ON NOVEMBER 22, 2005, when serious winter has already set in on New York City, bringing battleship gray clouds, intermittent cold rain, and a chilled wind off the metallic Hudson, the first creative meeting on Sarah Jessica Parker’s perfume product is held at IFF’s global headquarters, 521 West Fifty-seventh Street.
It is 3:00 P.M., and you’d think it was 6:00, or maybe 8:00. At midafternoon the cars already have their headlights on. The headquarters, which sits opposite the New York CBS affiliate, is a paradigmatic massive nondescript office structure with 1980s gold-colored doors. Donald Trump meets East Berlin. Catherine Walsh and Carlos Timiraos are at eighth-floor reception. Several IFF people are gathering as well because Parker is arriving. (One says to me discreetly, “It’s not my project, but I really like Sex and the City.”)
Everyone goes downstairs to wait for her. Joanne H. Trembley, IFF’s VP of sales for North America, is there, and Yvette Ross, IFF’s senior account executive on Parker’s perfume. Walsh chats with Trembley and Ross and keeps an eye on West Fifty-seventh Street.
Exactly on time, a black town car pulls to the curb and stops, and we watch someone inside open the large rear door. Melinda Relyea, Parker’s assistant, a young blond woman preternaturally laid-back and cool, gets out, followed by Parker. It’s always a bit of a surprise how thin and small she is. She is wearing stilettos and a trim gray camel’s-hair coat with a belt tied precisely around it and, in the afternoon gloom, gigantic jet-black Ralph Lauren sunglasses that cover her face. We watch the chilly wind blowing her hair around. “Why is it so cold so early,” murmurs Yvette Ross to no one. Parker comes out of the gray into the warm lobby, and we all start the greetings. She takes off her coat, and she’s dressed in a simple blue shirt and slacks. Some mascara and a bit of natural lip color. Her eyes are the same intense storm-cloud blue.
I sort of hang back a little, and when she gets done with the rest, she turns to me and for an instant we both hesitate there in the lobby. I realize she’s not certain what is appropriate either, but, journalist subject divide or not, I give her a kiss on the cheek. She beams and says intensely, “How are you?” with a voice that has a raspy-squeaky angle. We all crowd into the elevator, and someone hits the button.
The meeting takes place in one of the larger meeting rooms I’ve seen in the IFF complex, a glass-enclosed room surrounded by the offices of perfumers and evaluators. There’s a vast expanse of table, and we do that thing where everyone enters and chooses their places carefully. Ross, as the IFF account exec, directs Parker to the center. (“Here?” says Parker, “you want me here?”) I find the chair nearest an electrical outlet, plug in my computer, sit down next to Walsh.
There are three sets of players here, three interdependent kingdoms.
Coty is arguably first among equals. It is Coty, in the person of Walsh, that allows all this to happen. The financial risk is Coty’s, and they are capitalizing the brand with millions of dollars in development, overhead, marketing, advertising. IFF is quite aware that Coty is its client. Everyone knows that Coty had sent the brief to other scent makers, and that Walsh chose the juice created by the IFF perfumers Laurent Le Guernec and Clément Gavarry—both of them are here as well—which is why IFF won the brief, and in this plush conference room the IFF people, in all the appropriate, subtle ways of corporate interactions, make clear to Walsh that they appreciate her business. Le Guernec is sitting next to Parker at the table, telling her about a scent angle he’s trying for another perfume project. Gavarry is next to him, smiling broadly.
Parker is the concept, the commercial idea around which this particular Coty venture is built. Walsh is there because Parker is there, and it is Parker’s aesthetic that’s guiding all of this, and her artistic vision of the juice is what will be sold. She’s central to the commercial idea, but then Parker’s only in the room because Walsh said yes to her. And everyone is aware of the various roles that are being played and of who ultimately signs the checks. A few months before, Parker, with Matthew Broderick, spotted Walsh at a glamorous black-tie event at the Plaza hotel. She grabbed Walsh by the arm and, somewhat to Walsh’s consternation, towed her around the room introducing her to everyone she could corral as “my boss.”
“Don’t forget the sushi,” says Ross. Parker looks around, exclaims, “There it is!” There’s a table overflowing with cookies, drinks, salad, cheeses, fresh fruit (New York delis do great fresh fruit). Some of us take plates, pick up tongs. Someone sets down a large bowl of popcorn. I put two pieces of maguro on my plate. “And it’s the good stuff,” says Timiraos, who is right behind me with a plate. (It is, indeed, the expensive stuff. We try to look like we’re not wolfing it down.)
We reassemble at the table. People are chopsticking up pieces of raw clam and rice, the IFF contingent is organizing notes, and Walsh and Parker avidly discuss Parker’s recent appearance on Oprah’s once-a-year Favorite Things show. “It’s the things that get her through the day,” Parker says, “from the necessary to the completely indulgent, soaps to slippers to TiVo. Last year,” she adds, the audience “was all teachers.”
