THE THING ABOUT planning on hanging out with a celebrity is that you’re going to be hanging out with a celebrity. I found it a little discomforting, and it got more so. For one, even the initial meeting took months, and months to put together—and kept never getting put together: We didn’t have a date.
I had a phone conversation with Ina Treciokas, Parker’s publicist. Efficient, professional, a bit sharp, a bit impatient, and protective of the client in the standard Hollywood way. Would I please send a copy of my book The Emperor of Scent to her for Sarah Jessica. Sure, no problem. I sent it. We talked about SJP’s availability (I didn’t know what to call her; a friend of mine who worked with her referred to her as Sarah Jessica, but it seemed lengthy), and yes, she was committed to doing the piece, and yes, they were going to schedule it, but she was always on a plane or in LA or in Europe or somewhere. We hung up. I got a call a few weeks later from Belinda Arnold, Coty’s director of public relations. Would I please send a copy of The Emperor of Scent to Ina for Sarah Jessica. I said I’d sent one; I could hear her shrug on the phone. I sent another one. People somehow think authors have an infinite, free supply of their own books. We don’t, and that was irritating.
We finally got the date—Sunday, August 14—and then came very strict marching orders: You will wait for her on the stoop of her brownstone; you will not knock on the door; when she is finished with hair and makeup she’ll come out and greet you; no photography in front of Sarah Jessica’s house; two hours with her and not a second more; she won’t invite you in—don’t ask, don’t even think about it.
What really freaked me out was when I checked my e-mail and found the “call sheet.” I realize (now) that this is quite normal in fashion, but I was trained as a newspaper reporter—I’d been living in Japan and started my career in the Southeast Asia bureau of The Christian Science Monitor writing on economics and politics—and then a magazine journalist, primarily writing on science. I never had a call sheet before.
I called the photo editor. Scott Hall turned out to be a totally nice guy. “Who’s your photographer?” he asked. “Jennifer Livingston? She’s good; you won’t have any problems.” He was very relaxed. “Shoot whatever you want; we’ll make it work.” You’ll just edit me out if I get in the shot by accident. “Sure,” he said, “or we’ll just put you in with her.” Seriously? So then I spent a few minutes thinking about this.
Belinda sent me a bottle of the perfume, and I started wearing it.
I figured I’d better call the photographer. I assumed she’d be more worldly in the ways of celebrities than I was. I dialed the number and reached an absolutely delightful young woman on her cell phone directing a cabbie where to drop her off on Third Avenue. Uh, so could we get together and scout out the territory? She said sure, that she’d be happy to; how about the Saturday before seeing SJP.
On Saturday I rode my bike down to Parker’s house, which is on Charles Street in the West Village, and Jennifer and I met like spies, skulking around. It was sweltering. I’d gotten Sarah Jessica’s address several weeks earlier from a friend who happened to live across the street from her. It seemed like everyone knew it except me. Gwyneth Paltrow’s house was just down the street, he’d said, pointing it out, and there’s Liv Tyler’s, a block away. Jennifer and I stood in front of the imposing structure and gazed up at it. Jennifer was thin and small and cheerful and dark-eyed and cute. “So what’s our plan?” she asked. I looked up and down the street like an idiot and realized I was supposed to have a plan.
I smelled SJP’s stoop. It smelled like a stoop in New York in the summer, a dull powdery stone with soot. I tried to imagine getting her to bend over and smell the stoop. I smelled the tree in front of the house, but it didn’t smell like anything. Jennifer gave me a look.
We walked to Bleecker Street and took a left, and I smelled the brick wall of an art gallery. It smelled of nothing. Great. New York is an empire of scents, but they tend to materialize in entirely aleatory ways and at unexpected times. You turn a corner, you’re enveloped out of nowhere in an olfactory hologram of warm steamed rice, or spectral sour milk, or acrid, cloying pot, or overheated cedar mulch (the hardware store on Tenth Avenue) with a sweaty genitals angle, or some greasy unidentifiable evil smell that leaps on you, mugs you, and vanishes inexplicably in the middle of the crosswalk at Twenty-third Street and Seventh Avenue. That they are invisible makes them no less substantial. The way to experience New York’s smells is on your bike because then they come at you, sequentially and strong, the plasticky chemical scent of the excessive air-conditioning in the office buildings (you enter the scent, one, two, three seconds, you exit the other end), the smell of the Gristedes grocery vegetable aisle, the 1950s scents of the lobbies of the midcentury buildings as if from a time machine, the ripely fermented rotting garbage that fell off a truck, sweetly putrifying fruit rind from the Korean bodega (the peeled detritus of a hundred smoothies in $4.95 increments of bananas and strawberries and kiwi), but you can’t find them if you look for them. They find you.
I saw a flower store, Ovando, at 337 Bleecker, and we went in and looked around. We smelled the flowers, the ones with scent, the ones with none. Jennifer loved the visuals. “We could put her here!” she said. “We could put her there!” The girl in the store was scowling at us. “I’ll definitely want to shoot in here,” Jennifer was saying. I asked the girl if the manager was there. She was not. Huh, OK. I gave my name and The New York Times’s, said I’d like to bring in (pause to figure out if this is name-dropping or if I’m ensuring that things go correctly) a celebrity tomorrow, maybe, and maybe take some photos. The girl regarded me flatly. “The owner will be here tomorrow,” she said. “You can ask her then.”
There was a noise. The girl stepped to the back of the store, and a moment later a blond woman came out. Sandra de Ovando, the owner. Brazilian. I explained to her what we wanted to do with this celebrity. She was cautious, a bit dubious. But she’d be there tomorrow, she confirmed; yes, we could stop by.
Jennifer and I went all over the Village. We walked up to Magnolia Bakery because it was this phenomenon Sarah Jessica had helped create with Sex and the City, but after inhaling hopefully we agreed it actually didn’t smell that much inside. Christ, a bakery without a smell. We went into the park in the V-intersection of Hudson and Bleecker Streets, and I got down on my hands and knees to smell the ingenious spongy rubber they’d laid on the ground so kids don’t kill themselves, but it didn’t have any smell. Oh, for Chrissake. We went down to the Hudson River and Hudson River Park, and nothing much smelled. We were sweating through our T-shirts. August in New York. We tried Perry Street, a then brand-new Jean-Georges Vongerichten place in the brand-new Richard Meier glass buildings on the West Side Highway—we thought they’d make a nice visual backdrop, and she’d like that—but the French maître d’ informed us the restaurant was not opening until Monday, one day too late.
I biked home up Sixth Avenue. Herald Square was emerald and gray in front of Macy’s, the sky was blue above the Empire State Building, and it was summertime.
On Sunday at 1:00 P.M. Jennifer and I meet at Sant Ambroeus, a restaurant at 259 West Fourth and Perry Streets, as we’d planned. “Don’t worry!” she says brightly. “You’ll do great!” She’s got thousands of dollars of camera equipment with her. I’m quietly morose. I don’t have a plan, or at least not a workable one. “It doesn’t matter,” she says, “you’re going to talk about her perfume anyway.” Yeah, but … “She’s supposed to be very nice,” says Jennifer.
Hm.
At 1:20 P.M. we leave Sant Ambroeus. We get to Charles Street. We’re eight minutes early. I realize I’ve locked my old black bike right in front of the stoop of SJP’s West Village brownstone. I say, Screw it, and we sit on her stoop at 1:25, or rather I sit and Jennifer stands and prepares her camera equipment. The street is empty, August in the Village. I realize I haven’t been solicitous of Jennifer’s worries. She seems pretty serene, but she’s commented just enough about needing to catch SJP moving and wanting to have time with her to set her up right and also would I mind sometimes talking to her while standing back a bit? Out of the shot?
