Coco Chanel

by Justine Picardie

  The narrative was a Misia classic – somewhat vague in its logic and chronology, yet dramatic, with herself playing a central role. The sheet of paper had apparently remained within her possession and she quoted it at length in her memoir, under the title The Secret of the Medicis. ‘Shortly before the war, excavations performed in the underground passages of a famous royal chateau on the banks of the Loire brought to light several manuscripts by Rene the Florentine, Perfume-Maker to Queen Catherine de’ Medici. Among those manuscripts there appeared The Secret of the Medicis, the famous eau de toilette which made it possible for Queen Catherine, for Diane de Poitiers, and later for Queen Marie de’ Medici to brave the years, yet to keep, even in old age, a ravishing skin and the complexion of a young girl.’

  Misia’s first reaction – or so she claimed – was amusement, but this was immediately followed by inspiration. ‘“You want six thousand francs for this formula,” I said to him; “You shall have it.” I had just thought of Coco. Since everything she touched succeeded, why not launch a Chanel eau de toilette based on this formula?’ Misia’s story was hazy on detail (what was the formula and who re-created it, and when?), yet she told it with aplomb. ‘Painstakingly, we experimented with a very severe bottle, ultra-simple, almost pharmaceutical, but in the Chanel style and with the elegant touch she gave to everything. A few weeks later, L’Eau Chanel made its appearance. It succeeded far beyond our wildest hopes. It was unbelievable, almost as if we had won first prize in a lottery! “Why don’t you really go in for perfumes?” I said to Coco. “It seems to me, after the success of L’Eau Chanel, that Rene the Florentine is the goose that laid the golden egg.”

  ‘At that moment Mademoiselle Chanel, who at first considered the eau de toilette a plaything, had the genius to see the future possibilities of this new idea. And from the start her perfumes were so successful that Chanel N°5, N°22 and Bois des Iles [the scents created by Beaux in swift succession, along with Cuir de Russie and Gardénia] were soon in demand on all five continents. And that is how the sorceress, with a flick of her wrist, started with the minuscule idea The Secret of the Medicis had given me and created an industry of such importance that, one by one, all the fashion houses followed in her path. Thanks to her, they managed to balance their budgets during the years when they were threatened with bankruptcy!’

  Chanel, continued Misia, in her characteristic blend of self-effacement and egotism (the two qualities that made her such a potent muse), was to play a central role in the transformation of women; but it took Misia to see her potential. ‘I felt it so strongly that, from our first meeting, I could hardly wait to make others aware of it. One could say that it is easy to help a beautiful diamond to shine. Still, it was my privilege to help it emerge from its rough state, and – in my heart – to be the first person to be dazzled by it.’

  Needless to say, when Misia showed Chanel the chapter in which she featured in her memoir, Chanel demanded that it be withdrawn from the book. It is unclear what, precisely, she most objected to: the story about The Secret of the Medicis, or the role that Misia assigned herself in the legend of Chanel. But whatever the provenance of Rene the Florentine’s miraculous formula, the man behind the throne of Chanel N°5 was someone else entirely: Pierre Wertheimer, the owner (with his brother Paul) of Bourjois, one of the largest cosmetics companies in France.

  Chanel was introduced to Wertheimer by Théophile Bader, proprietor of Galeries Lafayette, after she had asked Bader to stock her perfume in his department store (which also happened to be the place where Chanel had originally bought her straw boaters, simple pieces that she trimmed with ribbons for herself, and for her first millinery clients). Bader was quick to see the commercial potential of Chanel N°5, at the same time as pointing out to her that if it were to be sold in Galeries Lafayette, as well as in her boutiques, the scent would need to be produced in far greater quantities than Ernest Beaux could supply from his laboratory. But the Bourjois factories might be able to do so; hence the meeting between Pierre Wertheimer and Coco Chanel at the Deauville racetrack, where one of Wertheimer’s large stable of horses was running.

