The Secret of Chanel No. 5 (38 page)

As David B. Boyce writes: “The ‘Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes' made such a cultural impact at the time that the American Association of Museums organized its own show of 400 works selected from the ‘Exposition.' The MFA, Boston, was the first of nine venues to host this touring exhibition from January 15 to February 7, 1926.” The exhibits in the United States were “[d]edicated to modern decorative arts and intended to boost the French economy; this ambitious exhibition displayed works from around the globe and attracted over 16 million viewers. More than 20 countries contributed to categories comprising architecture, interior furnishings, costume, and public arts and education"; see Boyce, “Art Deco Exhibit at MFA Is a Dazzling Display,”
South Coast Today,
September 15, 2004, B4, http://archive.southcoasttoday.com/daily/09-04/09-15-04/b01li181.htm.

6
“Perfumery,” those sixteen million visitors read, “is an essentially modern art …”: Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes,
1925, vol. 9, 73.

7
Tellingly, the perfume wasn't advertised in France until as late as the 1940s:
Chanel archives.

8
a moment in history when “objects were defined as ‘expressive' of the identity of the consumer”:
Simon Dell, “The Consumer and the Making of the ‘Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes,' 1907–1925,”
Journal of Design History
(1999), 311.

9
“The 1925 exhibition of decorative arts … saw her and her friends at the center of the excitement”:
Madsen,
Chanel,
162.

10
Before long, an advertisement in the French periodical
L'Illustration
flaunted another new perfume, Cadolle's Le No. 9: L'Illustration,
May 4, 1929, Chanel archives.

11
names like Rallet No. 3 and Rallet No. 33:
On these scents and for images of early Rallet fragrance bottles and advertisements, see Philip Goutell, “A. Rallet and Company,”
Perfume Projects,
www.perfumeprojects.com/museum/marketers/Rallet.shtml.

12
Like Chanel No. 22 (1922)–also one of the original reformulations of Rallet:
Some perfumers suspect that it was Chanel No. 22 (presumably sample number 22 in the original series) that had the accidental overdose of aldehydes. However, the story of the overdose has never been confirmed for either of the perfumes, and Ernest Beaux' earlier experiments with the materials in Le Bouquet de Catherine / Rallet No. 1 suggest that he was familiar with the effect of aldehydes in large doses by 1920.

13
Jay Thorpe advertised the “light and sparkling” Chanel No. 5 as “the most famous” of the Chanel perfumes: New York Times,
1928, Chanel archives.

1
thirty billion dollars–the equivalent of $4,080,000,000,000–simply vanished:
calculated using nominal GDP per capita.

2
Now came the collapse of the American economy–and of the dollar:
On the period between the wars in France and the United States and on the effect of the economic crisis on the luxury markets, see particularly Carol Mann,
Paris Between the Wars
(New York: Vendome Press, 1996); Alfred Sauvy, “The Economic Crisis of the 1930s in France,”
Journal of Contemporary History
4, no. 4 (October 1969): 21–35; and Robert S. McElvaine,
The Great Depression: America, 1929–1941
(New York: Times Books, 1981); on the role of credit and luxury, see McElvaine, 41.

3
from 1929 to 1941, more than a quarter of America's workforce were unemployed:
Tom Reichert,
The Erotic History of Advertising
(Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2003), 99.

4
dropped precipitously: from $3.4 billion in 1929 to $1.3 billion four years later:
Ibid.

5
Madeleine Vionnet and the house of Lenthéric had launched lines of fragrances:
On these various lettered and numbered perfumes, see Lefkowith,
Paul Poiret and His Rosine Perfumes,
210; Madsen,
Chanel,
140; and
Perfume Intelligence,
www.perfumeintelligence.co.uk/library/perfume/a/a1/a1p1.htm.

6
Designer Lucien Lelong, rather unoriginally, countered with A, B, C, J, and N (1924) fragrances:
Lelong company history, www.lucienlelong.com/history.shtml.

7
“were pioneers in the art of enhancing and contextualizing commodities by using exotic backdrops”:
See Ellen Furlough, “Selling the American Way in Interwar France: ‘Prix Uniques' and the Salons des Arts Menagers,”
Journal of Social History
26, no. 3 (Spring 1993): 491–519.