Sure.
At 1:34, SJP comes out. I’m sitting on the stoop. I think it’s inevitably shocking to see a face in the flesh that you know so well as photons on a screen. You stare at it because it looks different. And, of course, very much the same. She’s smaller than I expect. She smiles, and I realize it’s the blue eyes that are freaking me out, deep blue, and I think that that’s what I must register from the screen without realizing it. She holds out her hand to Jennifer, says, “Hi, I’m Sarah Jessica.”
“I’m Jennifer Livingston,” says Jennifer, beaming—Jennifer is always beaming—and adds, “I’m the photographer,” and laughs because given all the equipment it’s pretty obvious.
She turns to me and says, “I’m Sarah Jessica,” and I say, I’m Chandl—and she says, “I know who you are, and I am soooo intimidated!”
Uh—why?
“I’m making a perfume!” she says. “And you wrote this … book on perfume!”
Have you read it?
“I’m reading it!” she says, looking up at me very seriously. She actually seems a little agitated. I’m completely flattered, and charmed, and a bit caught off guard. “It’s on my book pile. You should see it. My book pile goes up to here.” She raises her right hand far over her head and cups the fingers down. It’s a cute exaggeration, only very slightly pretentious, since no one’s pile is that high, but I appreciate the idea. I also doubt she’s reading my book, but again: same thought.
She’s five foot four, incredibly thin, and the guy did a great job with her hair. Spike heels, dark-blue summer dress. She’s wearing light photography-ready makeup, and she looks cool and very pretty.
The first thing SJP asks me is what my sexual orientation is. What strikes me is not the question (I couldn’t care less) but how delicate she is about it, and a little awkward. “What’s …” She’s smiling. “When you date …” I figure out what she’s asking and say, Oh, I’m gay. And then: Why?
“Are you single?”
“Yeah.”
She gives a little sigh. “A friend of mine—a girl—saw your photo, and she thinks you’re really cute, and she’s single too, but”—she shrugs—”oh well!”
We sit on the stoop, and I get out my materials. I say, I brought some things to show you.
When you were making your perfume, did you smell a lot of things?
“Things?”
Molecules. (Jennifer is moving around us, aiming, crouching, shooting pictures, and I’m being very cool about it and ignoring the camera. I’m such a goddamn pro.) Scent materials. I want to show you some things I really like, I tell her, I got these from a scent manufacturer called Symrise. (Symrise made me a really exquisite kit, eighty synthetics, eighty naturals in neat rows in two boxes.) Sarah Jessica takes one of the tiny vials from me, a natural absolute of algae, and she smells it with practiced, professional efficiency, cocks her head to think about it. “Brown-green,” she says, which is a good description. I add, Rich ocean. “Mm, yes.” Smelling it. “Ye-es. Very dark. I love this!”
I hand her a Symrise natural pepper oil. Her eyes close as she focuses on the vial under her nose. Then she opens them. Takes a second to focus. “Amazing …” She’s shining with the beauty of this pepper.
Isn’t it great? I say, excited.
“Wonderful,” she says. We’re both grinning. “Like heat inside glass,” she says. She hands the pepper to Jennifer, who puts down her camera and smells it, says, “Wow,” then smells it again.
SJP is fascinated. “I love that,” she says.
I hand her another vial. She cocks her head to let the scent settle in, thinking about it. She says “soapy,” which is the best descriptor of an aldehyde’s scent. It’s aldehyde C-12, I say (she peers at the label), the synthetic that in concert with jasmine and rose powers Chanel No. 5. “Really.” She smells it, thinking.
Can you, I ask, place the material in your memory of Chanel No. 5?
She shakes her head, says, “I actually don’t know No. 5 that well.”
Your mom didn’t wear it?
“No. When I was growing up in Ohio, my mom and dad would save up their money, and when they could afford it they’d go to Dayton to buy White Linen for her. It was a pretty big deal. That was her scent.”
SJP’s husband, Matthew Broderick, and a friend of his come out of the house. He looks tired, and she laughs and touches his face, introduces both of them. She asks him, “What time is everyone coming?”
“Six.”
“You’re going to be back by then, promise me!”
He nods. “We’ve got lots of food arriving,” he says as a warning. “Like, tons.”
She rolls her eyes. “We’ll have leftovers.”
Matthew and friend take off and I say, OK, so the plan for the afternoon is to walk around and smell your neighborhood and talk about Lovely.
“Cool,” she says, then, “Are you hungry?” I tell her I just had red chicken curry at this awesome new Thai place. “Really! Where?” Pong Sri, Twenty-third and Sixth. No—sorry, Seventh. One of the best Thai places in Manhattan. “Will you write that down for me?” She looks around distractedly for a pen—I tell her I will; I make a mental note to e-mail it to her—and she announces very seriously, “Gosh, I have got to get a slice of pizza.”
She gets up, dusts the stoop off her hands, ready to roll. Jennifer goes into mobile mode, somehow (I’m sort of half conscious of what she’s doing) hangs all the heavy equipment around her thin shoulders. Movin’ out. We go to work.
“I always, always, always thought about creating my own scent,” SJP says as we walk down the sidewalk of Charles Street toward the Hudson River. “Finally, after twenty years of having it in my head, I got brave enough to talk to my agent, Peter Hess, about it.” (She gives me a sideways look. “It’s funny,” she whispers, “I’m still sort of embarrassed, you know? Like I really know what I’m doing, right?”) “So Peter said great, good to know, I’ll get back to you. And I thought, OK …” She makes an “Uh—right” look with her eyes.
We walk.
“And then suddenly he called, and we started meeting companies”—potential licensors who would take the financial risk, develop, and distribute her perfume—”and it didn’t click and didn’t click, and then the instant I met Catherine, and, I mean, we’d barely exchanged pleasantries, and”—she looks awed—”it felt so right with her, and, well, I hoped she felt the same.”
Walsh did. Walsh got to work, and an immense amount of internal discussion, focus groups on the impact of Parker’s name and image, and numbers crunching in various perfume markets around the world led to the meeting in Hess’s office. Parker talks about her with open awe. “I was mentored by her, in knowing fragrance and in knowing the consumer. She’s mighty and powerful and a truly elegant woman. One of the last who wears really red lipstick and nothing else. It’s so strong. She’s tiny, I think even shorter than I am.”
She looks at me. “The idea that you like something can lead you to the idea that you know something about it.” She raises her eyebrows, looking in that instant both pretty and a bit alarmed. “Which is, of course, not necessarily the case.”
We turn left at Bleecker. “When Catherine and I started talking about creating a perfume,” she says as we walk, “I gave her my idea.”
You already had a specific scent in mind?
“Oh yeah. Very specific because I had—in a sense—and this sounds strange perhaps, but—I had already created a fragrance, something I wore for years. Three scents I mixed on my skin, and honestly it was terrific. The grips and the cameramen would say, ‘Wow, what are you wearing?’ It was really successful.”
What was it?
She hesitates. “Do you think it’s bad to say?”
No—why?
She considers. “Well, first, I’d buy a drugstore musk, $6.99 a bottle at Thriftys.”
What was it called?
“Uhhh …” She touches my arm, looks pretty torn up. “Do I say?” Winces. “I think I better not say.”
I pretend to look hurt, she’s apologetic, I cave, and she laughs.
The second?
“Second was an Egyptian oil from an African American gentleman who used to sell them on lower Broadway. And, third, a fairly costly male scent.” She tells me what it is, off the record. I’m surprised. It’s from an edgy scent collection with a dark, very downtown, not infrequently forbidding aesthetic. It’s not, I say, a scent I’d have imagined you creating.
