“Get me some towels,” Daisy demanded. “And tell Danillo I’ll be out in just a little while. It only takes me about three minutes to do my own make-up if I start with a clean face. Robertson! Hairbrush, please! Oh, for heaven’s sake, Alonzo, just put your head between your legs and take a few deep breaths!”
“Could we just go over what we have so far, Warner?” asked Hugo Ralli, the general manager of the Tavern on the Green. Candice Bloom and Warner Le Roy had seen eye to eye so quickly that he wanted to make sure that they hadn’t overlooked anything.
The secretary read from her notes. “The Elm Room is to be used for the receiving line. Both the Elm and Rafters rooms will have ten rolling tables circulating from the moment the party starts, with two waiters at each table. The tables will carry three ice sculptures of the Princess Daisy bottle, each three feet tall, one to contain ten pounds of caviar, one to hold a jeroboam of champagne, specified Louis Roederer Cristal, another a bottle of Stolichnaya vodka. The caviar will be served on small plates with whatever trimmings the guest chooses.”
“You left out the gypsies,” said Candice, adding a touch of lemon juice to the smoked trout she was eating. Warner Le Roy looked at her kindly from behind the glasses. As always, when he went over a party with someone who was taking over the entire restaurant, he dressed in his most conservative way. Today he had adorned his agreeably liberal girth with red trousers and a gray, red and white plaid jacket. He enjoyed clothes even as subdued as these. He enjoyed boyish, bossy Candice Bloom. He enjoyed owning Maxwell’s Plum and the Tavern on the Green. He enjoyed life and life enjoyed him.
“I was just about to get to the gypsies,” the secretary said. “During the arrival of the guests there will be a thirty-man gypsy band playing outside on both sides of the front entrance and another thirty gypsies strolling through the Rafters and Elm rooms, not, note not, playing loudly, or else they may drown out the introductions to Princess Daisy on the receiving line. There will be eight searchlights placed around the restaurant and an additional fifty parking attendants will be hired to supplement our regular staff because of the troikas. The men must be trained in handling horses.”
“What did we finally decide about the buffet?” asked Candice, as she sat, finishing her trout, at a round table under an umbrella on the terrace of the restaurant
“It’s supposed to be set up in the Pavilion Room,” the secretary said, consulting her notes.
“I’m not sure about that,” Warner Le Roy said. “I think that with six hundred guests we’ve got to have two separate buffets.”
“Agreed,” said Walter Rauscher, the banquet manager, who made the fifth member of the lunch party.
The secretary made a note and continued. “During dinner there will be a waltz orchestra playing in the Crystal Room and waltzing will take place both in the Crystal Room and outside under the trees on the terrace. Both gypsy bands will play in the Pavilion Room. The disco band will play in the Terrace Room at the back of the restaurant, starting right after dinner.”
“What if it rains?” asked Candice.
“We can put up a tent outside and have radiant heat but I think that so early in September, you don’t really have to worry,” Warner Le Roy reassured her.
“Warner,” Candice said, in as waggish a tone as she’d ever permitted herself. “I’m still not tout à fait happy with the caviar. We just say ‘caviar’ but I’d like to get more precise. I take a personal interest in it.”
“If you want to go all the way, I could try to order the golden Iranian, but I doubt that there’d be enough available,” he told her. “And most people wouldn’t know what it was, anyway.”
“What’s the next best?” she asked, finishing her trout Public relations had its moments of compensation. She must remember to tell her analyst
“The best beluga. No problem getting it. If you want to be reasonably lavish you provide two large scoops for each person, three ounces in all, so that makes one pound for every five people, considering that not everyone likes caviar.”
“My orders are to be unreasonably lavish,” Candice said with gusto. “How about four ounces per person? And let’s figure that everyone wants caviar because I intend to put away two pounds myself and I expect a large doggie bag and a dogsled to take it home in.”
“So, six hundred people at four ounces to a person … makes two thousand, four hundred ounces … of course the Russian pound is only fourteen ounces so that makes …”
“To be on the safe side, Warner, one hundred seventy-five pounds of the best beluga at a hundred and twenty-five dollars a pound, wholesale, and one large doggie bag,” Walter Rauscher suggested.
“Done and done,” Candice pronounced, her Tootsie Roll brown eyes sparkling with anticipatory greed.
“Shall I go on?” asked the secretary. Candice nodded.
