THE WRITER TAD Friend nailed it in his “Notes on the Death of the Celebrity Profile.” He opened this way.
Exhibit A. A few years ago I had a brief and mutually unsatisfactory conversation with one Charlotte Parker, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s PR flack at the time. I had just met Arnold while reporting a Planet Hollywood story for Esquire when Parker drew me aside: “We’d like to get Arnold on Esquire’s cover,” she said. “He’s been everywhere else.”
“Oh?”
“How much time with him would you need?” Parker asked. “Half an hour? Forty-five minutes?”
“Well, if I were going to do it, I’d want to hang around over a few days,” I said, rather stiffly.
“Oh, God,” she said disgustedly, “this wouldn’t be one of those profiles where you try to figure him out, would it?”
Exhibit B. Us magazine, December 1997.
Us: “What [do] you loathe about yourself?”
Richard Gere: [Laughs darkly] “You are someone I met ten minutes ago, and now you want to get into the deep, dark questions about my being?”
Friend more or less pinpoints the way I felt going in. The conventions and clichés of standard fashion journalism (perfume is treated as fashion; I don’t make the rules) are toxic. Reporting on scent is akin to a rocket’s launching: You expend your greatest energy fighting free of the public relations muck. Once that’s done, if you actually find any substance, the real work is (comparatively) weightless.
With Sarah Jessica Parker, the process was compounded, it seemed to me, by the question of how the hell one was supposed to get anything real out of a celebrity. To make it worse, Belinda Arnold had sent me a press release. Perfume industry press releases are like the dark matter of the universe. No one can actually see them; no one reads them; they are recycled boilerplate vanishing even as they appear. Each one is built out of plastic predigested identical components on a fixed formula: The first sentence breathlessly announces the magnificent news, the next two give you “the wider picture,” the PR person writes quotes that she attributes to the corporate people, who OK them on their BlackBerries in airports, the thing is poured into a mold to set and, once dry, sprayed into the in-boxes and fax machines of a thousand journalists and editors, who dump them in their trash cans. (The exception being when the editor, lazy and/or craven, simply runs the release. This happens all the time.)
This press release was standard.
Contact:
Belinda Arnold
Lancaster Group US
Public Relations Director
212.389.7428
E-mail: belinda_arnold@cotyinc.com
COTY INC. PARTNERS WITH SARAH JESSICA PARKER TO DEVELOP AND MARKET FRAGRANCES
Agreement Marks the Actress’ Debut into the Beauty Industry
NEW YORK, February 8, 2005—Coty Inc., a leader in the beauty industry, announced today the signing of a global licensing agreement with Sarah Jessica Parker to develop and market a line of fragrances …
And so on. The partnership was the “first entrance” by the internationally known actress into fragrance. It would be designed to reflect the talent, style, and confidence “of which she has become a symbol.”
The fake quotes were carefully predictable. In PR, the star is always thrilled, and so that was what they had her say. “‘The creative energy and dedication of the Lancaster Group is exactly what I am looking for in a beauty partner,’ said Sarah Jessica Parker. ‘Their admiration and passion for their brands is what I was impressed by, and I look forward to working closely with [them] to bring my first fragrance to the market.’”The standard manufactured quote from Coty’s CEO Bernd Beetz (Parker’s “qualities and values make her a global icon”) and then, aiming squarely at Wall Street and the stock analysts, a plug for Coty, how the new partnership was “yet another example of how we are able to succeed and build stellar brands … by moving faster, thinking more freely, and taking our ideas further.”
The quote they made up for Walsh was, naturally, designed to be more intimate. “‘We are delighted to add Sarah Jessica to our portfolio,’ said Catherine Walsh, SVP Marketing, Cosmetics and American Licenses.” There was the obligatory application of the words “iconic” and “excitement.” The press release is, quite literally, a form of poetry with its own imagery, conventions, and tropes. It is also an extremely professional execution of corporate policy. I once angered Carlos Timiraos by writing something in The New Yorker about a soulless Kenneth Cole perfume, and Timiraos’s e-mail said, “I’m very upset about what you said about Kenneth Cole Black.” Not Black—it was Kenneth Cole Black. He carefully wrote out the full name of the perfume. These guys are always respectful of the designer, always careful with the brand, always on message.
The question is the degree to which you’re ever going to get something real. It wasn’t, incidentally, all that different with Ellena. He had boundaries and expectations, ego and moods, and we dealt with those in the usual way during the process. The logistics of covering the two of them were different, but the activity itself, ultimately, was not.
I had dinner one evening at Josie’s on Third Avenue with Melinda Relyea, Parker’s assistant, because we found we had a friend in common, Clay Floren, so the three of us got together. It wasn’t an interview about Parker, and I wasn’t taking notes, but Relyea turned out to be an interested observer of her situation. She commented at one point—she was speaking about her job—”No matter who we’re with, movie stars, producers, fans, whoever it is, Sarah Jessica never introduces me as her assistant. She says, ‘This is Melinda Relyea.’”It was significant to her, and she said so. It wasn’t, she said, that they never had tense moments. They did. “But at the end of the day it’s me and her in the airplane seats next to each other, going over whatever we need to go over, and she’s never, ever not made that work.”
