What I Chose, Part 1

I have never before shared the first part of something that I was still in the process of writing with a bunch of people, but there are some people out there who requested this true story—and are waiting for it—so I thought—delusiastically—why not. After all, maybe I'll get some feedback from readers about areas that need more work or things that need more explanation. Or maybe it will just help me stay motivated to finish. Part 2 will come one of these days. —Nina

What I Chose, Part 1

The perfume industry would like us to believe that perfume goes bad after a year or two and after that you need to buy a fresh bottle. But it turns out this is just not true. If stored properly, perfume, like fine wine, can even outlive the person who bought it. But unlike wine, at any time as the years pass, perfume can be opened and sniffed—or even worn—and all the memories associated with that smell will come flooding back. Then you can put the cap back on and return the bottle a cool, dark cabinet, where it will wait patiently for you until the next time you are ready to time travel. Be careful with this powerful magic, however! Because life is so complex and bittersweet, when a perfume triggers memories it will bring you sorrow as well as joy and pain as well as pleasure. 

Today I’m uncapping a bottle of the first perfume I chose for myself, Le De Givenchy. Of course, this splash bottle of eau de toilette is not the same one I wore when I was a teenager—that one I used up completely. But the bottle I have now, which was given to me by another Nina—one whose mother had died and left behind a large stash of perfume, some of which was quite old—looks the same and smells the same as the one I wore in the late sixties. Handling the smooth, thick glass bottle brings me a surprising jolt of sensual pleasure. And I know the perfume inside it hasn’t gone off because not only does the fragrance evoke memories of the time when I wore it, but the smell itself—cool and crystalline with hints of flowers and a dry, herbal edge—is one that I remember so well. And although I don’t remember the date or even the time of year I first smelled this perfume, I remember exactly how I discovered it.

When I was in junior high, my father started his own design firm—with my mother providing office support—and his studio was right on Westwood Boulevard, just a couple of blocks away from my school. So, sometimes after school, instead of taking the long bus ride back up to Beverly Glen Canyon and our house on Chrysanthemum Lane, I’d just walk to the studio and get a ride home with my mother when she was done with her work. While I was waiting for her, I could do my homework or check out what my father or his assistant were working on—seeing graphic design work in progress was always fascinating to me—photos, type, and artwork all coming together in a layout. But I soon discovered, I could also just wander down Westwood Boulevard by myself, looking at the shop windows and sometimes—when I got the courage up—even going inside a shop! For someone who lived up in a canyon in the Santa Monica Mountains, where there was nowhere to go by myself except up into the hills—though I did love that—it was thrilling to be able to walk alone down a city street. And then one day I discovered that the small local pharmacy had a selection of high-end perfumes—the same ones they had at Bullock’s department store—with testers. So, I developed a habit of stopping in there and sniffing perfumes. 

Before then, all the perfumes I wore had just come to me. My first signature perfume, Ma Griffe, which I was still wearing at the time this story begins, was given to me by my mother’s friend, Phyllis. And before that, I had been given an inexpensive drugstore gift set of three Faberge perfumes, Tigress, Woodhue, and Aphrodesia, which I had enjoyed, but which felt too “ordinary” for me. 

The truth is that when I first started Junior High, I had some ideas about being popular and “fitting in.” But I came to a quick and harsh realization that this was never going to happen. My super curly and frizzy hair was all wrong for the era when the fashion was stick-straight long hair with bangs, like the English model Jean Shrimpton and the singer Marianne Faithfull. My mother tried to help with that by chemically straightening my hair, but the result always looked stiff and unnatural, with frizz at the roots. And other girls made it quite clear to me that I wasn’t fooling anyone when they would walk up to me and say, “I’m so glad I don’t have hair like yours!” But it wasn’t just my looks that were the problem. Even in grade school, I’d been a little too smart and a bit rebellious. But now I was reading adult novels and seeing adult movies, and I questioned my teachers about anything they said that seemed too simplistic and I’m sure I showed my disdain when my classmates gave the banal, formulaic answers that the teachers seemed to want to hear. 

