Sleeping with the Enemy (Vaughan)

Book Reviews
Too many diplomatic documents are reproduced at too much length. Contradictions are not clearly sorted out. Vaughan seems to have felt as though his rich source materials could speak for themselves, but they don’t — and he doesn’t succeed in lending authority to the accounts of contemporary witnesses who were, undoubtedly, unreliable.
Judith Warner - New York Times Book Review


[A] compelling chronicle of Coco Chanel...a different Chanel from any you'll find at the company store...by no means the account of an emerging style but a tale of how a single-minded woman faced history, made hard choices, connived, lied, collaborated and used every imaginable wile to survive and see that the people she cared about survived with her.... Vaughan has gleaned many of the details of Chanel's collaboration from documents that were scattered for years throughout European archives.... It's an astonishing story...gripping...provocative...riveting history.
Marie Arana - Washington Post


Chanel's war years, as explored by Hal Vaughan, are as camera-ready and as neck-deep in melodrama as Quentin Tarantino's Inglorious Bastards, and just as hard to forget now that they're exposed.
David Darcy - San Francisco Chronicle


[Hal Vaughan] ably demonstrates that Chanel was far from an innocent victim of circumstance during the second world war but a fully fledged Abwehr (German secret service) agent with her own number and codename: Westminster (no doubt a nod to her one-time lover, the Duke of Westminster).... Vaughan, who writes with welcome economy and flair, deserves a lot of credit for finally unraveling the strands of Chanel’s deeply deceptive personality.
Tobias Grey - Financial Times


Sleeping with the Enemy sheds new light on Chanel's dealings with the famously tight-lipped Wertheimer family.... To this day, the family refuses to discuss Coco Chanel with the media, but Vaughan still manages to paint an engrossing portrait of the dealings between the two.
New Yorker.com


[Sleeping with the Enemy] distinguishes itself from the many other Chanel biographies by tackling the dicey subject of Gabrielle Chanel’s activities during World War II.... This is a frank and unsentimental portrait of a figure that fashion writers are nearly incapable of criticizing.... While Vaughan’s discussions of Chanel’s contributions to fashion add nothing new to the extensive literature on her, he more than makes up for it with his impressive research and the never-before-seen information that he has unearthed about her wartime activities... What Sleeping with the Enemy offers is a more rounded look at a figure who has been over-studied and under-examined.
Isabel Schwab - New Republic


Hal Vaughan has done a stupendous job of research.... Vaughan draws a brilliant portrait...a terrific and fascinating story...wonderfully told, and full of great characters.... Vaughan brings her to life so vividly that we understand why no less a judge than Andre Malraux said that "from this century in France only three names will remain: de Gaulle, Picasso, and Chanel."... It is that rarest of good reads, a biography about a famous person with a surprise on every page. Nancy Mitford, I think, would have loved it, and written a wonderful letter to Evelyn Waugh about it!
Mchael Korda - Daily Beast


Tenacious digging into secret wartime records reveals a worsening case for the legendary French designer. Well rendered by Vaughan...a sorry story of war-time collaboration, exacerbated by the lack of reckoning during her lifetime.
Kirkus Reviews