The Secret of Chanel No. 5

by Tilar J. Mazzeo

  EIGHT

  THE SCENT WITH A REPUTATION

  Chanel No. 5 might not have been the only perfume named after Coco’s favorite number to launch in 1921. This story has just as much to do with Coco’s belief in her own good luck as it does with the pleasure she took in a bit of gambling. It was a friendly contest that she won handily. Later, however, there were moments of regret and loss that came with it. Her wager should have made Coco Chanel realize just how intimate her connection with this new signature perfume really was.

  One of her friends in the fashion business was a couturier and former military officer named Edward Molyneux, who had just opened his atelier in Paris, first at number 14 and, later, at number 5, rue Royale. Coco Chanel had long been at ease with men of his experience–they had been, after all, her first admirers and lovers in the dance halls of provincial France. She and Molyneux also shared a certain sense of chaste minimalism1 that would make him one of the most famous fashion designers of the 1920s and 1930s.

  That winter they hit upon a bit of friendly competition. Each would launch on precisely the same day a perfume with the same name, and the contest would be to see who would be more successful. She was being sly and more than a bit superstitious when she suggested number five–her lucky number. There was no harm in stacking the decks in favor of good fortune.

  Edward Molyneux did, in fact, launch a perfume called Numéro Cinq–"number five.” Rare bottles of it still survive, and, depending on the date of its first production, it may be the first modern oriental in perfume history. As Luca Turin writes2:

  [Edward Molyneux’s] Numéro Cinq is surpassingly beautiful and strange, the only example I know of an iris oriental. Assuming the fragrance wasn’t changed, the uncertainty about its age then becomes as exciting as the discovery of an Egyptian mummy clutching an iPod. 1921 is when the first oriental, Coty’s Emeraude, came out. 1925 is the birth date of its famous successor Shalimar. If Molyneux’ [Number] 5 dates from 1921, perfume history needs to be rewritten.

  In fact, archives reveal that Shalimar was invented and briefly launched in 1921 as well, only deepening the enigma. About Numéro Cinq, nothing is certain. Some believe that it was launched, as planned, at the same time as Coco Chanel’s No. 5 in 1921. Others believe that Molyneux didn’t release his fragrance–along with perfumes Number 3 and Number 14–until a few years later. The whole thing is shrouded in more than a bit of mystery, and those who knew the facts never put them on the record.

  Two things are certain. First, there’s no debating just who won this little entrepreneurial contest. Second, Coco Chanel’s changing attitude toward Molyneux’s Numéro Cinq perfume speaks volumes about the instant fame of Chanel No. 5–and about her passionate identification with it. In the beginning, a wager over two number-five perfumes seemed like an amusing bit of innocent competition. It didn’t take long, though, for Coco to lose her sense of humor.

  What happened, of course, was that in the space of a few short years Chanel No. 5 became successful beyond all imagining. Suddenly, she didn’t want anyone else riding on her coattails. Coco Chanel now insisted that Molyneux change the name of his perfume. Everyone in the world of fashion knew that Chanel’s signature scent already had a cult following, especially among the trendsetting beautiful young things who already called themselves flappers, and these fashionable trendsetters weren’t exactly rushing out to buy Molyneux’s Numéro Cinq perfume. It was Chanel’s No. 5 that everyone coveted, and she hardly needed to bother. However, Coco’s possessiveness was also legendary. In the end, this change of heart would be the beginning of a pattern of having second thoughts about business deals and entrepreneurial gambles–a pattern that would cause her, especially with Chanel No. 5, no end of trouble.

  Molyneux found her ire amusing. In fact, he couldn’t resist the opportunity to needle his quick-tempered competitor. Mademoiselle Chanel was upset at his calling his perfume Numéro Cinq, he told his customers. With a bit of sly irony, he began simply advertising it instead to anyone who would listen as Le Parfum Connu: the known perfume, the perfume with a reputation. What he meant, of course, was the perfume with that familiar number. Then again, Coco also had a bit of a reputation herself.

