The Secret of Chanel No. 5

FOR SUSANNE

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

PREFACE

PART I COCO BEFORE CHANEL NO. 5

ONE AUBAZINE AND THE SECRET CODE OF SCENT

TWO THE PRETTY PERFUMER

THREE THE SOENT OF BETRAYAL

FOUR AN EDUCATION IN THE SENSES

FIVE THE PRINCE AND THE PERFUMER

SIX THE BIRTH OF A MODERN LEGEND

PART II LOVE AND WAR

SEVEN LAUNCHING CHANEL NO. 5

EIGHT THE SCENT WITH A REPUTATION

NINE MARKETING MINIMALISM

TEN CHANEL NO. 5 AND THE STYLE MODERNE

ELEVEN HOLLYWOOD AND THE GREAT DEPRESSION

TWELVE A BROKEN PARTNERSHIP

THIRTEEN IN THE SHADOW OF THE RITZ

FOURTEEN COCO AT WAR

FIFTEEN COCO PLAYS THE NUMBERS

PART III THE LIFE OF AN ICON

SIXTEEN AN ICON OF THE 1950S

SEVENTEEN THE ART OF BUSINESS

EIGHTEEN THE END OF MODERN PERFUMERY

AFTERWORD

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

About the Author

ALSO BY TILAR J. MAZZEO

Copyright

About the Publisher

H
eadlines around the world in the first days of December 2009 boldly announced something that came as a surprise to few: “Chanel No. 5 rated ‘most seductive scent' in poll of women.”
¹
Coco Chanel's iconic fragrance had once again been tapped as the world's sexiest perfume, handily beating out the designer perfumes of the contemporary fashion greats, including scents as ubiquitous and lovely as Calvin Klein's Eternity or Estée Lauder's Beautiful. Some of the world's bestselling fragrances didn't make the list at all. Among the fragrances ranked in the top twenty, there was something else remarkable, too: not one had a history that went back earlier than the 1980s–not one, that is, except for Chanel No. 5, now nearly ninety years old.

Chanel No. 5 is one of the few remaining “legacy” perfumes, and the idea that Chanel No. 5 makes a woman irresistibly alluring isn't a new one. When the story about the world's most seductive fragrance ran in the pages of the
London Daily Mail,
the reporter drily observed that “Marilyn Monroe never had trouble attracting men”
²
either. Now, “it appear[ed] her colourful love life may have been down to a simple choice
³
–her perfume.” After all, who could forget that the starlet famously quipped that all she wore to bed at night were a few drops of Chanel No. 5
⁴
? Certainly not the thousands of women who voted to name it the most alluring fragrance on the market and declared it the perfect scent not just for getting a date but also “for getting beyond it to boyfriend status
⁵
.” In fact, among these women, an astonishing one in ten claimed they met Mr. Right while wearing the iconic perfume
⁶
.

If that's the case, Chanel No. 5 has to its credit a whole lot of love stories: according to the French government, a bottle of the world's most famous perfume sells
⁷
somewhere around the globe on the average of every thirty seconds, to the tune of $100 million a year. The precise figure, like so much about this celebrated fragrance, is a closely guarded company secret. But those numbers–which translate into something upward of a million bottles sold annually–mean just one thing: a vast number of beautifully scented women for someone to adore. And this has been happening year after year, for decades.

Secrets, of course, give rise to legends, and both swirl around the story of Chanel No. 5. They have done so almost since Coco Chanel launched her signature perfume in the opening years of the 1920s–that pivotal moment after the first “Great War” when the world was determined to leave behind a painful past and to embrace all the promises of the new and the modern. Suddenly, once unimaginable things seemed possible. Albert Einstein won the Nobel Prize for reimagining the laws of physics, and once deadly diseases were tamed by the miracle of vaccinations. At the beginning of that decade, America had just a handful of millionaires. A few years later, the ranks of the super rich had swelled by more than 700 percent
⁸
to a number approaching fifteen thousand, ushering in what promised to be a new gilded age. The bustling postwar economies created a new standard of wealth and luxury, and, for the first time, it all seemed within reach of the average person. There were wireless radios and talkie films, cars for the middle classes and chic ready-made fashions–and fine French perfumes–on the floors of glittering department stores, another phenomenon of this enticing new commercial era
⁹
.

This was the decade of New York and Paris and of all the things that happened at a moment when the distance between those two great cities was beginning to seem just a little bit shorter. It was the decade of superstars and heroes. And, as the rise of rapid communication created the beginnings of an international cosmopolitan culture, it also became the era of celebrity icons. Babe Ruth led the New York Yankees to three World Series titles
¹⁰
in that roaring decade, and Charles Lindbergh flew thirty-three hours from New York to Paris. Clara Bow became the world's first “It Girl"; Charlie Chaplin took Hollywood slapstick to dizzying heights; and on the nighttime stages in France's capital, the sultry Josephine Baker danced topless to breathless applause, night after night, during the interwar years. Among all the icons of the 1920s, however, none could touch Coco Chanel, already acknowledged as one of the most chic and influential women of an entire generation.

