The Secret of Chanel No. 5 (24 page)

None of these fragrances was, of course, an exact replica of Chanel No. 5. Each perfumer had taken the concept and worked to improve and reimagine it. Even with Chanel No. 46 there were significant modifications. Yet if they had been simple knockoffs, it hardly would have mattered. What all these new Chanel No. 5 versions testify to is the terrific celebrity of the original product. By the end of the Second World War, Chanel No. 5 was no longer just a perfume. It was a cultural icon, rich with a meaning and symbolism that had little to do any longer with the scent itself or with the woman who had first been inspired to produce it.

The partners at Les Parfums Chanel weren't worried, then, that Coco Chanel's red-label perfumes would compete with Chanel No. 5. It was already obvious that nothing could rival the fragrance. What they were worried about was Coco Chanel tearing down the prestige of the name. Part of that concern was for the damage she could do by stirring up worries about its quality. But the bigger part of their concern, it was said, was the damage she could do to the name of Chanel itself if her wartime story were laid bare to the international press. Said her friend and biographer Marcel Haedrich, “If one took seriously the few disclosures that Mademoiselle Chanel allowed herself to make about those black years of the occupation
²¹
, one's teeth would be set on edge.”

It was all too easy to imagine Coco Chanel becoming infamous. It would be far better for everyone that she just retire quietly.
Forbes
magazine reported later that Pierre Wertheimer's worry was how “a legal fight might illuminate Chanel's wartime activities and wreck her image–and his business
²²
.” By the late 1950s, even Coco Chanel realized that it would be wiser to pass over the war in silence, and she reputedly paid Walter Schellenberg, one of the principal operatives in the failed diplomatic mission to Berlin
²³
, to suppress any mention of her in his prison-house memoirs. For Coco, however, what Chanel No. 5 represented made letting go of the scent emotionally difficult. Losing control of the fragrance evoked too viscerally the pain and desire tangled up with all those earlier losses. What she needed was to feel that she had conquered a whole set of demons, and Chanel No. 5 was a symbol of it all.

By 1946, both sides were suing each other in courts on two continents, with cases in New York, London, and Paris all moving along inexorably. The partners at Les Parfums Chanel blinked first. They decided that it was better to make peace, at almost any cost. In early May of 1947, the lawyer for Les Parfums Chanel, Claude Lewy, placed a transatlantic telephone call from New York to Paris. “Pierre [Wertheimer],” he told Coco Chanel's lawyer, “is standing here next to me.
²⁴
He is ready to make a trip with me. We can start by seeing you on Saturday, the 17th in the afternoon. We'll have dinner together. He wants with all his heart to conclude a total and definitive peace with Coco.” On May 17, they did meet in an office on the Champs Elysées, but nothing got resolved by the dinner hour. The negotiations went on late into the night. After an epic eight-hour conference, throughout which Coco Chanel remained insistent, a peace treaty in one of the century's great entrepreneurial battles was signed.

By the end of the meeting, just as Coco Chanel wanted, they had renegotiated the contract. She would have the right to sell her new line of perfumes in Switzerland, where she was now living. But that wasn't what had ever really mattered. What mattered was the settlement. The partners at Les Parfums Chanel would give Coco Chanel $350,000–a sum today worth nearly nine million dollars
²⁵
–as payment for the wartime sales of Chanel No. 5, and in the future not just 10 percent of the profits but 2 percent of the perfume
sales
worldwide, a vast increase in her income. In exchange, she agreed not to use the number five in any of her marketing. Her estimated annual income would be over a million dollars–today's equivalent of $25 million a year, using conservative estimates. Before the ink was dry, she had become, at the age of sixty-five, one of the richest women in the world.

Unmoored from her signature perfume, without a fashion house, and living in a kind of half-exile between Zürich and Paris as some version of a pampered mistress, Coco Chanel now became, in the world of fashion and fragrance during the final years of the 1940s, a kind of ghostly presence. Chanel No. 5, however, was still living large.

D
uring the winter of 1947, it wasn't Paris that was occupied but Berlin, as the Allies took administrative control of the city that Coco Chanel had visited quietly in the final days of the Second World War on her unlucky diplomatic mission. Now, President Truman would not have had the same troubles finding a bottle of Chanel No. 5 as a souvenir for Bess.

One of the popular entertainments in Berlin that year testifies to just how famous Chanel No. 5 had become–to the way in which this perfume had become a powerful and truly international cultural icon. Coco's signature scent had plenty of admirers in Germany. Chanel No. 5 was also part of what the Americans in the city were celebrating. The show tunes that the G.I.s were singing that winter came from a light “boy-meets-girls” comic opera called
Chanel No. 5.
¹
“We know the ladies,” one of the catchy tunes went,

For men who had served in France and lined up on streets to find bottles of a favorite fragrance after the liberation, a tune about perfumes was amusing and contemporary. What is fascinating about this long list of popular scents is the simple fact that Chanel No. 5 was the one that stood in for them all: the ladies might like Mitsouko and Scandal, but the title of the opera was Coco Chanel's signature perfume. On the cover of the score, what everyone saw was a huge bottle of Chanel No. 5 and a sultry woman standing next to it. It wasn't just the American G.I.s who loved it, either. It had been a favorite scent of the German troops in Paris, too. Fragrance crossed all those complicated borders during the 1940s.

