What the Nose Knows: The Science of Scent in Everyday Life (17 page)

W
HEN AUTHORS EROTIZE
scent, they may reveal something of themselves. Take the American novelist Willa Cather, for example. She never married and lived for long periods with woman friends. Her sexual identity remains ambiguous and is the subject of much speculation in Queer Studies departments.
O Pioneers!
is her 1913 novel about illicit love and a doomed affair on the Nebraska frontier. Its unsentimental heroine, Alexandra Bergson, treats men as fellow workers, never marries, and never consummates a love affair. The many indoor smells of
O Pioneers!
—spirits, pipe smoke, damp woolens, kerosene, and noxious Mexican cigarettes—are all unpleasant, manufactured, and male. In contrast, the outdoor smells are positively emotional and almost erotic. There is the “strong, clean smell” of brown earth in the springtime that “yields itself eagerly to the plow,” the spicy odor of wild roses after a rain, ripe fields of corn and wheat, sweet clover, and evening air “heavy with the smell of wild cotton,” the “more powerful perfume of midsummer.” Alexandra has one romantic fantasy in which she is carried away by a strong, anonymous man: “She never saw him, but, with eyes closed, she could feel that he was yellow like the sunlight, and there was the smell of ripe cornfields about him.” Cather’s human eroticism (such as it is) is much like her eroticizing of nature. The Queer Studies folks might be missing the point. The nose clues suggest that Cather’s sexual orientation was far too diffuse to be captured by either end of the male-female continuum.

W
ILLIAM
F
AULKNER
was an old man when a student asked him about the many references to scent in his writing. Faulkner replied that “maybe smell is one of my sharper senses, maybe it’s sharper than sight.” I think Faulkner was saying what he thought the kid wanted to hear. I’m doubtful that smell was Faulkner’s sharper sense, because it doesn’t add up with anything else we know about him. He was a dapper dresser who apparently didn’t wear cologne. There are perfunctory references to lilacs in his early romantic poems. There is not much to suggest that he had a heightened awareness of odor. Nor did he write about scent naturalistically. He used smells a lot, but in a brilliantly contrived way. Faulkner has been called “the most radical innovator in the annals of American fiction.” He didn’t get this reputation from the precise observations of his “sharper sense” he got it from a highly original use of smell as metaphor.

Faulkner set his stories in the South, yet he took the stereotypically sweet and romantic scents of wisteria and honeysuckle and turned them into symbols of sorrow and “the inherent tragedy of southern history.” He pushed the envelope further in
The Unvanquished,
a novel about young Bayard Sartorius, whose father was a colonel in the Confederate cavalry. At first Faulkner pairs smell with emotion in conventional ways: gunpowder with conflict, and dead roses with a murdered grandmother. It’s not until the final chapter—“An Odor of Verbena”—that Faulkner really uncorks the olfactory symbolism. In real life, true verbena (
Verbena officinalis
) is nearly scentless. By talking about it as if it had an aroma, Faulkner forces the reader to see the scent as a symbol of courage and violence.

Faulkner gives the odor of verbena a different strength in each scene. Bayard perceives the “now fierce odor of the verbena sprig” on his jacket as he walks to confront his father’s killer. The Southern code of honor demands that he avenge the murder. When the man fires twice, deliberately missing the unarmed Bayard, honor has been satisfied without bloodshed. Bayard returns home and is able to smell the flowers at his father’s wake above the now-diminished odor of verbena. We understand that violence is no longer needed; the call for courage has been met. Smells wax and wane in real life; Faulkner’s genius was to synchronize the sensory with the symbolic.

His most extended use of smell was in
The Sound and the Fury,
a novel about the breakdown of the Compson family of Mississippi. Faulkner tells it in time-fractured sections and by taking the point of view of different characters, each with their own smells. The mentally defective Benjy perceives the world as a confusing, multisensory jumble; he finds calm in the bodily scents of his caretakers, especially his sister Caddy. Benjy’s constant refrain is that Caddy “smells like trees.” Their brother Quentin’s obsessive, guilt-ridden, and erotically tinged thoughts about Caddy are paired with “the twilight-coloured smell of honeysuckle.” When Quentin prepares to commit suicide, the tone of the story changes and honeysuckle is replaced by the harsh smell of gasoline. Jason is the hard and cynical Compson brother who lacks feelings. The stink of gasoline and camphor are the only smells to appear in his story. In the novel’s final section, an all-knowing voice completes the story against a depersonalized and oppressive aromatic backdrop: “obscurity odorous of dank earth and mould and rubber,” a “faint smell of cheap cosmetics,” a “forlorn scent of pear blossoms,” and a “a pervading reek of camphor.”

