Esme of Paris

During the early 1940s, Esme Davis Matz, launched a fragrance line called Esme of Paris in New York. 

Born on January 18, 1906 as Esmeralda Consuelo Maria del Delgado Holland to Spanish, Gypsy and Irish parentage in Wheeling, West Virginia. 

The father of Esmé Davis was a Canadian banker of good Irish Catholic family - they had some property but were rather decayed. He served in India with the Irish Guards and later married in London the grand opera singer, Sofia Oswaldo, who called herself Marie de L'Isle [Maria de Lisle], by whom he had a son and a daughter.

Esme said that her grandmother had told her that she was born inconveniently "feet first" in a breached birth during one of the wildest storms and coldest winters ever known in that region. Her mother was visiting her grandmother who was assembling her company for the southern tour of the Sells-Floto circus, Wheeling in those days was a starting point for acts headed south for the winter circus dates. Her father was in Canada, and her mother had intended joining him for the birth of Esme, but she was born three weeks premature, the result of an accident her mother experienced while driving with her grandmother, in which she broke her wrist. The shock precipitated the birth and caused complications which nearly cost her mother her life.

Esme's grandmother, already a famous flamenco dancer known throughout Spain as “La Maravilla” (the Marvel), Lola "Lolita" Bazil de Delgado, and was described as a tiny framed, slender, Cuban cigar-smoking, gambling, snake-charming, spell-setting, full-blooded Andalusian gypsy with a dark complexion and jet black hair. She married the handsome abogado (lawyer) Guillermo Oswaldo and together they had fourteen children, with Esme's mother being the seventh born. Esme mentioned that her grandfather's family had been owners for three or four generations of a fleet of small freighters that piled in and out the port of Cadiz with cargoes of fruit. Her grandfather had died at a rather young age.

Esme claimed that her grandmothers "diminutive green satin slippers are still preserved in a glass case in the Mesón del Sevillano, also called Posada de la Sangre, in the Plaza de Zocodover. The inn was an ancient hangout of bullfighters and their cuadrillas in the Albaïcin gipsy quarter of Seville, where the autographed dancing slippers of many great dancers of Spain are reverently kept, together with the glowering black heads of famous bulls." 

Esme immortalized her grandmother in the fictionalized biography, Lola, La Maravilla" Seed of the Serpent, published in 1947. Seed of the Serpent tells the life story of Lola Bazil , an Andalusian gypsy beauty, who won renown as a dancer and snake charmer. The time and scene are late nineteenth century Europe.

As a child Esmé Davis toured Europe with her soprano singer mother and grandmother. Her grandmother had an exotic circus or music hall act known as "A Night in India," which featured snakes, exotic animals, and an orchestra composed of Indian musicians wearing vividly colored costumes and playing specially written music on native instruments, with heart pounding drum effects. The Night in India act went on the seasonable tour with the Sells-Floto Circus. No matter how much money grandmother's Night in India act or her mother's glorious voice had made, the family was always plagued with financial troubles.

In 1911, when the family was broke in Russia, Esme was sent to stay at an old friend of her mother's Princess Soltikoff, who had a magnificent house in the outskirts of Moscow and one on the Nevsky Prospekt in Petrograd. Esme was apprenticed at the age of eight to the Ograinsky (Okrainsky) Wonder Children and two years later was a child wonder on the flying trapeze. Esme was to receive a small salary for her work in the act for a period of three years, after which the contract would need to be renewed. 

Esme had three years of study in the Nelidova ballet school in Moscow before she became a wonder star. Her extensive ballet training proved a lifesaver when at the age of eleven she fell at the Olympia, smashing her left arm and shoulder and shattering her legs. Eighteen months later, she went back to ballet becase the circus seemed to be forever out of her life. 

At the tender age of fifteen, she organized and presented her own ballet troupe in Buenos Aires. But when she got back to London, her Spanish mother and grandmother were so furious that they married her off to a handsome grenadier 26 year old Guardsman named Captain Leslie Strudwick. Strudwick, with the help of his aunt, the dowager Lady Mildred, sent her to a fashionable girl's school in order to learn proper deportment and court protocol. Lady Mildred referred her to the Court dressmakers, who, under Royal Command, had the distinction of making the court gowns in whatever colors the Queen decreed for that season. But Esme, ever the little rebel, decided to go against the grain and went to a Frenchwoman called Maghele, who created for her a gown of light sapphire blue. 

