Coco Chanel_ An Intimate Life - Lisa Chaney [125]
But Gabrielle also wore this imitation jewelry. Indeed, she famously made a habit of mixing it with her own fabulous jewels, many of them received as gifts from her lovers. Imitation jewelry had been made for the less well off for thousands of years. But where these jewels had traditionally copied the “real thing,” Gabrielle’s oversized jewelry was different in that it was ostentatiously fake. And her prestige was such that her clients followed her; women who usually owned valuable collections of precious real jewels wanted Gabrielle’s imitations. She believed that
Expensive jewelry does not improve the woman who wears it... if she looks plain she will remain so . . . the mania to want to dazzle disgusts me; jewelry is not meant to arouse envy; still less astonishment. It should remain an ornament and an amusement . . . Jewelry from jewelry shops bores me; I had the idea of getting François Hugo to design clip-on earrings, brooches .. .7
In order to look right, it had to be imitation. Typical of Gabrielle’s capacity for paradox, she believed that too much money killed luxury. She also had many of her priceless gems dismantled and reordered to her own designs. Later, the renowned jeweler Robert Goossens would say, “I took apart a lot of Mademoiselle’s jewels. I don’t know if they were Grand Duke Dmitri’s or the Duke of Westminster’s, but I remember a ruby necklace . . . from Cartier, out of which I made earrings. Mademoiselle would give them away as presents . . . They were unique pieces.”8
During the daytime, Gabrielle often wore a mass of jewelry, while in the evening she might wear none at all. She had a more sophisticated understanding of luxury than many of the wealthy, and said, “Jewelry should be looked on innocently, naively, rather as one enjoys the sight of an apple tree in blossom by the side of the road as one speeds by in a motor car. This is how ordinary people perceive it; for them jewelry denotes social standing.”9 So it does for many of the rich. While Gabrielle was at pains to turn the snobbery of jewelry on its head, she was also ahead of her time in challenging the idea of what is “real.”
Gabrielle worked extremely hard, turning out her two large collections every year, and the orders only grew. In 1924, when she had something like three thousand workers, her perfume, Chanel N° 5, had been selling steadily from her salons in Paris, Deauville and Biarritz. Exactly how much demand there was for more perfume is unclear, but Gabrielle wanted to sell more. She was now advised by an acquaintance of some years, Théophile Bader, the owner of the largest Paris department store, Galeries Lafayette. He said he wouldn’t sell Gabrielle’s perfume until she had a much larger quantity than Ernest Beaux was presently making down in Grasse. Bader said he knew just the people Gabrielle should meet. These were two young brothers, Pierre and Paul Wertheimer. Intelligent, hardheaded businessmen, the Wertheimers owned Bourjois perfumeries, the largest cosmetics and fragrance company in France, and were intent upon building on their father’s considerable success. Apparently, the Wertheimers and Gabrielle met at the Longchamp racetrack, and there they struck a deal.
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