What the Nose Knows: The Science of Scent in Everyday Life (18 page)

By 1955 Laube’s career was gaining momentum. He gave a private demonstration of his system at the Cinerama-Warner Theatre in New York, using a short version of
My Dream.
It must have been a success, because he persuaded the Stanley Warner Corporation, which owned the rights to Cinerama, to fund further development. To secure international rights to his invention, he filed a European patent application, and then applied for a second U.S. patent. In May, Laube married for the second time after a month-long romance. In July he received shares in a newly formed company called Scentovision, Inc.

In September 1956, Scentovision held another private demo for industry executives at Mike Todd’s Warner Cinema in New York. The 16 mm film ran for eight and a half minutes and used seventeen aromas.
Motion Picture Daily
hinted that Laube’s system would be installed in a top theater within nine months, and that Scentovision was negotiating with film producers who wanted to use the process. In November 1957, Laube and a partner were issued U.S. Patent 2,813,452, “Motion pictures with synchronized odor emission,” and were mentioned in the
New York Times.

M
ICHAEL
T
ODD’S
first movie, the 1956 blockbuster
Around the World in 80 Days,
capitalized on his marketing strategy of heavily hyped limited openings, and heavily marketed accessory items (the movie’s soundtrack album was the first nonmusical soundtrack to earn big money). Early in 1957 he married Elizabeth Taylor—the third marriage for each of them—and a month later the newlyweds attended the Academy Awards, where
80 Days
won the Oscar for Best Picture. With movie profits rolling in, Todd was looking about for his next project, and he felt the time was right for a push into smellies.

Things were finally looking good for Scentovision. Hans Laube had a patent, a prototype system, and a company to promote it. Mike Todd had committed to funding the technology and was considering it for a major movie. Then, on March 21, 1958, Todd was killed when his private plane went down in a storm over Grants, New Mexico.

After the funeral, twenty-eight-year-old Mike Todd Jr. took the reins of his father’s production company, where he had been working for years. Though the son had little of his father’s charisma and outsized appetites, he was a smart and sociable young man with ambitions of his own. Perhaps hoping to establish himself with a blockbuster new film process, Mike junior threw himself and his company’s resources behind a smell movie project called
Scent of Danger.
He signed Hans Laube to an exclusive, long-term contract and lent him the company’s New York warehouse space to work in, and the Cinestage Theatre in Chicago for installation and full-scale testing. Glenda Jensen, then a secretary in Todd’s New York office, recalls that Laube was intimately involved in planning the film. He met regularly with Mike junior and scriptwriters William and Audrey Roos in the spring and summer of 1958, crafting a script that would showcase his scent effects. United Artists, which had distributed
80 Days,
agreed to underwrite the film. The widowed Elizabeth Taylor was cast to play the woman at the heart of the mystery in a ten-second-long, smellable cameo.

At the end of the summer,
Film Daily
reported that a public-relations executive named Charles Weiss was planning his own scented feature film. The Weiss Screen-Scent Corp. had lined up Rhodia, a well-known fragrance company, to supply smells to be blown over the audience via the theater’s air-conditioning system. The paper reported that production would begin on March 26, 1959, and that release was slated for late 1959 in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Detroit. Nothing was said about a director, producer, stars, or studio. It would have been hard for Todd and Laube to know how credible this threat was.

Todd began filming in Spain on March 30, 1959, and Bill Doll, the Todds’ superstar press agent, set to work building a buzz in the media. A story in
Film Daily
revealed the cast, a new title (
Scent of Mystery
), a new name for the process (Smell-O-Vision), and a release date (an August premiere in Chicago). The story ran with a now-famous photo of Mike junior and Laube on either side of the scent generator’s mechanical brain. The
Los Angeles Times
disclosed the movie’s ad slogan:
“First (1893) they moved, then (1927) they talked, now (1959) they smell.”

Laube, meanwhile, began installing and testing his system at the Cinestage in Chicago. The odors in his machine were contained in a set of forty 400 cc cylinders or “cells.” A syringelike pickup nozzle descended into a cell, extracted 2 cc of fragrance, and injected it into a blower. Scented air was carried into the theater through plastic tubing and released from perforated cylinders (eighteen inches long and three quarters of an inch in diameter) mounted on seatbacks.