“The buffet will feature whole cold sturgeon and salmon, roast quail, roast wild boar with sautéed apples and lingonberries …”
“Ah, look, Warner, I just don’t know about that wild boar,” Candice said. “I know it’s Russian, but are you sure?”
“It’s sensational. We marinate it for five days and do it in light bread crumbs with a Béarnaise sauce.” He waved at the secretary to continue reading the long buffet list Eventually she came to her last notes.
“The desserts will be served at the table. Mr. Ralli and the head chef will decide on the most appropriate ingredients for a variety of sculptured bombe desserts to be carried in, en flambé.”
“Not a flaming Princess Daisy bottle,” Candice warned.
“Of course not!” Warner said, shocked. “Trust me.”
“I do,” said Candice wistfully, “but I just don’t see why we can’t have icicles on the trees on the terrace. We’re going to have snow all around the Tavern, except on the outside dance floor, so pourquoi isn’t there some sort of real dripless icicle?”
“We could do theatrical icicles, I suppose, or I could put up the winter lights,” Warner said thoughtfully.
“Oh, yes! That’s it! The winter lights, all white and tiny and twinkling—I remember them from last Christmas, driving by. They were incroyable! Let’s put them up,” Candice said in excitement.
“There’s just one problem. They’ll have to come down the next day—I don’t start winter until just after Thanksgiving.”
“What’s the problem?”
“There are sixty thousand lights. That’s going to cost a lot for labor.”
“Mr. Shannon wouldn’t like to hear that I decided to draw the line at twinkle lights,” the publicity woman told Warner. “Not with fifty thousand dollars worth of man-made snow.”
Hugo Ralli coughed. “Did we say only candlelight?” he asked, thinking of places that demanded electricity.
“No, we said at least two thousand candles, in silver candelabra—candles everywhere they could possibly be, but electric light in the Johns,” Candice remembered. “And now, about the flowers, Mr. Ralli, they’re terribly important. Millions of daisies. I don’t know where you’ll find that many in the city, but we’ve got to have them, no matter what. C’est indispensable!”
“I can get them, but they won’t make the right effect unless I mix them with white roses and spider chrysanthemums in yellow and white,” he insisted.
“Okay, just so long as you find the daisies.” Candice turned to Warner Le Roy, grandson of Harry Warner, grand-nephew of Jack Warner, heir to a sense of the spectacular not possessed by any other restaurateur in the world. “Could you just give me a ballpark figure on how much this party is going to cost? Forget the snow and the troikas and the horses.”
Warner thought for a minute, remembering the twenty-fifth anniversary party for the Klebergs of the King Ranch in Texas, who had flown 250 people to New York and taken over the restaurant. “Somewhere in the neighborhood of—well, with all the extras and the ice sculpture and all, somewhere in the neighborhood of two hundred thousand—it could go higher, depending on how much caviar you
want in your doggie bag.”
“Sounds reasonable,” Candice said, judiciously, waiting for the next course to be served. Lunch, thank God, had only started.
When he woke from his first restless hours of sleep, Hilly Bijur, president of Elstree, often wondered what had ever lured him into the jungle of the fucking fragrance business. As soon as this question formed in his mind, he had trained himself to try to relax his muscles, grimly starting at the top of his scalp and working down to his toes, and then back up again, not neglecting his clenched teeth, as the hypnotherapist he had gone to for insomnia had taught him, but by the time his ears were relaxed and he started on his forehead, words started to whirl in his mind: Quadrille, Calèche, L’Air du Temps, Arpège, distaile, Jontue, Halston—damn Halston—why couldn’t he have a French name like the others?—Aliage, Infini, Cabochard, Ecusson … when he got to Ecusson he usually was able to return his concentration to his forehead and sometimes he got down as far as relaxing his jaw muscles when another set of names would start dancing behind his eyes: first, Dick Johnson, perfume buyer for the Hess chain based in Allentown, Pennsylvania; then Mike Gannaway, merchandise manager at Dayton’s in Minneapolis; swiftly followed by Verda Gaines, head of cosmetics at Steinfeld’s in Tucson; Karol Kempster, buyer for Henri Bendel; Marjorie Cassell, buyer for Harvey’s in Nashville; Melody Grim at Garfinkle’s—the list could go on all night, but when Hilly Bijur reached Garfinkle’s he gave up trying to work on his muscles, got out of bed and took a sleeping pill that his doctor had guaranteed to be nonaddictive, nonbarbiturate and without evil side effects which might cause it to build up in the body. This remarkable pill had only one drawback, Hilly Bijur reflected, it did not put him to sleep. However, just swallowing a pill made him feel calmer, even if it only acted as a placebo, he assured himself as he crept out of the bedroom so as not to wake his wife. He read a few more pages of Leon Edel’s five-volume biography of Henry James. This great scholarly work, detailed, leisurely and undoubtedly good for him, had the virtue of not being a page turner. At about five in the morning, trying hard to think only about James churning out books in London, books Hilly Bijur had never read, he ventured back to bed and usually managed to sleep for several hours before he woke up to another day of the Princess Daisy project.
