17
As soon as I am ushered up to the private room above the Salons du Palais-Royal, done in saffron and cumin in contrast to the mauve and black of the ground floor, Serge Lutens insists: ‘It’s funny, when I first met you, I thought I knew you. And today, when I saw you, I told myself again I know this person, but I don’t know why.’
This uncanny sense of familiarity was no shortcut to obtaining an audience. When at long last I had been invited to one of his launches, I had introduced myself, gushing in a most un-Parisian fashion that I’d admired him since the age of twelve. He’d looked at me as though he had known me for that long too, and after taking leave of me had doubled back on his steps to tell me that when he said au revoir, it wasn’t a mere manner of speaking: we would see each other again. But when I took him at his word and put in a formal request for an interview, I was asked to forward my questions in writing along with a covering letter. I described myself as he’d seen me: ‘Silver hair, scarlet lips, black trench coat.’ He answered that I defined my silhouette as a battledress meant, perhaps, to protect myself, and that this may have been what had made him come to me intuitively, without a word.
* * *
I’d been led to understand that we would elaborate on his written answers over the course of our face-to-face interview but, as it turns out, Serge Lutens isn’t much interested in discussing them. Nor am I, for that matter. I haven’t come for answers. I’ve come to see the Wizard.
A mutual acquaintance had told me that he might enquire about my astrological sign – he himself is Pisces with Leo rising – and he does. If he asks, he explains, it is out of shyness and curiosity, to get to know people a little more quickly. I am Aries with Cancer rising, I tell him, which sets us off on a discussion of the hot Arian temper, which he advises me not to rein in. But I’m not one to display my anger:
‘Anger is very intimate, and sometimes you don’t want that intimacy.’
‘We don’t want to squander our anger on just anyone, do we?’ he quips.
‘So what about you?’
‘I can be very choleric, but ridiculously! I’m completely infantile … I lose it in front of everyone. I’m a disaster. My angers are frankly … irrational. After that, I’m sorry.’
This isn’t an interview, the ritual in which one person extorts as much as she can from another without disclosing anything. Lutens is asking me questions, a sly way of wiggling out of mine about his perfumes, I suspect. He says, once he’s done with them, he’s through. So we speak in circles around them as his assistant pours him tea and he pulls out his round glasses from his pocket without ever putting them on.
From astrology we slide into tarot. His photographs have always seemed to me to be somewhat tarot-like figures, their meaning endlessly reversible. Lutens doesn’t read the tarot. He doesn’t even play cards: ‘I’d be sure to lose.’ But he does know something about the reversibility of signs and sentiments. For instance, he seems to have taken a perverse pleasure in launching a ‘clean laundry’ scent that ran counter to every expectation, L’Eau Serge Lutens. His fandom resonated with cries of treason, I tell him. The word amuses him.
‘Would you enjoy being seen in the same way after twenty years? You tell yourself that you’ll be better understood as time goes by, but also that you’ll disappoint more and more. This can be called treason, but it’s not yourself you’re betraying.’
It’s no wonder Jean Genet, the homoerotic thief who turned treason into the driving principle of his life, is Lutens’ favourite author: ‘Anyone who hasn’t experienced the ecstasy of betrayal knows nothing about ecstasy at all,’ Genet writes in The Prisoner of Love.
It is then that, in a way, I commit my own act of treason by telling him about my project with Bertrand, which I’ve never spoken about to anyone in the industry. My disclosure arouses no more than the slight interest one bestows on a mildly interesting piece of gossip, but it’s given me a jolt. I’ve just realized that what I want to learn from Lutens is the secret of the peculiar mind-meld between the one who brings the story and the one who translates it into a perfume formula … Lutens doesn’t compose his scents: ‘I am not a perfumer,’ he says. ‘I make perfumes, or rather, I make them talk, or even confess.’ For the past twenty years, with one exception, the actual composition has been carried out by Christopher Sheldrake.
Is ‘Serge Lutens’ only Lutens, or him and Sheldrake? The two men couldn’t be more different: Sheldrake is a sweet, straightforward family man who, says Lutens, likes food and wine, lives in a light-filled house and dresses in neutral colours. By contrast, ‘I love dark houses, strong perfumes – the ones that leave traces. Black is their colour. Eating and drinking are pointless to me and my solitude is rich.’ Their aesthetics don’t complete or influence each other, he tells me: they ‘listen to each other’.
