4

It is now ten o’clock the following morning, and Mimi and her advertising director, Mark Segal, sit in the small conference room of the Miray offices at 666 Fifth Avenue. Mimi is perched on one end of the conference table, and Mark sits at the other, and between them, spread out across the table, are the pasteups for the print advertising and the storyboards for the television commercials for the new Mireille campaign. Seated a short distance away from them, trying to be unobtrusive, is Jim Greenway, whom Mimi has invited to follow her about during a somewhat atypical business day. It is atypical because it is not every day that the final details are worked out for a fifty-million-dollar campaign that will spell either success or failure for a brand-new range of products in a notoriously fickle marketplace.

There is tension in the air as Segal, an athletic-looking young redhead with a fiery beard, in jeans and shirtsleeves, holds up one after another of the ads and storyboards for Mimi’s inspection. At first, no one speaks. All the ads, which feature the Mireille Couple in various romantic locales and situations, are signed with the line, which is Mark Segal’s, “Mireille … at last the miracle fragrance.” The television commercials, which are designed to expand on the situations depicted in the print ads, also close with this signature line. Watching Mimi’s reactions closely, Segal nervously flexes the biceps of his right arm.

Finally, he says, “Something’s bothering you—I can tell. What is it?”

Mimi continues to study the photographs of the two models. Then she says, “She’s lovely, there’s no doubt about it. Lovely. She’s got just the look I want. Of course, you’d hope that with looks like that would go just a little glimmer of intelligence, but in her case there just isn’t any. It doesn’t seem fair, does it—that a girl who can sparkle like that in front of a camera should be such a dim bulb in real life? But it doesn’t matter. She looks … simply wonderful. I wouldn’t change a thing about her.”

“Fortunately, only Sherrill’s friends will get to see her in real life,” Mark says.

“If we decide to use her live in any in-store promotions, just make sure she’s not allowed to open her mouth. They were both at my house for dinner last night, and you should have seen her trying to figure out which fork to use. It’s sad, isn’t it? You’d want a girl like that to have everything, wouldn’t you? But all she is is a gorgeous face.”

“That’s about all you can say about most of these girls,” he says.

“Well, maybe the exposure we’ll give her will help her wise up—go to charm school, or something. But it’s not her I’m worried about, Mark. It’s him. Why does he seem too …”

“Pretty?”

“Yes. That’s it, exactly. Here’s the case of a boy who, when you see him in the flesh, looks nice and wholesome—rugged, outdoorsy, like he belongs on a ski slope, or on top of a diving board, or sculling with the Yale crew. But in front of a camera, he seems to go all … soft, somehow.”

“Effeminate, you mean?”

“Not effeminate, exactly. Just … soft. Do you see what I mean, Mark?”

“Yes, I’m afraid I do.”

“Can we screen the first commercial again, Mark?”

“Sure,” he says. He dims the lights, the screen descends from its recess in the conference room ceiling, and the video projector begins to roll.

The scene is the dock in front of the Seawanhaka Yacht Club in Oyster Bay, a balmy summer afternoon; sunlight on the blue water of Long Island Sound refracts the camera’s eye with diamond flashes. Through these flashes, we see a snappy yawl-rigged sailboat move into view, the Mireille Man at the tiller, in dark blue jeans, bare to the waist. There is a bright sting of music. The camera then moves to pick up:

The Girl, standing on the dock, waving to him, all in white, her skirts blowing in the breeze.

THE GIRL: You’re late!

THE BOY: Tricky winds!

We see the boy maneuver the sailboat expertly to the dock and throw a line, which she catches and lashes around an upright pier. Then we watch as he holds up both arms, as she steps into them, and as he lifts her lightly down to the deck. He nuzzles her shoulder. Then, in close-up:

THE BOY: Hey! What’s that you’re wearing? You smell brand-new!

THE GIRL: It is brand-new! It’s Mireille—by Miray!

