Coco Chanel (30 page)

Whatever has been written or said to the contrary, it is not actually known how or when Gabrielle Chanel met the gifted young perfumer Ernest Beaux. Even more significantly, no one really knows exactly when Chanel N° 5 was created. In fact, from its two creators' first meeting to the perfume's inception, its production and its very first sales, Chanel N° 5 is shrouded in mystery. But the main reason for this is because, from the outset, Gabrielle and Beaux understood that this was crucial.

The story has traditionally been told in the following way: Gabrielle had decided she wanted to have a perfume as an accompaniment to her clothes, and during the summer of 1920, Dmitri Pavlovich introduced her to Ernest Beaux, whom he had known through Beaux's connection with the Russian court. Together, Gabrielle and Beaux now set out to create Gabrielle's perfume. By early 1921, Chanel N° 5 was in production and being launched. The month is often given as May. However, remembering that Dmitri's diary tells us it wasn't until a year later—February 1921—that he himself met Gabrielle, it is almost impossible that Gabrielle and Beaux could have made, packaged and launched their perfume between, approximately, February and May of that year. Either Dmitri did not introduce Chanel to Beaux, or if he did, the perfume had to have been launched later.

While Chanel has become one of the world's most famous “brands,” without N° 5's high profile, most of us might barely have heard of Coco Chanel, or her part in revolutionizing women's lives. Although Gabrielle had already begun to formulate elements of her myth by 1921, it was in turn furthered by the creation of Chanel N° 5. Both have been perpetuated by the Chanel Company. With N° 5's given date of creation—1921—mired in uncertainty, who was Ernest Beaux, the man who helped make the first Chanel perfume such an outstanding success?

Beaux's father was one of the directors of the perfume company A. Rallet & Co., founded in Moscow by a Frenchman and purveyor of fragrance to the Russian court. Ernest joined the company, worked under its enlightened perfumery director and was encouraged to explore both new ingredients for perfume, and contemporary art and culture. He was already celebrated as a perfumer when the revolution drove him and his colleagues to leave Russia.

The Rallet company based itself outside Grasse, in the south of France, and Beaux arrived in late 1919—having lost everything—to begin his life again. Beaux was noted for his experimentation with synthetic components, including synthetic aldehydes. (Aldehydes are those organic compounds present in various natural materials, for example, rose oil and citrus essence.) His famed early fragrance, Bouquet de Catherine, probably created in 1913, most likely used synthetic aldehydes, which would be essential in the development of Chanel N° 5. Between 1919 and 1920, Beaux further experimented on the Bouquet de Catherine formula.

In 1946, he would give a lecture in which he described his own contribution to Chanel N° 5. Questioned about its creation, he said it was “in 1920 exactly, upon my return from the war.” We remember that, in fact, he returned from the war in 1919. Beaux then said that N° 5 was launched “at the time of the Cannes Conference,” but this was held in early January 1922. So he has now told us that Chanel N° 5 was launched in both 1921 and 1922. In the end, all we know is that at some point in 1920, or 1921, Beaux was introduced to Gabrielle, and they began developing the new fragrance. Like Gabrielle herself, the true provenance of N° 5 has been converted into a myth.

Despite Misia Sert's urge to take credit for the triumphs of her “protégée” Gabrielle, the following story is, however, plausible. Lucien Daudet, secretary to the empress Eugénie, wife to Napoléon III, had brought Misia an astonishing beauty formula he had unearthed in the papers of the empress. From the hand of a perfume maker to the sixteenth-century queen Catherine de' Medi-cis, consort to Henri II of France, was the recipe for the renowned toilet water The Secret of the Medici. Neither exactly a perfume nor a normal cosmetic cream, this was an essence said to repel miraculously the signs of aging. Misia's claim that she saw the formula's possibilities, immediately took it to Gabrielle and proposed that she launch a toilet water based upon the recipe is probably correct. As Gabrielle's name “was then on everyone's lips, it was in itself a guarantee of success.”
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Gabrielle liked Misia's idea, bought the formula and, according to Misia, they set to work, “painstakingly experimenting with a very severe bottle, ultra-simple, almost pharmaceutical, but in the Chanel style and with the elegant touch she gave to everything.”
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Here, of course, we are meant to see Misia's hand in the earliest version of the unmistakable Chanel N° 5 bottle.

