The Secret of Chanel No. 5 (40 page)

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 While this may or may not have been the case, unpublished archival materials suggest that the British and the American governments were satisfied that Coco Chanel had not actively collaborated.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_/.

4
“after the defeat of France,” writes one historian, “Germany received a supply of luxury goods such as she had not seen for years”:
Marshall Dill,
Germany: A Modern History
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1970).

5
It was $15,000–today worth a cool million dollars:
Based on nominal GDP per capita.

6
in the United States she received only 10 percent of a 10 percent dividend:
Galante,
Mademoiselle Chanel,
198.

7
“It is monstrous,” she insisted. “They produced it in Hoboken!”:
Abescat and Stavridès, “Derrière l'Empire Chanel,” 83; see also Kennett,
Coco,
83.

8
“From Miami to Anchorage, from Naples to Berlin … next to milk chocolate”:
Abescat and Stavridès, “Derrière l'Empire Chanel,” 83; also quoted in the official Chanel history of No. 5, François Ternon,
Histoire du No. 5 Chanel: Un numéro intemporel
(Nantes, France: Éditions Normant, 2009), 45.

9
In her private war with the Wertheimers, though, she now declared, “We need to get our weapons … and I have some!”:
Abescat and Stavridès, “Derrière l'Empire Chanel,” 83.

10
she threatened to produce a scent simply called Mademoiselle Chanel No. 5:
Madsen,
Chanel,
268.

11
Just outside Zürich, for example, in the village of Dübendorf, a small perfumery called Chemische Fabrik Flora:
Philip Kraft, personal correspondence, 2010.

12
He paid about five dollars each–more than sixty dollars a bottle in modern figures–for flasks:
The notebooks, along with a collection of vintage perfumes, were sold in an auction in Britain during 2010 to an undisclosed buyer, and details here are based on photographic records from the sale; calculations based on consumer price index.

13
This mossy, green scent with jasmine and roses went on to become … “the celebrated No. 19” fragrance:
Fiemeyer,
Coco Chanel,
133. See also Angela Taylor, “Coco Left a Legacy–It's Chanel No. 19,”
New York Times,
September 11, 1972, 46: “A few years before her death in 1971, Mlle. Chanel got a little bored with smelling like everyone else, according to H. Gregory Thomas, her good friend and chairman of Chanel, Inc. here. She wanted a perfume all her own. … It was numbered 19.” Named after Coco Chanel's birth date, on August 19, it was based on the red-label formula and updated sometime after 1965 by Chanel's perfumer Henri Robert, who added to it a recently discovered synthetic jasmine compound, Hedione. See Galante,
Mademoiselle Chanel,
275.

14
“A perfume ought to punch you right on the nose”:
Claude Delay,
Chanel Solitaire
(Paris: Gallimard, 1983), 88.

15
She boasted that it was the scent of Chanel No. 5–"but even better”:
Galante,
Mademoiselle Chanel,
193.

16
“When he came in,” the lawyer remembered, “I showed him the samples … “:
Ibid.

17
“The suit asks that the French parent concern [Les Parfums Chanel] be ordered to cease manufacture …”: New York Times,
June 3, 1946, 24.

18
eight million dollars–$240 million today”:
Calculated using nominal GDP per capita.

19
Several sources speculate that it must have been Ernest Beaux:
For the best discussion, see Kraft, Ledard, and Goutell, “From
Rallet No. 1
to
Chanel No.
5"; perfumer and fragrance historian Elena Vosnaki notes that it is a “violet-orris” with a structure that “is a common thread in Beaux creations”: private correspondence, 2009.

20
Gilberte Beaux, Ernest's daughter-in-law is equally confident that he wasn't the nose behind those fragrances, and her observation is also a good one:
Gilberte Beaux, interview, 2010.

Mademoiselle Chanel No. 1 resembles Rallet No. 1, but no one could have confused it with Chanel No. 5 if they sniffed either appreciatively. While they have the floral heart in common, there is one crucially important difference. Unlike both Chanel No. 5 and Rallet No. 1, Mademoiselle Chanel No. 1 doesn't have any aldehydes. Those scent materials transformed the world of perfumery in the 1920s, but they were no longer cutting edge in the late 1940s. The success of Chanel No. 5 meant that perfumers had readily incorporated these materials into their fragrances for several decades.

Instead of the aldehyde bouquet, the perfumer made a new innovation. Aldehydes might have become a familiar part of the scent idiom of the 1940s, but a-n-methyl ionone (alpha, nu; marketed by Givaudan as Raldeine A)–a synthetic compound with the unique scent of woody florals and orris butter–was still uncharted territory. It allowed perfumers, who could never have afforded to use large proportions of natural orris, a prohibitively expensive compound made naturally from the rhizome roots of iris flowers, to experiment with the full range of its aromas. Mademoiselle Chanel No. 1 used a-n-methyl ionone for nearly 25 percent of its entire formula. “As a result,” researchers have discovered, “Mademoiselle Chanel No. 1 becomes somewhat of a violet-orris modification of the Chanel No. 5 theme"; Kraft, et al., 46.

