The Secret of Chanel No. 5 (6 page)

Even if the Medici manuscript didn't lead directly to the creation of Chanel No. 5 perfume, it was a crucial preliminary stage in Coco Chanel's thinking about the development of a signature scent. While she had set this ancient recipe and the idea of an Eau Chanel aside quickly, she was now convinced that the time had come to launch a couture perfume. She had missed the opportunity for fabulous fragrance sales at the end of the war, when American soldiers queued for hours outside boutiques in search of French perfumes, and she was about to make up for lost time.

Fragrance was an industry poised on the brink of a massive explosion. Indeed, the 1920s and 1930s are still known as the golden age of modern perfumery, and Coco Chanel had an inkling of it. If she had launched a perfume in 1919, however, it would not have been Chanel No. 5, or at least not Chanel No. 5 as we know it. Her relationship to the fragrance also would have been entirely different at that moment, with vastly different results for the history of this iconic perfume. Because what stopped her from moving forward with a perfume at that moment would soon become part of the reason that she became doubly obsessed with finding the perfect scent–the precise aroma of Chanel No. 5.

I
n 1919, Coco Chanel's private life was in tatters. In truth, it had been painful and tumultuous since at least the autumn of 1918, when Boy Capel, nearly a decade into an intense and powerful love affair with Coco, announced that he would never marry her. It was a heartbreaking reminder that there was no escaping her beginnings.

Being famous wasn't enough to make Coco respectable. In the circles in which she traveled, nothing ever would have been. She would always be the daughter of itinerant peasants who was abandoned by her father to the nuns of a rural orphanage. No one would forget that she began her career singing risqué cabaret tunes for officers in the dance halls, either. Nor would anyone overlook the fact that she gained a first foothold in the world of high society as a wealthy man's second mistress and as one of those shadowy and seductive
demi-mondaines.
Through talent and charm, she had made a brilliant career for herself. Now she wanted to make a life with Boy. “We were in love,” she later remembered, “we could have gotten married
²³
.” He refused. He wanted her only as his mistress. Respectable men at the beginning of the twentieth century didn't marry their illegitimate mistresses, even if one of those mistresses had become an international arbiter of high fashion and good taste.

Just as the first wave of those American soldiers were lining up outside boutiques in Paris in the autumn of 1918, looking for luxury scents to carry home to their girls and their mothers, Boy confessed what they both knew had been the truth all along. No matter where his heart might lie, he was now engaged to someone else, someone demure and respectable. The kind of girl who wore the simple floral scents of tea roses or violets and whose mores, at least on the face of things, were modestly old-fashioned. Coco, he hoped, would remain his lover and confidante–but she would be nothing more. For much of that year, they had lived together as always in his Paris apartment. Then he married the charming Diana Lister Wyndham. Coco Chanel was thirty-six.

It was a staggering betrayal, and Coco found herself facing an impossible dilemma. She knew what it meant to stay on as Boy's mistress. She had done it long enough to understand perfectly. She would live forever on the margins of the lives of others. It meant lonely birthdays and holidays among friends, and the apartment they shared would never be their home. Leaving, however, was almost equally unbearable.

By December, Coco still had not been able to make a final decision. She moved that fall into an apartment of her own in Paris, and the now-married Boy followed. Then, in the days before Christmas, he left for the south of France, to spend the holidays with his wife and her family. Coco Chanel stayed behind in Paris.

The French call the seacoast along the Mediterranean the Côte d'Azur–the “blue coast"–and the roads there are famously treacherous. South along the coast, they wind in hairpin turns along the cliffs that hang over the sea. Beyond are the
penetrantes,
roads twisting through the mountains and pine forests that are still among the most dangerous in France. Drive along them, and it is easy to understand how treacherous they really are. A car crash happened late one night: the result of a blown-out tire and perhaps too much champagne as well. It was December 22, 1919, on the road from St. Raphael to Cannes, and Boy did not survive.

