The Secret of Chanel No. 5

by Tilar J. Mazzeo

  Actually, what he offered her was the position as his second live-in mistress. When Coco Chanel considered the options, her choice must have appeared quite simple. It had quickly become apparent to everyone that the young Coco, however lithe and charming, simply wasn’t talented enough as a singer to make a brilliant career on the stage. She couldn’t bear to go back to working as a salesgirl or seamstress, either; both meant a hard life with few pleasures. Choosing between becoming a kept woman on a rich man’s grand country estate and a squinting life hunched over one pair of torn men’s breeches after another wasn’t difficult. Besides, she liked Étienne. For better or worse, she chose life as a kept woman, and for the next six years lived as one of his lovers.

  High society in France at the beginning of the new century was still a world of codes and rituals, and, during those years with Balsan, Coco Chanel–a girl with peasant roots–learned to navigate them superbly. Among those codes, she quickly understood that none was more revealing than scent. There was a fine line between respectability and the demi-monde, and there were even different kinds–and levels–of mistresses. Perfume was one of the essential ways of making a distinction between them.

  Étienne’s official lover, the celebrity courtesan Émilienne d’Alençon, was at the apex of this hierarchy. She had been mistress to the king of Belgium11, and the French writer Marcel Proust immortalized her liaisons in his epic novel À la recherche du temps perdu, the famous scent-filled extravaganza known to English readers as Remembrance of Things Past. Émilienne was one of the so-called grande horizontales–the great horizontal women–of her era, and Coco Chanel admired her immensely.

  What Coco Chanel liked about Émilienne most was that, unlike so many of the other mistresses who came and went on the weekends at Étienne’s estate at Royallieu, where his male friends came to drink champagne and make love to women, she never smelled like a courtesan.

  At the beginning of the twentieth century, there was a notable difference between the scent of a courtesan and the scent of a nice girl12. Some aromas–like jasmine and musk, patchouli and tuberose–made a woman smell openly sexual, and only an actress or courtesan or demi-mondaine would dare to wear them. Respectable girls wore delicate floral scents of roses or violets. This was why the audience laughed so delightedly in La Jolie Parfumeuse when Rose, the pretty perfumer, punished her lusty would-be seducer in the back of her shop with more erotic perfume than he could handle.

  A woman’s fragrance told a silent story about her sexuality, and, for much of history, the connections between perfume and prostitution were nearly inseparable. According to archeologists, the world’s oldest perfume was made on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus13 thousands of years before the common era, and this heady scent–a sweet and woody concoction with hints of citrus and vanilla–was dedicated to Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of sexual love. Long before anyone ever thought of the atomizer, this fragrant oil was burnt as an offering in her temples, and it’s worth remembering that the very word perfume, after all, comes from the Latin per fumum: “through the smoke.”

  Also offered up in Aphrodite’s temples on Cyprus, however, were beautiful young virgins. The island was at the heart of one of the ancient world’s most famous cults dedicated to sacred prostitution14. In veneration of the goddess, girls were required to offer up their bodies to strangers once in their lives. It was one half of a ritual sacrifice. Burning large quantities of expensive perfume was the other half.

  Perhaps the reason the priestesses burned the fragrance in Aphrodite’s perfumed temples with such abandon was that its fumes were believed to be powerfully intoxicating and sexually arousing. Some people still believe that the central ingredient of this ancient fragrance–a plant resin from the Cistercians’ cistus or rockrose known as labdanum–is inherently sexy15. It is used today in modern perfumery because it also smells uncannily like another of the world’s most prized ingredients in the history of fragrance, the “floating gold” known as ambergris or “gray amber.”16 Ambergris comes from whale excreta, and, perhaps surprisingly considering those origins, it is also considered irresistibly erotic. Jeanne Bécu, better known to history as the celebrated royal courtesan Madame du Barry17, doused herself with ambergris in the eighteenth century and apparently both she and the king of France, Louis XV, were pleased with the amatory results. It all began in Aphrodite’s temples, though, and aphrodisiacs are named after the goddess of lusty pleasures for a reason.