“Oh, it’s me,” she says. “Love it. Really dirty. Really dirty, really sexy. I said to Catherine, ‘There’s nothing on the market for women like this.’”
So you did know something about creating a perfume, I say.
“Well,” she says, “I thought I did.”
We cross West Tenth.
Generally New Yorkers live up to their reputation for carefully, indeed stoically, ignoring famous people. The New Yorkers ignore Sarah Jessica. The tourists break into huge surprised smiles. “Whoa!” They nudge each other.
What scent do you wear? I ask her.
“Sarah,” says a woman, so excited, “can I have a picture with you?”
I stop, though I’m not sure if I’m supposed to, and so she stops, and stopped, is gracious and smiling. “Sure!”
They take the photo.
We continue down the sidewalk. I ask, What scent?
“Guerlain’s Vetiver.”
Whoa, I say, you’re hard-core! A classic masculine! Seriously?
“I love Vetiver!”
She stops and stares at a young couple in front of her, who are at the same time realizing who she is and staring back. “Hey, are you from Cincinnati?” she asks them. He’s wearing a Reds T-shirt.
“Yeah,” he says. He’s blond, maybe twenty-two, beefy, smiling, relaxed; she, on the other hand, is quite startled.
“What part?”
“Cincinnati,” he says, and Parker says immediately, insistent, “Yes, yes, what part?” and then, “I’m from Clifton!”
“Huh!” he says. “Right near us!”
She prepares to move off and by way of apology rolls her eyes significantly in my direction. (“I’m working!”) They look over at me (I’m writing down “Clifton”), make an “Oh” look (a reporter …), and nod back confidentially (got it), and we move down Bleecker.
She tells me how Walsh assembled her creative group, the people who would take her ideas and turn them into Lovely. “I called them my mighty team, small and terrific. Jon DiNapoli, Carlos Timiraos, and Leslie Oglesby, global marketing director, who translated and educated me, and Chad Lavigne, our great bottle designer. That was it. Coty’s huge, they just bought Unilever’s entire fragrance division, but working with them felt totally intimate. Sex and the City—you know how most TV shows have, like, twenty writers?—we had six. It was the same feel. It was boutique.”
Walsh and Timiraos put together Parker’s brief. She was, she says, intimidated by the process, struggling to get out her thoughts of this scent. “I said to Catherine, ‘I don’t know chemistry! I don’t know the vernacular!’ and Catherine said, ‘Yes you do; you have language.’ Sometimes I grasped for words, but I’d find them, or they’d find them for me. The language was so important. So I gave my idea to Catherine—”
This idea is those three you told me about? I ask. Or didn’t tell me about, the cheap drugstore—?
“—drugstore musk, uh huh, and the—”
The Egyptian oil, right? And the—
”—yeah, the masculine sce—wait, you didn’t write those down, did you!”
I didn’t write them down! You told me not to! (I hold up my notebook to her, and she peers at it. Didn’t write it down.)
“So Laurent [Le Guernec] and Clément [Gavarry] took these scents I’d given them and everything we’d talked about, and they went away and came back with our first draft.” She takes a deep breath. “And guess what,” she says, very grimly. “The oiliness bothered me. And also guess what. My dirty instinct really made Catherine uncomfortable. She said, ‘Listen, you simply can’t sell this to a girl. The market just won’t follow you there. Not yet.’ And I wanted my scent to be genderless—not masculine, not feminine, just the scent—but they pointed out that my first time out, a feminine is so much more classic.” (Which is to say that feminines are much more commercially successful than mixed scents, at least thus far.) “And I had this idea I loved, and then I didn’t have it, and I thought, My God, so what do I do now?”
We’re almost to Ovando, and I say to her, OK, so I want to take you to this flower store.
“There’s a flower store near here?”
I point at 337 Bleecker. She looks at it. “Huh,” she says, “I don’t think I’ve ever been in here. Isn’t that strange?”
Exquisite flowers, chic black walls, the fresh, fresh stems in the air-conditioned cold, and as the stem-filled air hits us, “That smell,” Parker says, “that green.” The girl behind the counter sees her: “Oh!” Bursts into a huge smile. Sarah Jessica smiles back, says, “Could I drop these …?” (Her purse and glasses, on the counter.) The girl says, “Ahh—anything you want!” which I think is a little weirdly servile. I look at Sarah Jessica because I want to see how she’ll react, and she just swims right over the remark, moving to the flowers.
We lean over some small, white, round buds. I frown. I say, Jesus, these flowers smell exactly like the algae absolute! Sarah Jessica leans in, bursts out laughing. “My God, they do.” She leans down eagerly over some dark green mint. Inhales it. “Mmmm! We grow mint at the beach. I pretty much don’t drink, but when friends are over we crush this in drinks, put in ice, and you don’t need anything else.”
Sandra de Ovando comes in. Sarah Jessica asks her what the algae-smelling buds are. St.-John’s-wort. “That’s why we feel so good!” she says to me, and jokes, “You can get off your Prozac.”
Paxil, I say, looking at the St.-John’s-wort.
“There ya go!” She turns to Sandra to negotiate some on my behalf: “How much?”
“Three fifty a stem,” says Sandra, and Sarah Jessica counts the stems—”three fifty, seven, ten fifty …”—turns to me, “Fifty dollars a month, you’ll feel great, and they’re beautiful.”
I say I’ll certainly consider it. We move on to the scentless white hydrangeas—”These we grow at home,” she says. We bury our noses in a big bouquet of chamomile, gorgeous scents of fresh and cold green. Sandra brings in a bowl of the most sumptuous apricot-colored tea rose, and Sarah Jessica shoves them to my nose. “These are wonderful!” The scent is amazing. Tomato, I say.
“Artichoke,” she says, and I’m irritated that she’s hit it closer. “God, roses that smell of rose. You can’t find that anymore. They’re all deli roses now.” She looks daintily grim. “Deli roses just don’t cut it.” She runs back to smell the chamomile again, her hair flying, Jennifer shooting her as she moves. (Jennifer turns around, mouths to me, This is so fun. Jennifer is shooting like a determined sniper, then pauses. “Do you want to put on lipstick?” she asks. “Oh,” says Sarah Jessica, “I don’t wear it.”) She picks up thistles, inhales, says to me, “Chandler, you’ve gotta smell this!” Thistles smell of clean dust and hay. “We’re around hay a lot in Ireland,” she says. “We help them unload it, and my husband smells of it.”
We walk a few doors down to Goodfellas Pizza at Christopher Street. She orders a slice of pepperoni and a root beer and, for me, a slice of mushroom and an iced tea. “Hey!” one of the pizza guys says to her, “you gotta perfume now, right?” “I do,” she says deliciously. He narrows his eyes. “Yeah?” (And she better be straight with him here.) “So—whaddya put in that stuff?” “It has a tiny, teeny little bit of orange blossom,” she says, “and we cut in a little lavender. And patchouli.”
The guy looks impressed: This is a woman who knows how to make a perfume. When she tries to pay, he waves it away. “Onna house.” “C’mon,” she says, then laughs and leaves a tip twice as big as the check. I’m staring at the friendly pizza guy, dark hair, wearing a sweaty wifebeater-T in front of his oven. I’m thinking, How the hell does this guy know she has a perfume? She sees my look and takes it for something else, leans toward me. “If we could all take a truth pill, us Americans, with our antibacterial soap and our deodorants—we love BO! We love the smell of us. Our bodies. Yes, we want to be clean, but really I think we like what we smell like.”