“This year it was all Katrina workers,” says Walsh.
“And she picks one of her favorite things and gives it to everyone in the audience,” says Parker. “And she picked Lovely!” The big deal with Oprah is if she’ll say the name of the product, and Parker tells us about her best friend, Jill, who called her and said (she puts on a thick New York accent), “Dijya see it?! Dijya see it?! If she said it once, she said it foive toimes!”
“She asked me afterward,” says Walsh to the room, of Parker, “how it had gone, and I told her that if Oprah had simply said Sarah Jessica had a new fragrance, I’d have been happy. The fact that Oprah, who doesn’t wear fragrance, said this is her favorite scent, and that she wears it, is amazing!”
This happened days ago, and they’re still elated.
It’s Parker who claps the meeting to order. “OK! What are we doing today?”
There’s a three-part agenda. First, a “what’s this new product going to be about” discussion combined with a business update on the state of the brand. Second, a crash course for Parker in cosmetic chemistry; after years in the industry Walsh and Timiraos generally know stearic acid from propylparaben, but Parker does not, and as they’re going to be creating a perfume product (they’ll be determining what kind) in a rather unusual base, they want her to be comfortable with propylparaben as well. Third is giving Parker a little course in Perfumery 101.
Walsh sits forward, and the room turns to her. “I think it’s important to go over what we were trying to do when we created the Sarah Jessica Parker brand,” she begins. “That this scent would not be created like other celebrity fragrances. We [at Coty] were the masters, the starters of the celebrity fragrances.” She looks in turn at each person. “We learned that with other celebrities you have to launch something every three months. But here we wanted something that was the opposite of what people had seen in Sex and the City.” Parker is watching Walsh attentively. “Sarah Jessica was provocative in that series. Here with her fragrance, it’s different. We wanted her perfume to possess a sense of quiet. An understated elegance.”
Parker says, “A trust in the audience. That assumes, as good television does, that they’re smart.”
Ross and Le Guernec are taking notes.
Walsh puts the first big point on the table. “What we’re doing today is not”—she stresses the not—”coming back next fall with a Sarah Jessica Parker flanker.”
Flanker is the industry term for a new version of an existing perfume. Polo is a hit; Ralph Lauren puts out Polo Blue. Privately the perfume industry views flankers the way the movie industry views sequels; like later Star Wars episodes, they enjoy rather lesser reputations. Financially, however, they have a logic, though sometimes the flanker happens because the original was a success, sometimes because it was a failure: Chanel did Egoïste, which disappointed, but having invested so heavily in the name, it did Egoïste Platinum, which succeeded. Often flankers are dictated by the investment in the name. Yves Saint Laurent poured a river of money into launching M7 (the name stands for “the seventh YSL masculine”), created by the star perfumers Alberto Morillas and Jacques Cavallier of Firmenich. M7 smells like a Fiat engine engulfed in flame on a shoulder of the A6, an alarming chemical storm of burned rubber, charred metal, torched leather, and toxic melting polycarbon. This is not necessarily a criticism: It was a well constructed, thoughtfully built scorched car in flames. But people stayed away by the million, and the scent was a disaster. YSL allowed some time to go by, then launched the M7 flanker, M7 Fresh. M7 Fresh, also by Morillas and Cavallier, is an excellently constructed light smoke scent, relieved of the flame-thrower death smell, mesmerizingly delightful and in all ways better than the original. (It too failed to sell, however, and Yves Saint Laurent has now, in the best Argentine manner, quietly disappeared both scents.)
Flankers are supposed to be variations on a common theme, but the only thing Eternity and its flankers have in common are the ad dollars Calvin Klein marketers spent on imbedding that name in people’s neurons. Dior is king of the flankers with its Poison franchise. Poison of 1985 was followed by Tendre Poison, Hypnotique Poison, Pure Poison, and, in 2007, Midnight Poison. I once asked a Dior exec, What is the commonality between the Poisons? “None,” he said. “None! Well —he reconsidered it—”all have white flowers,” and then he listed the flowers, which bore no similarities. I said, In other words, none.
He said, “Correct.”
Flankers differ from seasonals in that flankers are permanent (that is, they’re allowed to live as long as they sell) additions to the house’s collection, whereas seasonals have death sentences built into their designated life spans. (Seasonals are mostly issued for summer and are basically excuses for the house to bring out lighter, more commercial perfumes.) Escada is the king of seasonals. P&G, Es-cada’s licensee, terminated Ibiza Hippie, a summer seasonal with a flanker-sounding name. It was a terrific little commercial jewel, and deleting it was a minor crime.