8
one that emphasized “elaborate displays [and] the cultivation of the shopping experience”:
Furlough, “Selling the American Way,” 493.

9
“Perfume,” visitors to the pavilion learned, “is a luxury naturally adapted … to feminine fantasy”: Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes,
77; see also Owens, “They Held the Scent of Glamour.”

10
clever new “cocktail” themes that year:
Lefkowith,
Paul Poiret and His Rosine Perfumes,
211.

11
“women were seen by Hollywood as the primary consumers of cinema”:
Berry,
Screen Style,
xiv, 53.

12
Art deco was a phenomenon in America:
Berry,
Screen Style,
6.

13
the equivalent of over $75 million today:
Calculated using nominal GDP per capita.

14
According to an article in
Collier's
magazine in 1932, “The Grand Duke …”
: Quoted in Galante,
Mademoiselle Chanel,
155.

15
“see what the pictures have to offer me and what I have to offer the pictures”:
Madsen,
Chanel,
195. She ultimately designed the costumes for three Hollywood films,
Palmy Days
(1931),
Tonight or Never
(1931), and
The Greeks Had a Word for It
(1932).

16
Coco Chanel and Paul Iribe had known each other for decades:
Paul Bachollet, Daniel Bordet, and Anne-Claude Lelieur,
Paul Iribe
(Paris: Editions Denoël, 1984), 74. Iribe had been born Iribarnegaray.

17
Paul Iribe's first wife, the famed vaudeville actress Jeanne Dirys:
Bachollet et al.,
Paul Iribe,
106.

18
“My nascent celebrity,” she later told a friend, “had eclipsed … “:
Bachollet et al.,
Paul Iribe,
194–98.

19
His views were only marginally less narrow than those of another former lover, the Duke of Westminster:
On the controversies surrounding the Duke of Westminster's politics, see Richard Griffiths,
Patriotism Perverted: Captain Ramsay, the Right Club and British Anti-Semitism 1939–40
(London: Constable, 1998).

20
Time
magazine reported on March 16, 1931, “In Manhattan …”:
“People, March 16, 1931,”
Time,
March 16, 1931.

1
Notably, it was during these years that some of the first numbered perfumes finally began disappearing from the Chanel advertising:
By 1929, the French sales catalog advertised only Chanel No. 5 and Chanel No. 22 among the numbered perfumes, and the United States catalogs in 1931 and 1934 included only Chanel No. 2, Chanel No. 5, Chanel No. 11, Chanel No. 14, Chanel No. 20, Chanel No. 21, Chanel No. 22, Chanel No. 27, and Chanel No. 55–presumably a reflection of the relative popularity of those fragrances; Chanel archives.

2
the scent “worn by more smart women than any other perfume”: New York Times,
December 15, 1935, 41.

3
By 1928, the partners had assigned an in-house lawyer to handle their prickly celebrity designer:
Madsen,
Chanel,
137.

4
Part of the problem was a simple matter of dividends:
Details of this growing conflict, here and below, drawn from various sources, including Galante's
Mademoiselle Chanel,
143–53,
et passim;
and Bruno Abescat and Yves Stavridès's extensive three-part history, “Derrière l'Empire Chanel … la Fabuleuse Histoire des Wertheimer,” published in
L'Express
in the spring and summer of 2005.

5
What prompted her outrage was ostensibly the extension of the Chanel cleansing-cream line, scheduled for 1934:
Pierre Galante tells the story of this conflict in his biography of Coco Chanel, but he has at least one detail wrong: Les Parfums Chanel did not introduce a cleansing cream for the first time in 1934; the first Chanel Crème de Toilette was advertised in the French sales catalog in 1927 and in the United States sales catalog in 1931. Regardless, the cleansing cream became a point of contention between Coco Chanel and her partners by 1934. See Galante,
Mademoiselle Chanel,
151; Chanel archives.

6
“You don't have the right to make a cream,” she told the partners; “I demand …”:
Galante,
Mademoiselle Chanel,
151.

