Hal Vaughan's Sleeping with the Enemy is the definitive account of Coco Chanel's wartime activities, built on declassified French and German intelligence files. It documents her registration as Abwehr agent F-7124, her 1941 attempt to use Aryanisation law to strip her Jewish partners of Parfums Chanel, and her role in Operation Modellhut — a 1943–44 mission to open separate peace talks with Churchill via an Abwehr channel. Vaughan treats Chanel not as a collaborator or a victim but as a strategic actor who saw the occupation as an opportunity to settle old business scores.
This is the book that broke the story of Chanel's wartime intelligence work, and it is the archival basis for the wartime material in this library's Chanel entry. For founders, the uncomfortable lesson is that the same qualities that make a founder effective in building — high tolerance for risk, willingness to work outside established channels, refusal to accept a bad deal as final — can, when the institutional order collapses, express themselves in ways that are legally and morally indefensible. Vaughan does not moralize; he simply shows what the documents say.
The book is also a masterclass in how an obsessive founder never stops trying to fix what she considers the defining mistake of her business life: the 1924 Wertheimer deal that left her with 10% of her own perfume company. She tried to undo it in the 1930s through French courts, in the 1940s through Nazi law, and in the 1950s through renegotiation. She never succeeded in owning control, but by 1947 she had secured 2% of worldwide Chanel No. 5 sales plus living expenses for life — a settlement that made her one of the richest women in the world anyway. The lesson is that a founder who refuses to consider any fight permanently lost can eventually win enough to matter, but the path she takes to get there matters to everyone around her.