By the late 1940s, Coco Chanel was also crossing borders again and traveling between France and Switzerland, and in the end her relationship with von Dincklage seems to have simply fizzled. By 1950, she was once again alone, and 1953 found her back in Paris permanently and dissatisfied. Her wartime sins, a decade later, had been largely forgotten, but the world of fashion had forgotten her too. After all, her couture house had been closed for fifteen years. It was only Chanel No. 5 that everyone remembered, and, in her second deal with the partners at Les Parfums Chanel, it seemed that she had let go of that part of her past. Her relationship with Pierre Wertheimer, though, was still a deeply complicated one, and René de Chambrun believed that it was “based on a businessman's passion for a woman who felt exploited by him
³
.” In the mid-1950s, he remembered how “Pierre returned to Paris full of pride and excitement
⁴
[after one of his horses won the English Derby]. … He rushed to Coco, expecting congratulations and praise. But she refused to kiss him. She resented him, you see, all her life.” To those who knew Coco Chanel, however, the relationship she constructed with him looked distinctly like the relationships in which she had spent her twenties.

Chanel No. 5 was over for her. Having given up even a minority role in the company that she had struggled to reassert control over in the long decades of the 1920s, ‘30s, and ‘40s, she wasn't sure she was ready to be done with perfume entirely, however. One afternoon in a café, she proposed to Pierre Wertheimer that perhaps they should launch a new fragrance, and she would play a role in designing it. “Pierre,” she said, “let's launch a new perfume.” “A new perfume,” he countered, “why?” Conveniently forgetting her forays into the red-label fragrances, Coco responded that she hadn't created a new one since 1924. “Don't even think of it,” Wertheimer responded. “It's too risky.
⁵
Launching a new perfume now would take an enormous investment in publicity. And why bother? One can live on No. 5. The Americans don't want something new. They want No. 5.” Anything they released, he explained to her, would only compete with the sales of Chanel No. 5, and that scent, he reminded her, was the reason she was living in the lap of luxury, with money in the bank. Finally–after decades of the company creating its own competition–it was all about Chanel No. 5.

Sometime in late 1953 or early 1954, Coco Chanel and Pierre Wertheimer settled instead on a different arrangement. She would reopen the fashion house, and he would pay for everything associated with this business venture. There was one last thing, too. She gave up in the new settlement the right to use her own name in exchange for a huge monthly income from him. With the death of his brother and the decision to buy out the Bader family interests in the late 1940s, he was now the only partner left at Les Parfums Chanel
⁶
. He would pay all her bills–everything from her rent at the Ritz Hotel to the cost of her postage stamps. Later, offended at being taxed under French law as a “spinster,” she would even insist that Pierre pay her taxes.
⁷
In giving up Chanel No. 5 for a second time, she was even more fundamentally giving up rights to her persona and her public identity.

It was a scent that had been born out of her conflicted relationship with her sexuality and her history as a rich man's mistress. Curiously, what made her happy in the end was something that looked a lot like becoming, once again, a kept woman. Perhaps that had been part of their long conflict.

As her acquaintance Edmonde Charles-Roux wondered later, “Pierre Wertheimer, you see, had been one of those
entreteneurs
(like Balsan) of a type that no longer existed, whence Gabrielle's attraction for him.
⁸
How could he have regarded her as anything but an
irrégulière?”
An
entreteneur
translates, quite simply, into a man who kept mistresses. Wertheimer was:

Pierre Wertheimer was used to paying for a mistress, and, for Coco Chanel, there was also something about this that was comforting and familiar. In the end, what made her happy was to formalize their arrangement.

Adding to the sense of
déjà vu
surrounding her relationship with Pierre, it was an odd replay of the way in which Étienne Balsan and Boy Capel had funded her millinery shop in the beginning. Coco would now give up the rights to everything. In a curious kind of entrepreneurial marriage, she would give Pierre, in fact, her name. The Wertheimer interest would include not just ownership of the Chanel brand in the fragrance industry but rights to the fashion house as well. Coco Chanel would have complete license as designer and artistic director, but it would be, in all other respects, once again someone else's business.

It sounds like a hard deal to accept, but once again it was also Coco Chanel's idea. This time, she was happy with it. She was vastly wealthy already, and she had the funds to launch any new and daring enterprise she could imagine. If she had wanted to go solo with a relaunch of the fashion house, there was nothing stopping her. She had 2 percent of Chanel No. 5's sales coming in year after year and could count on it for decades. Someone else would pay all her bills on top of it. The truth was that retaining control over the Chanel name simply wasn't what she wanted. Pierre Wertheimer now controlled the entire Chanel business operation, and Coco Chanel was his only real partner.

Considering everything that had happened between them during the Second World War–including the Wertheimers' exile as Jewish refugees and Coco's efforts to use the laws of Nazi-occupied France to strip the partners of this contested possession–it is an astonishing story. Despite their curious love-hate relationship, Pierre Wertheimer had cut through the Gordian knot of their legal battles with Coco Chanel simply by agreeing to pay for anything she ever wanted, forever. She seemed to have finally found some lasting closure.

Coco Chanel had given up her name entirely, and, having disentangled herself from her signature fragrance, she returned to a private life that was, despite all her riches, oddly monastic. She lived in a simply decorated room at the Ritz Hotel and took to writing, in her Catholic schoolgirl hand, a book of aphorisms that she imagined one day publishing.
¹⁰

But the story of Chanel No. 5 didn't end with her retreat from the world of perfume. If it had, Chanel No. 5 would have gone down in history as one of the great scents of the early twentieth century, but it never would have become the fragrance industry's
monstre.
Its greatest success was still in front of it. In the 1950s, the perfume took on a life of its own, and it would need to live and die on its own value and on the basis of how others saw it. Artists and celebrities would become increasingly important arbiters of its fame–but the celebrity of Coco Chanel would no longer be the driving force behind the perfume.