We watch him as, nostrils flared, he nuzzles her some more, drinking in her scent with obvious pleasure and excitement; nuzzles her shoulder, her cheekbones, her ear lobe, and finally brushes her lips with his. There is another musical sting, a clear, high, bright electronic chord.

THE BOY: You smell … miraculous!

Once more the screen fills up with diamondlike flashes of sunlight refracted on water as, simultaneously, the legend travels across the screen: Mireille … at last the miracle fragrance.

The screen goes blank, and the lights come up again.

“Do you see what I mean?” Mimi says after a moment. “A soft look. What can we do, Mark, to make him have a harder edge?”

He says nothing.

“His face has no corners to it. Do you agree?”

He nods, frowning, looking unhappy, and flexes his biceps several more times.

Suddenly Mimi picks up a grease pencil from the table, and, pulling out the storyboard for the commercial they have just screened, she makes a mark across the face of Dirk Gordon. “I think I have it,” she says.

“What is it?”

“What if we gave him a scar, Mark?”

“A scar?”

“Yes—like a dueling scar. Across one cheek. It would break up that dumb symmetry. And it would give him a history, like—”

“Like the Hathaway man with the eyepatch?”

“Exactly,” Mimi says. “Only this would be more exciting than an eyepatch. How did that good-looking man get that ugly scar? the viewer will wonder. In some barroom brawl? Defending some maiden’s honor? In some nasty accident? Or on the lacrosse field in some really rugged play? Smashed in the face by a hockey puck? See what I mean?”

Mark Segal scratches his red beard thoughtfully. “I see what you mean, but—”

“But what?”

“I don’t know how little Dirkie-boy will feel about us turning him into Scarface,” he says.

“Well,” she says with a little laugh, “we do have him under contract, don’t we? It’s really up to us how we decide to make him look, Mark.”

“That’s true, but—”

“Again, but what?”

“You’re talking about reshooting the entire campaign, Mimi.”

“Look,” she says, “maybe for the print ads we can airbrush in the scar. If that doesn’t work—”

“Then what?”

“Then, I guess we reshoot. It’s not the first time we’ve had to do that.”

“You’re also talking about reshooting three thirty-second television commercials. You can’t airbrush TV film. Do you know how much that’s going to cost?”

“Of course I do. But Mark, I honestly think that the scar could make all the difference—between an excellent campaign and one that’s spectacular. I think we’ve got to try it, Mark, don’t you?”

He is scowling now. “Well …”

“Really, Mark. Because this is the most important product launch we’ve ever done.”

“The most important ever? How come?”

“It just is. All at once it is—for reasons I can’t go into right now. Just take my word for it. This campaign can’t just be successful. It’s got to be sensationally successful.”

He shrugs. “If you say so,” he says.

“Let’s try it with the airbrush first. Give the head shots of Dirk to the art department, and have them experiment with scars. Have them try different kinds of scars. Tell them I want some real tough-looking scars. Once we see the airbrushing, then we’ll decide—”

The door to the conference room opens, and it is Mimi’s secretary, Mrs. Hanna. “Mr. Michael Horowitz, Miss Myerson,” she says. “Returning your call.”

“Oh, yes,” Mimi says, hopping off the edge of the table. “I want to talk to him.” To Segal, she says, “We’ll decide when we see what the art department comes up with,” and blows him a kiss.

Segal, still scowling, begins gathering up the layouts and pasteups and storyboards from the conference table. Before immediately following Mimi back to her office, Jim Greenway steps over to him and says, “What do you think of this scar idea, anyway?”

At first, Mark Segal merely grunts. Then he mutters, “Brilliant. As usual. Fucking brilliant. Simply fucking brilliant, is all I can say.”

It all began, needless to say, with one of her famous “Mimi Memos” more than two years ago, in the spring of 1985.

MIRAY CORPORATION

Interoffice Memorandum

TO: All employees

FROM: MM

(Over the years, her employees have learned that whenever they see that double M on an interoffice memo, something important is on the boss’s mind. But that the subject of this memo should have now gained the importance that it has, they could not have guessed.)

