The Secret of Chanel No. 5

by Tilar J. Mazzeo

  The partners’ daring coup in Grasse meant that Chanel No. 5 was poised to become even more famous. Crucially, it was one of the few–and perhaps the only–fabled French perfume of the 1930s still able to continue production at the highest levels of quality. At least as long as those supplies of jasmine lasted. Where the concrete to make Chanel No. 5 came from late in the war is another one of those tantalizing puzzles. Those seven hundred pounds were enough to produce perhaps 350,000 small bottles of the celebrated parfum,15 and sales figures of any kind remain a company secret. But given the immense celebrity that Chanel No. 5 had during the six years of the war, it’s difficult to believe that the partners sold fewer than sixty thousand bottles a year. That means, of course, that the jasmine supplies somehow needed to be replenished. Perhaps it kept coming from those plantations in Grasse. The black market flourished across occupied Europe, and the truth is that anything could be obtained if someone were willing to pay enough for it–and to take a high-stakes gamble.

  All we know for certain is that the prodigious sales of this perfume during the 1940s depended, according to someone who knew Coco Chanel, on one simple fact: that “No. 5 [was] probably the only perfume whose quality remained the same throughout the war.”16 This, in turn, meant that Chanel No. 5 would become, in an era of rationing and making-do, the ultimate symbol of luxury.

  The future of No. 5 secure, at least for the moment, the partners did show fiscal restraint during the war. Importing hundreds of pounds of contraband jasmine and opening new factories in Hoboken took considerable resources, and the partners at Les Parfums Chanel understood that any resources they had left in France–especially real-estate properties–were almost certainly going to be confiscated. Expenses needed to be curtailed. One of the cuts they made was to the advertising budget.

  The large-scale campaign that began in 193417–the first coordinated campaign to feature Chanel No. 5 as the Chanel fragrance–was scaled back in the early 1940s. Once again, it was a decision that leaves the marketing men wondering. It wasn’t the industry norm at that moment. Perfume advertisements from the period show that other fragrance manufacturers were advertising aggressively, and companies like Yardley, Elizabeth Arden, Helena Rubenstein–and Coty–championed their products intensively during the war18. Adding to the competition was a new breed of savvy American competitors. For the first time, fine fragrances were being manufactured in the United States, which still represented the world’s largest luxury market19.

  There had been talk at the beginning of the war of how the partners were preparing to launch a “vast publicity campaign to showcase No. 520.” In 1939 and 1940, there had been a flurry of significant advertising. By 1941, however, all that had been cut back dramatically, and the archives of 1943 and 1944 don’t contain the record of even a single advertisement. Perhaps that was because the partners at Les Parfums Chanel soon realized that it simply wasn’t necessary.

  There was almost no print advertising. Yet, from 1940 to 1945, perfume sales in the United States increased tenfold21; once again without a great deal of expensive advertising, Chanel No. 5 flourished. That was because the partners at Les Parfums Chanel had a second stunning entrepreneurial insight that may have been the reason they decided pouring hundreds of thousands of advertising dollars into promoting Chanel No. 5 was superfluous. It was so simple. It was beautiful, really. One single brilliant insight, more than anything else, transformed Chanel No. 5 from being simply the world’s bestselling perfume into a “goddamned cultural monument.”

  The partners’ new plan in New York was to negotiate distribution of the fragrance through the United States Army, where it was sold tax-free through the military commissaries around the world during the war, along with other luxury products and basic supplies.

  Selling a luxury product through the commissary post exchange–known to a generation of veterans simply as the “PX"–was a potentially risky strategy, however. The sales through the commissaries might easily have destroyed the prestige of the product, because Chanel No. 5 would be sitting there on the shelves with chocolate bars and soap powder. There was something five-and-dime about it.

  In the beginning, however, that might have been part of the attraction to some of the partners at Les Parfums Chanel. Théophile Bader, who still held an important 20 percent share in the company, had won his immense fortune not in the fragrance business but as the owner of the prestigious Galeries Lafayette, one of France’s largest department stores. By the early 1930s, he was leading the way in introducing a wider model to France with popular new prix-unique chains like Monoprix and the now-forgotten Lanoma22. The world of consumer sales was changing, and the partners at Les Parfums Chanel weren’t shy about embracing this new model of innovation. With the introduction of the small and less prohibitively expensive purse-sized flacons, they had been reaching out to the middle-class consumer since the late 1920s. It was the natural evolution of a strategy to do precisely what they had promised in the beginning: to bring the Chanel perfumes to a wide international market. But it was a risk. The trading-post style of the commissary didn’t evoke the image of luxury and high fashion.