Walsh wants Sarah Jessica Parker’s Lovely to be what Parker wants it to be: a classic, a serious, elegant perfume for adults. The dilemma is that they also want to put out a new product that reincarnates Lovely, this perfume they’ve worked so hard on, and to the market, that says flanker, but Walsh is determined somehow to produce a sequel that is an original at the same time. She is saying to them that they are going to walk this tightrope, and they’re going to walk it successfully. The question is how. “We want an initiative other than a flanker,” says Walsh. She emphasizes the words, looking at each of them, and the table is rapt. “This product we start working on today is not about changing Lovely in any way. This is about using Lovely to give the customer something different. It will have the same olfactive heart of Lovely, but it’s going to have to be big enough and strong enough to stand entirely on its own. We have nice ancillaries in the line. This has to be perceived by the customer as just as important as the first launch [of the perfume], yet keeping the fundamentals of the scent.”
She pauses. “Remember that Sarah Jessica created her scent from scratch, from components in her head, with a very particular vision, a scent that smelled of skin, and there’s something in your concoction—and I use that word as lovingly as possible—of those three elements that is far from what we put in that bottle. That something is what we’re going to find today. That something is our product.” That, in short, is why this thing they’re starting right now will stand on its own. The same perfume, but with a different aspect of its soul made visible.
She turns to Parker. “Remember how you said it was too dirty, so we flowered it up, and you said it was too flowery.”
They both laugh.
Parker: “Too chaste.”
Walsh: “Too fat.”
Parker: “Oh, god!”
Walsh: “And we got to something that is so clearly you and so clearly your vision but that simply worked better as your first scent. Better for your audience.”
Parker nods.
Walsh: “But still there’s something you’re not getting out of this scent.”
“Something,” Parker turns to me and carefully stipulates, “that we agreed not to get. Knowingly not getting it. There was a certain fattiness that brought down the higher notes and a bit of dirtiness. And honestly”—she turns to them now—”I don’t think that would have been right.”
Walsh says to me: “Think of it this way, Chandler. The component of Sarah Jessica’s original concept that carried the most character was the African oil, which brought the fattiness, the human skin; the other two things brought smoke-plus-dirt and, then, the girl.” To Parker: “When you lose that oil, you just lose that skin aspect.”
Parker: “The perfume just gets higher!”
Timiraos says to the room, “We felt that African oil was the best starting point for this reinterpretation of her fragrance.”
“So let’s not take our eye off Lovely,” says Walsh to everyone. “Let’s return to our original story but create something technologically that went missing with that original oil. Because it’s Sarah Jessica, we’re going to be launching at the busiest time of the year, but this project can’t be ‘Here’s a nice little gesture.’ It has to be a big idea. Not an ancillary or a soft launch. We are totally trying to do something that the market is not doing. We presented this to Michele [Scannavini, president worldwide of Coty Prestige] and Bernd [Beetz, CEO of Coty, Inc.], and they’re totally behind it.”
Walsh pauses. Everyone is listening intently. “Great,” says Parker, focused on Walsh.
They formally start the business report on Lovely.
“We picked one brand we want to make our ‘classic,’”says Walsh with an eye on Timiraos, “and it’s this brand. Now, we did something very smart with the launch in the market phasing-in.” She means the delicate and complex strategy of choosing media markets and placing ads carefully in specific retail spaces to benefit the product. “Most people come out with everything immediately, all the ads, print, broadcast, editorial. Launch hysteria. The perfume goes to number one, and then there’s no more marketing support behind it, and you watch it peter out. That’s exactly what we didn’t want to do with Sarah Jessica. We had a very interesting phasing to Lovely. We launched in September 2005. Now it’s late November, and it’s almost like we’re still launching.”
Parker says to me, “We haven’t even launched the on-air yet.” I say, Really? I’m pretty surprised; I have the distinct impression of having seen the broadcast ad. She shakes her head, says, “Yeah, those of us who live in New York think we’ve seen it”—the Lovely ad images were, for example, two stories high on Lord & Taylor on Fifth Avenue—”but we haven’t.”
Timiraos: “We didn’t play all our cards up front.” He grins. “I have to say, there were moments in the beginning when we were starting to doubt ourselves.” Parker laughs. “I never told you that,” he says to her. “I remember some calls to Catherine, ‘Did we do the right thing pacing the launch like this?’”
Parker says to Walsh, laughing, “All on those tiny narrow shoulders!”
Walsh shrugs her narrow shoulders. “You have to stand behind your work. The specialty stores were no problem, but we got a significant amount of resistance from the department stores.”
Walsh also has to manage international markets, and with Parker’s perfume, she tells me later, she’d had to do some smart managing “because Asia [that is, Coty’s various Asian distributors] came to us and said, ‘We’d really like to launch this perfume, but it might not suit Asians so we want to do a gentle launch.’ Carlos and I said, ‘Thanks, but in that case you’re not getting the product. You launch it, or no.’ As of June ‘06 we’re in Singapore and Hong Kong and doing very well, but we’re not in Japan.” (Coty has business partners in each market around the world, affiliates and business units, and the partners make the decision on how to invest and what products to support. Their money can come from them and/or from Coty, the parent, but each country is independent.)
