The Secret of Chanel No. 5

by Tilar J. Mazzeo

  Those audiences were mostly female. Writes one film historian, “women were seen by Hollywood as the primary consumers of cinema11.” Everyone also knew that women found haute couture fascinating. So nothing could be more natural than to have films start borrowing from the conventions of the fashion show, which had been invented in the dressing rooms of Paris at the turn of the century.

  It was the final logical marriage of the theatrical display of the 1925 art deco exhibition with costume and interior designing. Art deco was a phenomenon in America12. The MGM artistic director Cedric Gibbons had attended the Paris exposition, and his interpretation of the new modernist style in the 1925 film Our Dancing Daughters, with Joan Crawford, set off a fashion in the United States for everything French and art deco. Despite the fact that Chanel No. 5–perhaps the quintessential art deco fragrance–had been curiously absent from the exposition, “Chanel” was already the epitome of this new Style Moderne in the minds of many.

  When it came to marketing fashion, Sam Goldwyn also saw a golden opportunity. He would draw women to the movies by having his stars wear only the latest cutting-edge Parisian designs. In that world of couture, no one had more cachet and verve than Coco Chanel. Come to Hollywood, he said. Dress my starlets. And he offered her the staggering sum of a million dollars–the equivalent of over $75 million today13–if she would take just two trips a year to California and design costumes for his stars.

  Understanding a good business opportunity when she saw one, Coco Chanel took the contract and headed for the United States in the winter of 1931. For a second time in the history of Chanel No. 5, Dmitri Pavlovich had been behind an introduction crucial to Coco’s success. According to an article in Collier’s magazine in 1932, “The Grand Duke14 Dimitri, of the Romanoffs, quite casually introduced Samuel Goldwyn, of the movies, to [Mademoiselle] Gabrielle Chanel of Chanel. Pleasant talk, pleasant compliments, big inspiration, big contract–and the great Chanel has agreed to come to Hollywood to design clothes for the movies. Admittedly, it’s a gamble, but on a million-dollar scale.”

  Still, Coco Chanel was dubious about the dazzle of the big screen and California. After all, she had once dreamed of a career on the stage, and she had determinedly left that life behind. But for a million dollars, she was willing to take a trip to “see what the pictures have to offer me and what I have to offer the pictures15.”

  By then, Coco had another reason for being curious about the world of the movie industry. That winter, she had a new lover, and this time he was a man who had Hollywood connections. She had thrown herself into a liaison with the fashion illustrator, political satirist, and Hollywood set designer Paul Iribe, the illustrator and sometime-journalist who had famously sketched the dresses of her competitor Paul Poiret.

  Coco Chanel and Paul Iribe had known each other for decades16, and they had an entire circle of friends in common, including Misia Sert, Igor Stravinsky, Jean Cocteau, Sergei Diaghilev, and many of the Russian exiles associated with the Ballet Russes in the 1910s and 1920s. In fact, the connections between them went back even further. Paul Iribe’s first wife, the famed vaudeville actress Jeanne Dirys17, had worn hats created by her friend–another onetime showgirl–Coco Chanel.

  To their friends, it was a bizarre connection, because, when it came to fashion, Coco Chanel and Paul Iribe had radically different sensibilities. In his polemical 1929 antimodern design treatise Choix, Iribe had attacked the revolutionary “emancipated” and international style her work epitomized, complaining that it was part of the degeneration of French culture. It hardly seems, then, that Paul Iribe would have been the person to turn to for career advice and supportive conversation. But he had worked for several years at some of the big studios, and, in advance of the Hollywood tour, Coco reconnected with her old acquaintance to get his perspective on the film industry. Sparks flew, and they quickly became lovers. In fact, as soon as he could get a divorce from his wife, an unlucky heiress named Maybelle, they planned to get married.

