A Passion for
Fragrance
(Marie
Claire – November 1992)
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| Sally Blake in the Perfume Room at Hanover Gate 1992 |
When Sally Blake met Mae West she was
intoxicated by her glamour, magic – and her scent. The experience triggered her
obsession with fragrance and ‘deranged her for life’; today her home is a
museum housing over five hundred bottles and phials. By Kate Shapland
“I don’t consider it unreasonable
not to want to smell like peach-melba yoghurt, fabric conditioner, insect spray
or lavatory cleaner; I just feel that perfume should be a little more
exclusive. No work of art was achieved painting by numbers; no symphony was
ever composed with a synthesiser; so why is perfume, an ancient and arcane art,
so consistently abused and defiled?”
I had been to see Sally Blake to
talk about her life-long obsession with perfume and received these comments
from her in a letter two weeks later. Blake is referring to the degeneration of
perfumery as an art; her interest – her passion – lies in the skill of
scent-making proper: fragrance craftsmanship, which she believes is evaporating
as commercial demands challenge quality. And her preoccupation with scent – the
flasks, the science, and the stories of its creation – is supported by an
awesome knowledge that is probably unsurpassed in this country.
“I think what started it – what
absolutely blew my head off and deranged me for life – was Mae West,” she says.
As a fourteen-year-old Welsh schoolgirl (with plaits), Blake came to London to
see Diamond Lil at the theatre.
“My mother was desperate to see Mae
West,” she recalls, “but I was more interested in Danny Kaye. We waited at the
stage door for them. I was clutching my autograph book for Danny, but decided
to ask for Mae’s signature too.
“’Oh honey’ she said, climbing into
a huge limousine, ‘don’t stand out there in the cold – come on in’. So I
slipped into the darkness, sank down into lavender swansdown and fur and was
intoxicated by the most heavenly scent I’ve ever smelt in my life. It was
exposure to absolute glamour and magic; and when I fell out of that car, I was
never the same again.”
Blake’s home now resembles a
fragrant stronghold. At the time of writing, it houses five hundred bottles and
phials filled with scents whose recipes have ‘died’ – exquisite elixirs which
officially no longer exist but which Blake has managed to salvage.
“My first was Paris by Coty” she
says, “followed by Apple Blossom and Green Velvet by Helena Rubenstein: then I
had Red Lilac by Lenthéric. Somebody gave me Chanel No5 – but I prefer Chanel
No22 – then I had Lanvin’s Prétexte, and Diorama.
“Diorama was possibly the most
opulent, unbelievably glamorous scent ever. An article in the Sunday Times
claimed it smelt of jasmine gathered before dawn in yellow Provençal baskets
and that it was Dior’s greatest scent – but it didn’t sell. So they
discontinued it.
“I was furious and wrote to Dior,
who sent me four bottles. I made them last for donkey’s years. That was another
reason I started my ‘hunt’: it seemed to me that everything I liked got
discontinued – whether it was a lipstick shade or a perfume. And when Diorama
went, it was the end as far as I was concerned: I’d already lost Lanvin’s
Scandale, Prétexte, and Green Velvet.”
Another great admirer of Diorama was
Srba Micovic, a Yugoslavian who represented Guerlain at Selfridges in London.
“He was remarkably knowledgeable
about scent,” says Blake. “So I asked him if he would like to come and see my
collection. And instead of being frightened or thinking this woman is crazy, he
had the courage to come, and we talked about perfume for four hours.”
Micovic would go to Blake’s for a
‘Diorama fix’ – “we used to dream about wild cyclamen in the Yugoslavian woods”
– and through him, she met Roja Dove, Guerlains Professeur de Parfum and fellow perfume lover.
“Guerlain has kept faith,” says
Blake. “It’s a good deed in a naughty world: it’s the Vatican of perfumery. And
it has managed to keep its head up in a market that has seen so many fragrance
houses go down. They have always been wonderful to me. I also have charming
correspondence with the director of the perfumers Rigaud – my mother wore
Rigaud’s Un Air Embaumé, a glorious scent. Talented people are always the
nicest; you can tell the Johnny-come-latelys by the bad way they treat you – in
every sphere, not just perfumery.”
Guerlain created over two hundred
perfumes before 1900.
“They made them for people, for
parties and events,” says Blake. “It was just a spur-of-the-moment thing and
some survived, for instance Eau Impériale (1853), Jicky (1889), and Eau du Coq
(1894).”
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| Part of Sally Blake's collection - on the piano at Hanover Gate |
As she takes you ‘bottle browsing’
around her museum, Blake relates tales that accompany many of the perfumes.
“Patou’s Normandie was inspired by the liner, and the genius of it is that is
smells of expensive suitcases – a lovely rosy sort of Russian leather smell.
Vacances was created to commemorate the first paid public holiday. And Volt was
named after the advent of electricity.
“Every single thing I look at,
experience or read brings me back to perfume. I’ll see one called something
strange like Rosine’s Le Balcon and think, ‘why on earth would anyone want to
call a scent The Balcony? What an extraordinary thing.’ You think it must be
something to do with Romeo and Juliet,
and it turns out to have been inspired by a Baudelaire poem.”
Perfumery, she believes, is a great
art.
“If it was music, it would be played
at the Albert Hall or La Scala; if it was a painting it would be hung at the
Louvre or Royal Academy. But people have always tended to look down their noses
at scent, saying that no lady wore it. There was a terrible prejudice towards
it.”
She denies that this attitude
stemmed from Queen Victoria: “She was a great one for freebies, and she often
wore Rigaud perfumes.”
Blake uses Picasso’s analogy, ‘Art
is a lie that helps you see the truth’, to define the essence of perfumery.
“A scent may make you think it’s
violet, but it’s probably nothing of the sort. Have you ever noticed how
violets lose their scent? Well, they haven’t stopped smelling, it’s just that
you’ve lost your ability to smell them because they carry an anaesthetic. It’s
impossible to create ‘violet’ perfume without synthetic notes; a lot of
manoeuvring has gone into a violet scent to make it appear ‘straight’.
“I like single florals – but I
loathe the current obsession with fruit. I do not want to smell like a fruit
bowl. I say to myself, ‘You don’t mind smelling of roses or violets, so why not
smell like a grapefruit?’ But as far as I am concerned, there are classic
smells which we all love – toast, fresh air, coffee, fruit – but commercially
created scents shouldn’t try to be specific; they should create an ambience.”
Blake agrees that commercial scent can
be very evocative.
“It’s strange how potent cheap music
can be,” she says. “Charles Revson [of Revlon] realised that. But then he could
have put Jeyes fluid into a scent bottle and sold it: he understood that it is
the marketing that matters – not the product. It may be the greatest perfume
that has ever been created, but if it doesn’t sell, that’s it.”
Which brings us back to Blake’s
crusade.
“My main interest is fragrance,” she
says. “The bottles are the cherry on the cake. Perfumery marries two great
skills: the art of the flacon-maker and the beauty, mystery, joy and wonder of
glass; then there’s the sorcerer’s potion inside. Just think how many senses it
gratifies: sight, touch, smell – it just doesn’t make a sound.”
Kate Shapland
Marie Claire
1992