They talk about the skin aspect of the scent. Yvette Ross, IFF’s senior account executive, says, “I tell you, Sarah Jessica, there are people here used for skin, people we reserve to test the smell of perfumes on skin—”
Parker: “That’s so amazing!”
“—and your perfume worked beautifully on them.”
Parker: “That’s great to hear. It’s not unlike what I do for a living. Whatever is formulaic is always what gets copied. It’s the remake, it’s the endless imitation of, because that’s what people feel safe with. If a department store wants that, I understand. So the thing that makes us doubt—the risk at doing something novel, at not being formulaic—that’s exactly what we really want to do.”
“Which is why we made the marketing for Lovely different,” says Carlos Timiraos. He explains that Belinda Arnold spent months with Ina Treciokas, SJP’s press rep, figuring out exactly “where they’d be,” as they phrased it (they meant what stores their visuals would appear in, in which publications their ads would appear, their overall presence) and how to get themselves into the places they wanted to be. “We held back on some PR at first. We paced ourselves.” Gradually they opened up a huge and very expensive campaign, but Coty carefully chose their media partners. “We had an exclusive with Vogue, that was great, and people are still talking about it, then Us Weekly.” He realizes, asks Parker, “Have you seen the letters to the editor?”
Parker: “No!”
Timiraos: “I’ll show them to you.”
Walsh gets up and presents Parker a bestseller chart of numbers from NPD, the perfume industry’s Billboard. “We’re in stage five [of the launch], and we still have several phases to go. Nordstrom really appreciated the scent.” (Due to its prestige, Walsh gave Nordstrom a “soft launch” exclusive on Lovely for the month of July 2005.) “But Nordstrom doesn’t do a lot of theater.” She means that unlike Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s, Nordstrom doesn’t do large visual displays. “Now,” says Walsh, and Parker’s BlackBerry goes off, her ring a series of gentle bells. Parker grabs it and says, “Sorry!” hits the buttons, and the ringing stops. Walsh points at the monthly figures. “Now these are from the fourth week in July till the third week in October.” (Lovely’s fiscal year as a brand coincides with Coty’s fiscal year, which starts July 1.) She points at the figures as she goes; Parker is absorbed. “We were $550,000 [sales] per week here, then $625,000. Then we dipped and you did personal appearances, and see where it went? Then we go up to an $800,000 week when we go on Oprah.”
Parker asks about a few details. She looks at once encouraged and unnerved, calm but wondering, it seems, where the bad news is. “The figures are great,” says Walsh reassuringly, reading her. Walsh is solid, professional.
“They’re great,” Timiraos says to Parker from the other side of the table. (She looks toward him, back to the figures.) “It’s not about launching big, it’s about staying there, and we’ve stayed top ten, in this environment, through launches from JLo and Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein, and we’re still there, and it’s amazing.” He grins, but says seriously, “And we worry about every sale.”
Parker faces Timiraos and says, urgently, anxiously, “And I worry about every sale! God, I worry!” She leans across the table as she says it.
Timiraos: “We’ve taken our net sales plan [the forecasts of what they’ll sell based on sales trends] up almost fifty percent!”
This is the result of a huge amount of planning worked out and bets placed. Walsh and Timiraos spend a significant portion of their time and talents calculating marketing variables, generally conferring with Parker only on the most complete issues of how to place the brand. They decide when to ship, how many units. They started with a projection that the Sarah Jessica Parker perfume brand would be a $30-million brand in Coty’s annual sales at wholesale prices. (Retailers generally do a 40 percent markup; that is, if Coty wholesales $30 million in bottles of Parker’s perfume to Saks, Saks will sell them for $42 million.)
Then they started pouring in money. “As the licensee, to make a perfume you actually build machinery, you build tools and molds, which costs hundreds of thousands of dollars,” Timiraos would say to me separately in his office. “On a short lead time, which we had—once we signed the deal, we got her scent to market very fast—you sometimes have to purchase perfumery raw materials before the testing on them is complete, so if they don’t pass the toxicity and R&D testing—and thankfully all of ours did—that’s a huge risk you take. You’d have to redraw your formula. We really moved at light speed. And there’s a huge opportunity cost; if you choose the wrong celebrity, you’ll burn millions of dollars for no return, so you have to be very careful. The launch will cost you two to three million dollars at a minimum, then annual advertising and marketing costs tens of millions. The first few years you’re just putting in millions and millions.” He stopped and sort of rolled his eyes and sort of smiled. “You know,” he said, looking directly at me, “in the end? It’s all a big crapshoot. Do all the research you want, until your opening weekend grosses? None of it matters.”
In the IFF meeting, Walsh reminds everyone that they started with an estimate of $30 million in sales annually. They soon discovered this was wrong. “Quarterly,” Walsh says, “Carlos and I sit down and say, ‘OK, what’s the status of business today? How are our markets?’ and then revise our forecast. By the first quarterly review we already had to revise upward our projection for the end of the year. It has now gone up to $46 million.” (Four months later, Timiraos will tell me that it had grown again to well over a $60-million gross.)