SUBJECT: Perfume

The perfumer’s art is at least 10,000 years old, and the earliest perfumes were in the form of incense. Indeed, the word derives from the Latin per and fumus, literally “through smoke.”

Ancient man, believing that the greatest offering to his gods could only be one of his most precious possessions, offered in sacrifice a domestic beast—or another human. The earliest perfumes were resinous gums such as frankincense, myrrh, cassia, and spikenard, which were sprinkled on an animal (or human) corpse before it was burned, in order to mask the stench of burning flesh. In the Bible, Noah, having survived the Flood, offered burnt animal sacrifices in gratitude, and “the Lord smelled the sweet odor”—of incense. Gradually, the burning of these resins alone replaced the sacrifices, and the burning of incense survives today in the ritual of the Catholic Church.

The logical next step was for men and women to anoint their bodies with these fragrant resins, and by 3000 B.C. the Sumerians in Mesopotamia and the Egyptians in the Nile Valley were literally bathing themselves in oils and alcohols of jasmine, iris, hyacinth, and honeysuckle.

Cleopatra believed in using different scents for different parts of her body. She scented her hands with an oil of roses, crocuses, and violets, and her feet with a lotion made of almond oil, honey, cinnamon, orange blossoms, and henna.

In ancient Greece, men spurned facial cosmetics but used perfumes liberally, scenting their arms with mint, their chests with cinnamon, their hands and feet with almond oil, and their hair and eyebrows with extract of marjoram. In fact, in Greece the perfumed male became a symbol of decadence, and the Athenian statesman Solon enacted a law forbidding the sale of fragrant oils to Athenian men. The law was routinely flouted and soon went off the books.

From Greece, male scents traveled to Rome, and a Roman soldier was considered unfit for battle unless he was anointed with scent. As the Roman Empire grew, new scents appeared from conquered lands: wisteria, lilac, carnation, and vanilla. From the Far and Middle East came fragrances of cedar, pine, ginger, and mimosa.

Perfume trivia corner: The Emperor Nero spent the equivalent of $160,000 for rose oils, rose water, and rose petals for himself and his guests for a single evening’s entertainment. For the funeral of his wife Poppaea, more perfume was splashed or sprayed over the proceedings than the entire country of Arabia could produce in a year. (Even the mules in the funeral cortege were scented.)

From the East, 11th-century Crusaders brought “attar of roses,” still one of the costliest of scents. (It takes 200 pounds of damask-rose petals to produce a single ounce of attar.)

The Crusaders also brought back other perfume ingredients that had been theretofore unknown in the Western world: animal oils. These are sexual and glandular secretions, and there are essentially four of these:

Musk: A sexual secretion from the abdomen of the musk deer of western China.

Ambergris: A waxy substance from the stomach of the sperm whale.

Civet: A genital secretion from both the male and female civet cat of Africa and the Far East, it can be collected regularly from captive cats without harm to the animal. On its own, it smells simply ghastly, but when blended with other essences it miraculously takes on a most agreeable odor and is an important “fixative” in fine perfumes—the fixative is what makes the scent last longer when worn.

Castor: A secretion from the stomachs of Russian and Canadian beavers. Again, castor is a scent-extending fixative. The reason why these animal essences work as fixatives, chemists tell us, is because of their heavy molecular weight. The heavy molecules serve to “anchor” the scent, preventing it from rising too quickly above the surface of the liquid and evaporating into the air. The varying strengths of these anchors, or fixatives, are what give a particular fragrance its “note,” or distinctive quality.

A note to animal lovers: Musk deer, beaver, and even—in some parts of the world—sperm whales are still hunted for their oils. Certain European perfumers still speak of using “legal ambergris,” since ambergris is a calculus formed in the intestines of certain diseased animals and is sometimes discharged naturally and drawn up by fishermen in their nets. (The largest piece ever found this way weighed 248 pounds and brought the lucky sailor who found it the equivalent of $50,000.) But in the United States, all use of natural ambergris is against the law. Meanwhile, musk, castor, and ambergris can now all be chemically synthesized.