It was now early September of 1977, almost eight months since preparations had begun for the new line of perfume and cosmetics. The fragrance which Patrick Shannon had named Princess Daisy had actually been seven years in the creation, the work of a man who was considered the greatest “nose” in France. To Hilly Bijur’s pragmatic judgment, it smelled good. As far as he was concerned, the world needed only one perfume, Arpège, the scent of the first woman he’d ever laid. Arpège turned him on in the way Youth Dew, his mother-in-law’s perfume, turned him off. What, he wondered, if his first real fuck had worn Youth Dew and his mother-in-law used Arpège? Would his tastes be reversed? Did perfume smell like sex or did sex smell like perfume? What would sex smell like without any perfume at all? Better? He thought so—but business was business and if people wanted to describe a perfume as “irrepressible yet romantic” or “spirited yet reserved” or “endearing and joyously feminine” they had as much right as wine freaks. He didn’t even give a good goddamn when they started talking about “single-note florals” or “ylang-ylang notes” or “little greenies” or throwing around phrases about a “serious perfume that goes with serious clothes” or the “musk revolution,” and he was indifferent to whether a perfume was “created” or “designed,” whether a claim was made that a woman didn’t just “put on” Chloe, but “entered it” or any equally baroque fragrance-world bullshit.
It was a question of merchandising, that’s all it was about, he thought to himself in the shower. Merchandising the sizzle, not the steak. Merchandising the fantasy, not the reality. Merchandising a luxury that had become increasingly a part of American life, a luxury that was sold in discount drugstores and continued to base its advertising on snob appeal.
He remembered, shudderingly, that first sales conference at which he had announced the new Princess Daisy concept to his sales staff, and told them of Shannon’s one-hundred-million-dollars’ sales expectation for the new line. Six of his top salesmen had resigned on the spot, and the ones who were left made the crew of H.M.S. Bounty look like the peaceful and contented seamen of the H.M.S. Pinafore. When he boiled it down, Hilly reflected, it simply amounted to the fact that no one was happy about being in on a launch. They’d have been more willing to go along with the old Elstree line, fading quietly into the back of consumers’ minds, than to have to hustle their asses trying to get cosmetic buyers to place orders for anything new, no matter how good, no matter how it was going to be backed up by advertising and packaging.
Hilly Bijur, seasoned merchandising man, had not been picked by Shannon as president of Elstree by accident Within a month, spending freely, he’d cleaned house and built a much stronger group of sales people, who, since they hadn’t worked for the old Elstree, had nothing to prevent them from being enthusiastic about the new plans. He’d made the important decisions about how many items to offer in the new cosmetic line, knowing how store buyers detested being asked to order a great variety of stock they weren’t sure they would sell. The Princess Daisy cosmetic collection was a full but strictly edited group of products: the essential moisturizing lotion, a cleansing cream, a body lotion, a liquid make-up base in the six most important shades, lipsticks and lip glosses in the basic groups of pinks, reds, raisins and plums, nail lacquer to match, four shades of blusher, four hues of face powder, roll-on mascaras in black and brown, eyeliner in four colors, eye shadow in eight shades (an area in which he congratulated himself on almost unheard-of self-restraint since over twenty shades were average for most cosmetic companies) and, of course, the soap, the after-bath dusting powder, the spray cologne in three sizes, and finally the perfume, in the half-ounce, the one-ounce size and the two-ounce bottles. As he turned over and over in his mind the array of new products, Hilly Bijur was remembering the words of the voice of his conscience, the very same Dick Johnson of Allentown who woke him up at night
“Yeah, you would not be exaggerating at all if you were to say we have too many products on the market today—the manufacturers are overdoing it completely.” Oh, Dick Johnson of those eleven eastern Pennsylvania cities which shelter a Hess’s, Inc., why were you not more like adventuresome Verda Gaines of Tucson who said, “Without new products, there is no progress.” Why???
