14 François Coty, who in 1919 became France’s first billionaire … wife Yvonne, who had also made her start as a fellow milliner in Paris: Details here and following from Toledano and Coty, François Coty, 24, 50, passim; Coty had earned his first billion by 1919.
15 Coco Chanel received an excited visit from a friend, the bohemian socialite Misia Sert: See Arthur Gold, Misia: The Life of Misia Sert (New York: Vintage, 1992).
16 They had talked about it already, debated bottle designs, and even planned how Coco would market it to her couture clients: According to Misia Sert, “Together we studied the packaging, a solemn, ultra-simple, quasi-pharmaceutical bottle, but in the Chanel taste and wrapped in … elegance,” Madsen, Chanel, 133.
17 It was a formula for the lost “miraculous perfume” of the Medici queens: Charles-Roux, Chanel, 164.
18 After all, the history of perfume-making in France began at the court of the Medici queens: See Nigel Groom, The New Perfume Handbook (London: Chapman and Hall, 1997).
19 “set up a laboratory in Grasse for the study of perfume-making in order to rival the fashionable Arab perfumes”: Groom, The New Perfume Handbook, 143.
20 She paid six thousand francs–the equivalent of nearly $10,000 today: Determining the relative value of historical currency is a notoriously imprecise science; all contemporary figures given here are based on the calculators developed by Professors Lawrence H. Officer and Samuel H. Williamson at www.measuring worth.com/uscompare/. The value of all commodities are calculated using consumer-price-index measures; other measures are as noted.
21 Misia Sert would later claim that this was the origin of Chanel No. 5: Madsen, Chanel, 133; see also Dominque Laty, Misia Sert et Coco Chanel (Paris: Jacob, 2009); Misia Sert, Misia par Misia (Paris: Gallimard, 1952); Gold, Misia.
22 His wife, Yvonne, always claimed that … François offered to let her use his laboratory for the development: Toledano and Coty, François Coty; the authors claim that, as late as 1960, there were people who saw the original bill, “presented on old brown paper with the company watermark,” 86.
23 “We were in love,” she later remembered, “we could have gotten married”: Madsen, Chanel, 91.
24 “For a woman,” Coco Chanel would later say, “betrayal has just one sense: that of the senses”: Baillén, Chanel Solitaire, 69.
1 These were favorite summer retreats for artists, intellectuals, and impoverished foreign princes: Marie-Christine Grasse, interview, 2009.
2 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 play”: Kennett, Coco, 49.
3 Today, there are at least a half-dozen different rubrics for diagramming all the possible categories of perfume: Perhaps the most widely used–but also rather complex–is the twelve-part fragrance wheel developed by Michael Edwards in the 1980s. For more on the topic, see also Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez, Perfumes: The Guide (New York: Viking, 2008); Stamelman, Perfume; Charles Sell, The Chemistry of Fragrances: From Perfumer to Consumer (London: Royal Society of Chemistry Publishing, 2005); David J. Rowe and Philip Kraft, Chemistry and Technology of Flavours and Fragrances (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2004); Jonathan Pereira, The Elements of Materia Medica and Therapeutics (Philadelphia: Blanchard and Lea, 1854); Morris, Fragrance; La Société Française des Parfumeurs, Osmothèque, La Mémoire Vivante des Parfums, Brochure Historique (Versailles: Osmothèque, n.d.); and Groom, The New Perfume Handbook.
4 When Cleopatra famously set sail to meet Mark Anthony: See Lisa Manniche, Sacred Luxuries: Fragrance, Aromatherapy, and Cosmetics in Ancient Egypt (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999); also Stamelman, Perfume.
5 Aimé Guerlain’s “ferociously modern” scent Jicky … the classical oriental perfume Shalimar: Stamelman, Perfume, 97; on the history of vanilla, see Patricia Rain, Vanilla: The Cultural History of the World’s Favorite Flavor and Fragrance (New York: Penguin, 2004).
6 traditional perfumery relied on perhaps as few as a hundred natural scent materials: See Milinski and Wedekind, “Evidence for MHC-Correlated Perfume Preferences in Humans"; also Lyall Watson, Jacobson’s Organ and the Remarkable Nature of Smell (New York: Plume, 2001).
