the secret chanel

It’s hard to believe that just three weeks ago I was in Shangri-La. The former home of the socialite, philanthropist, horticulturalist and billionairess, Doris Duke, once known as the ‘richest little girl in the world’ after inheriting her father’s fortune in 1925 and leading an astonishingly varied and fascinating life (a jazz pianist, a surfer, an art collector, the list goes on), the beautiful building, with a Hitchcockian view of the crashing waves near Diamond Head, is now the Museum Of Islamic Art, Culture, and Design, nestled in quiet suburban neighbourhood of the city and available for guided tours only three times a week via the Honolulu Museum Of Art.

D and I were lucky enough to be given a brief private tour in the morning of the collection by the museum’s director, the lovely Leslee Michelsen, a sharply acute and knowledgeable art historian who told us, after greeting us on arrival (and wearing Diptyque’s Philosokos), that she had something to show me later in her office ‘that I might be interested in’ – a cryptic enticement that had me wondering.

Construction of Shangri La took place between 1936 and 1938, Duke having fallen in love with Islamic artefacts during her honeymoon trip to the Middle East and South East Asia with then husband James H R Cromwell. Wanting to escape the oppressive social requirements of Newport Rhode Island, the house was created as something of a hideaway and refuge – the only guest area being in a private bungalow beyond the swimming pool.

With its impressive – if overly condensed – variety of paintings, wall hangings, objects (including a lot of perfume bottles), jewellery, ceramics, sacred texts, calligraphy and important religious artefacts from a wide swathe of the Islamic world placed in every corner, the overall feeling you get from this privileged retreat is of taste, power and wealth: great beauty, if also a densely. monothematic torpor: almost a surfeit of beauty, wherein only certain areas gave you the feeling that you could really breathe.

((

In retrospect:

A cloaking, perhaps, of oneself in cultural ‘otherness’, in order to escape from the hell of the self?

Naively unaware of any of this backstory at the time, all of this has added a shocking level of new intrigue to my entire Hawaii experience (I was, after all, talking at the Doris Duke Theater named after her); deeper layers of mystery that at the time I was blissfully unconscious of – – there are instincts; but without context, you just walk, breathe, and watch…

Doused in a very singular atmosphere, and having reached the end of the tour of the property on that dazzling morning, with its view over the ocean disappearing from sight as we entered the museum staff offices, in my elated reverie I was about to be amazed by a perfume I had no idea existed.

The first surprise was a bespoke scent commissioned for the museum for the display of a centuries old Mughal carpet by a perfumer who had gone for a very rich natural rose and vetiver that I would gladly wear on a daily basis.

Excited to try this, I would have been happy to live it all there.

But there was still one unbelievable surprise for me to come.

“I think you are going to like this”, said the director.

“Doris Duke had Chanel make her an original perfume, for her private use only, and we keep the bottles in storage in the museum.

Would you like to try it? “

……

Er, yes…….( I had absolutely no idea)….

…

..

Just like Doris Duke herself, Coco Chanel of course also had a ‘complex’ past (she was possibly affiliated with the Nazis – an informant and spy code-named ‘Westminster’), and yet many of us still venerate her as a style iconoclast and the instigator of some of the most beautiful perfumes ever created (Picasso was sadistic towards women; Roman Polanski was convicted of sex with a minor.. …..what do we do with all of this information? Do we renounce all the art and other good that came with them? It is all subject for very valid debate). I love many Chanel perfumes, and was quietly electrified and attempting to keep my cool in such prestigious environs (I failed: my excitement seeped through my pores and invaded the atmosphere within microseconds, much to the delight of Leslee, who had probably been hoping for such a reaction – it was a fantastic denouement to a late morning spent in ‘Shangri-La’).

A private Chanel?

Nº19, as we all know, was Chanel’s exclusive scent, only made available after her death, utterly distinctive from any other perfumes in the impressive Chanel collection. Bois Des Isles and Cuir De Russie – equally tremendous works of art, are now a hundred years old and still, albeit adulterated, changed, available at Chanel boutiques.

An unknown perfume from this house’s archives, then (probably from the 1930’s) is a treasure absolutely not to be sniffed at. I was beside myself.

