The Secret of Chanel No. 5

by Tilar J. Mazzeo

  By the end of the meeting, just as Coco Chanel wanted, they had renegotiated the contract. She would have the right to sell her new line of perfumes in Switzerland, where she was now living. But that wasn’t what had ever really mattered. What mattered was the settlement. The partners at Les Parfums Chanel would give Coco Chanel $350,000–a sum today worth nearly nine million dollars25–as payment for the wartime sales of Chanel No. 5, and in the future not just 10 percent of the profits but 2 percent of the perfume sales worldwide, a vast increase in her income. In exchange, she agreed not to use the number five in any of her marketing. Her estimated annual income would be over a million dollars–today’s equivalent of $25 million a year, using conservative estimates. Before the ink was dry, she had become, at the age of sixty-five, one of the richest women in the world.

  Unmoored from her signature perfume, without a fashion house, and living in a kind of half-exile between Zürich and Paris as some version of a pampered mistress, Coco Chanel now became, in the world of fashion and fragrance during the final years of the 1940s, a kind of ghostly presence. Chanel No. 5, however, was still living large.

  PART III

  THE LIFE OF AN ICON

  SIXTEEN

  AN ICON OF THE 1950S

  During the winter of 1947, it wasn’t Paris that was occupied but Berlin, as the Allies took administrative control of the city that Coco Chanel had visited quietly in the final days of the Second World War on her unlucky diplomatic mission. Now, President Truman would not have had the same troubles finding a bottle of Chanel No. 5 as a souvenir for Bess.

  One of the popular entertainments in Berlin that year testifies to just how famous Chanel No. 5 had become–to the way in which this perfume had become a powerful and truly international cultural icon. Coco’s signature scent had plenty of admirers in Germany. Chanel No. 5 was also part of what the Americans in the city were celebrating. The show tunes that the G.I.s were singing that winter came from a light “boy-meets-girls” comic opera called Chanel No. 5.1 “We know the ladies,” one of the catchy tunes went,

  the blond and blue-black [haired] ones, the large and the slender ones.2 They love the bottles with the jingly names: l’Arpège, Schiaparelli, Mitsouko, Scandal. They choose the becoming scents for their type, the scents by Coty, Lanvin, Houbigant, and von Weill; it has an effect like slinking poison and costs many a man his sanity. The wildest man becomes like a lamb, the tame one becomes crazy, all because of the scent of a woman. When a beautiful woman passes by, then a scent of pefume follows her. And every man standing nearby asks himself, Was that Chanel, was that Guerlain? … Madame without quelques fleurs would be like a flower without its scent. When a beautiful woman passes by, her perfume discreetly does her talking for her: Non, non, monsieur! Peut-être mon ami! Oui, oui, mon chéri! [No, no, sir! Maybe, my dear! Yes, yes, my darling!]

  For men who had served in France and lined up on streets to find bottles of a favorite fragrance after the liberation, a tune about perfumes was amusing and contemporary. What is fascinating about this long list of popular scents is the simple fact that Chanel No. 5 was the one that stood in for them all: the ladies might like Mitsouko and Scandal, but the title of the opera was Coco Chanel’s signature perfume. On the cover of the score, what everyone saw was a huge bottle of Chanel No. 5 and a sultry woman standing next to it. It wasn’t just the American G.I.s who loved it, either. It had been a favorite scent of the German troops in Paris, too. Fragrance crossed all those complicated borders during the 1940s.

  By the late 1940s, Coco Chanel was also crossing borders again and traveling between France and Switzerland, and in the end her relationship with von Dincklage seems to have simply fizzled. By 1950, she was once again alone, and 1953 found her back in Paris permanently and dissatisfied. Her wartime sins, a decade later, had been largely forgotten, but the world of fashion had forgotten her too. After all, her couture house had been closed for fifteen years. It was only Chanel No. 5 that everyone remembered, and, in her second deal with the partners at Les Parfums Chanel, it seemed that she had let go of that part of her past. Her relationship with Pierre Wertheimer, though, was still a deeply complicated one, and René de Chambrun believed that it was “based on a businessman’s passion for a woman who felt exploited by him3.” In the mid-1950s, he remembered how “Pierre returned to Paris full of pride and excitement4 [after one of his horses won the English Derby]. … He rushed to Coco, expecting congratulations and praise. But she refused to kiss him. She resented him, you see, all her life.” To those who knew Coco Chanel, however, the relationship she constructed with him looked distinctly like the relationships in which she had spent her twenties.