7 the first scent to use a synthetic aromatic, the compound coumarin … new scent materials known as quinolines: First synthesized in 1868; Stamelman, Perfume, 96–97.
8 In 1895, the fragrance-industry giant Bourjois introduced a chypre … Chypre de Limassol: Fontan, Générations Bourjois, 48; see also Perfume Intelligence: A Comprehensive Illustrated Encyclopedia of Perfume, http://www.perfumeintelligence.co.uk/library/index.htm.
9 At the turn of the century, the runaway bestseller was François Coty’s La Rose Jacqueminot (1903): Toledano and Coty, François Coty, 60.
10 A special formulation called Violetta di Parma (1870) was the signature fragrance of the empress Marie Louise Bonaparte: See Francesca Sandrini, et al., Maria Luigia e le Violette di Parma (Parma, Italy: Pubblicazioni del Museo Glauco Lombardi, 2008).
11 “dreamed of imitating nature but of transforming the real,” with a new “emotive perfumery”: Stamelman, Perfume, 98.
12 “[T]he perfume many women use … is not mysterious. … I don’t want a woman to smell like a rose”: “People, March 16, 1931,” Time, March 16, 1931, L7, www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,769528,00.html; also quoted in Galante, Mademoiselle Chanel, 26.
13 “I want,” she had decided, “to give women an artificial perfume”: Pierre Galante, Les années Chanel (Paris: Paris-Match / Mercure de France, 1972), 79–80.
14 A woman, she thought, “should smell like a woman and not like a flower”: Various sources, including, for example, Galante, Mademoiselle Chanel, 67.
15 “A badly perfumed woman … is a woman without a future”: Interview with Jacques Chazot, produced as “Dim Dam Dom,” directed by Guy Job, 1969.
1 The musical references in both cases are telling: Ernest Beaux later said, “It is like writing music. Each component has a definite tonal value … I can compose a waltz or a funeral march,” “Business Abroad: King of Perfume,” Time, September 14, 1953, www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,858285,00.htm.
2 Women sunbathed on the beaches wearing ropes of pearls: For a cultural history of the 1920s, see, for example, William Wiser, Crazy Years: The Twenties in Paris (London: Thames and Hudson, 1990); Carol Mann, Paris Between the Wars (New York: Vendome Press, 1996).
3 “It was a whole race going hedonistic, deciding on pleasure”: F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Jazz Age (New York: New Directions, 1996), 6.
4 Soviet Russia after the revolution of 1917: On the history of this period in Russia, see Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
5 “While in his cups,” Rasputin it seems told the two young noblemen about the czarina’s “fixed intention”: Russian Diary of an Englishman, Petrograd, 1915–1917 (London: William Heinemann, 1919), 5. Details also drawn from Felix Youssoupoff, Lost Splendor: The Amazing Memoirs of the Man Who Killed Rasputin (New York: Helen Marx Books, 2007); Evard Radzinsky, The Rasputin File (New York: Anchor, 2001).
6 When Dmitri’s part in the murder was discovered: See Russian Diary of an Englishman; the anonymous civil servant writes, “All the Imperial Family are off their heads at the Grand Duke Dmitri’s arrest, for even the Emperor has not the right to arrest his family. … it was for threatening to arrest the Tzesarvich [Alexander I] that the Emperor Paul was killed,” 87–88.
7 “the confines of the Empire [at] the Persian border”: See Russian Diary of an Englishman, 79.
8 in the New York Times that “Rumors spread he was traveling in fetters”: “The German Propaganda: How It Spread in Russia and Roused Popular Indignation,” New York Times, March 16, 1917.
9 We “implore you,” they wrote in their petition, “to reconsider your harsh decision”: See Russian Diary of an Englishman, 211.
10 “The past, our past, still held t
he most important part of our lives”: Marie Pavlovna, A Princess in Exile (New York: Viking Press, 1932), 70–71.
11 one of Paris’s most famous textile and embroidery houses, Kitmir: See Marion Mienert, Maria Pavlovna: A Romanov Grand Duchess in Russia and in Exile (Mainz, Germany: Lennart-Bernadotte-Stiftung, 2004).
