The Perfume King and The Scent of Love: Read This Excerpt from "Masters of Sex"
“The
Scent of Love”
by
Thomas Maier
Excerpted from “Masters of Sex”
If birds and bees do
it, then surely human beings rely on a sense of smell in sexual selection.
Olfaction must play a hidden role in the allure between men and women, the
sweet and musky odors that excite the senses and signal the inevitability of
love. That was the long-held belief of Dr. William Masters and Virginia Johnson after years of study.
Their second book, Human Sexual Inadequacy, underlined the
“tremendous undeveloped potential” of smell in affecting human sexual behavior.
Sex pheromones—scents that somehow sparked a natural behavioral
response—remained uncharted territory in science.
Yet food and fragrance
companies, looking for possible methods to make money from this untapped
chemistry of desire, turned to the Reproductive Biology Research Foundation run
by Masters and Johnson. In a way that government refused to do, these private
firms provided grant money to explore this missing link of sexual attraction.
At Masters and
Johnson’s clinic, endocrinologist Joan Bauman investigated female scents under
funding from the Monell Chemical Senses Center, a Philadelphia-based nonprofit
financed by the food, beverage, fragrance, and pharmaceutical industries. “They
were interested in developing perfumes that would be pheromonal—in other words,
they would stimulate sexual feelings,” she remembered.
In this search, the
biggest supporter of Bill and Virginia’s work was International Flavors &
Fragrances Inc. (IFF) and its charismatic chairman, Henry G. Walter Jr., better
known as Hank. His multimillion-dollar global conglomerate provided smells and
tastes for a wide variety of products, from lemon-scented furniture polish to
chocolate flavor in Cocoa Puffs, the breakfast cereal. Most profitably, IFF
provided scents for perfume makers like Revlon and Estée Lauder. By extracting
the pheromones from gypsy moths, it synthesized a sex attractant used by Jovan
in perfumes for women and colognes for men.
Hank searched the
world for a new taste or aroma to adapt to the marketplace. “In China they have
floral preparations that make people go to sleep,” he once observed.
“Fragrances operate on the same part of the brain as opiates. Maybe we can
develop odor equivalents to Valium without the side-effects.” He called his
business “the sex and hunger industry.”
At age fifty-seven,
Hank Walter exuded health and vitality, capable of riding a bicycle across
Manhattan to his office with the speed and dexterity of a messenger boy. With a
nest of neatly coiffed hair and tight, tanned skin, he looked out at the world through
thick glasses and with a cocksure smile. A Fortune
magazine writer later described him as “one of the most distinctive chief
executives I’ve ever met—an earthy, saucy kind of guy. . . . His language is earthy,
rich in sexual allusion.”
In the office, he
avoided the usual gray flannel of corporate chieftains and wore unconventional
red suspenders, decorated sometimes by skunks or shamrocks. During
a tedious meeting with security
analysts at a posh club in London, Hank stripped off his shirt and rubbed
himself with IFF-scented lotion. “I think I woke them up,” he later said with a
gleam in his eye.
Helping to create the Monell Center in
1968, Hank theorized that women emitted pheromones that weren’t easily detected
by the human nose. He wanted to develop fragrances that would “amplify the odor
signal” or “sharpen the odor receptors.” Without
much difficulty, he enlisted Bill
Masters to capitalize on the scents of love. They exchanged several letters
over the years on this topic, with an occasional check enclosed for the clinic.
Hank suggested several ideas to be pursued. “If you think the whole idea is
crazy, please say so, or if you think some other variation of it is desirable,
also please say so,” he told Bill in foisting his grand plan.
By far, their biggest
success with Hank involved IFF-scented lotions used in sex therapy. Before
entering the bedroom, couples received lotions with commercial fragrances,
labeled by IFF as masculine or feminine. Four bouquet scents—floral; a mossy
green; a floral/woody blend; and “oriental”—were feminine. Aromas on
the menu marked as masculine included
lavender bouquet; modern
ambery; sweet bouquet; citrus bouquet;
fresh citrus plus woody,
floral bouquet; and a sharp fragrance
with balsamic notes.
If couples found one
smell objectionable, they switched to another lotion, unscented if they
preferred. Of one hundred couples studied, many enjoyed the sensual experience of
massaging the glistening cream along their naked skin, helping them overcome
their own hang-ups about seminal fluid or vaginal lubrication. Without any
clear-cut conclusions, Bill and Gini
found that lotion rubbing could be an accurate barometer of difficulty ahead in
the therapy. Of the eighteen couples who rejected the lotions as “juvenile,
undignified, unmeaningful, or that they got nothing from the lotion,” more than
three-quarters failed to reverse their overall sexual problems during the
two-week treatment. In Human Sexual
Inadequacy, the two researchers called for more comprehensive olfactory
research, convinced they were on to something.