And that’s what you wanted in your perfume.
“That’s what I wanted.”
We’re walking up toward Greenwich Avenue. The hot August sky has become dark and menacing, and we have no umbrellas. “So we worked on it,” she says, “and worked on it and worked on it and worked on it. We had all our meetings in Peter’s offices at CAA. Toward the end, Catherine said distinguishing our successive versions was like splitting atoms, that’s the kind of fine-tuning we did.”
Walsh, in fact, made an unusual decision; often, celebrities and designers never once lay eyes on the perfumers who build their scents, never speak with them or see them, never know their names. But Walsh, quite intelligently and rather daringly, decided that Parker should personally direct the final stages. As Walsh said to her, “You have the images in your head and the words you need to express them.” Which is why Parker wound up sitting down with Gavarry and Le Guernec.
“I told them I wanted my fragrance to have social skills. You know how when you hug someone because you have to or because they force themselves on you? And how their scent stays on you. Usually some scent-of-the-moment, talking too loud. Never. I wanted mine to have manners, beauty, subtlety. My mother never let us listen to commercial radio, only the NPR station, with classical after that, and then All Things Considered.” She intones, “‘Eighty-nine point nine, WQXR.’ It was great for everyone, kids who don’t have TV, for adults, a feeling of culture, of calm, civilized.” She puts her hand over her mouth and lowers her voice. “‘That was Fauré, Opus 26.’”
She starts to tell me about how they went about the pink dress, designed by Oscar de la Renta for the ad, the thousand other details. “What upset me a little when they premiered Lovely for the press,” she says, “was when they’d write about my scent with others that they call ‘celebrity’ which”—she laughs, very briefly—”is not a word I’d apply to myself. I was clumped in with everyone, and it simply makes my perfume seem …” She searches for the word, then delicately makes the point differently. “I was at every single meeting. Every one. We worked like crazy. I brought in pieces of fabric for them that I’d worn, synthetics, natural fibers, with the latest version of the scent sprayed on them. I think people like walking into their closet and smelling their scent. I wanted to know how it smelled on different clothes.
“We tried this grosgrain ribbed ribbon around the neck of the bottle, and that one, and that one, we blew up my name, reduced it, changed the font a thousand times. And the scent … we agonized over it, contemplated it, altered it a million ways. It was so important to me because I know how my mom saved to buy her one bottle of perfume a year, two if she was lucky. Most people do not have huge disposable incomes, and I don’t care if I don’t make any money on this, honestly, I didn’t do this to become superrich. I wanted to create this beautiful thing, and it just has to be worth it when people spend their money. It’s that instant when you smell it, and, you know, you think, Yes. We’d be on conference calls, Catherine in Paris, Jon in New York, me who knows where, we’d change it, and I’d get the next sample three days later, put it on, put it on my sister, my clothes, my friends.”
Since we’re here in the Village, I figure we should talk about the smells of the Village, so I bring it up. The chalky, warm scent of hot brick, New York’s perfume of warm asphalt, the hot dry cement. She crinkles her nose and smells. As she’s doing this, a young guy walks by with his very young daughters and says, “Sarah?” and she almost shouts and gives him a huge hug and talks to his daughters.
We walk past Magnolia Bakery and talk about the perfumes she likes. “One I loooooove,” she says, “it’s Yves Saint Laurent, it’s called—oh God, I’ve got a bottle upstairs, pink? Bottle like a jewel?”
I say, Baby Doll?
“No, no, the—what is—I smelled it the first time because I inherited an unopened bottle from a friend’s deceased mother. Weird, huh. The black top?”
Oh, Paris?
“Paris! I love that one.” Jennifer is shooting away, crouching down, darting in front of people. It’s a weird thing I’ve noticed photographers do, honestly just not giving a damn about anyone else while they’re taking shots. People sort of jump out of her way. We stop in the antiques store Venfield, and we smell the candles burning there, from Paris’s Hôtel Costes, the scent of a dark, rich European library, leather and spices with a bit of cigar ash dropped on the thick wool carpets.
“This is great,” she says. As soon as we step outside, huge raindrops start a slow barrage, and we run, she adeptly in heels, past the new Bond No. 9 store and Marc Jacobs and up her street. “The scent when the cement gets wet,” I yell, and she shouts, “And the wet heat smell that comes up.” She runs, laughing, to her house, she pushes open the door for us as the sky opens and it becomes monsoon. Her son, in pajamas and with his nanny, is surprised and delighted to see her in the entry. “What’s your name!” she asks, shaking off a little rain. He thinks about it, states: “James Wilke Broderick!” James has not taken his nap and is no worse for wear.
We take James and go up to the living room, large and clean and cool. I look at a pile of books on top of the mantel over the fireplace in the comfortable study in back. She glances over. “See? That’s the pile.” She raises her right hand far over her head and cups the fingers down, and it exactly fits the pile, which is just that high. She pulls my book out—it’s the sixth down of about fifteen—and hands it to me. As she walks away, I see a bookmark in the middle.
We’re talking about how she feels about scent. Jennifer interrupts briefly to ask her to pose on the stairs, no, the other way, put your arms up. I’m interested to see the degree to which Jennifer is directive and Sarah Jessica is malleable, she does exactly what Jennifer asks and doesn’t stop talking to me about body odor, this mystery scent she won’t tell me about, as her body moves to Jennifer’s repositioning her arms. Sarah Jessica says to Jennifer, “I just really don’t want to look into the camera, OK? I haaaaate that.” I’m confused. I say, You hate looking into the camera? “Ech,” she says and shudders. “We never do it on the movie set.”
James is still in the living room, singing a song to himself. He’s being very precise with the words.
I say, So this scent you created—that you didn’t use—
“—this time.”
This time. It represents your … (I’m stuck.)
She cocks her head and assesses me for a moment, eyes narrowed. She says, “Wait.” Disappears. Jennifer and I look at each other. She reappears. She’s holding three different bottles in her hand. “Bonnie Belle Skin Musk,” she says, hands it to me. The bottle alone could make you laugh out loud: cheap, tacky American drugstore perfume, tacky green cap, so evocative and fun. “Bonnie Belle called me because I’d been buying this in bulk from them,” she says, sitting cross-legged, “and it’s inexpensive, so the stuff disappears from your skin fast. They said, ‘We’ve been bought, and we can tell you that the formula is going to change, so would you like to buy what’s left?’ For a day I tried to calculate how long I was going to live. And then I bought every single bottle they had. About five hundred bottles. I have them in storage. Here.” She sees me trying to be sparing with it. “Oh, please, I still have plenty left.” She stops suddenly, realizing what James is softly singing: “And we lived,” he sings.
“A life of ease,” she sings, filling in the next words.
“In our yellow,” he sings back to her, completing the line.
Together they sing, “Submarine.”
She hands me a vial. The Egyptian oil. “I have a huge jar. Try it.” I apply it on top of the Bonnie Belle. The third is Comme des Garçons Incense Avignon, $150 for a 50ml bottle. Smoky, heavy, dark, perverse, slightly brutal. I put that on the other two, and the three together are powerful and strange, the smell just as she’d described it on the stoop. So this is what she had in her head. I smell it.
“My next scent will be genderless,” she says. “Less like an alto, more like a bass, less a pinot grigio than a cabernet. Fuller.” She inhales the crepuscular incense musk mix on my arm, sits back. “Riskier.”
Which shows exactly what is most interesting about the structure of Lovely. It is, in fact, a risk, and I suspect Parker doesn’t fully realize how successfully that risk has been negotiated by Clément Gavarry and Laurent Le Guernec, her perfumers, and her Coty marketing team. Lovely is a piece of extremely interesting technical work, but it is a tightrope walk, or more precisely a deft piece of multipart perfumery. It is, in its most simple and immediate incarnation, instantly legible, placeable.
