Crazy Salad and Scribble Scribble (12 page)

Once the basic formula for its feminine-hygiene spray was settled on (almost all the spray formulas contained hexachlorophene as the active deodorizing ingredient, perfume, an emollient, and a propellant), Alberto-Culver’s research department, under Dr. Cella, went to work testing the safety of the product. Because the spray was classified by the Food and Drug Administration as a cosmetic, very little testing was actually required: an eye-irritation test, an oral-toxicity test, and a skin-patch test would have been adequate. To its credit, Alberto-Culver went further; as it happens, though, by the standards set by its own chief scientist, it did not go nearly far enough.
In an article on deodorants published last year in
American Perfumer & Cosmetics
, Cella itemized the testing he thought was necessary for the sprays, as follows: “Animal skin irritation and sensitization studies, animal vulvar irritation studies, animal vaginal instillation studies using the aerosol concentrates, human repeated insult patch tests on intact and abraded skin, subacute and chronic human-use tests, particle size analysis of the spray, and animal inhalation studies.” Cella wrote that efficacy tests would also be desirable, but he added, in a sentence that is a masterpiece of scientific writing: “Efficacy testing in this category presents problems of delicacy which do not encumber the underarm counterparts.” Prior to its introduction of FDS in late 1966, Alberto-Culver conducted only three of these tests. One proved that FDS did no injury to the labia and vaginas of twenty rats over a three-day period. A second was a skin-patch test on sixty-seven persons. The third was a use test: thirty-one women were given the product to use at home over a five-week period and showed no irritation.

In the meantime, the market-research and advertising departments of Alberto-Culver were at work developing packaging, fragrance, and a name for the spray. “The first piece of research we did in 1966,” said Henry Wittemann, vice-president in charge of advertising services, “was a concept test on the product. If you did it today, there would be different results because today the category exists. The first test we commissioned said that the concept was not appealing, and based on that the research agency recommended that we drop the project. But if you looked at the research carefully, there was a suggestion that women weren’t
telling the interviewers what they really thought. The question came up as to whether women don’t really want to talk about this subject to anyone. We had done a questionnaire about deodorants with a concept statement saying that a leading manufacturer of toiletries was planning to come out with a deodorant for the vaginal area. Do you think you need it? Would you use it? When? With a test like this, you’re looking for over seventy percent to express interest. If you don’t get that, chances are you don’t have a product that’s appealing to the market. So we decided to go to a research company that had done work in this area, a company that had done questionnaires for feminine-hygiene manufacturers like Kimberly-Clark and Johnson & Johnson. These companies know how to structure questionnaires that deal with that subject to elicit a true response. So we did that, went out with a concept statement and samples, and the interest was over seventy-eight percent. We knew we had a viable concept.” Wittemann claims that at no time during this period was the question of sexual attitudes explicitly explored; the product, he claims, was conceived of as a general deodorant, not a sexual enhancer. (Sexually, the sprays are something of a bust: they cannot be used right before intercourse because they tend to cause skin irritation under those circumstances; furthermore, at least one of the sprays causes numbness of the tongue.)

“We considered names like Caresse and Care,” Wittemann continued, “all the names that might be in good taste. But every name we thought fit the product belonged to another product. We were using the code name ‘FD Number One,’ for feminine deodorant Number One. When we were blocked, we just went to the letters
‘FSD.’ Then it turned out we had to choose ‘FDs’ because even the letters ‘FSD’ were taken.” One criticism of FDS in recent years has been that its name is so close to F.D.A., a coincidence that might seem to imply government approval. Did that issue ever come up? “Never,” Wittemann replied. “The only thing that did come up was an objection by one of our executives, who thought the name sounded too much like FDR.”

“I had no idea it would be so controversial,” says Leonard Lavin today. “As we developed the product and the research proved to us that there was a need for this product—both from the clinical and consumer viewpoint—we were convinced of what we had. We realized that going to the marketplace with a feminine-hygiene deodorant was not the easiest thing in the world. This was an area, after all, where other products advertised with a certain amount of reluctance. Kotex and Tampax, for example. We leaned over backwards in delicacy, elusiveness, even in design of the package: it was as soft and delicate as possible. If you looked at the first print ads, you would really have to look to find out what the product really did.”

