PART I Emperor of Perfume

PART I Emperor of Perfume CHAPTER 1 France’s First Billionaire Coty has rattled the bogy of communism enough to give colic to the bourgeoisie. Arthur Train Jr. Not one man in France would have predicted that the country’s first billionaire would be a Corsican who launched a cosmetics and perfume business in 1904 that would become a worldwide enterprise before his death in 1934. François Spoturno, called Coty, had astounded the business world in 1906 by becoming a multimillionaire within two years of creating his first perfume,La Rose Jacqueminot. Soon after the end of World War I, he was a billionaire parfumeur and industrialist in the manufacture of cosmetics and their distribution worldwide. François Coty’s wealth surpassed that of the industrial magnates operating in the conventional pillars of the French economy, such as the Merciers, electricity producers who had brought this form of energy to Paris; automobile pioneers Louis Renault and André Citroen; and André Michelin, whose tires rolled the world over at the same time that Coty was selling powder puffs on five continents. The Coty firm’s small consumer items—cologne, powder, soap, lipstick—outsold capital goods and big-ticket items. A Frenchman acquired unimaginable wealth during the most devastating war in the history of Europe, fought on French soil. It seemed impossible, yet it happened. By 1917, the war against Germany had become a disaster for France. Serious mutinies had broken out among the starving and distressed soldiers in sixteen French army corps. At the last moment, the United States entered the war in France, moving swiftly to save the country. By March of 1918, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, chief of staff of the Forty- second Rainbow Division, had landed soldiers from twenty-six states. On June 2, 1918, at the Supreme War Council in Versailles, Gen. John J. Pershing, commander of the American Expeditionary Forces, promised to supply 250,000 American soldiers a month to bolster the Western Front. His First Army grew so large that he divided it into 25 26 FRANÇOIS COTY two armies—216,000 to attack the Meuse River area for the Saint- Mihiel offensive and 300,000 for an attack centering on the Argonne forest in September of 1918. The American presence in Paris and its environs consisted of civilians as well as the military. America shored up the French economy for four years during and after the war while the allies debated the Treaty of Versailles. The American Red Cross, with administrative offices for the European theater filling the Hôtel Crillon, ran the American Hospital at l’Avenue du Bois de Boulogne, as well as an installation at Saint-Pierre-des-Corps, where Coty financed transporting the wounded to his own château-turned-hospital. Much of the staff that ran these operations consisted of wealthy American men and women. Well-to-do Americans also attended an officers’ school at Tours or the French Artillery School at Fontainebleau, and filled managerial posts in the Post Dispatch Service and the State Department. These moneyed Americans not only filled the hotels and restaurants, the theaters and the Opera House, they also proved to be big shoppers for clothes, perfume, and jewelry. The French luxe trade could not be put down by a devastating world war. Once World War I ended in November of 1918, the American Service of Supply had to plan and organize the return to the United States of 2 million Americans, a project not completed until August of 1919. In the interim, American soldiers and civilians, glad not to be among the 116,000 dead Americans or the hundreds of thousands of badly wounded, swarmed about Paris and ports such as Nice and Bordeaux, where François Coty had shops, and they bought perfume and cosmetics. Coty perfume and powder caught the eyes of these legions of American doughboys, as well as other allied soldiers and service personnel, anxious to buy something to take home to their loved ones. Precisely because of these American civilians and soldiers in war- torn France, François Coty became France’s first billionaire, by 1919. The idea of including fragrance in sets of cosmetics, scented identically and packaged together, had come to François and Yvonne Coty when they marketed their products in the twentieth century’s first decade. The concept of cosmetic gift boxes, containing cologne, powder, soap, and crèmes all scented to match the purchaser’s preferred perfume, was a first for the cosmetics industry and wildly successful. Since 1904, François Coty had been creating fragrances, scented powders, soaps, face creams, lipsticks, and other cosmetics at the château he renovated, Longchamp, and, from 1909, at his growing industrial complex in Suresnes, across the Seine River. Throughout the war, the Coty employees worked feverishly to manufacture and package