  The partners at Les Parfums Chanel went ahead anyhow. And in the 1940s, they were proven right. Mass marketing Chanel No. 5 didn’t destroy the prestige of the fragrance. Instead, it transformed Chanel No. 5 into a symbol of everything that had been lost and everything those soldiers and their girls at home, all those nurses on the front lines, hoped still might be saved. It was part of a world before the war, a world of glamour and beauty that somehow had survived. It became the ultimate symbol of France, part of what everyone was fighting for. In an oral history of World War II, one American wartime nurse later remembered that it was one of the few souvenirs she brought back home with her. “I couldn’t bring back an awful lot,” she said. But there was one thing she treasured23: “Chanel, you know, the perfume.”

  In the end, No. 5's continued success was contingent upon somehow maintaining the quality of the perfume, and that depended, as the partners had known all along, on the rare plant materials from Grasse. It remained a luxury even as all other comforts of living vanished, and this status as a luxury–as something untouched by this era of losses–was part of the magic and the desire. It was this idea of making the perfume available through the United States Army, though, that catapulted the fragrance to a new level of cultural celebrity. Like the perfume itself–a balance of sexy florals and fresh-scrubbed aldehydes–it was the embodiment of an essential contradiction: something at once completely familiar and exclusively luxurious. At another moment, where and how Chanel No. 5 was sold might have mattered more. In fact, in time, it would matter crucially. During the chaotic years of the Second World War, however, quality trumped venue effortlessly. No one expected to find opulent boutiques and glitzy showrooms in a war zone.

  Given how expensive it had become to maintain Chanel No. 5's quality, however, the partners needed to raise funds to open that new production facility and resume advertising. Their competitor Estée Lauder in the beginning even helped the brothers24–now busily developing their satellite American corporation called Chanel, Inc.–to finance it.

  More than that, though, the partners were going to need to fight to retain control of Les Parfums Chanel. Before fleeing France in the spring of 1940, they had already taken important preparatory steps by doing something that demonstrated even greater powers of intuition. The Jewish partners of Les Parfums Chanel had sold their shares of the business to a daredevil pilot and industrialist named Félix Amiot25. Needless to say, they hadn’t asked Coco Chanel’s permission. They had already been engaged in a private war with her for half a decade. They had no trouble imagining to what lengths she was prepared to go in Paris.

  FOURTEEN

  COCO AT WAR

  Back in Paris, Coco Chanel was getting ready to play a deep and dirty game of business and politics. Determinedly at war with her exiled partners, she saw an opportunity.

  Under the laws of
the Third Reich, Jewish property was subject to confiscation, and her partners at Les Parfums Chanel were Jewish. It was her chance to break the contract she had signed giving up her rights to control the fragrance business. In fact, it was a chance to take over Les Parfums Chanel altogether.

  She might have resorted to such tactics in time regardless, but it was the sale of Les Parfums Chanel in October of 1940 that set Coco Chanel hurtling into motion. The ownership of a 70 percent stake in the company–the controlling share, she couldn’t help but notice–had now passed into the hands of Félix Amiot, who was both French and, more important, Aryan. She knew that sale was just an illusion.

  The occupying German forces, along with their French administrative collaborators1, suspected that it was just an illusion, too. Perhaps there were whispered rumors about the massive bribes Félix Amiot reputedly paid to grease the wheels of this particular transaction. In the next few months there was a full-scale investigation, and it was in all the newspapers. Amiot was hauled in for questioning by storm troopers, who warned him bluntly what everyone suspected: “You have bought the Bourjois and Chanel perfumeries2. But it’s just a compliance sale. The Wertheimers are your friends and associates. You are their front man. This is naïve and dangerous for you.”

  Coco Chanel couldn’t resist seizing the opportunity. On May 5, 1941, she wrote a letter, addressed to the provisional administrator–the man charged with determining who would receive business property left by anyone who had fled France. Parfums Chanel, she explained, was worth more than four million francs–over seventy million dollars in today’s numbers3–and “it is still the property of Jews4.” It had been, she claimed, legally “abandoned” by the owners.