Laube shuttled between New York and Chicago every week for months; he hated flying, so he took the train seventeen hours each way. Around June, Laube, joined by his close friend and collaborator Bert Good, began long hours of experimentation in the warehouse space at 1700 Broadway. They were there on a daily basis, fine-tuning the delivery of scent to a mocked-up row of theater seats in their makeshift laboratory. Hal Williamson, then a new employee of Todd Productions, remembers that Mike junior was a frequent visitor to the test site. Finally the system was ready to demonstrate to the United Artists brass, including president Robert Benjamin. Elizabeth Taylor, who now owned Todd’s estate and was herself an investor in the project, flew in for the evening demonstration. There was a lot at stake, but the studio execs were impressed with the new technology and agreed to continue their support.

Shooting wrapped on July 4 with the production already badly behind schedule. The planned August premiere was pushed back to year’s end; Mike junior told the
New York Times
they needed extra time to finalize the sound and scent tracks. Laube worked furiously. Fortunately his second U.S. patent was issued in September; it got him and Mike junior another mention in the papers.

If Smell-O-Vision caught on, they would need to rush production of enough scent generators to equip moviehouses across the country. A deal was struck with Belock Instrument Company, a Long Island defense contractor that supplied guidance and control components for Atlas and Polaris missiles. Belock was seeking consumer applications for its technology, and they agreed to manufacture the scent machines and to provide state-of-the-art eight-channel stereo sound as well. The company featured a photo of a Smell-O-Vision machine in its October 1959 annual report.

The Todd Organization spent nearly $2 million ($14 million in today’s money) producing the film, not a trivial amount in 1959 Hollywood. Shooting on multiple locations in Spain was expensive, as was using 70 mm widescreen cameras and eight-channel sound. Established actors like Peter Lorre (famous for his roles in
Casablanca
and
The Maltese Falcon
) came with a high price tag as well.

The Todd Organization also invested in a host of marketing tie-ins. The Schiaparelli company produced a limited-edition
Scent of Mystery
perfume, the same worn by Elizabeth Taylor’s character and smelled by moviegoers in the theater. A thirty-page souvenir program to be sold in theaters included a bound-in soft vinyl record. The movie’s title song, sung by crooner Eddie Fisher, was released as a 45 rpm single, along with an LP soundtrack album and sheet music. A novelization of the film by screenwriters William and Audrey Roos, illustrated with stills from the movie, was published as a Dell paperback. Press agent Bill Doll prepared and distributed more than forty individually captioned publicity stills to promote the film, and many of them ran in newspapers and national magazines. This level of expense and effort implies that the Smell-O-Vision team wasn’t indulging in a cheap gimmick—they expected a serious return on their substantial investment.

A Challenger Appears

On October 17, 1959, the
New York Times
reported that Walter Reade Jr. was “rushing plans to uncork a smell system of his own before Dec. 22, when Mr. Todd’s film opens in Chicago.” The forty-two-year-old Reade ran a chain of movie theaters and a movie distribution company (Continental Distributing, Inc.) founded by his father. For $300,000 he had just bought the rights to a previously released Italian travelogue about Red China, which he reedited and dubbed for scent. At a press conference, Reade revealed that his film, now called
Behind the Great Wall,
would use a new process called AromaRama: “
You must breathe it to believe it!
” Most alarming for Todd and Laube, the Reade picture would premiere in New York on December 2, three weeks before Smell-O-Vision’s debut in Chicago. Noting that Reade was “obviously rushing to beat Todd’s premiere date,”
Newsweek
went for the easy pun and declared that “Todd might be beaten by a nose.” Thus was born the epic competition between Smell-O-Vision and AromaRama, a duel that
Variety
dubbed “the battle of the smellies.”

According to Reade’s press kit, AromaRama dispersed smells through the theater’s existing air-conditioning ducts with a boost from Freon gas, while an electronic air purifier prevented odor buildup in the auditorium. A battery of premixed scents would last, it was claimed, for twenty-one performances. Installation costs ran from $3,500 to $7,500 per theater.

Detail for detail, Reade’s AromaRama was the system announced thirteen months earlier by Charles Weiss, who was now part of the AromaRama team. This raises a question: Had Reade acquired an independent business from Weiss, or had Weiss been a stalking horse for Reade all along?