  Chanel No. 5 was over for her. Having given up even a minority role in the company that she had struggled to reassert control over in the long decades of the 1920s, ‘30s, and ‘40s, she wasn’t sure she was ready to be done with perfume entirely, however. One afternoon in a café, she proposed to Pierre Wertheimer that perhaps they should launch a new fragrance, and she would play a role in designing it. “Pierre,” she said, “let’s launch a new perfume.” “A new perfume,” he countered, “why?” Conveniently forgetting her forays into the red-label fragrances, Coco responded that she hadn’t created a new one since 1924. “Don’t even think of it,” Wertheimer responded. “It’s too risky.5 Launching a new perfume now would take an enormous investment in publicity. And why bother? One can live on No. 5. The Americans don’t want something new. They want No. 5.” Anything they released, he explained to her, would only compete with the sales of Chanel No. 5, and that scent, he reminded her, was the reason she was living in the lap of luxury, with money in the bank. Finally–after decades of the company creating its own competition–it was all about Chanel No. 5.

  Sometime in late 1953 or early 1954, Coco Chanel and Pierre Wertheimer settled instead on a different arrangement. She would reopen the fashion house, and he would pay for everything associated with this business venture. There was one last thing, too. She gave up in the new settlement the right to use her own name in exchange for a huge monthly income from him. With the death of his brother and the decision to buy out the Bader family interests in the late 1940s, he was now the only partner left at Les Parfums Chanel6. He would pay all her bills–everything from her rent at the Ritz Hotel to the cost of her postage stamps. Later, offended at being taxed under French law as a “spinster,” she would even insist that Pierre pay her taxes.7 In giving up Chanel No. 5 for a second time, she was even more fundamentally giving up rights to her persona and her public identity.

  It was a scent that had been born out of her conflicted relationship with her sexuality and her history as a rich man’s mistress. Curiously, what made her happy in the end was something that looked a lot like becoming, once again, a kept woman. Perhaps that had been part of their long conflict.

  As her acquaintance Edmonde Charles-Roux wondered later, “Pierre Wertheimer, you see, had been one of those entreteneurs (like Balsan) of a type that no longer existed, whence Gabrielle’s attraction for him.8 How could he have regarded her as anything but an irrégulière?” An entreteneur translates, quite simply, into a man who kept mistresses. Wertheimer was:

  a man who had had many mistresses in his day, [and he] was used to paying women’s personal expenses.9 Coco, in fact, could never make up her mind whether she wanted Pierre to treat her as a businessperson or as a woman, with the result that he treated her with the listless forebearance a lover exhibits toward a mistress who has outstayed her welcome.

  Pierre Wertheimer was used to paying for a mistress, and, for Coco Chanel, there was also something about this that was comforting and familiar. In the end, what made her happy was to formalize their arrangement.

  Adding to the sense of déjà vu surrounding her relationship with Pierre, it was an odd replay of the way in which Étienne Balsan and Boy Capel had funded her millinery shop in the beginning. Coco would now give up the rights to everything. In a curious kind of entrepreneurial marriage,
she would give Pierre, in fact, her name. The Wertheimer interest would include not just ownership of the Chanel brand in the fragrance industry but rights to the fashion house as well. Coco Chanel would have complete license as designer and artistic director, but it would be, in all other respects, once again someone else’s business.