‘During its gestation, perfume is organic; it moves by itself and within itself, and sometimes leads us to unpredictable and unsuspected paths. If I were to say it leads us by the nose, it wouldn’t be false. Day after day, it explains to me who it is and what it is. Once it’s done, I give it a name and follow it until it has become what it needs to become. Then we part ways, never to see each other again, and I move on to the next one. It’s like a passing fling … almost nymphomania!’
Mr Lutens may come off as an otherworldly sprite, but he’s actually quite a funny man. As we burst out laughing, I find myself nodding vigorously. He hasn’t disclosed a thing about the way he works with his partner-in-perfume, but he’s told me what I need to know: to follow the perfume ‘until it becomes what it needs to become’. Duende must dictate its own terms – the last thing I want is a bespoke perfume. I’ve never seen the point of them. As for Lutens, he thinks they’re a joke: ‘Perfume is made-to-measure by definition if you recognize yourself in it. Perfume is the subject, just as the tiger is the tamer’s subject. Making a perfume for someone? The perfume is forgotten! It’s not itself any more!’
He’s been asked a hundred times to do it, he adds, ‘But I’m not a psychoanalyst! And besides, who’d be able to tell it was a bespoke perfume? You might just as well wear the bottle on a chain around your neck, with a label stating the cost. I am accountable to the perfume, and nothing else.’
Our conversation meanders from his memories of coming to Paris as a young man and discovering the rites and mystique of the great couture houses to the books he is reading – he says his scents are now more inspired by literature than by the smells of Morocco. I pull out a quote by Genet I’d copied down in my notebook: ‘Solitude is not given to me, I earned it. I am led towards it by a concern for beauty. I want to define myself, delineate my contours, escape from confusion, order myself.’ Of course, he knows it. It could be the motto of a man who spends most of his days reading, and who presided for three decades over the unending embellishment of a palace in Marrakech: ‘It was an image I pursued, but I can’t live in it, I need disorder,’ he explains, which conjures visions of the impeccably turned-out Serge in a djellabah, sprawled on piles of cushions, surrounded by open books, perhaps unshaven and tousled-headed …
The palace was shrouded in utmost secrecy as long as it wasn’t completed: since then, Lutens has allowed pictures of some of the rooms to be published by W magazine. I was interested to find out he’d decorated an entire wall with Berber fibulas, etched silver clasps used to fasten traditional garments. It just so happens that I own such a fibula: it is my favourite piece of jewellery and, more than that, my talisman. I’m wearing it today, hung from a slim platinum torque. Its peculiar shape is what attracted me to it: a lozenge ending with a sharp spike, which makes it both a dagger and a shield, a feminine and masculine symbol. It was the first thing Lutens noticed when I came in. Now I tell him how I came to buy it. It was, of course, in Marrakech.
* * *
I made it to Lutensian Ground Zero in 1999. I’d gone with the Tomcat to do a story on the last survivors of the Yves Saint Laurent posse, ensconced in the riads they had t
ransformed into One Thousand and One Nights palaces with the help of peerless Moroccan craftsmen. I knew Lutens had been working on his own house and sent out feelers to secure an introduction. But he didn’t participate in the endless round of dinners and fêtes of the expat community, at least not the ones I knew. When I spoke to an architect who’d been consulted on it, he said he was sworn to secrecy. Fair enough. Besides, I had other things on my mind.
From the instant I’d set foot within the pink walls of the old city, its winding alleys that seemed as though they had been secreted by the earth itself giving way to cool inner gardens choked with gaudy-coloured bougainvilleas around cooing fountains, I’d felt at home, my senses in overdrive. It was Seville all over again, as it must’ve been under the reign of the Caliphs. The Koutoubia minaret loomed, identical to that of the cathedral of Seville, over the central plaza of Djema-el-Fnah with its storytellers, charms vendors, teeth-pullers crouching behind piles of yellowed molars, carts of mint pulled by donkeys and pyramids of oranges to be squeezed for fresh juice …
And it was spring. And I caught it with a pang, wafting from a garden, and I tumbled back in time to the woman I’d once been, to Carmen. It had been building up, this need to throw off my shackles. My impatience with the Tomcat, with his expectation that I would set aside my literary ambitions while he wrote ‘the Novel’ or ‘the Script’ … The Neverland of Marrakech, the suspended reality its inhabitants had built for themselves away from the West, had revived an ache to live in beauty all the perfume collections in the world couldn’t have soothed, not even Serge’s alchemical potions.
