Sometime in the late-1920s, Bourjois executives sat in an office building in Manhattan and plotted how to conquer the American market. Bourjois was mostly known for its lipsticks and powders, but it had had some success in France with Mon Parfum in 1923. Bourjois was owned then, as it is now, by the Wertheimer family, which also owned Chanel.
In my mind’s eye, it was a warm day, and the rumble of traffic competed with fans whirring in the corner of the office. The visiting French executives bemoaned the bottle of chilled white wine they would have had at lunch had it not been Prohibition. “Coty has a stranglehold on lipstick in this country. Let’s try a fragrance,” one of them said. “We can get Chanel’s perfumer to do something for us, but nothing as upscale as No. 5. We want something friendlier, something that will appeal to the businessman’s wife in Iowa, or even to Margaret.”
Margaret was the stenographer…