  It all happened suddenly, and, within a year of beginning their liaison, things were serious. By Coco Chanel’s own testimony, however, it was a strange and sometimes tortured relationship. “My nascent celebrity,” she later told a friend,18

  had eclipsed his declining glory. … I represented a Paris that he could never possess, dominate. … Iribe loved me … with the secret wish to destroy me. He longed for me to be crushed and humiliated, he wanted me to die. It would have given him great pleasure to see me belong to him totally, poor, reduced to helplessness, paralyzed. … He was a creature who was very perverse, very affectionate, very intelligent, very self-interested, with an extraordinary refinement. … My history tortured him.

  Her celebrity at the beginning of the 1930s was hardly “nascent,” but no one doubted that it was an astonishing attachment. Coco’s friends thought Iribe was devilish and couldn’t understand it. As always for Coco, her past troubled him. One thing that doesn’t seem to have unsettled her about the love affair, however, was Iribe’s politics, which flirted with a peculiar brand of proto-fascist nationalism. His views were only marginally less narrow than those of another former lover, the Duke of Westminster19, and by now those narrow politics probably reflected her own. The history of Chanel No. 5 would soon become dangerously embroiled with them.

  For Sam Goldwyn, bringing the famous Coco Chanel to America was all about the publicity, and he was delighted with the media blitz that surrounded her arrival in the United States. He had arranged for her to travel in high style–and very visibly–from New York to Los Angeles on a special white luxury train. Before she departed, Time magazine reported on March 16, 1931, “In Manhattan20 famed stylist Gabrielle (“Coco”) Chanel, who is on her way from her Paris shops to Hollywood to design clothes for cinemactresses, received newsgatherers. She was attired in red sports clothes and wore a five-strand pearl necklace, ten bracelets.” Cameras and admirers surrounded her. She had come to the great department stores of New York to see her designs on display and to give them her stamp of approval. And she stopped at the perfume counter to see that they had plenty of Chanel No. 5.

  What words of wisdom did Coco Chanel have for American women about fashion? It wasn’t hemlines or jersey suits that she mentioned. On her mind was perfume–a perfume that, technically, she had given up the right to control a half-decade earlier. Women, she once again told the press, should not wear floral scents. It was one of her stock lines about fragrances. They needed something modern, something composed, and she could recommend only Chanel No. 5. Not that anyone needed the recommendation. It was already a bestseller and one of the hallmarks of her fame.

  The problems between Coco Chanel and the partners had been simmering in the background since as early as the mid-1920s, but in the aftermath of her trip to Hollywood her unhappiness intensified. From this point forward, a bitter–and sometimes explosive–resentment would define her relationship with the partners and with the product she had created. Having helped to establish the reputation of Chanel No. 5 and its position in the world market, having launched it and trusted the partners at Les Parfums Chanel to bring it to the attention of the world and nurtured it with her personal celebrity throughout the 1920s, she would spend the next several decades doing everything she could to wrest control of it from the investors.

  By the early 1930s, Coco Chanel had also begun to feel that, in giving up control of Chanel No. 5, she had lost something terribly important. She had nagging doubts about the bargain she had brokered. She started to think that maybe she had even been tricked. Now, having seen just how popular Chanel No. 5 had become in that vast American market, she was certain. This conviction signaled the end of whatever true partnership she had enjoyed with the men at Les Parfums Chanel. She wanted control over her fragrance.

  If that didn’t succeed, she was prepared to destroy it.

  TWELVE

  A BROKEN PARTNERSHIP

  It was the decade from 1925 to 1935 that first turned Chanel No. 5 into the signatur
e Chanel perfume, although that’s not the same as its becoming a cultural icon. That would come later. The success of the first decade, however, was by any account spectacular. Despite the confusing marketing and the plethora of Chanel perfumes with all those numbers, this one scent came to the foreground during the most profound economic crisis in modern history, and it has been the world’s most famous fragrance ever since.

