海角大神

In the opening chapters of 鈥淐hanel鈥檚 Riviera: Glamour, Decadence, and Survival in Peace and War, 1930-1944,鈥� we鈥檙e enveloped in the drama and gossip swirling around fashion designer Coco Chanel. The setting is the French Riviera of the 1930s, a 鈥済lamorous, golden, sun-filled coastline famous for uninhibited enjoyment,鈥� as historian Anne de Courcy describes it.

The idylls and excesses that consumed the lives of the wealthy, though, soon shift to far grimmer concerns, as World War II progressed from an ominous shadow to a terrible reality.

Previously pressing topics 鈥� King Edward VIII abdicating the throne for love of Wallis Simpson, Chanel鈥檚 business rivalry with Elsa Schiaparelli 鈥� give way to Germany鈥檚 stunning breach of the Maginot Line and the despair of the 1940 Franco-German armistice.聽

鈥淔rance was defeated after only six weeks of fighting. When she learnt this, Chanel went to her room and wept,鈥� de Courcy writes.

De Courcy, author of several other books on the aristocracy and on the same time period, fills the book with boldfaced names who frequented the Riviera, such as Pablo Picasso and Somerset Maugham, along with high-society heirs and heiresses who are little known today. Chanel was among the celebrities, famed for both her revolutionary women鈥檚 clothing line and for her eponymous perfume. She provides a focal point for the book, but comes off neither as a hero nor a villain.聽

Staying in Paris at the Ritz when the Maginot Line is breached, Chanel flees the city along with millions of others, though in different style: 鈥淧aying her bill for two months in advance, she left in her chauffeur鈥檚 car, as her blue Rolls-Royce would have been too conspicuous, taking with her several of her female employees to seek refuge in the south.鈥� (When she returns, she is unconcerned to live among Nazis at the Ritz, and de Courcy writes: 鈥淥dd though it sounds, to Chanel the war was an interruption, rather than a life-or-death conflict in which one had to choose one side or the other.鈥� At one point Chanel attempts to 鈥渁ct as intermediary in a peace settlement between the Allies and the Axis powers,鈥� and she is taken at war鈥檚 end in for questioning as a potential collaborator. (She may have escaped retribution in part because she had offered every American GI liberating Paris a free bottle of Chanel No. 5.) At the end, de Courcy notes that 鈥淗ow much or how far Chanel collaborated is still a matter for conjecture. ... What is certain is that while she was both pro-British and pro-French, she was above all pro-Chanel.鈥澛�

While some of her fellow jet-setters exhibit valor and loyalty throughout the war, the book鈥檚 characters who represent the best of the Riviera tend to be the ones who never would have appeared in the society pages.聽

Some of their stories are drawn from the files of Yad Vashem, the Holocaust remembrance center in Jerusalem, and from papers and oral histories in other archives.聽

They include the desperate bravery of characters like Henri Korb, a young Jewish man who used the 鈥渟low and tortuous byways of French bureaucracy鈥� to escape to Nice. He joins the Resistance, where, 鈥渁rriving in two Citro毛ns and threatening its guard with a Sten gun, they raided an arms factory in St-脡tienne for guns.鈥�

There are multiple diary entries from Elizabeth Foster, 鈥渁n elderly American confined for health reasons to her apartment in a smart part of Nice.鈥� She writes of the 鈥渢errible little notice鈥� that appears almost daily in the newspaper 鈥済iving the names of men shot by order of the German High Command.鈥� We see the chilling account of 600 Jews rounded up in Nice, where 鈥渃aptives were bundled into trains, with children as young as three separated from their mothers and the gendarmes using batons and hoses,鈥� shipped to a notorious departure point for the Auschwitz concentration camp.聽

The rich are different from you and me, as F. Scott Fitzgerald (another Riviera visitor) was credited as having said, and the book shows that holds true even in wartime.

When Enid Furness, the 鈥渘otorious鈥� and dazzling third wife of the fabulously wealthy Lord Furness, must boil down candles for soap, saving her scant food rations for her daughter and sick husband, she also unironically observes that 鈥淣ever in living history have women been so badly dressed.鈥�

It seemed a long time, de Courcy wrote, 鈥渟ince the day less than a year earlier when Enid had lain back luxuriously in her bed in the London Clinic after a facelift, her cheetah sprawled across her, seriously disconcerting the famous Sir Archibald McIndoe when he came to see how his patient was getting on.鈥� (In fairness, Enid also eventually helps Allied prisoners escape.)

De Courcy doesn鈥檛 judge her subjects, but seems deeply familiar with them, describing scenes with such confidence and intimacy the reader is practically viewing them through a peephole. Even for relatively minor characters, we learn vivid details about topics from their landscaping to their scandalous entanglements, from pets (one had a 鈥渧icious male lemur with needle-sharp teeth鈥�) to plates (Florence Gould, a friend and client of Chanel鈥檚, kept piles of 鈥渕arvellous Chinese flower-decorated porcelain鈥� in the pantry to feed notable figures like Matisse and Colette, while 鈥淸s]tacked in the silver cupboard were a dozen superb silver plates made in 1770 for Catherine the Great to give to one of her favorites.鈥�)

The book includes a lengthy bibliography and acknowledgments page, but specific footnotes would have been a treat: I especially wanted to know how de Courcy found the architect who employed 鈥渃unning and split-second timing worthy of a French farce鈥� to measure a client鈥檚 鈥渆normous rump鈥� for a slide that dropped from her chateau鈥檚 swimming pool into the sea.聽

The mix of humor and horror can be discombobulating, along with the piecemeal narrative: One character is introduced with a chilling prophecy about her fate, for instance; we don鈥檛 hear more until the prophecy is fulfilled more than 100 pages later.

Still, we are warned of this approach early on: De Courcy states in her prologue that she did not intend to write either a biography of Chanel or an account of the Riviera, but to just tell the story of the years when Chanel summered there. It鈥檚 a framing device of space and time, making for a fascinating kaleidoscope of a story 鈥� one that works because of the glitter of each individual piece.