Lisa Chaney - Coco Chanel - An Intimate Life

While Paul was a more retiring personality, Pierre’s charm made his handsomeness almost irresistible. He loved horses, women and collecting and, in business, was said to be ruthless. Like the Rothschilds, the Wertheimers were a long-Gallicized Jewish family, who traced their roots back to Germany. They were also diligently discreet about the extent of their financial empire — a discretion that would, over the years, manifest itself in the manner of their control over Gabrielle’s empire.

For more than half a century, Pierre Wertheimer and Gabrielle were to carry on a tempestuous and complex relationship in which they alternately needed and loathed each other but were never able to part. Battling over their differences in a sometimes bitter struggle, they each tried tirelessly to wrest an atom of respect from their partner-opponent, whom they loved but also hated. Almost in the same breath, Gabrielle would be able to refer to Pierre Wertheimer as “that crook who cheated me” and “dear Pierre.”

During their early meetings, Gabrielle apparently wasn’t really interested in the details of the transaction. She would later say of herself, “I’ve conducted business without being a businesswoman,” and that it bored her to death to think about such things as sheets of figures. It wasn’t that she wasn’t capable of counting money in the till at the end of the day, but her capacity to make vast sums was more instinctive than that. Gabrielle’s moneymaking ability derived from her wily peasant ancestors and her mad urge to create. She could say, rightly, that “I am not in the least frivolous, I have a boss’s soul,” but that same soul was also deeply creative and questing. She was not an artist, but her manner of invention was, more often than not, in the spirit of one.

The woman of whom Picasso would say she was “the most practical in the world” would herself say, “Order is a subjective phenomenon.” This was the reaction of the creator who understood perfectly Apollinaire’s words: “Bringing forth order from chaos, that’s what creation is all about.”

When Gabrielle was informed by the Wertheimers that if she wanted them to distribute her perfumes, they would have to form a company, she is supposed to have said, “Form a company if you like, but I’m not interested in getting involved in your business… I’ll be content with 10 per cent of the stock.” Over time, this statement would be the cause of much disagreement. Gabrielle had meant 10 percent of the perfume’s profits, but the Wertheimers interpreted it differently. In future years, Gabrielle’s lawyer, René de Chambrun, would become convinced that it was fear of losing control over her couture house that motivated her to sign away her perfume for 10 percent of her already large business.

The partnership set up between the Wertheimers and Gabrielle in 1924 would be characterized by bickering, antipathy and a large number of lawsuits. But their relationship also came to include both mutual respect and real friendship, albeit often grudging. Nevertheless, Gabrielle’s leitmotif for the following half a century was to be: “I signed something in 1924; I let myself be swindled.” Certainly, there would be examples of injustices perpetrated upon her by her partners, but on discovering, for example, that on introducing her to the Wertheimers, Bader had received 20 percent of the partnership (not uncommon in business), Gabrielle felt this was patronizing in the extreme. All the same, she was forever machinating against the Wertheimers and over the years gave just as good as she got. Quite possibly, Gabrielle had been “swindled,” but she was also unwilling to acknowledge the snares involved in the bargain she had agreed to when initiating her relationship with her middlemen, the Wertheimers.

In all likelihood, notwithstanding Gabrielle’s instinct for her times, she didn’t quite comprehend the ways in which this was a novel relationship, one that would gradually make her part of a new kind of company. The complexity of her business relations with the Wertheimers went way beyond that between the market trader and his suppliers. Its ramifications were more complex than any of the biggest international enterprises of the past, where a merchant and his agents might have traveled to the farthest corners of the earth in caravans of horses or camels, or onboard ship, armed with their negotiating skills, their contacts and their ability to strike a bargain with their suppliers.

Gabrielle’s new partnership was a twentieth-century corporation in embryo, and the commodity being sold was, essentially, Gabrielle. But while on the one hand proud of it, on the other, she would also remain ambivalent about being one of the founders of the twentieth century and all that its democratic, mechanized and merchandising possibilities eventually brought about. As the woman who, more than any other, would make fashion possible for millions of other women across the world, Gabrielle experienced the dilemma of being deeply individualistic in the first age of mass culture and mass consumption.

How could the skilled craftsmen and women who had made buttons, braids, ribbons and lace, and woven beautiful textiles of all kinds by hand, and Gabrielle’s premières, who used these things in their painstaking handiwork, compete with the speed and the cheapness of the mechanization of almost every conceivable task? Gabrielle’s was an empire that, by the time she died, would have become a corporate one, and that, in the years since her death, has developed into something representative of truly modern times: a global corporation. Gabrielle’s name has become a corporate identity.

In the course of 1924, Ernest Beaux developed another perfume for Gabrielle. They called it Cuir de Russie. Two years later, this was followed by Bois des Iles and, in 1927, another one, Gardénia, was being promoted. Yet despite the Wertheimers’ publicity department promotions, the success of these perfumes would be nothing compared to Chanel № 5. Even taking into account the fact that the lion’s share of the profits went to the Wertheimers, by far the largest part of Gabrielle’s wealth would soon depend upon this one perfume. Over the years, the company the Wertheimers named Les Parfums Chanel would promote Gabrielle’s perfume with a publicity campaign of increasing sophistication. Here, like Gabrielle, the prodigy Raymond Radiguet had shown his flair for the spirit of the age when he prophesied, “I speak of advertising… In publicity, more than anywhere else, I see the future of the sublime, so threatened in modern poetry.”

During the war, the material damage sustained by France had been staggering. But afterward, while there wasn’t an economic revolution, new activities, such as car production, helped boost the economy, and during the twenties, life for many carried on improving. At the same time, the structure of mainstream French society, and its attitudes, remained effectively the same. What needed to change? There was a boom. And as part of postwar “reconstruction,” a traditionalist and government drive called for the preservation of home and hearth, and for women to have more babies.

The New Woman, however, was becoming more conspicuous, spent less time by the French hearth and was producing alarmingly fewer babies. Not only was she infiltrating previously male preserves, but by the midtwenties, at least, she was also wearing versions of Gabrielle’s straight-up-and-down dresses, camouflaging bosom and hips and cutting off her hair. This way she earned for herself the sobriquet la garçonne; in the English-speaking world, she became the “flapper.”

In 1922, Victor Margueritte’s racy, bestselling novel La garçonne, from which the above name derived — introduced a modern young woman personifying the social, intellectual and technological changes now beginning to shape bourgeois urban life. Projected in the mass media leading an entirely altered life, the “emancipated” woman drove motor cars, flew planes and was a dashing young thing entirely in control of her life. Attractive, self-assured, often quite aggressive, she was also independent and out for adventure. Always on the move, she traveled unescorted and succeeded in some newly invented career. Slicking down her short hair, she smoked, wore trousers, and even men’s suits. And while ambiguity of all kinds became a highly visible aspect of society, the majority of those women dressing in confrontational ways were actually only practicing a “visual language of liberation” rather than the real thing.