I was, at every point, conscious of the care with which Parker managed her fame. I was riding my bike up Sixth Avenue after our first day spent together and turned right on Thirty-eighth, and she called me just to ask how did I think it had gone and was it OK? and wow, she was always so nervous about these things. I’m standing with my bike between my legs on West Thirty-eighth Street talking to her on my cell phone, and both of us know exactly what she’s doing: She’s taking care of The New York Times, and that’s fine, she should be. The fact that she’s being nice to me is analogous to any business transaction. It only feels stranger because the voice is so familiar, and because it’s all handled in personal terms. I was talking with her one day about TV—I’d been approached by a producer who wanted to make a television series with me about perfume—and she gave me some advice, mentioning a director who was doing an interesting television project. A friend of hers, she said. She added, “Sam Mendes.” I said something like, Sam Mendes, he’s great! She agreed. And then after a moment she added, “And he has a very beautiful wife.”
I actually only realized afterward that this was a tiny bit of management, the line she was supposed to say because she’s a careful professional; whether she believes it is beside the point. I knew Mendes was married to Kate Winslet, and Parker knew, even if I didn’t, that editors who edit the things written about her would ask the question: “Oh, she talked about Mendes? What did she say about Kate?” Parker had supplied the answer, one that conveyed the correct respect, was entirely appropriate, and of course revealed nothing about her. It made me feel funny, because I didn’t want her to feel obligated to say those things to me, but that was just my being naive.
As Tad wrote, you feel this weird obligation to figure her out. And she’s just not going to get into the deep, dark questions about her being, and yet at the same time I’ve had trenchant, indelible conversations with complete strangers on the 4/5 subway, people who’ve said things to me and I to them about those questions, things that I wouldn’t say to anyone who knew who I was or who I’d ever see again. Parker and I liked each other as much as any two people who meet professionally and get along, and even as we were doing our jobs, she said real things to me and I to her. We had one real and very intense argument for about ten minutes at Mary’s Fish Camp, a restaurant in the Village, and then consciously put it to rest. We talked, when we weren’t talking about the project, about things that mattered to us. She wasn’t going to waste that precious time if she could help it, and I wasn’t either. Everyone tries to enjoy their work and live their lives well, and this is what you think as you go through.
With Ellena it was a bit different inasmuch as he is more obviously guarded and careful than she is. And oddly he has, in a way, an even more highly developed sense of the correct presentation of his persona as perfumer to the public. But he also put that aside at other moments and was free and open. The normal fluctuations. With both of them I talked about politics, very frankly and off the record, and that was quite interesting. With both I talked about their careers.
I’m sure this business of my watching and revealing a year of their lives during these complex projects was as strange for both of them as it was for me. Ellena had an entire house trusting him on this hugely public journalistic project, a house in which he was moreover the new guy, and he had to shoulder the whole thing, not screw it up, make it work.
And Parker: She’s telling some guy she doesn’t know a story about a business venture she’s created, for which she’s responsible, one that involves hundreds of other people, their jobs, and millions of dollars of other people’s money, a project that uses her life and her tastes and her name, it’s her job to represent it. And she’s got to trust this guy to get it all right?
The second meeting at IFF takes place on January 13, 2006. They assemble again in the same conference room.
At this point, they’re actually not sure if they’re going to change the original Lovely scent in the new product. Walsh, Parker, and Timiraos have been toying with the idea of a new olfactory angle. Parker actually came up with the idea after the first meeting, describing it as “adding salt and pepper.” What and how remains vague.
What they want to create, Catherine Walsh reiterates to everyone at the large table, is an unflanker. If they change the scent, she says, you’ll still have to recognize Lovely. The question is how they might change it; that is, what does she like? (She glances toward Parker.)
“So today,” says Yvette Ross, the IFF account executive, taking the conversational ball smoothly from Walsh and moving into the session, “is about finding out what Sarah Jessica Parker likes.”
Parker opens her eyes wide and smiles. “Well!” she says, “that’s fun.”
Ross is handing out sheets of paper with olfactive categories printed on them. She’s going to be presenting scents to Parker, the project’s creative director, and getting her feedback. This is crucial to any perfume creation process in which the creative director’s vision, not the perfumer’s, rules, which is the case in 99 percent of perfumes on the market. (This is why Ellena’s creative role at Hermès as perfumer is so highly unusual. While Dubrule and Gautier are officially cocreative directors of Un Jardin sur le Nil and possess—if it comes to it—veto power, he operates both as perfumer and a first-among-equals creative director of his own perfumes.)
As Ross organizes her scents in the IFF conference room, the players are also conscious that there is an ulterior motive for this meeting, which is that whether or not they create a different version of Lovely for the new product, Coty and IFF both assume the SJP franchise will be launching another completely new Sarah Jessica Parker perfume. So today’s meeting will serve double duty, a creative meeting both for the Lovely product they’re working on today and for that future scent they all hope to start on soon.