12 known as Rallet O-De-Kolon No. 1 Vesovoi–or simply Rallet No. 1 perfume: Philip Kraft, Christine Ledard, and Philip Goutell, “From Rallet No. 1 to Chanel No. 5 versus Mademoiselle Chanel No. 1,” Perfume and Flavorist, October 2007, 36–41, 37–38. This seminal article is the source for information throughout on the chemical structures of Rallet No. 5, Mademoiselle Chanel No. 1, and Chanel No. 5-like perfumes.
13 Among the personal possessions looted from the Romanov royal family’s prison chambers were vials of some unnamed perfumes: “List of Valuables Taken by Yurovsky from the Romanovs,” www.alexanderpalace.org/palace/Yurovsky List.html.
14 They may have met in Venice that first winter after Boy’s death, in early 1920: Charles-Roux, Chanel, 199.
15 Fabergé, the Russian-French jewelry firm … fled to exile in Switzerland: Toby Faber, Fabergé's Eggs: The Extraordinary Story of the Masterpieces That Outlived an Empire (New York: Random House, 2008); Eric Onstad, “Revived Fabergé to Create First Egg Since 1917,” USA Today, May 23, 2008, www.usatoday.com/money/industries/retail/2008-05-23-faberge-eggs_N.htm.
16 which had been purchased in 1898 by a prominent French family of perfume distributors: Kraft, Ledard, and Goutell, “From Rallet No. 1 to Chanel No. 5,” 39.
17 as he later remembered, it “became an incredible success”: Interview with Ernest Beaux, in S. Samuels, “Souvenirs d’un Parfumeur,” Industrie de la Parfumerie 1, no. 7 (October 1947), 228–31; Beaux’s recollections are the source of other details in this chapter.
18 interrogating Bolshevik prisoners in Arkangelsk, at the infamous Mudyug Island prison: Pavel P. Rasskavov, Notes of a Prisoner (Arkhangel: Sevkraigiz, 1935).
19 It has since been called modern history’s first concentration camp: Robert C. Toth, “Diplomats Say TV Show Instigates Hatred, Soviets Blame ‘Amerika’ for Vandalism,” Los Angeles Times, February 18, 1987, http://articles.latimes.com/1987-02-18/news/mn-2723_1.
20 These alliances–and the many wartime decorations that he earned for his service to France and Britain and in the cause of the White Russians: Gilberte Beaux, interview, 2010.
21 Bolshevik prisoners at the camp in Arkangelsk later remembered a Lieutenant Beaux: Rasskavov, Notes of a Prisoner, transliterated in Russian to “Bo.” See also Beaux, “Souvenirs.”
22 Misia Sert and Paul Morand both believed that Dmitri was the one: Madsen, Chanel, 132; as Madsen notes, some people have also suggested that the French novelist Colette might have made the introduction. However, since Coco Chanel and Colette didn’t become friends until sometime after 1922, that scenario is impossible.
1 Ernest was hesitant: Galante, Mademoiselle Chanel, 74.
2 The gap in the numbers reflected the fact that these were scents in two different–but complementary–series: Beaux, in “Souvenirs,” explains, “I created in 1919–1920, in addition to No. 5 of which I have spoken, No. 22 and a series of other different perfumes.” See also “Business Abroad,” Time, 1953.
3 “that is what I was waiting for. A perfume like nothing else. A woman’s perfume, with the scent of a woman”: Galante, Les années Chanel, 85.
4 It had been Boy Capel’s magic number, too, something else they shared: Boy Capel introduced Coco Chanel to the new spiritualist movement known as theosophism, of which he was an enthusiastic member, and, as one of Chanel’s biographers writes: “Boy also had a penchant for the number five, speaking of divinities with five heads in Hinduism, the five horizons, the five visions of
5 the Buddha, the mystique of the number five in China, the number five in alchemy also, and the other uses of this sacred and magical number,” Fiemeyer, Coco Chanel, 74; see also Haedrich, Coco Chanel, 138.