  The Wertheimers were a Jewish family, as rich and successful as the Rothschilds, but apparently even more intent on privacy. Their roots could be traced back to medieval Germany, although they had been thoroughly French for generations: knowledgeable art collectors as well as expert businessmen, who had transformed Bourjois from a nineteenth-century theatrical make-up company into a thriving cosmetics and perfume manufacturer. Pierre Wertheimer’s decision to back Chanel was to add a new dimension to his family’s business empire; their association was to last a lifetime, and still continues today, for the Wertheimers have kept Chanel in private ownership, while other couturiers and beauty brands have become absorbed into global conglomerates. The current owners, Pierre’s grandsons Alain and Gerard, remain as discreet as their predecessors, but a carefully preserved archive can be found in the former Bourjois factory in Pantin on the northern outskirts of Paris. Production of Chanel perfume and beauty products began here in 1924 (and Bourjois products even earlier, since the factory was opened in 1891), and there is a faint scent of rose oil that still lingers, as if embedded in the brickwork after over a century of manufacturing. Fifty years ago, the factory employed 800 people, making everything from lipstick to the polished glass stoppers for Chanel N°5. But perhaps the most precious artefact within the factory is the past; or more precisely, the heritage that is contained in the neatly filed records of Bourjois and Chanel.

  On one of the upper floors, overlooking the train tracks that were used to export crates of scent bottles and make-up from here to all over Europe, is an archive of Chanel beauty products. In immaculate glass display cases are the earliest examples of Chanel N°5, the double C logo still pristine in black against the unblemished white packaging; white as the walls of the room that contains them (a perfect white box of a room, where nothing intrudes from the outside world). Beside the perfumes is a photograph of Coco and Dmitri Pavlovich, taken soon after their romance began, and another of Ernest Beaux; the pictures and the bottles of scent are preserved in the same glass case, like relics in a shrine to a long dead saint.

  In another vitrine, on the other side of the white room, is a carefully arranged display of the first Chanel lipsticks and face powders: the earliest a red lipstick from 1924, in a tiny ivory case marked with a single C, followed by a more substantial black tube in 1929, and a bullet-shaped metal cartridge design from 1934. Nowhere is there any visible sign of the Wertheimers, but the archives contain the relevant numbers: when Les Parfums Chanel was established in April 1924, Mademoiselle owned 10 per cent of the company, the Wertheimers had 70 per cent, with the remaining 20 per cent going to Théophile Bader (who was subsequently bought out by the Wertheimers).

  To categorise Pierre Wertheimer’s long-standing relationship with Coco Chanel as a business arrangement based on straightforward arithmetic would, however, be too simple for a union as complicated and intense as the most enduring marriage. Wertheimer was far more loyal to Chanel than any of her lovers; and although each tormented the other at different points in their lives, with such antagonism that Pierre had to employ a full-time lawyer simply to deal with her, as they pressed their opposing sides in a combat reminiscent of a bitterly fought divorce, they nonetheless retained a mutual respect.

  Wertheimer’s initial majority investment in the perfume company was a mark of his confidence in Chanel, but the return was so profitable that Coco was to regret having retained only 10 per cent of the business that bore her name. Thus her battle over numbers flared up periodically: she wanted a larger share of the profits, but Pierre Wertheimer resisted her attempts to wrest a greater percentage from him. Their legal disputes and manoeuvres included acrimonious feuds, worthy of the most elaborate Medici drama; but eventually, a kind of harmony prevailed. The two of them somehow added up to N°5; more than the sum of their parts, and never less than committed to the mathematics of their uni
on. If five was Chanel’s lucky number, then it took Wertheimer to make her luck into solid profit. And in doing so, he gave her the freedom and independence to live her life without relying on a husband; though she could never be rid of Wertheimer, or he of her, in a mysterious alchemy that turned perfume into gold.

  When you walk through the empty corridors of the factory at Pantin, down the staircase to the silent basement vaults that contain the most precious records of Chanel, the scent of roses becomes fainter, and finally disappears. But on the other side of the locked doors into the depths of the building – the innermost sanctum – is a drawer that contains a small, original bottle of N°5. The golden liquid inside the glass is almost entirely gone now – evaporated or diminished by time – but pick up the bottle, using protective white gloves, and you come close enough to sniff the glass top. It smells nothing like the Chanel N°5 that I am wearing – rare perfume, unlike fine wine, does not improve with age. But even so, it carries with it a strange potency; the precious scent of a vanished woman, the last traces of an invisible ghost.

