Coco Chanel

by Lisa Chaney

  Was that the ultimate cause of Arthur’s accident, as he had driven along the Cannes road toward a Christmas with his sister? There was no satisfactory resolution to his dilemma: staying with Diana or going to Gabrielle. Had Arthur’s tiredness at the end of that long journey south been the last factor heightening his overwrought state of mind, so that he brought about his own death? The possibility of his suicide must have occurred to Gabrielle that day when she had sat, weeping, beside the wreck of her dead lover’s car.

  The following day, Gabrielle and Dmitri left old Marseille behind them. Marveling at Aix-en-Provence, Avignon and Orange, they drove on, reaching Lyon for the night. Next morning, they altered their proposed route, making a long detour to Vichy. The subsequent entries in Dmitri’s diary show that while he was unaware of it, there was actually nothing random about this next leg of their journey. Gabrielle was giving the impression of leaving things to chance; in reality, she had made a plan.

  As they left Lyon, the sun shone, and they drove with the Silver Cloud’s roof rolled down. After lunch, they abandoned the major road and drove out “across country.” With the Rolls impressively negotiating the winding road through high and remote terrain, Dmitri noted their frequent stops to admire the drama of the Auvergne landscape, where the peaks are often snow covered. On reaching Vichy, he was less impressed, finding it flat and unattractive. The weather had turned, and the resort was mournful in its dearth of tourists. Thanks to the low season, they met no one there they knew, for which Dmitri was grateful. On a desultory walk around the town, little could he have known that his companion had a clear agenda: she was secretly reliving her youth. As far as we know, Gabrielle hadn’t returned to Vichy since her failed bid for the stage more than fifteen years earlier. How her life had changed.

  The next day, she suggested a trip to Thiers, the center of the French cutlery trade since the fifteenth century. She must have had to sell this detour to Dmitri with some enthusiasm, for Thiers is almost twenty-five miles in the opposite direction from their final destination, Paris. But Gabrielle was now in earnest; she was intent on traveling through the terrain of her childhood.

  While Dmitri innocently noted Thiers’s reputation, Gabrielle was reliving her memories of her father’s buying his scissors and knives there for resale throughout the Midi. Dmitri recorded that after a bad meal they “made a little excursion around the area.”12 First navigating the tortuous mountainous roads through the chestnut and pine forests in their “little excursion,” Gabrielle must next have suggested they follow the river Dore just six miles farther south to Courpière, her mother’s birthplace.

  How strange it must have been to see the place where Gabrielle’s mother had left her and her siblings in search of her renegade husband, the place where Gabrielle had played those lonely childhood games in the churchyard. Gabrielle gave away nothing to Dmitri about the significance of this remote Auvergne backwater, but her thoughts must have been brimful of the past. Driving in one of the world’s most luxurious cars and supporting herself as one of the world’s most avant-garde designers, she was the personification of female modernity. She was being sought out by the Parisian elite, could name among her friends some of the most famous artists, writers and musicians of the day, and now her traveling companion was a grand duke. Did Gabrielle feel triumphant, remembering those Courpière relations who had said she was useless, and who had pitied “poor Jeanne” for following that no-good Albert Chanel around? Jeanne, the woman her daughter defended with the comment: “Hadn’t she at least married the man she loved?”

  Gabrielle had not only traveled way beyond that humiliation, she had also outgrown the mind-set burdening her with those judgments. And while, from her origins, she drew her stubborn and forthright tenacity, for the rest, Gabrielle Chanel had long since outgrown her roots. Ironically, it was that inherited capacity for endurance that had permitted her to make the leap from a fantasized self-transformation to one sustained by reality and hard work. These were the two opposing yet complementary aspects of Gabrielle’s nature. Like any artist of caliber, she possessed an outlandish imagination, which had allowed her to reinvent first herself and then the wardrobes of the female population; she also possessed the essential counterpart of a vivid imagination: practicality.

  Gabrielle would say, “People say I’m an Auvergnat. There’s nothing of the Auvergnat in me. Nothing, nothing! My mother was one. In that part of the world . . . I was thoroughly unhappy . . . I fed on sorrow and horror, and regularly thought of dying.”13 How Gabrielle had hated her childhood. Meanwhile, on that very day, May 2, 1921, while she chose her secret return to the distant places of her childhood, on the other side of the world, one of her closest childhood companions reached a mournful conclusion.

