The Secret of Chanel No. 5 (19 page)

The courts, however, had a different idea about the matter. During the first months of the Second World War, with other lawsuits still dragging on, she learned that the case launched five years earlier to stop the production of scented beauty creams had gone in favor of the partners at Les Parfums Chanel, whose right to produce and market the perfume was reconfirmed legally.

With this disappointing setback regarding Chanel No. 5 fresh on her mind, Coco Chanel just dug in her heels more doggedly. She was living at the Ritz Hotel in 1940. The back entrance looked out onto rue Cambon–where she still kept her showrooms and offices. By then Paris was occupied, and, if you were rich enough, rooms at the Ritz Hotel weren't a bad way to ride out the war in a city where daily life for many was a series of small and capricious horrors. At a time when thousands were losing their lives as well as their fortunes, the celebrated designer was still an immensely wealthy woman, and it was a life of relative comfort.

For many who lived in Paris during those years, it was life's small luxuries that helped to make those horrors bearable. There were already demeaning shortages. Coffee was replaced with chicory, and chocolate all but disappeared
¹⁸
. Both became powerful objects of desire. Perhaps the only object more coveted was fine French perfume. It was the reminder of another time, when everything was not so brutal and so difficult, and it became an intoxicating indulgence. On the black market, its value was astronomical. Among all the French perfumes in the city, there was one that was famous beyond anything else. Sometimes one could still find it. Chanel No. 5. The scent was quickly becoming, in the crucible of those war years, an indomitable cultural icon.

S
ales of Coco Chanel's signature scent, the still wildly successful Chanel No. 5, were booming. To anyone who happened to stroll past her boutique on rue Cambon, the source of her riches was immediately obvious. During the war, the first floor of the shop was a sparkling trove of glass perfume bottles. Before long, it sold nothing else.

There, in the shadow of the Ritz Hotel, soldiers made orderly lines on the sidewalk as they waited to buy a bottle or two for someone back home or, far more often, a pretty French girl who, in these times of rationing and deprivation, didn't have Coco Chanel's advantages. “The ground-floor boutique,” one historian writes, “was filled with German soldiers
¹
buying the only item on sale–Chanel No. 5. When the stocks ran out the Fritzes picked up the display bottles marked with the intertwined double C and paid for them. It was something to take back to the
Fraülein,
something that proved they had been in Paris.” German generals didn't wait in line. They strode in and bought it by the armfuls. Coco told a friend that it was ridiculous: “During the war we could sell only about twenty bottles of perfume a day
²
in the House of Chanel. People lined up long before opening time, chiefly German soldiers. I laughed when I saw them; I thought, you poor fools, most of you will go away empty-handed.” Sold throughout the territories of the Third Reich, including Germany, of course, that singular scent was the reason she could afford to wait out the occupation in luxury.

For the partners at Les Parfums Chanel, waiting out the war in the Ritz Hotel was not an option. The Wertheimer brothers still owned 70 percent of the company. Théophile Bader had been in poor health since 1935, and his 20 percent stake had been entrusted to the management of his sons-in-law, Raoul Meyer and Max Heilbronn
³
. Although from old French families, their backgrounds were Jewish
⁴
, and they knew that they were in danger. The Wertheimer clan realized by the spring of 1940, in the weeks before the fall of France, that exile was the only protection. On May 13, as the German troops crossed the Meuse River and made their way to Paris, the family made a snap decision to flee France. They gathered at Pierre Wertheimer's house at 55, avenue Foch, and set out in a convoy of five cars, driving south to Bordeaux. From there, they crossed by train into Spain, where the borders still remained open for refugees. Then the family left immediately for South America, waiting only until visas for entry into the United States could be processed. By August 5, 1940, after nearly four months of travel and waiting, the Wertheimers had arrived in New York City. Meyer was later able to flee to the unoccupied territories. Heilbronn fought for the French resistance and ultimately survived the concentration camps at Buchenwald.