The line between legend and history, however, is wonderfully–and perplexingly–malleable. Much of what is told and retold as conventional wisdom about the spectacular rise of Chanel No. 5 and its transformation into an international byword for luxury is the stuff of half-truths, confusion, collective fantasy, and sheer invention. Sometimes, the truth that those legends obscure is more fantastic than any fiction.

Consider all the things you think you know about Chanel No. 5, which for most of its history has been the bestselling fragrance of all time and among the twentieth century's most coveted luxury objects. Perhaps you remember how this unique scent was invented in the summer of 1920 by the young fashion designer Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel. Except it wasn't. In fact, it was already a scent with a long and tangled history–a history about nothing so much as the intimacy of loss and desire.

Perhaps you've read sources that tell how Chanel No. 5 stunned the world of traditional fragrance as a dazzling new technical innovation: history's first synthetic composition, its first abstract scent, with its novel use of the perfume materials known as “aldehydes.” Indeed, it's likely that you have because this claim is a key part of the legend of how Chanel No. 5 became a phenomenon. The trouble is that none of this is true, either. Chanel No. 5 wasn't the first perfume to do any of those things. It wasn't even the second. Poised on the brink of what is still known as the “golden age” of perfumery, Chanel No. 5
was
a genuine revolution that changed the history of fragrance forever and one of the great works of a new kind of art in a vibrant modern era. What makes it spectacular, however, is something different–something that makes it enduringly and genuinely sexy.

Among the widely held beliefs, there is one that is nearly universal: the idea that clever and persistent advertising created Chanel No. 5's international fame. Despite the beauty of a scent that perfume experts applaud as a milestone and masterpiece, who could doubt that its celebrity and staying power comes down to brilliant marketing and, especially, to the careful packaging of the scent in that wonderfully understated square-cut bottle? After all, the legend tells us how the bottle became revered, how it was recognized by Andy Warhol in his famous 1960s lithograph series as a twentieth-century icon. Then there is that spectacular photo shoot of Marilyn Monroe, the perfume's greatest spokeswoman, holding the Chanel No. 5 bottle provocatively close to her ample cleavage.

The trouble is that Chanel No. 5 was never one of the images in Warhol's famous pop art icon series in the 1960s. No one paid Marilyn Monroe for any endorsement, either. Even the well-known story about how the bottle became part of the permanent collections at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in the late 1950s is simply mistaken. Yet the idea that Chanel No. 5 is the creature of marketing is persistent because it seems so obvious. Look back through the archives, through the history of advertising and dusty copies of old newspapers and fashion magazines, however, and a simple and surprising fact emerges: Chanel No. 5's early success never came down to marketing at all.

Despite the widespread popular conviction that clever advertising made Chanel No. 5 a great name in the world of luxury, the truth is something stranger and a story far more compelling and complicated: for the first forty years of its fame, the marketing was run-of-the-mill and largely uninspired. It should have been nothing short of disastrous. The biggest competitors for Chanel No. 5 in the 1920s, ‘30s, and even ‘40s were a competition and confusion of the company's–and, later, Coco Chanel's–own making. Somehow, the marketing and promotion just didn't matter.

Consider again that one simple fact: a bottle every thirty seconds. The numbers are staggering, and they aren't part of a recent trend, either. Chanel No. 5 has been this kind of runaway success since the 1920s. As
New York Times
perfume critic Chandler Burr reminds us, in the fragrance industry today, the scent, which still dominates the global market, is spoken of in reverent tones simply as
le monstre–the
monster.
¹¹

More than that, although it wasn't among Warhol's icons in the 1960s, Chanel No. 5
is
one of those astonishingly rare products that has taken on a life of its own and breathes meaning as a symbol. It
is
an icon. As an exasperated competitor once anonymously confessed to Burr, “It's unbelievable! It's not a fragrance; it's a goddamn cultural monument, like Coke.”
¹²
The best metaphor, however, is still the one of the beautiful
monstre,
because this thing has a life of its own.

Few products around the world are more beloved than Chanel No. 5, and it inspires in its millions of fans–and there are millions–the kind of passion and loyalty that executives in slick advertising offices on Madison Avenue can only dream about manufacturing. The dilemma for any curious historian, savvy entrepreneur, or fragrance aficionado is: what, precisely, is the connection?
How
did Chanel No. 5 become one of the most celebrated luxury products of all time? If it took decades for the marketing to catch up with the success of the world's most famous perfume, what
is
the secret of its fabulous destiny? More simply still, why is Chanel No. 5 the most sensual perfume in the world, and what exactly is it that makes this scent so sexy? This book–the unauthorized biography of a scent–separates the fact from the fiction, and teases out the truths from the jumble of half-truths and revealing silences, to tell the story of a familiar cultural monument whose history we've never really known.