  From Canada, Gabrielle’s sister Antoinette had continued sending despairing letters to Gabrielle and Adrienne, and they had continued urging her to persevere. But Antoinette was entirely unsuited to her new life. In response, Gabrielle had recently dispatched a young Argentinian with a letter of recommendation to Antoinette’s father-in-law. The reasons are lost with the letter, but he may have been an emissary sent to discover the extent of Antoinette’s plight. Antoinette found the young man entertaining, and within days of his departure for Buenos Aires, she had fled her in-laws’ household, leaving everything behind her.

  Whatever precipitated her departure, once Antoinette arrived in Buenos Aires, her movements are a mystery. All we know is that any hopes she might have had of beginning again were disappointed, because, on May 2, she gave up the struggle and took her own life. This was almost certainly with an overdose of drugs. Until the recent discovery of Antoinette’s death certificate,14 the story has usually been told that she had already died, a year earlier, in 1920, a casualty of the postwar Spanish flu epidemic.15 Gabrielle and Adrienne possibly never knew the real cause of Antoinette’s death. On the other hand, they might have fabricated the Spanish flu story so as to conceal her despairing end and avoid the stigma of another family suicide.

  Gabrielle’s response to her sister’s suicide is nowhere recorded. But Antoinette had been part of Gabrielle and Adrienne’s undertaking to transform their lives, and she had worked hard for her older sister. She had benefited, but in reality, Antoinette had only taken on the trappings of their new lives. She hadn’t possessed Adrienne’s prudence, which would finally lead to her marriage to the man she loved. Nor did Antoinette have the inspired, rule-breaking originality of her sister Gabrielle. In the end, poor Antoinette lacked their tenacity and force of personality. She neither succeeded in marrying “above herself” nor in making herself into a truly New Woman, dependent upon no one but herself. Perhaps there was no connection, but for many years Gabrielle didn’t present a wedding dress at the end of her show, a tradition all the couture houses followed.

  Gabrielle saw Adrienne, and occasionally her brothers, who periodically called on her in rue Cambon. She regularly sent one of them a check, and looked after André, her dead sister Julia-Berthe’s son, mostly away at boarding school. Aside from this, Gabrielle now had very little to do with her extended family. With Antoinette’s death, one more connection with her childhood was lost, and she was a little more alone. Years later, in referring to her relations, Gabrielle would say that no one in her family grew old: “I don’t know how I escaped the slaughter.”16

  As Gabrielle made her secret journey through her past with Dmitri, their sojourn was concluding. Dmitri would write that Gabrielle was “sad that tomorrow our trip comes to an end.” With many miles ahead of them, on the final morning they were up early and drove through rain, then thick snow, until eventually halting for coffee to warm up. Setting off again, Dmitri wrote that “the highway was covered in snow, and the countryside looked Russian. It was rather sad and moving.”17 The weary travelers finally reached Paris, where Dmitri would again ask his diary why it was they had made that detour around Vichy.

  Laughing off rumors of marriage to Gabrielle during his “adventure,
” Dmitri was less sanguine about the rumor put around in their absence that she was keeping him. He did nonetheless go and see her the following evening. Moved by her inability to conceal “her sadness that our excursion had come to an end,” Dmitri didn’t leave her suite until two the next morning. The following afternoon, “She had cheered up but was nonetheless very touching.”18

  18

  The Lucky N° 5

  Work for Gabrielle had long since become a refuge and the place where she could put her feelings aside. She would say that work gave her energy. She had endured the emotional torments of the last two years or so and her creativity seemed unstoppable. The countesses Rehbinder, Castries, Sjorza, Noailles, Doubazow and Moustiers, the princesses Radziwill and Murat, Mme. Miguel Yturbe (wife of one of Gabrielle’s earlier admirers), the Honorable Mrs. Anthony Henley, Mlle. Gabrielle Davelli, Mlle. Cécile Sorel, Mlle. Gabrielle Dorziat and Misia Sert were only a selection of the society women and celebrities making their way to Gabrielle’s salon door.