“Wonderful,” says Ross, congratulating Parker.
Walsh: “And we haven’t gotten through Christmas.” Everyone is smiling. Walsh and Timiraos are happy, but Parker seems mostly relieved, palpably so.
Change of gears. Walsh now shows Parker the NPDs for the first time. The List of the top hundred best-selling perfumes on the market by week, month, and year. Parker is fascinated. Walsh tells her that Hess, her agent, has been getting the NPDs and, ever protective, first gives her some caveats: The List is manipulated in all sorts of ways and for all sorts of reasons. For example, spiffing. (“Spiffing,” says Parker, looking at the columns of perfumes and the columns of rankings and of retail sales.) Walsh explains “spiffing,” a marketing strategy that is, in essence, payola. It goes like this. The store manager tells the BAs (the beauty associates, the sellers that Coty in this case pays per hour to stand on the floor of Macy’s and push the product) that today, they’ll get another five dollars for every bottle they sell. More bottles are sold, so volume increases, but spiffing takes money away from Coty—and Parker, if she’s being paid in a percentage of sales—with each sale.
And the List accounts for less than all sales. No one can be sure, because of the way data is collected, exactly how much of the total it represents. (At the time of this meeting, Nordstrom and Nieman Marcus, for example, didn’t report to NPD.) “Still,” says Walsh, “this is 1800 doors.” (A “door” is a point of sale, or store.) She points at a column. “This is the month of October.” She indicates gray boxes. “What’s in gray is what’s sold at the fragrance bar, meaning you have your six feet of space at Bloomingdale’s, Donna Karan has her six feet.” (She looks up to stipulate, “We do not own the person behind the bar.” That person is the employee of Bloomingdale’s. She looks back at the figures.)
“The white areas here are what the industry classes as the cosmetic brands—the Cliniques, the Lancômes. We don’t use those numbers for comparison purposes, for making our List. We want to compare apples with apples, so we remove the cosmetics numbers and only use sales at the fragrance bar.” (Coty is not alone in doing this; most of the licensors pick and choose their comparison methods, which is, unofficially of course, done strictly to make their numbers look better.)
“OK,” says Walsh, “so here we are. Number one is Calvin Klein’s Euphoria. Number two is Be Delicious by Donna Karan.”
Parker: “Oh, that’s Trey Laird!” Laird had also done the Donna Karan design and campaign.
“Number three,” says Walsh, “is Britney. Number four is Chanel No. 5. And the top-five perfume is … you!”
Parker looks elated for an instant, then suddenly sardonic. She says with a tough New York accent, “Chanel 5, kickin’ my ass.”
Walsh: “You’re crazy!”
Parker rolls her eyes. “I’m kidding, I’m kidding!”
Walsh: “No, really, look at the difference between you and No. 5, it’s $200,000.” Virtually nothing.
Parker: “Wow. OK. Cool! Wait, who’s nipping at my heels?”
Walsh: “Clinique Aromatics Elixir.”
Parker shrugs, very macho: “Eeeeh, no problem.” She eyes the list, going down it. Grimly: “Hm, Paris Hilton.”
Timiraos: “This is where the spiffs really make a difference ‘cause if Donna Karan is spiffing, the girl’s gonna sell Donna Karan.”
There’s a sound at the glass door. Steve Semoff, IFF’s vice president for technical services, North America, puts his head into the room. Walsh looks at her watch; he’s right on time. “Five minutes,” she says. Part 1 is finished; they’ll start Part 2 after the restroom-and-sushi break. People get up, stretch. Investigate the popcorn bowl. Walsh and Parker catch up a bit.
One time I saw Parker, she’d just gotten back from Los Angeles filming The Family Stone. It was the first studio feature by a young director named Thomas Bezucha, and when I asked her about him she said emphatically, “He’s the best director I’ve ever worked with, and I’d do anything he asked me to.” I found it so startlingly categoric, given all the other directors she’s worked with, that I asked her if that remark was on the record. She assured me it was.
I went to see the movie at the AMC Empire 25 on Forty-second Street and Eighth Avenue, then called Bezucha’s agent, who, like Parker’s, was at CAA. Bezucha, when he called me a few days later from LA, turned out to be startlingly nice and low-key. He talked about the way people in Parker’s position live in “another reality,” he said, “in which every element revolves around that one single point, and I always find with Sarah Jessica that the way she spins her universe, she always works double time to make you the center. I find her very deflective of attention. There is a very, very well-mannered and precisely polite personality. But she’s also the person you want to be sitting next to in the bleachers at the pep rally, talking about the other students. There was a girl in my seventh-grade French class, Lucy Luddy, and we always had to be separated. I feel that way about her.