Faulkner tried to convince an impressionable undergraduate that this all proceeded from a sharp sense of smell, that he had “no deliberate intent” to make a big deal of smell in his work. But I detect a whiff of bullshit. Masterfully gauged metaphors don’t happen by themselves.

A Night at the Opera

Early in 1993, I received a letter from Roland Tec, director of the New Opera Theatre Ensemble of Boston. Tec was producing a new work called
Blind Trust,
a boy-meets-blind-girl story with an improvised score and script. The production was to take place entirely in the dark, with scenes to be accompanied by scent to give a sense of place. Could I help them do this?

I convinced my boss at Givaudan-Roure Fragrances that this was an interesting creative challenge, one that would shower the company with free publicity and position us as a patron of the arts.
Blind Trust
became an official project, and we started designing atmospheres for a pizza parlor, a flower shop, a laundry, and a movie theater. Some of the fragrance development was easy—the flower shop required only a basic floral bouquet formulation with an exaggerated “green” note to suggest stems and leaves. We already had an excellent freshly-pressed-linen accord for the laundry. Pizza and buttered popcorn required extra effort—I crossed corporate boundaries and called the flavor division for help.

With initial fragrance formulations in hand, the next step was to adjust them so they smelled right in a big air space. This is not a concern for fragrance worn on skin, but it’s a critical step in developing an air-freshener scent. An oil that smells good on a piece of blotter paper takes on an entirely different character when it fills a room via aerosol or scented candle. The fragrance may “fall apart”: one component overwhelms the others, or is lost entirely. To get a sense of how a fragrance will smell in actual use, we test them in small rooms or, in our case, stainless-steel booths.

Within a week or so I was conducting informal scent-booth evaluations of the
Blind Trust
fragrances. Our staff, usually called on to rate the next “Country Meadow” air freshener, were amused to be judging pizza aroma. Still, their comments were useful (“more garlic,” “less basil,” “find a better cheese note”). When we tested the buttered-popcorn smell one afternoon, people wandered in from all over the building, asking who had microwaved the popcorn.

Blind Trust
premiered in the planetarium of the Boston Science Museum on June 5, 1993. Tec’s artistic conception demanded that the audience experience everything as a blind person would—by ear or nose only. Instead of dimming the house lights, Tec plunged the room into complete blackness. Instead of a graceful word of welcome, he read aloud the program notes in their entirety. The music began and the singers stood next to the star-projector in the center of the room. Tec’s four odor-wranglers stealthily took up positions by the hall’s air inlets, located on the walls at head level. Armed with aerosol cans, they waited for their cues to start spraying. It was soon clear that even four cans at once were no match for the planetarium. Odors that were powerful in a living room seemed delicate in a hall this big. Also, the cues weren’t always well timed. Too often the smell arrived before the scene had been established, leaving the audience sniffing in puzzlement. Instead of building a multisensory realism, the scent effects sowed confusion. Smelling my contributions in action, I thought we could have improved upon them here and there: the pizza was overly garlicky, and the fresh-linen smell in the dry cleaner’s scene was too weak.

In the pitch-black hall, it was hard to know when a scene was over, leaving the audience uncertain when to applaud. At the end of this long and frustrating performance, Tec read the show’s entire production credits, thereby destroying whatever sympathy his beleagured audience had left.

The
Boston Globe
’s review was merciless: “Blind Trust: Hold Your Nose.” While noting that Tec’s troupe had “built a modest reputation for creating new, quasi-improvised operas on themes of political correctness, Cambridge-style,” the paper ripped the new production to shreds. The music was “worthless” when not “derivative and mechanical” in the Phillip Glass mode. The improvised singing consisted of “verbal, vocal and harmonic cliché.” And the odors, alas, were “confusing and unpleasant.”

