So this is what I can gather — in 2005, independent perfumer Yosh Han created a fragrance called ‘The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things’ as an homage to the allegedly autobiographical collection of stories of the same name by writer JT Leroy: “Then there’s JT LeRoy, the 24-year-old reclusive cult figure whom Han has yet to meet in person, who conscripted her via a series of e-mail conversations to design a fragrance for him based on his book ‘The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things,’ an autobiographical account of his troubled youth.”
Just around that time, the whole JT Leroy hoax began to fall apart, and it was revealed in 2006 that the supposed former child-prostitute/abuse-victim turned NY-hipster extraordinaire JT Leroy was actually a Brooklyn born, 40 year old woman named Laura Albert, with the entire sad, brutalized life story of Leroy created as merely a means of getting editors interested in publishing the books Ms. Albert wanted to write: “‘People were generous because they thought they were helping an H.I.V.-positive former drug addict, ex-prostitute, who used the hardships of his life to make art,’ said Ira Silverberg, JT Leroy’s former literary agent and an early champion.”
This caused somewhat of a scandalous ripple throughout the literary/arts world, since entire swathes of the coastal coolest had been eagerly taken in by, and even helped perpetuate, the Leroy hoax: “Writers like Dennis Cooper, Mary Gaitskill and Mary Karr were among those who offered support to Mr. Leroy’s literary career, as did several prominent editors at Manhattan publishing houses, and numerous film and pop music celebrities offered him emotional support, including Courtney Love, Tatum O’Neal, Billy Corgan, Shirley Manson and Carrie Fisher.”
Once championed as the next white-hot literary star grinding out gritty novels that would “prove to be among the most influential American books of the last 10 years,” the JT Leroy phenomenon quickly sputtered to an embarrassed stop after the wig and glasses came off and the mysterious, 20-something, slyly androgynous pose collided with the brick wall of one attention-starved, 40-something, straight white female.
***Note: Gawker has a rundown of the extremely unflattering demise of Laura Albert’s alter-ego (and the life it once afforded her): The Girl Who Was JT LeRoy, while the L.A. Weekly published a long, fascinating profile of Laura Albert in early 2008: The Lies and Follies of Laura Albert, aka JT Leroy. The profile isn’t fascinating because Albert is fascinating (she’s not), but because of how it reveals the hollow center at the heart of the art-world’s hype machine.
Yosh Han is said to have felt personally betrayed by the hoax and so withdrew her support from the ‘Heart is Deceitful’ fragrance. Apparently, when she yanked her support, she took the formula along with her (it’s rumored that ‘The Heart is Deceitful’ has been reformulated since Han’s exit and recent reviews use language like “cheap” and “vile”) and released it as Trompeur (trompeur means “misleading” in French) under her own brand name in 2007.
Fragrance notes for Trompeur are: bay rum, massoia, parvati sandalwood, sheer musk, vanilla and fig. The concoction is creamy, warm, slightly green, nutty and sweet. Ms. Han stated that she originally created ‘The Heart is Deceitful’ as an earthy scent with a vibe of overt sexuality (sexual violence and abuse were recurring themes in the writings of Leroy/Albert), but Trompeur comes across as more quiet and comforting than va-va-voom, and I’m all right with that.
I’m not an official fanboy of Yosh Han (I thought her Omniscient 0.96 was an atrocious mess), but I like the easy, casual piece she created for Lucky Scent’s Untitled series, and Trompeur has now won me over, as well. Maybe I just enjoy her approach to vanilla — the way she frames it in leaves, nuts and woods.
BTW: Independent (and very expensive) Berkeley perfumer Mandy Aftel was also suckered in by the whole JT Leroy fabrication — at the website Celebrity Fragrance Guide, under the section “Custom Scents Created Just for Them”, you’ll find this tidbit:
Laura Albert may be a complete literary fraud, but she certainly hooked up with some excellent perfumers.
FYI: There’s some bitter outcry on perfume forums about how Trompeur is the exact same fragrance as the former ‘The Heart is Deceitful’ but now costs twice as much, yet Han has built herself a reputation for utilizing excellent materials in her fragrances, and sometimes prices for limited-demand materials go way up from year to year. It’s a fact of life.
Below is the preview trailer for the film version of Albert/Leroy’s “The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things” — the New York Daily News calls it “an execrable movie” while the New York Times and the San Francisco Chronicle state that it’s “unwatchable”:
***Note: In 2007, Laura Albert was found guilty of fraud and ordered to pay $350,000.00 in legal fees in a jury trial that centered around whether a contract she signed with a movie production company was valid because she’d signed it as the fictional JT Leroy and not as herself.
