The Secret of Chanel No. 5

Tilar J. Mazzeo

• Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780062020772
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

"Who knew that such a tiny bottle housed so many secrets?" —Michael Tonello, author of Bringing Home the Birkin

Tilar J. Mazzeo, author of the New York Times bestseller The Widow Clicquot (an Amazon Best of the Month book in October 2008) returns with a captivating history of the world's most famous, seductive, and popular perfume: Chanel No. 5. Mazzeo's sweeping story of the iconic scent (known as "le monstre" in the fragrance industry) stretches from Coco Chanel's early success to the rise of the seminal fragrance during the 1950s to the confirmation of its bestseller status in today's crowded perfume market.

"Here is the life of one of the 20th century's most interesting and deeply complicated women, a fascinating cultural history, and the story of an extraordinary perfume." —Chandler Burr, New York Times scent critic and author of The Perfect Scent

PART I
COCO BEFORE CHANEL NO. 5

ONE
AUBAZINE AND THE SECRET CODE OF SCENT

For the better part of a century, the scent of Chanel No. 5 has been a sultry whisper that says we are in the presence of something rich and sensuous. It’s the quiet rustle of elegant self-indulgence, the scent of a world that is splendidly and beautifully opulent. And, at nearly four hundred dollars an ounce¹, it’s no wonder that Chanel No. 5 suggests nothing in our minds so much as the idea of luxury.

It’s a powerful association. Chanel No. 5 is sumptuous. In fact, the story of this famous scent is the tale of how a singular perfume captured precisely the fast-living and carefree spirit of the young and the rich in the Roaring Twenties–and of how it went on to capture the world’s imagination and desires. Chanel No. 5, from the moment of its first great heyday, was the scent of beautiful extravagance.

The origins of the perfume and its creator, however, could not have been more different from all of this. Indeed, part of the complexity of telling Chanel No. 5's history is the great divide between how we think of this iconic perfume and the place where it began. Chanel No. 5 calls to mind all that is rich and lovely. It’s surprising to think that it started in a place that was the antithesis of what would later come to define it. The truth is that the fragrance that epitomizes all those worldly pleasures began with miserable impoverishment and amid the most staggering kinds of losses.

Gabrielle Chanel’s peasant roots² went deep into the earth of provincial southwestern France, and, in 1895, her mother, Jeanne Chanel–worn out by work and childbirth–succumbed to the tuberculosis that had slowly destroyed her. The disease spread quickly in the wet and cold conditions of the rural provinces, and in the nineteenth century it was called “consumption” for a reason. It ate away at the health of its victims from the inside, corrupting the lungs hopelessly and painfully. Gabrielle–named after the nun who delivered her–and her four surviving brothers and sisters had watched it all. She was just twelve years old at the time of her mother’s death.

Her father, Albert, was an itinerant peddler, and perhaps he simply had no idea how to care for five young children. Perhaps he didn’t particularly care. He had about him a rakish charm and a lifelong knack for dodging responsibility. Whatever the case, in the span of only a few weeks, the young Gabrielle would also lose her second parent. The boys were sent out to work and to make their way in the world as best they could. Albert loaded his three daughters into a wagon without explanation and abandoned them at an orphanage in a rural hillside town in the Corrèze, at a convent abbey known as Aubazine.

It was here that the girl who would become known around the world simply as Coco grew up as a charity-case orphan. It was a profound desertion, and the wounds of loss and abandonment were themes that would become as entwined in the story of Chanel No. 5 as they were in Coco’s. They formed an emotional register that would shape the history of the world’s most famous perfume and Coco Chanel’s often complicated relationship to it.

Today, the abbey at Aubazine remains much as it was during her hard and lonely girlhood. Indeed, it remains much as it was during the twelfth century, when the saint Étienne d’Obazine³–as his name was rendered in the original Latin–founded it. During their time at the orphanage, Coco Chanel and the other girls were assigned to read and reread the story of his exemplary life, and the unrelenting dullness of his good deeds is crushing.

The saintly Étienne, however, had a keen sense of aesthetics at a moment when Western culture’s ideas about beauty and proportion were in radical transition. He and the monks who followed him to this wilderness in a remote corner of southwestern France were members of the new and rapidly growing Cistercian clerical order, which prized nothing so much as a life and an art of elemental simplicity. Étienne’s isolated retreat from the world at Aubazine was–and remains–a space of echoing austere grandeur.

The road from the valley that winds up to Aubazine is steep and narrow, and the forests slant down sharply into long ravines. At the summit, there is nothing more than a small village, with a cluster of low stone buildings, a few shops, and quiet houses overshadowed by the looming presence of one of France’s great medieval abbeys. By the middle of the nineteenth century, it had been transformed from a monastery into a convent orphanage for girls. For the children who lived there, it was a youth of hard work and strict discipline and, fortunately for the future prospects of the young Gabrielle, much of it focused on clothing. There was nothing luxurious about it, however. Days were spent washing laundry and mending, and it was here that she learned, of course, to sew.