I stood at the threshold of the garden, abstracted. Then I stepped into the garden and saw the orange trees in blossom. And when I came back, as Leonard Cohen sings in ‘Famous Blue Raincoat’, I was nobody’s wife.
* * *
Before we part, I ask Serge Lutens one last question. Which of his perfumes he would pick out for me? His verdict is swift:
‘The one that condemns you.’
18
To mark the start of our time together, Monsieur had bought a new watch for himself and one for me. Then he’d asked me to find us each a new fragrance. He’d only specified he wanted something with lavender. It didn’t take me long to unearth the little-known Mouchoir de Monsieur by Guerlain, launched in 1904 and kept in production for Jean-Claude Brialy, a French actor who’d gone from Nouvelle Vague icon to society darling. The epicene notes of the ‘gentleman’s handkerchief’ – flowers and vanilla as a yin counterpoint to the citrus, lavender and civet yang – suited Brialy’s witty, endearing persona, but they also seemed like a good fit for Monsieur, a man whose virile appearance belied the almost feminine delicacy he seldom displayed.
It was this contrast between Monsieur’s hearty self-assurance and his utter sensitivity to the finest nuances of my moods that had drawn me to him; that, and the fact that he was more fun than anyone I’d ever slept with: fun to laugh with, fun to play with. It also helped that he could afford to whisk me off to Rome or Avignon on the trail of Caron’s Farnesiana and the eponymous Comme des Garçons, treat me to the finest restaurants and bed me in four-star hotels: money made everything lighter. It allowed us to improvise our stolen moments. Monsieur was married. I hadn’t divorced yet. We were making the story up as we went along.
Finding my own perfume to herald our clandestine love affair wasn’t much of a quandary either. As soon as he smelled Serge Lutens’ Tubéreuse Criminelle between my breasts, Monsieur whispered ‘Criminelle’ in gloating tones and proceeded to bare them.
Tuberose became the olfactory thread of our six-year romance. Flamboyant, assertive, provocatively feminine, it burst with the self-confidence of a woman wholly desired. Its scent was one I had to live up to, in the same way that, amidst the complications and dissembling of an adulterous affair, I felt an almost ethical – or was that aesthetic? – urge to keep things light and playful. Wasn’t that the whole point of taking a lover? Somehow tuberose embodied this love-as-aesthetic-performance stance: a cold, venomous green bitch-slap subsumed in narcotic, creamy, coconut-white flesh betraying hints of a rubber soul.
* * *
The couturier Robert Piguet sussed the diva out perfectly when he dressed up the first best-selling tuberose perfume in black and hot pink. The aptly named Fracas ups the exuberance of the flower until it reaches the shrill peaks of a soprano coloratura: The Magic Flute’s Queen of the Night, with her dramatic entrance and near-hysteric trills. Shades of Germaine Greer’s Female Eunuch, Fracas could very well be the perfume equivalent of a Hollywood persona accumulating the signs of femininity on a body that is already feminine (Marilyn Monroe) or not (Ru Paul). Fittingly, Fracas is said to have been the signature fragrance of Madonna (the ultimate manipulator of feminine semiotics), the late fashion editor and muse Isabella Blow and the resplendent beauty whose modelling career she launched, Sophie Dahl: this is nothing if not the scent of divas.
But much as I admire Fracas, it resists me. In fact, it lived up to its name by shattering on my floor as soon as I took my vintage bottle out of its box. It was the weirder Tubéreuse Criminelle that introduced me to the dark side of the flower and set off my addiction.
