The Secret of Chanel No. 5

by Tilar J. Mazzeo

  The caricature was a nod to the beginning of the tango craze that year in Europe, ignited by a bestselling book, Modern Dancing, written by the couple of the hour, Verne and Irene Castle8. Irene Castle was a scrappy socialite, an aspiring fashion designer, and, with her bobbed hair in 1914, already–like Coco Chanel–an early flapper, at a moment when the garçonne look was still shocking. The cartoon was also a pointed and rather mean-spirited dig at Boy’s decadent equestrian indulgences and a sly allusion to the lusts of the mythological centaurs, known in Greek mythology for their habit of brashly abducting women. After all, just because he and Coco were in love didn’t mean that Boy didn’t have a stable of mistresses9. And everyone knew that Coco had been with Étienne before Boy Capel had charmed her.

  Gabrielle Chanel and Arthur Capel by the cartoonist sem in 1913.

  A caricature like this was not precisely the sort of coverage in the fashionable press a conflicted young demi-rep–as women who were only “half reputable” were called–would desire, but in a way it was a sign that she had arrived. Sketches like this, however, would also leave Coco Chanel wary of the press and determined to control her public image in ways that would profoundly shape some of her most critical decisions about business–and one day the business of her Chanel No. 5 fragrance in particular.

  During the next four years, the years of the First World War in Europe, Coco Chanel flourished. By the end of them, she could afford to treat herself to a seaside villa in the south of France and a “little blue Rolls10.” She was a celebrity, and she was quickly becoming rich as well. “The war helped me,” Chanel later remembered. “Catastrophes show what one really is. In 1919 I woke up famous.”11 She had come a long way from the charity convent school of Aubazine and her days as a cabaret chanteuse.

  She had done it by learning not to turn down lucky chances. When the war ended in November of 1918, though, there was one opportunity that Coco Chanel had missed completely: perfume. That winter in Paris, it would have been hard to miss. For months and months after the armistice, the city was still filled with many of the two million American soldiers12 whose return home it would take the United States government the better part of a year to coordinate. While they waited, French fragrances were the souvenirs they all wanted. It was because of those soldiers that French perfumers became some of the wealthiest entrepreneurs in the world during that decade. Perfume was Paris. Paris was chic and sexy. The returning soldiers wanted something to show they had been there, something to help to remember it.

  The story of the fantastic rise of French perfume during the early twentieth century is in many respects also an essentially American story, because had it not been for the American market and the American passion for Parisian fragrances, the fortunes made would have been far, far smaller. That market would one day be at the heart of the century’s great passion for Coco Chanel’s No. 5 perfume especially–a fragrance that went all but unadvertised in France for decades after its invention.

  The interest in French perfume had been growing in the United States steadily even before the First World War, and large fragrance companies like Bourjois and Coty had begun setting up offices in the United States by the 1910s13. Now, these forward-thinking entrepreneurs were poised to become huge international successes with the frenzy for Parisian perfume that followed the armistice. No one had a story more amazing or more emblematic than the jaunty entrepreneur François Coty, who in 1919 became France’s first billionaire. His wife Yvonne, who had also made her start as a fellow milliner in Paris14, was a friend of the stylish and already celebrated Coco Chanel.

  If Paul Poiret and the fabulous success of his Parfums de Rosine first gave Coco Chanel the idea of linking a perfume line with a fashion house, it was François Coty who was now her real inspiration. Later, they would become rivals. Coty had the gift of an incredibly keen sense of smell and had stumbled upon perfumery one afternoon in the back room of a friend’s pharmacy, where rows of scented materials were lined up in simple, medicinal bottles. He sold his first cologne from the back of a pony cart to women in the provinces, and now, at the end of the First World War, he was one of the world’s most celebrated industrial magnates and a man of high culture. His perfumes were worn by czarinas at the Russian imperial court and by thousands of middle-class women elsewhere. In the burgeoning American market, Coty was quickly becoming a household name, and he was raking in a vast fortune. His story was one of a self-made entrepreneur finding fabulous success, and the enterprising young Coco Chanel, keen to make her fortune too, understood it intuitively.

