books ($2.10)

Two recent books read.

"Chanel" by Axel Madsen. Not surprisingly, I knew little about fashion designer Coco Chanel, but in reading recent books I saw references to her ambiguous (at best) stance during World War II when she stayed in Paris, and befriended a German spy. And that intrigued me.

The Madsen biography was written fifteen years ago, and I did not know if it would whitewash her, but it didn't. It portrayed her as a very talented and interesting person, who life was fascinating.

Basically, she was orphaned early and grew up in a Catholic orphanage, a fact she tried to hide all her life. She learned to sew and got jobs at shops of various sorts in the rural area where she was born. She tried singing and dancing, and met her first nobleman and millionaire and that started a series of relationships that continued throughout her life.

She was attractive, if not beautiful. She was always quite thin. She was bright without being intellectual. Her interests were wide, including interests in hobnobbing with the wealthy.

One of her male friends funded her first business, but she proved very successful very quickly, both as an entrepeneur and as a designer. Catering to the individual tastes of her wealthy clientele, bucking fashion trends, creating casual clothes in a fancy era (in part as a result of shortages during World War I and the need for women to get jobs), creating recognizable trademark designs and encouraging them to be copied by others, developing pearls as a jewelry of choice, and of course Chanel No. 5 perfume.

She had Jewish friends. She was clearly a French patriot. She hated war. She did not seem to object to the anti-Jewish practices of Nazi Germany, and seemed to feel that occupation would be better than war. she thought that she could end the war, as an emissary to her old friend Churchill, going with German support. It didn't happen this way of course.

After the war, she fell out of fashion. She had lost control over most of her business.

She had no children. She never married. she was quite interesting.