  In autumn 1920, Vogue had enthused over Gabrielle’s “perfect taste . . . and her extraordinary perception of the woman of today,” and discussed the variety of Gabrielle’s offerings. A particular cape, then the thing, was “a very smart affair of conservative lines but elaborated with a design in quilting which covers most of its surface . . . this is both warm and decorative.” Then there were “evening wraps, enveloping capes, superb manteaux of rich-toned velvets embroidered with gold and enriched with otter or sable, very simple in line,” and gowns of lace and tulle, and “sheath frocks.” “The embroideries which she uses are all designed for her, and her laces are unusual and distinctive.”

  Over and again throughout these years, the magazines advised that because at Chanel there was what Vogue described as an “avoidance of extremes, each model at this house suits an amazing variety of types.” Saying that while Gabrielle followed principles that could at first be thought uninteresting—practicality and simplicity—the magazine admired her unerring ability to create “many new effects each season.”1

  Speaking of “eminently wearable and well-designed costumes,” there were “tailored suits in black, beige or grey.” And here we note the colors that were to become Chanel trademarks, establishing their place in her canon. In addition to the tailored suit, there was “the coat-frock, where the frocks cling without side-seams and close at the sides with embroidery or buttons.” Other frocks had loose backs “combined with a closely fitting front which follows the lines of the figure and emphasizes the absence of the corset.”

  It was Poiret, not Gabrielle (as is often said), who first attempted to dispense with the corset. While apparently representing greater freedom, Gabrielle’s much straighter, shape-revealing twenties chemises, often made in diaphanous materials, would have been unthinkable for most women without a corset of some kind. Gabrielle may have been fairly ruthless in her attitude toward women who weren’t as slim as she, but she was also business-minded enough to realize that not everyone had her girlish figure. Consequently, she sold corsets. For Gabrielle, they had the dual purpose not only of pulling in any “excess” plumpness but also of flattening the bust. She had set out to design because she thought contemporary dress unsuitable for the new times; her clothes were in essence made for herself. Thus Gabrielle’s designs looked far the best on androgynous figures like her own.

  Gabrielle’s vacation with Dmitri Pavlovich had helped her still unsteady sense of equilibrium, and in this improved state she was better able to put into effect one of the most important undertakings of her life. At some point between the previous autumn and now, the spring of 1921, Gabrielle had met another young man. His name was Ernest Beaux. Beaux was not to become her lover. Instead, with Gabrielle, he would create Chanel N° 5, destined to become the most famous perfume in the world. While so much about the first half of Gabrielle’s life is cloaked in uncertainty, the story of this most iconic of all perfumes—created at around this time—is a major factor in the construction of her myth. A myth, of course, is not the same thing as history, and the history of Chanel N° 5 proves stubbornly resistant to reconstruction.

  Yet N° 5’s appearance is also typical of an enduring element in the allure of all great perfumes: the secrecy surrounding their ingredients and the manner of their creation. The provenance of any fine perfume is better thought of with reference to the old alchemists, who in the manner of all secret societies, ensured the idea of exclusivity by keeping their “knowledge” hidden. The alchemist’s exalted claims were never made by the perfumers, but there were parallels. Certainly, the perfumers understood that while they dealt in an art whose methods were practical ones, the process and the results were often intangible.

  Whatever has been written or said to the contrary, it is not actually known how or when Gabrielle Chanel met the gifted young perfumer Ernest Beaux. Even more significantly, no one really knows exactly when Chanel N° 5 was created. In fact, from its two creators’ first meeting to the perfume’s inception, its production and its very first sales, Chanel N° 5 is shrouded in mystery. But the main reason for this is because, from the outset, Gabrielle and Beaux understood that this was crucial.

  The story has traditionally been told in the following way: Gabrielle had decided she wanted to have a perfume as an accompaniment to her clothes, and during the summer of 1920, Dmitri Pavlovich introduced her to Ernest Beaux, whom he had known through Beaux’s connection with the Russian court. Together, Gabrielle and Beaux now set out to create Gabrielle’s perfume. By early 1921, Chanel N° 5 was in production and being launched. The month is often given as May. However, remembering that Dmitri’s diary tells us it wasn’t until a year later—February 1921—that he himself met Gabrielle, it is almost impossible that Gabrielle and Beaux could have made, packaged and launched their perfume between, approximately, February and May of that year. Either Dmitri did not introduce Chanel to Beaux, or if he did, the perfume had to have been launched later.

