Sleeping with the Enemy: Coco Chanel’s Secret War

by Vaughan, Hal

  But Reverdy the aesthetic, the poets’ poet who enchanted Chanel with phrases like “What would become of dreams if people were happy,” couldn’t swallow the everyday terrestrial world of Chanel. On May 30, 1926, after burning a number of manuscripts in front of a few friends, he retired to a little house just outside the Benedictine abbey at Solesmes, where he lived for thirty years with his wife, Henriette.

  Chanel loved him and he loved her. Biographer Edmonde Charles-Roux believed that Reverdy, who had converted to Catholicism the same year, went into exile seeking inspiration and God. His separation from Chanel was inevitable.

  French poet, playwright, and film director Jean Cocteau (center) with (from left) Lydia Sokolova (born Hilda Munnings), English dancer and choreographer Anton Dolin, Leon Woizikowsky, and Bronislava Nijinska after the first performance of Le Train bleu in Britain, at the Coliseum Theatre, London. Costumes designed by Chanel. (illustration credit 2.7)

  Though she was hurt at first, Chanel eventually accepted fate. Nevertheless she never really lost Reverdy. He would visit Paris from time to time and somehow be available.

  Over their long years of friendship Chanel gave Reverdy strength, confidence in his creative ability, and material assistance. She was generous and tactful, secretly buying up his manuscripts, financing him through his publisher, and underwriting his work. Despite her own success, Reverdy’s darkest fears and somber view of life struck a melancholy chord in Chanel—a remembrance of her childhood. For Reverdy, son of a winegrower, was someone of her breed. Even though he had adopted a quasi-monastic lifestyle, their affair never seemed to end.

  WHEN REVERDY WAS NOT available the handsome Russian Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich was. He had fallen out of favor in 1916 at the court of his first cousin, Nicholas II, emperor of all Russia. Nicholas was not amused when the twenty-one-year-old guardsman had a drawn-out homosexual love affair with his handsome, cross-dressing, and bisexual cousin, Prince Felix Yusupov. (Prince Felix chose Dmitri to help carry out the murder of Grigori Rasputin, the Russian monk whose influence on the Czarina was feared in court circles and the Russian parliament.) Dmitri was banished to the Persian front in the early days of World War I—an act of grace as it turned out, because it spared him the ravages of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and probably saved his life. Dmitri eventually fled to France with few belongings but his stock of precious jewels, including strings of fabulous pearls. Some would end up draped around Chanel’s neck, launching another Chanel fashion creation: costume jewelry.

  Once in France, and a pretender to the Russian throne, the tall, elegant, and alcoholic Dmitri Pavlovich grieved with other Russian exiles over the annihilation of the Romanov family. But Dmitri could be lively and fun loving. His good looks, green eyes, long Romanov legs, and charm seduced Chanel. It was just what she needed after the intensity of Reverdy and a brief tryst with Stravinsky.

  In late 1920, when the Grand Duke entered Chanel’s intimate life, Paris wags dubbed her new adventure “Chanel’s Slavic period.” In homage to her new paramour, Coco wanted to create an authentic Russian line. She hired Dmitri’s sister, the Grand Duchess Marie, and her exiled Russian royal friends. The Czarina’s former ladies-in-waiting delivered embroidery and beadwork at far less cost than demanded by French artisans. They fashioned stunning combinations of needlework and fur, such as Chanel’s own white coat embroidered and trimmed in Russian sable featured in a 1920 issue of Vogue magazine.

  Augmenting her Slavic collection, Chanel included a component never before seen on the continent: Russian-inspired peasant dresses worn with a draping of pearls, some with squareneck tunic tops and elbow-length sleeves, Oriental embroideries, chenille knitted cloches, and stunning waterfall gowns of crystals and lignite jet. And for those wanting something more classic, she brought out a line of modern garb: wool knits, dresses cut from fine French muslin cotton, tulle for day wear and lamé or metallic lace for an evening out. It was all very grand. Like her jersey line before it, Chanel’s “Russian look” was a great success. It sold so well that she was soon employing fifty Russian seamstresses in addition to designers and technicians, all working at an expanded atelier on the rue Cambon under her critical eye.

