The Secret of Chanel No. 5 (17 page)

Once again, Coco Chanel had changed the direction of the world of fashion, and it was all an extension of her initial intuition. From the beginning, the link between Chanel No. 5 and her atelier had been explicit. She had sprayed the perfume in the fitting rooms of her boutique as an essential part of her word-of-mouth marketing in 1921 and lauded it as
her
personal scent. Now that idea was coming to fruition in the luxury fragrance market. It meant new competition.

By the mid-1920s, the world of marketing was also experiencing a revolution. A new way of selling perfumes was emerging in Paris especially, and it didn't have much to do with the kind of department store-sponsored newspaper advertisements that the partners at Les Parfums Chanel used to promote Chanel No. 5 in those first few decades. These new trends, however, did owe a great deal to the history of the department store, which emerged as a powerful commercial institution in the early twentieth century. The owners of retail temples like the Galeries Lafayette in Paris “were pioneers in the art of enhancing and contextualizing commodities by using exotic backdrops
⁷
.” Théophile Bader at the Galeries Lafayette, in fact, had been the first retailer to sell Chanel No. 5 in the early days, and, in exchange for introducing Coco Chanel to the Wertheimer brothers, he still owned a 20 percent stake in Les Parfums Chanel–twice Coco Chanel's share in the fragrance she had created.

The great innovation of the 1930s, however, wasn't the department-store counter but the lush new scent salons being created by fragrance houses. In these extravagant boutiques, clients indulged their senses. It was a backward glance to the summer of 1911 and Paul Poiret's spectacular midnight launch of his Nuit Persane, which had inspired Coco Chanel to develop history's third couture fragrance. It was also part of a brand-new style of merchandising, one that emphasized “elaborate displays [and] the cultivation of the shopping experience.”
⁸

The trend had begun with those perfume fountains of the 1925 art deco exhibition. “Perfume,” visitors to the pavilion learned, “is a luxury naturally adapted … to feminine fantasy,”
⁹
and at the “expo” the retailers competed fiercely with one another to draw spectators into a perfumed world of the imagination. Those who saw it were delighted, and the perfume pavilion was such a success that perfume houses soon picked up on the idea and expanded upon it. It was the perfect way to make the point that fine fragrances were not the kind of thing you bought in a
prix unique,
the French equivalent of the five-and-dime. It was the birth of a certain kind of luxury marketing.

Designers began refitting their boutiques to showcase their perfumes and accessories, and the boutique created by the designer Jean Patou was a celebrated example. In 1930, Patou released his scent Joy, which was based on perfumer Henri Alméras's experiments with even more extravagant amounts of jasmine and rose than in the bestselling Chanel No. 5. Coco Chanel had told Ernest Beaux just a decade earlier that what she wanted to create was the most extravagant perfume in the world. Now, Joy had officially taken that title from her. It was not the kind of thing calculated to make Coco Chanel happy–especially combined with a series of newspaper advertisements touting her fragrances at remarkably modest prices.

In fact, Coco Chanel's aesthetics were far more in line with the marketing strategy that Jean Patou pursued to market his new fragrance. That tension–between heady exclusivity and the mass-market commercialization of a luxury product–was at the heart of much that came later. The early 1930s were a difficult time to introduce a new luxury product, even one with such a determinedly cheerful name as Joy, and Patou knew that selling this new scent in the aftermath of the stock market crash would require some creative efforts. Hoping to drum up some long-distance business, Patou sent bottles of Joy as a gift to cheer up his best clients in America, who were finding their European shopping trips hampered by the Great Depression. This perfume, he hoped, would keep the name of Patou in the minds of women as a designer at a moment when few people could afford haute couture.

Then, he did something else clever. In his boutique, he had long maintained a cocktail bar for the gentlemen who were kept waiting during those protracted feminine fittings. With a major redesign of his salon, he now gave his loyal clients–and the other women who frequented couturiers–an added incentive to make the effort to come to his salon in Paris. He added a glamorous perfume bar, where clients could sample not liquors but perfumes, several of which had clever new “cocktail” themes that year
¹⁰
. Clients could even blend their own scents. Or they could buy his new ultra-exclusive interwar fragrance. It was the ultimate shopping experience. The combined result was that Joy became, despite the odds, a terrific success.