“My entry into her world was unusual in that I don’t have a television, and I’d never seen Sex and the City when I met her. I was a fan from film. She and I met when I was in New York casting one of the first incarnations of The Family Stone. They’d stationed me at the bar of the Soho Grand, and I felt like I was hosting my own TV show because it was a different star every thirty minutes. She was my last meeting, and it was 5:30 P.M.; this was the week before Christmas, the first Christmas after 9/11. The bar had been empty all day, and suddenly—I told her this story once, in the back of the car on the way to the movie’s premiere—it was full of people after work. She walks in. In New York, the celebrity thing is funny: You’re never, ever supposed to notice, and nobody turned around, but everybody froze. She came over and shook my hand, introduced herself, and it was really interesting to me—there’d been a lot of celebrities, and it wasn’t, actually, that she was a famous actress; it was like the essence of all of New York’s best qualities, its style, its wit, its elegance, was in the room. It didn’t feel as much like people wanted to take her picture as that they wanted to salute.”
He talked about working with her, which was, he said, “so easy. This is only the second film I’ve done. She’s very offhand about her work. ‘Oh, I just do what I do.’ Which is so obscuring of what she is. You make the smallest suggestion, and she will make that adjustment, and she’ll do it, perfectly, till you give another direction. She’s a calibrated technician, in the very best sense. She was so protective of that script and of me. Luke [Wilson] is so—he just feels his way, freewheeling. She was precise, completely prepared. The boys had ad-libbed a few things. When Craig [T. Nelson] says sexual orientation is like handedness, Luke ad-libbed his reaction, and in the charade scene, Dermot [Mulroney] and Luke ad-libbed with each other. And then, in the scene where Sarah Jessica is trying to pick mushrooms out of the dish she’d made? And the viewer knows that Dermot’s character is allergic to mushrooms? That scene was just supposed to end with the line ‘Are those mushrooms?’ And Luke says the line, and suddenly she screamed, ‘I didn’t know!’ You can actually see Luke laughing in the shot. That’s when I fell flat in love with her. She’d finally felt comfortable enough to create on her own terms, and when she did, it was what made the scene.
“The dark hair was one of her conscious things. She really didn’t want to be Carrie [her character from Sex and the City]. I’d assumed she’d be blond. She decided to be darker. People assume we talked about it. We didn’t. She created her character. I did want her hair up, and I wanted the movie to open on the knot on the back of her head, and she’d be in a gray Kim Novak suit. We sat down to talk about the opening, and she said, ‘OK, I’m thinking of wearing my hair up,’ and I’m like, ‘Uh huh.’ And she says, ‘And a gray suit?’ And I’m like, ‘Uh huh.’ And that was it.
“She had to deliver a line once, in a car, to Luke, a single word: what. She did it, and I told her, ‘OK, here’s what you’re feeling. Now put that in.’ And the next take, the what had totally transformed.” He paused to remember the word, the way she’d said it. “It was perfect,” he said.
People arrive back precisely on time.
They’re in the second phase of the meeting, the beginning of the discussion of the new product: What version of Lovely will they make and how will they make it. Development starts now.
“OK,” says Ross when everyone is sitting, “this is what Steve calls Cosmetic Chemistry 101.” On cue, Semoff enters. He is a very tall man, massive, with thick, dark hair, the slow, deliberate movements of a professor, and an ironic, bone-dry wit, all of which gives him the demeanor of a sardonic, slightly sleepy Jewish grizzly bear. He deals with the technical aspects of products IFF manufactures and knows butylene glycol from sodium laureth sulfosuccinate and so is here to teach Parker about various possibilities for the new Lovely product—what gels, silicones, or oils, what serums they might use, the perfum-able bases available on the market.
From the various materials Semoff will show Parker, she, Walsh, and Timiraos will choose the ones they want for the new Lovely-scented product. Semoff sits next to Parker at the large oval table, and she scrunches over for him.
“So this,” says Ross, basically meaning Semoff, “this is, ‘Now that we’re making your next one, how do we do it?’ What does ‘emolliency’ mean and so on.” Semoff blinks sleepily. Mr. Emolliency.
Parker says to everyone, “So that I can be clear: This is about skin, skin, skin. Yes?” She means their working idea for the product: something that will work particularly well on, or render silken, or beautify (they’re not sure what it will be yet) skin.
Walsh nods. “This is the first meeting so we can have the same vocabulary.”
“You’re a consumer,” Semoff says to Parker, eyeing her skeptically as if he wasn’t quite sure it was true. “So you know what you like. Fine. But the thing we’re talking about here is how do you communicate that to the guys in the white coats.” He pauses, adds dourly, “So they can tell you you can’t have it.”
Parker, daintily: “Ah. Great. I look forward to that.”
Semoff starts his PowerPoint presentation. “This product of yours. You’ve got five choices.” Everyone looks at the screen. “You can only have a liquid, a gel—like a shampoo—a solid—like a candle—a semisolid—say, a very heavy cream—or a powder. And you will have to marry it to packaging: Again, you have a choice of a bottle or a jar, a squeeze package, a pump, a spray, an aerosol, a dropper, a stick, a roll-on, or a wipe.”