So by ninth grade I had moved away from trying to fit in toward trying to be extraordinary. And because my school was large enough that there were others—both boys and girls—who also saw themselves as a bit different—who read books and wanted to talk about them, who played the guitar and sang folk songs, who went to the beach even in the winter—a group of us who called ourselves “deep” eventually coalesced. 

I noticed him because he was so striking looking as he strode alone across the schoolyard, the boy who looked like a man, all six feet of him. He had the broad-shouldered, muscular build of a football player along with the all-American square-jawed handsome face and blond hair to go with it. Not my type at all, in other words. There were those black-framed heavy glasses, though. But I never had a class with him, never met him, and never knew his name, and wasn’t interested enough to try to find out. He was just “that guy.”

I soon found a perfume at the drugstore that I wanted to smell over and over. “I think I love you,” I said to myself. It wasn’t the name I loved—Le De—what did that even mean?—nothing much I was later to find out. And it wasn't the bottle, which was very simple. And it wasn’t the idea of the perfume because I had never seen an ad for it and had no associations with it. It truly was just the smell. 

The only print ad I can find now, which is from 1965, is very strange, with a dark photo against a black background, and tiny print that says nothing about what the perfume smells like.

Why did I love this particular fragrance so much? At the time, I didn’t try to analyze it; I just responded to it emotionally. But now I suspect that one reason I was drawn to it was because of the unusual dry herbal and woody opening—the top notes include coriander, tarragon, and rosewood, along with mandarin orange and bergamot—which must have reminded me of the chaparral on the hills behind our house in Beverly Glen Canyon that I loved.

When I had been a child, the hills behind our house—picture cowboy movie terrain and the dusty, herbal scent of toyon, chamise, scrub oak, and yucca—had been a place to have hiking adventures along with my father, my brother, and our dog. As a teenager, the same hills became my refuge. On those afternoons when I felt restless and lonely, I would go up there by myself, often with a notebook to write in. Sometimes I would only go as far as the Sweet Acacia tree half way up the hill behind our house and sit down underneath it, leaning back against its trunk. There I would be completely private, as no one in the house could see me and I could not see our house. But other times I need to get further away, so I would walk along the ridge that ran parallel with Chrysanthemum Lane—a short, steep street that had once been a creek bed—to the ridge of hills that ran perpendicular to the lane. Then I would turn right and continue on until I came to my other favorite spot, a small clearing above the very end of the lane, where I could gaze down at the entire street. From there I was literally above it all, unseen yet all seeing. 

But I know that I was also drawn to the crisp and pristine quality of Le De as it moved from its dry, herbal opening to a heart that included very cool notes of iris and lily of the valley, along with classic perfume notes of jasmine, ylang-ylang, and rose. Perhaps I was drawn to that crisp, pristine quality because the perfume felt young, as I still was—just thirteen—and less bombastic than the Ma Griffe I had been wearing since Phyllis gave it to me. Or perhaps that crisp, pristine quality signaled a new beginning. 

I’ve read a lot of reviews of this perfume, and I feel like most of them get it wrong when they describe Le De “elegant.” Perhaps the reviewers jump to this conclusion because Le De was one of the two perfumes that Hubert de Givenchy created for Audrey Hepburn, the most famously elegant of movie stars. But Mimi Froufrou of The Scented Salamander blog describes Le De in a way that feels more authentic to me, saying it “has the clarity and purity of a fountain of youth cascading with crystalline floral water, only emitting the loveliest of murmur in the middle of a glade in a delicate green forest.” 

I told my mother I had found a new perfume that I wanted for my birthday that year. And when Le De was mine, I left Ma Griffe behind and wore Le De exclusively. 

When I started high school, I noticed that guy again—the boy who looked like a man, all six feet of him. But this time, he was not striding across the school yard. Instead, I spotted him from my seat on the school bus as it headed out of Beverly Glen Canyon. There he was, long blond hair falling into his face, standing in front of the Bel Air gates, hitching hiking on Sunset Boulevard, heading west. This was not the right direction for him to be going in—and where did he live anyway?—if he was trying to get the University High—and, in fact, I never saw him at Uni—so where was he going? After noticing him in that same spot, always hitch hiking, a few more times, I got in the habit of checking each morning to see if he was there that day—that guy.

See Choosing Myself, Part 2 for the second half of this story.

by Nina Zolotow

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