Danielle Steel's perfume: An inspiration

It takes a grand persona to have a perfume branded with your name, a level of celebrity bigger and shinier than most authors ever reach. But Danielle Steel is not most authors.

Chandler Burr, the New York Times perfume critic, has created a work of art in his review of the perfume Danielle by Danielle Steel. (After this excerpt, I've created a few knock-offs -- purely fictional, of course.)

Here's Burr:

Danielle Steel stepped from the late-model cherry-red Bentley, the spike heel of her Louboutins skipping over a pile of trash in the gutter and planting itself firmly on the Manhattan sidewalk.

Steel had sold 450 million books. She wore a stunning Oscar de la Renta top that cost lots and lots of money and a big, amazing, tasteless fur coat that cost even more money. Her perfectly tanned face, immaculately made up with Chanel makeup that reflected her Swarovski earrings that cost lots of money, was turned upward to the offices of her perfume licensee, Elizabeth Arden, the company that would be making Danielle by Danielle Steel, the Danielle Steel Perfume....

Danielle by Danielle Steel was like the pile of trash that Danielle Steel stepped over on her way to the creative meeting. For the first four seconds it smelled sort of vaguely like a kind of flower that you get in a gallon of floral-scented laundry detergent, and then for five seconds it reminded you of Edvard Munch’s “The Scream.” Then it evaporated, like the prose in a novel by Danielle Steel evaporated from your memory the moment you read it.

The Sun Also Scents by Ernest Hemingway

Downstairs he came out through the first-floor dining room into the street. A waiter went for a taxi. It was hot and bright. Up the street was a little square with trees and grass and that was the scent he wanted. That and smoke and rioja alta. A taxi came up the street, the waiter hanging out at the side. He tipped him and told the driver where to drive. The driver started up the street. It was very hot and bright, and the houses looked sharply white. He turned out onto the Gran Via. The scent would be quick and bright. The bottle would be short and hard and black.

  Marriage and Lovers/Mothers... after the jump

Marriage by Jane Austen

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of good fortune must be in want of a wife.

However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighborhood, this truth to be so fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered as the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters.

"Ours have none of them much to recommend them," Mr. Bennet said.

"Mr. Bennet how can you abuse your own children in such a way?" his wife replied, vexed. "It is very likely Mr. Bingley may fall in love with one of them. We need only outfit them with the proper perfume."

Lovers/Mothers by DH Lawrence

On Sunday morning she looked very beautiful in a dress of foulard, silky and sweeping, and blue as a jay-bird's feather, and in a large cream hat covered with any roses, mostly crimson. Nobody could admire her enough. His betrothed was so beautiful it hurt. 

Yet she could understand nothing but love-making and chatter. He was accustomed to having all his thoughts sifted through his mother's mind; so, when he wanted companionship, and was asked in reply to be the billing and twittering lover, he hated his betrothed.

Lovers/Mothers: for the man who will settle for nothing less than supreme beauty paired with singular, intelligent devotion.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Hemingway photo credit: Courtesy the Nobel Foundation