Following the Scent

The life of French designer,Coco Chanel as seen through her perfume.

Each 30-milliliter bottle of Chanel No. 5 is packed with the essence of a thousand jasmine flowers,the fragrance of a dozen May roses from Grasse and a heaping dose of aldehydes,the molecules that early on gave the scent its modern edge. But as Tilar J. Mazzeo points out in her book,The Secret of Chanel No. 5,these are only a few of the many ingredients that turned a perfume into a 20th-century obsession. Into the brew went Coco Chanels warm memories of tallow soap and her anguish over lost love,as well as the perfumer Ernest Beauxs nostalgia for imperial Russia and the Arctic breezes of the White Sea.

No. 5,has been an item of fashion and fetish since its debut in 1921,when in a bit of stealth marketing,Chanel invited her friends to dinner in Cannes and spritzed the perfume into the atmosphere around them. All the women who passed by our table stopped and sniffed the air, Chanel reported. We pretended we didnt notice.

Mazzeo calls her book an unauthorised biography of a scent, but in fact it is a biography of Coco Chanel as seen through the prism of her famous square flacon.

Chanels story has itself become a commodity: young Gabrielle,an orphan,becomes Coco of the cabarets,a mistress to wealthy men and,soon enough,the intrepid hatmaker who conquers the fashion world. (If Mazzeos book has a fault,it is a failure to digress more richly into Chanels role in fashion.) At Aubazine,the convent-orphanage where Chanel spent her childhood (she was left there by her father after her mother died of tuberculosis),she was immersed in an austerity that would guide her aesthetic,and absorbed the scents of fresh linens and soapy children that would seep into No. 5. Later,she admired the grand courtesan Émilienne dAlençon,who,unlike her peers,smelled like a lady,which is to say scrubbed. Chanels signature perfume had to be lush and opulent and sexy, Mazzeo writes,but it also had to smell clean.

Perfume aficionados suspect that it was Chanels lover Dmitri Pavlovicha cousin to Czar Nicholas II living in exile in France after conspiring to assassinate Rasputinwho introduced her to the perfumer Beaux in 1920. The fifth sample,No. 5,was the one she had waited for: a perfume like nothing else, she said,a womans perfume,with the scent of a woman.

No. 5 succeeded despite a bumbling marketing plan,tough competition and a protracted legal battle between Chanel and the brothers Pierre and Paul Wertheimer,the industrialists who handled manufacturing and distribution of No. 5 and to whom she sold a majority of her perfume business in 1924. It was a decision she would regret.

When Germany invaded France in 1940,the Wertheimers,who were Jewish,fled to New York,where Estée Lauder helped set them up; a daring employee returned to occupied France and smuggled out enough jasmine and rose extracts to produce No. 5 in large quantities. As for Chanel,her wartime activities included an attempt to claim the Wertheimers French business as abandoned, a request the Vichy government denied.

Story continues below this ad

Still,Chanel wouldnt let No. 5 go. From Switzerland,she publicly declaimed its poor quality and created a competing line under the name Mademoiselle Chanel. Rather than take her to court,Pierre Wertheimer brokered a settlement persuading Chanel to sign over all rights to her business,and her name,in exchange for a hefty annual income and the promise that hed pay for anything she wantedforever. By Mazzeos lights,Chanel,late in her life,resumed living as a kept woman.

By then,though,No. 5 was beyond taint from politics or scandalous association. The perfume represented prewar decadence,glamour and good times in a bottle.