Before long, perfume showrooms and designer boutiques across Paris were opulent invitations to fantasy, more like movie sets than sales floors. The Hollywood connection wasn't coincidental, especially for Coco Chanel. In 1930, still enjoying great personal celebrity, she met the Hollywood producer Sam Goldwyn at a restaurant in Monte Carlo. Their collaboration would inspire new directions in fragrance marketing, bring Coco Chanel a fortune, and catapult Chanel No. 5 to even greater fame. It was a far cry from corner newspaper advertisements.

I
n these uncertain times, Hollywood producers were also looking for ways to reach audiences. It was the beginning of the golden age of Hollywood, and within just a few months the “Swedish Sphinx,” Greta Garbo, would star in her first talkie, but the Great Depression was taking its toll even in sunny California. There were already other dark signs on the cultural horizon. Censorship, anti-communism, and anti-Semitism ran through those years in an ominous undercurrent. The surface, however, was glitter, and Hollywood moguls began experimenting with new ways of enticing audiences by bringing luxury products to consumers.

Those audiences were mostly female. Writes one film historian, “women were seen by Hollywood as the primary consumers of cinema
¹¹
.” Everyone also knew that women found haute couture fascinating. So nothing could be more natural than to have films start borrowing from the conventions of the fashion show, which had been invented in the dressing rooms of Paris at the turn of the century.

It was the final logical marriage of the theatrical display of the 1925 art deco exhibition with costume and interior designing. Art deco was a phenomenon in America
¹²
. The MGM artistic director Cedric Gibbons had attended the Paris exposition, and his interpretation of the new modernist style in the 1925 film
Our Dancing Daughters,
with Joan Crawford, set off a fashion in the United States for everything French and art deco. Despite the fact that Chanel No. 5–perhaps the quintessential art deco fragrance–had been curiously absent from the exposition, “Chanel” was already the epitome of this new Style Moderne in the minds of many.

When it came to marketing fashion, Sam Goldwyn also saw a golden opportunity. He would draw women to the movies by having his stars wear only the latest cutting-edge Parisian designs. In that world of couture, no one had more cachet and verve than Coco Chanel. Come to Hollywood, he said. Dress my starlets. And he offered her the staggering sum of a million dollars–the equivalent of over $75 million today
¹³
–if she would take just two trips a year to California and design costumes for his stars.

Understanding a good business opportunity when she saw one, Coco Chanel took the contract and headed for the United States in the winter of 1931. For a second time in the history of Chanel No. 5, Dmitri Pavlovich had been behind an introduction crucial to Coco's success. According to an article in
Collier's
magazine in 1932, “The Grand Duke
¹⁴
Dimitri, of the Romanoffs, quite casually introduced Samuel Goldwyn, of the movies, to [Mademoiselle] Gabrielle Chanel of Chanel. Pleasant talk, pleasant compliments, big inspiration, big contract–and the great Chanel has agreed to come to Hollywood to design clothes for the movies. Admittedly, it's a gamble, but on a million-dollar scale.”

Still, Coco Chanel was dubious about the dazzle of the big screen and California. After all, she had once dreamed of a career on the stage, and she had determinedly left that life behind. But for a million dollars, she was willing to take a trip to “see what the pictures have to offer me and what I have to offer the pictures
¹⁵
.”

By then, Coco had another reason for being curious about the world of the movie industry. That winter, she had a new lover, and this time he was a man who had Hollywood connections. She had thrown herself into a liaison with the fashion illustrator, political satirist, and Hollywood set designer Paul Iribe, the illustrator and sometime-journalist who had famously sketched the dresses of her competitor Paul Poiret.

