The Secret of Chanel No. 5 (13 page)

P
art 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 pleasure
⁶
. 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.

W
hat 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 1923, 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 stage
⁸
. 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 known
¹⁰
.

Chanel wasn't willing to risk her fashion business for anything. So, when it came to the perfume, she effectively washed her hands of it. She wanted to keep “her association with the Wertheimers … at arm's length
¹¹
,” a friend later suggested. Others who knew the terms of the agreement believed that “her fear of losing control over her fashion house made her sign away the perfume for ten percent of the corporation
¹²
.” The Wertheimer brothers, Paul and Pierre, who were to front the costs of producing, marketing, and distributing Chanel No. 5, suggested that she could retain complete control of the couture house by simply agreeing to create a second company, Les Parfums Chanel. Each of the partners would take a share. Coco Chanel told them, “Form a company if you like, but I am not interested in getting involved in your business
¹³
. I'll give you my calling card and will be content with 10% of the stock. For the rest, I expect to be the absolute boss of everything.” That was the bargain, and she had brokered it.

Perfume was
their
business, and from now on the business side of Chanel No. 5 was their concern, their product. She would give them the right to use her name on it, and in exchange she would get a share of the profits. It was perfectly simple. The contract read
¹⁴
:

They agreed that, to protect the status of her name as a designer, they would sell as Chanel “only first-class products” that she deemed sufficiently luxurious
¹⁵
. She kept the right to sell perfumes–which she could have manufactured elsewhere if she wanted–from her fashion houses in Paris, Deauville, Cannes, and Biarritz, but she was otherwise out of the perfume business. Coco Chanel would receive 10 percent of the profits of the company and would put up none of the capital; Théophile Bader was given a 20 percent share in Les Parfums Chanel as a finder's fee and distribution partner; and the Wertheimers would control the rest of the company. In exchange for developing the brand, they would get 70 percent of the profits–and take all of the risks. That spring of 1924, Coco Chanel had owned Chanel No. 5 for just four years.

It was an extraordinary decision from an emotional perspective. She had been driven to create not just a signature scent but also a fragrance that encapsulated both her sense of loss and the story of her life and loves. She had named it after her lucky number, and she thought of luck as her middle name. She had wanted it to be a success, and she had identified with it deeply. In fact, she would consider it “her” fragrance for decades. With it, she scented her house as well as her body. Despite these intense personal connections to this perfume, however, she licensed it to the partners at Les Parfums Chanel just as it was poised to become a blockbuster.

If the decision was emotionally complicated, as a business move it was clearly brilliant. Here was a product with amazing potential, and anyone who had tracked its meteoric rise in those first few years knew it. For Chanel No. 5 to reach an ever-broader market, however, she would need the help of experts in the fragrance industry, and that was precisely what she now had negotiated. Having worked to develop the fragrance, she naturally had always planned to have it succeed brilliantly.

However, she never imagined what it would become or how hard it would be for her to disentangle herself from it emotionally. After all, her initial fear–that the scent that captured something essential about her style wouldn't reach a wide enough audience–had proved unfounded. Indeed, it was immediately successful. She should have been thrilled. Instead, there were painful jabs in the society papers like that 1923 caricature to rattle her.

At that moment, it was the public face of her fashion house that she associated with her persona, and her greatest anxiety was that anyone or anything would be able to co-opt it. But she was above all in her own mind a hardheaded businesswoman. In 1924, Chanel No. 5 still seemed like something that could be–with a bit of distance and some expert marketing–turned to account and managed.

In the years to come, the difficulty was that the product would go on to have a life and a legend of its own, one that she couldn't control. It was also a perfume that would make them all wealthy almost beyond imagining. The money rolling in wouldn't satisfy Coco Chanel forever, though. Increasingly she would also sense that she was no longer at the center of the Chanel No. 5 story.

L
es Parfums Chanel was established on April 4, 1924, and–despite the conclusive evidence that Chanel No. 5 was based on a Rallet perfume–there are no records of any formal arrangement with the perfume house of A. Rallet, still at that time a subsidiary of Chiris. People in the perfume industry in Grasse remembered later how the firm had offered Coco Chanel the formula for Rallet No. 1 when she had first approached Ernest Beaux, and perhaps they had all negotiated the rights free and clear from the outset. Perhaps they had not, and the company now balked. Certainly, in 1920, Ernest Beaux had been looking for new career opportunities, knowing that the legendary perfumer Joseph Robert already occupied the position of chief “nose” at Chiris, and there is a chance that Ernest took it on as a private commission. In any event, by 1922 he had broken ties with the company and moved to Charabot, a company specializing in perfume materials
¹⁶
. When he left, he quite understandably took his work with him.

Even if Coco Chanel and the partners at Les Parfums Chanel didn't make a formal arrangement with Chiris to use the formula for Chanel No. 5, it would hardly have mattered. Ernest Beaux had invented the perfume, and he knew the formula. Perfume formulas even today, like other recipes, aren't protected as intellectual property. That has always been part of the reason for the urgent secrecy of the fragrance industry. The loss of the formula would have been the occasion for considerable consternation and teeth gnashing in the Rallet division, where the perfume had been invented, but there was nothing anyone could do.

Ernest Beaux had created Chanel No. 5 and unlocked the secret of its innovations, and he was well paid for it. Alone among the key players, however, he had no share in the business or in the vast riches that were on the horizon. Poised to take on a greater role in the perfume's success, in 1924 Ernest was hired as the technical director and perfumer for fragrances at Bourjois and Les Parfums Chanel.