The nasty smell of Coco Chanel’s Nazi sympathies

She was utterly horrible – but her perfume’s divine, says Mary Kenny

The world’s most famous perfume – the jasmine-based Chanel No 5 – marks its centenary this year.

When the only scent I had previously heard of was Evening in Paris (available from Woolworths), I still knew about Chanel No 5. Everyone did. Marilyn Monroe, when asked what she wore in bed, simply said, ‘Chanel No 5.’

Coco Chanel, who launched the fragrance in 1921, was a brilliant businesswoman. Consigned to a convent orphanage in Saumur, aged 12, when her overburdened mother died, she took from those nuns much of her design sense: the simple black dress, the black-and-white patterns and the mystical significance of the number five. That came from the pathways she had seen at Aubazine Abbey, laid out in patterns of five.

Chanel is a world brand today – according to French sources, it’s worth £9.6 billion in annual revenues. And yet, considering Coco’s opinions, it’s a wonder that Chanel survives in our ‘woke’ world.

Coco was anti-semitic and homophobic, deploring the existence of ‘queers’ – in the fashion business! She was anti-republican and anti-trade union. She spent the Second World War holed up in the Paris Ritz with her lover, a German officer with Gestapo connections. It later transpired that she had probably passed intelligence to Nazi Germany.

She used the anti-semitic laws to reclaim her Parfums Chanel – notably No 5 – from her Jewish business partners, the Wertheimer brothers, stating she alone was an ‘Aryan’. The Wertheimers escaped to America and generously forgave her this perfidy – partly from decency, but partly because nobody wanted to damage the No 5 brand.

How did Coco get away with it? She had always cultivated numerous lovers, and she retained them as useful connections. She was never charged with Nazi collaboration, it’s claimed, because Churchill recommended flexibility; or perhaps she knew too much about old boyfriends such as the Duke of Westminster, who held not altogether salubrious political views.

After the war, Coco disappeared to Switzerland, returning to Paris in the mid-1950s with a sensational new Chanel collection. She had a glorious funeral in 1971 in Paris’s lovely Madeleine church. From her convent days, Coco had retained a devotion to St Thérèse of Lisieux.

In an era when statues fall for longago colonialist sins, when Marie Stopes is disowned by her own birth-control clinics for her racist and homophobic opinions, and when one dodgy Tweet can get you ‘cancelled’, Coco Chanel is still an untouchable world legend, a French institution, seemingly untainted by some of the reprehensible views she held.

Would I indulge in a bottle of Chanel No 5 to mark its anniversary? Bien sûr!

Loneliness has been a persistent theme of our lockdown year: walled up in dutiful isolation, whole population swaths have been afflicted by a sense of the solitary.

Still, according to Noreena Hertz, author of The Lonely Century, in developed societies that tendency to isolation was already present.

Prof Hertz claims that one in five millennials has no friends, and young people are losing face-to-face communication skills because of their addiction to screens.

For oldies, there are warnings that loneliness can lead to, or accelerate, Alzheimer’s. There are claims that people join daft right-wing cult groups because of loneliness.

Human beings did not evolve as atomised units. Until relatively recently, we lived our lives in connected groups. Children grew up sharing not just bedrooms, but beds. Old movies like the Googie Withers 1947 classic It Always Rains on Sunday (catch it on Talking Pictures sometime) show grown-up sisters still sharing a bed as a normal practice. Privacy and individual space emerged only with rising living standards.

Lockdown loneliness, especially for singletons, prompts us to contemplate our existential aloneness in the universe. Or it prompts us to wallow in Elvis Presley’s immortal Are You Lonesome Tonight?

How sad that the traditional Irish turf fire will be no more. How warming and aromatic was a sod of turf burning in the hearth.

But the bogs and peatlands that produce turf are being closed: harvesting turf emits greenhouse gases. The Dublin government has decreed that while the few stocks of turf that remain, milled into briquettes, may be used up, no further supplies will be permitted.

The bogland was part of the Irish landscape – as was the donkey that stood patiently in the bog for the turf-cutters. Lord Snowdon told me that when he visited Ireland in the 1950s – his stepfather was the Earl of Rosse – the most endearing sight he beheld was the ass, as the Irish called it, carrying panniers of turf.

Bogland people were sometimes called ‘bogtrotters’, a little derisively; but the bogs preserved ancient treasures too.

Many a bogman broke open a sod of turf to find beads of amber therein, preserved from pre-christian times.

Goodbye to all that!