On to more appetizing matters. All the above floral, herbal, fruit, and animal oils and essences, or their chemical equivalents, are used in the making of fine fragrances today, and they can be mixed in a literally infinite number of permutations and combinations.

But yesterday a jobber came to my office and offered me a sample of a floral essence that I can only describe as magical. It is called Bulgarian rose absolute, and it is distilled from rose petals that are gathered—at dawn—on certain slopes of the Balkan Mountains that must face east. When I rubbed a drop or two on my wrist, I’m not exaggerating when I say I could smell not only Bulgarian roses but also Bulgarian morning dew! It is very expensive, roughly $6,000 a pound wholesale, for you can imagine how many thousands of pounds of dawn-developing rose petals a Bulgarian peasant must have to gather to distill just an ounce of the absolute. I immediately began to think of ways we might use this fragrance in our products, either now or in something new.

And by now you have all doubtless guessed the purpose of this memo. It is to announce that I have asked the chemists in our labs, using this or something equally extraordinary, to come up with the most exciting new fragrance in the world—for us.

Back in her corner office, with its spectacular view of the twin spires of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Mimi picks up the telephone and says, “Michael?”

“Miss Myerson?”

“Yes.”

“One moment, please, for Mr. Horowitz.”

To Jim Greenway, standing just outside her door, she makes a beckoning gesture, and he steps inside, closing the door behind him. With her left hand covering the mouthpiece of the phone, Mimi says, “We’re playing musical secretaries. It’s always a contest to see which one can get to put the other one’s boss on hold. This time, I lost.” Then, speaking into the phone, she says, “Michael. How are you? … Oh, I’m very well, but it’s been ages since I’ve seen you.… All I do is read about you in the papers, while you try to tell Ed Koch how to run the city of New York.… Michael, I think we need to talk, you and I. I’m sure you know what’s on my mind.… You don’t? Well, I’ll tell you when I see you. When can you have lunch? … Next Thursday? Let me see.” She flips the pages of her calendar. “Yes, that would be perfect. Let’s make it one o’clock at Le Cirque.… My secretary will make the reservation.… Good, Michael. I’ll see you then.” She replaces the telephone carefully in its cradle.

Mimi sits at her desk, her polished-silver eyes focused on some invisible point in the middle distance. On her desk, in silver frames, are a formal Bachrach portrait of her husband, Bradford Moore, and another color photograph of her son, Badger, grinning in his tennis whites, wearing a braided wristband, a racquet in his hand, looking as though he had just aced a serve. The corner office is large and airy, and Mimi has decorated it in light, bright colors, with a cheery mix of fabrics (flowered chintzes and plaids on the chairs and sofas), contemporary paintings on the walls (including Andy Warhol’s silk-screen multiple portrait of herself combing her hair), and greenery (a tall ficus tree in one corner, and windowboxes filled with flowering plants that are changed with the seasons). The office colors often inspire her with the buoyant names for some of her lipsticks and nail polishes: “Dappled Sunlight,” “Winter Fire,” “Russet Apple,” and the rest.

But the expression on Mimi’s face is far from buoyant now. Instead, her look is pensive, even troubled, and for a moment or two she seems to have forgotten that she has a visitor. Usually so poised, self-possessed, slightly amused—even self-mocking—there is no self-mockery in her expression now. For a moment, she seems to repress a small shudder, almost of revulsion. She brushes a loose strand of pale hair away from her face. Then she sighs and says, “That was Michael Horowitz. An old friend. And an old enemy.”

“With supposedly the biggest ego in New York.”

“That ego is his Achilles heel.” She sighs again. “I’m not looking forward to that lunch.” Then, collecting herself, she says, “Well, I have a few minutes. Is there anything in particular you’d like to talk about?”

Jim Greenway seats himself in front of her desk and removes a ballpoint pen and notebook from his briefcase. “Let’s start at the beginning,” he suggests. “Let’s start with your grandfather. Tell me everything you remember about him.”