France’s First Billionaire 27 all the products for which they could acquire the basic ingredients. Sales spiked for Coty’s luxury items by the time the armistice was signed, as the craze for Coty products continued. Pres. Woodrow Wilson landed with his vast entourage at Brest on December 13, 1918, in time for Christmas in Paris. Kings, presidents, heads of states, and thousands of staff members from the countries of both victors and vanquished crowded the hotels of Paris, refurbished to accommodate this huge boon to Paris’s desperate economy. President and Mrs. Wilson, whom the French insisted on calling Madame Galt, since she was the widower’s second and recent wife, stayed at Hôtel Le Murat with their entourage. Coty’s signature retail sales shop on rue de Faubourg Saint Honoré at Place Vendôme, as well as his display windows in the major hotels, featured Chypre, Emeraude, Paris, l’Origan, l’Aimant, and other expensive perfumes in their exquisite Baccarat and Lalique flasks. Coty’s sophisticated and beautiful window displays attracted men and women from the Old World and the new. The diplomats and officers with their retinues remained for months, sightseeing and buying, while Paris became the center, once more, of the European universe. By day and by night, President Wilson’s Fourteen Points were debated, along with the futures of Germany and Eastern Europe, and the allies parceled out colonies to the various victors of World War I, but time was found for the purchase of lovely mementos of Paris, most obviously, Coty perfumes and powders. By war’s end, Coty, besides being France’s and the world’s premier parfumeur, was France’s greatest captain of industry, measured on a global scale. At his Cité des Parfums in Suresnes, ateliers continued to churn out Coty products for the European market and raw materials to ship in vast quantities for assembly in the United States. Factories throughout Europe, even in Germany, were back into production within the year, and fields for François Coty’s flowers, dormant during the war, were plowed and sown throughout Europe and the French colonies. No matter how hard the times, how little food, electricity, and currency were available, women could scratch together enough money to buy fragrance and powder from Coty. His product delivery system never failed because he had developed “Le Système Coty,” a vertical system wherein he owned and ran every aspect of his perfume businesses worldwide—not just wholesale factories and retail stores. Glassblowing, labeling, and packaging ateliers as well as shipping-box factories along the Seine near Suresnes employed over four thousand workers, the stacks exuding smoke throughout the suburbs. Coty owned fleets of delivery trucks and vast research and marketing divisions. 28 FRANÇOIS COTY Coty had joined the Nineteenth Infantry Regiment of Ajaccio in response to the French war decree of August 1, 1914. He was released in December of the same year in Paris because of an astigmatism in his left eye. He lost all sight in the eye in 1920, reportedly due to a thrombosis of a central vein of the retina. He spent the war years in Paris overseeing the operation of his growing enterprise. World War I did not prevent Coty’s production, distribution, or sales of his merchandise, at least in France and Italy. During the war, a 1917 Maison Coty catalogue of about twenty-eight pages, produced in French and Italian by Coty’s printer, Georges Draeger, featured twenty-one scents, along with eau de toilette (infamously mistranslated as “toilet water” in English), cologne, toothpaste, soaps, sachets, powders, brilliantines in crystals or liquid, and a plethora of other products for women. Lotions and powder, scented to match the perfume or cologne of choice, rested in beautiful boxes of Moroccan work. François created and produced one of his most important perfumes during the war. Chypre came out in 1917. He called it “a perfume of amber froth emanating at certain hours from the woods and the forests,” having in mind the odors and the forests of his Corsican childhood. While his Chypre collected a huge following and instigated the creation of other important scents because of its success, oils and resins from the chypre shrub had been used previously by competitors: Guerlain’s Eau de Chypre was offered in 1850, their Cyprisine in 1894, and Chypre de Paris in 1909. Before the turn of the twentieth century, at least Roger et Gallet and Lubin produced scents based on chypre. Coty’s work as a parfumeur with chypre, blending naturals with chemicals, paved the way for the use of chypre in some of the most important perfumes of the world. Coty did not limit himself to focusing on business throughout World War I. He worked toward some kind of relief for the most severely wounded or mutilated French soldiers.

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