  You can follow the trail of this perfume elsewhere in the Chanel empire: to Rue Cambon, of course, where a young assistant would spray N°5 in the entrance to the building a moment before Mademoiselle Chanel walked in every day, having been warned of her imminent arrival by the doorman who had ushered her out of the Ritz. The scent still lingers around the mirrored staircase, and in her private apartment, where she scattered N°5 on the hot coals of the fireplace. And it also pervades the gleaming modern building at Neuilly on the outer edge of Paris where the current creator of Parfums Chanel, Jacques Polge, oversees the continuation of tradition, as well as the formulation of new fragrances, all of them inspired by Coco Chanel (not simply in name, but also as a means to capture the essence of her allure). He is only the second director of perfume at Chanel since Ernest Beaux’s retirement in 1954, arriving at the company as its ‘nose’ in 1978, and is as adept at quoting Proust as he as at identifying several thousand different olfactory bases. Proust, he notes, wrote that perfume is ‘that last and best reserve of the past, the one which when all our tears have run dry, can make us cry again’. If Chanel N°5 was in its way revolutionary – both in its chemistry and in the modernist design of its bottle, and its logo and label that needed no translation into different languages – then it has also come to represent constancy, an unbroken connection with the woman who made it her own. N°5, like all the best scents, seems in one sense to be entirely abstract – a complete thing in itself, rather than a conceptual philosophy – but it is also a catalyst to the imagination; a clue to unravel the mystery of Coco Chanel, as immaterial yet unyielding as the designer herself.

  THE RUSSIANS

  On 10th April 1917, Paul Morand, by then a diplomat as well as a writer, went to visit Misia, as he often did. ‘She is in bed,’ he reported in his diary, ‘buried in pink pillows and lace, sick with a stalactitic cold; even her colds are rococo … She speaks enthusiastically about the Russian Revolution, which she sees as an enormous ballet.’ Tsar Nicholas II had abdicated just a few weeks previously, Lenin had not yet seized power from the provisional Russian government, and the Ballets Russes had found themselves in something of a diplomatic muddle on the eve of a gala performance in Rome. In normal circumstances, the performance would have begun with the national anthem, but now no one felt it appropriate to sing ‘God Save the Tsar’, so Diaghilev persuaded Igor Stravinsky to provide a last-minute orchestration of a Russian folk song instead. All this Morand had discovered from Misia – at the centre of everything, as usual, despite having taken to her bed – and although she expressed some sympathy for the plight of the tsar, she was easily diverted. ‘She says the Tsar has been robbed deprived of everything that the Revolution is the triumph of Rasputin, who always said, “If I disappear, you will disappear …” In the middle of her speech Sert arrives … He has bought all the balloons from a vendor in the Tuileries. Overjoyed, Misia forgets her cold and stands in her bed, plays with the multicoloured bunch of balloons, ties her griffon to the string to see if he’ll float in the air. But the dog is too heavy.’

  Thus did the Russian Revolution touch Misia’s Paris – a dark cloud passing, casting a shadow over the balloons and lapdogs; but entertaining, in its own way – and Coco Chanel seemed to take much the same view. Like Misia, she saw an overlap between the Ballets Russes and the political revolutionaries; or so she said to Paul Morand, recalling the October Revolution in 1917, when the Bolsheviks took over from the provisional government. Diaghilev, she recalled, had talked to her about the weeks leading up to the Revolution when he was working with the Ballets Russes in Switzerland, while Lenin and Trotsky were preparing their own dramatic entrance. ‘He [Diaghilev] was rehearsing in Lausanne, in a hangar; Stravinsky was working … next door; Lenin and Trotsky were waiting on the shores of Lake Leman for the moment when they were to return to Russia, in a sealed carriage.’ In retrospect, Chanel concluded that these parallel events amounted to ‘one and the same thing’. History did not prove her right, but her personal life was shaped by the consequences of revolution (and for Chanel, the personal tended to take precedence over the political). ‘The Ballets Russes had jolted the world of dance; October 1917 had jolted the whole of Russia, and Paris became filled with émigrés.’