Would this Chanel I was about to try have a similarly specific, one-off character?

An unknown, aldehydic (or otherwise) wonder?

Would I be experiencing some magnificent, revelatory secret?

I would not.

Though nothing could diminish my thrill at having access to such a rare perfume, the moments between unstoppering the flacons and actually smelling the scent itself, loaded and momentous – hoping for and dreaming of a rare and exquisite gazelle – it was immediately obvious that this very potent extrait (they have vats of it) – nameless – which was a pity in itself in some ways even if in others it could be argued that the unlabelled anonymity of the perfume just added to its enigma – was not rarified and unusual enough to qualify as a ‘classic’ Chanel. It was merely a perfume of its time.

‘Doris Duke’ is (was? this had definitely deteriorated over the years as perfumes do) a musty, muffled, but resplendently confident perfume full of fur coats and mushroom aldehydes, animal musks, jasmine and roses, weighted down by the years of being kept in clandestine storage, heavily reminiscent of Lanvin My Sin, perhaps with a little Shocking, some original L’Interdit and a bit of Caron’s Nuit De Noel (“It’s just generic, of that ilk”) said D, rather unconvinced, later on, and he was right …… and yet with its deep character – and later, in the dry down, a certain gentle, woody vulnerability, this perfume still was very much its own inimitable beast.

Gobsmacked to then be offered to take some home with me, a wonderful and very generous gesture that had me barely suppressing my internal delirium, we all realized at that moment that there was not really anything to hand to transfer the liquid in except for a Hawaiian floral painted glass with a fitted lid, lovely in itself, that was there on a shelf in the office .

And this was what we then used to take back my sample.

Regular readers of The Black Narcissus can probably (though they will be groaning in their interior) imagine what happened next.

Yes.

As we passed through a cool atrium with one of the most valuable white and blue sacred Iraqi tiled walls in the museum, the smell of Doris Duke was suddenly so strong in the air all around us that I thought I was hallucinating.

What was happening?

It could surely (oh god no) only mean one thing..

And looking down onto the pristine floors I saw big drops of the perfume, sploshing all around me, my cup (of priceless perfume) literally overflowing…

Though probably the most outrageously extravagant thing that has ever happened to me (spilling an ultra rare perfume onto the floor of the home of the richest woman in America in an exquisite art space ), and a small, outrageously Baudelairian part of me finding it all bizarre and hilarious (thank goodness Leslee has a good sense of humour), of course another part of me, the main part, was wholly mortified beyond measure by this act of malfunctioning buffoonery.

I had gone beyond my usual irrevocable clumsiness into something more like blasphemy.

The glass was empty.

The perfume had seeped into all of the bubblewrap surrounding it – thoroughly – was dripping from my bag, and in many ways I felt like the most ridiculous person in the world, though nothing could possibly be more Neil Chapman.

The smell was tremendously strong. And not entirely pleasant. To me it was, kind of, as O Lover of Vintage, but an employee in the courtyard had already covered her mouth in dismay saying what the hell is that smell? the nitro-musked miasmas of a forgotten age rising up toxically and filling the atmosphere (the stratosphere) to the point where my friend and facilitator Christine – allergic to all my perfumes to begin with finally -put her foot down and said right that’s it, I ‘m calling you an Uber- you are not getting in my car ! retreating quickly to her vehicle after the director had been kind enough to give me another sample of the perfume in an old, brown just washed, essential oil bottle with no label. Which I screwed on very tight, and inserted carefully into a snug place in an inside pocket of my wallet.

I thanked her gratefully as we said goodbye at Shangri La’s gates.

And then we were gone.

Part Two

( The Haunting )

Back at our place, later, a self catering apartment called The Holiday Surf where we felt more relaxed than at the more expensive commercial hotel on the main Waikiki strand, I took out the still dripping, coagulating bubble wrap and the wet Shangri-La programme, all drenched in the hidden Chanel, and the smell of Doris Duke completely filled up the room.

“Duncan, it’s like she’s in the room with us!” I said like a foolish child (all reminiscences, obviously, now have new connotations; what felt like a genie being released from a lamp now has a more gauzy and sinister overlay).