There is the classic French school of perfumery—Hermès’s Calèche, Lanvin’s Arpège—a philosophy that holds that the point is artistry and the ego of the creator, and the focus is the perfume itself, and when you smell these perfumes you say, “She’s wearing a great fragrance.” Though it’s actually the fragrance that wears you; the person is merely a transport vehicle for the perfume. And then there are the modernist works of scent art, done so well by Fresh, for example, in which a material—a pear, a cup of sake, a peel of tree bark—is transformed into an abstracted scent that exists to enhance you. You say, “She smells amazing” as if (this is the point) the perfume emanated from and was part of her own body.
Lovely is an interesting fusion of both. It is French school in style, in that one doesn’t “smell of” Lovely. One wears it. One puts it on. Lovely is the lightest olfactory party dress of powder and sweet, the scent equivalent of the terrific wrap of soft floating mesh fabric I saw one summer enveloping the shoulders of a young woman, a physical cloud she wore elegantly through the East Village streets. One notices that lovely wrap. But Lovely is modernist school in behavior. The perfume melts into you, and there is a point in its development when the other person will stop seeing the wrap—where the scent stops behaving like a coat—and sees only the wearer, who is somehow prettier, more delicate—enhanced—in an indefinable way. The perfume, as “the perfume,” has disappeared, leaving only you.
This is, in part, why it takes a bit of time to notice that Parker has in a real sense gotten what she wanted, though Walsh allowed it in a very astute way. By the time I met her, I’d been wearing Lovely for a week. The scent does not, even well into the dry-down, bifurcate at all. It reveals none of its moving parts. What it does do, for those who pay attention, is reveal its structure, a sheath of light built around a core of dark. It reveals the scent of the skin of the shoulders below, the scent of a clean, warm, very human body that might be walking energetically up Bleecker Street past Goodfellas and Ovando toward Greenwich Avenue.
I doubt Sarah Jessica knew the perfumery term (animalic; I forgot to ask her about it), but she had the concept, and she found a way to express it. Taking Coty’s probably wise marketing advice, she and the team created a lilting perfume welded to an invisible platform as masculine as it is feminine, animalic, hard-core, ever so slightly sweaty. The girl we see and the girl we don’t. At first.
Do you, I ask her, regret the choice not to do the full-on dirty sexy thing? She looks at me, smiling broadly, slowly shakes her head no. “When I was thirteen, Brooke Shields and I were really good friends, and she gave me a bottle of Joy. I was, like, holy moley, Joy! My mom took it away from me.” Did you resent that? “Not at all. She was completely right. It would’ve simply been inappropriate for a thirteen-year-old girl weighing thirty-eight pounds to be wearing Joy. That was a choice. With mine, I made choices.”
She pushes back a strand of hair. She looks pensive for a second. “Catherine said, ‘Go farther with your next one.’ You know how when you travel in Europe and everything is so well marked? This destination, then that one, and the final one in big letters? I can see my next destination. I can see it, I know the name, the shape of the bottle, the ad campaign. I just can’t think about it right now.”
Lovely, which Coty had debuted privately to the press several months before, officially launched to the public in late August 2005. In all, Coty would spend millions on it, as would its competitors on any similarly high-profile perfume, and everywhere there was Parker’s image, carefully directed and engineered by the marketing and branding visionary Trey Laird, the surprisingly modest, low-key head of Laird+Partners, which had handled Parker for her multimillion-dollar Gap campaign; Parker revered him. The image was Parker in a pale pink vaguely ballet-style dress designed by Oscar de la Renta. The pink of DiNapoli’s eggs.
The perfume started rising up the charts.
I spoke one afternoon with Walsh in her corner office at Coty’s then headquarters in the Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue. She was wearing her signature really red lipstick, blunt hairstyle of undyed gray standing up from her head. She was characteristically direct and strong without being aggressive and, as do most executives, took care to express things with precision.
“We met with Sarah Jessica for the first time in the CAA offices of her agent, Peter Hess, in New York. Ina Treciokas, her publicist, was also there. White conference room, very slick, very agent. There was sushi on platters—we always have sushi. We’d negotiated a certain amount before, obviously, the parameters of the deal and so on, but this was the first time I’d met her. She was dressed very casually, jeans, T-shirt—it was May—and I was talking on my phone”—Walsh took out her impossibly tiny red cell phone—”and I didn’t hear her walk in, and I turn around and hang up fast, and the first thing she does is hands to mouth, ‘Oh! I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to make you cut your call off!’ and then, ‘Is that real?’ Because she and Matthew apparently have a competition about who has the latest gadget. I was at the Chateau Marmont and it blew off the table, that’s how light the phone is.
“It’s not just that she’s friendly, which I expected, and humble, which was a nice surprise. It’s that she wanted to listen, so intently, to every word I said. I was in that office explaining how one goes about creating a fragrance and what would be the steps between now, our first meeting, and setting the first jar of Sarah Jessica’s perfume on the first counter. She was so interested in hearing every word, looking right in my eyes, and she was taking it seriously. No, more: She’d done her homework. She was on. It was passion. What continues to impress me about her is how big her mind is. In my career you work with a lot of smart people, passionate people, creative people—she wraps them all up.” Walsh paused, then rendered the italics visible. “She makes me look forward to going to work.”
“Even during the difficult parts. The last part of her perfume, when we were splitting molecules, she was learning the industry in a short, intense amount of time, and we were explaining to her that the fragrance she’d been making all those years, the blend she loved so much that she’d been mixing on herself of Bonnie Belle musk, that Egyptian oil, and the Comme des Garçons Incense Avignon, that she’d wanted that so much, and Laurent and Clément had created that for her, and privately Carlos and I knew that her perfume, at least her first perfume, shouldn’t be that. So here I was saying, ‘OK, you have to make the decision. You have to approve this. Accept this. And we think it should be different. Are you sure you want to go there? Are you sure you want the scent to be that masculine? We’re not so sure. The first is the first. Sometimes you only have one shot.’ And she’s listening intently, focused. She gets it. As hard as that is. She’s learning a new industry, and she has to kill her baby. It was … astonishingly tough. We went in a different direction, away from her original dream. And it takes someone with a big mind to process all those things on all those levels—emotional, intellectual, aesthetic.
“The way Sarah Jessica talks about her mom and the way she was raised is very similar to the way I was raised. Very humble background. No mean words. I still call taxi drivers ‘sir.’ Living in New York and in my job I’ve developed a much tougher shell than she has. And when I started to spend time with her, she made me remember all the things my mother taught me. It’s actually easier now to be a woman than it was twenty years ago. I don’t think she has any shell. She says ‘gosh.’ She asked me where I stay in LA, I say, ‘Chateau Marmont,’ and she says, ‘I’m not cool enough for that.’ She’s the person who opens the door for everyone else.
“You know, if I’d been acting for three decades and in her position, I think it would be hard to be confused. But she allows herself that. And I think that’s really rare. That’s not to say she’s light, or ‘sweet.’ We had a 6:50 A.M. flight one time for a personal appearance. She carried her own dress on the plane. We sat together. She was delightful. Got off, she went right into hair and makeup, I sat there watching them getting her ready, and she’s focusing on The New York Times, absorbing it completely, talked about politics and economics with everyone in the room, then went and spoke to three thousand people who’d come to see her, and we got back on the plane.