Misia said that within weeks, Gabrielle had launched L'Eau de Chanel, and that “it succeeded far beyond our wildest hopes. It was unbelievable.”
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Her story is borne out by a document—in the Chanel archives—for a skin-care product called L'Eau de Chanel signed and dated by Misia: July 1919. This Eau de Chanel may well have been a crucial step on the road to N° 5.

Gabrielle had a preoccupation with cleanliness amounting almost to a neurosis, and she loathed it when someone didn't “smell good.” Her admiration for the
grandes cocottes
in part stemmed from their pleasant fragrance. By contrast, speaking of society women, Gabrielle would say, “Ah yes, those women dressed in ball gowns, whose photographs we contemplate with a touch of nostalgia, were dirty... They were dirty. Are you surprised? But that's the way it was.”
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While all society women were not, of course, unwashed, Gabrielle's sense of smell was hypersensitive. Decrying this “unwashed” upper class, she also abhorred the simple flower fragrances she said were used to camouflage their bad habits.

She would say:

Gabrielle wanted a perfume that scented a clean female body, a fragrance that through its subtle olfactory message completed her picture of a young, forward-looking woman who was independent, fashionable and desirable. Also important, she wanted a scent that would last.

With very few exceptions, fragrance had been the province of the perfumers, who also sold them. One rare exception, Paul Poiret, had long since developed a beauty and perfume business in tandem with his couture. But while he had been well in advance of his times, Poiret now lagged behind, and it was Gabrielle's star that was in the ascendant. She was a master at capitalizing on her own and others' intuitions, and the practical sources of her success would always derive from combining her singular creative abilities with her talents as an entrepreneur. This always involved having around her a small group, usually invisible to the public, who supported and inspired her. This group of people was fairly fluid, but a handful remained with Gabrielle for many years. In this instance, the person acting as a catalyst for her latest project was the inspired perfumer Ernest Beaux.

It might at first appear that Gabrielle's introduction of clothes that were costly and simple was the exact opposite of what she now sought in a perfume: a composite refinement. But, for Gabrielle, these two ideas were entirely complementary. She was never in any doubt that her “simple” clothes were actually artificial, and would say “A dress is artificial, fabricated.” In the same way, she believed a perfume shouldn't try to emulate nature: it should be a synthesis of the natural. Thus her perfume would be a distillation of complex elements in a bottle of refined simplicity.

Misia said that Gabrielle had “the genius' to see their Eau de Chanel as the beginning of something, and that its success gave her the idea to go beyond a cosmetic and make perfumes too. Gabrielle is normally given the credit for the original concept for Chanel N° 5: a synthesis of fragrances. She is famously supposed to have described this to Beaux, who then set about putting it into practice.

There are various claims involving the originality of Chanel N° 5; for instance, it is often said that it was the first synthetic perfume. It wasn't. It was, however, the first synthetic fragrance created in the twenties. The first “modern” perfume we know of featuring any synthetic components was Fougère Royale, created by Paul Parquet for Houbigant, way back in 1882. (Another early “modern” perfume using synthetics was Jicky, made by Aimé Guerlain in 1889.)

However, Beaux was one of the earliest perfumers who understood the significance of aldehydes, and his brilliance lay in his ability to blend perfectly the natural and the chemical elements in such a way that the chemicals reinforced the natural. Of almost equal importance was his understanding that the aldehydes kept the perfume stable, thereby making it last far longer once sprayed from its bottle. The use of these chemicals was to revolutionize luxury perfumes.