  Grand Duke Dimitri, Chanel’s lover—who helped Chanel launch her successful Chanel No. 5 perfume, 1910. (illustration credit 2.8)

  The Grand Duke brought Chanel something rare and more precious than a few strings of pearls. Just as Boy Capel’s English knit sweaters had inspired her to copy that mode for women, Pavlovich helped to inspire her to create the Russian-Slavic collection—and to venture into perfume.

  During WWI, women were wedded to their grandmothers’ lye soap for personal hygiene. Later, they used scents extracted from a combination of flowers—violets, roses, orange blossoms, jasmine—or scents from animal sources. For a night out, more sophisticated women applied powder and sprayed their bodies with floral mists. Men favored Bay Rum or Roger & Gallet cologne, liberally splashed about to mask unpleasant odors. Rumors now spread that Chanel was about to launch a “secret, marvelous eau Chanel.” The secret, according to Paris gossip, was known to the fifteenth-century Medici family of Florence. Women thought the perfumed liquid preserved their skin while men used it to cure razor burns.

  The hallmark Chanel No. 5 flacon, illustrated by French artist SEM (Georges Goursat), ca. 1921. The bottle entered the New York Museum of Modern Art in 1959. (illustration credit 2.9)

  By this time, the younger set in France was already beginning to wear Chanel’s little black dresses, sweaters, and short, pleated skirts. So why not marry a new fragrance to what was already fashionable? When it came to daubing a pearl of scent behind a feminine ear, on a wrist, or at the hollow of a shoulder curve, it was all about the sweet smell of success; it embodied poet Paul Valéry’s statement: “A woman who doesn’t wear perfume has no future.” It was about knowing how to dress and having the thousand-dollar allure of a Parisian hostess.

  Chanel set out with the help of Dmitri and a Russian chemist friend to devise a scent that would become part of the folklore of the interwar years: a fragrant emblem for les garçonnes, the boyish emancipated females sporting a unisex allure who danced the tango and Charleston, sometimes smoked opium, and embraced the art of Cocteau and Picasso. These women boasted short, manly haircuts, men’s suit jackets and ties, culottes, and shift dresses shockingly cut to the knee, without sleeves but with Charleston fringes. Indeed, the right perfume would go along perfectly with makeup, fast cars, sports, travel, and the Charleston.

  When Dmitri introduced Chanel to his Russian émigré friend, Ernest Beaux, the ex-czar’s official perfumer, a new fashion venture was launched. The Moscow-born Beaux had fled St. Petersburg after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution to fight the “Reds.” He joined the anti-Bolsheviks’ White Russian armies and landed in the far north, near the Arctic Circle where the sun shone at midnight and where lakes and rivers give off a refreshing perfume. In France, where he quickly became a respected chemist and specialist in concocting exotic perfumes, Beaux was just then experimenting with using synthetic compounds to enhance various natural mixtures. At his laboratory in the south of France at Grasse, known as the perfume center of the world, Beaux, under Chanel’s watchful eye and delicate sense of smell, worked his magic. He insisted that he could capture the freshness of a sunny Arctic day in his test tubes.

  Chanel found the perfumes of the day, extracted from violets, roses, and orange blossoms and put up in extravagant bottles banal. She told Beaux she wanted everything in the perfume—a scent that would evoke the femininity of a woman. Beaux’s genius was then to add synthetic chemical components to enhance the natural scents and stabilize the perfume so that the scent lingered on the skin—unlike the natural scents.

  In 1921, Beaux presented Chanel with a series of concoctions, numbered from 1 to 5 and 20 to 24. At first, she chose the twenty-second one and offered it for sale. But it was No. 5 that delighted Chanel, and she decided it must be introduced in 1921 along
with her collection. She would call the new fragrance Chanel No. 5.

  Except to a handful of the initiated, the formula for making Chanel No. 5 remains secret. It is known to be exceptionally complicated. The perfume was, and still is, constructed of approximately eighty ingredients. The most important one is high-quality jasmine found only in Grasse.

  Chanel banished the idea of a baroque bottle design her competitors used—no sculpted cupids or flowers. Rather, Chanel chose a geometric cube minimalist bottle—her modern concept of packaging.

  The name she chose, her fetish number 5, was a revolution. It was serpentine, recalling the divine five heads of Hinduism or the five visions of Buddha. (Chanel would celebrate the number 5 time and again. Her collections were invariably offered to the public on February 5 and August 5 of every year.)

