The Secret of Chanel No. 5

by Tilar J. Mazzeo

  In the months to come, Coco would discover why Chanel No. 5 had become something even an American First Lady coveted. The reason would make her wildly furious. That night, however, she had other things on her mind. At the Ritz Hotel in the days after the liberation, it was a scene of joy and wine and drunken celebration. Although she lived upstairs, Coco Chanel was not among the revelers. She hated the war and was glad that it was over. She loved France and its culture. But she was also proud, and, like a good number of other women in Paris, she had reason to be just a little bit worried.

  Before the celebrations had even ended, les épurations–the purges–began,23 and from the beginning it was a kind of wild and indiscriminate vigilante justice. Those who had helped the Germans during the occupation were attacked by mobs and sometimes summarily executed in the streets. In those weeks after the war ended, as many as twenty thousand women were accused of “horizontal collaboration"–of having slept with the enemy. As punishment, their heads were shaved, and their identity cards were revised to list their occupation as prostitutes. They were then forced to walk, barefoot and often stripped naked, through the streets of Paris, reviled and ridiculed, with swastikas marked on their foreheads.

  It was whispered that Christiane, the daughter of Coco Chanel’s old friend and now archrival, François Coty, was among those brutalized24. Although Coty’s grandson, Henri, had fought for the French resistance and was deported to the camp at Buchenwald at the end of the war for his efforts, what people remembered were the politics of her father. Before his death in the 1930s, François Coty had purchased controlling shares in two newspapers, L’Ami du Peuple and Le Figaro, and he used both as bully pulpits for his pro-fascist and anti-Semitic principles. They were painful times, and Christiane Coty was just one among thousands targeted.

  You could have seen much of it from the windows of the Ritz Hotel, and Coco Chanel, whether she wanted to believe it yet or not, had a problem. Christiane Coty had been humiliated on the grounds that she had simply socialized with German officers25–not unlikely, since the Coty mansion on Avenue Raphaël in Paris had been requisitioned as the personal residence of one of Hitler’s generals, Hans von Boineburg, during the war.

  If Christiane Coty had appeared too tolerant of the occupiers, Coco Chanel had fallen in love with one of them, an elegant and well-connected gentleman. His name was Hans Günther von Dincklage, and he was a German officer of the fascist regime and probably a spy, and, of course, also Coco Chanel’s wartime companion26. Some say they met by chance in the lobby of the Ritz Hotel in the summer of 1941, which had already been taken over by the Germans, and that the affair had begun when she asked him to help to arrange the safety of one of her nephews. Others insist that she had known him for years and been his lover before the war began. Whatever the case, she was in the good graces of the Germans, and Chanel No. 5 was sold freely throughout the Third Reich.

  Now, after the liberation, Coco Chanel had no idea where Hans von Dincklage was, and all she could think to do in the days that followed was to ask a German-American soldier if perhaps he would help her.27 He was a fresh-faced G.I., and she guessed that his knowledge of the German language might mean he would be assigned in the coming days to intelligence and interrogation. She was looking for someone, a friend, she told him. If he ever found him among the prisoners of war, would he be kind enough to let her know. All the young man ever needed to do was to send a postcard. Address it simply to Coco Chanel, The Ritz Hotel, Paris. It would reach her. As thanks, she did the only thing she could imagine. She filled his duffel bag with bottle after bottle of her Chanel No. 5 perfume. With it, he could buy anything on the black markets. It was as good as giving him gold and worth a small fortune.

  For days, Coco kept to herself, and all was quiet. Then, one day in early September came the inevitable knock on the door of her room at the Ritz. There were officers waiting, agents of the purges. She was, in the idiom of the time, a suspected collabo, and they asked that she come along for interrogation. When friends had warned her that the liaison with von Dincklage was dangerous28, she had indignantly dismissed them. His mother, she insisted, was English. If he were a double agent, that might have mattered. All that mattered now at the end of the war was that von Dincklage was a German and an officer. What if he was German, she insisted. She couldn’t see how it mattered. At her age, she wryly announced, when she had the chance of a lover she was hardly going to inspect a man’s passport29. About his politics, she never commented.

  The possibility of being paraded through the streets as a collaborator and whore was grim enough, but Chanel was, in fact, in far greater danger. She had done more during those years than simply carry on a romance with a German officer30 in Nazi-occupied Paris. Just that past spring, in April of 1943, when there were whispers of talks between Germany and the Allies, she had traveled to Berlin with von Dincklage and played a high-stakes game of what she considered covert diplomacy. There she met with Theodore Mumm, an S.S. officer named Schiebe, and Walter Friedrich Schellenberg–the powerful German officer best known to history for his memoirs of Nazi Germany, written after his conviction for war crimes. Declassified documents show that Coco returned to Berlin again in December of 194331. Remembering those meetings, Mumm later declared that she had “a drop of the blood of Joan of Arc in her veins32.” From her perspective, she was trying to help broker a separate peace between Germany and Britain. With emotions running high in Paris, a wartime trip to Berlin might have looked to others like treason.