It was a narrow window, and, had the Wertheimer family not managed to flee France in the first days of the occupation, there would not be Chanel No. 5 as we know it, because it was during the Second World War that this fragrance went from being a bestseller to becoming an international cultural icon. From New York, the majority partners were determined to keep making Chanel No. 5 perfume, and they set out to dazzle once again the American market. Despite Coco Chanel's protestations and resentments, they had every right to do it. Les Parfums Chanel had been, for all intents and purposes, their business for almost twenty years.

Now in New York, the partners needed to find a way to produce the fragrance. So Pierre Wertheimer contacted an old friend, Arnold van Ameringen, who happened to be dating a lady named Josephine Esther Lauter–better known to the world as Estée Lauder. In order to keep Bourjois and Les Parfums Chanel running, the family would need a new production facility in the United States. They found one in Hoboken, New Jersey, but there was just one massive problem. They needed raw materials, especially those rare floral essences from Grasse that had always been part of Chanel No. 5's secret. Unless they moved quickly–and were willing to take a series of dangerous gambles–getting those supplies was going to be impossible.

They devised a daring plan: they would send someone back to France. The man they entrusted was named H. Gregory Thomas, a native New Yorker with law degrees from Paris and Salamanca, Spain. Thomas had been the president of the perfume house of Guerlain before the war
⁵
, and he would go on to become the president of Chanel's fragrance operation in America. In 1940, while in his early thirties, he was sent on a complicated covert mission. Most urgently, someone needed to help Pierre Wertheimer's son, Jacques, escape from occupied France in advance of the deportations. After that, Thomas was charged with picking up the precious formula for Chanel No. 5 from the company offices in Paris, then going on to Grasse to purchase as much as possible of the rare botanical essences on which the perfume depended. Price was not an object.

Without the floral extracts from Grasse, the partners at Les Parfums Chanel knew that there could be no Chanel No. 5–at least not at the level of quality the world expected. Had Thomas failed, it might have been the end of Coco Chanel's famous perfume. Never had this celebrated fragrance been in such danger.

As times changed, tastes changed with them, and fifteen years was already a long time for any luxury product to remain at the height of international fashion. Even for a perfume as beloved and familiar as Chanel No. 5, an extended absence from the world stage would have been an incredibly risky proposition. Continued production was imperative–and that meant they needed jasmine. Amazingly, Thomas succeeded. Because the partners at Les Parfums Chanel had acted quickly, they would be among the only perfumers during the war to have access to these legendary and unique materials from Grasse–the scents at the heart of Chanel No. 5.

W
hat was so crucial about these specific materials from Grasse? What made them worth sending someone to smuggle them out of France? It all goes back to the original formula. Coco Chanel once said that in Chanel No. 5 she wanted a perfume that was artificial, something composed–"like a dress
⁶
"–and not something that made women smell like flowers. Ironically, however, it's the flowers that have largely made this perfume famous. Part of the secret of its beauty is the rare floral oils used to create it–what Ernest Beaux called the “first materials"–and especially the scents of roses and jasmine. At the moment when Chanel No. 5 was first being launched, these materials were used in many of the finest fragrances in France and could be obtained in Grasse.

Throughout the 1920s, in fact, the perfume industry made Grasse one of the most popular tourist destinations in the south of France, and visitors sent home postcards showing the rose harvest and the town's sprawling
usines
–its fragrance factories. Ernest Beaux's laboratory was among the area's most famously elite attractions. When Coco Chanel threw herself into learning everything she could about the production of perfumes in 1918 and 1919, she visited Grasse.

The village was the world's epicenter of fragrance manufacturing and research, largely as a result of the stunning quality of the local natural materials. In fact, “in Grasse, where all flowers were called by their proper [Latin] names, jasmine was simply known [in the 1920s] as ‘the flower,'”
⁷
and vast plantations were given over to its cultivation. The jasmine, in particular, was unlike anything else in the world. The Côte d'Azur is the far northern limit of the natural climate for jasmine, and there is a truism in the world of aromatics that flowers take on the finest scents in the places where they struggle. Here the jasmine plants grow to only half their normal height, and they have lower proportions of those so-called indoles
⁸
, which can give jasmine an intensely sweet physical odor. The result is a flower that smells subtler and less overpowering. It also has about it a distinct note that smells like tea
⁹
.