  Chanel’s path soon crossed with a number of those émigrés – including the Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich and Ernest Beaux. Having embarked upon a profitable relationship with the latter and a passionate affair with the former, she declared that ‘every Westerner should have succumbed to “Slavic charm” to know what it is. I was captivated.’ But she was also captivating – chic and rich and independent; more than a match for a Grand Duke who had found himself penniless after the Revolution. If legend is to be believed, they were introduced in Biarritz in July 1920 by Dmitri’s then lover, and Coco’s friend from her past life at Royallieu, Marthe Davelli, who had become a famous soprano. ‘If you’re interested you can have him,’ Davelli is supposed to have remarked to Chanel. ‘He really is a little expensive for me.’

  Towards the end of her life, when Chanel was talking to Claude Delay (long after Dmitri had married an American heiress), she described the Grand Duke, and others like him, as diminished, almost emasculated by their poverty in exile: ‘Those Grand Dukes were all the same – they looked marvellous but there was nothing behind. Green eyes, fine hands and shoulders, peace-loving, timorous. They drank so as not to be afraid. They were tall and handsome and splendid, but behind it all – nothing: just vodka and the void.’

  Even so, when she encountered Dmitri in 1920, he was undeniably glamorous, and surrounded by scandal and mystery that gave some edge to his reputation as a penniless playboy. A first cousin of Tsar Nicholas II, he had been involved in the plot to murder Rasputin in 1916, and his escape from Russia thereafter was to save his life, unlike those of the majority of his family (including his father), who were subsequently executed by the Bolsheviks. According to Chanel, in her conversations with Paul Morand, she had already met Dmitri in 1914, but had not seen him since then, until they chanced upon one another six years later.

  ‘We dined together,’ Chanel remarked to Morand. ‘I saw him the following day. In a very friendly way, I say to him: “I have just bought a little blue Rolls, let’s go to Monte Carlo.”

  “I have no money, all I’ve got is fifteen thousand francs …”

  “I’ll put in the same amount,” I replied to the Grand-Duke. “With thirty thousand, we’ll have enough to enjoy ourselves for a week.”’

  (As it happened, she later remarked to Claude Delay, the manager of the hotel in Monte Carlo didn’t want to give the Grand Duke a bill: ‘“Oh yes, you must,” I told him. “Just a little one.”’)

  But he wasn’t the only Russian that she was supporting, nor the only one who sought her attentions, or whose attention she had bought. Chanel’s relationship with Diaghilev had been founded on her financial donation to the Ballets Russes to support the
revival of Le Sacre du printemps; a gesture that also made her central to the life of its composer, Igor Stravinsky. In his autobiography, written in 1935, Stravinsky referred to Chanel’s patronage: ‘As Diaghilev’s affairs were at this time in very low water financially, the reproduction of the Sacre had been made possible only by the backing of his friends. I should like especially to mention Mlle Gabrielle Chanel, who not only generously came to the assistance of the venture, but took an active part in the production by arranging to have the costumes made in her world-famous dressmaking establishment.’

  What Stravinsky did not disclose was that Chanel had also provided a home for himself and his family, offering them her villa at Garches, Bel Respiro, when the composer was utterly impoverished. A brief postcard he wrote to a friend, dated 22nd September 1920, bears the Bel Respiro address, and refers to his ‘nerves’ as being ‘in poor condition’. His autobiography provides even less detail, but dates his stay at Garches as taking place in ‘the winter of 1920-1921 … Diaghilev was just then giving a new production of Le Sacre du printemps at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées.’ Whether or not the composer’s memory was correct, the date on the postcard would suggest that Stravinsky moved into the villa swiftly after the Grand Duke moved out, for Dmitri had been staying there with Chanel towards the end of the summer of 1920.