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to a slightly greater gravity than the rest of him. Unimpeachably handsome once, he will become a pendulous fellow over the next decade, before becoming fully pot-bellied after yet another. But in February 1999, the New York Times insisted his appearance was still distinguished: He has “the burnish of the Paris Match eurocracy: steely, graying hair, Riviera-toned skin. Prince Rainier by way of Austin Powers.” Now, in September, Monsieur Olivier Creed sits in a small boutique north of Houston Street. The shop itself is a fitting setting for a conversation with this particular monied divorcé, who drives a Ferrari and dates a woman 20 years his junior. The shop abuts the Robbins & Appleton Building at 1-5 Bond, designed by renowned architect Stephen Decatur Hatch in the Second Empire Style – with an iron façade and mansard roof – in 1879 and designated a New York City Landmark exactly 100 years later. Meanwhile, the building in which the man sits was constructed in 1904 without ingenuity – it was simply built to resemble its neighbor, to the snickering of architectural critics. Creed arrived here from his home in Paris by way of the Concorde. And so he lounges sipping tea, this middle-aged roué, in fast-gentrifying NoHo, pausing to discuss in French, with the help of his New York-based US distributor and publicist, the nature of his work – in particular the nine custom fragrances he crafted the previous year for VIP clients at a cost of anywhere from $10,000-$20,000 each. "I psychoanalyze the clients,” the man says. “We talk about everything. About nothing. If they go to the countryside, what do they do there?" He must learn about clients’ sex lives, his distributor adds. Olivier says he requires about three or four fittings to get a person’s unique scent just so, that he spends 40 hours sniffing each creation as it is made, that each client receives a five-year-supply of bespoke perfume, and that he recently conceived his non-bespoke, commercial fragrance Green Valley while playing golf. And he can really only force himself to work three hours a day. Also did you know that he skis? “He’s very sporty,” says the distributor. And he smokes a Cuban cigar every afternoon. That Olivier is a caricature of a Frenchman born into great wealth – that his definition of sporting would be rather brutally challenged just a few Subway stops away, say in Rucker Park, or just over the Manhattan Bridge, in Gleason’s Gym – is obvious. He fits in downtown no better than Crocodile Dundee, if for reasons less outback-tough than Gallic-smug. Less clear is why this man proclaiming himself a perfumer is being accorded such respect – by the reporter present now from The New York Observer, by the Times journalist who profiled him earlier in 1999, by the New Yorker writer who’ll mention Creed in two years’ time. Is that, too, due to money? Or perhaps it’s merely due to the family history elucidated on its web site:

“Olivier CREED is the eminent sixth generation master perfumer and chief executive of CREED. Following decades of study of scent with his father, Olivier CREED became master perfumer in 1975. He has created some of the most widely beloved and artistic scents in the 247-year history of the House.” But there is an odd detail included on the press release for this bespoke scent project – namely, that your scent may not be made by Olivier Creed at all but by a perfumer named Jean-Pierre Subrénat, whose career output consists of a co-authored 1978 perfume and three female fragrances for Avon in 1992. And there is a memoir – a damn entertaining one, in fact – written by Olivier’s uncle Charles, a playboy women’s couturier of some prominence in the post-war London fashion world who wound up marrying the editor of British Vogue. The book, “Maid to Measure,” was published in 1961, or the year Olivier Creed turned 18. It describes a long family history of work in the garment industry but not a word about scent. Creed shows the reporter a tobacco-based scent of his family’s creation that was favored by King George IV, who has been dead, mind you, for 169 years. "Turkey, Bulgaria, Morocco, southern Italy. Every country has its own smells,” Olivier says. "I travel everywhere. Always. La bergamote, le citron, la mandarine! The best is in Sicily. That's where you find good bergamot." Yeah, sure. The 1961 memoir delves into the life of Olivier’s father, too – James Henry, a men’s haberdasher with a longtime shop on Rue Royale, that grand avenue leading up to the Luxor Obelisk in Paris. No mention of bergamot. Perhaps, these are small incongruities – the accounts of the tailors who preceded Olivier versus the family history presented on his firm’s web site. Perhaps the inclusion of an additional perfumer in the bespoke scent program’s fine-print is owed to some small technicality – that it’s no hint of a larger scheme. That Olivier’s lack of any education in the art of aromatic composition, so far as the record shows, was somehow no barrier to his excellence in this realm. Maybe the flamboyance, the insubstantiality, the sense of entitlement that in nearly every other circumstance would raise a reporter’s eyebrows is here nothing more than a sign of authentic old-world aristocracy. Oh, the follies of the nobles. That The New York Times got it right in 1999: Charles and Diana commissioned scents from Olivier. That British GQ nailed it three years later: the Creeds made scents for “King George, Madonna, Winston Churchill, both Elvises – Presley and Costello – Queen Victoria and Michael Jackson.” Nor was there a mistake in The Independent on Sunday in 2013: Olivier and his forebears had won over customers from “Winston Churchill to Michelle Obama, Frank Sinatra to the Queen.” That when Olivier’s son Erwin told The International Herald Tribune in 2004, regarding its VIP clients: "It is how we do things now -- not to divulge too much,” he was somehow not misrepresenting the company’s practice of listing every star customer in its literature, including Natalie Wood, for whom a