Parker asks him about the difference between a spray and an aerosol. Semoff explains that a spray is a natural pump, no propellant, the fragrance atomized through the pump mechanism, whereas an aerosol uses a propellant, a liquified natural gas under pressure, usually a hydrocarbon blend of isobutane and propane. The industry uses a fragrance grade that’s odorless and tasteless. She nods fast; “Got it, got it.” Moving on.
Walsh: “So we’ve got to choose from this.”
Appearance, Form, and Format, says Semoff, and you marry the three. For example (he glances at Parker to make sure she’s with him), a clear liquid in a pump spray. The appearance is “clear,” the form is “liquid,” and format is “pump spray”—basically this is about packaging. You want to create a serum scented with Lovely? You might choose translucent plus gel plus dropper. Or you can have a pearlescent powder in a stick.
There are several bases they could do:
Lipophilic base (oil system);
Hydrophilic base (water-based system);
HLB blend (an emulsion system that blends the two).
Semoff then explains that emulsion means two insoluble phases residing side by side on a molecular level, one phase continuous, the other phase discontinuous. Oil mixed into water (O/W) or water mixed into oil (W/O). O/W is water is a continuous phase, says Semoff, water as the primary player, and those are lighter. Noxzema Cold Cream is W/O, water mixed into oil.
“Noxzema!” says Parker, grinning. “Crazy!”
Ross prompts Semoff: “Salad dressing.”
Oil and vinegar, says Semoff. Two incompatible materials that are mixed on a molecular level will separate. The oil will be suspended in water, but only for a few moments. Emulsion simply means a permanent suspension. It’s easy, you just put in waxes, or perhaps fatty acids. “Add the tiniest bit of mustard,” says Semoff, “and the oil and vinegar will be emulsified; they’ll mix permanently. Mustard is an emulsifier.” He pauses for a moment of thought. “Probably the starch in it,” he murmurs. “Most skin-care products,” he says, “are delivered as an emulsion, an oil in water brought together in a single product. Like salad dressing.”
Next PowerPoint. Basic Cosmetic Definitions. Semoff begins with emolliency: Something that applies slip to the skin, can be oil or water based. Dry feel. Gloss. Spreading. Substantivity. He reaches around and out of the air brings out a bottle of Lubriderm, slaps it down in front of Parker. “Classic greasy.” He puts a bottle of Clinique M Lotion on the table: Dry feel. I comment that I really like M Lotion, it’s been around for years, and it’s still just about the best thing you can buy, effective, no grease, works fast, even during New York City winters that just suck the moisture out of your skin. Parker replies, in good didactic form, “What’s the best way to moisturize your hands? Soak them in water for half an hour, then—without drying them—lather on Vaseline and wrap them in Saran Wrap.” She adds with a loud whisper, “And that’s free tap water.” Semoff nods rabbinically: This is truth. Sarah Jessica jumps up to get a cookie, turns back to whisper to me, “Don’t tell anyone!” A few people take advantage of her lead and stock up. She adds fruit and popcorn to the cookie. People sit back down.
Semoff starts the next phase: Key Cosmetic Components. “The key ingredient in everything is water, usually about seventy-five percent. There’s a little water in Lovely—”
Parker: “In the perfume.”
Semoff:“—in the perfume, because it controls the volatility. If it were pure alcohol, it would flash right off the skin and take some of the fragrance with it. It’s also in there for accordance with the VOC—Volatile Organic Compound laws of California—laws about the max percentage of volatile products.”
Semoff tells Parker about humectants, hydrophilic materials that attract water. He selects glycerine and propylene glycol. “They’re put in for feel and to attract moisture. If you’re in Tucson, you don’t want too much of these because they’re moisture magnets, and if the humidity in the air isn’t high enough they can also pull moisture out of your skin. In Atlanta in July you have no problem.”
There is a game being played here that is kept tacit, though every player, except Parker—they have no need to bother her with these sorts of details—knows it’s going on. IFF makes its money by manufacturing Lovely and selling it to Coty. Parker’s new product is going to be imbedding the scent in a base much more complex—and much more expensive—than the simple alcohol in which perfume is normally served up. IFF’s “core competency” is fragrance creation and simple liquid blending and Coty has its own quite competent makeup and skin-care formulators, so IFF won’t be making the base. Although Semoff is IFF, and though he’s showing Parker these bases made with IFF products, IFF knows that Coty will be creating the base. And Coty knows that Coty will be creating the base. In fact Coty quietly told IFF before the meeting, “Don’t show Sarah Jessica anything that we couldn’t make or that’s outside the Coty competencies.” “Because,” as Semoff will explain in his office a few weeks later in his usual straightforward style, “then Coty’d have to buy it from us. And that ain’t gonna happen.”