  Since the beginning of its history, then, perfume has been associated with a woman’s sensuality, and, during her time as Étienne’s mistress, Coco Chanel learned just how important a woman’s choice of fragrance could be in how she advertised her sensuality. While rich and languid perfumes based on scents like musk, jasmine, tuberose, and ambergris came and went as an aristocratic fashion in the nineteenth century–so much so that in the 1810s the empress Joséphine doused everything in the palace at Versailles in the intimate smells of animal musk18 to arouse Napoléon–the lines were clear and unambiguous at the dawn of the twentieth century. By then, these kinds of scents were associated with just one thing: the “odor di femina of prostitutes and other women of easy virtue.”19 Everyone understood that “heavy animal-based … or jasmine fragrances,” especially, “were marked as belonging to the marginal world of prostitutes and courtesans20.” Women “of good taste and standing” wore “only [the] simple floral scents”21 that captured the aroma of a single garden flower.

  What Coco Chanel liked about Émilienne was that she broke the rules about a woman’s sexuality–and about a courtesan’s perfume. Émilienne didn’t arrive for country weekends at Royallieu leaving the aromas of jasmine and musk in her wake. She eschewed the perfumes that the other women of pleasure used in those days when even country châteaux didn’t have running bathwater to cover the scents of sex and bodies. To Coco Chanel, the scent of overpowering musk, with its hints of unwashed bodies, was simply dirty. She understood immediately that it was the odor of prostitution, and it was unbearable. So keen was her nose and so offensive did she find those perfumes that the way some of those other kept women smelled made her nauseous.22

  Émilienne didn’t pretend that she was a dainty ingénue and douse herself in shy violet aromas, but she refused to smell like the boudoir either. Émilienne–the elegant and cultured Émilienne, who could pass effortlessly among the kings and princes of Europe–smelled to Coco Chanel of just one thing: the scent of clean. She was sexy and beautiful, but she carried her perfume lightly, and there was always somewhere around her the fragrance of warm skin and freshly washed hair.

  The smell of something at once clean and sensual: that was the combination Coco Chanel admired. After all, there was also something distasteful in the idea that a woman could not be sensual or that sexuality itself was dirty. Although she had no idea in 1905 of creating a signature perfume–no idea, in fact, that she would become the celebrated Coco Chanel in the short space of a decade–she already knew that she was looking for ways to capture the essence of a new and different kind of modern sexuality. It was essential to how she thought about herself and her own decisions.

  There was something fresh and modern about Coco Chanel’s particular brand of frank sensuality, and it was part of what made her so attractive. She was far from being a convent prude, and she embodied a daring new kind of eroticism that the young men in the first years of the twentieth century found especially titillating. While the height of beauty then was still for voluptuous women with soft curves like Émilienne, there was a risqué fashion for women with the childish bodies known as fruits verts–green fruits23. It was a fashion fueled by turn-of-the-century pornographic fiction, with tales of the secret lusts of orphaned Catholic schoolgirls, and Coco Chanel fit the image precisely.

  In Coco Chanel’s youth, this boyish look was charged with a very precise kind of naughty eroticism that no respectable woman would have dared to display. As one historian notes, what was titillating wasn’t women who looked like men, “
but rather like children24.” It was scandalous then, too, that these “green fruits” were often associated with a liberated lesbianism. Throughout her life, there were persistent stories that Coco took many different kinds of lovers. With the publication of Victor Margueritte’s scandalously erotic novel La Garçonne25 (1922), it became a bohemian fashion. By the height of the Roaring Twenties, it was the look to which every young flapper–as these garçonnes came to be known in English–would aspire. It lives on today on the runways of Paris and Milan thanks in no small part to the celebrity of Coco Chanel.