  So, sometime in late 1918 or perhaps early 1919, Coco Chanel threw herself into seriously planning the creation of her signature perfume. Of the many possible explanations for how Chanel No. 5 came into existence, perhaps the most intriguing is the legend that a long-lost secret perfume formula was the basis for Chanel’s decision to produce a new fragrance in 1919. It is a story shrouded in mystery, and, were it not for evidence in the Chanel archives in Paris that affirm the formula’s existence, it would be hard to take such a romantic tale seriously.

  It was probably during the winter of 1918 that Coco Chanel received an excited visit from a friend, the bohemian socialite Misia Sert15, a woman whose great beauty was captured in paintings by Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Henri Toulouse-Lautrec. Misia knew that Coco was researching the launch of a signature perfume. They had talked about it already, debated bottle designs, and even planned how Coco would market it to her couture clients16–or so Misia always claimed afterward. Now, Misia had heard of an amazing discovery in an old library in a château in the Loire valley. There, during renovations, the owners had discovered a Renaissance manuscript, and among its pages was a recipe. It was a formula for the lost “miraculous perfume” of the Medici queens17, an elixir said to preserve aging beauties from the ravages of time.

  If authentic, both Misia and Coco Chanel knew that it would be an exciting discovery–and a fabulous way to promote her fragrance among her wealthy clients. After all, the history of perfume-making in France began at the court of the Medici queens18, when the young Catherine de Medici was sent to France as the bride of King Henry II. Arriving from Italy, Catherine brought with her a certain Renato Bianco, better known simply as René the Florentine, as part of her entourage. René became the first official perfumer in French history, and, from his shop in sixteenth-century Paris, he supplied scented aphrodisiacal potions and fragrances for the art of seduction. When those went wrong and lovers strayed unaccountably, some said he also sold the occasional rare and deadly poison with which to dispatch the competition–or the offender.

  This perfume recipe, however, was said to belong to Catherine de Medici’s cousin, Marie, who had also married into the French royal family and who was an even more committed perfume aficionado. In fact, it is because of Marie de Medici that the French village of Grasse, which started out as an artisan center for the production of gloves and leather tanning, became the fragrance capital of the world in the seventeenth century. As perfume historian Nigel Groom tells the story, she “set up a laboratory in Grasse for the study of perfume-making in order to rival the fashionable Arab perfumes19 of the time, for which she is regarded by some as the founder of the French perfume industry.” The queen was obsessed with scents and aromatics–and especially with their beauty secrets. Because she remained strikingly beautiful well into her sixties, no one doubted that she had found something magical.

  Now, an ancient manuscript with one of Marie de Medici’s perfumes had been discovered. Misia Sert urged Coco Chanel to buy it, and she did. She paid six thousand francs–the equivalent of nearly $10,000 today20–for the manuscript that revealed the secrets of this mysterious “cologne,” as light citrus-based scents were still fashionably called. Surely, Misia told her, it would be the perfect foundation for her signature beauty products. Coco Chanel must have agreed, because that summer she was apparently planning actively for its production. On July 24, 1919, company records show that Coco Chanel regist
ered a trademark for a product line that she planned to call Eau Chanel–Chanel water.

  Misia Sert would later claim that this was the origin of Chanel No. 521. She also claimed that she and Coco Chanel spent hours together designing the packaging and hitting upon the elegantly simple idea of using a common pharmaceutical bottle for the flacon. Perhaps if the turmoil in Coco Chanel’s personal life had not intervened in the autumn of 1919, Chanel No. 5 would have been invented earlier. But nowhere in the Chanel archives is there any evidence that Coco Chanel got as far as ordering bottles that summer. The only evidence that hints at the production of any perfume is the report of a mysterious undated receipt said to have been discovered in the Coty company archives as late as the 1960s, which shows that her friend François billed Coco Chanel for some perfume laboratory work. His wife, Yvonne, always claimed that when Coco first began considering the idea of launching a fragrance, François offered to let her use his laboratory for the development.22