  She knew it had been abandoned under the terms of the statutes, because she had presided in the partners’ absence over the Les Parfums Chanel board meeting where she had passed just such a resolution. She attempted to install a man named Georges Madoux as the temporary head of the company. He had worked until 1931 as the commercial director at Les Parfums Chanel5 and had later maintained close connections with Coco’s couture house. Now, in his role as a government agent, Madoux had been charged with reassigning ownership of Jewish businesses. He was in her pocket, and, unsurprisingly, it was his assessment that “the company of Parfums Chanel is still a Jewish business.” As one historian puts it, Coco Chanel and the administrator “appreciated each other.”6

  Since the stated mission of the administrator’s office was to cede property of this sort “to Aryan subjects,” she was writing to ask for complete ownership of the company. “I have,” she wrote, “an indisputable right of priority7 … the profits that I have received from my creations since the foundation of this business … are disproportionate … [and] you can help to repair in part the prejudices that I have suffered in the course of these last seventeen years.” She still thought of Pierre Wertheimer, in particular, as “that bandit who screwed me8.”

  What Coco Chanel sought was for the government of occupied France to annul the recent sale of the company to an Aryan other than herself. But the partners at Les Parfums Chanel were smart, and they were businessmen. They understood what the laws of wartime France meant, and, anticipating this maneuver before it was too late, they had worked out a solution. They had sold the company to Amiot before they ever left France, although Coco Chanel hadn’t known that. He had agreed to hold it for them during the war. As early as May 1, 1940, “any presence of Pierre and Paul [Wertheimer] in the capital of the company had officially disappeared.”9 In order to backdate the stock transfers that would “ma[k]e indisputable the purchase of the business,” they probably had to bribe German officials10, but they had managed it.

  Félix Amiot was loyal to the partners at Les Parfums Chanel, but he was hardly a model of virtue either. As one historian summarizes it, the Wertheimer family:

  bought almost 50 percent of an airplane propeller company11 run by a French engineer (and an Aryan) named Félix Amiot. When Chanel betrayed them, the Wertheimers signed Les Parfums Chanel over to Amiot, a collaborator who sold arms to the Nazis. … When the war was over, Amiot gave the company back to the Wertheimers; helping them “saved his little neck” from the revenge-seeking Allies, Alain Wertheimer told Forbes.

  In the end, the sale survived. The German investigator, a certain Herr Blanke, decided that Les Parfums Chanel could not be considered a Jewish business. Coco Chanel had lost another battle with her partners. The government–encouraged by a well-placed inducement or two, almost certainly–upheld the new ownership of the company, finding that “the perfume company of Bourjois [of which Les Parfums Chanel was a part] has passed to Aryan hands in a manner that is legal and correct.”12 It was a transfer dated to to the first months of 1941. Even then, not everyone in occupied France was content to let the matter rest. In February of 1942, the case was reopened, and Félix Amiot was once again subjected to a long interrogation13. In fact, his position throughout the war must have been precarious. He was allowed to run Les Parfums Chanel and to sell No. 5 throughout the Third Reich, despite suspicions. But who knows what was demanded of him. Perhaps unsurprisingly, that was the year Bourjois perfumes released in New York a new fragrance: Courage. Whatever his other sins, Amiot had stood by his old friends in America steadfastly.

  Coco Chanel had tried to play dirty, and, surprisingly, given how the deck was rigged during those years, she still lost. The amazing thing is that she didn’t lose a great deal more, because, as the war drew to a close in the summer of 1944, her position was growing increasingly tenuous also.

  No one who lived in Paris in 1944 would ever forget how that summer ended, if only because the city’s inhabitants could still remember the uninhibited, alcohol-soaked years before the war, when flappers danced the Charleston late into the night, women smoked cigarettes, and there were boozy drives along the winding back roads of the French Riviera. These years–the 1920s–had been known as les années folles–the crazy years–and they had seemed to promise so much at the time.

