#199 Coco Chanel: The Legend and the Life

**David Senra** (0:00)
Those on whom legends are built are their legends, declared Coco Chanel not long before her death, when her face had already become a fixed mass to the world, and her myth apparently impenetrable. She was speaking to Claude Delay. Delay was a young woman at the time, the daughter of a well-known French psychiatrist, but is herself now an eminent psychoanalyst and an expert guide to the labyrinth of secrets and lies that Chanel constructed to conceal the truth of her past. Not that there is ever a single truth in a life, especially for a woman who built a career on refashioning women's ideas of themselves, which may be why Chanel recounted so many different stories about herself, as if in each version, something new might emerge out of her history.
I don't like the family, she told Delay. You're born in it, not of it. I don't know anything more terrifying than the family. And so she circled, around and about it, telling and retelling the narrative of her youth, remaking history just as she remade the sleeves of a jacket, unfastening its seams and cutting its threads, and then sewing it back together again. Childhood, you speak of it when you're very tired, because it's a time when you had hopes, expectations. I remember my childhood by heart. If Chanel's memory did survive intact, she nevertheless obscured her past from others, reshaping its heartaches, smoothing away the rough edges. But she couldn't keep all the details hidden. That was an excerpt from the book that I'm going to talk to you about today, which is Coco Chanel, The Legend and the Life, and it was written by Justine Picardie.
Okay, so this is my second time reading a biography of Coco Chanel. There's two primary reasons why I needed to read another one. In addition to her being one of the most successful entrepreneurs to ever live, and maybe creating one of the best, or not maybe, definitely creating one of the best well-known brands that has ever existed in human history. But the primary reason is that the book I covered all the way back on Founders No. 64, that was a book that was published right after she died, and I had an original copy. So that book was published first in 1972, and the copy I had smelled, like it was published in 1972 I had to make sure I read that book in a well-ventilated area. But since that book was published, a lot of new information has come out. And so the book I hold in my hand is published in 2010, 40 years, nearly 40 years after Coco Chanel died, and it has more information than the first book I did all the way back on Founders No. 64 And then the second part that I found that just blew my mind when I started reading about Coco Chanel the first time was the deal that she was able to make for herself in the 1940s after fighting with her business partners, the ones she was collaborating with for almost two decades at that point on the production of her perfume. So Chanel No. 5, which from a financial perspective has to be one of the most successful products ever created.
So the deal she winds up working out, and remember this is in the 1940s for the numbers I'm about to tell you, she gets 2% of all the sales of Chanel No. 5 and all the other perfumes. That estimated to pay her $25 million a year in the 1940s. And I've seen some estimates that in later years, she was making as much as $50 million a year.
This is gonna make her one of the richest people, excuse me, one of the richest women in the world at the time. Plus, and this is where the deal was even crazier. So she's getting all that money, right? They're managing the company, she doesn't have to manage the company anymore. Plus, the company has to pay all of her living expenses, from the most minute detail, all the way to the largest expenditure, houses, cars, everything else. So that 25 million, that 30 million, that 50 million, depending on how much sales were done that year, is essentially all profit. She has no expenses for the rest of her life. And that deal was made in the 1940s, she doesn't die till 1971
And so when I sit down and think of Coco Chanel, I think of, okay, this is one of the most successful entrepreneurs that ever lived. She created some of the most successful products. She's one of the most famous names in history, and she created one of the most famous brands in history. How does somebody that grew up in an orphanage do that?