Le Guernec and Gavarry have spent months working on scents to show Parker. They’ve created a few dozen, each a sort of olfactory diagnostic test, designed not so much to please her—or necessarily to become actual perfumes—but rather to give them calibrated soundings of her taste in smell.
The IFF marketers have grouped these into three categories. First is the somewhat cheesily named “Sarah’s Garden,” all floral scents; they’re perfectly aware Parker generally hates florals but want to run them by her; they also need to know what she dislikes. The next category is “Background Notes: Dark Animalic Incense” (which generally she loves) and then “Skin and Musks.” The clear glass vials of liquids are lined up in precise, neat rows, the stack of clean white paper touches like cardboard ammunition.
Ross begins loading, dipping the touches, but Parker is frowning, looking over the scents to come. She is as conscious of her primacy in creating the next perfume as she is of her lack of training. Each elixir represents a technical feat, a blend of molecules, that she herself would be incapable of creating. The two experts are before her, and she asks Le Guernec and Gavarry, “I’m curious”—she hesitates—”isn’t it important that these be notes that you like?” She glances at Walsh, who is watching her carefully. “Because can’t that somehow—you know, help you make it great?”
Le Guernec glances at Gavarry. He looks back at Parker. “We’ll make it great.”
They’re here to realize her vision, that’s their job, but it is a question that is virtually never asked of perfumers, and Le Guernec is authentically surprised, and touched. It goes to the heart of the debate among perfumers—when they talk to each other out of earshot of their clients—from the moment they enter the perfumery school to the moment of retirement: Are they artists with their own visions and aesthetics producing art, or are they hired artisans whose job is to be simply the amanuensis of the creatives and the marketing people?
Ross hands out heavy, gleaming new metal blotter clips that hold the slips of paper conveniently upright (“Wow,” says Parker, “you’re giving us those? You guys must be rolling in it!”), and the first of the battery of smells is launched. Its name is Sexy Potion. Gavarry created it.
Everyone smells it. Silence for a moment. “OK,” says Parker, “here’s what surprises me. It’s more powdery than something I’d have thought I’d like. I mean a 1940s talc. Which is strangely appealing. It’s literally milky. High dairy. For those lactose intolerant, this is not a fragrance for them. It’s cool. For what we’re going for, it would be good to add some complexity?”
She stops, looks at Ross. Ross has bent the tip of her blotter—the part she dipped—up. “Why did you bend it?”
Ross: “To make sure it doesn’t touch the table.”
Ross hands out Erotic Skin.
Parker: “It has the depth of great ambers. Erotic Skin. It’s definitely skin. I like the warmth of it. It’s not rough or unpretty.” She carefully bends up the blotter’s tip and places it so the tip doesn’t touch the table.
Walsh: “There should be a trend to go back to amber.”
Parker: “There’s an amber I love, which is Prada, it’s terrific—”
Le Guernec is electrified. “We did that … !” he says. By “we” he means IFF, and he points—it’s very sweet, he’s like a schoolboy, his finger moving eagerly—at Gavarry. It was Gavarry, along with two other IFF perfumers, his father Max and Carlos Benjamin, who created the Prada perfume.
Parker is surprised. “Wow! Great! Seriously! Well, what I think is brave about Prada is that it has sweet in a strange way, and it has so much depth. You feel stone. It’s not some feminine thing.” She really loathes anything typically feminine.
Nicolas Mirzayantz, IFF’s senior vice president for fine fragrances, an extremely tall and dynamic man with his trademark gigantic muttonchop sideburns, comes in and congratulates Parker on her success. “And you’re so much part of it!” he says.
“For better or worse!” says Parker.
They talk kids; their children go to the same school in Chelsea.
Walsh is still smelling the Erotic Skin. “I don’t know if this added to Lovely would get us where we want to go, but this is definitely where the market is going.”
Next is Elixir: Dark Amber. It’s powerful and shadowy with strange dark angles.
“Whoa!” says Parker. “Unbelievable!” She loves this darkness. She can’t get enough of it. Walsh pretends to panic; this is a resolutely noncommercial scent.
Ross (placatingly): “It’s just an indication of how far you can go.”
Walsh: “If Carlos were here”—Some heads turn, realizing Timiraos is not there; “He’s on vacation,” says Walsh—”he’d be kicking me under the table.”
“There’s real dry, musty attic in here,” I say.
Parker: “Yep.”
Walsh: “Damp.”
Parker: “Yes.”
Walsh: “This is so much more real than Sexy Potion.”
Parker: “This is so much more sophisticated.” Smells it, sighs, puts it down with regret. “That’s so neato.”
Ross: “Let’s take a quick break. The next ones are florals.”
Parker (with a smile, but firmly): “Which I tend to respond less well to.”
Ross (with a smile): “Uh huh.” Ross experienced Parker’s dislike of florals firsthand during the process of creating Lovely. “You said you liked Plum Blossom, so Laurent made one up.”
Parker’s down with that. She says, “Great!” She jumps up to get a water, turns, asks, “Anyone want anything?”
She comes back. Seeking to be amenable, she says, “You must have a hint of floral for commercial success.”
Le Guernec encourages this: “Everyone has a floral piece.”
