The Secret of Chanel No. 5

by Tilar J. Mazzeo

  5 Thomas had been the president of the perfume house of Guerlain before the war: On H. Gregory Thomas, Jacques Wertheimer, and the problem of bringing jasmine into the United States, see Abescat and Stavridès, “Derrière l’Empire Chanel"; and the obituary published in the New York Times, October 10, 1990, www.nytimes.com/1990/10/10/obituaries/h-gregory-thomas-chanel-executive-82.html?pagewanted=1.

  6 something composed–"like a dress”: Galante, Les années Chanel, 79–80.

  7 “in Grasse, where all flowers were called by their proper [Latin] names, jasmine was simply known [in the 1920s] as ‘the flower’ “: Toledano and Coty, François Coty, 57.

  8 the jasmine plants grow to only half their normal height, and they have lower proportions of those so-called indoles: Christopher Sheldrake, Chanel, interview, 2009.

  9 It also has about it a distinct note that smells like tea: Jacques Polge, Chanel, interview, 2009.

  10 a concrete or the highly purified scent of an absolute: Joseph Mul and Jean-François Vieille, Grasse, interview, 2009.

  11 “Louis Chiris had set up his first workshop based on solvent extraction,” having wisely already secured “apatent … “: Toledano and Coty, François Coty, 58.

  12 each small, thirty-milliliter bottle of Chanel No. 5 parfum is the essence of more than a thousand jasmine flowers and the bouquet of a dozen roses: Jacques Polge, Chanel, interview, 2009.

  13 “With a great deal of foresight, the Wertheimer brothers sent people to France to round up stocks while it was still possible to do so: Galante, Mademoiselle Chanel, 183.

  14 “eighty kinds of aldehydes, [and was] unique in the world”: Abescat and Stavridès, “Derrière l’Empire Chanel,” 86.

  15 Those seven hundred pounds were enough to produce perhaps 350,000 small bottles of the celebrated parfum: This is a broad approximation, which assumes a stable dosage of jasmine, based on the calculation of a thousand jasmine flowers in a thirty-milliliter bottle of Chanel No. 5 perfume, which translated to roughly 500,000 flowers or five hundred bottles in a pound of concrete.

  16 “No. 5 [was] probably the only perfume whose quality remained the same throughout the war”: Galante, Mademoiselle Chanel, 183.

  17 The large-scale campaign that began in 1934: Archival research reveals three times as many advertisements for Chanel No. 5 in the New York Times in 1940, for example, as in 1941 or in 1942. The advertising was scaled back even more dramatically in 1943 and 1944, and it resumed actively in 1945, suggesting a general approach of not attempting to advertise actively in traditional outlets during the Second World War. However, there was considerable exposure through the United States Army commissary, perhaps making additional advertisements seem unnecessary. Among the Bourjois advertisements during the war, by far the most frequent were pitches for Ernest Beaux’ newest perfume, Evening in Paris, which was heavily promoted.

  18 companies like Yardley, Elizabeth Arden, Helena Rubenstein–and Coty–championed their products intensively during the war: See, for example, the advertising collection at Duke University Library, http://library.duke.edu/digitalcollections/adaccess/browse/. These same publications do not include any advertisements for Chanel No. 5.

  19 fine fragrances were being manufactured in the United States, which still represented the world’s largest luxury market: See Stanley Marcus, Quest for the Best (Denton: University of North Texas Press, 2001), 117.

  20 the partners were preparing to launch a “vast publicity campaign to showcase No. 5”: Abescat and Stavridès, “Derrière l’Empire Chanel,” 86.

  21 Yet, from 1940 to 1945, perfume sales in the United States increased tenfold”: Galante, Mademoiselle Chanel, 183.

  22 By the early 1930s, he was leading the way in introducing a wider model to France with popular new prix-unique chains like Monoprix and the now-forgotten Lanoma: See Max Heilbronn, Galeries Lafayette, Buchenwald, Galeries Lafayette (Paris: Éditions Economica, 1989).