Grasse was also home to large plantations of a particular variety of heirloom rose, the delicately floral
centifolia.
Often simply called the May rose of Grasse, the
centifolia
is grafted to the rootstock of the
indica major,
and when it blooms in the late spring its aroma is more complex than that of any other species of rose. Both were scents at the heart of Chanel No. 5. Ernest Beaux was simply using world-class local materials.

As her friends later remembered, though, Coco Chanel didn't just tour the flower gardens and plantations when she visited Grasse. She also visited the factories where natural plant materials were turned into the elements of a perfume. When Gregory Thomas negotiated those wartime supplies of rose and jasmine scents for Les Parfums Chanel, he, too, knew that what happened in the fields was only half the equation. The quality of a perfume depended on how carefully the flowers were processed in the distillery. The end result of that processing was to turn millions of blossoms into materials perfumers could use–either the waxy “raw” form of fragrance essence known as a concrete or the highly purified scent of an absolute
¹⁰
.

Turning rose and jasmine petals to perfume is a delicate and laborious business, and this was the other thing that made the natural materials from Grasse superior in 1940. As the most important center of the fragrance industry for the better part of a century already, this was where many of France's great perfume companies had their research laboratories. In terms of technical innovation, Grasse was simply cutting edge, and the result was a superior level of quality.

It was the Chiris family who had pioneered at the end of the nineteenth century the essential process that freed Gregory Thomas from being forced to bring back to the United States sacks of flower petals. Heat is the enemy of aroma, and they had developed an efficient commercial process for distilling plant-based fragrance materials using organic solvents at low temperatures that freed the industry from the laborious alternate process called in French
enfleurage,
or “enflowering,” where the blossoms were pressed into thin layers of fat over the course of days and weeks to extract their essences. By the turn of the century, “Louis Chiris had set up his first workshop based on solvent extraction,” having wisely already secured
¹¹
“a patent on these techniques and created the first factory to employ chemicals.” This discovery–along with the discovery of those new synthetic aromatic materials like aldehydes–is a large part of the reason the first decades of the twentieth century became the “golden age” of perfumery. For the first time, it was possible to obtain excellent-quality floral concrete and absolutes in larger and more affordable quantities.

While an absolute is the purest form of floral essence, what Gregory Thomas was looking to buy in 1940, anticipating a war that might drag on, was the less-refined material known as a concrete, a midstage product in the extraction process, where the scents remained blended with their natural vegetable waxes. Later, in New York, the concrete could be transformed into an even more intense absolute when the waxes were removed. There was a real advantage here. A fine concrete could last for several years, maybe even half a decade. Absolutes needed to be used far more quickly.

Today, a pound of jasmine absolute sells for more than $33,000. It was already fabulously expensive in the 1930s. The reason was the staggering number of flowers that it took to make it. Nearly 350 pounds of jasmine–over a half-million flowers–go into a pound of jasmine concrete, and in each small, thirty-milliliter bottle of Chanel No. 5
parfum
is the essence of more than a thousand jasmine flowers and the bouquet of a dozen roses
¹²
. Making Chanel No. 5 during the war was going to take all the raw materials they could get. The partners at Les Parfums Chanel, understanding what shortages would do to the perfume industry, were frantic to stockpile reserves of these essences.

Despite all the risks–and arrest for smuggling these rare ingredients out of France was a very real one–Gregory Thomas succeeded, returning with hundreds of pounds of rose and jasmine concrete from the finest fields in Grasse. In doing so, one might confidently argue he almost single-handedly saved Chanel No. 5 during the Second World War. Without those materials, production in the United States would not have been possible. No one knew whether the materials would be available in the months and years to come.