Old Sins (35 page)

Her position in the company was unchallenged, and the most envious, the most malicious person could not but have acknowledged it had been earned, that her success was not dependent on her relationship with the chairman. After Circe’s launch, Julian made her design director of the company (stores division); when he opened another Circe in Paris in 1961 he put her on the main board. Two years after that he made her advertising director as well, and creative director of the company worldwide; this meant she had to spend several months of the year in London as well. She bought a tiny flat in The Boltons, and shared her life with Julian exactly as she did in New York; undemandingly, charmingly and affectionately. But she was very clearly, as even Letitia (who loathed her) acknowledged, in London to work and not as his mistress.

She was brilliant, innovative and (most unusually) had a shrewd commercial sense as well; she never put forward a proposal for a new line, a relaunch, an advertising campaign without costing it out very carefully, without examining it in all its aspects, and she was equally clever at recognizing the virtue of an idea, a scheme, a suggestion from someone else; she knew how to delegate and she knew how to lead and inspire. She was an invaluable asset. And Julian needed her, very badly.

Circe had been a huge, a breathtaking success; it stood, a glittering jewel, in the very top echelons of the world’s stores; it did not so much rank with Bonwit’s, Bergdorfs and Saks in New York, Fortnum and Liberty in London, it had a glamour and style above and beyond all of them, for it had exclusivity, a sense of intimacy that set it closer to the smaller, more specialist establishments, to Gucci, Hermes, the Dior boutiques.

The Paris Circe, opened two years after New York, stood on
the Faubourg St Honoré, very similar in feel, a building that had, in living memory, been a house.

But it was the cosmetic company itself which was still at the heart of the Morell empire; and it needed ever more intense attention. Competition in the industry was getting increasingly ferocious in the sixties: Charles Revson was probably at the height of his creative and innovative skills, launching new colours with the brilliance and panache of an impresario: the show was a non-stop extravaganza with one brilliant promotion staged after another: six, eight brilliant launches a year, all with dazzling, emotive, pulsey names. The man who gave the world Fire and Ice, Stormy Pink, Cherries in the Snow was setting a formidable standard; he was also innovative with his products, there was powder blusher, frosted nail enamel, ‘wet-look’ lipsticks and above all a mood of constant excitement and innovation. Then there was Mrs Lauder, rocking the cosmetic world with her high-priced and exclusive range: Re-Nutriv Crême and Extract with its twenty secret ingredients, selling for the awe-inspiring sum of one hundred and fifteen dollars a jar.

The cosmetic industry was discovering science in a big way: Helena Rubinstein had launched a ‘deep pore’ bio facial treatment; Elizabeth Arden had Creme Extraordinaire ‘protecting and redirecting’; Biotherm had incorporated plankton ‘tiny primal organisms’ for the skin in their creams.

It was a challenging time in the industry and nobody could afford to rest on their laurels, however exquisitely coloured and beautifully perfumed the leaves. Julian responded with a range from Juliana called Epidermelle which offered a new complex cream containing placental extract for its ‘cell revival programme’ and fought back on the colour front with a series of promotions based on the concept of the new frenetic fashion of the sixties – his range of first mini and then micro-mini colours, pale, pale, transparent lipsticks, and ultra pearlized eye shadows sold out in days and his eye wardrobe, the collection of false eyelashes, thick and thin, upper and lower, launched to adorn the little-girl wide-eyed faces of the sixties dolly birds, with their waist-length hair and their waist-high legs, was the sensation of the cosmetic year in 1965.

Nevertheless, Letitia’s prophecy that Julian would need to
find more and more brilliant chemists had indeed come to pass. He had actually hired not one but three; each overseeing their own branch of a large development team: two American, one French, and the rivalry between them was intense (each having deliberately been given the impression that the others were just slightly more brilliant, talented and experienced) and a great spur to creative activity. He had opened a large new laboratory in New Jersey, and greatly expanded the one in England, having moved to new premises in Slough with Sarsted in charge.

However, most of the major cosmetic concepts for Juliana came from none of the chemists but from Julian himself. They were the result of several things: his extraordinarily astute understanding of women and what they wanted; his endlessly fertile mind; and a capacity above all to think laterally about what were apparently small and unimportant incidents.