“At her personal appearances, people bring notes, flowers, pictures of their children, ‘Would you sign it?’ Sex and the City books. She signs. She writes. She calls people. She called a woman and thanked her. I’d have to drag her away. I’d say, ‘OK, we’ve got twenty-five minutes and a hundred people, you’re going to have to jam on it.’ She’d say, ‘OK, but are you sure we’re going to get through everyone?’
“When we launched we started to send her sales reports weekly, by account [store]. She’d read them, and if we weren’t in the top three, she’d e-mail me back and ask me—and I’ll find you one of her e-mails—‘Is there something I need to do? Do I need to go there?’”Walsh stopped dead, looked incredulous. “I mean, come on! Who does this? Even I don’t do this! But she would! Carlos and I just looked at each other and said, ‘She’s really going to go to a department store in Dadeland country because we’re number nine?’
“When we went on Oprah, after we left, I was in a car going to the airport, they’d put her in a different car, she called my cell and said”—Walsh does an extremely creditable impression of Parker’s earnestness—” ‘Hi, hi! It’s me! Do you think it went well?’ I said, ‘Are you kidding? It was ten times more than we expected.’ She said, ‘Really?’ That reassured her, but then she said, ‘I was just so worried when I told the audience that everyone would be going home with a bottle of my perfume that I wouldn’t get a response.’”
I write the piece, send it in to Andy Port, my Times editor.
A few weeks later, I’m at my desk and Belinda calls me and says, “So, listen, about the exclusive.”
Yeah.
“We’re still committed to giving an exclusive on the perfume to The Times, OK?”
Yeah …
“She’s going to be on the cover of Vogue—”
Uh oh.
”—but”—Belinda moves on smoothly—”it’s going to be about her life and her next movies. There’ll be, like, a paragraph on the perfume. No more.”
Uh … OK, I say, shouldn’t be a problem. (I have no idea, actually. I’ve never done this and am making it up as I go.)
I call Andy, and she listens, asks a few questions in her concise way, and says fine.
When it hits the newsstands a full month before ours, half the Vogue piece, it turns out, is about the perfume, and Andy’s reaction is very dark and she uses language I’ve never heard her use, but that’s the business, and in the end Vogue has its piece, we have ours. The Times piece runs—SJ likes it, Coty likes it, and frankly we quite like it too.
The brands are constantly proposing articles on their launches. Ninety percent of the time they offer no substance and have no intention whatsoever of allowing you to see anything real. So you pass. Around the same time that I’d started talking to Belinda, I’d gotten a call from a PR rep for a major American designer. “New perfume,” she’d said.
And? What’s the story?
She’d sighed. Her designer is as risk-averse as they come, his communications Stalinist, his marketing regimented, his creative process Kremlinesque. She knew I wouldn’t be interested. We left it there.
The night the Parker piece came out, she saw me at an industry event, came over—I like this woman; she’s very direct, practical, realistic—and said brightly, “Congratulations, it’s gorgeous, and god-damn you, that could’ve been us.”
You didn’t make the offer.
“Oh, I know, I know,” she said, looking around the room. “They’re incapable of letting anyone in.”
So they don’t get the piece.
“So they don’t,” she said with a tight smile, “get the piece.”
M onths later, it’s December, and I leave for Paris to do two stories.
All those early mornings of coming-to on airplanes, tight, dry eyes in desiccated air. Raise the shade and peer blearily out through the plastic oval at the freezing coals of sunrise twenty thousand feet over Paris. In New York it’s half past midnight, here it is 6:30 A.M., and the sky is beaten black and blue and slit open along a red/amber knife’s edge as if it had just been wounded and we are flying slowly by the damage to inspect it. You fly strictly economy on The Times. You’re sitting up. As you descend into the cloud layer, the lights flicker on painfully and the chief flight attendant’s voice announces with iron cheerfulness, “Ladies and gentlemen, the captain has illuminated the seat belt sign indicating we’ve begun our initial descent to Charles de Gaulle.” There are two absolute capitals of perfume in the world, New York and Paris. I live in one, so I visit the other. Before I lived in this one, I lived in the other.
Arriving in Paris means the captain tells you about the latest strikes. The captain announces that last week government services struck, this week it’s trains (I hope the car service will be there), next week, he says with a bit of an edge, airport workers. Doing business in France means constantly hoping you’ll get the last flight out, as if it were a Third World country with a constantly toppling regime.
The plane lands, shudders in the dark, its belly just above the concrete, and the jet engines jam into reverse. Charles de Gaulle is its usual postmodernist mess, a disaster in concrete and glass that is one of the worst major airports in the world. After passport control I turn my cell on in front of the bored customs agents, and by the time the baggage starts appearing I have a voice mail: “Please meet your driver,” says the message, with no indication where.
It’s freezing and gray. Sure enough there are no trains. I watch a fifty-year-old Sikh taxi driver in a big blue turban wipe off the window of his Mercedes with a paper towel and then simply throw the towel on the street, just as one does in Mumbai. My cell phone has no more minutes. I look around and ask a friendly Sri Lankan taxi driver if he might lend me his phone. “Certainly!” he says, and I dial the travel agency that arranged for the car service. The woman on the line apologizes: “C’est totalement aléatoire, les voitures à Paris.” Car service in Paris is a totally random affair. She tells me to go with the Sri Lankan guy, who is happy about that. I have the gray grit of this Paris winter morning in my veins. I want to brush my teeth. I can’t remember where I put my passport.
The taxi is a new Renault, very comfortable, firm seats, smooth synthetic fibers. French cars generally feel great. I sit in front like the Buddha, and he chats at me energetically. I understand little of his English. Alternatively I understand little of his French. There’s a cross, a cheap plastic Blessed Virgin Mary, a Krishna image, Hindu prayer beads, a feisty Singhalese good luck demon, and a Tibetan prayer bracelet. All this from the air-conditioning knob.
He attacks my hotel by circling the périphérique, the concrete belt around Paris, then dives in via the Porte d’Asnières, negotiates the boulevard Malesherbes. He talks and talks. I understand nothing. Fascinated, I take a scientific approach and start interjecting nonsensical comments at inappropriate moments. He gives no indication of noticing. He drops me at Le Grand Hotel Intercontinental, happily waves good-bye. My bags disappear. My room, which is a seven-minute journey from reception by foot (you need sherpas), has twenty-foot ceilings and looks out on the Opéra. By the time I reach it, I am semicomatose.
My bags reappear in the room.
I go to my appointments. I spend two hours with a lovely young perfumer named Mathilde Laurent. Cartier has just taken Mathilde away from Guerlain, where she created the estimable Shalimar Light. Cartier has not yet figured out that, as Ellena and Polge are to Hermès and Chanel, Laurent should be the Cartier in-house perfumer. They have not realized she should create all of Cartier’s scents. Maybe they will someday. I have lunch with Jean-Michel Duriez, the in-house perfumer at Jean Patou, at a nice restaurant. As we’re paying the check, I see Véronique Ferval from IFF and stop to talk with her and her husband, the scent sculptor Nobi Shioya, who runs his own house in Brooklyn, S-Perfume, creating astonishing art scents. I leave the restaurant, walk around the corner past the Guerlain store, turn right and go talk perfume for a few hours with Pamela Roberts and Rémi Cléro, the creative director and CEO of l’Artisan Parfumeur. (On trips in summer, I rent a scooter and in T-shirt and jeans bomb around the streets I used to live on. I never go to the museums.) Late afternoon I work out in the hotel gym, eat dinner by myself. The next day I go to Dior, which is starting an interesting project, then have lunch with the perfumer Dominique Ropion at a place on the place de l’Alma, and we talk and talk, perfumes, molecules, launches. That evening I’m invited to friends’. I carry an umbrella around under the gray/black sky whose belly is as swollen with rain as a tick with blood, but it doesn’t rain.