The creation of bases is a fine science. It’s possible to create a shower gel that would “enhance fragrance performance”—show off the scent, in plain language. It will foam and clean, too, but the problem is the surfactants. You need to add surfactants to the base—they give you foam, a nice skin feel, and mildness; they’re called betaines—but betaines can cause problems if you’re not careful: If your base is alkaline, they’ll release free amines (compounds with nitrogen in them) that will smell like fish. (Nitrogens in amine form smell fishy.) The fish smell flashes off quickly, but it’s going to wreak havoc with your fragrance’s top notes. No one wants jasmine + flounder. “One thing Coty R&D does well,” says Semoff, “is create a base that has almost no odor, smells clean. This is why it takes six to eight months to create a product that’s ready for prime time.”
Semoff talks about “film ingredients,” molecules that create a film to allow the wearer to remember the product is there. “Specialty ingredients and fragrance,” he says, “these are really what the product is all about. So”—he starts reaching for vials of molecules and gels in lines in front of him—”we’re going to look at some things.” He assesses Parker. “You got skin?” She grins back at him, nods. “Let’s play.” Parker moves her chair over to his and happily holds out her arms, wrists up, as if for a phlebotomist.
Semoff starts by showing her a product similar to Chanel Elixir, except that IFF has put Lovely in it so it smells of Parker’s perfume. Basically, says Semoff, this is Lovely thickened with hydroxypropyl cellulose.
Parker: “I like it, but it’s been done in Chanel Elixir, and it has a coldness to it.”
Semoff shows her a different concept, a rollerball that administers a liquid that could, he notes, also be sprayable—lower viscosity. She tries it, puts it on me, rubs it on her arm, says, “Mm …” a bit darkly. Too greasy.
Semoff hands her a silicone substantivity polymer in alcohol. “Here’s a silicone formula,” he says. “It’s called Silicone Polymer 1401.” Parker rubs it, smells it. Her eyes fix vaguely on some point where the glass walls meet the ceiling; she’s focusing on the feel of her skin. She says, “Mm,” but very differently; she’s got a faint smile at the feel of this.
“Mineral oil,” chants Semoff, “petrolatum, esters, humectants.”
Parker snaps into verbal analytical mode. “There are several things I like about the Silicone 1401,” she begins. “One is that it’s new. Second, that a little goes a long way. Third, is that it really lasts. See? Here it is.” She touches the spot on her arm.
Semoff: “You can feel it.”
Parker: “I can. Right here.”
Semoff: “It’s been used very successfully in hair care, but no one has really embraced this ingredient full bore for skin care.” Parker puts some on her fingers and rubs it into her long wavy hair.
Semoff: “You can push it in terms of the skin feel, the texture, the imagery you’re trying to create. Most people are pushing it in terms of skin protection—that’s the heavier silicone polymers, dimethecone and phenyl trimethecone.”
Walsh: “Whereas this is really about the scent.”
Semoff: “It’s really a way of delivering scent that no one’s ever done.” He looks around, blinks owlishly behind his glasses. “And that’s it.” Presentation finished. Everyone applauds.
Parker: “Wow. And you have no idea how good you are, making me focus on chemistry. My high school chem career”—she gives a bleak look —”not good.”
Semoff: “I started in the perfume industry washing beakers in the lab.”
Parker: “And when you say ‘beaker’ to me, it brings back a flood of bad memories.”
Walsh says intently to Parker, “We love the idea of silicones—we simply want to create a package that will not read ‘ancillary’ and not ‘traditional perfume’ either because the consumer mustn’t be surprised.”
They talk about glass rods versus a dropper versus a stick. “A glass rod might be really pretty,” says Parker, considering it.
Walsh: “Whatever ideas we come up with we’ll pass on to Chad [Lavigne, the packaging designer].”
Parker: “How about etching?” She means on the bottle. “Is that terribly expensive?”
Timiraos: “Actually that’s not so expensive, and”—he glances at Walsh; he likes the idea—”I think it’s a good way to get across to the client the feeling of skin.”
Semoff: “What you could do is create a product where you increase the viscosity so that it falls right in the middle, between perfume in alcohol and a gel.”
Walsh says to him, “Anything that you can think of that relates to skin is where we want to go; that’s what makes the story unique.” She pauses. “We can put things in it.” She’s not really sure she should bring this up.
Parker opens her eyes wide. She says in a thick European accent, “Flecks of Svvvvaroffski crrrystals!” spreads her fingers, and wipes the hand across the space in front of her: ta da. She says to Walsh, “Like back in the day, 1970s—how sparkly we all were. Ohmygod, I don’t even like to remember!”
Walsh: “The white eyeshadow that was so reflective!”
They’re laughing hysterically. Parker says, “I’m amazed we didn’t accidentally blind drivers.” She pretends to slouch along a street, turns like a supermodel, and blinds an imaginary car.
Meeting’s over. Everyone starts gathering papers, getting up. Walsh suddenly realizes: They haven’t had time to get to Perfumery 101. She shrugs. Next meeting.