  And even that wasn’t everything. There had also been that spring an ugly complication involving the German gestapo and Coco’s former employee Vera Lombardi, an Englishwoman with connections to the royal Windsor family. Vera’s husband was an Italian colonel now in fascist custody, and, thinking she would help the situation, Coco Chanel worked some high-level German contacts and–according to top secret memos sent between the United States government and the office of Winston Churchill–deliberately exaggerated her old friend’s use to German intelligence.33 Coco may have seen this as assistance, but, after her interrogation at the hands of the Gestapo, Vera saw things in a starkly different light. She wrote to Churchill, a family relation, that summer protesting Coco’s treachery.34

  All this seems to have caused a lot of trouble. And it’s hard to know precisely who was playing whom. Vera might have had some good reasons for wondering if she was a pawn in a larger game. Or perhaps she was involved in some ugly covert “diplomacy” herself. The British and American governments wondered about it and her possible fascist sympathies in some of those memos. At any rate, in order to establish contact with Churchill, Coco had the idea that Vera would help, and it seems that, when Vera refused, von Dincklage may have been the one who thought to have her arrested35. It was a diplomatic and personal disaster.

  Undoubtedly, this was part of what those officers on her doorstep wanted to ask Coco about in the weeks after the liberation of Paris. The United States and British governments both wanted to get to the bottom of the matter, too, but the final report was never more than ambiguous. Vera’s own politics, the Americans decided, were dubious. But she did have a good reason to be angry with her old friend Coco: “Madame Chanel,” the report reads, “apparently instigated the special facilities afforded by the German Gestapo to Madame Lombardi36.”

  In the end, Coco Chanel was questioned and released. In fact, the officers of the purges got an extraordinary instruction. Mademoiselle Chanel was to be allowed to leave immediately. It was an order from the highest level. At the time, no one ever quite understood how it happened. For many years, there were two stories that told how she managed her release. Files in the British Foreign Office were mistakenly declassified for a brief window37, and those who saw them say they hint that Coco Chanel knew dangerous and embarrassing state secrets about aristocratic British collaboration. There were said to be grim secrets about the political compromises made by the Windsor family, in particular. Some say that it was Winston Churchill himself
who negotiated Chanel’s freedom. A decade later, people in Paris also speculated that Churchill–Coco Chanel’s next-door neighbor during summers on the Riviera–had sent a chauffeured limousine to police headquarters personally to fetch her, and the driver headed straight for the Swiss border. There was even a story that he made sure that Hans von Dincklage was in that car with her.

  It is actually all quite likely. That autumn after the end of the war, Churchill followed the investigation into Coco’s wartime imbroglio carefully, and, in the end, despite the “suspicious circumstances38"–her meeting with Nazi leaders in Berlin and the Vera Lombardi fiasco included–he seems to have believed that she was not an active collaborator.

  The other story of Coco’s escape from the purges, however, is almost as astonishing, and there is also likely to be some truth in it. In the words of one British intelligence officer with the government’s notoriously secretive M16 division, Coco Chanel did something even cannier. With her legendary sense of timing, it seems that she had hedged her bets thoroughly in the first hours of the purges. “By one of those majestically simple strokes which made Napoleon [sic] so successful as a general,”39 the anonymous agent reported, “she just put an announcement in the window of her emporium that scent was free for G.I.s, who thereupon queued up to get bottles of Chanel No. 5, and would have been outraged if the French police had touched a hair of her head.” It was a time of vastly complicated loyalties–and desires.

  After her release from interrogation, Coco had the sense to hedge her bets further. She set up a new life for herself in Swiss exile, where one way or another Hans von Dincklage–known to friends by the nickname Spatz, or “sparrow"–joined her. There, in Switzerland’s famously neutral banks, some of her wartime profits from Chanel No. 5 were safely deposited.

  Despite the fact that Coco Chanel’s personal reputation at the end of the war was pretty well in tatters, Chanel No. 5 had become, in the space of less than four or five years, one of the most potent icons of the century. More than just a popular and bestselling perfume, it became during the Second World War a powerful cultural symbol. That, after all, is the story behind the words of that British intelligence officer. It is what the duffel bag of that young German-American G.I. also tells us. It is what Harry S. Truman’s letter to Bess testifies. Long before the end of the war, Chanel No. 5 was a commodity exchangeable for anything.

  Consider how deeply that irony also resonates. Chanel No. 5 encapsulates some of the last century’s most complex tensions. It was a perfume produced and distributed by a partnership of Jewish families living as entrepreneurial refugees in New York City. It bore the name of an apparently anti-Semitic fashion designer who spent the war living with a German lover and who tried to use the laws of Nazi-occupied France to strip her partners of their investment. It was a luxury coveted by fascist officers and American G.I.s alike, and neither side cared much about the story of its origins, because in so many ways it had already slipped free of its inventor. It was sold in army commissaries and everywhere on the black market, and it lost none of its glamour and allure. It was as valuable as gold or whiskey or cigarettes all across Europe, and it emerged from the war with a new identity. This was all largely thanks to those countless young soldiers on both sides of the conflict.