While Hank applauded
his company’s contributions in treating sexual dysfunction, he pushed for
commercial products for the general public. Imagine, he wrote to Bill, if the
study of pheromones in human females could result in a “pleasurable fragrance”
sprayed on millions? Were they on the verge of finding an aphrodisiac for the
weary, a fountain of youth for the old and shriveled, an over-the-counter rival
to the pill’s effectiveness in detecting ovulation in a way that not even the
Vatican could object? If they could identify the pheromone that “marks the
actual date of ovulation in each
cycle,” women could use it as a natural
early-warning system “able
to avoid contraception by avoiding
intercourse during the relatively
short fertile ovulatory period,” Hank
theorized.
Undoubtedly, the possible
bonanza from such a natural-based enticement was well worth an occasional
$5,000 or $10,000 tax-deductible check from IFF and its affiliates. As a savvy
patron, Hank appealed to Bill’s scientific curiosity, with the smell of money
clearly in mind. “How can we best push forward this whole field of investigation?”
he urged Bill. “The goals are high and the methodology does not risk interference with bodily function a la
the pill or conflict with religious
teachings. The end product should be
very cheap.”
While Bill valued this monetary contribution to the clinic, Gini steadily grew interested in Hank
Walter himself. After the publication of Human Sexual
Response in 1966, Hank’s staff
contacted Bill and Gini “as an
exploratory thing, knowing who we were, by publicity,” she recalled.
“They wanted to know if there was any interrelatedness between the
kind of developmental work
that they did and what we did.”
With Hank’s help,
Gini developed the idea of rubbing lotion across the skin as a “medium of
exchange” between lovers during sensate therapy sessions. At times, she sounded like an Avon lady, talking so
effusively about Hank’s specially designed product. “Gini was doing the
smell research with the sensate [therapy] and at times it
was as if she had trouble staying focused on the therapy,” said Dr.
Marshall Shearer, one of the staffers in the early 1970s. “She would
spend fifteen minutes talking about these scents, and another fifteen
minutes interviewing them about which they liked better.”
Hank was an older,
yet virile man of considerable accomplishment who showered Virginia with
attention and delighted in her presence. More handsome than Masters and loaded
with money, Hank promised to go anywhere in the world as long as she followed.
But Hank was also married. For a time, his marital status may have made it
easier for her to consider just a fling. Eventually, though, Hank came along on
Virginia’s family vacations, such as a trip to a dude ranch, where their
romance intensified and they conversed about being together permanently.
“Wherever I traveled,
he would always join me, and that developed
it,” Virginia said. “He said, ‘It’s
going to cost me several million
to really divest myself of this
marriage I am in, but I will do it because
I want you with me all the time.’”
Despite her fame and
increasing fortune after Human Sexual
Inadequacy appeared,
Gini had never felt so vulnerable, so open to
such a tempting offer. With Hank’s
sophisticated charm, his affection
and sexual magnetism, he offered her
both love and escape.
After twelve
exhausting years, she longed to leave her partnership with Bill, to give up the ceaseless
scientific expedition. She knew full well that Bill had given her so
much, the satisfaction of seeing her own theories translated and
amazingly accepted by organized medicine. Yet her personal relationship
with him, for all of its physical and professional intimacy, never had
the tenderness of real love. She had learned to have sex with
Bill—at first as part of the implicit job description, but eventually as a
way to satisfy her own desires as an unmarried forty-year-old
woman with children. She’d learned to become watchful of his
moods, anticipate and tend to nearly all of his needs. But now that
they had achieved their goals—appearing on television,
newspapers, and the cover of Time
magazine—she wanted to let go, be free
of Bill Masters.
“I probably never had
loved him,” Gini reflected years later. “We had in common a real devotion to a sexual
relationship and that was probably the strongest common denominator that
we had.”
Regardless of the
complexities of their lives, getting married to Hank might be just the answer her
family needed. Deep down, Gini felt remorse about the time she had
spent away from her children while they were growing up. “The amount
of time she spent in research laboratory was unbelievable,” Bill
later wrote. “She was either actively working or on call seven days
and three nights a week. In addition, she had two small children
at home for whom she was
responsible. To this day, I don’t know
how she managed.” She went through a series of housekeepers and
babysitters who stayed with Scott and Lisa. Now that her kids were
teenagers, she hoped to make
up for lost time. In this new life with
Hank, she could change her name once more, so no one would bother
her or her family.