scent called Jasmal was said to be created in 1959, despite its dating by a historian to 1999, 18 years after the actress’ death. Because for all these claims to be false -- for hundreds, if not thousands, of newspaper and magazine articles and profiles – in the most fact-checked of periodicals – to be untrue – Olivier Creed must have perpetrated the greatest fraud in the history of luxury retail. As this very book was being written, in February 2020, Oliver Creed sold his business to a private capital fund at BlackRock, the largest asset manager in the world, a firm that oversees $8.67 trillion in assets. It was the fund’s first investment in a European company. The terms of the deal were not disclosed – nor Creed’s books, as the perfumery is private. However, analysts pegged Creed’s annual revenue at $200 million (with huge double digit profit margins; the French newspaper Les Echoes estimated it was even higher – $270 million), and the brand’s former US distributor told me BlackRock likely paid close to $1 billion.i A financial heavyweight, eschewing oodles of other possible deals, paid a tiny French fragrance operation a billion dollars? This would have to be one preposterously successful perfumery. A grooming brand gone filthy rich. Which would make the actual creator of the scents – Olivier Creed’s Cyrano – the most abused artist in the industry ever. The press release announcing the deal said BlackRock had valued Creed for its “unique proposition” as a “founder-led” enterprise. The new Creed chairman, the former CEO of Bacardí, added, “The quality of the products that Olivier and Erwin have developed has enabled Creed to become the world’s leading artisan fragrance.” Est-ce possible? ______________ What if I told you that F. Scott Fitzgerald didn’t author “The Great Gatsby” -- that despite the attribution on the book’s cover, the writer’s own paperwork and reportage on the project in every major periodical for nearly 100 years – the byline was an incredible hoax? That Fitzgerald, far from penning “Gatsby,” had actually paid off a genius colleague with low self-esteem to sell him the manuscript and the right to call it his own? And not only “Gatsby,” mind you, but his every other notable work – “This Side of Paradise,” “Tender is the Night,” all those short stories? And what if that insecure colleague with daddy issues he’d bought off was none other than Hemingway – so that a proper revision of Ernest’s bibliography now included not just “The Sun Also Rises” and “A Farewell to Arms” and “For Whom the Bell Tolls” but nearly every word ever ostensibly penned by Fitzy? Such a discovery would shock not just the literary world but anyone who’d ever taken high school English. Moreover, it’d spur a reassessment of Hemingway that would strain the best critics’ capacity to evaluate a man – if you’ve already called Papa the best, if you long ago doled out every superlative, what additional praise could be offered now? What is infinity plus one?

But of course, this is a silly exercise in alternate history, a flight of sci-fi fancy, you’re thinking – we aren’t going to find out Fitzgerald was a fraud who purchased his prestige in the manner of Gatsby himself. Nor are we ever to make a similar discovery in another field. These seem almost conspiracy theories, inappropriate even to propose hypothetically in an age of rampant untruth. But what if there was a field in which this actually did occur – for decades? What if the man who’d bought off the masterpieces had been so successful consequently he’d been able to sell over his supposed life’s work to a private equity fund for untold millions? What if the genius who’d pawned off masterpieces, filled with regret, had retreated to a 19th-century castle in a remote piece of country along a river, refusing to discuss his known career – already lauded – let alone that secret portion of his life’s work about which nobody had ever known to inquire? What if the truth, so bitterly swallowed up, seemed bound to be buried alongside the legend – until a zealous outsider came knocking? Is that an artistic field in which you might be interested? Because it happened in perfumery – a Hemingway invented a Fitzgerald. Welcome to the heady world of fragrance. ________________ Admittedly, perfumery isn’t the domain of a single, striking secret – it’s rife with fraudulence. There are clones whose outrageous pricing makes an implicit claim for originality. There are perfumers who go by multiple names so their output doesn’t seem inartistically rapid. There is rampant philandering – name a great male perfumer of the last century and I will point out his mistress (some of whom became second wives). But if the perfume world is full of secrets, the following is its greatest: That the seminal works of the Creed fragrance company were composed not by venal namesake Olivier Creed or his ancestors, as the man and company claim, but by the genius perfumer Pierre Bourdon (Name revealed in the book The Ghost Perfumer), whose sense of self-worth, dented by his own father, led him to give up brilliant compositions to Creed for a pittance and thus cover up his role as the primary olfactive artist of his generation. This is the story of an odorant heist. i Olivier told Forbes in October 1999 that the company generates $40 million in annual revenue, with a profit margin of 12 percent. This is almost certainly an intentional diminishment of his margins so as to convince the Forbes reader of the extravagance of his costly natural ingredients. Mass perfumery can achieve margins of 90 percent on the juice. There’s every reason to think Olivier can keep his nearly as high (I say nearly, because Creed can’t achieve the same economies of scale as Coty or Lauder). At the time of the BlackRock acquisition two decades later, analysts estimated Creed’s annual revenue at $200 million, a large portion of which could be straight-up profit

To get a sense of the complexities involved in these negotiations: Creed’s Paris boutique, at 38 Avenue Pierre 1er de Serbie, near the Four Seasons, has been registered as its own limited liability company since January of 2006, under the name of Olivier’s ex-wife, Fabienne. In 2019, this little shop, whose marble busts, carpeted stairs and ubiquitous mirrors recall a Vegas hotel, did $2.6 million in revenue, or 1-2 percent of the company’s total intake. This backs up an additional truth about Creed known by those in the know: People in Paris have no longstanding relationship with these liquids. They’ve heard of Guerlain, sure, but Creed? It does not register as a legitimate Parisian institution – because, well, in its current form, it is not.