  When Coco Chanel began selling her signature fragrance from her busy fashion-house headquarters in Paris, the result was, as Misia Sert put it, “success beyond anything we could have imagined. … like a winning lottery ticket.” “Eau Chanel,” as Misia still stubbornly–but mistakenly–insisted on calling it, was “the hen laying the golden eggs.”3 For the first four years of its existence, from its commercial launch in 1921 until 1924, Chanel No. 5 was sold only from her shops through word of mouth. Coco Chanel’s boutique strategy had been a stunning success, and among the fashionable elite of Europe it was almost immediately–as Molyneux’s joke testifies–the perfume everyone knew.

  One of the most amazing things is the simple fact that advertising had nothing to do with it. Chanel always proudly insisted that, during those first years, she never paid for any kind of promotion–despite the fact that what is lauded as the first advertisement for Chanel No. 5 appeared in 1921. Astonishingly, it came from a man who had made a habit out of mocking her in public for years and making her and the rest of French high society the butt of some of his deliciously funny satires.

  The artist of this first Chanel No. 5 tribute was none other than Georges Goursat, who had skewered her and Boy Capel in his 1914 caricature “Tangoville sur Mer.” Coco Chanel never paid him for any of his promotion, and, for that matter, he was the last person she would have hired if she were going to hire anyone. Sem–as Goursat was more familiarly known–had kept Coco Chanel in his sights ever since that first satire depicting her and Boy in a randy embrace. He had roasted her again in 1919, with an even nastier cartoon called “Mam’selle Coco,” published in his album Le Grand Monde à l’Envers. That title translates roughly to something like “high society upside-down,” and in it Coco Chanel is a droopy-breasted woman with a distinct slouch, shown selling her summer hats in one of her resort boutiques. It is not a flattering portrait.

  He did always think of her, at least, as a genuine arbiter of fashion, though, and in 1921 even Sem couldn’t help but be impressed by what this upstart young milliner-turned-designer had accomplished. The result was one of the earliest and most lasting images of Chanel No. 5 in this perfume’s long history, a graceful flapper gazing up longingly and wordlessly at a floating bottle of Coco Chanel’s signature scent. It was lovely and elegant, and it captured perfectly the kind of reverence this perfume immediately inspired.

  That first 1921 sketch has been mistakenly lauded and reproduced as the first Chanel No. 5 advertisement, and it is conventional wisdom that the lovely young flapper in the image is Coco Chanel. This is wishful thinking, too; Sem was applauding the success of Chanel No. 5, not endorsing it. He acknowledged the phenomenon that Coco’s perfume had instantly become and nothing more. In fact, he was even impressed enough to go out of his way to visit Ernest Beaux in January of 1922 at his laboratory. Chanel No. 5, Beaux remembered, “was already a remarkable success4 … and it was the time of the Conférence de Cannes and the factory at La Bocca was the kind of thing that attracted distinguished visitors.” One day, Sem was among them. The caricaturist was quite taken with the beauty of the perfume, declaring in a witty punch line that Ernest Beaux was the new “Ministre de la Narine"–the “nostril minister” of France. He was willing to give Coco Chanel some credit, too. But he drew the line at flattering her personally.

  Tribute to the perfume Chanel No. 5 by the cartoonist Sem in 1921.

  The reason that the flapper couldn’t possibly be Coco is simple. The caricature doesn’t look like her, and, without a doubt, Sem knew perfectly well how to make Coco Chanel immediately recognizable to anyone who saw his satires. He had been doing it already for years. In fact, just two years later, in 1923, when it was clear that Chanel No. 5 was on its way to becoming a cultural institution, he published a wicked
ly clever cartoon that was devastatingly direct in its message. It was his second “tribute” to Chanel No. 5. This time, no one confused it with paid promotion.

  This next Sem image was a message about Chanel No. 5 and Coco Chanel’s illegitimate sexuality–and about the kind of “reputation” both had in the 1920s. It is only the second time in history that the perfume appeared in the world of print. For that reason, at least, it is a milestone in the history of this fragrance. It was also an image that would inevitably have consequences for how Coco Chanel would think about her signature scent.

  The picture in this caricature is a scene in Coco Chanel’s atelier, and it was a stark reminder to the French public of facts that Coco was keen to forget: that she started her career as a cabaret singer and was clearly nouveau riche. In it, the designer–this time clearly recognizable–is lounging on a divan, while a fashionable client is having an evening gown fitted by a kneeling seamstress. It is a seamstress who was likely, in this strange, new world, to have once been a princess. Everyone knew that, by the 1920s, Coco Chanel–who began life as a peasant–was employing those unlucky exiled Russian aristocrats to sew in her workshops. It all takes place inside the silhouette of that square-cut modernist bottle.

