Queen of the Underworld (26 page)

“At first she thinks I’m talking
mishegoss
but then she catches on. She laughs and actually takes a sniff.

“
‘Non,’
she says, ‘too sickly sweet. We need a musky touch of
ambrette.
And,
peut-être,
something spicy?’

“ ‘How about a
shtikl
of nutmeg?’ I suggest.

“We named our first fragrance ‘Latrine Oh Là Là.’

“Our next creation was ‘Pour la Femme Négligée,’ which means ‘For the Woman Who Neglects Herself.’ To the stifling base note of seventy unwashed female bodies we added the fresh citrusy scent of oil of neroli combined with infusions of cypress and eucalyptus.

“All this in fantasy, of course, but it amused us and took our minds away from our nausea.”

The Stella of the 1948 photo was less wrinkled than the Aunt Stella I knew. The Colette bangs were darker, the Chanel suit a bit spiffier, but the
sportif
neck scarf and the sibylline little side-grin, which had so appealed to me from the start, were exactly the same. She was posed beside her portable perfume organ, a leather carrying case that unfolded into a triptych of shelves with holes for several hundred tiny vials.

Next came clips from the nineteen-fifties, when the Home Section had become For and About Women.

In a feature on gifts for Valentine’s Day by Darcy Feinstein, staff writer:

. . . Perfumer Stella Rossignol, who creates individual scents for her Miami Beach clients, offers the following tips to would-be perfume givers.

“If you know her preferred scent, you can’t go wrong in presenting her with an ounce of the
parfum,
which is the extract in its most concentrated and lasting form.”

But Rossignol, who once wrote ad copy for Guerlain in Paris, warns against choosing a perfume for your beloved on the basis of fancy packaging or exclusive brand name.

“I know a girl who broke her engagement after her fiancé gave her a twelve-ounce bottle of . . . let us just say a French perfume that advertises itself as costly.

“Poor
shlemiel,
can’t you see him striding up to the perfume counter. ‘I want the biggest size you’ve got of that perfume that costs so much.’ But when his fiancée opens the package, his goose is cooked. ‘I realized he didn’t know the first thing about me,’ she says. ‘I wouldn’t be caught dead stinking of that hothouse
dreck.
’ ”

Next came an un-bylined clip:

Perfume for Men
In Fashion Again

It was Napoleon Bonaparte who put the lid on men’s perfumes.

Though he went through several bottles a day of Farina eau de cologne, which you can still purchase today from Roget & Gallet, he forbade all “floral, musk, and amber scents,” maintaining that they incited lust and indolence in his troops.

But now, 150 years later, the winds of masculine fashion are shifting again.

“Perfume for men is hardly a new idea. Men have been anointing themselves with precious oils and spices since the beginning of civilization,” says Miami Beach’s popular custom perfumer Stella Rossignol.

“King David saturated his clothes with aloe and cinnamon. Who knows, it was maybe the king’s ‘custom scent’ that snared Bathsheba!

“The Roman emperor Nero bathed in attar of roses.

“And according to the memoirs of the Duke of Saint-Simon, the court of Louis the fourteenth positively
reeked
of civet,” Rossignol adds with a chuckle.

However, Napoleon’s moratorium on sensuous scents succeeded in cramping the style of perfumers until the last years of the nineteenth century.

It wasn’t until 1889 that the famous House of Guerlain broke the taboo, says Rossignol, who once worked for Guerlain in Paris.

“That year Aimé Guerlain, the head of the house and a famous ‘nose,’ as perfumers are called in our trade, created a sensational perfume that became an instant must-have for
La Belle Époque
’s aesthetes.

“He named it after his favorite nephew, Jacques (‘Jicky’) Guerlain. Some people were scandalized by Jicky’s audacious civet base note and its indefinable appeal—what the French call
je ne sais quoi,
” explains the diminutive Miami Beach “nose.”

“But the dandies adored it. And soon it became a favorite with the type of woman who is not afraid to be original.”

Stella was obviously the pet source when it came to scent lore, though, two-thirds through the piece, the writer of the men’s feature had dutifully squeezed in quotes from perfume buyers for Burdines and Jordan Marsh. Both said that men were definitely buying more colognes and scented soaps, leaning toward Caron’s Pour un Homme and Rochas’s Moustache, the classic favorites, though Dior’s Eau Sauvage was the current rage among young men-about-town. But the standby, they agreed, was still Shulton’s Old Spice.