“Oh, dear,” she says, shaking her head as though loosening all the scattered memories of Adolph Myerson from her brain. “Oh, dear. It would fill a whole book to tell you everything I remember about him.”

“Let’s begin, anyway.”

“Well, I was named Mireille, after his Miray Corporation, as my grandmother told you last night. It was my parents’ pathetic attempt to curry a little bit of favor out of him. Of course it didn’t work.…”

Meanwhile, not that many city blocks away, in her apartment at the Carlyle, Adolph Myerson’s widow is spending her morning, as she customarily does, on the telephone, and as New York women of leisure have done since the year 1900 when residential telephone service became widely available in the city. Right now, Granny Flo is talking, again, with her friend Mrs. Norman Perlman. “You know, Rose,” she is saying, “the more I think about it, the more I just can’t believe your neighbor deliberately poisoned your little Fluffy. I just can’t believe that anybody could be that mean. And in your nice building. What I think must have happened is that little Fluffy got into something when your doorman was out walking him. You know how little doggies are, always sniffing and snuffing around at things they smell on the ground, licking at things they really shouldn’t with their little tongues. Anymore, there’s so much litter in New York! Filthy city! And then the garbage men go on strike! What for? More money so they can raise our taxes? Sometimes I thank God I’m blind so I can’t see the trash anymore, Rose. I mean it, sometimes I thank God I’m blind. Anyway, I’m sure that little Fluffy must have licked at something on the street that was bad, like a—like a stale potato chip that had gone rancid. Yes, like a rancid potato chip. That would do it. Their little constitutions are so weak, these little doggies; a rancid potato chip would have been enough to make him go into a convulsion. I’m sure that was what it was. Hold on, Rose. My other phone is ringing. Hello? Who is it? Oh, Nonie, I can’t talk now. I’m on another important call. I’ll call you back. Rose? That was my daughter. Nonie wants something, I can always tell. She thinks I’m a bottomless pit. But I’m not a bottomless pit. I’m an old woman, living on a fixed income, like you. But anyway, where were we? Oh, yes, little Fluffy. I’ve decided what you must do, Rose. You must replace little Fluffy right away. I know, a replacement is never the same as the thing you’ve lost. Nothing you really love can ever be replaced, but you’ve got to try, Rose. A new puppy will fill up the gap. I’ve lost things I loved, and I know how it is. You know how Adolph was always buying me jewelry. Jewelry I never wanted, but he bought it to impress my family. But there was one diamond ring I really loved. It wasn’t a big diamond—maybe half a carat—but I loved it because, because when he gave it to me it was when I thought he really loved me, and wasn’t doing it just to impress my family. And one day, years ago, when we still had that big place in Maine, I was out walking in the garden and I suddenly noticed that that diamond had fallen out of its setting. I felt it fall! It fell in the grass. I searched and searched, but I couldn’t find it. Adolph said, ‘Don’t worry, we’ll replace it,’ but I said, ‘No, no, I want that particular diamond,’ and for weeks and weeks I hunted in the grass for that little diamond, up and down, back and forth, in that little piece of grass where I’d felt it fall out of my ring. No luck at all. Then, one day, it was early in the morning near the end of summer—soon it would be time for us all to go back to New York again—I was out in the garden for one last look. ‘If I don’t find it today,’ I told myself, ‘I never will.’ And just then I saw a little brightly shining, sparkly thing in the grass: my diamond, at last! But when I reached down to pick it up, the little brightly shining, sparkly thing just dissolved between my fingers. Because you know what it was, Rose? It was just a tiny drop of dew! And I burst into tears, Rose, just sat down in the grass and sobbed.” Granny Flo is weeping now at the memory of this experience. “Because, Rose, that was when I knew I’d never see my precious little diamond again, that it had turned into just a little drop of dew.… Oh, Rose, if I’d let him replace it, would anything have been any different? It’s too late now.…”