Lady Mildred eventually got Esme presented at one of the Court Balls in Buckingham Palace. A scandal arose when an elderly man, an attache of the Belgian legation, took it upon himself to kiss her arm just above her elbow at the top of her long white kid leather gloves. It was just at that very moment that Lady Mildred caught the improper scene and gave her a scathing rebuke, then angrily informed Strudwick about the impropriety that had just happened. Facing his frightened wife whose face was reddened and choking back sobs, he hurled his own fiery complaints towards Esme. He raved on and on about her scandalous behavior and what his aunt had said and thought, and while every two minutes their conversation was interrupted by some man who wanted to be introduced and have a dance with her once the ball officially opened. Exasperated, Esme lead her husband into a quiet corridor and told him she was sick and tired of being badgered and insulted since she had come to the ball only to please him. When she got that off her chest, she turned and left in a huff. The next morning she packed her bags and left for Paris. Esme lamented later, "but he never could make a lady out of me. It took the heart out of both of us."

After ten years in ballet, she combined her old circus training and her dancing. Billed as "Esme of Paris" she became a star of music halls and circuses in world capitals. She opened a night club in Buenos Aires, managed a troupe of Cossacks on a South American tour, helped train leopards and other big cats, helped wrangle her grandmother's snakes and maneuvered her mother out of her many jams.

But Paris was her headquarters. It was during the various tours around the world that Esme picked up enough foreign words and phrases to become fluent in seven languages. It was in Paris she started her writing career. For 30 months she wrote for the women's magazine Paris Soir. Her first book, printed in French, was called "High Heels."

In 1938, she divorced from her first husband and married Robert Matz, Jr, a Ringling Brothers rigger, in Appleton, Wisconsin with her dog playing the part of the best man.

Esme Davis lead an extraordinary life. In 1944, she released her autobiography, Esme of Paris. When she was younger, she toured around the world with her famous mother and grandmother in ballets, theatre and circuses. Esme performed as a featured ballet dancer touring alongside notables such as Anna Pavlova and Diaghilev in France, South America, Africa, Asia and Russia. It was in Russia when she met two women who would change her life.

 Among Esme's old Russian acquaintances in Paris had been the Ourasoff princesses and Madame Loury. While in Moscow with her mother and Princess Ourasoff, they visited the perfume shop of Manioulieff. Esme claimed that Manioulieff had been one of the greatest perfumers the 19th century had known in Europe. From being and obscure Georgian chemist, he had risen to fame in the whole of the world. As an example, his fame brought him the opportunity to custom blend a perfume he called "Jersey Lily" for the sublime actress Lily Langtry. Esme also claimed that although few of Manioulieff's scents had ever been named, his most famous was called "Imperial Violettes," said to have been first made for the Czarina and later introduced to England by Princess Soltikoff. When forced to flee from the revolution, he had left thousands of rubles stuffed in the upholstery of his chairs and cushions in his ultra chic little shop in Moscow.

Manioulieff had a tiny perfume shop with cases and gothic windows filled with rare bottles crafted of precious jade and sparkling crystal. Esme said that the majority of Manioulieff's fragrant triumphs were bottled in heavy crystal flacons, with tiny coronets, or just the initials of their distinguished users. Esme said that that perfumes that floated through the shop haunted her for days and started her on the love for good perfumes, of which her mother was a great critic. Thinking back on her interest in perfumes, Esme confided "that remains from memories of my beautiful mother's scent of violets. And my father's sentimental liking for it."

Madame Loury and Princess Ourasoff between them gained a fairly substantial living from their work and made themselves responsible for Manioulieff's widow, Ludmilla. She was the actual owner of the formulas but utterly incapable of utilizing the, commercially with the result that in moments of financial stress she would sell a priceless formula to any laboratory which would pay for it. They were making quite a good thing out of the Manioulieff perfume formulas, selling some of the original ones to their former users, now in Paris. madame Loury distilled many of the oils from her own flower and herb gardens near St Germaine, buying the fixatives and other rare ingredients. 

Neither of the partners in the business had any idea of putting the perfumes on the market in a commercial way, but when Esme met them she began studying their methods and formula, spending hours watching madame Loury blend her fragrances. Esme mentally registered an intention to take it up seriously on a commercial basis at some future date. She brought a collection of essences and formulas back to her home in Paris, which she kept more or less as a curiosity, for the heavy animal aromas predominant in oriental perfumes had never appealed to her although she thought them interesting studies. 

Now after the summer of 1939, Esme was quite ill for some weeks and had to undergo an operation for complications resulting from her last fall. While recuperating in New York, she began thinking again of perfumes and the possibility of putting in practice the possibility of selling perfumes in America. As luck would have it, she received a letter from her Russian friends in Paris, saying they were leaving for Switzerland and had an opportunity to send her the formulas through friends coming to New York. There was, Madame Loury wrote, a marvelous opportunity to make money in America now that the European perfumes were rapidly becoming a thing of the past. 

The Princess, Madame Loury and Esme then entered into a partnership. Esme promptly took advice on the subject of such a venture from perfume experts and essential oil houses and found the information of Monsieur de la Vigne of Maison Roure-Dupont et Cie of France, of the greatest assistance in deciding the first steps necessary to the formation of her project.  Esme wanted to study perfumes, their history and formulas. She eventually learned a great deal about them and was deeply interested in knowing more about oriental essentials and fixatives.  

