Mrs. Grahams’s Gift

While the rest of my junior-high friends were smitten with drugstore brands like Evening in Parisand Tweed, I always wore Blue Grass. And why not: I had access to an endless supply of the scent in all its manifestations—perfume, soap, even dusting powder that came with a huge soft puff. Blue Grasswas already a well-established brand by the time I began wearing it; it had been introduced by Elizabeth Arden in 1938, ten years before I was born. She personally named it after the Kentucky ground cover as well as in tribute to her own beloved thoroughbreds. Widely celebrated as a pioneering and savvy entrepreneur, in fact Elizabeth Arden had been born a country girl and she loved horses as much as she loved the cosmetics business.

For as long as I could remember, Blue Grass products were staples around our apartment, along with various other Arden offerings like Venetian Orange Cream, which my mother swore by. She claimed that it saved her skin, despite the fact that she never went in the sun and it seemed her skin hardly needed saving. I couldn’t stand Orange Cream, with its goppy texture and burnt-orange coloring, to say nothing of its pungent smell, but I was young and not in need of a face cream, anyway. To me it was an old-lady’s product.

This happy abundance of upscale beauty products was a gift in the truest sense of the word. Elizabeth Arden, whose real name was Florence Nightingale Graham, owned an apartment in the Fifth Avenue building where we lived, my father being the superintendent. Always generous with tips to the building’s staff, Mrs. Graham (as we knew her) rounded out her Christmas and Easter gifts with baskets of cosmetics featuring, among other things, the entire Blue Grass line. These would arrive at our door a few days in advance of the holiday for my father to distribute. I suppose it was easier for Mrs. Graham to send an unspecified number of baskets than to try to match one to each employee—like all the tenants in the building, she had multiple dwellings and numerous people staffing them—so invariably my father would have many baskets left over, which he passed along to the live-in help of the other tenants. Those cooks and maids were certainly well taken care of by their own employers, but this was too good a gift to refuse. Still, no matter how many baskets he dispatched, we always seemed to have more lurking in the hall closet, begging to be taken out and enjoyed before the next round arrived.

When I turned 14 I was allowed to open one basket and pick what I liked. My mother took the Orange Cream and the lipstick, as well as the mascara and nail polish, and I chose all the Blue Grass. Misty toilet water, bath salts, purse-size atomizers…I considered myself quite the lady in those days, heady with the notion that overnight I had graduated to the League of Sophisticated Women. That September I started at a boarding school where wearing any sort of perfume was strictly forbidden, and in my new-found wisdom I saw this as a blessing: I would not have wanted to lord over the other girls how much more grown-up I was, with my grown-up choice of scent.

Thanksgiving rolled around. I was home again, and at school I had made new girl friends who lived nearby named Patty and Liz. They came over to play records and practice dance steps, and it was then that I introduced them to Blue Grass. We spent that afternoon spritzing and smoothing lotion onto our skin until the entire apartment smelled like a perfume factory. At Christmas—when another shipment of baskets was piled high in our living room, waiting to be distributed—I splurged, with my parents’ approval, and offered them the pickings of an entire basket. They were thrilled. And so it went, as school chums and home pals, over spring breaks and holidays, during long hot summers, Patty, Liz and I shared the dual happiness of teenage camaraderie and of having our own signature scent: Blue Grass.

But with the possible exception of boarding-school friendships, nothing lasts forever. Mrs. Graham died in 1966 and her apartment was sold; after the last closet stash ran out, if my friends and I wanted to keep on using Blue Grass, we would have to buy it. With the fickleness of teen-age girls we were soon trying all sorts of other perfumes, Ambush and Chantilly, White Shoulders, Arpege…for a while I even dabbled in Chanel No. 5, although it broke my budget. New scents came along, Charlie and Obsession,Beautiful, Poison, and although Blue Grass was still available, it faded into a nostalgic dream as I grew out of adolescence and into adulthood.

Elizabeth Arden’s Orange Cream is still sold, and it is still orange and gloppy, but it’s now called Eight-Hour Cream and it has a cult following among makeup artists. Blue Grass was re-formulated twice over the years, most recently in the 1990’s. On impulse I bought an Elizabeth Arden gift box last year—the sort of combo-pack heavily advertised during the Christmas season, with perfume, dusting powder and lotion—and took it to the annual holiday lunch that Patty, Liz and I have shared all these years. I thought their eyes would light up when they saw it, and that we could once again break open the cellophane and have fun picking what we each wanted. Instead, both of them frowned.

“What?” I asked. “Don’t you remember how nice it was? How we used to love it? It’s Blue Grass, for heaven’s sake!”

“What I remember is how nice you were to share it with us,” Patty finally admitted.

Liz nodded. “Even back then, it smelled like old-lady perfume,” she said. “But I was very grateful to get it.”

For a brief moment I stared at them, and then all three of us burst out laughing.

“For old times’ sake,” I declared as we cut open the box. I took the atomizer and spritzed quickly over each of our heads. “And to Mrs. Graham: thank you for all the years of happiness that began with a gift of scent.”