The Secret of Chanel No. 5 (2 page)

In some ways, this is an unconventional book. After all, where, exactly, does one begin the story of a product, a consumable item? Does it start with the product's creation? Does it start with its first success? With the moment when the idea was planted in the mind of its creator? Despite being one of the twentieth century's iconic luxury products, sold around the world to millions of loyal enthusiasts, throughout the history of Chanel No. 5 there is one thing that has remained unchanged: behind all the risks and struggles and triumphs that have created this product there are profoundly intimate stories. From the private losses that led Coco Chanel to imagine a signature fragrance to the heady days of its spectacular success; from the decades of tense courtroom dramas that ultimately led her to try to sabotage her creation to the bitter private war waged with partners under the laws of Nazi-occupied France and in the industrial factories of Hoboken, New Jersey; from a moment of glorious postwar fame to the present day, when the perfume maintains its extraordinary allure despite all the odds,
The Secret of Chanel No. 5
is the story of how a beloved product can have its own life.

This is the history of the world's most seductive scent, the pursuit of the fragrance industry's glorious
monstre
–an intimate look into the secret life of a perfume that is about nothing so much as the production of desire. That story can only begin with the product's beautiful, but deeply flawed, creator–a woman whose fabled life becomes more complex and fascinating when viewed through the lens of one of her most famous creations.

F
or the better part of a century, the scent of Chanel No. 5 has been a sultry whisper that says we are in the presence of something rich and sensuous. It's the quiet rustle of elegant self-indulgence, the scent of a world that is splendidly and beautifully opulent. And, at nearly four hundred dollars an ounce
¹
, it's no wonder that Chanel No. 5 suggests nothing in our minds so much as the idea of luxury.

It's a powerful association. Chanel No. 5 is sumptuous. In fact, the story of this famous scent is the tale of how a singular perfume captured precisely the fast-living and carefree spirit of the young and the rich in the Roaring Twenties–and of how it went on to capture the world's imagination and desires. Chanel No. 5, from the moment of its first great heyday, was the scent of beautiful extravagance.

The origins of the perfume and its creator, however, could not have been more different from all of this. Indeed, part of the complexity of telling Chanel No. 5's history is the great divide between how we think of this iconic perfume and the place where it began. Chanel No. 5 calls to mind all that is rich and lovely. It's surprising to think that it started in a place that was the antithesis of what would later come to define it. The truth is that the fragrance that epitomizes all those worldly pleasures began with miserable impoverishment and amid the most staggering kinds of losses.

G
abrielle Chanel's peasant roots
²
went deep into the earth of provincial southwestern France, and, in 1895, her mother, Jeanne Chanel–worn out by work and childbirth–succumbed to the tuberculosis that had slowly destroyed her. The disease spread quickly in the wet and cold conditions of the rural provinces, and in the nineteenth century it was called “consumption” for a reason. It ate away at the health of its victims from the inside, corrupting the lungs hopelessly and painfully. Gabrielle–named after the nun who delivered her–and her four surviving brothers and sisters had watched it all. She was just twelve years old at the time of her mother's death.

Her father, Albert, was an itinerant peddler, and perhaps he simply had no idea how to care for five young children. Perhaps he didn't particularly care. He had about him a rakish charm and a lifelong knack for dodging responsibility. Whatever the case, in the span of only a few weeks, the young Gabrielle would also lose her second parent. The boys were sent out to work and to make their way in the world as best they could. Albert loaded his three daughters into a wagon without explanation and abandoned them at an orphanage in a rural hillside town in the Corrèze, at a convent abbey known as Aubazine.

It was here that the girl who would become known around the world simply as Coco grew up as a charity-case orphan. It was a profound desertion, and the wounds of loss and abandonment were themes that would become as entwined in the story of Chanel No. 5 as they were in Coco's. They formed an emotional register that would shape the history of the world's most famous perfume and Coco Chanel's often complicated relationship to it.

Today, the abbey at Aubazine remains much as it was during her hard and lonely girlhood. Indeed, it remains much as it was during the twelfth century, when the saint Étienne d'Obazine
³
–as his name was rendered in the original Latin–founded it. During their time at the orphanage, Coco Chanel and the other girls were assigned to read and reread the story of his exemplary life, and the unrelenting dullness of his good deeds is crushing.

The saintly Étienne, however, had a keen sense of aesthetics at a moment when Western culture's ideas about beauty and proportion were in radical transition. He and the monks who followed him to this wilderness in a remote corner of southwestern France were members of the new and rapidly growing Cistercian clerical order, which prized nothing so much as a life and an art of elemental simplicity. Étienne's isolated retreat from the world at Aubazine was–and remains–a space of echoing austere grandeur.

The road from the valley that winds up to Aubazine is steep and narrow, and the forests slant down sharply into long ravines. At the summit, there is nothing more than a small village, with a cluster of low stone buildings, a few shops, and quiet houses overshadowed by the looming presence of one of France's great medieval abbeys. By the middle of the nineteenth century, it had been transformed from a monastery into a convent orphanage for girls. For the children who lived there, it was a youth of hard work and strict discipline and, fortunately for the future prospects of the young Gabrielle, much of it focused on clothing. There was nothing luxurious about it, however. Days were spent washing laundry and mending, and it was here that she learned, of course, to sew.

Coco Chanel once later said that fashion was architecture
⁴
, and the architecture she meant was based on this convent home, with its brutally clean lines and the stark beauty of simple contrasts. The connection has never been fully explored in any of the books that have been written on Coco Chanel's revolutionary fashions. Perhaps the first person to recognize Aubazine's profound importance was Coco Chanel's biographer, Edmonde Charles-Roux, who was one of the few people to know the story of this lonely childhood. She mentions it in passing. Thinking of Aubazine and Gabrielle's longing for a certain kind of starkness, Charles-Roux always believed that
⁵
:

It was at the heart of Coco Chanel's aesthetics–her obsession with purity and minimalism. It would shape the dresses she designed and the way she lived. It would shape Chanel No. 5, her great olfactory creation, no less profoundly.

