The Secret of Chanel No. 5

by Tilar J. Mazzeo

  Uncle Sergei and their German-born aunt Elizabeth–the sister of the czarina and, through her mother, the granddaughter of Britain’s Queen Victoria–embraced Dmitri and his sister, Marie, but even that story didn’t have a happy ending. A few years later, Sergei Alexandrovich was assassinated on the street in front of them all during the first abortive efforts at revolution in Russia in 1905. Afterward, the orphans were sent to live at the royal court with their relations, the czar and czarina. There was even talk for a while that, if his sickly cousin Alexei died of his incapacitating hemophilia, Dmitri might someday inherit the imperial throne.

  All that talk of inheriting an empire ended in 1916, when Dmitri was twenty-five. Horrified by the power of the “mad monk” Grigori Rasputin over the czarina and by the whispered talk of a palace revolt, Dmitri and his cousin Prince Felix Yusopov conspired to murder the mystic. An English aristocrat living at the Russian court later revealed why. “While in his cups,” Rasputin it seems told the two young noblemen about the czarina’s “fixed intention5, early in January 1917, to launch a coup d’état to dethrone the [czar] … and herself to assume the reins of Government in the name and on behalf of her son.” The prince and the duke were horrified, and they resolved to take action. First, they poisoned Rasputin with wine dosed with massive quantities of cyanide. When he failed to die, the prince shot him. According to the gruesome legend, Rasputin survived another three gunshots in the back, and, when bullets, too, seemed eerily ineffective, the young men finally drowned him beneath the ice of the city’s frozen river.

  When Dmitri’s part in the murder was discovered6, the enraged czarina shocked the royal family by having him illegally arrested. The result was scandal. A Russian grand duke stood apart from the law–part of what riled the revolutionary Bolsheviks. Even the czar didn’t have the right to arrest a member of the royal family. Dmitri’s imprisonment dragged on for days, and at first it seemed that the weak-willed czar would not be able to summon the resolve to counteract the czarina. Then, on the day before Christmas, the royal court was stunned again to learn that, instead of standing trial, Dmitri had been exiled from Russia. In the dead of night, he had been forcibly put, without food and under arrest, in the locked carriage of a train heading east to Kasvin, on “the confines of the Empire [at] the Persian border.”7 He was being sent to serve in the disease-riddled battlefields of Persia, where it was expected he would die.

  It was a bleak punishment. By contrast, Prince Yusopov got off lightly, simply being sent by train to comfortable exile at a family country estate near Moscow. The most scandalous part of that tale was that he was made to travel second class. Dmitri’s destiny was far crueler.

  In 1916, at the peak of the First World War, the Middle Eastern theater was the site of a bitter struggle over the oil needed to fuel this global conflict. It was a combination of cold trench warfare in the mountains and sweltering summer heats, and Dmitri was sent to Persia in order to be humiliated. He was attached to a supply chain in the army, and, as far away as America, there were reports in the New York Times that “Rumors spread he was traveling in fetters”8 and chains. No one misunderstood that it was intended as a death sentence.

  Some of those closest to the czar wrote to him, begging that he change his mind about Dmitri. We “implore you,” they wrote in their petition, “to reconsider your harsh decision9 concerning the fate of the Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich. Your Majesty must know the very harsh conditions under which our troops have to live in Persia, without shelter and in constant peril. … to live there would be for the Grand Duke almost certain death.” The czar was resolute. Dmitri would never come home.

  For the young duke, it was a terrifying and vicious retribution, made worse by the fact that he was singled out among the conspirators by the sentence. It was also a stroke of good fortune, for only this punishment would save his life. Just a year later, the revolution in Russia brought the Romanov dynasty to a bloody end. Scores of his friends–and nearly all of his family–were executed, including his cousin the czar, the czarina, the czarevitch, and all the royal princesses, as well as his noble aunt and even, in the end, his aristocratic father, who had finally been pardoned and had returned to Russia at just the wrong moment in history. If Dmitri had been in St. Petersburg, he would almost certainly have died with them.