In the end, Givaudan-Roure did not get the positive press it had hoped for. We didn’t even get credit for trying. When a show stinks up a storm all by itself, I’m not sure even the best of stage scents can salvage it. Roland Tec went on write a play and direct a movie. The last time I checked, however,
Blind Trust
was not part of his online biography.

CHAPTER 8

Hollywood Psychophysics

[T]he producers of this film believe that today’s audiences are mature enough to accept the fact that some things in life just plain stink.

—from the prologue to
Polyester

I
SAW
J
OHN
W
ATERS’S FILM
P
OLYESTER
ON ITS FIRST RELEASE
in 1981, in a packed theater in Philadelphia. Like everyone else, I scratched and sniffed my Odorama card as an onscreen character named Francine Fishpaw (played by the obese and outrageous Divine) let one loose under the bedcovers. The audience groaned; we knew what was coming, yet we all inhaled. To this day, Waters delights in his cinematic coup: he tells me “audiences worldwide paid me money to smell a fart.”

The idea of smelling a movie has been a joke for so long, it’s easy to forget that scented films once played at major venues in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. History has not been kind to Smell-O-Vision or its rival, AromaRama; they have been relegated to books like
Arts & Entertainment Fads,
and
Oops: 20 Life Lessons from the Fiascoes That Shaped America.
The
Times
of London wrinkled its editorial nose and called them “cinematic stinkers” and “historic blunders.” Smell-O-Vision made
Time
’s list of the 100 Worst Ideas of the Century, along with Hair Club for Men, leisure suits, and New Coke. Michael and Harry Medved nominated it for a Golden Turkey Award in the category of “Most Inane and Unwelcome ‘Technical Advance’ in Hollywood History.”

The loud mockery of the pundits strikes me as a cheap shot for a couple of reasons. First, I feel a warm emotional connection to the smelly moments of Hollywood history, perhaps because of my personal role in the odorific failure of
Blind Trust,
or my involvement during the dot-com boom with a startup called DigiScents, Inc., that aimed to bring smell to the Internet via a PC-linked scent generator. Why is it so difficult for critics to believe that people have a sincere interest in the possibilities of scented entertainment? My second reason is a lingering suspicion that the magazines and media professors are missing something important: If it’s really such a bad idea, why does the public remain so fascinated by it? I decided to take a closer look for myself, and began spooling through miles of microfilm and talking to people who had experienced Smell-O-Vision and AromaRama for themselves. My goal? To find out whether there was something more to the story than all the snark would suggest.

T
HE FIRST ATTEMPT
to odorize movies dates back to the earliest days of silent film and was the brainchild of Samuel “Roxy” Rothafel (1882–1936), the legendary cinematic impresario who ran New York venues such as the Rialto and the Strand. The lavish movie palace he created and named after himself—the Roxy—became a generic name for cinemas across America. The man helped make Hollywood what it is today, but the story of Rothafel’s smelly movie has a few holes in the plot.

According to
Film Daily,
Rothafel “tried the rose bit back in 1906, in a silent-film house he ran in Forest City, Pennsylvania. For newsreel clips of the Pasadena Rose Bowl Game, he dipped absorbent cotton in a rose essence and put it in front of an electric fan.” This charming story is repeated in book after book on the history of movies. There’s only one problem with it: there was no Rose Bowl game in 1906. The first one was played in 1902; it was such a blowout (Stanford conceded in the third quarter, trailing Michigan 49–0) that the Tournament of Roses gave up on football and ran chariot races for a few years. Football didn’t return until 1916 (Washington State 14, Brown 0). So at what movie was Roxy blowing rose essence in 1906? Pasadena had hosted a New Year’s Day Rose Parade since 1890, and the Vitascope Company filmed it for the first time in 1900. It’s more likely that Roxy scented a newsreel of flower-trimmed floats in the 1906 Rose Parade.

Roxy never repeated his improvised stunt, but it was imitated by others. In 1929 the manager of Boston’s Fenway Theatre poured a pint of lilac perfume into the ventilation system; he timed it to hit the audience just as the movie’s title—
Lilac Time
—flashed on screen. The same year, an orange scent was dispensed at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Los Angeles during showings of MGM’s
Hollywood Review
; the smell came during a big musical number called “Orange Blossom Time.”