She went with some friends of Gino Abouin's who were research chemists for one of the big Paris laboratories, to the house of the Ferhendi [Ferhandi?] Brothers on the rue de Nalika Farela- one of the greatest of all oriental perfume exporters. 

Esme had been fascinated, on her first day of touring in Egypt, when passing by a doorway of a perfumer near the Mohammed Ali Theatre in Alexandria, by the odor of a fragrance she could not place but whose elusive quality haunted her. Upon entering the shop and trying flacons of all descriptions without finding the one that had first intrigued her, she bought some attar of roses for her mother and an ambre chypre perfume, but they were not what she wanted. 

She searched and sniffed, until the day at Ferhendi's when suddenly, one of the chemists was explaining a long and complicated combination of oils to Abouin's friends, and Esme caught a whiff some the scent she was looking for. It turned out to be nothing more nor less than the essence of the humble tonka bean, but its fragrance expressed for her the mysterious soul of the East. 

Esme said that during her travels for essences to use in her perfumes, one of the most sought after and expensive fixatives was civet. She wanted to bring a civet cat back to America but she was refused.

Esme met with the chemists and began studying their methods and formulas, spending hours watching Madame Loury blend her fragrances. According to Esme, Loury had a rare gift for suiting the values of perfume to color and mood, and her library of antique recipes for all sorts of perfume blends was fascinating.

Through Monsieur de la Vigne's practical guidance and kind interest, Esme was able to obtain a reserve of necessary oils and fixatives required for the formulas when they arrived. Chemists and expert blenders went through long tests and research, growing more enthusiastic daily after translating some of the old formulas with solidified ingredients into the more modern liquid preparations. With these they chose some of the more exquisite fragrances then timidly launched then on the New York market. 

One of the first fragrances to be released was "Green Eyes," which debuted in 1940. It was a light, heady favorite contained in a bottle that has a hand for a stopper. The perfume was undoubtedly named after herself, who was said to have had vivid green eyes.

Their success was astonishing, especially since at that time, 1940, French scents were still procurable, many of them being manufactured in America. Of course Esme had made the usual mistake of having no idea how to start a business, plunging into too many perfumes and too many expensive packages at the same time - but she learned, and a year later, she was on her way toward making a go of a delightful and absorbing business. 

She never attempted handling anything but the artistic side of the affair, such as the creating of titles, packaging for the perfumes, advertising, promotion, and all the mise en scene indispensable to presenting them. Perhaps some of her happiest perfume titles had been thought up while driving long hours for the American Women's Voluntary Services' Motor Transport Corps - the group of volunteer women who gave their rime and cars to the services of the Armed Forces.

The financial details of the perfume project were left entirely in the hands of her husband, whose business sense developed with surprising rapidity and whose personality had done much to build their clientele. As her little venture grew, she gradually built an office in the penthouse she found on a hotel rooftop, then a showroom, and then she rented a plant and warehouse downtown, with salesman and employees. 

It was at this time she also bought five dogs - three Bostons and two toy poodles to accompany five turtles, one canary and seven goldfish to join her and her husband at their home at 9 East 62nd Street, in New York City.

Following her various career choices, Esme dabbled in designing costume jewelry in the late 1950s. Already widowed, in her later years, Esme was in serious financial straits, as well as ailing health.

Esme died at the age of 52 from a heart attack on April 20, 1960 at her New York apartment. She had called for help at 6:45am from her four-room penthouse atop 135 Central Park West, at 73rd Street. "I'm dying - get help! she gasped over the phone to her friend, Fern Danell. Miss Danell contacted the West 68th Street police, but when the ambulance arrived, they found her dead. Her apartment was cluttered with scrapbooks, mementos, clippings and photos. Also in the home were two toy poodles, which refused to leave Esme. Police resorted to calling the ASPCA for assistance in removing them. 

 Esme suggested that when you are looking to select a more lasting perfume: Apply a drop of perfume on the back of your hand. Let it rest there while you continue shopping, during this time lapse, it  is undergoing chemical changes on your skin. From time to time, sniff your hand to see if your perfume is still with you and if you still like having it around. Esme also suggests to prevent evaporation and spoilage, decant your precious perfume from its crystal bottle into another one that you can store safely away from heat and light. She said to fill the fancy bottle with a phony amber colored liquid to simulate perfume and keep that bottle displayed on your vanity table.

The perfumes of Esme:

• 1940 - A May Morning (smells like new mown hay)
• 1940 - Green Eyes
• 1940 - Ballet
• 1941 - Hubava
• 1941 - Sea Lady
• 1941 - Secret Garden
• 1941 - The Lady Wore Black
• 1941 - Totem Pole 
• 1942 - Sophisticated Lady
• 1943 - On Fifth Avenue
• 1944 - Indian Summer
• 1944 - In The Forest
• 1953 - High Heels