  All that seemed like the distant past now, because the real crazy years had been the decades that followed. First had come the Great Depression, which had tempered the hedonism of the 1920s, and then a second terrible world conflict that destroyed it altogether. Here in the final year of that war, Paris remained occupied, and life under Nazi rule was cruel and unpredictable. Yet in the nightclubs, Édith Piaf still belted out sultry love songs, brothels were doing a fabulous business, and in the palatial Ritz Hotel on the Place Vendôme the party went on. Whatever else happened beyond its walls, at the Ritz there was still champagne on ice until it all ended.

  By August of 1944, the wait was nearly over. The liberation began on August 19, Coco Chanel’s sixty-first birthday. The week before, there had been rumors that the Allies were advancing on Paris, and, fearing an uprising of the local resistance, the Germans rounded up several thousand suspected French activists and loaded them on the final convoy of trains sent creeping from the industrial western suburbs of Pantin14 to the concentration camp at Buchenwald. The trains left not much more than a stone’s throw from some of the city’s renowned factories, including, coincidentally, the Bourjois factory where Chanel No. 5 had been produced for decades. In the last days of the war, Théophile Bader’s son-in-law, Max Heilbronn, was on one of them15. It was a cruel irony: Parfums Chanel was a company his family had helped to found, but under the laws of Nazi-occupied France it could no longer officially be theirs to manage. Its usine must have been one of the last things he saw that day in Paris.

  Meanwhile, the battle in Paris began in the streets, fought by the other thousands of men and women of the French Résistance, part of the underground Forces of the French Interior–known colloquially as the FFI, or “fifi.” For five days, Paris was an urban war zone. Finally, on the warm Thursday morning of August 25, the sound of gunfire stopped. Out of the silence, the ringing bells of the cathedral of Notre Dame echoed over the Seine16. As the Allies gained control of one neighborhoo
d after another, the other distant bells were added to the chorus. Soon everyone knew that the Germans had surrendered.

  As those in Paris that night remembered, what came after was simply the world’s greatest party, and the French “swept the [soldiers] into their arms, dancing, singing, often making love to them.17 … The lovemaking was so widespread that a Catholic group hastily ran off tracts addressed to Paris’s young women,” pleading with them to remember their virtue. It was all in vain. After years of living in an occupied city, restrained celebrations were the last thing on anyone’s mind.

  In fact, many of the city’s inhabitants had long ago jettisoned sexual discretion. Only one-in-four Parisian residents had enough food during those years18, but nobody could ration life’s most simple pleasures. On the streets of occupied Paris throughout the war, Frenchwomen watched as scantily clad German soldiers performed daily calisthenics in the city’s parks, and, small surprise, there were tens of thousands of war babies. Some have called the occupation not the crazy years but les années érotiques–the erotic years–instead.19

  Ernest Hemingway would always claim that he was among the soldiers who personally liberated the bar at the Ritz Hotel that summer day. He was there as a war correspondent, writing for Collier’s magazine, and, when the bells began ringing throughout Paris, what he remembered was the hard-drinking life of youthful abandon, when he and F. Scott Fitzgerald and a generation of American expatriates had imagined the city as their playground. On this of all days, he wanted to celebrate with a cocktail at the Ritz. When he arrived, the Germans were already in retreat, however, so he fired a few rounds of gunfire from the roof, freed from their imprisonment in the cellars several good bottles of Bordeaux, and made his way to the bar, where he greeted his old friend Bertin, the bartender, whose dry martinis were legendary.

  From the bar at the Ritz Hotel, the view faced onto rue Cambon, where, at number 31, everyone knew they could find one of France’s most famous landmarks: the flagship boutique of Coco Chanel. In those heady days, as soldiers poured into the capital and the American troops liberated Paris, “there was one souvenir of the city they all wanted20. An average G.I. only had to enter a perfumery and hold up five fingers, to buy Chanel’s classic.” Later, one British newspaper journalist claimed, “Not only was it the only French perfume the American G.I. had ever heard of, it was the only one he could pronounce21.” At the end of the First World War, French perfume had first become a souvenir symbolizing victory and elegance. At the end of the Second World War, it was simply Chanel No. 5 that everyone wanted. A year later, even the American president, Harry S. Truman, went looking for it22. In a letter to his wife, Bess, written from Potsdam, Germany, in 1945, he wrote that he had purchased for her many pretty souvenirs–but he was sorry, he couldn’t find her anywhere a bottle of Chanel No. 5.