Over time, however,
their secret affair only became more tangled. During a business trip to New York,
Hank invited Bill and Gini to his spacious Manhattan apartment where he lived
with his wife, Rosalind. During World War II, Rosalind worked as a riveter building
fighter planes on Long Island and supposedly inspired the song “Rosie the
Riveter.”
“Roz was a dear lady
and Bill and I were good friends with Hank,” Gini recalled. “We were in their
home quite a lot.”
Neither Bill nor Roz
seemed to sense a romance brewing between Gini and Hank. “She didn’t guess because she
used to confide in me a lot,” said Gini, who felt a tinge of
discomfort listening to Hank’s wife talk of their marriage, just as Libby
talked about Bill. “It was a weird position to be in. He was charmed
by her and she was a lovely, charming woman—I liked her very much.
But they were just so out of tune with one another. There was
nothing I could tell her. I couldn’t fix it. I couldn’t make her
into what he wanted, or vice versa.”
Years later, when
asked about Gini’s claims that she’d considered marrying Hank, Rosalind Walter gave a
blunt reply. “It makes sense,” Rosalind said. “She could
join the group—a lot of ladies admired my husband.” Upon
reflection, Rosalind expressed dismay about such claims, suggesting it
was no one’s business, but acknowledged she was none the wiser at
the time. “My husband was an extraordinarily intelligent and
interesting person,” she said. “He was interested in the work that
they did because of his business with IFF. He did pursue it and write
about it and read everything they wrote and visited them. Other than
that, I know nothing.”
Back in St. Louis,
most staffers had no idea of Gini’s affair with one of their wealthiest patrons. In a
clinic filled with secrets, this was the least known. Gini assumed Dr.
Robert Kolodny might figure out what was going on because he dealt
regularly with Hank on the clinic’s studies, yet she didn’t
actually confide in him until years later.
“Gini at an earlier
time told me that she seduced him,” Bob Kolodny recalled. “I think she sort of
hinted around at that. I find it very hard to believe [though] that he would
have divorced his wife.” While very different in style, Kolodny liked Hank
Walter, who spoke with the confidence of a
self-made man and fancied himself a bit of a Casanova. “He talked
with me rather boastfully over a few dinners and a bottle of wine
about his sexual escapades around the world,” said Kolodny. “He
certainly painted very clearly that he felt he could seduce just about
any woman around. And he recognized part of that was the
allure of his wealth.”
Bill remained
clueless until Hank took one of his visits to the St. Louis clinic. Usually on these
occasions, Masters and sometimes Kolodny would join Gini in taking their
New York patron out to a local restaurant. On this particular
night, though, Gini left her kids with the housekeeper so she could
entertain Hank alone. That night, she had a marvelous time with
him, laughing and conversing about their dreams of seeing the world together.
Nights like these reminded her of how much she
enjoyed being with him.
When she finally
arrived home, Gini discovered that Bill had telephoned
her all night, to no avail. “I got home
and my housekeeper
had a whole series of notes of the time
of that evening that he
called—all these messages from my
housekeeper, with the times
11:30, 12:45, 1:50—the number of times
that Bill had called,” recalled
Gini. “That night, I wasn’t home and he
knew that this man
was in town, so he [Bill] put two and
two together. He was not a
stupid man. So he read the handwriting
on the wall there, and
that’s when he got into gear.”
The next day at the
clinic, Bill confronted her about Hank. She had never seen her partner so upset
with her. His face wasn’t angry as much as worried; his whole demeanor appeared
thrown for a loss. “Bill was really afraid that I would marry him,” she said.
“He was startled.”
She made no attempt
at hiding the truth of her relationship with this other man. Whatever doubts
she harbored about marrying Hank, she didn’t show them. At this point, Bill
didn’t deserve any more information than she was willing to reveal. She didn’t want
to be manipulated or talked out of doing the right thing for herself and her
children. For years, he’d known of her intent to marry again. Bill’s own
actions seemed to assume she would never act upon her personal wishes as long
as their work remained compelling, as long as their duplicitous affair remained
satisfying and concealed, as long as Libby stayed home with the kids, and as
long as the income and renown continued from their Masters and Johnson name.
“If you leave, the
work will be destroyed!” insisted Bill. He
looked like a man who was about to lose
everything.
For the first time in
his life, Bill wasn’t sure what Gini might
do. He knew Hank was a formidable
contender, a man quite capable
of providing anything she wanted or
needed.
Perhaps Bill felt
jealous, suddenly realizing that the “perfect woman” he had
trained and elevated was about to leave
him. He didn’t plan to stand
around and watch their partnership fall
apart. Convinced this threat
was real, Bill resolved to do something
about it.