Gavarry: “Even Prada has a floral.”
Parker (she’s not at all convinced but is trying): “Even Prada!”
Ross deals out scents as the perfumers track Parker’s expressions and movements like watchmen in a tower. This first accord is called White Bells.
Parker: “Whoa. Total lily of the valley. It gets a little”—(she’s smelling it)—”chaste for me. Churchy.”
Le Guernec: “Hm.” He leans into it again, analyzing it in short, shallow inhalations.
Parker: “Righteous.” Looks at him. “Moralistic.”
Le Guernec clearly decides it’s time to face facts: “So you’re not a floral person!”
Parker: “My mother loves lily of the valley, so I carried them in my wedding.” She tries to look a little apologetic for not being a floral person, but really she just isn’t.
“Centifolia Rose,” says Le Guernec. The next accord. “Rose is difficult,” he adds, “because everyone goes back to face powder or toilet paper.”
Parker: “Yes!” She laughs, and Mirzayantz grins and says to her, “Don’t blush.”
“Red Velvet Rose”—this one smells amazing. Parker notes the soap angle: “Smokey … slightly waxy … amazing! It’s got depth; it’s got tactile properties.” It contains an LMR rose material and Mirzayantz tells her about LMR, how Monique Rémy fought for the perfumer.
Parker starts picking up the touches and putting them together, trying combinations. She talks about how they might use them, proposes things. Le Guernec hands her “Plum Blossom.” (When she went on Oprah, she did a produced video segment walking around New York, showing the things she loves: a tchotchke store in Chinatown with silk pajamas, a burger place on Fifth Avenue in the Fifties that Matthew goes to for chili burgers, a painting in MOMA with plum blossoms.)
Gavarry: “It’s like a combination of fruity and nuanced notes with flora. Creaminess.”
Walsh: “This as a steady diet would be cloying.”
Parker shoots her a grateful look. “I get soapy.”
Gavarry: “Sarah Jessica, when you say ‘soapy,’ is that negative?”
Parker’s face says yeah, negative. “That soap,” she says, “that sits forever and ever in the guest bathroom that matches the color of the towels and then gets dust on it? It just feels …” She makes a desperate look.
Gavarry nods. Got it. Fine.
Parker talks about the notes in Lauder’s Aliage, the green notes, her dad’s pipe. Ross starts sending out the “Dark Animalic Incense” category, and so she talks about Marlene Dietrich and how she wore Creed.
“Gold Incense.”
Parker smells: “Wow! I love that,” she says. “It’s cold and warm together.” Smells it again. “It’s addictive.”
Ross and the perfumers share a look. “We figured this would be Sarah Jessica,” says Ross.
“Hearts of Fire.” Walsh hates it. She writes “Nauseous” on her paper. Parker agrees. “Not as brave.” She goes back to “Gold Incense.”
“Amber Crystals.” Creamy and earthy. She likes it OK.
“Raw Amber.” Parker picks it up and is completely still. Then suddenly grabs Ross’s arm and says, “I freakin’ love this.” She doesn’t emphasize the words, simply states them. She sits there, inhaling, moving. A lock of hair falls over her face. She murmurs, “Sweet.”
She smells the geranium.
Le Guernec: “Geranium has a lot of mint. A lot of coolness.” She says to him, “Gorgeous.” She blinks. “Is there a perfume called Gorgeous?”
Yes, says someone.
Parker shrugs. Oh well. She adds, “Very Barbra Streisand.”
The last scent is “Ultra Suede.” She loves it. “This is gorgeous. This is gorgeous. I love this!” She says “creamy leather” and “buttery” and “soft.” She squints. Identifies vetiver.
You can see Le Guernec’s eyes open. “Hm!” he says. “She’s good.”
Walsh: “I don’t see it mixing with Lovely.”
Parker: “Neither do I. But we’ll save it. As [the stylist] Pat Fields says”—lowers her voice, belts out—” ‘Don’t burn it!’”
The next accord: “Southern Magnolia.” Parker is … indifferent. Doesn’t hate it.
She goes back up the touches, smelling each one rapidly. “My gay friends would love for Gold Incense to be part of it. It’s so natural, earthy.”
Mirzayantz: “It’s not until the twentieth century that perfumes were gendered. Before, they were for everyone.”
Parker and Walsh, facing each other across the table, start to do their triage: “Gold Incense,” “Raw Amber,” “Ultra Suede,” “Elixir,” “Red Velvet Rose.” Parker: “Perhaps we could use ‘Gold Incense’ in our Lovely skin product and, if I’m lucky enough to do a second fragrance, separate from Lovely, reintroduce it, in a completely new idea, as a note.”
They’ll keep “Southern Magnolia” in the game for now. “Centifolia” is just “too high.” “Amber Crystals,” “too light.” They get cut.
I suggest they show her Cabochard. That’s dirty. They go and, after a few minutes, retrieve a sample of this 1959 perfume and give it to her. “Iva Rifkin! This is my friend Iva Rifkin! This is unbelievable. So sophisticated. Iva Rifkin!” She’s enraptured, then instantly despondent. “But if girls are buying Britney …”
Walsh: “My dear, you are already breaking the mold.”