When Beaux met Gabrielle, he was experimenting further on Bouquet de Catherine, which contained a pronounced aldehyde element. Early in the recent war, aware of possible sensibilities about the perfume's namesake, Catherine the Great, the perfume had been renamed. Interestingly, it was now simply a number: Rallet N° 1. Almost certainly, Beaux's researches on Rallet N° 1 were what he now brought to Gabrielle. In his lecture, he would say, “I came to present my creations, two series: numbers 1–5 and 20–24. She chose a few, one of which was N° 5.” Beaux remembered asking Gabrielle, “What should it be called?” She said that she was presenting her dress collection “on May 5, the fifth (month) of the year; let's leave the name N° 5.”
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Gabrielle was superstitious, and it is said that a gypsy had told her that five would be her lucky number. Her zodiac symbol, Leo, is the fifth sign, and she may well have known that five—signifying the cosmos for the old alchemists—was the quintessential number. The story that she never forgot the five-sided star, laid out in the floor mosaic at the convent at Aubazine, may be wishful thinking on the part of Gabrielle's more recent followers. Whatever the true source of her superstition, she believed with a passion that the number five brought her luck.

Gabrielle and Beaux had discovered in each other the perfect partner. Beaux's awareness of the cultural and artistic changes taking place around him had undoubtedly fed into his creation. Meanwhile, Gabrielle was asking for exactly what Beaux achieved: an exclusive synthesis of nature. Nevertheless, even if the story that her questing intelligence enabled her to make a suggestion here or there is true—she would later comment, “How I annoyed him”—in the end it is Beaux who must take by far the greater credit for creating Gabrielle's perfume. This perfume has acquired such status in the Chanel Company that today it is referred to as their “treasure.”

Gabrielle and Beaux's relationship was, though, complementary. Faced as we are with the myth constructed so carefully around N° 5, we will never know if it was Gabrielle or Beaux who initiated the idea at the heart of the perfume's mystique: a fragrance that smelled of a synthesis of “woman.” For Gabrielle, this meant a perfume symbolizing modern woman: in other words, herself. When Beaux told her that the perfume's large number of rare ingredients, especially the jasmine, would make it “very expensive,” she is supposed to have said, “In that case, add more of it. I would like to create the most costly perfume in the world.”
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With Gabrielle's sensitivity to her times, her instincts had told her years ago that the manner in which she presented what she sold would be essential to its success. And by 1922, Gabrielle herself had undoubtedly become a crucial part of her message. Her edgily fashionable clothes, her short hair (in 1921, still seen by many as outrageous), her possessions, her lovers, her independence—in all this Gabrielle was in the vanguard of her times. In short, while the private lives of the rich and famous were respected infinitely more than today, Gabrielle was nonetheless becoming fascinating to those who had never met her. In the style journals, “Gabrielle Chanel” had previously been mentioned as the name of the designer who had made this or that highly sought-after dress or hat. Now she was unique among the couturiers in that she was in the society pages as much for herself. She was becoming as newsworthy as her illustrious clients. In the October 1921 issue of the magazine
Femina,
for example, we see Gabrielle in a photograph with Countess Doubazow, being filmed in “a beautiful garden in the environs of Biarritz.”

Gabrielle had pushed at the old boundaries of acceptability and forged new ones. If appearance is about communicating—and implicit in Gabrielle's work was her ability to communicate—she was attempting to show women how best they could accommodate themselves to life in this radically altered modern world. What was the kind of appearance that would facilitate their handling of their new society? As Gabrielle said, she was developing her style according to her own needs and, implicitly, the needs of her fellow sex. If fashion articulates and illuminates the moment, Gabrielle did this to a radical degree. For rather than simply following and reflecting what was happening around her, she was ahead, articulating it.

Continually refining who she wanted to be, while never interested in being a revolutionary, Gabrielle was undoubtedly one of the first “modern women.” But when she said, “One day in 1919 I woke up famous,”
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she was being disingenuous. Gabrielle had achieved notice through years of hard work and careful management of her image. En route she had understood, like the best courtesans, that her image was something she must nurture. With this in mind, we find in a small and very rare black and beige catalogue not only the select array of perfumes and cosmetics that, in two years' time—by 1924—Gabrielle would have developed for her clients, but also a document revealing the essential promotional psychology of the House of Chanel.
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