  Someday, she would create the perfect scent for those flappers, too–a perfume that would refute all the conventional stereotypes about two kinds of women and the fragrances they could wear. It would be a scent that could define what it meant to be modern and elegant and sexy. Someday, but not yet.

  THREE

  THE SOENT OF BETRAYAL

  The day when Coco Chanel first began to imagine this perfume came much earlier than we might expect, perhaps as early as 1911. By then, she was already another man’s mistress. In fact, by then Coco was in love. She was already on her way to becoming one of her century’s great fashion designers as well. These developments were two small miracles for which she could thank Étienne Balsan in a roundabout way.

  During the years at Royallieu, she was known among the men and their mistresses simply as Étienne’s petite amie, his little friend, and she passed her early twenties lounging in bed until noon reading romance novels and learning to ride fast horses. Eventually, boredom struck. Besides, Coco Chanel had the sense to realize that she would not look young and boyish forever. Still dreaming of a glittering life on the Paris vaudeville stage, she considered returning to acting, but Étienne disapproved. With returning to the stage out of the question, she asked instead to take advantage of her knack for making pretty hats, and he couldn’t see the harm in letting her pursue a more feminine hobby. In 1909, with Étienne’s blessing, she set up a millinery shop, which she would run out of the ground floor of his Paris apartment. As the doors opened for business, Coco Chanel was launched in the fashion business.

  While Étienne thought Coco’s venture was a lark and a diversion, he was prepared to support her. But that next winter, when she asked for a loan to expand the business, which had been a success almost instantly, he turned her down flat. A former showgirl lover was one thing: it was scandalously and deliciously bohemian. A mistress who worked for a living in one of the trades was something quite different, at least in his aristocratic circles.

  Anyhow, by that time, they both knew she was sharing her bed with someone else. One weekend at Royallieu, Coco met Étienne’s rich English friend Arthur “Boy” Capel and was immediately infatuated. She liked that Boy smelled of “leather, horses, forest, and saddle soap1,” and, with the strange civility of two men swapping a mistress, Étienne and Boy agreed that Coco would become Capel’s lover and that he would financially support her.

  So, that next year Coco Chanel opened her millinery shop at the now famous address, number 21, rue Cambon in Paris, on a narrow street running along the back side of the Ritz Hotel. Only a decade or so later, the novelist Virginia Woolf would make the bold assertion that “On or about December 1910 human character changed,” bringing along with it sweeping changes “in religion, conduct, politics, and literature.”2 What Woolf forgot to mention was a change in the future of fashion, because Coco Chanel was part of that seismic shift in Western culture toward the modern.

  She already had her eye on a larger and more ambitious vision. Coco Chanel was probably also already weighing the idea that perfume would be a part of it. Because one of the other tenants in the building made dresses, the initial lease on her boutique on rue Cambon had in it a clause3 that specifically forbade the enterprising young milliner from using it to sell fashions. If she wanted to expand her business, couture in 1910 was not the obvious direction. In fact, there are hints that she had the idea of launching a signature fragrance perhaps a full two years before she ever sold her first fashions at new boutiques in the fashionable resort towns of Biarritz and Deauville. It’s a curious if minor point. But, consider: had she begun with fragrance, the story of the house of Chanel might have been astonishingly different. There might have been no couture, and history might remember Coco Chanel first and foremost not as the inventor of modern classics like the little black dress but as a pretty perfumer.

  Nor is it any wonder that in the summer of 1911 Coco Chanel’s thoughts would have turned to fragrance. Perfume was the story of the moment. By June, all of Paris was buzzing with talk of scent. Fragrance had already made the young Corsican entrepreneur François Coty, whose family traced its lineage back to Napoléon, one of France’s richest men4. His Parisian home was considered the center of all that was extravagant and fashionable, and tidbits about his opulent lifestyle were forever in the papers. Even more important, though, the most celebrated fashion designer of the moment, Paul Poiret, had stunned the capital that summer with the launch of his new perfumes–making him the first couturier in history to have a signature scent.