They talk perfumes: Aliage (Parker: “I wore it!”) and Cinnabar (Walsh, guiltily: “I wore that.”).
Everyone goes down to the IFF perfumery school to see Ron Winnegrad, who heads it. “Your son’s favorite painter is van Gogh, right?” he says to Parker. He gives her a children’s book for him, You Are My I Love You. “Perfect,” she says. “Every day I tell him I love him, and every day he says, ‘But why do you love me? Why?’”
Winnegrad is talking about synesthesia, a neurological condition in which senses cross-mix inputs—hearing colors or smelling music. “You’re born with it, but you can develop it too. So we’re going to try to cultivate a little synesthesia today.” He makes Parker read a collection of words that are colored, but she has to—as fast as she can—say the color of the word and not actually read the word. It’s incredibly difficult. He shows her how evolution has programmed the nostrils to take turns constricting from right to left, the open one allowing the lighter molecules to rush through and hit the olfactory bulb, the constricted one trapping the light molecules and letting through only the heavy ones.
Winnegrad has her smell the original Ralph Lauren, which is a brilliantly constructed perfume, an extremely and wonderfully odd combination of fresh plant and wool gabardine and clear wood, like opening a clean wardrobe to find a tropical fruit tree growing inside it. He has Parker write down adjectives, paint with watercolors.
They head to IFF’s Technical Applications Lab, where TAG (the tech applications group) does its thing; someone says to the group in the hall, “You going to TAGland?” The lab, large, spotlessly clean, and formica-white and looking just like the spaceship in 2001: A Space Odyssey, is where they do things like testing bases and choosing colors for juices.
Steve Semoff is there to meet them. “I’m on again,” he observes dryly.
“Take it away!” says Parker. She turns and sees the robot and stops dead. One wall of TAGland is covered by a huge robot that mixes scents. It is a giant metal machine with dozens of tubes rotating around its middle. “It’s a robot,” Semoff says, and explains to her how it mixes materials, milk shakes of allyl amyl glycolate and undecalactone and ethyl vanillin.
She is amazed by the level of technology necessary to produce a sample. The robot’s name, says Semoff, is Elvis because whenever people asked, “Is the robot here?” the response became inevitably “Elvis is in the house.”
Semoff gestures at five products sitting neatly on a lab table. “Now we’re going to look at the market,” he says, and decide which of these might serve as a good model for Parker’s product. (Looking at the competition is—as it is in every industry—standard practice. One executive told me, “Your first thousand SKUs you sell to your competitors; clients only start buying them at the thousand-and-first.”)
Each of Semoff’s five products is a perfume in some kind of skin gel. First is a Chanel No. 5 gel, which Chanel calls Elixir Sensuel. The product is, quite simply, Chanel No. 5 perfume in hydroxy propyl methyl cellulose. The second product is another perfume in an alcoholic gel—Parker tries each one on in turn—the third a body oil. Parker particularly likes the fourth, a silicone-alcohol blend. The fifth is a body milk, but a body milk you can spray. Parker goes back down the line. “Number four—could you spray it?” she asks. Semoff replies that some silicones can’t be sprayed because there’s an inhalation issue.
They examine them. Walsh and Parker agree that, as Walsh puts it, the milk “takes you to an ancillary product and not a fine fragrance.” So that’s out. Parker doesn’t particularly like the oil, so that’s out. The gel she finds too sticky.
Number four wins. It’s a liquid silicone lotion, a blend of dimethecone, an expensive material. “What I like about this,” says Parker, “is that it gives you a silken feel, but it’s dry. I like number five, the milk, as an ancillary.”
“You can load the silicone lotion up with all sorts of stuff,” observes Semoff. “Vitamins.”
Parker: “Yeah, yeah, whatever, baloney.” She’s impatient with the gadgets, with tricking out a product.
Semoff, who completely agrees, says dryly, “Yeah, whatever you want” and peers around the room.
Parker’s got to go. Two marketing people, very hesitantly, signal a need to talk to her, one last thing. What’s up? says Parker.
They’re a bit nervous. It’s, uh, well, they need to ask her to do, uh, a press thing?
Parker looks at them for a second. “What is it?”
Like, a list of questions? They could e-mail them to her?
She’s so fine with it she looks confused. “Sure!” she says—why are they bothering with all the diffidence?—and then with equal measures of resolute professionalism and resignation, she gives them the official answer: “Tell them I’m completely amenable to it.”
Well (they look at each other), there was apparently some—issue? With one very protective publicist working for Parker?
Ah … She’s quiet for an instant, clears her throat in a way that means she’ll take care of it. She finishes with “I’ll do whatever it is that you need me to do.”
She says her good-byes, kisses, hugs. Says to Semoff, “We hardly saw you! You come in right at the end!”
“I’m the closer,” he observes dourly.
She gives him a confidential, New York gangster look, lowered voice: “Yah uh excuhllen closuh.”
