Like Geneviève de Gaulle and Jacqueline Marié, Jacqueline d’Alincourt married in 1946. Her husband was Pierre Péry, a Buchenwald survivor, and the couple decided to live in New York. Several friends had told her she must meet a remarkable American woman called Caroline Ferriday. ‘I know you two will understand each other.’
Caroline Woolsey Ferriday was an only child, auspiciously born on 4 July 1902, into a family of wealth and privilege. She was a stunning young woman, a Francophile who spoke fluent French, and was interested in politics from a young age. By the time Hitler came to power she was working as a volunteer in the French Consulate in New York and by 1941 was actively involved in running France Forever, the American support organization to which Micheline Rosenberg, Paul’s daughter and the mother of Anne Sinclair, was also committed. Deeply concerned about the suffering of the French people, especially children, she was involved in raising money throughout the war to help orphans and already in 1945 had lists of women and children desperately in need of food, clothing and other support. As she wrote in an emotive appeal on behalf of France Forever shortly after the war: ‘Although the Germans suffered a crushing military defeat, Germany will in the long run emerge the victor and it will be Germany who has won the war unless the youth of liberated Europe survive to enjoy the fruits of Victory.’ Caroline and Jacqueline became lifelong friends. As Jacqueline recalled, ‘Our friendship was sealed after the first meeting when she immediately asked: “What can I do?” She became a sister.’ Caroline set up an American friends of ADIR and was constantly looking for ways to help the French victims of the war.
Caroline Ferriday, the lifelong Francophile who played a key role helping the post-war recovery of the Ravensbrück lapins
Not surprisingly, those who feared that the justice they faced might not be to their liking also escaped Paris. Chanel, still under a cloud, spent much of 1946 in Switzerland, part of the time with the writer Paul Morand, an active supporter of the Vichy government who knew her well and whom she now commissioned to write her memoirs. She was still indulging, more discreetly these days, her affair with Spatz, described by those who saw him at this time as ‘an impoverished, ageing playboy who nevertheless managed to keep up the pretence of wealth’. This charade was largely made possible by Chanel; even after the affair had petered out when Spatz went to live in the Balearics, she continued to remit a monthly allowance. According to Morand’s view of Chanel at this time, she was still full of ‘brooding fury and barely suppressed energies during her years away from the fashion business that had shaped her life and bore her name’. She was also now fighting in earnest for control of her perfume business, employing the lawyer René de Chambrun, who had been her legal adviser since the early 1930s.
Chanel was neither the first nor the last couturier to realize that extending her brand to perfume could be immensely profitable and did not involve designing new clothes every season. In the summer of 1920 she had met the legendary perfumer Ernest Beaux, who had a laboratory in Grasse in the south of France. According to Bettina Ballard, the influential editor of Vogue, she concocted Chanel No 5 there in the aftermath of her grief over the death of Captain Arthur Edward ‘Boy’ Capel, an English polo-player with whom she had had an intense nine-year affair and who had financed her early shops. However, production did not properly begin until 1924 when she was introduced to Pierre Wertheimer, owner, with his brother Paul, of Bourjois, one of the largest cosmetics companies in France. The Wertheimers were a longstanding French Jewish family with some factories, and whose investment in the new company, Les Parfums Chanel, ensured that Chanel perfume and beauty products could be produced in large enough quantities to be sold commercially in Galeries Lafayette and other stores and would make them immensely rich.