  Instead, in 1920 Dmitri was living on charity as a refugee between Paris and London, where he learned that his sister Marie, after a harrowing journey through Romania, somehow had also survived the revolution. In her memoirs she told how, at the time, “The past, our past, still held the most important part of our lives10: we were like people roughly shaken out of a pleasant dream, waiting for the moment to go to sleep again and take up the threads where they had broken off.” This princess soon found herself taking up threads of a different sort. She would go on to establish–with the support of Coco Chanel–one of Paris’s most famous textile and embroidery houses, Kitmir11, which supplied Chanel with many of her gloriously flamboyant fabrics during the 1920s and her famous “Russian period.”

  The past that Dmitri and Marie remembered was filled with every imaginable luxury and always with the richness of perfume. For both of these royals, perfume was a passion. The imperial palace at St. Petersburg was a famously perfumed court, and Dmitri’s aunts and royal cousins had arrived amid the rustle of scented fur and velvet. There was one fragrance that both Dmitri and Marie remembered piercingly: an eau de cologne with the rich notes of rose and jasmine. Made in Moscow by the firm of A. Rallet and Company, it was known as Rallet O-De-Kolon No. 1 Vesovoi–or simply Rallet No. 1 perfume12. It had been a royal family favorite, and the czarina–for whom it had been invented–cherished it especially. In fact, that scent may have been among the last beautiful things that Dmitri’s murdered cousins ever experienced. Among the personal possessions looted from the Romanov royal family’s prison chambers were vials of some unnamed perfumes13.

  For Dmitri, living in impoverished exile in the south of France, this was the scent of childhood: the smell of home and family and a life that had been shattered irrevocably. Scientists have long known that scent and memory are, in the neurological circuitry of our brains, inextricably connected. Dmitri knew it too, intuitively and without explanation. The scent of that perfume was among the familiar smells of a world that had disappeared. Some say his sister Marie still wore Rallet No. 1, and nothing could have been more natural than his effort to make it live on in other ways, too, by sharing it with his fashionable new lover–a woman whose passion at that moment was just this kind of a perfume. No one knows precisely what Dmitri’s thoughts were about the fragrance that Coco invented that summer; he never wrote them down for posterity. But more than any other influence in Coco Chanel’s life, at critical junctures Dmitri Pavlovich shaped the destiny of Chanel No. 5, and it’s easy to understand why when we know the whole story.

  When Coco Chanel met Dmitri, she was very much in pursuit of scent, and perhaps it was part of what drew them together. They may have met in Venice that first winter after Boy’s death, in early 192014, when her grief was still at its keenest. More likely, though, they had met before in Biarritz or somewhere along the Riviera and were thrown together again later in the summer. By the summer of 1920, in any event, they were lovers.

  Despite the vast differences in their backgrounds, they shared common ground: the same sense of longing in their emotional lives. The same sense of losing those they loved; the same sense of abandonment and betrayal. They both also understood what it meant to be alone and rootless. There is no documentary evidence to confirm what happened that summer, but there’s a compelling emotional logic to the speculations and stories. Coco Chanel would have told Dmitri, of course, of her plans for a signature fragrance. Perhaps she told him of the ancient Medici formula, too, of this perfume made for their queens and how she had first planned to re-create it. She told him of the smells and all those sensations that she wanted a scent to capture.

  In return, he told her
of that scent he above all remembered, the favorite perfume of his lost imperial childhood, that fragrance that had been created especially in honor of his aunt and cousins to celebrate the women of the Romanov dynasty: Rallet No. 1. Some stories even say that he did the simplest thing imaginable: he bought her a bottle. It was produced, after all, in those foothills just beyond Cannes. Most importantly however, friends always thought afterward that he was the one who introduced her to a fellow Franco-Russian exile–the man who had created that imperial fragrance.

  She had found her perfumer.

  After all, it wasn’t only the aristocrats who fled Russia in 1917. In the years after the Bolshevik revolution, those working in the luxury business quickly saw the wisdom of setting up shop somewhere else. Fabergé, the Russian-French jewelry firm famous for its jeweled Easter eggs, was nationalized, and its founders fled to exile in Switzerland15. Russia’s famed Imperial Porcelain Factory, known for its signature cobalt-blue patterns, was renamed the State Porcelain Factory, and its luxury craftsmen set to producing cheap works of pottery-turned-propaganda. A working-class communist revolution didn’t hold many opportunities for families who had made their fortunes producing expensive perfumes, either–especially perfumes supplied to the late royal court.