FDS was introduced on December 1, 1966. It came in a pale blue and white can, with a lacy white pattern surrounding the label. The drugstore display unit contained a sign, duplicating the first magazine advertisements, that read, “This new product will become as essential to you as your toothbrush.” In smaller print: “FDS. The name is FDS. Feminine Hygiene Deodorant Spray. It is new. A most personal sort of deodorant. An external deodorant. Unique in all the world. Essential on special days. Welcome protection against odor—every single day. FDS. For your total freshness.”

With the exception of Bidex, the Swiss product Warner-Lambert still had in test market in two cities, FDS had the feminine-hygiene-spray field to itself for almost a full year. The drug trade, which is notoriously unadventurous, did not believe there was any chance for the product to succeed. Leonard Lavin, who thrives on the notion of his relatively small company as a little guy plugging away in an industry of giants, believed implicitly in FDS, and he spent hundreds of thousands of dollars animating his belief, advertising in print media, publishing pamphlets for drugstore displays, creating a demand for the product by making women understand how much they needed it. “I don’t call it creating guilt,” said Lavin. “That’s your word. I think of what we did as raising consciousness. That’s a less loaded word.” There were almost daily battles to be fought: drugstore owners would not stock the item; magazines like
Life
,
McCall’s
, and
Seventeen
were reluctant at first to accept ads for it; television had a ban on advertising for all such products. But by late 1967, Alberto-Culver had sold almost $4 million worth of sprays, and Warner-Lambert, a company that could read sales charts as well as any, decided to move ahead. The name Bidex was changed to Pristeen and the product went into a wide test-market pattern prior to national introduction in 1968. “The
name Bidex was already taken under trademark,” said Guido Battista, associate director in charge of research and development on toiletries and cosmetics at Warner-Lambert. “But I would have objected to it because of the possibility of misusing the product. It might have seemed to have been intended for internal use. Interestingly enough, some of the information that got to the lay people was that these were vaginal sprays, which they’re not.”

“Our whole approach,” said Warner-Lambert’s Steve Bray, “was, women have a vaginal-odor problem and here is a product that will solve the problem. They do, you know. And panty hose contribute to it. Women’s liberation says that advertising is creating a need that isn’t there. They say it’s a nice, natural smell. That’s their right. But I would go back and ask them, do women have a vaginal-odor problem? I keep going back to the problem. The problem is there.”

Exactly how much of a problem American women were aware of before the sprays were introduced is not clear; what is clear is that feminine-hygiene-spray manufacturers cannot be accused of inventing it. In 1968, a market-research firm hired to investigate consumer reaction to the product gathered a group of housewives for a tape-recorded session that is notable for its embarrassment and coyness about the vaginal area. Said one woman: “I think the new deodorant sprays are sensational. Not that I have a problem down
there
, but sometimes I think I might.” Said another: “I prefer sprays to the foams or powders.… The sprays eliminate having to touch yourself.”

Says Natalie Shainess, a New York psychoanalyst: “Our society has tended since medieval times, when the
odor of the great unwashed was everywhere, to work at eliminating unpleasant aspects of smell. The sense of smell is tied up with paranoia—one of the classic paranoid symptoms is the feeling, ‘I smell bad. That’s why no one likes me.’ The sense of being malodorous is connected with more serious disturbances. These products further paranoid feelings in women and in men about women—and the way they’re advertised presents a horrendous image, of women being inherently smelly creatures. It undermines the sense of self and ego even as it’s supposed to do something about it.”

By 1969, the market for the sprays had grown to $19.3 million and manufacturers were tumbling in. The boom in sales came largely because Alberto-Culver had succeeded in getting the National Association of Broadcasters to change its code and permit the sprays to be advertised on television. (The stations themselves exerted pressure, of course.) The ads were required to be totally bland and unspecific—the word “vagina” is not allowed on the air—and they were. A woman walked down the beach with her child. Or lit the candles for dinner. Or talked, haltingly, about this somewhat mysterious product, she, uh, really liked a lot. Dorothy Provine emerged from what she calls semi-retirement to endorse Feminique, and returned to semi-retirement $100,000 richer. The advertising budgets backing the product mushroomed: in 1970, FDS, which sold somewhere around $13–14 million worth of the $32 million spray market, spent $3.5 million advertising it.