  The Poiret launch was a soirée at his Paris mansion, a costume ball provocatively called “la mille et deuxième nuit“–the thousand-and-second night. Inspired by the “heavily perfumed odalisques in Scheherazade,” it was a sultan’s fantasy5. All of Parisian high society was invited.

  That summer evening, on June, 24, 1911, the warm air was alive with the sound of low Persian music6, and the lucky guests who arrived at the entrance to the opulent Poiret estate were greeted with the wafting scents of oriental perfumes long before they ever stepped foot into a world of fantasy. Servants dressed in silken robes ushered three hundred of the city’s most glamorous socialites into a huge garden, brilliantly illuminated with glowing lanterns, and dotted with harem tents. Wildly colorful tropical birds perched overhead in trees; musicians played sultry beats somewhere out of sight; and, from her prison in a dazzling golden cage, the beautiful Madame Poiret played the role of a languishing odalisque entrapped in splendor. Everywhere there were the burning scents of rich myrrh and frankincense, the intoxicating smells of rare perfume, and glass after glass of sparkling champagne.

  The guests reveled in this thousand-and-second night of sensual pleasures until the small hours of the morning, and at dawn there were fireworks that lit up the skies of Paris. As the ladies departed–ladies who included all the most fashionable names in aristocratic and artistic Paris–Poiret, their host and the evening’s sultan, bestowed upon each a parting gift. It was a bottle of his first perfume, named Nuit Persane in homage to this night of Persian luxuries. The history of fragrance had never seen such a spectacularly imaginative launch for a new perfume, and all of Paris was enchanted.

  It was hard not to admire Poiret’s business acumen. Although he would deny such suggestions strenuously and always claim that he had thrown the party only for the enjoyment of his special friends, it was in fact a brilliant way of introducing the arbiters of fashion to his new line of fragrances, Parfums de Rosine, which he had finished preparing for launch only days earlier. The line was named after his daughter, Rosine, and the first scents took their names from the theme of oriental harems, with fragrances like Nuit Persane (1911) and Le Minaret (1912). The bottles of that first scent were decorated using motifs drawn from the window decorations that were the signature of his well-known boutique, in case any of the ladies was liable to forget the connection between his scents and his salon.

  In launching perfumes from his fashion house, Poiret became the first couturier in history to link design and fragrance. He had delighted all of Paris with his dramatic flair for marketing this novel perfume, and the newspapers were filled with descriptions of his extravagant party–and of the new scents that could capture its spirit. Less than a decade later, in 1919, the obscure fashion designer Maurice Babani became the second couturier to launch a signature scent7. Coco Chanel would be the third. And, when the time came, she would remember the flair for
which Poiret was everywhere celebrated.

  For the moment, however, Coco Chanel set any fleeting thoughts of perfume aside. She threw herself instead into her romance with Boy Capel and into the introduction in 1913 of a simple line of sportswear in her boutique on the coast at Deauville, where the rich and fashionable people of France spent their leisure time. The next year, the First World War began, and the uniforms of the volunteer nurses of the era inspired her to create, in inexpensive jersey fabric, a line of simple, chic, and liberating dresses for the upper-class women who had been part of her circle since her first days at Royallieu. Within a few short years, these new fashions had made her name and made her a small fortune. By the time the war ended, Coco Chanel was already a famous designer.

  In fact, by 1914 she was even well enough known in high society to find her relationship with Boy Capel the target of gossip and public teasing. That year, the celebrity cartoonist and illustrator Georges Goursat–usually known simply by his signature “Sem"–published a sketch of her and Boy dancing at the fashionable resort town of Deauville sur Mer, titled simply “Tangoville sur Mer.” In it, the polo-mad Boy Capel is satirized as a lusty centaur running off with the dazed milliner, who, in case anyone missed the identification, carries a huge hatbox distinctly labeled “Coco.”