A normal person would have thrown out the ridiculously reeking plastic.

After all, I still, amazingly, had a full essential oil bottle of the stuff for safekeeping and to take back with me to Japan (it is now kept carefully in one of my perfume cabinets). D was coughing from the fust of the fumes (some of those old perfume ingredients really haven’t aged well; literally and aesthetically), and yet I know from experience how much a ‘new’ scent can stamp an experience into time, forever (I first smelled Nuit De Noel in Los Angeles, bought from the miraculously wonderful Beverly Hills Perfumery, and one whiff from my vintage bottle and I am there straight again); the experience of preparing for Hawaii and then doing the events in reality had been so intense that this also felt like the perfect way to seal up the memories and bottle them. I inhaled deeply. I would live with Chanel Doris Duke. I placed the bubble wrap under my bed. I slept with it; put it in one of the hotel drawers (very selfish of me), let it totally permeate our surroundings until it became the very experience itself.

We would go out onto the balcony for a few hours, come back in – and she would be there.

Leave the slats open on the blinds, the moist breeze blowing next to my drying leis, and when we would walk in, the room was suffused with double perfume.

Five nights in, and our low level digs really began to feel like home.

We would get up, got used to the morning view of the apartments opposite and to the right – voyeuristic, rear window pleasure in watching other people coming and going, morning, afternoon and evening.

By now, the outer-aged haze of the perfume had dissipated, and what was left was much more pleasant; the soapy, gentle, almost lovable heart of this fragrance finally coming through; its tenderness (last night, walking down the hill in Kamakura, having worked on this piece in the daytime, I dared to put some of the scent on the back of my hand for the evening air; a little daunted, in truth – as though through sorcery, bringing the dead back to life.

It really did feel like a person.)

The question is of course, who?

Who was this person, who bequeathed all of this to later generations?

All the images hitherto in this article have been ours.

But I think it’s time now to take a look at Doris Duke herself, with some pictures from the archives.

Duke may have once been the richest women in the whole of America, but in truth, before going to Hawaii at the museum’s behest, I had never even heard of her. Wealth is not something I am obsessed with, I am no reader of Forbes magazine. I can’t comment on her life. It seems, in many ways, to have been an amazing one. In her philanthropical work she obviously did a great deal of good, through environmental conservation, funding medical research, child well being, and support for architectural preservation and the arts; she was a jazz pianist, she helped work for the soldiers in World War II, she was a a close friend of Jackie Kennedy Onassis – she paid for the building of a beautiful refuge in Hawaii, Shangri-La, where people can go to be educated, absorb culture, listen to the birds in the courtyards of plumerias, and dream. She did a lot. It is quite a legacy.

Yet it does also seem clear now, according to the compelling evidence on offer, in various places (even on the basic Wikipedia entry) that Doris Duke really did actually kill Eduardo Tirella. A man who was flourishing in his career, an associate of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, a renowned Hollywood set designer and aesthete, who was about to go on to do bigger things but had his head and chest crushed under the wheels of her furious car instead. Perhaps the billionairess just couldn’t bear for Tirella to leave her when she had already had several failed marriages; perhaps it all happened in a split second of blind passion and love/ hate rage (relationships between gay men and their beloved straight female companions can sometimes be extraordinarily deep rooted and complex, full of poisonous jealousies and possessive fury; it is not hard to imagine everything spiralling out of control). Who knows? Was his life undervalued because of his homosexuality? Was he just ‘some fag’?

I can’t say. I wasn’t there.

Who knows what actually happened?

What is very clear, though, is that Duke certainly had the power, and of course the money, to cover up the startlingly vicious and violent crime and get it ruled as an accident.

To silence the police, and then let the secret stay hidden.

And, with bitter irony, retiring to a place, called Shangri-La, of all things, whose dictionary definition is ‘a remote beautiful imaginary place where life approaches perfection’…

Dying in 1993, Duke was lucky to have the chance to live another 27 years after Eduardo Tirella’s death.

Cooped up with her art and her loyal staff and the knowledge of what really happened. Her paintings and her furniture; her possessions; her bottles of Chanel.