Then back to Stella for a snappy windup. Yes, she had created custom scents for many men since coming to Miami Beach; she couldn’t divulge names, of course, but they included entertainers, athletes, attorneys, hotel directors, law enforcement officers, sales representatives,

“and the kind of man who has grown bored with the same old de rigueur
shnook
-splash after his morning shave.

“This type of man wishes to go deeper into himself, to experiment with the subtleties of scent, to stir up new moods in himself and others.”

Rossignol cites the case of a young man who, just before opening a new business establishment on the Beach, decided to Anglicize his surname.

“He wanted a scent to affirm his new identity. For him I made a fantastic cologne with a dry note of blond tobacco, the clean mossy scent of vetiver, and a base of costus root.”

Rossignol laughs. “By itself costus smells of wet dog, but if it is used sparingly in combination with other ingredients, it creates a potent and provocative mix.

“As a matter of fact,” the perfumer roguishly confides, “costus is a time-honored aphrodisiac.”

I scanned all the intervening minor clips on Stella, snipped and archived in chronological order by the ever-vigilant Moira: a reference to Stella’s “Scent Booth” in a trade show; her “Sidewalk Saturday” schedule on Lincoln Road during high season; her advice about making potpourri for the home (“White flowers do not dry well, they turn brown . . . Choose glass or porcelain containers, which don’t react with the essential oils of a plant.”); her suggested ingredients for “Your Personal Bath Blend”: pine needles, sweet orange, lemon, juniper berries, or rosemary for an invigorating uplift; chamomile, clary sage, sandalwood, or ylang-ylang—which Rossignol called “your budget jasmine”—for a calming, soothing bath.

Last in the envelope came the page-one spread in For and About Women, after Marge Armstrong had become the
Star’
s women’s editor and Stella Rossignol had her waiting list of clients.

Perfumer Designs “Character
Scents” for Miami Notables

By Alma Olsen
Star
Staff Writer

The feature had run on the first Sunday in October of 1956. Or, as Paul, always generous about establishing my whereabouts during his own important moments, would have said, “when you were starting your sophomore year in college.”

Compared to the other profiles of Stella, this one was drab and uninspired. It was just as well for the reader that the arrangement of the head shots around a new photo of a more-wrinkled Stella with her portable perfume organ took up more space on the page than the writing, which concentrated on the prominent clients displayed in the head shots: Arthur Godfrey; Xavier Cugat and his wife, Abbe Lane; Tommy Dorsey’s widow, Jane Dorsey; and Fontainebleau architect Morris Lapidus.

For the Stella parts, the writer had simply lifted chunks from the earlier stories, especially the one Marge wrote when she was a temporary. There was the scent game the two women had played in the French internment camp, though Alma Olsen had managed to drain it of all quickness, humor, and dialogue. There was the “beware” quote about coveting another woman’s fragrance, but with the
“chérie”
omitted. As in the previous stories, Stella remained the “chic” or “diminutive” perfumer “who had worked for Guerlain in Paris.”

The most interesting observation in the whole piece was the Morris Lapidus quote, which the copydesk had incorporated into its headline: “Just as I imagine myself as a movie set designer when creating a hotel for my client, I see Stella Rossignol as a character designer who employs scent to help define her clients to themselves.”

A
S THE
reporter was still occupying my daytime desk in the city room, I had no choice but to return to the women’s cage, where Marge was now seated at her typewriter, pecking out copy. She had shed her terry-cloth turban, and her close-cropped gray curls, dry again after her swim, sprang up around her pleasant tanned face.

“Well, Emma, you must have had a productive hour.”

“Was it an hour? This stupid watch, I forget to look at it. It’s designed to pass itself off as a bracelet. The minute I get my paycheck I’m going to go to Woolworth’s and buy a straightforward timepiece.”

“Did you find anything useful in the clips?”

“Well, first of all, I wasn’t aware Stella was so well known. And then that game you wrote about? The one they played when they were prisoners in that camp? She sometimes spoke of it, but never in all that great detail. Your interview made me realize I need to pay more attention. I need to get better at drawing people’s stories out of them. You really caught her personality, the way she talked.”