  Perhaps that summer Coco Chanel had moved forward with some preliminary formulations and this is behind the story of the bill in the Coty archives. Today, there is no way of knowing for sure. Chanel, however, believes that the story of any connection between the Coty laboratory and Chanel No. 5 is simply apocryphal. François’s granddaughter, Elizabeth Coty, who tells the story in the biography of her famous relative, seems less certain. What is certain is that a perfume called Eau Chanel never existed–and, for reasons almost equally as complicated and circuitous, its scent could not possibly have been the inspiration behind Chanel No. 5.

  Even if the Medici manuscript didn’t lead directly to the creation of Chanel No. 5 perfume, it was a crucial preliminary stage in Coco Chanel’s thinking about the development of a signature scent. While she had set this ancient recipe and the idea of an Eau Chanel aside quickly, she was now convinced that the time had come to launch a couture perfume. She had missed the opportunity for fabulous fragrance sales at the end of the war, when American soldiers queued for hours outside boutiques in search of French perfumes, and she was about to make up for lost time.

  Fragrance was an industry poised on the brink of a massive explosion. Indeed, the 1920s and 1930s are still known as the golden age of modern perfumery, and Coco Chanel had an inkling of it. If she had launched a perfume in 1919, however, it would not have been Chanel No. 5, or at least not Chanel No. 5 as we know it. Her relationship to the fragrance also would have been entirely different at that moment, with vastly different results for the history of this iconic perfume. Because what stopped her from moving forward with a perfume at that moment would soon become part of the reason that she became doubly obsessed with finding the perfect scent–the precise aroma of Chanel No. 5.

  In 1919, Coco Chanel’s private life was in tatters. In truth, it had been painful and tumultuous since at least the autumn of 1918, when Boy Capel, nearly a decade into an intense and powerful love affair with Coco, announced that he would never marry her. It was a heartbreaking reminder that there was no escaping her beginnings.

  Being famous wasn’t enough to make Coco respectable. In the circles in which she traveled, nothing ever would have been. She would always be the daughter of itinerant peasants who was abandoned by her father to the nuns of a rural orphanage. No one would forget that she began her career singing risqué cabaret tunes for officers in the dance halls, either. Nor would anyone overlook the fact that she gained a first foothold in the world of high society as a wealthy man’s second mistress and as one of those shadowy and seductive demi-mondaines. Through talent and charm, she had made a brilliant career for herself. Now she wanted to make a life with Boy. “We were in love,” she later remembered, “we could have gotten married23.” He refused. He wanted her only as his mistress. Respectable men at the beginning of the twentieth century didn’t marry their illegitimate mistresses, even if one of those mistresses had become an international arbiter of high fashion and good taste.

  Just as the first wave of those American soldiers were lining up outside boutiques in Paris in the autumn of 1918, looking for luxury scents to carry home to their girls and their mothers, Boy confessed what they both knew had been the truth all along. No matter where his heart might lie, he was now engaged to someone else, someone demure and respectable. The kind of girl who wore the simple floral scents of tea roses or violets and whose mores, at least on the face of things, were modestly old-fashioned. Coco, he hoped, would remain his lover and confidante–but she would be nothing more. For much of that year, they had lived together as always in his Paris apartment. Then he married the charming Diana Lister Wyndham. Coco Chanel was thirty-six.

  It was a staggering betrayal, and Coco found herself facing an impossible dilemma. She knew what it meant to stay on as Boy’s mistress. She had done it long enough to understand perfectly. She would live forever on the margins of the lives of others. It meant lonely birthdays and holidays among friends, and the apartment they shared would never be their home. Leaving, however, was almost equally unbearable.

  By December, Coco still had not been able to make a final decision. She moved that fall into an apartment of her own in Paris, and the now-married Boy followed. Then, in the days before Christmas, he left for the south of France, to spend the holidays with his wife and her family. Coco Chanel stayed behind in Paris.