  Notably, it was during these years that some of the first numbered perfumes finally began disappearing from the Chanel advertising1, and in the mid-1930s–as a belated reflection of its already singular success–advertising for Chanel No. 5 consistently began to appear alone. By 1935, when the world was still in economic turmoil and political tragedy was looming dimly on the horizon, it was being hailed in casual advertising as the scent “worn by more smart women than any other perfume.”2

  Finally the partners at Les Parfums Chanel seriously considered a campaign that would capitalize on the perfume’s continued popularity, and the first true marketing blitz for Chanel No. 5 was planned for 1934 and 1935. This time, part of the strategy was to highlight Chanel No. 5 in some of the advertisements as a perfume with a unique brand identity, apart from the other numbered perfumes of the Chanel fragrance line. The first truly “solo” advertisement of Chanel No. 5, as the most important Chanel perfume, comparable only to her legend as a couturière, ran in the New York Times on June 10, 1934, ten years after Coco Chanel had signed her partnership with the investors at Les Parfums Chanel. In it, a model wearing a gown from the new collection poses, and someone has tucked into the frame a silhouetted bottle of Chanel No. 5 perfume. The tagline reads: “Both are Chanel. Equally they express that taste and originality that have won Chanel her high distinction. For perfume is Chanel’s other life. And in her No. 5 she has triumphed as significantly as in the most inspired of her celebrated mode creations.” By the time this advertising appeared, however, Chanel No. 5 had already triumphed for a decade.

  Tensions between Coco Chanel and the partners had been steadily growing. By 1928 the partners had assigned an in-house lawyer to handle their prickly celebrity designer.3 Now, the conflict between Coco Chanel and the partners was about to intensify significantly. Her celebrity and the trip to Hollywood had only made matters worse. During 1935, suddenly Chanel No. 5 was everywhere. It was making Les Parfums Chanel more money than ever. Not coincidently, Coco had been starting to feel that, in giving up control of it, she had lost something worth possessing.

  Although Chanel had named her own terms for the initial partnership in the beginning, by the time Chanel No. 5 was the world’s bestselling fragrance, she was convinced that she had been grossly cheated. From her perspective, Les Parfums Chanel–and the men to whom she had licensed her scents–was making a fortune off her name and fragrance, and, to the extent that her personal celebrity established the popularity of No. 5 apart from all those other early numbered perfumes, her frustration had some justification. She knew as well as anyone that the success of Chanel No. 5 didn’t come down to those newspaper advertisements, and it had always seemed as though the partners should be doing more for their share of the money. Perhaps she also had concerns about how the tenor of those advertisements in the early 1930s had changed the idea of Chanel No. 5 as a luxury. Certainly, that was a bone of contention later. Ironically, it was the new marketing campaign–which focused on Chanel No. 5 as an exclusive product and which should have delighted her–that set off the controversy.

  Part of the problem was a simple matter of dividends4. Coco Chanel owned a minority 10 percent stake in Les Parfums Chanel–the right to receive a check, essentially, for 10 percent of the profits as a licensing agreement. This new publicity campaign, however, cost money, and that new advertising investment naturally meant a short-term reduction in her profits. While the benefit of this strategy seemed obvious to everyone else, all Coco saw was that the amount of money coming her way was decreasing when she knew for a certainty that sales were flourishing.

  What prompted her outrage was ostensibly the extension of the Chanel cleansing-cream line, scheduled for 19345 as part of a larger effort to expand the sales of the fragrance further. Recognizing the potential for a broad range of Chanel No. 5 products, the partners saw that the product extension promised to bring in even more fabulous sales–all part of the new Chanel No. 5 marketing campaign.

  Coco Chanel, however, had other ideas. Cleansing cream now struck her as not precisely luxurious. She had also reached the point where she wanted a bigger share of the profits before seeing her name used on any new project–and she felt certain that this was a new project for the company. Les Parfums Chanel saw that differently.

  The language of the original contract she had signed licensing her products to the company in 1924 now struck her as ambiguous. Les Parfums Chanel had the right to sell products associated with the perfume and beauty trades: that was manifestly clear. The terms of the licensing specifically included only “make-up,” however, and she maintained that cleansing cream didn’t fall under that category. “You don’t have the right to make a cream,” she told the partners; “I demand6 that you give me all the balance sheets, all the books, all the minutes and reports, all the profits and losses of the past ten years during which I have been president. [Or] else, I will go to court.” Then Chanel–ever the suspicious businesswoman–sought a court order to prevent its production anyhow.