“Thank you, I worked hard on that piece. I can assure you it didn’t look like that the first few times it came out of the typewriter.”

She tapped a cigarette out of the open pack on her desk, and glanced down at what she had been writing. “I used to think it would get easier, but it doesn’t. I’m still Tillie the Toiler when it comes to prose. Why don’t you use that desk, the neat one. It’s Darcy’s, she’s away on her honeymoon.”

“She wrote the Valentine piece about Stella.”

“You’re right, she did indeed. Was it helpful?”

“Next to yours, it was the most help.”

“Darcy’s my star. I hope we can keep her. What did you think of the other pieces?”

“The one on men’s perfumes was interesting, I don’t recall the byline.”

“It didn’t have one. It was assigned to someone we’d just hired, but she dropped the ball. I had to phone Stella and do a makeover.”

“The ‘de rigueur
shnook
-splash’ and the aphrodisiac that smells like wet dog, that was yours?”

“It was vintage Stella. All I did was write it down. If you ask me, Emma, you pay pretty close attention.”

“I’m trying to train myself. My stepfather was always telling me I never listened. This person who dropped the ball, was it Alma Olsen?”

“No, the poor ball-dropper didn’t last the summer. What made you think of Alma Olsen?”

“Well, because her piece on Stella wasn’t very original, just quotes from other people’s pieces—she drained the oomph out of those. The only good part was that Morris Lapidus quote about Stella.”

Marge made a not-very-serious attempt to suppress a smile. “Originality was never Alma’s leading quality. But she has organizational skills, so they tell me. She’s Broward women’s editor up in Lauderdale now.”

As I set up shop at Darcy’s desk, I made a mental note to read the complete works of Marge’s “star” on a future trip to the morgue.

I flipped open my notepad—all the “fun homes” numbers and contacts were penciled inside the front cover—and dialed Fisher’s. The mortician on duty—alas, not my usual contact—said he was still compiling the information on the deceased. Could the
Star
call back tomorrow morning at the usual time?

“Actually, we’re trying to put together something a little special about her for the Sunday edition. Miss Rossignol was an interesting figure locally, she created custom scents for many famous clients like Arthur Godfrey and Morris Lapidus—there’s lots of material about her in our files for me to work with. All I’ll trouble you for tonight, if you could spare me a minute, is her date of birth, and the place—I think it was Leipzig, Germany, but I need to be sure. And could you just confirm that the funeral service is at noon at Fisher’s on Monday, with burial immediately following at North Shore?”

It would have been humiliating to have Marge overhear me fail, but he stayed on the phone and warmed to his task the longer we talked. At last I thanked him profusely, hung up, and set to work, stuffing as much color and detail into the limited inches of the
Star
’s standard obit as I thought could make it past the copydesk slashers.

Meanwhile the women’s editor pecked and paused and x’d out lines, drawing ruminatively on her cigarette. As she typed, her long-waisted torso rose and sank like that of someone posting on a horse. The aroma of her tobacco I found nostalgically pleasing. Mother had smoked the same brand in her newspaper days, using an atomizer to douse herself with Tweed cologne and chewing clove Life Savers at the end of the day so Loney would believe it was the smoke of
others
that had seeped into her clothes in the newsroom. All the smooth girls at college had smoked, choreographing the act into a rite of seduction. In the early days, before I had cut a dash with my
Daily Tar Heel
column “Carolina Carousel,” I always carried a pack of Camels in my purse as a kind of emergency social accessory, though I never learned to inhale.

Marge Armstrong and Major Marjac were both handsome, affable women with careers. They had an aura about them that deterred you from categorizing them as old maids. What if I ended up without a husband at their age? What would I need to have accomplished by then to deter people from pitying me for being single?

My obit was an inch and a half over the limit, but, reading it over, I thought it was substantial enough to make it past the copy editors. I delivered it to the copydesk in person.

“I know it’s too late for tomorrow,” I told the old slasher on duty, someone I hadn’t seen before, “but I want to be sure it’ll be in Sunday’s paper because the funeral’s at noon on Monday.”