  23 “I couldn’t bring back an awful lot,” she said. But there was one thing she treasured: “Chanel, you know, the perfume”: Margaret Reynolds, undated interview, Indiana University Southeast, Floyd County Oral History Project, A Community Project Operated under the Indiana University Southeast Applied Research and Education Center, http://homepages.ius.edu/Special/OralHistory/MREYNOLDS.htm.

  24 Estée Lauder in the beginning even helped the brothers: Abescat and Stavridès, “Derrière l’Empire Chanel,” 86. The American company Chanel, Inc. and a British company Chanel Ltd. were first established in 1924, when the partnership was created; Chanel archives.

  25 The Jewish partners of Les Parfums Chanel had sold their shares of the business to a daredevil pilot and industrialist named Félix Amiot: Details from various sources, the most comprehensive being Abescat and Stavridès, “Derrière l’Empire Chanel.”

  1 The occupying German forces, along with their French administrative collaborators: For information on Vichy France, see, for example, Robert O. Paxton, Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940–1944 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001).

  2 “You have bought the Bourjois and Chanel perfumeries”: Abescat and Stavridès, “Derrière l’Empire Chanel,” 87.

  3 “worth more than four million francs–over seventy million dollars in today’s numbers”: based on nominal GDP per capita.

  4 “it is still the property of Jews”: Abescat and Stavridès, “Derrière l’Empire Chanel,” 85; the article includes a photographic reproduction of the letter, signed by Chanel.

  5 He had worked until 1931 as the commercial director at Les Parfums Chanel: Chanel archives.

  6 “it is still a Jewish business” … Coco Chanel and the administrator “appreciated each other”: Abescat and Stavridès, “Derrière l’Empire Chanel,” L’Express, 88.

  7 “I have,” she wrote, “an indisputable right of priority”: Abescat and Stavridès, “Derrière l’Empire Chanel,” L’Express, 85.

  8 She still thought of Pierre Wertheimer, in particular, as “that bandit who screwed me”: Madsen, Chanel, 137.

  9 “any presence of Pierre and Paul [Wertheimer] in the capital of the company had officially disappeared”: Abescat and Stavridès, “Derrière l’Empire Chanel,” 87.

  10 In order to backdate the stock transfers that would “ma[k]e indisputable the purchase of the business,” they probably had to bribe German officials: Ibid.

  11 “bought almost 50 percent of an airplane propeller company”: Dana Thomas, “The Power Behind the Cologne,” New York Times, February 24, 2002, www.nytimes.com/2002/02/24/magazine/the-power-behind-the-cologne.html?pagewanted=3.

  12 “the perfume company of Bourjois … passed to Aryan hands in a manner that is legal and correct”: Abescat and Stavridès, “Derrière l’Empire Chanel,” 88.

  13 In February of 1942, the case was reopened, and Félix Amiot once again subjected to a long interrogation: Abescat and Stavridès, “Derrière l’Empire Chanel,” 86.

  14 loaded them on the final convoy of trains sent creeping from the industrial western suburbs of Pantin: See “Histoire de Pantin,” www.ville-pantin.fr/fileadmin/MEDIA/Histoire_de_Pantin/histoire.pdf.

  15 In the last days of the war, Théophile Bader’s son-in-law, Max Heilbronn, was on one of them: See Max Heilbronn, Galeries Lafayette, Buchenwald, Galeries Lafayette (Paris: Éditions Economica, 1989).

  16 Out of the silence, the ringing bells of the cathedral of Notre Dame echoed over the Seine: Recollections of John Mac Vane, “On the Air in World War II,” interview, 1979; Martin Blumenson, “Liberation,” interview, 1978, www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/parisliberation.htm.

  17 the French “swept the [soldiers] into their arms, dancing, singing, often making love to them”: Levenstein, We’ll Always Have Paris.

  18 Only one-in-four Parisian residents had enough food during those years: Sharon Fogg, The Politics of Everyday Life in Vichy France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 4.

