How Doris Lessing Was Indirectly Responsible for My Signature Fragrance
When I was in junior high, my mother’s friend Phyllis came to stay with us on Chrysanthemum Lane while she got back on her feet. She was returning to Los Angeles from England, after having moved to London to live with her lover, the writer Clancy Sigal, who had fled to England after being blacklisted in Hollywood. Unfortunately, things hadn’t worked out with Clancy because it turned out he was having an affair with another writer in London named Doris Lessing. (Clancy went on to live with Doris for about four years, and she wrote about their relationship in her groundbreaking novel The Golden Notebook, which I read and adored—yes, Clancy was the main male character in that book, the American writer Saul Green. And Clancy wrote about Doris in his novel The Secret Defector.)
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| I don't have a photo of Phyllis, so here's a photo of Clancy and Doris |
So Phyllis was heart-broken, and she had come back LA to try to put her life back together again, and that was why my mother took her in. Before that, Phyllis wasn’t someone I knew that well—unlike my mother’s best friend, Tomi, who lived just across the street from us. But I had seen her at a few of my mother’s dinner parties (being a child, I was allowed to meet the guests but not allowed to attend the dinners themselves). And I gathered that they had become friends after having been in group therapy together with a well-known clinical psychologist named Murray Korngold because their conversations were always peppered with “Murray said this” and “Murray said that.”
And I also knew that before she left for England, Phyllis was a roommate of Rita Moreno, who was at that time still a little-known actress, and my parent’s used to laugh as they told the story of how one night when they were visiting Phyllis, Rita was getting ready for her date with Marlon Brando, with whom she was having a secret affair, so when the doorbell rang, my father went to answer it instead of Rita, extending his hand and saying to Brando, “Hi, I’m Milt Zolotow,” but Brando then punched him in the face because he was confusing my father with first cousin Maurice Zolotow, who then wrote about Hollywood stars for a living.
Phyllis wasn’t conventionally beautiful; she was tall and large-boned, with thin, straight hair in a bob and craggy features (my mother said “Phyllis has a great face” but I didn’t see it at the time). But I was in awe of her Bohemian lifestyle and her glamorous connections, so it was a very exciting day for me when Phyllis arrived at our house, with all her suitcases, direct from England. And she brought gifts for everyone! I don’t remember what she brought for the others, but for me there was a bottle of perfume. It was called Ma Griffe by Carven, and although I had never heard of it, I immediately loved it because I was sure that Phyllis—despite her heart-broken status—knew exactly the right perfume for an interesting and unconventional young woman, which is what I had recently decided I wanted to be.
And when I sniffed the perfume, I was thrilled because it was unlike anything I had ever smelled before—it was a bold very green floral with a slight edge, something almost sweaty, I thought. And back then it seemed to me both youthful and sophisticated, and oh, so, French. Looking at the notes now for Ma Griffe, I see it was so green because it included galbanum as well as vetiver and that those two sharp and bitter grassy green notes were balanced by the sweetness of white flowers, including gardenia, jasmine, and orange blossom. And some perfume reviews I’ve read cite the asafoetida note as contributing to that slightly “sweaty” impression that I detected—something that made the fragrance more human rather than just flower water. Back then, I imagined it was a new fragrance, but it turns out that it had already been on the market for 20 years or so. However, it was indeed intentionally designed for younger women. As Victoria Frolova of Bois de Jasmin wrote, “Carven dreamed up Ma Griffe for a young woman, but she also wanted it to dazzle and to project confidence.”
From then on, Ma Griffe was my signature fragrance, and I wore Ma Griffe every single day, even though I was only 13 and all the other girls were wearing simple, sweet perfumes, like Yardley’s Oh! de London or Dana’s Chantilly, or just the laundry-musk scent of their deodorants. Whenever anyone at school asked me about my perfume and then looked at me blankly after I told them its name, I’d always say with a shrug, “I only wear French perfume.”
The relationship that Clancy and Doris Lessing had was very tempestuous, and eventually they broke up for good. After publishing her most famous book, The Golden Notebook, Doris went on to write many more novels, eventually winning the Nobel Prize in literature. And Clancy stayed in England for 30 years, where he also published some novels and non-fiction, even getting a nomination for the National Book Award for his book Going Away. But he eventually returned to Los Angeles, where he taught writing and became a screenwriter (he co-wrote wrote the script for the movie Frida with his wife, Janice Tidwell).