B
EHIND THE
G
REAT
W
ALL
became the first commercially released smellie when it opened at the DeMille Theater in New York on December 2, 1959. That Reade chose a venue directly across the street from Todd’s Warner Cinema was either a coincidence or an in-your-face marketing gesture. The premiere was not a particularly classy event; Joan Didion covered it for William F. Buckley’s
National Review
:

The glory that was AromaRama began even before the theater darkened. Outside, a gentleman in a Tartar falconer’s costume strolled about Seventh Avenue with a stuffed falcon on his arm; the lobby crawled with acned, pigtailed youths in coolie hats and usherettes with Maybelline-slanted eyes and rayon-brocade sheath dresses slit past their knees. Except for the inscrutable fact that everybody on the scene at the DeMille was pure Bronx Caucasian, the ambience seemed roughly that of the old honkytonk International Settlement in San Francisco. Upstairs, tea was poured for the customers “courtesy of Chin and Lee,” who were pushing their canned chow mein in conjunction with this Third Wonder of the Entertainment World.

As for the film itself, the opening sequence featuring a sliced orange was a crowd pleaser. The
New York Times
found the other odors to be “neither so clear nor pleasurable.” Luz Gunsberg had the same reaction. Her husband, Sheldon Gunsberg, was Reade’s assistant and closely involved with AromaRama. She remembers, “When the film started…in the little prolog, he cut an orange and that was incredible. That was fabulous—just wonderful. But after that the smells got all mixed up and they couldn’t get them out; so it was a terrible situation.” The odors that poured from the overhead ventilation ducts were potent.
Time
magazine reported that they were “strong enough to give a bloodhound a headache,” and
The New Yorker
called the experience “quite a massive assault on the olfactory nerves.” Says Gunsberg, “my husband would come home and we would have to hang his suits all over the house and open all the windows because we couldn’t get the smell out. It really permeated the whole place.” Todd employee Hal Williamson bought a ticket to scope out the competition: “Your clothes reeked when you came out of this stuff that had been dumped into the air conditioning system. As I recall there was even a fine mist in the air.”

The smells, created by Rhodia perfumer Selma Weidenfeld, were criticized for a lack of subtlety.
Time
thought they “will probably seem phony, even to the average uneducated nose. A beautiful old pine grove in Peking, for instance, smells rather like a subway rest room on disinfectant day.” (I sympathize with Weidenfeld; a formula that smells great on a test blotter can fall apart completely when it fills an entire room. Asking her to design at her desk fragrances meant to be smelled throughout an auditorium was like expecting the guy who etches your name on a rice grain to do it in skywriting.) The sheer number and range of the AromaRama smells were overwhelming: jasmine, grassland, incense, spices, soy sauce, a tiger, and a pungent waterfront, among others. Instead of heightening reality, the smells were distracting, according to the mass of critics at the
New York Times, Variety,
and
The New Yorker.

Then there was the problem of synchronization. Every so often, said
Variety,
“the machine-made olfactory flavors don’t correspond with what’s on view.”
Time
complained that “the smells are not always removed as rapidly as the scene requires: at one point the audience distinctly smells grass in the middle of the Gobi Desert.” Paul Baise, who worked for Reade in advertising and public relations, experienced this firsthand. He tells me that AromaRama “worked part-time but not over a period of time, because after a while all the smells melded into one, they overlapped into each other, and they were coming out onto the screen with the wrong image. It was doomed because it got off sync.”

More than a whiff of cynicism hovered over Reade’s project, beginning with its name: AromaRama made fun of Michael Todd’s Cinerama. In the only original footage he added to the movie, Reade took a swipe at Lowell Thomas’s introductory appearance in
This Is Cinerama.
In the opening sequence of
Great Wall,
Reade had NBC television news anchor Chet Huntley demonstrate AromaRama by slicing the orange in half. The choice of
Great Wall
as a movie vehicle was another dig at the Todds; travelogues were a Cinerama specialty:
Cinerama Holiday
(1955) and
Cinerama South Seas Adventure
(1958), for example. Reade’s tactics got under Mike junior’s skin. On his Christmas card for 1959, he printed a verse that began, “Let kind oblivion overtake / all other ’scopes and ’ramas,’” and continued, “Into this world of much dissension / I bring you some fun in a brand new dimension.”