What the Nose Knows - Avery Gilbert [76]
The glory that was AromaRama began even before the theater darkened. Outside, a gentleman in a Tartar falconer’s costume strolled about Seventh Avenue with a stuffed falcon on his arm; the lobby crawled with acned, pigtailed youths in coolie hats and usherettes with Maybelline-slanted eyes and rayon-brocade sheath dresses slit past their knees. Except for the inscrutable fact that everybody on the scene at the DeMille was pure Bronx Caucasian, the ambience seemed roughly that of the old honkytonk International Settlement in San Francisco. Upstairs, tea was poured for the customers “courtesy of Chin and Lee,” who were pushing their canned chow mein in conjunction with this Third Wonder of the Entertainment World.
As for the film itself, the opening sequence featuring a sliced orange was a crowd pleaser. The New York Times found the other odors to be “neither so clear nor pleasurable.” Luz Gunsberg had the same reaction. Her husband, Sheldon Gunsberg, was Reade’s assistant and closely involved with AromaRama. She remembers, “When the film started…in the little prolog, he cut an orange and that was incredible. That was fabulous—just wonderful. But after that the smells got all mixed up and they couldn’t get them out; so it was a terrible situation.” The odors that poured from the overhead ventilation ducts were potent. Time magazine reported that they were “strong enough to give a bloodhound a headache,” and The New Yorker called the experience “quite a massive assault on the olfactory nerves.” Says Gunsberg, “my husband would come home and we would have to hang his suits all over the house and open all the windows because we couldn’t get the smell out. It really permeated the whole place.” Todd employee Hal Williamson bought a ticket to scope out the competition: “Your clothes reeked when you came out of this stuff that had been dumped into the air conditioning system. As I recall there was even a fine mist in the air.”
The smells, created by Rhodia perfumer Selma Weidenfeld, were criticized for a lack of subtlety. Time thought they “will probably seem phony, even to the average uneducated nose. A beautiful old pine grove in Peking, for instance, smells rather like a subway rest room on disinfectant day.” (I sympathize with Weidenfeld; a formula that smells great on a test blotter can fall apart completely when it fills an entire room. Asking her to design at her desk fragrances meant to be smelled throughout an auditorium was like expecting the guy who etches your name on a rice grain to do it in skywriting.) The sheer number and range of the AromaRama smells were overwhelming: jasmine, grassland, incense, spices, soy sauce, a tiger, and a pungent waterfront, among others. Instead of heightening reality, the smells were distracting, according to the mass of critics at the New York Times, Variety, and The New Yorker.
Then there was the problem of synchronization. Every so often, said Variety, “the machine-made olfactory flavors don’t correspond with what’s on view.” Time complained that “the smells are not always removed as rapidly as the scene requires: at one point the audience distinctly smells grass in the middle of the Gobi Desert.” Paul Baise, who worked for Reade in advertising and public relations, experienced this firsthand. He tells me that AromaRama “worked part-time but not over a period of time, because after a while all the smells melded into one, they overlapped into each other, and they were coming out onto the screen with the wrong image. It was doomed because it got off sync.”
More than a whiff of cynicism hovered over Reade’s project, beginning with its name: AromaRama made fun of Michael Todd’s Cinerama. In the only original footage he added to the movie, Reade took a swipe at Lowell Thomas’s introductory appearance in This Is Cinerama. In the opening sequence of Great Wall, Reade had NBC television news anchor Chet Huntley demonstrate AromaRama by