Coco Chanel once later said that fashion was architecture⁴, and the architecture she meant was based on this convent home, with its brutally clean lines and the stark beauty of simple contrasts. The connection has never been fully explored in any of the books that have been written on Coco Chanel’s revolutionary fashions. Perhaps the first person to recognize Aubazine’s profound importance was Coco Chanel’s biographer, Edmonde Charles-Roux, who was one of the few people to know the story of this lonely childhood. She mentions it in passing. Thinking of Aubazine and Gabrielle’s longing for a certain kind of starkness, Charles-Roux always believed that⁵:

Whenever [Coco] began yearning for austerity, for the ultimate in cleanliness, for faces scrubbed with yellow soap; or waxed nostalgic for all things white, simple and clear, for linen piled high in cupboards, whitewashed walls … one had to understand that she was speaking in a secret code, and that every word she uttered meant only one word. Aubazine.

It was at the heart of Coco Chanel’s aesthetics–her obsession with purity and minimalism. It would shape the dresses she designed and the way she lived. It would shape Chanel No. 5, her great olfactory creation, no less profoundly.

Standing amid the scenes of Coco Chanel’s childhood, the power of Aubazine is obvious. From the exterior, the abbey is an imposing structure of granite and sandy-hued limestone that towers over the village that grew up around it. Inside, it is a contrast of brilliant whiteness and lingering shadows. The keyhole doorways are dark wood against vast expanses of pale stone. There is the cool solidity of arching walls, adorned only with the play of light and the sun streaking in through colorless lead-paned windows. It possesses a striking and silent kind of beauty.

This building was also filled with meanings that would shape the course of Coco Chanel’s life–and the life of Chanel No. 5. Everywhere in the world at Aubazine, there were scents and symbols–and reminders of the importance of perfume. St. Bernard of Clairvaux, who founded the Cistercian movement⁶, made a point of encouraging his monks to give perfume and anointment a central role in prayer and in rituals of purification. In his famous sermons on the Bible’s “Song of Songs,” some of the most erotic verses anywhere in religious literature, he advised devout clerics to spend some spiritual time contemplating the perfumed breasts of the young bride described in the song’s key passages. Soon, someone got the idea that this contemplation would be even more effective if it were combined with time spent simultaneously sniffing the aromas of the local jasmine, lavender, and roses.

For centuries, scent had been part of the life of devotion at Aubazine, and the traces lingered. Étienne had made a mission of planting richly scented flowers everywhere in the empty ravines and wastes around his abbeys⁷. They were the same hills where the girls went for long walks with the nuns on Sundays. Just beyond, in the cloister courtyard, were the carefully tended remains of the original twelfth-century gardens, the source of all those scents. The echoing nave, where Gabrielle Chanel listened to endless sermons, had been the site of these perfumed rituals of meditation and prayer for hundreds of years. Even the worn, stone staircase at Aubazine that led to the children’s bedchambers⁸ and the attics, where Gabrielle hid her secret romance novels, was the same one those medieval monks climbed every night on the way to their perfumed dreams. Scent had always been a part of her childhood.

It was a desperately unhappy childhood⁹. Later, “Aubazine” was a word throughout her life that Coco Chanel would never speak. She surrounded it in silence and mystery, and it remained a guarded and shameful secret¹⁰. In all the interviews that she gave in the years that followed, she would claim to have grown up with aunts and invented a fabulous and fictional story about her father making a fortune in America. In fact, she did everything in her power to jettison the past, going so far as to send money to members of her family on the condition that they never reveal those shared secrets.

What she lived with always, however, were Aubazine’s smells. They were the bracing scents of order and severity. Everywhere at Aubazine was the aroma of sheets boiled in copper pots sweetened with dried root of iris¹¹ and the aromas of ironing. There was the scent from linen cupboards lined with pungent rosewood and verbena. There were clean hands and washed stone floors. Above all, there was the smell of raw tallow soap on children’s skin and ruthlessly scoured little bodies. It was the scent of everything that was clean. Aubazine was a secret code of smell, and in the years to come it would be at the heart of everything she would find beautiful.