  This launched a public battle that would last five years, and it was just the beginning of conflicts between Coco Chanel and Les Parfums Chanel that would result, as her lawyer René de Chambrun later ruefully remembered, in literally more than a ton of paperwork gathered in files in his offices7. In fact, before the beginning of the Second World War alone, there would be three or four different lawsuits8, all over minor–but important–contractual details of this sort.

  Things heated up considerably in the autumn of 1933, when, rather than attend the board of directors meeting, Coco appointed her paramour Paul Iribe her representative. The result was disaster. The Wertheimers and the other men in the Parfums Chanel partnership were all from prominent Jewish families in France, and it can’t have helped that Iribe spent his time privately–and sometimes publicly–railing against the “Judeo-Masonic Mafia9.” By 1931, the Nazis were already the second largest party in Germany10, and its paramilitary branch, the S.A., had already begun openly attacking Jewish businesses. In 1933, Iribe launched a political magazine called Le Témoin–"The Witness"–and “In the first number, Iribe inscribed his journal in the line of far-right publications during the period11.”

  It was an era of rising nationalism and anti-Semitism, and Coco Chanel’s politics were also of the moment. Convinced that the partners were cheating her, she “developed a delusion that intensified her anti-Semitism12.” One of her relatives remembered Coco as an “appalling troublemaker” and told how she lumped the Jewish men with whom she did business13–Samuel Goldwyn, of course, among them–into three categories. There were the “Israelites”: the great Jewish families of France, among whom she counted the Rothschilds. In the 1930s and even the early 1940s, “Israelites” was still a religious category and not a racial one. Then, there were the ethnic “Jews,” and, in racialized French slang, the “youpins” at the bottom. About those terms, there was nothing neutral. Depending on her mood, she counted the men who controlled Les Parfums Chanel in one of the last two categories.

  In 1933, Chanel was the titular head of the company, but this had never been more than a matter of politeness. As long as she didn’t interfere with the business of running the company, it was smart public relations. But with things souring rapidly between Coco Chanel and the partners, the advantages were suddenly less obvious. Now, as a show of pique, she refused to attend the board meetings. Instead, Iribe was there as her representative–with full power of attorney. He was obstreperous and stonewalled the agenda. Worse, he knew nothing about the perfume business and infuriated the partners–who included not just the Wertheimer brother
s, who owned 70 percent of the company, but the sons-in-law of Théophile Bader at Galeries Lafayette, the Meyer and Heilbronn families, who controlled another 20 percent interest. At the end of the meeting, just to be difficult, Iribe refused to sign the minutes. Coco Chanel’s strategy seems to have been simply to prevent business from getting done, and Iribe was using her position on the board to do it for her.

  This resulted in the partners’ immediate decision to vote Iribe–and by extension Coco Chanel–off the board of directors at the end of the meeting14. The next step would be to remove her from the presidency. Since she was by far the minority partner, this was easily accomplished. The title had only ever been a courtesy, and her strategy had backfired disastrously.

  Stripped of even symbolic control over the perfume company to which she had long ago signed away rights, Coco Chanel was incensed. Her relationship with the partners deteriorated further when, at the end of 1934, they replaced the management team. Coco was convinced that the sole object of this corporate reorganization was to cut her further out of the company, and she retaliated by hiring the team back on in the couture division just to make an embarrassing public spectacle of it all.

  The timing of what came next also could not have been more emotionally complicated. The creation of Chanel No. 5 had represented an effort to contain the loss of Boy Capel. By the early 1930s, Coco Chanel’s lack of control over the company and the perfume seemed like losing him all over. Now, she was in love again and for the first time planning to get married. Perhaps if that had happened, Chanel No. 5 gradually would have seemed less personally significant. Instead, in the middle of a tennis match one afternoon, on September 21, 1935, she watched Paul Iribe die in front of her from a heart attack, still in his early fifties. In the aftermath of sorrow, she threw herself again into scent and Chanel No. 5. This time, she wasn’t intent on invention. She wanted control of the perfume, and she would do whatever she had to do to get it.