The Well-Groomed Panther

After wine and pate, no product is more typically French than perfume. The French perfume industry sells $30 million worth of scent at home each year and, despite the rise of a huge cosmetics industry in the U.S., exports another $30 million worth. One reason for this success is the skillful art with which French perfume is marketed; it is subtly associated with haute couture, elegance and refinement.

France's top perfume makers--Chanel, Guerlain, Lanvin, Caron and Dior --have long skillfully employed this art to keep themselves fragrantly prosperous, but it has also been used with remarkable success by a relative newcomer to the ranks of the leaders. The newcomer is the house of Marcel Rochas, where le president is Mme. Helene Rochas, who took over the company when her husband died in 1955. Since then she has increased Rochas's busi ness tenfold, turning it into one of the six largest perfume makers in France; its turnover last year was $6,000,000.

Mme. Rochas looks and lives as a perfume queen should. Now 43, she has wide cornflower-blue eyes, an engaging smile, a mannequin's figure, a fragile air --and the business reputation of a panther. Her Paris apartment glitters like an open jewel box. Eggs made of jade and amethyst nest on a coffee table, and an 18th century chandelier supports candles set in gold. One night, Premier Georges Pompidou and Franchise Sagan may come to dinner, the next Marlene Dietrich and Gian Carlo Menotti.

Playing Pygmalion. Helene Rochas's mother was one of France's first women dentists. Her father, a World War I hero who was fond of gambling, left his family little when he died. Helene took ballet lessons, became at seven the youngest of "The Opera Rats," and hoped for a career on the stage. At 18, she met Marcel Rochas--in the Metro.

Already an established couturier, Rochas was twice her age, had been married and divorced twice. But he liked the shape of her head, he said. He signed her on for his fashion house, married her a few months later. Rochas did not care how Helene cooked or sewed--he had a staff of eight to do that--but he did care how she looked.

He molded her personality, selected her clothes and hair styles (long to the shoulders), taught her poise and grooming. "I suppose," says Mme. Rochas today, "he played Pygmalion with me." Helene Rochas disregarded only one of his whims: she cut her hair short when he died. Since Rochas's death and her remarriage to Theater Producer Andre

Bernheim, Helene's life is only slightly less extravagant.

Moss & Tibetan Musk. She makes it a point always to be at her desk by 9 a.m., works a ten-hour day five days a week, and spends her weekends with her husband and 19-year-old daughter Sophie at their country house, 40 miles south of Paris. Once a 13th century priory, the house is furnished in Louis XVI style. "It's rather rustic," says Mme. Rochas. Things are less rustic back home in Paris, where the dominant colors are blue and red. "In blue I find repose," explains Mme. Rochas, "whereas the violence of red refreshes my enthusiasm."

Her wardrobe is equally spectacular.

She designs her own sportswear (though she plays no sport but gin rummy) but lets Guy Laroche run up her dresses. She owns a dozen fur coats, a Goya, a Renoir, a Fiat and a Rolls-Royce. She applies her perfume to her clothes, rather than to her skin. Her favorite scent is a mixture of geraniol, rhodinol, cedryl, acetate, jasmine, geranium, santal, patchouli, oak moss and Tibetan musk. It is called "Madame Rochas."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.