Perfumers are deeply strange people simply because their sensorial perception of the world is so highly trained. The educated olfactory capacity makes spending time with them not unlike spending time with talking Labradors. I was on an Air France flight from Florence to Paris sitting with the perfumer Marc-Antoine Corticchiato, and the flight attendant, with the refined, almost prissy movements of many large heterosexual Frenchmen—they look like football players from finishing schools—handed us the serviettes rafraîchissantes. I ripped mine open, rubbed the towelette over my hands, stopped to lean into the smell.
Not bad, I said.
Corticchiato glanced over. I held up my hand, and he smelled and made a dismissive face. “Eh.”
Wait, seriously, for a towelette in aluminum? It’s not bad.
“Linalol,” he listed, throwing them off quickly and without interest, “linalyl acetate for the fake bergamot, citronellol and geraniol for the flowery, dihydromyrcenol, Galaxolide, qui ne coûte rien du tout et qui rassure.” Which costs nothing and which reassures. “Et c’est ça.” He shrugged. “Tous ces trucs cheaps.” All these cheap things. He saw the codes behind the images and heard the tones outside the normal human range.
We landed. On the hike from terminal 2D to 2E, we walked by a Charles de Gaulle International toilet, and as we passed through a pocket of invisible molecules in the air, Corticchiato reeled off the raw materials scenting the French toilet-cleaning products.
Perfumers work in the patronage system—the perfume industry is a quintessential patronage paradigm, with Pucci and Kenzo in the role of the Catholic Church and the king of Spain—and they have, since the system began, both embraced and lamented its strangenesses and quirks. The perfumers are emphatically not free. They are employees. They are also emphatically artists. Their strangest relationships are often with each other: competition, collaboration, envy, revenge, admiration. Their lives consist quite literally of creating liquid secrets, doling them out judiciously, hoarding them, playing the politics. They amass molecular treasures at one Big Boy, then another Big Boy makes them an offer (better pay, a transfer to Paris, subsidized housing and tuition for the Lycée français in New York City, whatever it is), and they jump ship. The corporate types loathe it. It’s well known that before they leave, the perfumers download their formulae, quietly photocopy charts, scan captives, and send batches of dark via anonymous personal e-mails to hard drives in their home offices. (Captives are patented molecules that cost a premium and are only available from their creator companies, just like nongeneric drugs.)
Then, once you’ve unpacked in your new office, you get to know your colleagues: other perfumers.
Each perfumer belongs to a corporate camp, and everyone knows what everyone else looks like, and the bosses are always watching, and so at parties, they can but they really can’t socialize. They do and don’t talk to each other. It’s all sort of vague, and the boundaries are unclear. But they are hyperaware of each other. On his first day at his new job at one of the Big Boys, a friend of mine was grabbed by one of the indigenous perfumers and marched into her office and watched in amazement as she began a systematic analysis of every single perfumer at his previous company based on the way they built their formulae. To his astonishment, she was almost completely right about everything. “X must love women! He must sleep with an awful lot of them.” “Y is manic depressive, right?” “Z is a closeted lesbian. You can smell the frustration.” “B has a thing for T; she follows every accord he makes—is she fucking him?” “M has to be completely sexually frustrated; you can smell her closed-up hole in everything she does.”
Some perfumers wear an elegant remoteness like armor and take it off only on the phone late in the evening; some are friendly and vapid; some are intense; some hide their ambition. Some are posers. Some are so suspicious and paranoid and repressed that they wear a mental psychiatric suit every day and are incapable of saying anything even remotely interesting. Zombies. Some are wonderful, salt of the earth, they tell you terrific stories about this scent or that one, explain the latest captive, and every minute with them is a delight. Angels. Showmen. Some try for beauty. A few don’t.
Francis Kurkdjian is nervous as lightning. Carlos Benaïm is cautious as a Thai diplomat. Bertrand Duchaufour is earnest, Pierre Wargnye is your best drinking buddy, Olivier Cresp and Christine Nagel could each run a French ministry, Daphné Bugey will cut you in half if you get in her way, though she won’t mean it. Jean-Michel Duriez is a loving Teddy Bear. Yann Vasnier is less and more than meets the eye. Sophia Grojsman stands behind the Tsar. Dominique Ropion and Harry Frémont could happily fish with you for hours. Jean Guichard melts in your mouth. Anne Flipo is practical, take it or leave it, and Olivier Polge you would introduce to your daughter. Christophe Laudamiel is hypermetamorphic. Jean-Marc Chaillan will argue with you in a bar. Thierry Wasser has secrets. Caroline Sabas doesn’t. Calice Becker is decidedly present. Pierre Negrin, less so. Stephen Nilsen wants things to be right. Dave Apel is game if you are. Ilias Ermenidis is Greek as Euripides, Maurice Roucel is French as de Gaulle, and Alberto Morillas could have sung tango on the radio to adoring millions.
Some perfumers hate their colleagues; some are nervous; some are sweet as chocolate; some have been abused. Some are fascinated by the work; others are burned out. Some are paranoid. Some demonstrate an amazingly earthy, blunt sexuality, a frank cynical crassness that I love.
Freud would have a field day in this industry. Though if this is true, it is because the crucial people in the industry are artists.
On the last night of the Paris trip I go to a party. It is a Cartier party. I put on my tuxedo and go downstairs at 7:01 P.M. I walk down rue Scribe, cross boulevard des Capucines, jog left on rue Daunou for a short block, then right on rue de la Paix, where the Cartier store sits, famously, at number 13.
The rue de la Paix—one of the most expensive streets in the world, with the place Vendôme (begun in the late 1600s) and its baubles, the Ritz, Chanel, Dior, Mauboussin, and the rest on one end and the place de l’Opéra at the other—is utterly transformed. It has snowed, but the snow covers the street between the rue Daunou and the rue des Capucines within a precise rectangle only in front of the Cartier store and the Park Hyatt Vendôme just next to it because it is fake snow. I reach down. It’s wet. It squishes out between my fingers like goop, some sort of plastic. Amazingly realistic. It has been carefully laid there by a massive team of workers with shovels and trucks.
Snow falls on our heads, glittering. In flight it looks utterly real. It’s snowing in Paris, and it rests in people’s hair. They’re blowing it from the top of the building, but this isn’t the plastic, it’s something else, metallic acrylic flakes. A crowd in coats and mufflers and hats is gathered behind the ropes to watch the arrivals, a constant stream of Mercedes and Jaguars dropping off guests in tuxedos and gowns. The fake snowflakes mirror the glitter of the gowns. I wonder if it’s cold enough to really snow. There are ten miniature stages that we walk past on the way to the store’s entrance, each one a fantastic life-size jewelry box enclosing a costumed person: a Chinese princess, a sorceress, a ballerina. They perform over and over, the curtains going up and down.
The crowd cranes its collective head. There’s a rush of excitement—is that Monica Bellucci? Yes it is, her hair up. Searchlights move across the sky, and the camera flashes sparkle against the jewelry dripping from the necks of the women. A very tall, pretty young American woman speaking good French is being led in, the cameras on her. She and I enter at the same time, and she says to her friend, “Oh, meet my agent.” The French speak English to the Chinese. Thin, gorgeous, curving young women wear silky gowns covering thighs under fur wraps.