  If the image wasn’t enough of a jab, the words written below the caricature are an even more barbed little bit of humor. They are the lyrics of a song, written in imitation of the flirtatious old dance-hall tune “Ko Ko Ri Ko” that earned the young Coco Chanel her nickname. They read:

  The atelier of Coco Chanel by the cartoonist Sem in 1923.

  I declare quite shamelessly,

  There is nothing less coco,

  Than a design by Coco

  Perfumed with eau de Coco

  De Coco, de Cocologne.

  Her low-class social origins and history as a showgirl were no longer something Coco Chanel wanted to advertise. The entire thrust of the caricature, however, was at the expense of her peasant upbringing.

  In fact, the last line–a reference to Coco’s famous Cocologne–has another joke buried in it: a reference to the legendary land of Cockaigne (in French, the pays de Cocagne), the mythical land of luxury and ease5, the workingman or workingwoman’s dream, where everything in the real world is turned topsy-turvy. Here, peasants are kings and nuns take lovers. In this astonishing “New World"–the title of the collection in which this caricature was published–poor convent schoolgirls turned demi-mondaine mistresses luxuriate in riches and splendor, while a princess labors on her knees.

  For Coco Chanel, this image can only have been painful. While being caricatured was a mark that she had arrived in high society and had achieved a kind of chic celebrity, the point of the satire was still to poke fun at her–and she was a proud woman. Most difficult of all was the way that Sem had unerringly chosen her perfume as the way to ridicule her past–a perfume that privately captured something essential about her sensuality. It cut close to the bone.

  She had identified with Chanel No. 5 intimately from the beginning. Bringing together the scrubbed asceticism of Aubazine and opulent invitation of musk and jasmine, it was the scent of her past. The trouble was that Sem recognized it, and now those complicated affairs of the heart were being publicly satirized. Because the connections between Coco Chanel and her signature scent seemed so obviously intimate, the cartoon’s appearance had become a public occasion to tease her personally in a way that had never happened with her daringly understated dresses. This kind of mockery and the pain it caused must have been considerable.

  Part of what makes any scent potentially painful is the way in which it can serve for any of us as an intimate emotional repository. As Coco Chanel once put it, thinking of the loss of Boy Capel and her scent memories, “Suffering makes people better, not pleasure6. The most mysterious, the most human thing is smell. That means that your physique corresponds to the other’s.”

  Whatever we think about the value of suffering, Coco Chanel was right about scent. It does mean that our bodies somehow correspond. In the circuitry of the human brain, scent and our feelings for each other are also hopelessly entangled because there is a specific part of the human brain–"ancient,” if we think about it in evolutionary terms–known as the rhinencephalon. This part of the brain processes two things: smells and emotions. In fact, rhinencephalon in Latin simply means “nose brain.” As neuroscientist Rachel Herz writes in her book The Scent of Desire,7 “the areas of the brain that process smell and emotion are as intertwined and codependent as any … could possibly be.” This is why the scent of a missing lover’s shirt or a mother’s favorite perfume can move us so deeply.

  The basic structure of the human brain means that scent and sensuality are hopelessly–and wonderfully–caught up together in a network of desire. This was at the heart of Coco Chanel’s relationship to her No. 5 perfume. When a journalist just a few years later suggested that she invented the little black dress in order to put the whole world into mourning for Boy Capel, Chanel was furious. The idea was tasteless. She was equally defensive about her identification with No. 5; it had always been a scent about her most private emotional terrain.

  Those satires by Sem–the first public images of Chanel No. 5 in its history–had a powerful impact. They are an eloquent and silent testimony to the astonishing desire that this fragrance instantly inspired, but they are also probably part of the reason Coco Chanel set out to create some public distance between herself and her perfume. It was the beginning of an ambivalent relationship to her creation that would wreak professional and emotional havoc for decades to come. Chanel wouldn’t willingly appear in an advertisement for the fragrance for almost twenty years–not until 1937–and, even then, she probably didn’t know that she was posing for one.