  While Chanel has become one of the world’s most famous “brands,” without N° 5’s high profile, most of us might barely have heard of Coco Chanel, or her part in revolutionizing women’s lives. Although Gabrielle had already begun to formulate elements of her myth by 1921, it was in turn furthered by the creation of Chanel N° 5. Both have been perpetuated by the Chanel Company. With N° 5’s given date of creation—1921—mired in uncertainty, who was Ernest Beaux, the man who helped make the first Chanel perfume such an outstanding success?

  Beaux’s father was one of the directors of the perfume company A. Rallet & Co., founded in Moscow by a Frenchman and purveyor of fragrance to the Russian court. Ernest joined the company, worked under its enlightened perfumery director and was encouraged to explore both new ingredients for perfume, and contemporary art and culture. He was already celebrated as a perfumer when the revolution drove him and his colleagues to leave Russia.

  The Rallet company based itself outside Grasse, in the south of France, and Beaux arrived in late 1919—having lost everything—to begin his life again. Beaux was noted for his experimentation with synthetic components, including synthetic aldehydes. (Aldehydes are those organic compounds present in various natural materials, for example, rose oil and citrus essence.) His famed early fragrance, Bouquet de Catherine, probably created in 1913, most likely used synthetic aldehydes, which would be essential in the development of Chanel N° 5. Between 1919 and 1920, Beaux further experimented on the Bouquet de Catherine formula.

  In 1946, he would give a lecture in which he described his own contribution to Chanel N° 5. Questioned about its creation, he said it was “in 1920 exactly, upon my return from the war.” We remember that, in fact, he returned from the war in 1919. Beaux then said that N° 5 was launched “at the time of the Cannes Conference,” but this was held in early January 1922. So he has now told us that Chanel N° 5 was launched in both 1921 and 1922. In the end, all we know is that at some point in 1920, or 1921, Beaux was introduced to Gabrielle, and they began developing the n
ew fragrance. Like Gabrielle herself, the true provenance of N° 5 has been converted into a myth.

  Despite Misia Sert’s urge to take credit for the triumphs of her “protégée” Gabrielle, the following story is, however, plausible. Lucien Daudet, secretary to the empress Eugénie, wife to Napoléon III, had brought Misia an astonishing beauty formula he had unearthed in the papers of the empress. From the hand of a perfume maker to the sixteenth-century queen Catherine de’ Medi-cis, consort to Henri II of France, was the recipe for the renowned toilet water The Secret of the Medici. Neither exactly a perfume nor a normal cosmetic cream, this was an essence said to repel miraculously the signs of aging. Misia’s claim that she saw the formula’s possibilities, immediately took it to Gabrielle and proposed that she launch a toilet water based upon the recipe is probably correct. As Gabrielle’s name “was then on everyone’s lips, it was in itself a guarantee of success.”2

  Gabrielle liked Misia’s idea, bought the formula and, according to Misia, they set to work, “painstakingly experimenting with a very severe bottle, ultra-simple, almost pharmaceutical, but in the Chanel style and with the elegant touch she gave to everything.”3 Here, of course, we are meant to see Misia’s hand in the earliest version of the unmistakable Chanel N° 5 bottle.

  Misia said that within weeks, Gabrielle had launched L’Eau de Chanel, and that “it succeeded far beyond our wildest hopes. It was unbelievable.”4 Her story is borne out by a document—in the Chanel archives—for a skin-care product called L’Eau de Chanel signed and dated by Misia: July 1919. This Eau de Chanel may well have been a crucial step on the road to N° 5.

  Gabrielle had a preoccupation with cleanliness amounting almost to a neurosis, and she loathed it when someone didn’t “smell good.” Her admiration for the grandes cocottes in part stemmed from their pleasant fragrance. By contrast, speaking of society women, Gabrielle would say, “Ah yes, those women dressed in ball gowns, whose photographs we contemplate with a touch of nostalgia, were dirty... They were dirty. Are you surprised? But that’s the way it was.”5 While all society women were not, of course, unwashed, Gabrielle’s sense of smell was hypersensitive. Decrying this “unwashed” upper class, she also abhorred the simple flower fragrances she said were used to camouflage their bad habits.