I met Peter Hess, SJP’s agent at CAA, at a black-tie event. The usual gauntlet of photographers was corralled in a vast squirming, tentacled rectangle beside the red carpet, aiming its hundreds of recording devices, an electrical firing squad. The two of them moved down it, Hess in tux, Parker in gown. Hess escorted her, gauging the rhythm, supporting her glide, a Duke of Edinburgh with an expert hand lightly on the controls. He’s a handsome guy, compact and smooth and controlled, sort of the prototypal agent. They could cast him. The cameras tried to suck her into their lenses, and Hess was collaterally strafed by the flashes cloaking her in white hot light. I noticed that he was impervious, as was she, to the photon bombardment; not a single blink, no matter the intensity of the barrage.
I was standing just inside, watching, and she walked over and gave me a kiss and a hug and exclaimed, “Chandler Burr!” and, gesturing around her, “Isn’t this something?” and we chatted about it. She turned to greet someone, and he put out a hand and said, “I’m Peter Hess.” I said, Oh, you’re Peter, and started to introduce myself and he laughed and said, “I know, I read your piece.”
Yeah?
“So, like, uh,” he says, wryly, “I love that she comes to me with this idea for a perfume, and I’m in The New York Times as being like, ‘Whatever, I’ll get back to you.’”
It wasn’t like that?
“Well, no,” he said, and hesitated. More serious now. He had the agent’s instinct against putting himself into his client’s story and the agent’s desire not to be left out totally. “I mean, look, I was dedicated to it.”
She told me that. Seriously, she made that clear. I grinned. I didn’t mean to dis you, I said.
He shrugged; he really just found it funny. I was trying to remember what the hell I’d written. I went back and looked at the piece later, and he was right; she’d presented him to me in, frankly, pretty broad strokes, and the part in between her saying, “I went to my agent and told him my dream of doing this thing” and the part where she said, “I got a call from my agent and it all started happening” she hadn’t exactly filled in. It did make him sound like a real impresario—”I made it happen, baby, and you’re on in five”— but I can see how a guy would want his character fleshed out.
It in fact took about half a year for me to find out just how big a role Hess had played. There is always the story of making the story, and that was him. And the Parker/Lovely backstory is that here was this huge perfume success, and it almost never happened at all. No one would take her. Hess couldn’t find a licensee that would sign a perfume deal with her. He didn’t tell me that, of course, nor did anyone at Coty. The industry did, and only circuitously.
Six months after Lovely had launched, I had lunch on Fifty-seventh Street with a senior exec at one of the biggest perfume licensees and mentioned Parker’s excellent NPDs (her high ranking on the List). Slicing into his steak with a serrated knife, he said, “Yep,” and then added evenly, “We turned her down.” (I had just heard this from another executive.) He shrugged, good-naturedly. It wasn’t bitter, it wasn’t even regretful; it was simply a fact. I liked him for just stating it. No bluff, no excuses. The best of them are like that; hey, no one bats a thousand.
He added calmly, “Everyone turned her down.” Everyone did. Hess had gone to all of them, L’Oréal, LVMH, Estée Lauder, Interparfums, etc., and said, “My client would like to create a perfume.” Walsh told me very bluntly that of the singers, agents, movie stars, managers, and other celebrities and celebrity handlers who approach her, she turns down more than 99 percent. When the project sounds interesting, she and the other licensees run the numbers. And everyone had gotten to work and run them on Parker. One after another, they’d said no. In their views, the numbers didn’t work: Their research told them that a Sarah Jessica Parker perfume wouldn’t sell, or to express it in a slightly more sophisticated manner, that the perfume’s potential sales didn’t provide them sufficient assurance of profit given their projected costs for development and launch.
The Coty team—Walsh and Timiraos and CEO Bernd Beetz—did the same research. “At an early stage, Catherine hired a research company to validate SJP’s appeal outside the U.S.,” Timiraos told me much later when I finally came and asked him about it, “so we did need some convincing. And we were absolutely convinced. The research company completely validated her appeal. People were relating to her in Germany and the UK and France, which is where they studied it.” Coty had looked at her box office around the world, focus-grouped her, asked people if they’d buy a Sarah Jessica Parker perfume, then ran the numbers very carefully. “You have to make sure the star is global.”
In the end, Hess came to an agreement with Walsh, and they signed her. Several friends of mine have made offhand, somewhat dismissive comments to the effect that of course Parker’s perfume became a huge success, she’s a celebrity, everything works for her. This is incorrect. Mel Brooks once made a comment to the effect that the instant The Producers became a huge multimillion-dollar Broadway hit, people started using the word “inevitable” about it. Oh, everyone knew it would be a success, a gigantic money machine. No, Brooks said emphatically, no one knew. No one. Least of all him.
These perfume deals are standard, and they aren’t. Every agent (and, from behind that careful remove, every client) negotiates different terms. One huge star made a licensing deal that was seen as stupid by everyone involved, the stupidity being huge distributions to the star that, observers felt, suffocated the perfume’s marketing budget. Getting too much can actually harm you. Other times the brand screws things up. “Jesus Christ,” an executive said to me, “can you believe Beyoncé got two million dollars up front and a percent of sales, and they didn’t even put her name on the thing!”
