The Secret of Chanel No. 5 (18 page)

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

I
t was the decade from 1925 to 1935 that first turned Chanel No. 5 into
the
signature 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 advertising
¹
, 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 dividends
⁴
. 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 1934
⁵
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 demand
⁶
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 offices
⁷
. In fact, before the beginning of the Second World War alone, there would be three or four different lawsuits
⁸
, 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 Mafia
⁹
.” By 1931, the Nazis were already the second largest party in Germany
¹⁰
, 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 period
¹¹
.”

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-Semitism
¹²
.” One of her relatives remembered Coco as an “appalling troublemaker” and told how she lumped the Jewish men with whom she did business
¹³
–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 brothers, 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 meeting
¹⁴
. 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.

I
n the history of Chanel No. 5, the year 1935 was a decisive turning point. Les Parfums Chanel was taking a far more aggressive role in advertising this fragrance bestseller, and Coco had been removed from her figurehead position as president of the company. Everyone else was moving forward confidently with the business of marketing Chanel No. 5, but Coco Chanel was furious. She told René de Chambrun that she wanted to sue the partners at Les Parfums Chanel in a bid to regain control of the product.

Coco was sure that she would win her legal battles with the company and started a protracted series of tit-for-tat lawsuits on both sides of the Atlantic that were to drag on for more than a decade. She sued to stop the development of the new beauty line and asked for the court's protection as a minority shareholder. The partners at Les Parfums Chanel counter-sued for breach of contract. Coco Chanel's position was that if the partners wanted to extend the Chanel No. 5 line to other beauty products, they would have to renegotiate the terms of the initial contract. The board of directors maintained that those rights had already been granted with the 1924 document. If they lost, Coco Chanel was determined to drive a hard bargain this time.

By the second part of the 1930s, life for Coco was also privately less satisfying. Paul Iribe was dead, and, astonishingly, he had been the first man she had loved who was prepared to marry her. The most important men in her life–her father, Boy Capel–had deserted her. Now, in his own way, Paul had deserted her too. Worse yet, she was also falling out of step for the first time with the world of fashion. Despite a 1937 advertisement for Chanel No. 5 that featured a full-length shot of Coco Chanel in front of the fireplace in her apartment at the Ritz Hotel and that lauded “Madame Gabrielle Chanel [as] above all an artist in living
¹⁵
,” times and fashions were changing. By the late 1930s, puffed sleeves, fitted waists, and shoulder pads were making the hourglass figure stylish, and the designers of the moment were Elsa Schiaparelli, Lucien Lelong, and Cristóbal Balenciaga
¹⁶
. It was the antithesis of the classic Chanel style, which had always been suited to the boyish figure of Coco's youth. Add to these new tastes a decade-long economic crisis and a bitter strike with her workers, and it's no wonder she was frustrated and tired. At the end of the summer of 1939, after all, Coco Chanel was fifty-six.

So, when France declared war against fascist Germany that September, Coco closed her fashion house and retired. This, she said to those who criticized her, was no time for fashion
¹⁷
. She didn't close her boutiques entirely, however. The shop at rue Cambon would remain open during the entire war. She planned to continue selling those famous fragrances and a line of costume jewelry and accessories, and, if anything, she became that much more invested in her perfume. She turned her attention back to Chanel No. 5 especially, blithely ignoring the fact that she had long ago sold its license. Already in America the perfume was becoming more famous than the designer. Suddenly, she was not prepared to count it among her losses.