What the Nose Knows: The Science of Scent in Everyday Life (19 page)

Reade’s actions were not those of a man expecting great success; according to
Variety,
he made only enough prints to show the film in six theaters simultaneously. He produced no ancillary merchandise, and his openings had none of the celebrity buzz that Todd’s did. He didn’t bother to incorporate AromaRama Industries, Inc., until one week before the picture opened. Reade promoted his smell system harder than his movie, printing
AROMARAMA
in gigantic letters atop the ads, with the movie name below it in letters a quarter the size. (The Smell-O-Vision tagline appeared in smaller letters below the title.)

The largely negative reaction to
Great Wall
threatened to spoil the upcoming release of
Scent of Mystery. Variety
noted that AromaRama’s New York ticket sales were good but not great, and that Reade’s people “apparently aren’t expecting any overwhelming jubilation on the part of the trade.”
Variety
was prepared to dismiss the idea of “smellies” before Smell-O-Vision had even opened. When I asked him about Reade and Weiss’s impact on Smell-O-Vision, Hal Williamson said, “in retrospect they probably did more to harm our cause than the occasional failure of [our] scents to work exactly as they were supposed to. It left a very bad taste with the press after the Reade opening in New York.” Even Reade’s people admit to the problems. Paul Baise says it “was doomed before it even got off the ground, but we went ahead with it anyway and presented it as a piece of new innovation.” AromaRama, he says, “belonged in the laboratories, and not presented to a paying public.”

Todd Junior Fights Back

Scent of Mystery
premiered in Chicago on January 12, 1960, with all the hype the formidable Todd PR machine could provide. A chartered plane flew Elizabeth Taylor in from New York, accompanied by members of the press. The producers threw a preshow cocktail party at Fritzl’s, a showbiz watering hole. The film was preceded by
The Tale of Old Whiff
, a cartoon with fifteen Smell-O-Vision scents and Bert Lahr (of Cowardly Lion fame) as a character voice. At a late dinner following the movie attended by nearly 250 people, the entertainment included Milton Berle, Henny Youngman, and Mort Sahl. Cohosting the event with Todd junior was Elizabeth Taylor, recently married to Todd senior’s showbiz buddy Eddie Fisher. At the New York opening on February 18, Taylor’s presence drew a huge crowd of fans and reporters.

The film itself was received warmly, if not enthusiastically. Most critics liked the exotic scenery and action sequences.
Variety
’s take was typical: “Diverting tale told with nostril-appeal.” The
New York Times
’s Bosley Crowther was the rare critic who disliked the film itself, from the “whole silly plot” to the acting (“downright atrocious” and “virtually amateur”). As for the smells, Crowther seemed to have trouble getting them; he said they were “the least impressive or even detectable features of the show” every so often, he detected something “faint and fleeting.”

The Smell-O-Vision scents played off the screen action in clever ways. When Peter Lorre’s character drank coffee, the audience smelled the brandy in it. When Denholm Elliott slipped and almost fell in an outdoor market, the audience smelled (but didn’t see) a banana—an aromatic twist on a very old sight gag. Topping it all off, the smoke from Peter Lorre’s pipe holds the key to the plot’s mystery.

Who Won?

Comparing Smell-O-Vision to AromaRama, Hollis Alpert, writing in
Saturday Review,
was even-handed but unsympathetic, saying that “neither is particularly successful or desirable. Differ though they may in technology, the smells are equally synthetic, and equally erratic.” Most other reviewers gave Smell-O-Vision the edge in aesthetics.
Time
said its odors were “on the whole no more accurate or credible than those employed by AromaRama, but at least they don’t stink so loud.” According to
Variety,
“The Smell-O-Vision odors seemed more distinct and recognizable and did not appear to linger as long as those in AromaRama.”
The New Yorker
’s John McCarten said, “After a lot of thoughtful recollective sniffing, I should say that Glorious Smell-O-Vision is subtler than AromaRama. Professor Laube seems to have mastered the quick change; in any case, he is able to get the smell of coffee out of the place before the loaf of fresh bread appears on the screen.”

But it wasn’t just Laube’s efforts that gave Smell-O-Vision its edge. Many years later, Mike Todd Jr. credited his press agent Bill Doll with the idea of reversing the odor pump after each delivery to reduce lingering of previous smell. “Bill got this idea after the third opening. It was used, and it worked perfectly, but by that time the ship had sailed.”