  It sounds like a hard deal to accept, but once again it was also Coco Chanel’s idea. This time, she was happy with it. She was vastly wealthy already, and she had the funds to launch any new and daring enterprise she could imagine. If she had wanted to go solo with a relaunch of the fashion house, there was nothing stopping her. She had 2 percent of Chanel No. 5's sales coming in year after year and could count on it for decades. Someone else would pay all her bills on top of it. The truth was that retaining control over the Chanel name simply wasn’t what she wanted. Pierre Wertheimer now controlled the entire Chanel business operation, and Coco Chanel was his only real partner.

  Considering everything that had happened between them during the Second World War–including the Wertheimers’ exile as Jewish refugees and Coco’s efforts to use the laws of Nazi-occupied France to strip the partners of this contested possession–it is an astonishing story. Despite their curious love-hate relationship, Pierre Wertheimer had cut through the Gordian knot of their legal battles with Coco Chanel simply by agreeing to pay for anything she ever wanted, forever. She seemed to have finally found some lasting closure.

  Coco Chanel had given up her name entirely, and, having disentangled herself from her signature fragrance, she returned to a private life that was, despite all her riches, oddly monastic. She lived in a simply decorated room at the Ritz Hotel and took to writing, in her Catholic schoolgirl hand, a book of aphorisms that she imagined one day publishing.10

  But the story of Chanel No. 5 didn’t end with her retreat from the world of perfume. If it had, Chanel No. 5 would have gone down in history as one of the great scents of the early twentieth century, but it never would have become the fragrance industry’s monstre. Its greatest success was still in front of it. In the 1950s, the perfume took on a life of its own, and it would need to live and die on its own value and on the basis of how others saw it. Artists and celebrities would become increasingly important arbiters of its fame–but the celebrity of Coco Chanel would no longer be the driving force behind the perfume.

  During those grim years of the Second World War, Chanel No. 5 had become embedded in the cultural imagination. It had become as much about the idea of mystery and feminine sexuality as about the scent contained in the bottle. Like only a handful of other brand names in history, Chanel No. 5 represented more than just a famous product. In many respects, the 1950s–its first decade as an icon–was the first moment of its true glory.

  What was iconic about Chanel No. 5 in the 1950s still wasn’t the bottle, though, and that’s a claim that would seem to fly in the face of reason. After all, it’s widely known that pop art guru Andy Warhol used the Chanel No. 5 bottle as the basis of a series of silk screens, placing it in the company of mass-culture icons such as Marilyn Monroe, Mao Tse-Tung, and Campbell’s Soup cans.

  It’s all part of the familiar Chanel No. 5 story, and, like so much of the legend, it’s fantasy mixed with fact. True, Andy Warhol did use the image of the famous square-cut bottle as one of his commercial icons, and he based his art on a series of advertisements that appeared briefly, from 1954 to 1956, in fashion magazines. The reality, however, is that Warhol didn’t create the Chanel No. 5 silk screens until the mid-1980s11. What happened is perfectly simple. In the early 1960s, Warhol had placed an outdated women’s magazine containing one of those mid-1950s advertisements into a time capsule and then went on busily creating his pop art renditions of the era’s great icons. The bottle for Chanel No. 5 was not yet among them.

  It is also a generally accepted part of the legend that in 1959 Chanel No. 5's bottle was famously featured in a special exhibit on “The Package” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York–one that would feature items “removed from their conventional context of advertising and sales” and selected “for excellence12 of structure and shape, color, texture, proportion, and the suitability of these qualities to functional performance"–and added to the permanent collection. Not quite so, it turns out. While Chanel No. 5 was included in that famous exhibit, what captured the attention of those curators was the paper packaging, not the bottle.

  Item number 22 in the catalog is “Box for Chanel No. 5,” with a note reading, “This is a most sophisticated use of bold black lettering on a white ground.13 Bounded by thick black borders, this package becomes elegant through understatement.” It was the monastic simplicity of the white box in which it was sold that seemed distinctively modern in the late 1950s–a shape that Coco Chanel had first discovered in the twelfth-century convent of her childhood. What that catalog doesn’t point out is that the design is also funereal: white paper bordered in black was associated with death and mourning, and everyone who had lived through the casualties of the Second World War knew it. Also featured among the collection were exhibits highlighting the perfection of the egg, an aluminum bottle for the Fragonard perfume Zizanie (1949), and plasticine perfume vials created by the Nips Company (1948–50)–but not the iconic Chanel No. 5 bottle.