  19 Some have called the occupation not the crazy years but les a
nnées érotiques–the erotic years–instead: Patrick Buisson, 1940–1945, Années Érotiques: Vichy ou les Infortunes de la Vertu (Paris: Albin Michel, 2008).

  20 the American troops liberated Paris, “there was one souvenir of the city they all wanted”: Kennett, Coco, 127.

  21 “Not only was it the only French perfume the American G.I. had ever heard of, it was the only one he could pronounce”: Philippa Toomey, “Shop Around,” The Times, November 26, 1977, 26; Issue 60171, col. D.

  22 the American president, Harry S. Truman, went looking for it: Letter from Harry S. Truman to Bess Wallace Truman, July 22, 1945, National Archives, ARC Identifier 200660, Collection HST-FBP: Harry S. Truman Papers Pertaining to Family, Business and Personal.

  23 Before the celebrations had even ended, les épurations–the purges–began: See Eugen Weber, “France’s Downfall,” Atlantic Magazine, October 2001, www.theatlantic.com/doc/200110/weber; Glenys Roberts, “Sleeping with the Enemy: New Book Claims Frenchwomen Started a Baby Boom with Nazi Men During Vichy Regime,” Daily Mail, July 17, 2008, www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1035804/Sleeping-enemy-New-book-claims-Frenchwomen-started-baby-boom-Nazi-men-Vichy-regime.html#ixzz0V9xfteQ9; and Jon Elster, Retribution and Reparation in the Transition to Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), who writes, “It was proposed that women who slept with the Germans would be conducted into prostitution, shorn, and registered, after having been examined for venereal diseases,” 97.

  24 Christiane, the daughter of Coco Chanel’s old friend and now archrival, François Coty, was among those brutalized: Toledano and Coty, François Coty, 255.

  25 Christiane Coty had been humiliated on the grounds that she had simply socialized with German officers”: Toledano and Coty, François Coty, 204–206, 254–55.

  26 Coco Chanel’s wartime companion: Details on her liaison and wartime activities, here and below, from various sources; the most complete accounts are Madsen, Chanel, 237–70; Charles-Roux, Chanel, 311–49.

  27 all she could think to do in the days that followed was ask a German-American soldier if perhaps he would help her: Madsen, Chanel, 264–65.

  28 When friends had warned her that the liaison with von Dincklage was dangerous: Haedrich, Coco Chanel, 147. Some have suggested, although without any corroboration, that von Dincklage was a double agent, also working for the British during the war; see discussion in Madsen, Chanel, 246.

  29 At her age, she wryly announced, when she had the chance of a lover she was hardly going to inspect a man’s passport: Madsen, Chanel, 262.

  30 She had done more during those years than simply carry on a romance with a German officer: See Kate Muir, “Chanel and the Nazis: What Coco Avant Chanel and Other Films Don’t Tell You,” The Times, April 4, 2009, http:// entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/film/article6027932.ece. The use of the term “Nazi” is historically complicated, and I refrain from using it here only because the question of von Dincklage’s association with the Nazi Party proper has never been satisfactorily settled. In many cases officers of other branches of the German fascist government were formally barred from party membership. However, insofar as von Dincklage acted as a German diplomat and later as an officer working with the fascist administration in Nazi-occupied France, Coco Chanel must have understood the political complexity of her liaison. 159 Walter Friedrich Schellenberg–the powerful German officer best known to history for his memoirs of Nazi Germany, written after his conviction for war crimes: Walter Schellenberg, The Labyrinth: Memoirs of Walter Schellenberg, Hitler’s Chief of Counterintelligence (London: DaCapo Press, 2000).

  31 Declassified documents show that Coco returned to Berlin again in December of 1943: For a narrative summary of the materials in the National Archives, Washington D.C., and for the best brief account of the Schellenberg and Lombardi affairs, see Christophe Agnus, “Chanel: un parfum d’espionnage,” L’Express, March 16, 1995, www.lexpress.fr/informations/chanel-un-parfum-d-espionnage_603397.html. Details here and following draw from this article and, as noted, from unpublished materials in the Churchill Archives, Churchill College, University of Cambridge.