S
CENTED ENTERTAINMENT
as an art form needs something more than a projectionist with a screwdriver and a flask of perfume. At around this time other people were giving serious thought to the artistic and dramatic potential of smell. Aldous Huxley offered a whiff of the possibilities in his 1931 novel
Brave New World
:

The scent organ was playing a delightfully refreshing Herbal Capriccio—rippling arpeggios of thyme and lavender, of rosemary, basil, myrtle, tarragon; a series of daring modulations through the spice keys into ambergris; and a slow return through sandalwood, camphor, cedar and newmown hay (with occasional subtle touches of discord—a whiff of kidney pudding, the faintest suspicion of pig’s dung) back to the simple aromatics with which the piece began. The final blast of thyme died away; there was a round of applause; the lights went up.

It’s a great fantasy: smells arrive at the nose in precisely timed pulses and disappear just as quickly. But as I learned in
Blind Trust,
moving scent through a big space is an inexact art form. Fan-blown air masses move slowly and linger too long; it’s easy to end up with olfactory sludge.

There is another problem. Even if a scent organ delivered odors with the brisk precision that Huxley imagined, the audience would have trouble keeping up. Fragrance arpeggios would blow by too quickly for the human nose to perceive distinct notes. (A mouse, on the other hand, might get it. Mice generate a fresh impression of the smellscape with each sniff, and since they sniff several times a second, they can easily keep up.) The human nose works on a longer time scale; it can’t follow a smellody the way the ear follows a tune. Anything faster than
largo ma non tropo
would leave an audience in the dust.

Bill Buford encountered a typically sedate olfactory tempo when he worked as a line chef in the kitchen of an Italian restaurant:

By midmorning, when many things had been prepared, they were cooked in quick succession, and the smells came, one after the other, waves of smell, like sounds in music. There was the smell of meat, and the kitchen was overwhelmed by the rich, sticky smell of wintry lamb. And then, in minutes, it would be chocolate melting in a metal bowl. Then a disturbing nonsequitur like tripe (a curious disjunction, having chocolate in your nose followed quickly by stewing cow innards). Then something ripe and fishy—octopus in a hot tub—followed by overextracted pineapple. And so they came, one after the other.

Another obstacle to olfactory cinema is clearing the air between performances. The movie-industry veteran Arthur Mayer found this out in 1933 when he installed the first true in-theater smell system. He had just taken over Paramount’s Rialto Theater on Broadway, when he was approached by an inventor who claimed he could deliver scent to an audience in synchrony with a movie. His demo film about a pair of young lovers was accompanied by all sorts of smells. There was a hitch, however, as Mayer recalled:

The blowers which wafted these odors out with such precision were supposed to waft them back with equal efficiency, but unfortunately this part of the invention had not yet been entirely perfected. The auditorium was so full of a mingling of honeysuckle, bacon and Lysol that it took over an hour to clear the air and for several days afterward there was such a strong smell of those mature apples around that a friend asked me if I was making applejack on the side. It was a long time before I finally lost confidence in the smellies, but my man and I—I had become a zealous partisan if not a partner—could never seem to master the backwards waft.

Mayer didn’t name his olfactory accomplice, but a cartoon in his book provides a clue. It shows Mayer in a projection booth, peering down into the house. Next to the film projector is a large device with tubes labeled “rose,” “honeysuckle,” “Lysol,” “ripe apple,” etc. The scent tubes lead into ventilating ducts that open into the theater. This arrangement is precisely the system described by John H. Leavell in a U.S. patent issued three years before Mayer met his unnamed inventor. If it was indeed Leavell who installed scent at the Rialto, then despite his short-lived partnership with Mayer, he deserves to be recognized as a pioneer of scented cinema.

In any case, the idea of odorized movies had taken on a life of its own. Walt Disney got excited about it when he was planning
Fantasia
in 1938. He considered floral perfumes for the
Nutcracker Suite
, incense for the
Ave Maria
and
Credo
, and gunpowder to stoke the devilishness of the
Sorcerer’s Apprentice
sequence (his conductor, Leopold Stokowski, was especially keen on this). Disney, while reluctant to give up on such a “great publicity angle,” eventually decided to steer away for cost reasons. A 1944 Warner Bros. cartoon called “The Old Grey Hare” followed Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd into the distant future; an elderly Fudd reads a newspaper headline in the year 2000: “Smellovision Replaces Television.” The Soviet Union, sensing another Cold War technology challenge from the Americans, tried to get in on the act. The Russian movie director Grigory Alexandrov claimed in 1949 that the Soviet film industry “was on the verge of producing smellies,” but there is no record they ever did.