“For a woman,” Coco Chanel would later say, “betrayal has just one sense
²⁴
: that of the senses.” Alone in the bed that they had shared, in the weeks that followed, she knew despair, and she doubtless knew as well how the lingering scent in the sheets of a man you had loved can bruise the spirit. That winter, Misia persuaded the distraught Coco to come to Italy for a long vacation. From Venice, Coco sent a telegram home, asking that everything be taken out of the apartment in Paris. In the end, she would live in rented rooms, sometimes at the Meurice Hotel, but mostly at the Ritz. It was all a reminder of the magnitude of her losses, all too much to bear. She turned, instead, to scent.

A
fter the death of Boy Capel, Coco threw herself into the world of perfume. She wasn't simply immersing herself in work and a new project as a distraction during a personal crisis, however. The allure of scent was something more essential. The perfume that she would create in the aftermath had everything to do with the complicated story of her sensuality, with the heartbreaking loss of Boy in his car crash, and with everything that had come before. In crafting this scent, she would return to her emotional ground zero.

She sought something oddly contradictory. Her perfume had to be lush and opulent and sexy, but it also had to smell clean, like Aubazine and Émilienne. It would be the scent of scoured warm flesh and soap in a provincial convent, yet it would be unabashedly luxurious and sensual. In the world of fine fragrance today, a perfume begins with an idea–a “brief"–and if Coco Chanel had put into words what she was looking for in her signature scent, it would have been this tension.

She was fascinated by the art of perfume and the story that it could tell about a woman. She was also a sharp entrepreneur. With all those Americans eager for French perfume and with her celebrity on the rise, she was betting she could make a fortune. When it came to her perfume–the perfume that she was still only envisioning–there was always at the heart of it all a conflict between the scent as an intimate, personal story and as something public and commercial. This convergence of her entrepreneurial dreams and private losses would shape both the scent she set out to create and her deeply complicated, sometimes even antagonistic, relationship to it in the decades to come. She knew already that the perfume would be her calling card–the product most closely associated with her name and her story. She was going to do this right.

For Coco Chanel, precision was a religion, and she knew better than to commit time and resources to developing a signature perfume without first making an exhaustive study of the art and science and business of the fragrance industry. Those who worked in her fashion salon during the years of her great fame as a couturière would always remember how sometimes she would take a dress apart and reassemble it fifteen or twenty times before announcing it to be perfect and allowing it to leave her atelier.

She had the same approach to scent. For the next year, scent became her passion. She traveled to southern France with friends and toured small villages in the hills not far beyond Cannes, places like La Bocca and, especially, Grasse, which had long been established as the center of the French perfume industry. These were favorite summer retreats for artists, intellectuals, and impoverished foreign princes
¹
, who gathered here for the warm climate and the exquisitely scented breezes that blew in from the sprawling plantations of rose and jasmine and mimosa beyond the walls of these picturesque medieval villages.

It was here–and perhaps in conversations with her acquaintance François Coty–that Coco began studying perfume seriously. As her confidante Lady Abdy remembered, “When she decided on something, she followed her idea to the end. In order to bring it off and succeed she brought everything into play
²
. Once she began to be interested in perfumery she wanted to learn everything about them–their formula, fabrication, and so forth. Naturally, she sought the best advice.”

Coco Chanel was wise to have made a study of modern perfumery, because in 1920, when she was immersing herself thoroughly in the world of scent, the fragrance industry and the science behind scent were both changing in ways that would reshape the olfactory experience of the twentieth century.

For many of us, appreciating the finer points of a fragrance is something mysterious, and the same was true when Coco Chanel set out to learn about perfume-making. A perfumer–known in the industry simply as a “nose"–is charged with the delicate and complicated task of creating, out of all the hundreds of thousands of possible scents in the world, a composition that both captures a precise idea or feeling and is capable of evolving gracefully and beautifully in time as it slowly disappears from our perception.

