I fell in love with the scent of tuberose flowers in Los Angeles; every week, huge piles of tuberose stalks would be delivered to the big downtown flower market. A two-foot-long individual stalk was $3.50! (A laughable figure these days.) A work friend would go to the flower market every other Friday to pick up ten stalks — five for her home and five for the office. Weeks and weeks would pass when I’d smell fresh tuberose flowers almost every day. Heaven.
At the same time, Robert Piguet Fracas (the Pierre Negrin version) was a huge hit in Hollywood. Wherever I went — the museum, the movies, Grand Central Market, my dentist (the worst place to smell Fracas, believe me!) — I was knocked in the nostrils by the most powerful perfume version of tuberose. Hell…