  This was the reason the Franco-German perfumer Ernest Beaux, when he was finally released from military service after the First World War, didn’t go home to Moscow, where his family had emigrated to work in the Russian luxury trade, but came instead to the south of France. His family had strong French roots in particular and long ties to the firm of A. Rallet and Company, which had been purchased in 1898 by a prominent French family of perfume distributors16 who ran one of the largest fragrance businesses in the world in 1919. The Chiris family owned flower plantations around the world and sprawling factories in the village of Grasse, dedicated to the processing of jasmine and roses. They also owned research laboratories where aspiring young perfumers like François Coty had come for training and important offices in Moscow and St. Petersburg, where much of their business began.

  Ernest Beaux had joined the firm of Rallet as a young man in Moscow in 1898, just after the Chiris takeover, and he was following in the footsteps of his older brother, who held an important position in the company. After beginning in the manufacture of luxury soap, he was soon shifted into a more prestigious line of work: creating innovative perfumes for the most famous and influential French fragrance house in czarist Russia.

  He was keenly interested in all those new scientific developments that were reshaping the world of scent at the beginning of the twentieth century. He also possessed a dazzling talent. Ernest’s first blockbuster fragrance, a men’s cologne called Le Bouquet de Napoléon–"Napoléon’s Bouquet"–hit the international market in 1912. He had created it to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of the Battle of Borodino, a decisive turning point in the final days of the Napoleonic Wars, and, as he later remembered, it “became an incredible success17.” Encouraged by the popularity of this fragrance, the company–already official perfumers to the royal family–urged him to create a new women’s perfume in time for the celebration of the three-hundred-year anniversary of the Romanov dynasty in 1913.

  Named Le Bouquet de Catherine after Catherine the Great, it was a lovely scent. Maddeningly, though, it was a commercial disaster; a perfume named after a German-born empress of Russia was doomed in 1914. It was a victim of its historical moment. In the early days of the First World War, Germany and Russia were already engaged in bloody conflict, and people increasingly resented the luxury-loving German-born czarina Alexandra and her strange, disturbing favorite, Rasputin. It was also staggeringly, even impossibly, expensive.

  Ernest knew it was a brilliant perfume. Perhaps not yet perfect, but brilliant. It was daring and original in its use of new ingredients and new design concepts, and the only thing like it on the market was that beautiful–and extremely successful–multiflore perfume, Houbigant’s Quelques Fleurs.

  Le Bouquet de Catherine was a perfume destined for great things, and he was certain of it. Hoping that it was just a matter of marketing, the company tried changing the name: Le Bouquet de Catherine became simply Rallet No. 1. It was well loved by the imperial family, and a scent that, in the summer of 1920, Dmitri would remember. Somehow it never found an international audience under either of its names, however. It was a matter of the worst kind of unlucky timing. Had events in Russia unfolded differently, it might have been a bestseller. Based on Ernest’s studies into Quelques Fleurs, which provided his initial inspiration, it was a scent that experimented boldly with pioneering fragrance materials. In the world of perfume, Rallet No. 1 was already a technical milestone and a scent innovation.

  In time, perhaps it would have become famous. Instead came the First World War, the revolution, and the end of imperial Russia itself. Ernest spent those last years of the war, from 1917 to 1919, as a lieutenant stationed far to the north, in the last arctic outposts of the continent, surrounded by frozen tundra and the smells of snow and lichen. During the revolution, he threw in his lot with the Allies and the exiled aristocratic White Russians, and he served throughout the war interrogating Bolshevik prisoners in Arkangelsk, at the infamous Mudyug Island prison18. It has since been called modern history’s first concentration camp19. These alliances–and the many wartime decorations that he earned for his service to France and Britain and in the cause of the White Russians20–meant that he would never be able to return home to communist Moscow. He mourned for the life he had lost in Moscow and for the fate of an unsung fragrance masterpiece that had faded with the glory of the Romanovs.

