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INTERVIEWER: Well, let me make it easier for you. Which side were you on? COCO CHANEL: On neither side, of course. I stood up for myself as I always have done. Nobody has ever told Coco Chanel what to think. A few days after Paris was liberated from the Nazis in August 1944, the most notorious fashion couturière in the world collapsed on a hotel bed in Switzerland after escaping the French capitol and certain death. How did an exhausted Coco Chanel get there and who helped her evade warring Allied and German troops? For 80 years, this incredible feat of courage, luck, and ingenuity in the midst of immense danger has been deliberately shrouded in disinformation and secrecy by family, friends, wary governments, risk-averse business partners, and fellow collaborators. But now, with the aid of new information contained in previously unreleased private French Resistance papers and a new assessment of discredited evidence from organised crime figures, what really happened to Coco Chanel during that fascinating and scandalous period of her life between 1944 and 1954 can finally be revealed. AUTHOR: Richard Wallace is a journalist and author. Having worked in Australia for the Fairfax newspaper organisation, he was posted to Europe in 1986 to cover the death of the Duchess of Windsor and the subsequent Geneva auction of her jewellery collection the following year. Leaving Fairfax, Richard joined the Independent shortly after its creation in 1986 at the request of eccentric founding editor, Andreas Whittam Smith. 20 illustrations

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RICHARD WALLACE has been expelled or threatened with expulsion from most of the institutions he’s been associated with. He was threatened with expulsion from his expensive school for not taking his university entrance exams seriously enough (he subsequently achieved the second highest result in the school’s history). He was almost thrown out of university for writing a friend’s final honours paper, but instead had his First Class degree downgraded in retaliation. As a junior reporter he was threatened with ejection from Wimbledon’s Centre Court press seats for clapping after a tense rally on set point. And he was ejected from the House of Commons press gallery for reading a book during a particularly dull debate. It’s little wonder he wound up in Public Relations and the Intelligence Services. He has so far avoided being ejected from The History Press, with whom he published The King’s Loot in 2024.

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