  To promote her new invention, Chanel—like the shrewd peasant she was—believed in “word of mouth.” She tested Chanel No. 5 by inviting friends to dine with her at a posh restaurant near Grasse; there she furtively sprayed guests passing by her table—they reacted with surprise and pleasure. Pleased with the results, Chanel returned to Paris and quietly launched her new venture. She didn’t announce its arrival in the press. She wore it herself and sprayed the shop’s dressing rooms with it, giving bottles to a few of her high-society friends. Her perfume soon became the talk of Paris.

  Chanel instructed Beaux to put No. 5 into production. “The success was beyond anything we could have imagined,” recalled Misia Sert. “It was like a winning lottery ticket.” And so Beaux’s juice, a woman’s perfume with a scent meant for a woman, was put into an Art Deco bottle and labeled “No. 5” with interlocking Cs back to back—and launched from Chanel’s rue Cambon boutique on May 5, 1921. The Chanel-Beaux creation would withstand the vicissitudes of the Great Depression and World War II. It was a fragrance that grandmothers and mothers would pay a small fortune to wear, and one that young women could hope to acquire one day.

  For the next three years, with the help of Grand Duke Dmitri, Chanel successfully promoted No. 5 as a luxury perfume. Soon, she realized that to fully exploit the growing demand for No. 5, her modest enterprise would have to expand production.

  On a Sunday in the early spring of 1923, Chanel dressed for a day at the Longchamp racetrack. The site was and still is today an elegant meeting place, located in the Bois de Boulogne where the Seine curves around the western extreme of Paris. It’s the place to go on a Sunday to see and be seen by Le Tout-Paris, to watch the “ponies” gallop around the oval, and to dine well after betting one’s money on some “gentleman-owner’s” horse.

  But it was Pierre Wertheimer and his money that brought Chanel to Longchamp that afternoon. Théophile Bader, who kept in touch with the “world of frippery,” arranged the meeting. As a prince of the French retail trade and one of the owners of Paris’s major emporium, Les Galeries Lafayette, Bader wanted to be sure he could obtain a steady supply of the perfume from the Beaux laboratory—and in quantities to satisfy his customers. “You have a perfume that deserves a much bigger market. I want you to meet Pierre Wertheimer, who owns Bourjois perfumes and has a large factory in France and an important distribution network,” he advised Chanel. (It is unknown if Bader revealed to Chanel that the Wertheimers were his business partners.)

  Chanel’s Longchamp meeting with Pierre Wertheimer was by all accounts short and to the point: “You want to produce and distribute perfumes for me?”

  “Why not?” he replied. “But if you want the perfume to be made under the name of Chanel, we’ve got to incorporate.”

  Within the time it took to complete the legal work, Chanel turned over to a newly formed French company Les Parfums Chanel, S.A. the ownership and rights to manufacture Chanel perfumes along with the formulas and methods to produce the fragrances developed by Beaux. In return, she became president of the new entity and held a stake of two hundred fully paid-up shares—worth 500 French francs each. Her ownership represented 10 percent of the paid-up capital. She was also granted 10 percent of the capital of all companies that manufactured her perfumes outside of France. The majority of the remaining capital, 70 percent of the outstanding shares, went to the Wertheimer clan, who would finance production and assure worldwide distribution of the perfume from their corporate headquarters in New York. Bader’s proxies (Adolphe Dreyfus and Max Grumbach) received 20 percent of the shares. One wonders if Chanel knew that Bader was in effect getting a kind of finder’s fee through these intermediaries.

  Pierre Wertheimer, the younger Wertheimer brother, 1928. The Wertheimers bought a majority of Chanel’s perfume company in 1924. (illustration credit 2.10)

  Chanel’s nonchalance in reaching a deal with Pierre Wertheimer—and agreeing to use the same lawyer as the Wertheimers to draw up contracts—borders on commercial recklessness. It may be that after her hopeless affair with Pierre Reverdy, and having recently parted with Grand Duke Dmitri, she was just too emotionally worked up to give the matter any serious attention. Indeed, between 1923 and 1937, Chanel was “Mademoiselle Ballet,” trapped in a whirlwind of hyperactivity. She poured her creative energy into designing costumes for Sergei Diaghilev’s ballets—Le Train bleu, Orphée, Oedipe roi—and a host of other theatrical productions, many choreographed by Diaghilev with Vaslav Nijinsky. Her costumes for Le Train bleu meshed beautifully with the subtle sexual transgressions in the dance, the characters playing with gender stereotypes, androgyny, and homosexuality—though in this case, the females were endowed with masculine characteristics. The ballet was an open exploration of avant-garde perversity—and Chanel must have been delighted to be part of the production.