  So it is easy to understand why, if this was the early “advertising” she was getting for Chanel No. 5, Coco decided to place the product in the hands of talented marketing professionals whose job would be to manage not just its distribution but its image. Soon afterward, she would do precisely that. She would always regret it.

  What she did next was an astonishing thing. Just at the moment Chanel No. 5 was becoming a stunning success, Coco Chanel signed away her rights to it.

  The decision would shape the direction of her life, and it would be at the heart of her increasingly tangled relationship with this legendary product. But Chanel was also a shrewd businesswoman, and the decision was a pragmatic one.

  Ernest Beaux had a research laboratory in Grasse, but he was not, after all, a manufacturer. Rallet was a relatively small perfume house, with its own line of fragrances to sell and bring to market. Creating perfumes for a fashion designer was still a pioneering enterprise. That first autumn of 1920, after their invention of Chanel No. 5, Ernest Beaux had produced for Coco Chanel just one hundred bottles, and Sem’s tribute of 1921 is testimony to just how popular her signature scent became and how quickly. Now, keeping pace with demand was a huge challenge.

  In the south of France, the laboratory at A. Rallet scaled up production, but there were limits. Coco Chanel was never good at accepting limits, though, and she had her sights set on something more ambitious. Once again her model was her friend François Coty, whom she had already known for the better part of a decade.

  While Coty had launched his fragrance business at Les Grands Magasins, Chanel had been doing business in the millinery side of her couture house for years with Théophile Bader, the man who owned the flagship Parisian department store Les Galeries Lafayette. Convinced that Chanel No. 5 was destined for the world stage, she asked if he would sell her fragrance there. Bader knew a blockbuster-in-the-making when he saw it. The only problem, they agreed, was supply: they would need enough perfume to meet the insatiable demand they both imagined.

  She needed, he told her quite bluntly, a partner capable of managing the large-scale manufacture and distribution of her perfume. Already she could see the obvious advantage, too, of someone to manage promotion and advertising. So, in the spring of 19
23, at the fashionable Deauville racetrack, Théophile Bader made one of the great entrepreneurial introductions in the history of the twentieth century. There, Coco Chanel met the industrialists Pierre and Paul Wertheimer, brothers who owned one of the world’s largest perfume manufacturing and distribution companies.

  The Wertheimers’ firm, Bourjois, had originally been founded by an actor and was bought by an earlier generation of Wertheimers in 1898, when it had already established a reputation for producing perfumes, theatrical makeup, and a bestselling face powder. Coco Chanel had begun her career as a showgirl, singing in the dance halls of provincial France. The Wertheimers had made their fortunes at Bourjois selling perfumes and cosmetics manufactured for the theater and vaudeville stage8. There was a kind of delicious irony about it, and they were willing to cut a deal with her. She piqued their interest.

  When Paul and Pierre Wertheimer took over the direction of Bourjois in 1917, the new focus was on a more contemporary style of perfumes, a move away from the traditional floral fragrances that had first established Bourjois as a major player in the market and toward the new, more modern scents that would carry it into the future. Their fragrance Mon Parfum was marketed from 1919 onward with the idea that “my perfume reflects my personality,” and it was the beginning of a trend that would transform both the fragrance industry and the world of fashion. Within just a few years, magazines would begin encouraging women to “analyz[e] one’s own personality to discover ‘its’ style,”9 and soon the idea followed that every woman needed a signature scent. When Coco Chanel offered her fragrance, backed by all her considerable celebrity, it was again a perfect match. Or so it seemed to them all at the outset.

  In the beginning, someone later remembered, there was only one lawyer.

  When they entered into negotiations, everything was agreed to very simply. Coco Chanel needed someone to manufacture and market her fragrance to the world, and she was ready to give up control over its distribution. This was a break from the past and from the emotional complex that the scent of Chanel No. 5 had represented. One had to be sensible and entrepreneurial. She was adamant, however, that control of the fashion house, which represented her future, would remain entirely in her hands. A partnership that infringed on her autonomy as a couturière was her greatest fear, and it shaped the plan that she suggested. In was an anxiety heightened by what she had seen happen to the people who did business with François Coty. His reputation as an unrelenting competitor who took pleasure in swallowing up the smaller companies with whom he partnered was already well known10.