He was sitting with Camilla in the New York office over a working lunch one day, discussing the decor of the salons in the Paris store, when Camilla said she would go and get some mineral water to drink. She stood up, looking in the mirror on Julian’s wall as she did so.

‘Oh, I look awful,’ she said. ‘This colour has changed on me so badly, the formula just doesn’t suit me, the lipstick has gone really dark. I look ten years older.’

‘I hope it’s not one of ours,’ said Julian absently; then he suddenly froze, staring at Camilla with an expression of intense excitement. ‘Good God,’ he said. ‘Dear Christ. God in heaven. Shelley!’ he shouted at his secretary down the intercom, ‘get me Tom Duchinsky in the lab right away.’

‘Good God,’ said Camilla, half amused, half startled. ‘Do I really look so awful?’

‘No, Camilla, you look wonderful. Wonderful. As always. Listen, listen – oh, Tom, is that you? Tom, listen to me. You know how lipsticks and eye colours – lipsticks particularly – change on the woman? Due to the acid content of her skin? Do you think you could formulate some quite basic colours that could make a virtue of that fact? That were sufficiently neutral and formulated so that they responded to the woman’s chemistry. Developed on her? Do you see what I’m getting at?
You do? Good. I’d have fired you if you hadn’t. What’s that? Of course it hasn’t been done. Well, it happens all the time, but it’s a vice, not a virtue. I want to turn it into a product benefit. And for eye shadows as well. Listen, give it some thought. Camilla and I will be over there in an hour.’

‘No we won’t,’ said Camilla crossly. ‘Julian, I have work to do on the new advertising, I can’t afford to spend the afternoon in New Jersey.’

‘Rubbish,’ said Julian. ‘If it wasn’t for all the new products, you wouldn’t have anything to advertise. Come on, I’ll drive us. In the Cord. You know you can’t resist that.’

‘Of course I can,’ said Camilla, crosser still. She found Julian’s endless preoccupation with cars intensely irritating, and was constantly telling him he would have been far better off with a perfectly ordinary limo and a chauffeur rather than insisting on driving himself round the streets of New York and London in the various exotic vehicles he fell in love with. The white thirties supercharged Cord was his latest piece of folly, as she saw it, with its monster curving mudguards and very long bonnet, set in front of a modestly shaped body; Julian told her as they pulled out from the garage built beneath Circe that he loved it more than anything in the world, with the possible exception of his new brood mare. Camilla was never quite sure whether this kind of remark was made as a joke or not; but there were times, and today was one of them, when she found it very hard indeed to smile.

Later that year they took a trip to Florida, and stayed in Key West; it was the first time he had suggested they vacationed together and Camilla saw it as important to their relationship. Lying in bed on the third humid night, she was dutifully struggling to arouse the energy to respond to Julian and his protestations of desire when he drew back and looked at her.

‘What’s the matter,’ he said, half amused, ‘don’t I excite you any more?’

‘Of course you do,’ she said, ‘it’s just so very very hot. Let me go and take a shower, and revive myself.’

She went and stood in the tepid water for a long time, doing some of the mental relaxation exercises her therapist had taught her, breathing deeply and emptying her mind, and some
of the physical ones too, earnestly clenching and unclenching her vaginal muscles, hoping to find in herself some semblance of desire. She had her eyes closed; she suddenly heard the shower curtains part, and saw Julian looking at her with an expression of great amusement.

‘What on earth are you doing?’ he said. ‘If I didn’t know you better, I would say you were up to all kinds of solitary vices in here.’

‘Certainly not,’ said Camilla, nearly in tears at being caught in such foolishness, ‘I’m just trying to relax, that’s all.’

‘Well, you had an expression of great concentration on your face. Not relaxed at all. Come on, darling, let me dry you down, and make you feel really good.’

He wrapped her in a huge towel and led her to the bed, and massaged her gently through it; then he removed it and took up her body oil and began to massage it into her breasts, her stomach, her thighs.

‘Nice?’