  The poet Pierre Reverdy, 1940—a man Chanel deeply loved. Their friendship lasted more than fifty years. (illustration credit 2.11)

  BY THE LATE 1920S, thanks to the production capabilities, marketing expertise, and distribution muscle of the Wertheimers, Chanel No. 5 had become a worldwide success—and nowhere more so than across the Atlantic. The perfume would become the most profitable and long-lasting result of her volcanic career, pumping out an ever-rising river of profits that would make both Chanel and the Wertheimers fabulously wealthy. But it would take a worldwide depression and later World War II for Chanel to realize the economic significance of her new perfume and the complications of her partnership with the Wertheimers. When she first signed the deal with the family, she did not and could not have imagined how Chanel No. 5 would become a fountain of riches.

  And who were these Wertheimers?

  France’s defeat by German armies in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871 split the Alsatian-Jewish Wertheimer family. Émile stayed in Alsace, now part of a united Second German Reich, while Julien and Ernest Wertheimer opted, as did some 15 percent of Alsatians, for French nationality. But it was brother Ernest who had the “nose.” In 1898 he established E. Wertheimer & Cie. and, with Julien at his side, acquired a majority interest in A. Bourjois & Cie., manufacturers of poudre de riz Bourjois (ladies’ powder), soap, and other beauty products distributed worldwide. They also acquired a production facility at Pantin, close to the Paris slaughterhouses of La Villette, known as “the city of blood.” Ironically, during the Nazi occupation of Paris, it was from the Pantin rail yards that French and German police deported uncounted thousands of men, women, and children to Germany and to certain death.

  Soon the brothers joined with other French Jews to invest in Galeries Lafayette, a large department store that would be run with great success by Théophile Bader, first on Paris’s boulevard Haussmann and later in other locations throughout France. On the shelves of the Galeries, Bourjois products for ladies and men found a warm welcome.

  Chanel was not an astute businesswoman. The whole idea of commerce, contracts, and paperwork “bored her to death.” For her entire life, she would have a love-hate, chaotic relationship with the shrewd businessman Pierre Wertheimer. She would come to believe that she had been exploited, lamenting, “He screwed me”—yet in a typical Chanel whis
per, she would add, “that darling Pierre.” Indeed, four years after inking the agreement with the temperamental couturier, the Wertheimers engaged a lawyer to deal with her while they kept an arm’s-length relationship.

  Still, the impoverished pupil of the sisters of the Congregation of the Sacred Heart mined a seam of gold in forty-one-year-old Paul and thirty-six-year-old Pierre Wertheimer. Between 1905 and 1920 the brothers had established some one hundred distribution arrangements for their products worldwide.

  WHILE ENJOYING her new fame and wealth, Chanel had yet to be accepted by the very top tier of French society; she had yet to be “anointed” by English “royals.” She was still an individual whose sexual promiscuity placed her outside of respectable society—despite her having “revolutionized French fashion” since 1910. Her amorous pursuits didn’t bother Pierre Wertheimer. He knew all about the gossip that swirled around her. In fact, Pierre had a crush on Gabrielle Chanel—still irresistible at forty-four and looking ten years younger. Despite their future quarrels, legal battles, and problems, Pierre would remain enamored of Chanel for the rest of his life. In the end, he would be her savior.

  FOR THE HOLIDAY SEASON of 1924–1925, Chanel drove down to Monte Carlo with Sarah Gertrude Arkwright Bate. Sarah, whom everyone called Vera, had been abandoned by her mother and became the surrogate child of Margaret Cambridge, Marchioness of Cambridge, daughter of the Duke of Westminster, and related to King Edward VII and Sir Winston Churchill. Vera thus acquired from childhood solid ties with the British royal family. Her good looks, luminous skin, statuesque figure, and English connections attracted Chanel. No one was more keenly appreciated by London high society … As a young woman Vera enjoyed a host of suitors: a stream of Archies, Harolds, Winstons, and Duffs at her side. Chanel hired this thirty-five-year-old darling of English royals to handle public relations in London and Paris society for the House of Chanel.