  This Museum of Modern Art exhibit featuring Chanel No. 5's packaging also dovetailed nicely with an important economic trend that had been emerging throughout the 1950s. With the postwar boom in the United States and the massive increase in the sales of domestic goods came the explosion of advertising, and it was the golden age of packaging in America. In the fifteen years from 1940 to 1955, the gross national product in the United States–always Chanel No. 5's key market–soared 400 percent,14 and the average American had a discretionary income now five times that of 1940. For the first time, “The package became an independent communicator of its own brand personality.”15

  What happened to Chanel No. 5 in the 1950s is also a curious example of a larger phenomenon that characterized the decade. After an era of rationing and “making do,” in which denying oneself consumer pleasures was lauded as a form of patriotism, now Americans threw themselves into the pleasures of material comforts and cozy domesticity16. In postwar America, the mass-market commodity reigned supreme. Nothing was so tantalizing after years of war and destruction as normalcy, homogenization, and the pleasures of shared middle-class luxuries. Once again, Chanel No. 5 fit the mood of the moment precisely. It became not just a famous and successful perfume but also a symbol of the times–a cultural icon that captured something universal.

  Creating a common cultural framework for those domestic, intimate narratives was the whole point of the marketing for Chanel No. 5 in the 1950s. During the first decade of its status as an icon, the advertising perceptively focused on the women who wore Chanel No. 5 and less intently on the product. The idea was to find a way to explain to women how they could enjoy mass-market luxuries and all the pleasures of a homogenized middle-class cultural experience but still express their individuality. The 1950s, after all, also saw the full expression of advertising directed at persuading people to identify themselves with the products around them in far more intimate and personal ways. This was especially true of the beauty industry. Writes one historian, “In 1955, $9,000,000,000 was poured into United States advertising, up a billion from 1954 and up three billion from 1950. … Some cosmetic firms began spending a fourth of all their income from sales on advertising and promotion. A cosmetics tycoon, probably mythical, was quoted as saying: ‘We don’t sell lipstick, we buy customers.’ ”17

  Psychologists in the 1950s began working for advertising firms, and the mainstream view became “any product not only must be good but must appeal to our feelings18.” It was a period in which marketers first identified the goal of brand loyalty and the idea that what mattered to consumers were images–especially self-images. One 1950s advertiser claimed, “Infatuation with one’s own body … and sex [were] now used differently to sell products.
”19

  The early postwar Chanel No. 5 advertisements were very much of the moment. During 1959, the campaign for Chanel No. 5 featured the tagline “Chanel becomes the woman you are"–with the text below explaining how “A perfume is different on different women because every woman has a skin chemistry all her own20. Chanel No. 5 is subtly created to blend with your own delicate essence–to be like Chanel No. 5, yet deliciously like you alone. Chanel becomes you because it becomes you.” It was always chic because it was always Chanel No. 5. You are what makes it extra unique and special, the ads told women. Thus the popular–but largely unfounded–legend that a perfume smells different on each woman was invented.

  While the campaign to remind women how “Chanel becomes the woman you are” was aimed at creating a personal, even intimate connection with what was already the world’s most ubiquitous fragrance, the company had taken a different tack in introducing its first television advertisements in the United States in 1953. Bourjois had been using radio commercials successfully since the 1930s, and, by embracing this new mass media, Chanel No. 5 was the first fragrance ever advertised on television21. Intended to reach an even wider audience, the scene showed a handsome man in a tuxedo and a woman being transformed–through the power of a fine perfume–into a princess in a fairy-tale fantasy. It was a predictable narrative but one that satisfied. More important, it was a return to Chanel No. 5's long associations with cinematography and the glamour of Hollywood, which had started back as early as Coco Chanel’s trip in 1931 to the MGM studios.