puissant, after four years lying in a Vichy grave, was exhumed by her mother, Estelle Van Cleef, and transported to Nice where it was reburied alongside her father in the Jewish cemetery. The company soon returned to trading from its familiar shop front in the Place Vend?me, but this time it was run by various members of the Arpels family. Although the Van Cleef name was retained, Renée’s death, childless as she was, spelled the end of the line for that branch of the family. Some historians of the business have argued that it was the bogus aryanization set in motion by Renée, selling the company to Comte Paul de Léséleuc, which saved it. Without that, the Germans would have confiscated the company for themselves.
While Spatz was being looked after by Chanel, his half-Jewish first wife Catsy, or Maximiliane von Schoenebeck, was faring less well. Having survived various internment camps at the beginning of the war, she was expelled from France and went to Austria to stay with cousins. But at some point towards the end of the war, she returned to her beloved Paris with a new name, only to be arrested once again in 1944 for collaboration. Known to have been involved in the black market, selling lingerie, she spent the following two years in prison, the price for her first marriage to Günther von Dincklage as well as for subsequent relationships with German officers.
‘She has had an appalling time,’ wrote Allanah Harper, the English-born founder of the French literary review Echanges and a close friend of Catsy’s half-sister, the writer Sybille Bedford. Harper visited Catsy von Dincklage in September in Paris following the latter’s release after almost two years in a French prison. She reported back to Bedford: ‘I took her to the Bar in Rue de la Paix, as she said they were the only place that had champagne that was really good. We had three glasses each at 100 francs a glass.’ She added that Catsy had been kept in the most filthy conditions, with only bread and water for months.
She said, typically, that it was amusing in the beginning because the prison was full of Marquises and Countesses who had collaborated, but after a few months they were all let out through influence, but she remained with only ‘les femmes de ménage et des grues’ [cleaners and hookers]. She thinks she was put in because of her husband, but I think it was for going about with officers. Any rate it could not be for being Jewish as it was after the Liberation she was put in and only came out four months ago … I think she feels rather lonely … she says she has to work to make money as she has none. She is going to work from next week in a hat shop with a friend.
It was not a story that Sybille, however affectionately she felt towards her sister, and in spite of a fierce belief in justice, was ever comfortable with.