Back in 1939, when he was promoting Odorated Talking Pictures, Hans Laube had said ten smells would suffice for a feature-length film, because more would be “too much for the public’s nose.” In his 1956 patent application, Laube increased the optimal number to between twelve and twenty.
Scent of Mystery
was released with thirty. In the competition to show off their new systems, both Todd and Reade had oversaturated their audience.

A
QUESTION OF
personality lingers over the battle of the smellies. Mike Todd Jr. had little of his father’s fire. He was polite and tentative. Anticipating ridicule, he adopted a tongue-in-cheek attitude toward Smell-O-Vision that signaled a lack of seriousness to critics and distributors. The movie critic Hollis Alpert Jr. found him “a somewhat timid revolutionist.”

The elder Todd took great pleasure in gambling on his own talents. According to his son, “He was at his best when the odds were against him and a show was in trouble and he needed to utilize all of his energy and ingenuity.” Todd senior was strongest late in the game. His contribution to a show began after rehearsals; he switched into top gear only during out-of-town preview performances. “He thought best on his feet, under pressure,” said his son. He was legendary for last-minute adjustments to shows and promotions that made winners out of questionable properties. And not least, he was a great motivator of other people: he knew how to drive technical wizards to produce workable, show-worthy effects.

One is tempted to ask: Would Smell-O-Vision have taken off if Michael Todd Sr. had lived? It is easy to imagine him pushing perfumers to the limit, stalking about the floor of the Cinestage before opening night to tweak the scent delivery. Todd senior’s showbiz sense would have kicked in; the film would have been snappier and the scent effects more polished. His genius for promotion would have taken flight—imagine him pushing
Scent of Mystery
perfume with the help of his glamorous movie star wife. He would have schmoozed the stuffy-nosed Bosley Crowther and his colleagues in the press. Above all, he would have reacted quickly to Reade’s tactics, and maybe played them to his advantage.

Hal Williamson says, “if we could have survived another couple of months probably, the fine-tuning could have been done. But at that point the critical and public reactions were such that Michael and Elizabeth decided not to keep going with it.”

Smell-O-Vision—its technology, its film, and its promoters—was a serious entertainment gamble, even if it was a long shot. AromaRama, in contrast, never had any legs at all. Technologically, business-wise, and aesthetically, it was a cynical rabbit punch of counterpromotion. Smell-O-Vision was more than a gimmick, but AromaRama was something less, a mean-spirited exploitation. Walter Reade ambushed Mike Todd Jr., then dogged his every turn. Temperamentally unsuited for the rough-and-tumble of showbiz, Todd gave his more aggressive rival too much room to maneuver. Although critical opinion tilted toward Smell-O-Vision, Reade had effectively killed any prospects for its commercial success.

W
ERE SCENTED MOVIES
simply gimmicks? John Waters thinks so. He tells me that his inspiration for Odorama was William Castle, whose promotions in the 1950s were the very definition of Hollywood gimmicks. Castle, for example, hid vibrating electric motors under random seats and set them off during the Vincent Price horror film
The Tingler.
Castle’s stunts were cheap and easy—no inventors spent long years in the lab perfecting them, and no lawyers were paid to file patents, incorporate companies, and draw up licensing agreements.

I ask Waters if movie smells can be anything other than a gimmick. “You mean for real in a drama? No. I think it will always be a gimmick, because it takes you out of the movie.

“To me, what made
Polyester
work were bad smells. All the movies had good smells. We started with a good smell, and ended with a good smell, but we had bad smells all through it and that’s what made it successful. Never is it going to be successful if it’s good smells. It’s boring. You have bad ones, it’s funny. If it’s ever used again, it will always be for comedy.”

But despite his protestations that it’s all in good fun, when the
Rugrats Go Wild
feature-length cartoon came out in 2003 with scratch-and-sniff “Odorama” cards, John Waters hit the roof. Attorneys for his studio, New Line Cinema, went to work, and in short order the Rugrats and their corporate owners at Nickelodeon and Viacom dropped the use of the name Odorama.