The Path to Smell-O-Vision

Smell-O-Vision was the lifelong quest of an obscure Swiss-American entrepreneur and fragrance enthusiast named Hans E. Laube. The saga began in 1939 when Laube, a tall, bespectacled, thirty-nine-year-old advertising executive from Zürich with a flair for invention and a passion for fragrance, developed a theatrical scent system that released multiple smells during a film. Along with financier Robert Barth and movie producer Conrad A. Schlaepfer, he formed a company called Odorated Talking Pictures. As a showcase for their new technology, the partners spent 30,000 Swiss francs (about $101,000 in today’s terms) to make an English-language feature film called
My Dream.
Its rudimentary plot included twenty smells: “A young man meets a pretty woman in a park. She disappears, but lets fall a handkerchief which diffuses a perfume. On the basis of this smell the man takes up pursuit. The public can also smell along: Rose scent, hospital atmosphere, car exhaust, and finally incense during the wedding of the pair in a Gothic chapel.”

The OTP partners unveiled their system at a press conference in Bern on December 2, 1939, garnering a mention in the
New York Times
in February 1940. Even better, they arranged to have
My Dream
shown in the Swiss Pavilion at the New York World’s Fair.

On the evening of Saturday, October 19, 1940, Laube’s scented film was shown in public for the first—and evidently last—time in the United States. The film historian Hervé Dumont describes what happened: “At the conclusion of the performance the O.T.P. equipment, along with the only copy of the film, is seized by the American police under the pretext that a similar, patented system already exists in the USA. The promoters stay in town and press various lawsuits in order to get back their material. In vain: Barth dies there, after he—like Schlaepfer—lost his entire investment.”

Despite this disaster, Laube refused to quit. He stayed in America during World War II to promote his inventions. Laube pitched supermarket ad displays with smells to accompany slides of food. He developed a device he claimed could release odors in synchrony with a television broadcast—more than 2,000 odors-on-demand available in your living room. Film and television deals continued to elude him, however. He became disillusioned and returned to Europe in 1946.

Enter Michael Todd

Laube, a quiet and intense inventor, might not have gotten very far had he not met Michael Todd, a Broadway impresario and flamboyant force of nature. A risk-taker and a feisty competitor, Todd spent freely on special effects to draw big crowds to his shows, and every one of his hit musicals featured an extravagant set or stage effect.

Yet Todd had more than a showman’s interest in special effects: he helped invent and commercialize several movie-making technologies. Todd’s Broadway hit,
The Hot Mikado,
was playing at the 1939 World’s Fair, and while keeping an eye on the show he met Fred Waller, who was demonstrating an eleven-projector wraparound movie film system called Vitarama. Cinerama, a three-camera, wide-screen format that was projected onto a specially shaped screen, was another Waller invention, and Todd became an investor in it. Expense and complicated technology were no barrier for Todd; his enthusiasm and salesmanship persuaded movie distributors to pony up and install the new equipment. He made a splash with
This Is Cinerama
(1952). Audiences thrilled to a sequence filmed on a roller coaster at Coney Island. It was the IMAX of its time, and eventually led to today’s Panavision system.

Mike Todd may have noticed another promising technology at the World’s Fair: Hans Laube’s Odorated Talking Pictures. It’s not clear whether Todd and Laube actually met there, but somehow Todd caught the scent bug. By 1954 Laube was back in America, trying to bring aroma to movies and television. That year he gave a demonstration to Todd and the producer decided to invest in the new system.

In his 1954 application for a U.S. patent, Laube described a device in which odor canisters were placed on a turntable. An electronic scent-track on the motion picture film triggered the turntable, which rotated the desired canister beneath a pickup nozzle, which sucked up scent and pumped it into the theater through tubes attached to the seatbacks. The liquid fragrances were filtered to remove the heavier notes and prevent the scents from lingering too long. To help clear the air between smells, one canister contained an “odor neutralizer.” The odors could be played in a fixed sequence or the scent-track could advance the turntable to any desired canister. Laube’s idea was that theaters would receive a standard set of odors; if a movie had unusual scent effects, a custom set would be shipped along with the film reels.