The Secret of Chanel No. 5 by Tilar J. Mazzeo

Author:Tilar J. Mazzeo [Mazzeo, Tilar J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-06-202077-2
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2010-03-25T16:00:00+00:00

FOURTEEN

COCO AT WAR

Back in Paris, Coco Chanel was getting ready to play a deep and dirty game of business and politics. Determinedly at war with her exiled partners, she saw an opportunity.

Under the laws of the Third Reich, Jewish property was subject to confiscation, and her partners at Les Parfums Chanel were Jewish. It was her chance to break the contract she had signed giving up her rights to control the fragrance business. In fact, it was a chance to take over Les Parfums Chanel altogether.

She might have resorted to such tactics in time regardless, but it was the sale of Les Parfums Chanel in October of 1940 that set Coco Chanel hurtling into motion. The ownership of a 70 percent stake in the company–the controlling share, she couldn’t help but notice–had now passed into the hands of Félix Amiot, who was both French and, more important, Aryan. She knew that sale was just an illusion.

The occupying German forces, along with their French administrative collaborators1, suspected that it was just an illusion, too. Perhaps there were whispered rumors about the massive bribes Félix Amiot reputedly paid to grease the wheels of this particular transaction. In the next few months there was a full-scale investigation, and it was in all the newspapers. Amiot was hauled in for questioning by storm troopers, who warned him bluntly what everyone suspected: “You have bought the Bourjois and Chanel perfumeries2. But it’s just a compliance sale. The Wertheimers are your friends and associates. You are their front man. This is naïve and dangerous for you.”

Coco Chanel couldn’t resist seizing the opportunity. On May 5, 1941, she wrote a letter, addressed to the provisional administrator–the man charged with determining who would receive business property left by anyone who had fled France. Parfums Chanel, she explained, was worth more than four million francs–over seventy million dollars in today’s numbers3–and “it is still the property of Jews4.” It had been, she claimed, legally “abandoned” by the owners.

She knew it had been abandoned under the terms of the statutes, because she had presided in the partners’ absence over the Les Parfums Chanel board meeting where she had passed just such a resolution. She attempted to install a man named Georges Madoux as the temporary head of the company. He had worked until 1931 as the commercial director at Les Parfums Chanel5 and had later maintained close connections with Coco’s couture house. Now, in his role as a government agent, Madoux had been charged with reassigning ownership of Jewish businesses. He was in her pocket, and, unsurprisingly, it was his assessment that “the company of Parfums Chanel is still a Jewish business.” As one historian puts it, Coco Chanel and the administrator “appreciated each other.”6

Since the stated mission of the administrator’s office was to cede property of this sort “to Aryan subjects,” she was writing to ask for complete ownership of the company. “I have,” she wrote, “an indisputable right of priority7 … the profits that I have received from

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