Standing amid the scenes of Coco Chanel's childhood, the power of Aubazine is obvious. From the exterior, the abbey is an imposing structure of granite and sandy-hued limestone that towers over the village that grew up around it. Inside, it is a contrast of brilliant whiteness and lingering shadows. The keyhole doorways are dark wood against vast expanses of pale stone. There is the cool solidity of arching walls, adorned only with the play of light and the sun streaking in through colorless lead-paned windows. It possesses a striking and silent kind of beauty.

This building was also filled with meanings that would shape the course of Coco Chanel's life–and the life of Chanel No. 5. Everywhere in the world at Aubazine, there were scents and symbols–and reminders of the importance of perfume. St. Bernard of Clairvaux, who founded the Cistercian movement
⁶
, made a point of encouraging his monks to give perfume and anointment a central role in prayer and in rituals of purification. In his famous sermons on the Bible's “Song of Songs,” some of the most erotic verses anywhere in religious literature, he advised devout clerics to spend some spiritual time contemplating the perfumed breasts of the young bride described in the song's key passages. Soon, someone got the idea that this contemplation would be even more effective if it were combined with time spent simultaneously sniffing the aromas of the local jasmine, lavender, and roses.

For centuries, scent had been part of the life of devotion at Aubazine, and the traces lingered. Étienne had made a mission of planting richly scented flowers everywhere in the empty ravines and wastes around his abbeys
⁷
. They were the same hills where the girls went for long walks with the nuns on Sundays. Just beyond, in the cloister courtyard, were the carefully tended remains of the original twelfth-century gardens, the source of all those scents. The echoing nave, where Gabrielle Chanel listened to endless sermons, had been the site of these perfumed rituals of meditation and prayer for hundreds of years. Even the worn, stone staircase at Aubazine that led to the children's bedchambers
⁸
and the attics, where Gabrielle hid her secret romance novels, was the same one those medieval monks climbed every night on the way to their perfumed dreams. Scent had always been a part of her childhood.

It was a desperately unhappy childhood
⁹
. Later, “Aubazine” was a word throughout her life that Coco Chanel would never speak. She surrounded it in silence and mystery, and it remained a guarded and shameful secret
¹⁰
. In all the interviews that she gave in the years that followed, she would claim to have grown up with aunts and invented a fabulous and fictional story about her father making a fortune in America. In fact, she did everything in her power to jettison the past, going so far as to send money to members of her family on the condition that they never reveal those shared secrets.

What she lived with always, however, were Aubazine's smells. They were the bracing scents of order and severity. Everywhere at Aubazine was the aroma of sheets boiled in copper pots sweetened with dried root of iris
¹¹
and the aromas of ironing. There was the scent from linen cupboards lined with pungent rosewood and verbena. There were clean hands and washed stone floors. Above all, there was the smell of raw tallow soap on children's skin and ruthlessly scoured little bodies. It was the scent of everything that was clean. Aubazine was a secret code of smell, and in the years to come it would be at the heart of everything she would find beautiful.

Aubazine was also filled with symbols and the mysterious power of numbers
¹²
, and these numbers could be found–along with their meaning–literally in the walls and on the floors around her. It was an architecture rich in silent stories. The Cistercians who raised these abbey walls nearly a thousand years before believed profoundly in a kind of sacred geometry that ordered the universe. Their buildings reflected it everywhere. In the small chapel where the children were sent to pray, the entire scope of Romanesque numerology was carved into stone before them in the most mundane places, on the floors and walls and doorways. Before them was the singular unity of God's perfection in the simple shape of a circle. Double columns reflected the duality of body and spirit, earth and heaven
¹³
, and three windows in a row were the threefold nature of the divinity. Nine represented the foundations of Jerusalem's walls and the number of the archangels, and six symbolized the days of creation.

The number five at Aubazine though was always considered special. It was the number of an essentially human kind of destiny. Or that, at least, was the idea of the monks who founded Coco Chanel's childhood abbey, and they built its entire structure on the power of this special number. Cistercian architecture flourished in Europe at the time of the Crusades, and these are the churches most closely associated with the occult mysteries of the Knights Templar
¹⁴
. To those mysteries, the number five–the pentagon–was central. “Cistercian cathedrals, churches, and abbeys,” writes one scholar, “are built on measures … which equal more or less [the] Golden Ratio of Pythagoras.”
¹⁵
It is the ratio of both the five-pointed star and the human form.

Coco Chanel understood the power of this number long before the nuns introduced the children to the esoteric symbolism of the abbey's architecture and its spiritual meaning in their lessons. In the long sunlit corridor that led into the dark solemnity of that cathedral, the path was laid with rough, uneven mosaics, ancient river stones arranged in geometric and symbolic patterns. Here, even the youngest girls waited in line to be summoned to their prayers, and Gabrielle walked this path daily. Laid out there in undulating circles, she found repeated incessantly the pattern of the number five, sometimes in the shape of stars. Sometimes, it was there in the shape of flowers.

The number five: she believed profoundly in its magic and its beauty. Those Cistercian nuns had raised their orphan charges to revere the power of symbols and spirit, and in this ancient branch of the Catholic faith it was a special number–the number of quintessence: the pure and perfect embodiment of a thing's essence. It was also, in a material universe of earth, water, wind, and fire, that other thing–ether, spirit–something mysteriously and untouchably beautiful.