Coco Chanel and Paul Iribe had known each other for decades
¹⁶
, and they had an entire circle of friends in common, including Misia Sert, Igor Stravinsky, Jean Cocteau, Sergei Diaghilev, and many of the Russian exiles associated with the Ballet Russes in the 1910s and 1920s. In fact, the connections between them went back even further. Paul Iribe's first wife, the famed vaudeville actress Jeanne Dirys
¹⁷
, had worn hats created by her friend–another onetime showgirl–Coco Chanel.

To their friends, it was a bizarre connection, because, when it came to fashion, Coco Chanel and Paul Iribe had radically different sensibilities. In his polemical 1929 antimodern design treatise
Choix,
Iribe had attacked the revolutionary “emancipated” and international style her work epitomized, complaining that it was part of the degeneration of French culture. It hardly seems, then, that Paul Iribe would have been the person to turn to for career advice and supportive conversation. But he had worked for several years at some of the big studios, and, in advance of the Hollywood tour, Coco reconnected with her old acquaintance to get his perspective on the film industry. Sparks flew, and they quickly became lovers. In fact, as soon as he could get a divorce from his wife, an unlucky heiress named Maybelle, they planned to get married.

It all happened suddenly, and, within a year of beginning their liaison, things were serious. By Coco Chanel's own testimony, however, it was a strange and sometimes tortured relationship. “My nascent celebrity,” she later told a friend,
¹⁸

Her celebrity at the beginning of the 1930s was hardly “nascent,” but no one doubted that it was an astonishing attachment. Coco's friends thought Iribe was devilish and couldn't understand it. As always for Coco, her past troubled him. One thing that doesn't seem to have unsettled her about the love affair, however, was Iribe's politics, which flirted with a peculiar brand of proto-fascist nationalism. His views were only marginally less narrow than those of another former lover, the Duke of Westminster
¹⁹
, and by now those narrow politics probably reflected her own. The history of Chanel No. 5 would soon become dangerously embroiled with them.

F
or Sam Goldwyn, bringing the famous Coco Chanel to America was all about the publicity, and he was delighted with the media blitz that surrounded her arrival in the United States. He had arranged for her to travel in high style–and very visibly–from New York to Los Angeles on a special white luxury train. Before she departed,
Time
magazine reported on March 16, 1931, “In Manhattan
²⁰
famed stylist Gabrielle (“Coco”) Chanel, who is on her way from her Paris shops to Hollywood to design clothes for cinemactresses, received newsgatherers. She was attired in red sports clothes and wore a five-strand pearl necklace, ten bracelets.” Cameras and admirers surrounded her. She had come to the great department stores of New York to see her designs on display and to give them her stamp of approval. And she stopped at the perfume counter to see that they had plenty of Chanel No. 5.

What words of wisdom did Coco Chanel have for American women about fashion? It wasn't hemlines or jersey suits that she mentioned. On her mind was perfume–a perfume that, technically, she had given up the right to control a half-decade earlier. Women, she once again told the press, should not wear floral scents. It was one of her stock lines about fragrances. They needed something modern, something composed, and she could recommend only Chanel No. 5. Not that anyone needed the recommendation. It was already a bestseller and one of the hallmarks of her fame.

The problems between Coco Chanel and the partners had been simmering in the background since as early as the mid-1920s, but in the aftermath of her trip to Hollywood her unhappiness intensified. From this point forward, a bitter–and sometimes explosive–resentment would define her relationship with the partners and with the product she had created. Having helped to establish the reputation of Chanel No. 5 and its position in the world market, having launched it and trusted the partners at Les Parfums Chanel to bring it to the attention of the world and nurtured it with her personal celebrity throughout the 1920s, she would spend the next several decades doing everything she could to wrest control of it from the investors.

By the early 1930s, Coco Chanel had also begun to feel that, in giving up control of Chanel No. 5, she had lost something terribly important. She had nagging doubts about the bargain she had brokered. She started to think that maybe she had even been tricked. Now, having seen just how popular Chanel No. 5 had become in that vast American market, she was certain. This conviction signaled the end of whatever true partnership she had enjoyed with the men at Les Parfums Chanel. She wanted control over her fragrance.