Coco Chanel_ An Intimate Life - Lisa Chaney [126]
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