When Serge Lutens and Christopher Sheldrake decided to tackle tuberose, rather than attempting to tame the jarring medicinal notes of tuberose absolute, they decided to amp them up. The result is the olfactory equivalent of an extreme close-up: the features of the tuberose are so distorted they are barely recognizable, as shocking as the face of a woman in the throes of pleasure seen at kissing distance. But this floral monstrosity fleshes out into an intoxicating potion: the belle-laide awakens sensations that a merely pretty girl could never hope to achieve …
In the language of flowers, the tuberose speaks of dangerous, forbidden pleasures: by taking up the Criminelle as the emblem of my passion, I’d guessed that message in a bottle. Perfumes are our subconscious. They read us more revealingly than any other choice of adornment, perhaps because their very invisibility deludes us into thinking we can get away with the message they carry, olfactory purloined letters lying right under everyone’s nose … And perfumes themselves have subconscious, twisted molecular secrets sending out subliminal calls of the wild. Don’t accuse perfumers of having a dirty mind, though their peculiar variety of sensual gluttony often does draw them to louche aromas.
Put the blame on Mame, boys.
* * *
Tuberose and her sisters jasmine, orange blossom, gardenia, honeysuckle are the vamps of the floral realm, pallid creatures whose hypnotic, diffusive scents are potions for attracting nocturnal pollinating insects – vividly coloured flowers need none to draw bees in the daytime. Their velvety flesh feels like a woman’s skin and, even at their freshest, a hint of corruption wafts up from their sweet fragrances. Stick your nose in them. Go past the pretty. Zero in on the weird. Butter, Camembert, mushrooms, horse manure, bad breath, dirty feet, blood, meat, shit … Despite their tiny size and pristine petals, white flowers bellow Nature’s obscene secret through their outsized fragrance: flowers are sexual organs. And if those sexual organs have ended up grafted David Cronenberg-style onto our skin, it is precisely because they also smell like the human body in all its extreme states, whether pleasure or death.
And therein lies the secret of their sexiness, if we are to believe Dr Paul Jellinek, who wrote The Psychological Basis of Perfumery in 1951. The German chemist and perfumer was convinced that the purpose of perfumery was ‘to create and enhance sexual attraction’, and classified raw materials according to their erotic effect: anti-erogenous (or refreshing), stimulating, narcotic or erogenous. The latter category encompassed ‘perfume materials reminiscent of human body odour’ emanating from the scalp, underarms, pubes, urogenital and anal regions. Though repulsive when smelled out of context, these subtle hints of the naked body were most frequently encountered in the act of love and therefore carried positive connotations, claimed Dr Jellinek. He further classified his erogenous mater
ials based on the smells of blondes (sour-cheesy), redheads (pungent-burnt) and brunettes (sweetish-rancid). One can only wonder at the method he used to collect these observations. I envision rows of naked women sniffed by a formal gentleman in a white lab-coat dictating to an assistant in cat’s-eye glasses, a scene Stanley Kubrick could’ve filmed circa Dr Strangelove … But though the progress of organic chemistry has rendered many of Dr Jellinek’s analyses obsolete, his take on the human facets of raw materials makes for a fascinating read. For instance, costus, the stuff Bertrand thought might be my ‘referent’, ‘is strongly reminiscent of the odour of the scalp region and … of the axillar odour of brunettes.’ Score one for Bertrand, then: though my hair has gone prematurely white, I am a brunette. Incense also has ‘something of the sweet-acrid effect’ of brunette sweat. It seems like we’re really on to something with Duende … As for orange blossom, what makes it so enticing is the indole it shares with other white flowers such as jasmine and tuberose: ‘It is precisely the odour of indole, reminiscent of decay and faeces, that lends [them] that putrid-sweet, sultry-intoxicating nuance which has led to the use of … their extracts as delicate aphrodisiacs.’
I’m quite happy to follow the good doctor’s ghost down that path: I do believe that reminiscences of a not-quite-surgically-scrubbed body can act as subconsciously enticing reminders of our animal nature. But I’m not quite sure the fatal attraction of white flowers boils down to indoles. There must be more to the story, and to find out, Octavian Coifan is the man I turn to.
Fortunately for me, the erudite author of 1000 Fragrances is not only a friend but practically a neighbour. I’ve spent many a Sunday afternoon with Octavian, rows of phials and blotters lined up between us on my dining-room table, parsing raw materials, vintage finds and new products while batting away the cat, who likes to snatch away our blotters. Octavian was the first to walk me through the maze of perfume composition and initiate me into raw materials. When I blurt out ‘Am I crazy, or is there such or such a note in this?’ he’s fond of answering, with a glint in his big green Byzantine eyes, ‘The nose is never crazy,’ which leaves the question of my own sanity open to conjecture …
The Perfume Lover Page 12