21
“If one took seriously the few disclosures that Mademoiselle Chanel allowed herself to make about those black years of the occupation”:
Haedrich,
Coco Chanel,
144.

22
Pierre Wertheimer's worry was how “a legal fight might illuminate Chanel's wartime activities and wreck her image–and his business”:
Madsen,
Chanel,
272; Phyllis Berman and Zina Sawaya, “The Billionaires Behind Chanel,”
Forbes,
April 3, 1989, 104.

23
Walter Schellenberg, one of the principal operatives in the failed diplomatic mission to Berlin:
Fiemeyer,
Coco Chanel,
136; the funds were paid in 1958.

24
“Pierre [Wertheimer],” he told Coco Chanel's lawyer, “is standing here next to me”:
Abescat and Stavridès, “Derrière l'Empire Chanel,” 82.

25
Parfums Chanel would give Coco Chanel $350,000–a sum today worth nearly nine million dollars:
figures here and below based on nominal GDP per capita.

1
a light “boy-meets-girls” comic opera called
Chanel No. 5: Composed by Friedrich Schröder, with lyrics by B. E. Lüthge and Günther Schwenn;
Chanel No. 5
(Berlin: Corso, 1946). The operetta was obviously quite popular and well known, since a number of individual songs were printed separately, including “That Is the Smile with Tears”
(“Das Ist das Lächeln der Tränen”),
“In My Thoughts I Already Say ‘Du' to You,” and “Tango Érotique.” Curiously, the story is not particularly focused on Chanel No. 5, despite the title. Instead, Chanel No. 5–as the most famous scent of a generation–stands in for a larger category of luxury French perfumes. The cover page depicts a large bottle of Chanel No. 5 with a woman beside it.

2
“We know the ladies … the blond and blue-black [haired] ones, the large and the slender ones”: Chanel No. 5,
Berlin: Corso, 1946.

3
“based on a businessman's passion for a woman who felt exploited by him”:
Berman and Sawaya, “The Billionaires Behind Chanel,” 104.

4
“Pierre returned to Paris full of pride and excitement”:
Ibid. There are divergent accounts of this story, however. See, for example, Galante,
Les années Chanel,
188.

5
“Pierre,” she said, “let's launch a new perfume” … “It's too risky”:
Ternon,
Histoire du No. 5 Chanel,
45; Madsen,
Chanel,
282.

6
he was now the only partner left at Les Parfums Chanel:
Madsen,
Chanel,
270.

7
offended at being taxed under French law as a “spinster,” she would even insist that Pierre Wertheimer pay her taxes:
Galante,
Mademoiselle Chanel,
151.

8
“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”:
Charles-Roux,
Chanel,
322; see also Edmonde Charles-Roux,
L'Irrégulière, ou Mon Itinéraire Chanel
(Paris: Grasset, 1994); and Edmonde Charles-Roux,
Chanel and Her World
(New York: Vendome, 2005).

9
“a man who had had many mistresses in his day, [and he] was used to paying women's personal expenses …”:
Charles-Roux,
Chanel,
322.

10
She lived in a simply decorated room at the Ritz Hotel and took to writing … a book of aphorisms that she imagined one day publishing:
Ann Brower tells of seeing the notebook during an interview with Coco Chanel in 1954; she recalls it as being approximately 6” x 4” and blue. When Brower had resigned a modeling position with the designer, she was asked in for an interview, and Coco Chanel asked her what she wanted to be. Brower replied that she wanted to be a writer, and Chanel told her, “I am a writer, too” and showed her the book.

11
The reality, however, is that Warhol didn't create the Chanel No. 5 silk screens until the mid-1980s:
My thanks to Matt Wrbican and Tresa Varner, at the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, for their assistance in dating this work.

12
“removed from their conventional context of advertising and sales” and selected “ for excellence”: The Package,
The Museum of Modern Art, 1959, catalog, 27:1 (Fall 1959), 24.

13
“This is a most sophisticated use of bold black lettering on a white ground”: The Package,
19.

14
In the fifteen years from 1940 to 1955, the gross national product in the United States … soared 400 percent:
Richard Shear, “The Package Design: A Leading or Trailing Indicator, 1950–1960,” October 14, 2009, http://richardshear.wordpress.com/2009/10/14/package-design-a-leading-or-trailing-indicator-1950–1960/.

15
For the first time “The package became an independent communicator of its own brand personality”:
Vance Packard,
The Hidden Persuaders
(New York: David McKay, 1957), 19–20.