Theosophism was a blend of these different spiritual traditions. It was a religion of mediums and séances, popular in the first decades of the twentieth century with fashionable bohemians, a blend of ancient yogic philosophy and the Russian mysticism of its founder, the celebrated psychic Madame Blavatsky. It was also, unfortunately, not entirely free of those rising currents of European anti-Semitism. Writes one historian, “The semites were in Blavatsky’s scheme. … ‘later’ Aryans–degenerate in spirituality, and perfected in ‘materiality,’ “ Colin Kidd, The Forging of Races: Race and Scripture in the Protestant Atlantic World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 244.
Among the central beliefs of theosophism–familiar ground for Coco Chanel–was a faith in numerology and, especially, in the magic of quintessence. “Quintessence or the fifth dimension,” the theosophists believe,
is … of a metaphysical nature [and] leads us to consider the number five, a most sacred Pythagorean number, associated in ancient symbolism with the mysteries of Life. It evokes especially the five-fold nature of man, the microcosm, whose symbol is the five-pointed star. Nature aims visibly at the production of beautiful shapes. … All the kingdoms are teeming with masterpieces of creation. … witnesses of the finest kind of aesthetic imagination. [Hermine Sabetay, “Creative Asymmetry,” The Theosophist Magazine, August 1962, 301–308; 304–305.]
As Coco Chanel once said, “I believe in the fourth, fifth, sixth dimensions.” It comes, she explained, “from the need for reassurance, for a belief that one never loses everything.” All her life, Coco Chanel believed that Boy Capel communicated with her from beyond this world of substance; see Haedrich, Coco Chanel, 138.
For further information on these “dimensions” as Coco Chanel understood them, see also Herbert Radcliffe, “Is There a Fourth Dimension?” World Theosophy, February-June 1931, 293–296; Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine (Wheaton, IL: Theosophical Publishing House, 1993).
6 A fortune-teller had told her that it was the number of her special destiny: “Chanel, the Couturier, Dead in Paris,” New York Times, January 11, 1971.
7 “I present my dress collections on the fifth of May, the fifth month of the year,” she told him, “and so … it will bring good luck”: Beaux, “Souvenirs.”
8 A perfume, she once sermonized, “should resemble the person wearing it”: Interview with Jacques Chazot, produced as “Dim Dam Dom.”
9 chemists Georges Darzens and E. E. Blaise … found ways to separate and synthesize a large group of fragrance molecules: Darzens directed the perfume research laboratory at L. T. Piver from 1897–1920; see Michael Edwards, Perfume Legends (Levallois: H.M. Editions, 1996), 43, 83.
10 A chemist would say that the hydrogen in the ethanol, the kind of alcohol in wine, combines with the oxygen in the air: Technically, ethanol oxidizes to acetic acid, with acetaldehyde as an intermediary stage; acetaldehyde is also the result of the fermentation process; see S. Q. Liu and G. J. Pilone, “An Overview of Formation and Roles of Acetaldehyde in Winemaking with Emphasis on Microbiological Implications,” International Journal of Food Science and Technology 35 (2000), 49–61.
11 Aldehydes have the smell of many things: For the best general discussion, see Luca Turin, The Secret of Scent: Adventures in Perfume and the Science of Smell (New York: Harper Perennial, 2006), 54.
12 The “unblemished whiteness of [these] aldehydes,” writes one fragrance expert, is the smell of “powder snow”: Jim Drobnick, ed., The Smell Culture Reader (Oxford, UK: Berg Publishers, 2006), 226, writing here about Estée Lauder’s strongly aldehydic fragrance White Linen, based on the almost equally aldehydic Chanel No. 22, based on Chanel No. 5; see also Turin, The Secret of Scent, 54, for the role of aldehydes in White Linen.
13 They are part of what gives a fine wine its heady bouquet and smooth tannins: On the role of aldehydes in wine, see Siss Frivik and Susan Ebeler, “Influence of Sulfur Dioxide on the Formation of Aldehydes in White Wine,” American Journal of Viticultu
re and Enology 54, no. 1 (2003): 31–38; Laura Culleré, Jaun Cacho, and Vincente Ferreira, “Analysis for Wine C5-C8 Aldehydes through the Determination of Their O-(2,3,4,5,6-pentafluorobenzyl)oximes Formed Directly in the Solid Phrase Extraction Cartridge,” Analytica Chimica Acta 523, no. 1–2 (2004): 201–206.
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