  In her article on “Chanel and the Nazis,” Kate Muir writes, “Schellenberg was interrogated by the British after the war concerning the visit in 1943 from ‘Frau Chanel a French subject and proprietress of the noted perfume factory.’ According to the transcript: ‘This woman was referred to as a person Churchill knew sufficiently to undertake political negotiations with him, as an enemy of Russia and as desirous of helping France and Germany whose destinies she believed to be closely linked together.’ Operation Modelhut [as the Schellenberg affair was known] fell apart, and the mutual friend of Churchill and Chanel denounced her as a German agent.”

  On Chanel’s connections with other German officers in occupied France, see also Uki Goñi, The Real Odessa: Smuggling Nazis to Perón’s Argentina (London: Granta Books, 2002).

  32 Remembering those meetings, Mumm later declared that she had “a drop of the blood of Joan of Arc in her veins”: Quoted in Agnus, “Chanel: un parfum d’espionnage.”

  33 according to top secret memos sent between the United States government and the office of Winston Churchill–had deliberately exaggerated her old friend’s use to German intelligence: Churchill Archive Centre, University of Cambridge, CHAR 20/198A, items 61–91; item 87, a top secret letter dated December 28, 1944, reads: “When Madame Lombardi was in Paris in December, 1941, her friend Madame Chanel deliberately exaggerated her importance in order to give the Germans the impression that she (Madame Lombardi) might be useful to them.”

  34 She wrote to Churchill that summer protesting Coco’s treachery: Churchill Archive Centre, University of Cambridge, CHAR 20/198A, item 75, letter from V. Lombardi, Madrid, August 8, 1944, to Winston Churchill.

  35 Coco had the idea that Vera would help, and it seems that, when Vera refused, von Dincklage may have been the one who thought to have her arrested: Agnus, “Chanel: un parfum d’espionnage.”

  36 “Madame Chanel,” the report reads, “apparently instigated the special facilities afforded by the German Gestapo to Madame Lombardi”: Churchill Archive Centre, University of Cambridge, CHAR 20/198A, item 86, letter from S. S. Hill-Dillon, Allied Force Headquarters, U.S. Army, December 3, 1944, to J. J. Martin, Prime Minister’s Principal Secretary, 10 Downing Street (Top Secret).

  37 Files in the British Foreign Office were mistakenly declassified for a brief window: Madsen, Chanel, 263. Madsen suggests that Coco Chanel knew details of Nazi collaboration by the Duke and Duchess of Windsor; see also Toledano and Coty, François Coty, 122. While this may or may not have been the case, unpublished archival materials suggest that the British and the American governments were satisfied that Coco Chanel had not actively collaborated.

  38 Churchill followed the investigation into Coco’s wartime imbroglio carefully … despite the “suspicious circumstances”: Churchill Archive Centre, University of Cambridge, CHAR 20/198A, item 86.

  39 “By one of those majestically simple strokes which made Napoléon so successful as a general …”: Madsen, Chanel, 263.

  1 Her object: “to create total confusion among her haute-couture clients, her friends, and the distributors of the authentic Chanel No. 5”: Abescat and Stavridès, “Derrière l’Empire Chanel,” 83.

  2 Paris would be “gay and animated,” filled with art, music, and entertainment: Charles Bremner, “Andre Zucca’s Portraits of Gay Paris at War Paint an Uneasy Portrait of City Collaboration,” The Times, April 18, 2008, http:// entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/visual_arts/article3767951.ece.

  3 the Bourjois factory on Queen’s Way in Croydon was destroyed in a terrible air raid in the summer of 1940: The bombing of the factory is occasionally in the news because of claims by former employees that a World War Two-era airplane remains buried in the ruins of the building; see most recently Kirsty Whalley, “Is Perfume House Hiding Secret Aircraft?,” Croydon Guardian, August 2,
2008, www.croydonguardian.co.uk/news/heritage/3565445.Is_perfume_warehouse[IQ] _hiding_secret_aircraft_/.