  The French call the seacoast along the Mediterranean the Côte d’Azur–the “blue coast"–and the roads there are famously treacherous. South along the coast, they wind in hairpin turns along the cliffs that hang over the sea. Beyond are the penetrantes, roads twisting through the mountains and pine forests that are still among the most dangerous in France. Drive along them, and it is easy to understand how treacherous they really are. A car crash happened late one night: the result of a blown-out tire and perhaps too much champagne as well. It was December 22, 1919, on the road from St. Raphael to Cannes, and Boy did not survive.

  “For a woman,” Coco Chanel would later say, “betrayal has just one sense24: that of the senses.” Alone in the bed that they had shared, in the weeks that followed, she knew despair, and she doubtless knew as well how the lingering scent in the sheets of a man you had loved can bruise the spirit. That winter, Misia persuaded the distraught Coco to come to Italy for a long vacation. From Venice, Coco sent a telegram home, asking that everything be taken out of the apartment in Paris. In the end, she would live in rented rooms, sometimes at the Meurice Hotel, but mostly at the Ritz. It was all a reminder of the magnitude of her losses, all too much to bear. She turned, instead, to scent.

  FOUR

  AN EDUCATION IN THE SENSES

  After the death of Boy Capel, Coco threw herself into the world of perfume. She wasn’t simply immersing herself in work and a new project as a distraction during a personal crisis, however. The allure of scent was something more essential. The perfume that she would create in the aftermath had everything to do with the complicated story of her sensuality, with the heartbreaking loss of Boy in his car crash, and with everything that had come before. In crafting this scent, she would return to her emotional ground zero.

  She sought something oddly contradictory. Her perfume had to be lush and opulent and sexy, but it also had to smell clean, like Aubazine and Émilienne. It would be the scent of scoured warm flesh and soap in a provincial convent, yet it would be unabashedly luxurious and sensual. In the world of fine fragrance today, a perfume begins with an idea–a “brief"–and if Coco Chanel had put into words what she was looking for in her signature scent, it would have been this tension.

  She was fascinated by the art of perfume and the story that it could tell about a woman. She was also a sharp entrepreneur. With all those Americans eager for French perfume and with her celebrity on the rise, she was betting she could make a fortune. When it came to her perfume–the perfume that she was still only envisioning–there was always at the heart of it all a conflict between the scent as an intimate, personal story and as something public and commercial. This convergence of her entre
preneurial dreams and private losses would shape both the scent she set out to create and her deeply complicated, sometimes even antagonistic, relationship to it in the decades to come. She knew already that the perfume would be her calling card–the product most closely associated with her name and her story. She was going to do this right.

  For Coco Chanel, precision was a religion, and she knew better than to commit time and resources to developing a signature perfume without first making an exhaustive study of the art and science and business of the fragrance industry. Those who worked in her fashion salon during the years of her great fame as a couturière would always remember how sometimes she would take a dress apart and reassemble it fifteen or twenty times before announcing it to be perfect and allowing it to leave her atelier.

  She had the same approach to scent. For the next year, scent became her passion. She traveled to southern France with friends and toured small villages in the hills not far beyond Cannes, places like La Bocca and, especially, Grasse, which had long been established as the center of the French perfume industry. These were favorite summer retreats for artists, intellectuals, and impoverished foreign princes1, who gathered here for the warm climate and the exquisitely scented breezes that blew in from the sprawling plantations of rose and jasmine and mimosa beyond the walls of these picturesque medieval villages.

  It was here–and perhaps in conversations with her acquaintance François Coty–that Coco began studying perfume seriously. As her confidante Lady Abdy remembered, “When she decided on something, she followed her idea to the end. In order to bring it off and succeed she brought everything into play2. Once she began to be interested in perfumery she wanted to learn everything about them–their formula, fabrication, and so forth. Naturally, she sought the best advice.”

  Coco Chanel was wise to have made a study of modern perfumery, because in 1920, when she was immersing herself thoroughly in the world of scent, the fragrance industry and the science behind scent were both changing in ways that would reshape the olfactory experience of the twentieth century.