Download Sleeping with the Enemy: Coco Chanel's Secret War AudioBook Free
"Out of this century, in France, three titles will stay: de Gaulle, Picasso, and Chanel."
-André Malraux Coco Chanel created the look of the modern girl and was the high priestess of couture. She believed in ease and elegance, and freed women from the tyranny of fashion. She inspired women to remove their bone corsets and cut their locks. She used ordinary shirt as couture cloth, elevated the waist, and created bell-bottom trousers, trench jackets, and turtleneck sweaters. Within the 1920s, when Chanel used more than 2,000 people in her workrooms, she had amassed a personal fortune of $15 million and continued to create an empire. Jean Cocteau once said of Chanel that she had the top of "just a little dark swan". And, added Colette, "the center of just a little black bull". In the beginning of World Warfare II, Chanel sealed down her couture house and gone next door to reside at the Hôtel Ritz. Picasso, her good friend, called her "one of the most sensible ladies in European countries". She continued to be at the Ritz throughout the battle, and afterward continued to Switzerland. For over fifty percent a century, Chanel's life from 1941 to 1954 has been shrouded in vagueness and rumor, unknown and misconception. Neither Chanel nor her many biographers have ever told the full story of those years. Now Hal Vaughan, in this explosive narrative-part suspense thriller, part wartime portrait-fully pieces together the invisible years of Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel's life, from the Nazi occupation of Paris to the aftermath of World Warfare II. Vaughan reveals the truth of Chanel's long-whispered collaboration with Hitler's high-ranking representatives in occupied Paris from 1940 to 1944. He writes in detail of her decades-long affair with Baron Hans Günther von Dincklage, "Spatz" ("sparrow" in British), described generally in most Chanel biographies as being an innocuous, English-speaking golf player playboy and a safe dupe-a loyal German soldier and diplomat portion his mom country and not a member of the Nazi get together. In Vaughan's absorbing, meticulously explored e book, Dincklage is discovered to have been a Nazi expert spy and German armed service intellect agent who ran a spy engagement ring in the Mediterranean and in Paris and reported right to Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, right side to Hitler. The book pieces mutually how Coco Chanel became a German intellect operative; how and just why she was enlisted in several spy missions; how she escaped arrest in France following the battle, despite her activities being known to the Gaullist intellect network; how she fled to Switzerland for a nine-year exile with her enthusiast, Dincklage. And exactly how, regardless of the French court's beginning a case involving Chanel's espionage activities through the war, she could return to Paris at years 70 and triumphantly resurrect and reinvent herself-and restore what is just about the iconic House of Chanel.