Eleven percent of every dollar cosmetic and fragrance manufacturers spend goes into packaging. It was this fact that made Hilly Bijur erase Dick Johnson from his mind as he plunged into delighted contemplation of the marvellous bottle that had been designed for the perfume. It was inspired, at Daisy’s suggestion, by the Easter eggs which Peter Carl Fabergé had made for the Imperial Family—fifty-seven eggs in all, between 1884 and 1917. Now they were scattered in museums all over the world, although some had found their way into private collections. Marjorie Merriweather Post, the great heiress of the General Foods Corporation, had been one of the few private people in the world to possess several of the Imperial eggs, and even in her vast collection of Russian treasures, they were the rarest, most prized objects.
The Princess Daisy bottle was egg shaped, hand-blown crystal, bound from its base to its top with four slender, rippling vermeil ribbons which came together above the stopper to form a bow. It stood on a graceful three-legged vermeil stand surmounted by an oval hoop into which it fit snugly. In a year of ever more modern bottles, at a time dominated by the severity of Halston’s packaging and the classicism of Chanel’s, the Elstree bottle was jewel-like, unique. It was impossible to see it and not want to lift it from its stand and caress it. After all, Bijur reflected, was the egg not considered nature’s most perfect form? Take that, Dick Johnson of Allentown! And take the rest of the packaging as well, jars and bottles and cases of deep, brilliant lapis lazuli blue, so highly glazed that they
resembled Fabergé enamel itself, each one bearing a single white and gold daisy on a green stem, a highly stylized design which was the trademark for the entire line. They were so fucking perfect they could make you fucking cry, Bijur had told Patrick Shannon and, for once, Shannon had agreed without even trying to suggest a single improvement.
Princess Daisy perfume was going to sell at a hundred dollars an ounce. Justified? Bijur thought so. Unlike many perfumes that sold for less, it was made only from natural oils and essences, produced and bottled in France. Of course, it didn’t cost anything close to one hundred dollars an ounce to make it or bottle it or merchandise it—my God, he thought, if it fucking did, where would the profit be? When cosmetics and perfumes start selling for anything even near the price they cost to produce, it’d be like fucking Russia.
As Hilly Bijur walked briskly down Park Avenue to the Supracorp building, he thought about the Christmas catalogues which major stores all over the country had sent out in August, almost all of them offering Princess Daisy perfume and gift boxes of various combinations of perfume, cologne, soap and bath powder. If they’d missed being in the Saks and Neiman-Marcus catalogues, to say nothing of the dozens of other catalogues in which they had been featured, Shannon’s wild dream wouldn’t have had a chance of being realized.
The Princess Daisy launch was being coordinated as if it were as important as D-Day. Shit, if you had a sense of perspective, it fucking was D-Day, Bijur ruminated. On the one hand there was Candice Bloom taking care of the fluff, building all that media excitement about Daisy herself which would finally flare into an explosion with the publication of the People cover story tomorrow, to say nothing of The Russian Winter Palace Ball, the launch party that should make every newsmagazine and newspaper women’s page in the country. And Helen Strauss had the advertising well in hand, the commercials, the double trade magazine ads, the four color brochures. Hilly himself was complacent about his shipments of perfume in the New Jersey warehouse. Everything had arrived from France in good time and in good shape and the salesmen had taken spectacular orders. Even Saks Fifth Avenue, traditionally the one store to get a perfume before anyone in New York had been persuaded to share the launch with Bendel’s and Bloomingdale’s; the special Princess Daisy capsule collection of fall fashions by Bill Blass was one of the most opulent that consistently elegant designer had ever created, and the clothes had been shipped to major stores across the country to be shown in banks of display windows the week of the launch; the Elstree saleswomen were being given an extra bonus commission on top of their regular commission for the first three months of sales; the samples of Princess Daisy perfume had already arrived in the chosen stores by the tens of thousands, to be distributed with an open hand at special designer “out-posts” on the stores’ ground floors, and Daisy herself was scheduled to fly from one city to another on a whirlwind tour of thirty major markets during the weeks following the party to make personal appearances at the largest department stores and draw the winning number which would give one of the women at each store who had bought Princess Daisy perfume or cosmetics a gift certificate for a thousand dollars.
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