  When he received word in late 1919 that Rallet had moved its production to the village of La Bocca, just outside Grasse, the idea of the warm aromas of the south was a welcome reprieve. Mudyug Island was a cold and ugly place during the war.

  By then the scent of the Arctic had captured his imagination, however. One of the Bolshevik prisoners at the camp in Arkangelsk later remembered a Lieutenant Beaux21: how, unlike so many other officers who interrogated them, he was never a heavy drinker. Instead, he would go for long walks along the coast of the White Sea and spent his afternoons secluded in a small, towered lighthouse at the end of the surf. There, the arctic scents surrounded him. He was struck by the exquisite freshness of the seaweed and cold air, and he was already dreaming of ways to capture its aroma. He had already guessed that those aldehydes would be the key to unraveling its secret.

  No one knows exactly when Coco Chanel met Ernest Beaux, and no one knows exactly how Dmitri might have framed that introduction. Coco’s friends Misia Sert and Paul Morand both believed that Dmitri was the one22 who made it happen. There are no additional details to tell the story of that pivotal first meeting.

  But the how and the when of that meeting make no difference. What matters is this: when these three people came together, their formative experiences–experiences that would shape how they thought of scent and fragrance and what was possible–had all been lived. Each knew precisely what it was that he or she imagined. Marvelously, there was sympathy of vision. The couturière had her perfumer.

  All that remained for the future of Chanel No. 5 was for Coco Chanel to convince Ernest Beaux to work for her–and for him to invent it.

  Precisely how that invention happened is one of the most fascinating, complex, and hotly contested parts of the entire Chanel No. 5 legend.

  SIX

  THE BIRTH OF A MODERN LEGEND

  All legends have their beginnings, and the story of the birth of Chanel No. 5 is more glamorous and complicated than many. In the summer of 1920, as the legend goes, the meeting of a prince, a perfumer, and a fashion designer changed the history of fragrance–and the history of luxury–in the century that followed. Nothing could have been more coincidental or more fortunate.

  Coco Chanel had asked Ernest Beaux that summer to create for her the signature perfume she was imagining, and she wanted a sultry freshness. Ernest was hesi
tant1. Creating a scent for a couturière, after all, was still largely unchartered territory. That summer, Coco Chanel would be only the third designer in history to venture into the field. All her time spent studying the perfume business now paid dividends–along with the keen sense of scent she had possessed from the outset. After several days exploring concepts together in the laboratory, Ernest was persuaded that the couturière was serious and that she knew what she was trying to accomplish. Still puzzling over how to unlock the clean scents of the polar north, he also thought that he knew precisely the note her fragrance needed. It was a vision shared by both creators.

  Won over, Ernest accepted the commission. He would design for her the scent that they were both building in the imagination, and he worked for months crafting it. Finally the day came when he invited her to test the fragrances he had created. She would choose the perfect one from among ten different samples, each a variation on a theme that he already knew had fantastic potential.

  There in front of them were ten small glass vials, labeled from one to five and twenty to twenty-four. The gap in the numbers reflected the fact that these were scents in two different–but complementary–series2, different “takes” on a new fragrance. Each of these small glass vials contained a new fragrance innovation, based on the core scents of May rose, jasmine, and those daring new fragrance molecules known as aldehydes. According to the legend, in one of the vials a careless laboratory assistant had accidentally added a massive overdose of this last and still largely undiscovered ingredient, confusing a 10 percent dilution for the pure, full-strength material.

  In the room that day, surrounded by rows of perfumer’s scales, beakers, and pharmaceutical bottles, Coco Chanel sniffed and considered. She slowly drew each sample beneath her nose, and in the room there was the quiet sound of her slow inhalation and exhalation. Her face revealed nothing. It was something everyone who knew her always remembered, how impassive she could seem. In one of those perfumes, something in the catalog of her senses resonated, because she smiled and said, at last, with no indecision: “number five.” “Yes,” she said later, “that is what I was waiting for. A perfume like nothing else. A woman’s perfume, with the scent of a woman3.”