  American soldiers in front of 31 rue Cambon in 1945 to buy the perfume Chanel No. 5.

  In fact, of all the images that speak to what Chanel No. 5 had become by the end of the Second World War, the most articulate is an old snapshot. It’s a black-and-white photograph, taken in the days after the liberation of Paris. In it, some of those fresh-faced young men, in their crisp uniforms, smile shyly at the camera. They are waiting–as German and American and British young men waited all throughout the war–in a long line on a narrow sidewalk along rue Cambon. Their destination is the Chanel boutique in Paris, and the soldiers–by 1945, they are, of course, American–are there to buy just one thing: a bottle of No. 5. It didn’t matter if they didn’t speak even a single word of French that summer. All it took was raising five fingers. It had always been the perfume with the famous number.

  What the photograph says is only this: a generation of consumers had mapped onto the perfume the essence of their hopes and desires, which gave it an intensely personal meaning. Chanel No. 5 had a life of its own precisely because it had an intimate place in the lives of others. Oddly, though, the one person to struggle with a connection to the perfume was the woman whose identity was perhaps most inextricably tied to it. Despite everything that had happened during the war, no one paid much attention to what Coco Chanel was doing because her signature scent had broken free from her. What had begun as something deeply personal had become a broad cultural icon that told the story of millions. Symbolically, as well as literally, it just wasn’t her business anymore. For Coco Chanel this was a crucial psychological turning point.

  Recognizing that Chanel No. 5 had a life of its own didn’t mean Coco Chanel stopped taking her conflict with the partners at Les Parfums Chanel personally, however. Coco identified deeply with the perfume, and part of her loved it. After the war, though, she came to see the entire situation as monstrous. She now understood that she had lost control of it for good–and she was prepared to change her strategy dramatically. She might not have the right to manage the product, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t harm it. It was the only power left to her, and, by the beginning of 1945, she was in a white fury and prepared to cause no end of trouble.

  FIFTEEN

  COCO PLAYS THE NUMBERS

  Her hope was to market mass confusion.

  There are rumors in the world of fragrance collecting, every so often, of something special coming up for auction: a bottle of vintage Chanel perfume with a bright red label. Most often it’s Chanel No. 1. Sometimes it’s a bottle of Chanel No. 2 or No. 31. New initiates each time ask the same question: Is it authentic? The answer comes back that, yes, those bottles are real. And Coco Chanel was behind them.

  From her exile in Switzerland, Coco Chanel started making plans for a new line of signature perfumes, provocatively sold with names that were numbers. One scent deliberately replicated her world-famous iconic formula. It was the fame of Chanel No. 5 that she was after. Not only did she plan to launch her own new formulas, she also began a whisper campaign among her well-placed friends and the denizens of high society, running down the reputation of her famous fragrance. Her object1: “to create total confusion among her haute-couture clients, her friends, and the distributors of the authentic Chanel No. 5.”

  That was the only way, after all, that she could think to force the partners at Les Parfums Chanel to renegotiate. She was furious when she learned, belatedly, that her signature fragrance–the scent of her youth and memories and private history–had been produced during the war in the United States.

  Now, it seems astonishing that she didn’t know it, but, then again, during the occupation, the German government had encouraged the continued production of some French luxury goods as part of an effort to put a positive spin on life in Nazi France. Joseph Goebbels, in charge of Hitler’s propaganda efforts, put out a directive: Paris would be “gay and animated,” filled with art, music, and entertainment2. The fashion houses, in particular, would remain open. Surprisingly, Coco Chanel was one of the few designers who refused to cooperate.

  She obviously knew that Chanel No. 5 was for sale. She sold it from her boutique on rue Cambon, presumably from stocks provided by the “new” Parfums Chanel operation, under the Aryan directorship of Félix Amiot. During his tenure, Chanel No. 5 was legally sold and distributed in all territories under the control of the Third Reich, and it remained a bestseller.

  She knew that there were production facilities throughout the war in Britain, even after the Bourjois factory on Queen’s Way in Croydon was destroyed in a terrible air raid in the summer of 19403. She knew that the production of her signature perfume continued, although on a reduced wartime scale, in Pantin. Perhaps the factory in Pantin e
ven managed to get its own supplies of that rare jasmine from Grasse. During the war, the production of prestigious luxury goods was especially encouraged, as a simple matter of pleasure and propaganda. After all, “after the defeat of France,” writes one historian, “Germany received a supply of luxury goods such as she had not seen for years4. Soldiers on leave in Paris and other French towns sent home silk stockings, perfumes, wines, and women’s clothing of a far superior quality to anything that German austerity had produced.”

  Coco Chanel learned of the American manufacture of Chanel No. 5 through the profits. When the partners returned to France after the war to reclaim their business properties and resume production, they also brought back a souvenir for Coco Chanel: the passbook to a Swiss bank account, where they had deposited her share of the wartime profits for sales of Chanel No. 5 perfume, distributed from the United States through the branch corporation, Chanel, Inc. It was $15,000–today worth a cool million dollars.5