Out of the blue one day someone e-mailed me a copy of a document that purported to be the licensing contract for Paris Hilton’s perfume. Parlux is the licensee that rolled the dice on her; it’s one of the smaller players. I have no idea whether the contract is real or not, but it certainly looks real, and those in the industry assure me that in any case it is authentically representative. It starts out
This LICENSE AGREEMENT (“Agreement”) is made and effective as of the 1st day of June, 2004, by and between PARIS HILTON ENTERTAINMENT INC., with offices at 250 North Canon Drive, 2nd Floor, Beverly Hills, CA 90210 (“Licensor”), and PARLUX FRAGRANCES, INC., a public Delaware corporation with offices at 3725 S.W. 30th Avenue, Ft. Lauderdale, Fl. 33312 (“Licensee”) (together the “Parties”).
There is the Whereas clause for the master license given the Licensee (that’s Parlux) by the Licensor, “Ms. Paris Hilton, an individual with a mailing address of c/o Ms. Wendy White,” who is granting access to Hilton’s hard-earned fame. (“Whereas Licensee is engaged in the business of manufacturing, promoting and selling Articles and Licensor desires to obtain the services of Licensee in connection with the manufacture, promotion and sale of the Articles bearing the Licensed Mark,” etc.) This is legalese for describing what they all—the Céline Dions, Anna Suis, and Calvin Kleins—desire to obtain. (Givenchy and Dior don’t have licensing contracts simply because they’re entirely LVMH-owned brands, fashion and everything else, and LVMH “manufactures, promotes, and sells” its own brands. Chanel and Hermès don’t because their operations are in-house.)
Then the substance. The license starts June 1, 2004, and terminates on June 30, 2009, and the contract gives Parlux the option to renew for five years. The contract defines Territory (Parlux receives world rights including duty-free stores, ships, airplanes, military bases, the diplomatic missions “of every country of the world,” and “the world-wide web”) and Articles (“Men’s and women’s fragrances, body lotion, body creme, body mist, shower gel, massage oil, dusting powder, shave gel,” et cetera.). Parlux also covers its bases for the future by reserving right of first refusal to extend into “cosmetics, skin care, and candles.” It has filed trademark on “Paris Hilton” in the United States in International Class 3 for fragrances (“Serial No. 78/412749”), and it takes the right to use “Paris Hilton” on all packing materials, hydrogen dirigibles, “and similar media presently existing or that may exist in the future.” Presumably this includes interstellar craft. The contract carefully defines Net Sales as the sales price at which Parlux bills customers for Articles (which means Hilton only gets a cut of wholesale) less things like returned product, uncollectible accounts, discounts, and shipping that Parlux has to pay on any invoice. Hilton gets nothing from the sale of discontinued merchandise as long as it’s sold at a discount of 25 percent or more “and then only to the extent that the aggregate gross sales thereof in any contract year do not exceed fifteen percent (15%) of total gross sales,” a clause her lawyers put in to make sure they don’t screw her by discounting, and sales of samples.
The Parlux lawyers, on the other hand, got Hilton’s approval to their signing “other additional licenses for other similar lines” (i.e., if Jessica Simpson decides to move her brand to Parlux, even if Hilton hates Jessica, she can’t block it), and Hilton’s lawyers stipulate that Parlux will not attack Hilton’s claim to her own name, a very serious issue; at the height of his immense success, the designer Halston lost control of his name, and it destroyed him almost instantly.
Confidentiality: “The Parties acknowledge that all information relating to the business and operations of Licensor and Licensee which they learn or have learned during or prior to the term of this Agreement is confidential.” Et cetera.
Parlux guarantees Hilton its “best efforts to sell the maximum quantity of Articles therein consistent with the high standards and prestige represented by the Licensed Mark” plus a “suitable” sales force. It assumes full responsibility for designing and producing everything “and shall bear all costs related thereto.” This means Hilton is completely off the hook for everything. Parlux also guarantees, without apparent irony, “workmanship of the highest quality consistent with [Paris Hilton’s] reputation, image and prestige, distributed and sold with packaging and sales promotion materials appropriate for such highest quality Products.” To give itself a concrete model, Parlux agrees to make fragrances of “prestige and price similar to that of Calvin Klein”—which is about as mass market as you can go and be considered luxury—”Tommy Hilfiger”—ditto—”and Ralph Lauren (excluding Purple Label).”
A single clause defines Hilton’s creative involvement. It reads: “Parlux shall submit to Hilton for her approval … two sets of the fragrance, scent, packaging and other material, designs, sketches, colors, tags, containers and labels [the ‘Approval Package’], which approval shall not be unreasonably withheld.” In other words: Zero.