Aubazine was also filled with symbols and the mysterious power of numbers¹², and these numbers could be found–along with their meaning–literally in the walls and on the floors around her. It was an architecture rich in silent stories. The Cistercians who raised these abbey walls nearly a thousand years before believed profoundly in a kind of sacred geometry that ordered the universe. Their buildings reflected it everywhere. In the small chapel where the children were sent to pray, the entire scope of Romanesque numerology was carved into stone before them in the most mundane places, on the floors and walls and doorways. Before them was the singular unity of God’s perfection in the simple shape of a circle. Double columns reflected the duality of body and spirit, earth and heaven¹³, and three windows in a row were the threefold nature of the divinity. Nine represented the foundations of Jerusalem’s walls and the number of the archangels, and six symbolized the days of creation.

The number five at Aubazine though was always considered special. It was the number of an essentially human kind of destiny. Or that, at least, was the idea of the monks who founded Coco Chanel’s childhood abbey, and they built its entire structure on the power of this special number. Cistercian architecture flourished in Europe at the time of the Crusades, and these are the churches most closely associated with the occult mysteries of the Knights Templar¹⁴. To those mysteries, the number five–the pentagon–was central. “Cistercian cathedrals, churches, and abbeys,” writes one scholar, “are built on measures … which equal more or less [the] Golden Ratio of Pythagoras.”¹⁵ It is the ratio of both the five-pointed star and the human form.

Coco Chanel understood the power of this number long before the nuns introduced the children to the esoteric symbolism of the abbey’s architecture and its spiritual meaning in their lessons. In the long sunlit corridor that led into the dark solemnity of that cathedral, the path was laid with rough, uneven mosaics, ancient river stones arranged in geometric and symbolic patterns. Here, even the youngest girls waited in line to be summoned to their prayers, and Gabrielle walked this path daily. Laid out there in undulating circles, she found repeated incessantly the pattern of the number five, sometimes in the shape of stars. Sometimes, it was there in the shape of flowers.

The number five: she believed profoundly in its magic and its beauty. Those Cistercian nuns had raised their orphan charges to revere the power of symbols and spirit, and in this ancient branch of the Catholic faith it was a special number–the number of quintessence: the pure and perfect embodiment of a thing’s essence. It was also, in a material universe of earth, water, wind, and fire, that other thing–ether, spirit–something mysteriously and untouchably beautiful.

There at Aubazine, the word she would never say, quintessence had been everywhere around her, and it hardly comes as a surprise, then, that the “No. 5 was her fetishistic number from childhood¹⁶.” It was part of her childhood games and her adolescent questioning: “she engraved it in the earth … with a branch she had picked up¹⁷, [it was the number] she looked for, as a game, among the dates inscribed on the graves in the cemetery.” When Gabrielle Chanel left the convent, she left behind its religion, but she never abandoned her belief in the occult mysticism of numbers.

She also already knew that the number five was about women in particular. From the beginning, the number five and its perfect proportions were tangled up with the secret sensuality of their allure–and with the symbolism of flowers. That connection was always, at Aubazine, elemental. Indeed, the very name “ ‘Cistercian,’ and that of [its] first monastery, Citeaux, both come from the word cistus, of the Cistaceae rockrose¹⁸ family, which we know today as the simple five-petalled ‘wild rose’. … popular in medieval symbolism involving depictions of the … Virgin Mary, [whom] the Cistercians, Templars, Hospitallers, and the Teutonic knights all honored as the patroness of their respective Orders.” Its image was carved into the stone tomb of St. Étienne, which the convent girls passed in the cloister daily, and the plant grew wild in the hills where they walked.

In the gardens of Aubazine, there was also another flower that looked remarkably similar: the white camellia blossom. It had a less ancient and less innocent history. Napoléon’s empress Joséphine had made camellias popular throughout France in the nineteenth century, and Alexandre Dumas brought them to the popular vaudeville stage a generation later¹⁹ with the 1852 theatrical adaptation of his novel La Dame aux Camélias²⁰ (1848)–"the lady with camellias"–the tragedy of a beautiful courtesan and her impossible love for a young gentleman. It was a novel that Gabrielle Chanel knew well, and as a young girl she once saw the legendary actress Sarah Bernhardt bring it to life on the stage in Paris. “La Dame aux Camélias,’ she once said, “was my life, all the trashy novels I’d fed on.” Giuseppe Verdi would take the story as the basis for his opera La Traviata (1853). This long-lasting flower, the leaves of which are a source of tea, was already a symbol of a lover’s devotion.

In the years after Aubazine, Coco Chanel would take the white camellia as a cherished personal symbol. It was the shape, she always said, of infinite possibility²¹. It would also be for her a flower mixed up with the story of devotion, the glitter of the footlights, and the kind of love that had no good solution. Unsurprisingly, it was sometimes depicted having five petals. Soon, she would come to know something too about the heartbreak of rich young men and their mistresses.

Coco Chanel, after all, wasn’t destined for the walls of a convent–far from it. When the orphaned gir...