A group of Spanish women sit in the gallery that rings the store on its second floor, women so tall and exquisitely beautiful and immaculately dressed it takes the breath away. One of them sullenly twists a lacquered fingernail into a diamond necklace, untwists it, twists it. People are speaking Mandarin, Russian, Japanese, French, Cantonese, Italian, English, Spanish, German, Swedish. The store, packed with guests, gleams. Aliona Doletskaya, the editor in chief of Russian Vogue, is chatting with Suzy Menkes of the International Herald Tribune. Someone introduces a countess of something to a CEO of something else. He kisses her gloved hand.
An army of uniformed young men hired by Cartier circulates. “If you would please make your way to dinner,” they murmur. We spill out of the Cartier store, turn right down the rue de la Paix, and walk through the place Vendôme, lit and shining. The stream of gowns flows between the Ritz and the Chanel jewelry boutique, runs down the rue Castiglione past the Guerlain and Payot stores, past Jean Patou. Castiglione is entirely colonized by an immaculate flotilla of new Mercedes, their drivers waiting. (“Mais combien ils ont dépensé pour ça?” demands a French gentleman to the woman next to him. But how much have they spent on all this?)
The tuxedos flow into the Tuileries, whose forged iron black lacquer gates have (now this actually makes people exclaim out loud, wait, the Tuileries? how did they get permission?) been modified, its spikes removed and replaced with a golden word: Cartier. The guests pass under the word on the wide red carpet, stilettos and shiny black shoes walking down into the Tuileries and into an immense Cartierred tent that’s been constructed, as wide and long as a cruise ship.
There’s a problem at the reception table. The young women in black search fruitlessly for an Arab couple under M. They aren’t under M. No? But your last name begins with M? Yes, yes, Meheri, says the nice Arab man, who is wearing a full-length black ostrich skin coat and a mustache, the one in worse taste than the other. Finally the Cartier people find them: They’re under A. Oh, yes, says the Arab man, Al-Meheri. Everyone smiles, and they sweep inside. Photographers are taking photos everywhere, it’s like a military bombardment, the flashes illuminating the amazing breasts mounding out of dresses of velvet, satin, lace, feathers. (They strafe the tall, pretty young American woman. She turns out to be named Electra and is the model for Cartier’s most recent campaign shoot.)
Everything inside is Cartier red. It is the deep 1800s French red of Deuxième Empire boudoirs, the red of the velvet in the old calèches, the red of a theater seat. Red velvet. Red flowers. Red walls. Red carpet. Red candles. Red drinks. The furniture is trimmed with gold. Two women in black gowns and four pounds of pearls around their necks pose on a sleek red settee like Ingres courtesans. They do nothing, just pose, and everyone gives them space to occupy. A huge screen shows images of Elizabeth Taylor accepting Cartier jewels. Grace Kelly wearing Cartier jewels in the Monte Carlo sun.
The Frenchmen put on their usual show of talking loudly and importantly into their cell phones. When people look at their loud, self-important talking, they glare at them. If people don’t look, they find people to glare at. It keeps them busy talking and glaring. Russian women murmur into their cell phones as if putting babies to bed. They smoke and murmur, smoke and murmur. The Japanese search for each other in the vast room on cell phones. “Ima doko?” (Where are you?) Mienai yo!” (I can’t see you!)
First the corps of coat check women, after them waves of shock troops of cocktail girls carrying drinks, the army of waiters invading after that from the left flank. As the Europeans exhale thunderheads, the usual putrid smog starts to coalesce in the room, filtering the cone of light projecting Elizabeth Taylor and her diamonds. Violins play somewhere. Gay men comment on everything in sight. Straight men follow women around. “François, comment tu vas?!” The waiters prepare their artillery (three kinds of caviar to start). A phalanx of bellhops in 1930s pillbox hats, dressed all in red, boys freshly scrubbed and beaming, deliver things, scurrying about. Security, head to toe in black, never smile nor even move much, as if the gravity of their job anchored them physically to the planet. The entire rue Castiglione, the entire rue de la Paix, this entire corner of the Tuileries, this one night, this moment seems the center of the world.
Dinner begins around 11:00 P.M.
An immense American swing orchestra, flown in from the United States, occupies a vast stage before the immense dining space. Men negotiate organza trains on their way to the dance floor. The orchestra is excellent. The actor Jean Reno dances elegantly. The daughter of a New York diamond merchant is talking to the daughter of the artist and filmmaker Julian Schnabel; Cartier flew them in first class, put them at the Hôtel Costes. (Everything is on Cartier’s tab: minibar, Internet connection, you name it.) A wealthy Chinese woman holds court at her table, reigning in a black velvet rhinestone-covered bolero jacket ugly beyond measure. Two young and beautiful English couples debate the merits of an expensive resort in the Maldives. A tall young Chinese man, muscular and movie-star handsome, walks silently across the dance floor in his tux, followed by the eyes of three Italian women. He is exquisite. The food is delicious.
One of the crisp young Englishmen stops, blinks, looking around. His companions pause. “How much did they spend on this?” he asks them offhandedly.
The next day, I’m at Charles de Gaulle for my flight back to New York. I pass a tall thin African guy whose body stinks so strongly I can smell him twenty seconds after we’ve passed each other. His stink is complex, nuanced. He perfumes the air like a boat leaving a wake.
At security the big Arab guy patting me down finds my Bigelow Mint Lip gel in my pocket and tosses it, which makes me furious, but the small Arab guy who checks bags misses my toothpaste in my carry-on. As he’s missing it I think, I should have put the goddamn mint gel stuff in my carry-on. Then I realize something. I ask him, Are you wearing Azzaro?
He looks at me warily. The two guys on the right and left sides of him look at me. A fat passenger with a cheesy mustache looks at me.
I’m a perfume journalist, I explain.
He’s like: Huh. Weird. OK. “C’est Azzaro,” he says. He says it a little proudly.
Is it Chrome?
He frowns, thinking. “I don’t know.” He says, “My wife gave it to me.”
“It’s not Chrome,” says his security colleague to the right of him, rubber-gloved hands forearm-deep in the mustache’s bag. He says it almost scornfully. “I’m wearing Chrome. His is something else.”
“Do you like it?” says my guy, to me. (He ignores his colleague.) He’s looking hopeful now. “You’re an expert in perfume?”
“Vous aimez?” Do you like it? He means his scent.
He is a sweet guy, and he’s wearing this scent that his wife gave him, and I can smell it on the other side of the security table with my lip stuff in a trash bag below, and it’s a vile smell, as if there were a chemical fire in Terminal 2E and the steel and plastic were a bubbling stink around us. I think about all the great scents I could tell him about, why they’re great. I think, quickly and without interest: linalol, dihydromyrcenol, Galaxolide, qui ne coûte rien du tout. All these cheap things. He’s hopeful. I say, It’s a classic masculine. He shoots a knowing look at the guy on his right. He’s got a classic masculine. The mustache nods sagely: Azzaro.
We say good-bye, he waves, and I head to gate E77.
My cell phone rings. It’s Belinda Arnold from New York.
“So guess what,” she says cheerfully. “You up for another one?”
What’ve you got?
She asks me how would I like to sit in on the creation of Sarah Jessica’s next scent product.
The next perfume?
She hesitates. “Sort of. Maybe. A perfume product we’re going to be creating that will use Lovely.”
I’m not sure I get it.
She says, “Well, we’re thinking about it now. But whatever it turns out to be? We’d like you to come along for the ride. We’ll include you in the whole creation process.”
Parker and the perfumers?
“Yep. But following the story not from the perfumer’s point of view.” She knows that in my reporting I head reflexively for the perfumer’s point of view. She wants to start us off clear. “It’d be from her point of view. Inside what it’s like to go through the creation of a perfume as the creative director. What do you think?”
I’m in.