7
literally more than a ton of paperwork gathered in files in his offices:
Madsen,
Chanel,
201.

8
before the beginning of the Second World War alone, there would be three or four different lawsuits:
Galante,
Mademoiselle Chanel,
149.

9
railing against the “Judeo-Masonic Mafia”:
Charles-Roux,
Chanel,
290.

10
By 1931, the Nazis were already the second largest party in Germany:
On the early rise of fascism in the 1930s, see, for example, Richard Bessel,
Political Violence and the Rise of Nazism: The Storm Troopers in Eastern Germany, 1925–1934
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984); Bruce Campbell,
The S.A. Generals and the Rise of Fascism
(Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1998).

11
“In the first number, Iribe inscribed his journal in the line of far-right publications during the period”:
Bachollet et al.,
Paul Iribe,
205; the journal had been published earlier and was revived during this period, and commentators have noted that in issue five, published on January 7, 1934, the cover image depicts Coco Chanel as Marianne–the figure of France–on trial. The caption reads “L'Accusée,” or “the accused.” Coco Chanel's image was used to represent Marianne in Iribe's journal on several occasions.

12
she “developed a delusion that intensified her anti-Semitism”:
Abescat and Stavridès, “Derrière l'Empire Chanel,” 29.

13
remembered Coco Chanel as an “appalling troublemaker” and told how she lumped the Jewish men with whom she did business:
Ibid.

14
to vote Iribe–and by extension Coco Chanel–off the board of directors at the end of the meeting:
For an account of this and the following, see, for example, Galante,
Mademoiselle Chanel,
151 ff.; Madsen,
Chanel,
205 ff.; Abescat and Stavridès, “Derrière l'Empire Chanel.”

15
“Madame Gabrielle Chanel [as] above all an artist in living”:
Photograph by Melle Kollar, 1937, Chanel archives, number 10818.

16
designers of the moment were Elsa Schiaparelli, Lucien Lelong, and Cristóbal Balenciaga:
See Katherine Fleming, “Coco Chanel: From Rags to Riches,”
Marie Claire,
October 7, 2008, http://au.lifestyle.yahoo.com/marie-claire/features/life-stories/article/-/5877952/coco-chanel-from-rags-to-riches/.

17
This, she said to those who criticized her, was no time for fashion:
Charles-Roux,
Chanel,
306.

18
Coffee was replaced with chicory, and chocolate all but disappeared:
On daily life in occupied France, see D. Veillon,
Vivre et survivre en France, 1939–1947
(Paris: Payot, 1995).

1
“The ground-floor boutique,” one historian writes, “was filled with German soldiers”:
Madsen,
Chanel,
238.

2
“During the war we could sell only about twenty bottles of perfume a day”:
Haedrich,
Coco Chanel,
146.

3
sons-in-law, Raoul Meyer and Max Heilbronn:
“Galeries Lafayette S.A., Company History,”
Funding Universe,
www.fundinguniverse.com/company-histories/Galeries-Lafayette-SA-Company-History.html.

4
Although old French families, their backgrounds were Jewish:
Details on the Wertheimer family, here and below, drawn from Abescat and Stavridès, “Derrière l'Empire Chanel,” 83–85,
et passim;
on Estée Lauder, see
Estée: A Success Story
(New York: Ballantine Books, 1986).

5
Thomas had been the president of the perfume house of Guerlain before the war:
On H. Gregory Thomas, Jacques Wertheimer, and the problem of bringing jasmine into the United States, see Abescat and Stavridès, “Derrière l'Empire Chanel"; and the obituary published in the
New York Times,
October 10, 1990, www.nytimes.com/1990/10/10/obituaries/h-gregory-thomas-chanel-executive-82.html?pagewanted=1.

6
something composed–"like a dress”:
Galante,
Les années Chanel,
79–80.

7
“in Grasse, where all flowers were called by their proper [Latin] names, jasmine was simply known [in the 1920s] as ‘the flower' “:
Toledano and Coty,
François Coty,
57.

8
the jasmine plants grow to only half their normal height, and they have lower proportions of those so-called indoles:
Christopher Sheldrake, Chanel, interview, 2009.