What was printed in magazine and newspaper ads for the sprays was a good deal more blunt than what was on television. Demure, for instance, offered this: “You don’t sleep with Teddy Bears any more.” And “Your Teddy
Bear loved you no matter what.” Feminique’s early print ad read: “Now that ‘The Pill’ has freed you from worry ‘The Spray’ will help make all that freedom worthwhile.” FDS, in a more subtle ad, nonetheless promised similar sexual rewards: “Being close was never nicer … now is the Age of FDS.” Manufacturers who were unwilling to allude to sexuality stressed the importance of including the product as part of the normal deodorant regimen. Said Pristeen, in an ad uncannily similar to an earlier FDS ad: “Unfortunately, the trickiest deodorant problem a girl has
isn’t
under her pretty little arms.” Or this, from FDS: “Having a female body doesn’t make you feminine. It’s the extra things you do—like FDS.” And yet another from FDS, this one utilizing the tried-and-true approach to upward mobility: “Could you be the last woman to be using just one deodorant?” Pristeen sought out famous women to write articles about women, with Pristeen advertisements tacked onto the end: Suzy Knickerbocker, Angie Dickinson, Mary Quant, and Judith Crist were among them. (For this, Mrs. Crist, along with Dorothy Provine, was chosen Sweet Pea of the Year by
Esquire
’s 1971 Dubious Achievement Awards.)

“The reason I did that ad had absolutely nothing to do with Pristeen,” said Judith Crist, the film critic. “It was extremely naïve of me and it was two years ago and I’m ashamed to admit I’m that naïve. They were doing a two-page spread that would have eight pictures of me taken by Richard Avedon, with a two-page headline saying ‘Today’s Woman.’ Then I had approximately eight hundred words to write what I wanted to say about women. I decided to write about women in communications. In the final column, there was a cutoff line and
about four inches of space, and then it said something like, ‘The modern woman who chooses to be immaculate will use Pristeen, a feminine-hygiene deodorant.’ It was going to run in eight women’s magazines in one month. It boggled the mind. You were reaching a hundred and twenty-five million people, an audience you couldn’t reach even if you were a movie for television. Then there were the photographs with Avedon and the negatives were mine if I wanted them—which was the kind of sitting you could never otherwise afford. And then came a huge fee in addition, and I saw my son getting an extra inning in camp, redoing the living room.” The fee for the ad was $5,000.

“What did bother me,” Mrs. Crist went on, “was the idea of it being a vaginal deodorant. So I consulted some friends. They said, ‘Boy are you ever being sexist. If it were Bond Bread, you’d do it. College presidents do commercials for the right Scotch. Why because it is a feminine-hygiene spray—what difference is a mouthwash from a vaginal wash? This is small, unenlightened thinking if we’re going to get silly about vaginas.’ But the essential thing was,
I
didn’t say, in the ad, ‘If you want to be a modern woman, use Pristeen.’ What I was saying had nothing to do with Pristeen. Well, it was the dumbest decision I’ve ever made. It was as if I had waltzed out like Dorothy Provine and said, ‘Have you used this marvelous vaginal spray?’ Which I hadn’t. I thought I would get responses about what I had said about women in the media—to hell with the money, the Avedon pictures,
what I said
. Instead, I got tied up with the spray. There were so many gags I could have thrown up. The students in one of my witty classes gave me an enormous box with a can of Pristeen at the bottom. The
Esquire
thing, which was quite embarrassing. Then Rex Reed, feeling betrayed because of my review of
Myra Breckinridge
, retaliated with thorough justification and said, ‘Now when she walks down the aisle, people will think, Does She Or Doesn’t She.’ Which obliged me to retaliate. I got right down to those lower depths, which was the worst part.