Gabe Oppenheim - The Ghost Perfumer: Creed, Lies, & the Scent of the Century

Gabe Oppenheim

The Ghost Perfumer

Part I: Creed, Lies, & the Scent of the Century

First published by Solicitude LLC 2021

Copyright 2021 by Gabe Oppenheim

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise without written permission from the publisher. It is illegal to copy this book, post it to a website, or distribute it by any other means without permission.

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To Barry and Sara, for affording me a West Coast chamber in which to work (and for tolerating my tack-effectuated punctures of its walls).

And for the brilliant Larry M., whose Santa Monica seafood meals and the belief in me such occasions signaled I herewith hope to repay and validate.

At the beginning of 1999, the New York Times insisted the 56-year-olds appearance was still distinguished: He had the burnish of the Paris Match eurocracy: steely, graying hair, Riviera-toned skin. Prince Rainier by way of Austin Powers.

But very soon, Monsieur Olivier Creed will have crepe-paper skin and a round, jutting chin. His cheeks and forehead wont quite sag not right away but theyll seem subject to a slightly greater gravity than the rest of him. Unimpeachably handsome once, he will become a pendulous fellow over the next decade, before becoming fully pot-bellied after yet another.

Now, on the precipice of all that, the start of autumn and the end of a century, September of 1999, Olivier sits in a small boutique north of Houston Street. The shop itself is a fitting setting for a conversation with this particular monied divorc, who drives a Ferrari and dates a woman 20 years his junior.

The shop abuts the Robbins & Appleton Building at 1-5 Bond, designed by renowned architect Stephen Decatur Hatch in the Second Empire Style with an iron faade and mansard roof in 1879 and designated a New York City Landmark exactly 100 years later.

Meanwhile, the building in which the man sits was constructed in 1904 without ingenuity it was simply built to resemble its neighbor, to the snickering of architectural critics. Creed arrived here from his home in Paris by way of the Concorde.

And so he lounges sipping tea, this middle-aged rou, in fast-gentrifying NoHo, pausing to discuss in French, with the help of his New York-based US distributor and publicist, the nature of his work in particular the nine custom fragrances he crafted the previous year for VIP clients at a cost of anywhere from $10,000-$20,000 each.

I psychoanalyze the clients, the man says. We talk about everything. About nothing. If they go to the countryside, what do they do there?

He must learn about clients sex lives, his distributor adds.

Olivier says he requires about three or four fittings to get a persons unique scent just so, that he spends 40 hours sniffing each creation as it is made, that each client receives a five-year-supply of bespoke perfume, and that he recently conceived his non-bespoke, commercial fragrance Green Valley while playing golf. And he can really only force himself to work three hours a day.

Also did you know that he skis? Hes very sporty, says the distributor. And he smokes a Cuban cigar every afternoon.

That Olivier is a caricature of a Frenchman born into great wealth that his definition of sporting would be rather brutally challenged just a few Subway stops away, say in Rucker Park, or just over the Manhattan Bridge, in Gleasons Gym is obvious. He fits in downtown no better than Crocodile Dundee, if for reasons less outback-tough than Gallic-smug.

Less clear is why this man proclaiming himself a perfumer is being accorded such respect by the reporter present now from The New York Observer, by the Times journalist who profiled him earlier in 1999, by the New Yorker writer wholl mention Creed in two years time.

Is that, too, due to money? Or perhaps its merely due to the family history elucidated on its web site:

Olivier CREED is the eminent sixth generation master perfumer and chief executive of CREED. Following decades of study of scent with his father, Olivier CREED became master perfumer in 1975. He has created some of the most widely beloved and artistic scents in the 247-year history of the House.

But there is an odd detail included on the press release for this bespoke scent project namely, that your scent may not be made by Olivier Creed at all but by a perfumer named Jean-Pierre Subrnat, whose career output consists of a co-authored 1978 perfume and three female fragrances for Avon in 1992.

And there is a memoir a damn entertaining one, in fact written by Oliviers uncle Charles, a playboy womens couturier of some prominence in the post-war London fashion world who wound up marrying the editor of British Vogue. The book, Maid to Measure, was published in 1961, or the year Olivier Creed turned 18. It describes a long family history of work in the garment industry but not a word about scent.

Creed shows the reporter a tobacco-based scent of his familys creation that was favored by King George IV, who has been dead, mind you, for 169 years.

Turkey, Bulgaria, Morocco, southern Italy. Every country has its own smells, Olivier says. I travel everywhere. Always. La bergamote, le citron, la mandarine! The best is in Sicily. Thats where you find good bergamot.

Yeah, sure. The 1961 memoir delves into the life of Oliviers father, too James Henry, a mens haberdasher with a longtime shop on Rue Royale, that grand avenue leading up to the Luxor Obelisk in Paris. No mention of bergamot.

Perhaps, these are small incongruities the accounts of the tailors who preceded Olivier versus the family history presented on his firms web site. Perhaps the inclusion of an additional perfumer in the bespoke scent programs fine-print is owed to some small technicality that its no hint of a larger scheme.

That Oliviers lack of any apparent education in the art of aromatic composition, so far as the record shows, was somehow no barrier to his excellence in this realm.

Maybe the flamboyance, the insubstantiality, the sense of entitlement that in nearly every other circumstance would raise a reporters eyebrows is here nothing more than a sign of authentic old-world aristocracy. Oh, the follies of the nobles.

That The New York Times got it right in 1999: Charles and Diana commissioned scents from Olivier.

That British GQ nailed it three years later: the Creeds made scents for King George, Madonna, Winston Churchill, both Elvises Presley and Costello Queen Victoria and Michael Jackson.

Nor was there a mistake in The Independent on Sunday in 2013: Olivier and his forebears had won over customers from Winston Churchill to Michelle Obama, Frank Sinatra to the Queen.

That when Oliviers son Erwin told The International Herald Tribune in 2004, regarding its VIP clients: It is how we do things now not to divulge too much, he was somehow not misrepresenting the companys practice of listing every star customer in its literature, including Natalie Wood, for whom a scent called Jasmal was said to be created in 1959, despite its dating by a historian to 1999, 18 years after the actress death.

Because for all these claims to be false for hundreds, if not thousands, of newspaper and magazine articles and profiles in the most fact-checked of periodicals to be untrue Olivier Creed must have perpetrated the greatest fraud in the history of luxury retail.