As for Phyllis, after a few months of living with us, she started her new life. First, she found a job as a script reader for a movie studio. (I’ll never forget what she told us after her first week of work, that she ended up walking the halls of the movie studio asking herself, “Where are all the grownups?” Remembering her saying that helped me through my own career, whether I was working as a technical writer for software companies or writing yoga books. Reminding myself not to expect any grownups helped me weather all the strife and drama that inevitably rears its ugly head when people, even professional people, spend so much time around each other.) Then she moved to her own apartment in nearby Westwood, which my mother helped her to fix up.
For a couple of years, Phyllis and my mother continued to be intimate friends, and she was a big part of our family life, even going with us on a family vacation to the magnificent Rosarito Hotel in Baja California. But then Phyllis suddenly stopped speaking to my mother. My mother was terribly hurt, and never understood what had happened. (Sometimes I remember a moment on that vacation when I heard Phyllis telling my father—who was wearing a new black turtleneck—how sexy he looked, and I wonder if that wasn't some kind of clue.) Eventually we heard Phyllis had become the fiction editor of Playboy magazine or maybe it was Playgirl magazine or maybe she was just some kind of editor at Playboy, not the fiction editor. But we never saw her again or even heard anything more about what the rest of her life was like.
I stopped wearing Ma Griffe after a couple of years, when I switched to another French perfume, one that I chose for myself. But ever since then, I’m always happy when I find Ma Griffe listed as one of the great perfumes of the mid-century era. Wearing it gave me a tiny boost of sorely needed confidence as I was trying to find a place for myself in a very large public junior high school where I felt lost and overwhelmed. However, although the fragrance itself gave me a boost because it was so bold and uncompromising, I now think it was the fact that it was given to me by interesting, unconventional woman—a woman who took me seriously—was what made wearing it so powerful for me.
The relationship that Clancy and Doris Lessing had was very tempestuous, and eventually they broke up for good. After publishing her most famous book, The Golden Notebook, Doris went on to write many more novels, eventually winning the Nobel Prize in literature. And Clancy stayed in England for 30 years, where he also published some novels and non-fiction, even getting a nomination for the National Book Award for his book Going Away. But he eventually returned to Los Angeles, where he taught writing and became a screenwriter (he co-wrote wrote the script for the movie Frida with his wife, Janice Tidwell).
As for Phyllis, after a few months of living with us, she started her new life. First, she found a job as a script reader for a movie studio. (I’ll never forget what she told us after her first week of work, that she ended up walking the halls of the movie studio asking herself, “Where are all the grownups?” Remembering her saying that helped me through my own career, whether I was working as a technical writer for software companies or writing yoga books. Reminding myself not to expect any grownups helped me weather all the strife and drama that inevitably rears its ugly head when people, even professional people, spend so much time around each other.) Then she moved to her own apartment in nearby Westwood, which my mother helped her to fix up.
For a couple of years, Phyllis and my mother continued to be intimate friends, and she was a big part of our family life, even going with us on a family vacation to the magnificent Rosarito Hotel in Baja California. But then Phyllis suddenly stopped speaking to my mother. My mother was terribly hurt, and never understood what had happened. (Sometimes I remember a moment on that vacation when I heard Phyllis telling my father—who was wearing a new black turtleneck—how sexy he looked, and I wonder if that wasn't some kind of clue.) Eventually we heard Phyllis had become the fiction editor of Playboy magazine or maybe it was Playgirl magazine or maybe she was just some kind of editor at Playboy, not the fiction editor. But we never saw her again or even heard anything more about what the rest of her life was like.
I stopped wearing Ma Griffe after a couple of years, when I switched to another French perfume, one that I chose for myself. But ever since then, I’m always happy when I find Ma Griffe listed as one of the great perfumes of the mid-century era. Wearing it gave me a tiny boost of sorely needed confidence as I was trying to find a place for myself in a very large public junior high school where I felt lost and overwhelmed. However, although the fragrance itself gave me a boost because it was so bold and uncompromising, I now think it was the fact that it was given to me by interesting, unconventional woman—a woman who took me seriously—was what made wearing it so powerful for me.
by Nina Zolotow
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