The creative input of the designers and celebrities and pro athletes putting out scents has always been more a matter of a good story whipped up for a gullible public. Donna Karan and Giorgio Armani and a few others are reputed to at least smell the juices sold under their names—no one knows if this is true; I’ve never seen them do it. Lev Glazman of Fresh lays claim to actually going into the lab and sitting with the perfumers at their benches while they build his scents, and he may, but again he hasn’t done it in my presence. As a general rule, I suspect the claim that (fill in a famous name) was “deeply involved” is bullshit. From what I know, the greatest input most of them have is negotiating their percentage. One of the most successful designers in the world is actually rumored to be anosmic—incapable of smelling anything at all. Like members of a cult, his PR people dutifully recite how he “loved” this or that scent. PR people like to say the designers are “obsessed with” and “in love with” and “totally, like, crazy about” each launch, which makes them sound like deranged serial monogamists.
As far as I can tell, Sarah Jessica’s involvement was extraordinary. This, of course, is the reason Coty allowed me inside.
If the contract is real, Hilton managed to get from Parlux something that only the stronger—or at least hotter—names command, a Guaranteed Minimum Royalty, paid to Hilton monthly on the first of every month; even if Parlux was unable to sell a single bottle, and before any royalties, it would pay Hilton. The contract, thinking forward, also stipulates the Minimum for each year if Parlux extends the license to 2014. At least the Parlux lawyers were able to get the Minimum credited against sales royalties; those will be paid on a quarterly basis within forty-five days after the close of the prior quarter’s sales, plus any Guaranteed Minimum Royalty due. Generally designers and celebrities—licensors—are paid between 2 and 7 percent of the total value of the deal. If Hilton’s perfume makes $50 million a year and she’s got a 5 percent deal, she makes $2.5 million.
The contract stipulates that payments of the royalties and the Minimum are divided: 20 percent go every month to one of Hilton’s lawyers, Robert L. Tucker, Esq., of Tucker & Latifi on East Eighty-fourth Street, and the rest to Paris Hilton Entertainment Inc. on North Canon Drive in Beverly Hills 90210.
Parlux also has to spend a minimum specific amount (it’s calculated based on Net Sales) for consumer advertising: newspapers, magazines, billboards, direct mail, blow-ins, and billing inserts “(both scented and unscented),” product samples, window and counter displays, co-ops, et cetera. Plus a $3-million minimum liability insurance to cover Hilton.
The contract tangibly defines Hilton’s work exclusively in PR terms. There is no mention at all in the document of her having any say in, or giving ideas for, or smelling any of the iterations of, or being creatively involved in any way with the smell of, the perfume.
Licensor undertakes at Licensee’s request to make Ms. Paris Hilton (“PH”) available at reasonable intervals and for reasonable periods (which shall involve a maximum of seven (7) appearances during the first contract year and a maximum of four (4) appearances each contract year thereafter) for promotional tie-ins serving to associate PH with the Articles. Licensee shall also be entitled to the use of PH’s likeness for advertising and promotional purposes upon Licensor’s approval first being obtained in each instance, which approval shall not be unreasonably withheld or delayed. Licensor shall make every reasonable effort, in light of PH’s busy schedule, at the request of the Licensee, to arrange for PH’s cooperation for publicity photographs, launch parties, personal appearances and radio and TV interviews (which shall be included in PH’s obligations of seven (7) and four (4) appearances discussed above). Licensee shall reimburse Licensor for the reasonable costs involved in providing PH plus one other individual, selected by Licensor, plus her Mother and Father if they wish to attend, with first-class travel, lodging, food and other related expenses mutually agreed upon in advance of each appearance attended by PH at Licensee’s request. If PH fails to appear for a scheduled Licensor approved event, Licensee will have the right to deduct up to $50,000 of its non-refundable out of pocket expenses incurred in connection with each specific event from the Sales Royalty. The failure to appear at a scheduled event could have a material adverse effect on the Licensee’s ability to market the Articles.
The contract is signed by Frank A. Buttacavoli, COO, CFO, for Parlux, and, under the phrase “acknowledged and approved,” Paris Hilton.
When, with all the irony implicit in asking something you know full well the other person is contractually forbidden from answering, I put the question to Timiraos, he smiled and said, “Although I of course wouldn’t comment on Sarah Jessica’s specific agreement; sometimes, with some celebrities and with most licensing agreements, there are minimum payouts; that is, regardless of how the brand does or even if you don’t launch it, you guarantee the person a certain amount of money.”
I have no idea what Parker’s specific terms are. Whatever Hess and Walsh negotiated, it assuredly worked well for both of them, and for Hess’s client.
Being an agent is one of the stranger jobs in the world. I once spent an LAX—JFK flight talking to an ex-William Morris agent. He was a really nice guy. He’d gotten out of the industry. He said, “Look, it comes down to the fact that you’re living and dying by your clients, who can leave you at any second. For any reason. They have a bad meal, you get a phone call from their assistant. I couldn’t do that, in the end.”
We talked about Toby McGuire’s brutal decampment from his ex-agent. Obviously if I ever asked SJP (which I never would, it’s stupid), “What do you think of Peter?” she’s going to say, He’s great, he’s wonderful. Why the hell would she say anything else to me? But the fact is that Hess was integral to making Lovely happen, and it wasn’t in any way a foregone conclusion, and after talking to people about how tough it actually is to get a celebrity perfume launched, and the risk involved, and the negotiations and second guesses and all the other stuff he dealt with, I feel like I can smell his piece of the perfume too.