Shades of Fortune

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  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.…”

  Part Two

  IN THE BEGINNING

  5

  Adolph Myerson was a man who started with nothing more than a dream. But it was a beautiful dream, and it was a dream of beauty.”

  So begins the “official” biography of the founder of the Miray Corporation in the corporate history that was published by the company in 1946.

  “The bright, ambitious young man’s dream,” this history continues, “was essentially a simple one. Without concern for personal power or pelf, the youthful Myerson dreamt of creating, for the American woman, a new sense of pride and self-esteem and self-worth through the gift of lovelier lips and fingertips. The American woman, the farsighted young man foresaw, could perceive herself more fully, and fulfill herself more wholly, were it possible for her to feel better about herself through presenting to the world a more beautiful appearance and a more radiant allure. Years ahead of his time, the young man decided that he, and he alone, would create a spectrum of beauty products that would help American women to become the most beautiful, the most envied women in the twentieth-century world. A true non pareil, young Myerson.…”

  “It’s mostly a lot of hogwash,” Mimi Myerson says to Jim Greenway when she gives him the corporate history to read. “Most of the dates are correct, but remember that this was written by Grandpa’s P.R. man, with Grandpa standing over his shoulder and telling him what to write.”

  In fact, as Mimi explains it, if her grandfather had any sort of dream at all in 1912, the year that his little company was founded—and who is to say that no man lacks some kind of dream?—he was dreaming of the Bronx. Also, Mimi points out, despite his anonymous biographer’s frequent use of such adjectives as “young,” and “youthful,” Adolph Myerson was not exactly a teenager in 1912. That was the year that saw Adolph Myerson celebrate—if that is the proper term for it—his forty-second birthday.

  “The Bronx!” he wrote to a young female cousin in Germany, whom he was still in the process of trying to persuade to come to America to marry him. “You must see this place to believe it, Lizetteleine! This is the true city of the future! All that is finest in America is being constructed here. Picture it, Lizette, my little one, if you can. First, there is a great broad avenue being built running from north to south across this greatest county of the greatest city in the world—broader than the Champs Élysées in Paris, grander than Unter den Linden. It is to be called the Grand Concourse, and it is at this point very nearly finished. Stately trees will line its length, and gardens will grace its central boulevard, for this will be known as a ‘Garden Suburb.’ A Great Hotel, larger and grander than any hotel ever built, to be called the Concourse Plaza, is going up before my eyes, bigger and more splendid than any Kaiser’s palace. Huge and towering blocks of flats (here called apartment houses) are being erected of gleaming sandstone and marble and yellow brick, and each of these buildings will contain spacious living quarters with all of the most modern of conveniences, including kitchens of electricity and central heating, dumbwaiters and lifts (here called elevators). Soon will come the Underground (here, subways) to whisk the businessman in minutes from the noise and bustle of the city into the clear, clean air of the Bronx countryside. It goes without saying that I am ‘proud as Punch,’ as they say here, to be a part of all this grand construction. Come to the Land of Golden Opportunity, dear Lizette, this goldene medinah, and let me take you to this earthly paradise, this Garden of Eden, the Bronx.…”

  Apparently, Adolph’s entreaties fell on deaf ears, for Cousin Lizette remained in Germany, and how this letter survived is something of a mystery. It was discovered among a small packet of papers after Adolph’s death in 1959. Perhaps it was never sent. Or perhaps Lizette returned her letters to him after she married someone else. It has been determined that Lizette and her family died at Auschwitz in 1943.

  “He had a certain journalistic flair,” Jim Greenway says to Mimi after reading this letter. “Are you sure there were no diaries?”

  “I’d never heard of any until the other night,” Mimi says. “Granny Flo is often confused these days. As Nonie said, you mustn’t give too much weight to what she claims to remember.”

  From Adolph’s rapturous description of the “Garden Suburb” that, in those innocent prewar days, the Bronx was designed to be
come, and from his talk of pride in having “a part” of this development, it is possible to suppose that Adolph Myerson was the developer himself. He was not. He was a housepainter, and on that fateful day in April 1912—the day that would change the fortunes of the family forever—Adolph and his five-years-younger brother, Leopold, were engaged in painting the kitchen of one Mrs. Spitzberg, in her new apartment at 3124 Grand Concourse in the Bronx.

  And if Adolph had been able to persuade his Lizette to join him in America, he would have been able to do no more than to take her on the streetcar to look at, and admire, the Bronx and the rising buildings along the new Grand Concourse. He could not have afforded to bring her there to live, for the Bronx was the choice of address for the newly affluent, and Adolph Myerson was not one of these. Every poor Jewish immigrant, even those who had at that point made it out of the ghetto of the Lower East Side and into the less crowded reaches of Brooklyn or Harlem, dreamed of one day moving to the Bronx. The Bronx was a beacon that was at once both economic and psychological, for by crossing the Harlem River it was possible to feel that one was entering the mainstream of American life. For immigrants such as Adolph’s parents, who had begun the long journey to America in 1879, when Adolph was nine, the trip had entailed going from island to island—from Hamburg to England, from England to Ellis Island, and from Ellis Island to Manhattan. But if one could attain the Bronx, the only borough of New York City that is not surrounded on all sides by water, one was at last setting foot on the mainland.

  But Adolph and Leopold’s father, Herman Myerson, had not been so fortunate. Arriving in New York, he had found work as a housepainter. When back troubles had made him no longer able to scale a ladder, and forced him into retirement in 1888, when Adolph was eighteen and Leopold was thirteen, his two sons had followed him into the trade. By 1912, the families of prosperous lawyers, doctors, dentists, pharmacists, and accountants, who had put themselves through City College, were moving into splendid apartments in the Bronx. But Adolph was still living with his parents in a railroad flat on Henry Street, and Leopold, who had by then married and had a young son of his own, lived not far away in a similar flat on Pell Street, still on the Lower East Side.