‘Lovely,’ said Camilla firmly, closing her eyes, forcing her mind back on to her relaxation therapy, saying, pleasure pleasure pleasure over and over again silently, like a mantra.

‘You feel better. Softer . . . This oil doesn’t smell very good,’ he said suddenly, ‘funny, how perfumes seem to change in bed, in this kind –’ he bent and kissed her breasts – ‘this kind of situation. I wonder – Good God, yes, I wonder . . .’

‘What, Julian? What do you wonder?’

‘Oh, nothing. Nothing worth talking about now.’

‘Tell me,’ said Camilla, who would have thought anything at all worth talking about then.

‘No, really nothing. All I want to do now is just take you over and love you until it’s light again.’

Camilla yawned and then hastily stifled the sound, hoping he would think it was a sigh of passion. It just all sounded terribly exhausting.

Signature Colours, the dazzling new range of lipsticks and eye shadows that were designed personally to suit every woman, to adjust to her own individual chemistry, and the new Juliana fragrance Affair, spearhead of an important new element in the Juliana range, were both great successes financially and
creatively, launched simultaneously in the spring of 1966 in New York and London. Affair was one of the new all-over fragrance concepts, designed to flatter and adorn the entire body. There was a bath oil, a shower gel, a body lotion, the usual battery of perfume concentrates, and eau de toilettes; and a new product altogether, a body fragrance for the night. ‘Night-Time Affair’, it said on the packaging, ‘to be stroked and massaged into the skin, last thing at night, to surround a woman and her body with the lingering sensuous echoes of Affair until morning.’ The implications were very clear.

Mick diMaggio produced an advertisement that was so near to being an explicit piece of soft porn – a woman’s body, a man’s hand, and a bottle of Night-Time Affair fallen on to the rumpled sheet beside them – that two publications (although assuredly not
Vogue
and
Harpers Bazaar
who both adored it) refused to run it; in its first week Night-Time Affair sold out in every store in New York.

Sometimes Camilla North wondered if there was any aspect of her life with Julian Morell that would not become a product.

When Roz was ten years old her parents decided to send her to boarding school. This was partly because they both felt she needed the discipline and stability it could provide and partly because neither of them was prepared to try and provide it at home. Julian was riding on the crest of wave after wave; dizzy, exalted with his own success, jetting from London to New York and back again almost weekly; he was investigating the possibility of launching Circe in Madrid and Nice, he was exploring hotels, he was investigating a chain of health farms, and he had no time at all to spare for an awkward little girl who was more demanding than all his business interests put together. Had she been more attractive, more appealing, he might have taken her with him sometimes, but she was still a large child, solemn, heavy featured; Eliza worked hard on her wardrobe and her hair, but she never looked pretty as so many of her friends did, and her manner was not appealing either, she was truculent and argumentative and she made no attempt to talk to people if she did not like them.

Eliza was also extremely busy, having a great many well-documented affairs both with members of the British
aristocracy and the cosmopolitan set: with the twin aims of having a good time and finding a husband. She was achieving the first, although not the second; the English aristocrats, while delighted to enjoy her favours in their beds, did not really wish to marry the twice divorced Mrs Thetford, and the cosmopolitan set, while appreciating her beauty and her style, found her in the last resort too English, she lacked their sybaritic indolence, the absolute devotion to the pursuit of pleasure that they required of her. Nevertheless, her days and her energies were extremely occupied; like Julian, there was no place in them for a daughter who did her very little credit. Boarding school, it was agreed, was the best place for Roz. It fell to Julian to tell her.

‘Mummy and I think,’ he said to her, over lunch one day at the Ritz (it had become a ritual at the start of each school holidays that he took her there), ‘that you should go to boarding school.’

Roz dropped her knife on the floor, panic rising in her throat. ‘I don’t want to go to boarding school,’ she said firmly, anxious not to allow him to see how frightened she was. ‘I like being at home.’

‘Well, darling, you might like it, but we think it would be better for you to go away. You’ll like that even better.’

‘I won’t. Why ever should I?’

‘Well, because you’re all on your own, it isn’t as if you have any brothers and sisters and Nanny really is getting very old and she can’t stay looking after you for ever, and Mummy and I worry about you being lonely.’