At the heart of every gimmick is an idea worth defending. The notion of scented entertainment—whether in the movies, a dance club, an opera, or a concert hall—remains attractive and widely popular. As an added dimension, it offers all the possibilities of sight and sound: compelling realism, surprise, and emotional transport, as well as sly commentary, comedy, and ironic distance. I have no doubt that a director with sufficient olfactory genius could create a superbly entertaining smellie. It’s unfair to ask such a person to develop the necessary technology as well. Somewhere in our wireless and digital world there is an elegant way to deliver scent to an audience. When it becomes a reality and falls into the right creative hands, we may see a new dawn of Smell-O-Vision.

Aftermath

The golden age of scented movies was brief but spectacular. It began in the spring of 1958 and was over by the summer of 1960. Neither Smell-O-Vision nor AromaRama would ever be used again.

The equipment Reade used for AromaRama—whatever it may have looked like—has vanished. When Mike Todd’s Cinestage Theatre in Chicago was about to be gutted in 1994, cinema buff Marc Gulbrandsen sneaked in to take a last look around. He spotted the old Smell-O-Vision equipment in the basement, but it was never recovered.

Carmen Laube, the daughter of the man who invented Smell-O-Vision, has an apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Her father was fifty-six years old when she was born, so she is too young to remember his excitement about
Scent of Mystery.
She does remember his passion for scent, and the disappointment of his old age when his entrepreneurial spirit waned at last. She showed me photographs of her father. He is dapperly dressed and always wears his signature dark-framed eyeglasses. The snapshots are from the deep past: Laube behind the wheel of a racing car in Switzerland in the 1930s, in a dinner jacket on board the luxury liner
Andrea Doria,
and finally at the 1939–40 New York World’s Fair, standing next to the packing crates that carried the Odorated Talking Pictures equipment from Zürich to Flushing Meadow for the screening of
My Dream.

Carmen opens a box of memorabilia and hands me tickets and an invitation to the Chicago premiere of
Scent of Mystery:
“Mrs. Eddie Fisher and Mr. Michael Todd, Jr. take pleasure in inviting you…” There is the printed menu from the post-film supper party—a glamorous midnight affair at the Ambassador West Hotel, with two bands and “impromptu entertainment by our friends from the world of show business.” There is the neatly folded stock certificate embossed with a corporate seal: 200 shares of Scentovision, Inc., to Hans Laube.

I speak on the phone to Hans Laube’s widow, Novia, who now lives in Florida. Through her heavy Estonian accent I hear fierce determination and loyalty. She tells me how she met and married this tall, handsome, intellectual European; how particular he was about his clothes—the fine suits and custom-made shirts. How hard he worked, often late at night, and about the seven months he spent commuting to Chicago to prepare Smell-O-Vision for its debut. For the Laubes, a lot was riding on Smell-O-Vision. She tells me, “Michael Todd and everybody said the name Laube would be known all over the world. Because we anticipated that this would be a great success.”

When I ask about the competition with Walter Reade and AromaRama, her tone sharpens. “He came out just a few weeks before us, or just a month before us. He spoiled the entire idea because when people went to see his movie the smell clung to their clothes and they said, ‘Oh no, no, we don’t want that.’…[Reade] wanted to make money, he wanted to come out before us, and he stole my husband’s idea.” The failure of Smell-O-Vision was a financial blow to Laube. Novia says Michael Todd promised her husband a nickel for every ticket sold. The film ran for months, but “they did not give Hans one single penny. So that was a terrible disappointment too. They did not keep their promise.” It took a psychological toll as well. “It killed my husband mentally,” she says.

After the movie closed, Laube rented laboratory space on East Eighty-fourth Street, where he developed an electronic home fragrancer called the Bestair, but the device was ahead of its time and never made it to market. The organizers of the U.S. exhibit at the 1964 World’s Fair approached him about a scented movie project, but dropped it at the last minute. With that final, crushing disappointment, Laube threw in the towel. “I had to take care of my husband for twelve long years…to support him after that because he ended up penniless, totally penniless.” After years of declining health, Hans Laube died in 1976, at the age of seventy-six.

I
N THE CORNER
of Carmen Laube’s living room, topped by a collection of ornate table lamps, sits a shiny stainless-steel cabinet. Behind its clear Plexiglas face I see motors, pumps, gauges, and dials, and above them a turntable ringed with glass bottles. I’m looking at the ultimate Smell-O-Vision artifact, the working prototype her father used to fine-tune scents for Mike Todd’s movie forty-seven years ago. A lever arm above one flask is frozen in place like the Tin Woodman’s arm, forever poised to descend and extract the next scent. The smell has long since evaporated.