As Coco Chanel quickly learned, the essentials of appreciating a fine fragrance begin with this art of blending aromas. Those who make perfumes talk about those scents in terms of “accords” and scent “families,” and this language is key to gaining a connoisseur's appreciation for the art of perfume. Accords are a group of scents that blend naturally and provocatively together and, in blending, transform each other. They are fragrances within a fragrance, the building blocks of a complex perfume, and these accords are how experts define the different fragrance families.

Today, there are at least a half-dozen different rubrics for diagramming all the possible categories of perfume
³
, and some of them are hopelessly, even occasionally comically, complex, with these families and subfamilies running into the dozens. In layman's terms, however, in the 1920s there were five traditional categories: scents designated as oriental, fougère, leather, chypre, and floral. Some had ancient origins and traditions; some were twentieth-century innovations.

When Cleopatra famously set sail to meet Mark Anthony
⁴
, she perfumed herself with sandalwood and filled the air with an incense of cinnamon, myrrh, and frankincense. Today, we could classify Cleopatra's fragrances, based around the “amber” scents of plant barks and resins, simply as oriental perfumes. At the end of the nineteenth century, perfumers added to the warm, spicy aroma of those oriental ambers–materials like frankincense, sandalwood, and patchouli–another set of fragrance notes, another accord, based around animal musk and the orchid scents of vanilla.

At the time when Coco Chanel was learning about perfume and about the daring innovations taking place in the chemistry of fragrance, perfumer Aimé Guerlain's “ferociously modern” scent Jicky was considered the ultimate oriental. In fact, for many admirers it still is. Invented in 1889, Jicky was the first fragrance to use the then-exotic scent of patchouli, to which Guerlain added the aroma of vanilla. According to fragrance folklore, the classic oriental perfume Shalimar
⁵
–Jicky's only rival as an oriental “reference” perfume–was invented in the 1920s when Jacques Guerlain, Aimé's nephew and the boy for whom Jicky was named, wondered what the perfume would smell like if he added an even larger dose of vanilla. The result was pure magic.

Contemporary perfumes in the oriental family are now recognized as having their scent based around vanilla–or, more precisely, vanilla along with the vanilla effects created by pinesap vanillin and the almond-and-vanilla-scented aromatic ingredient heliotropine, a synthetic molecule created in the mid-1880s–and blended in an accord with the scents of amber plant resins and animal musk. On the market today, familiar mass-market oriental perfumes include Calvin Klein's Obsession, Yves Saint Laurent's Opium, and even Old Spice cologne.

Oriental perfumes are meant to capture the scents of the East, but the perfumers with whom Coco Chanel talked that year also told her about a sea change in the approach to making fragrances. During the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth, dozens of new “synthetic” aromatic materials were being discovered in laboratories around the world, and this would change the direction of perfume-making to the present day.

For the first several millennia of its production, traditional perfumery relied on perhaps as few as a hundred natural scent materials
⁶
, and now new scents and new aromas, capable of creating new accords and olfactory effects, were being created with the help of modern science. Modern abstraction and innovation were coming to perfumery, and it was a new and fresh aesthetic–just the kind of thing that had always fascinated and inspired Coco Chanel as a designer.

One of those new abstract fragrances was the family of scents known as a fougère. The word simply means “fern” in French, and these new scents were meant to evoke green leafy fronds and fresh woodlands–or at least the idea of them. As a rule, ferns don't have any smell at all, and the category is beautifully conceptual. The name
fougère
comes from a great early fragrance by the firm of Houbigant, marketed as Fougère Royale (1882), or “royal fern.” It was a milestone in the history of modern fragrance: the first scent to use a synthetic aromatic, the compound coumarin, which smells of clean-cut hay. To this aroma, the perfumer Paul Parquet added the familiar cool scents of lavender and the dry-lichen aroma of oakmoss in a striking combination. The result was the refreshing coumarin-lavender-oakmoss accord still known today as a fougère. Fragrances that capture the essence of the fougère accord include such well-known scents as Geoffrey Beene's Grey Flannel, Davidoff's Cool Water, or the aromas of Brut Cologne.