Ashtrays, Matchbooks and 90-Year-Old Gossip Rags: Welcome to the World of El Morocco Perfumery

When Lillian Shalom stood outside 154 East 54th Street for the first time, she saw ghosts. It was this address that Humphrey Bogart was banned from for life after a drunken scuffle to defend the honor of two giant stuffed pandas he’d brought in as his dates. It's where Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz were photographed looking devastated over their breakup — and again weeks later, having reconciled and celebrating their wedding. This was the site of the El Morocco, the café society club famous for its zebra-print banquettes.

But on the sidewalk, not a trace was left. To everyone else, it was yet another Midtown loading bay. “It was her Midnight in Paris moment,” Shalom’s husband, Isaac Lekach, says.

Shalom and Lekach’s obsession with El Morocco began during lockdown. The couple were binge-watching decades-old noir films when Shalom, a jewelry designer, started researching the stars. “I would do deep dives into Orson Welles, Rita Hayworth, whoever we'd just watched,” she says. “And I kept seeing that these celebrities all hung out somewhere with a zebra print behind them.” It was the El Morocco, the Manhattan nightclub that ran from 1931 to 1970 and functioned, for a few decades, as the center of the celebrity universe.

Shalom found the club’s matchbooks on eBay, which led to ashtrays, menus, and swizzle sticks. She combed newspapers.com and got hold of copies of Life magazine from the 40s to learn more about what it might have been like to be inside the iconic club. When the couple’s first child was born, Lekach gifted Shalom a silk handkerchief — one of the very same that the club once gave its VIPs. Today, their collection spans vinyl records, a case of custom glassware, a waiter's towel, and more. “I was like an Egyptologist,” Shalom says of her excavation of the club’s past. “A Moroccotologist.”

The scent of the past

Now the pair are channeling their deep knowledge of the El Morocco nightclub into a perfume brand, El Morocco Perfumery. They have the skills: Lekach was raised by a perfumer father, and he has designed fragrances for Paris Hilton, Guess Jeans, Katy Perry and Selena Gomez. In 2019, he and Shalom set up Flower Shop Perfumes, which also works with celebrities and brands to create scents for them. But this would be the first time they had tried to capture the mood of something that no longer existed. And although the couple had become historians of the El Morocco nightclub, they had never actually stepped foot inside. How could they begin to imagine what it smelled like?

Rather than giving one fragrance the job of capturing the club’s entire essence, the couple worked with a range of perfumers on a collection of five, each built around a vignette they'd uncovered in their research. Highball for Lucius B., for example, is named after Lucius Beebe, the columnist and eccentric who bore witness from El Morocco's blue striped sofas and inhaled the “chromium mist,” as he called it, of cigarette smoke and champagne that hung over the room. The scents have been created in the chypre style, a dry, mossy genre of perfumery that dates to the club's 1930s heyday and has largely fallen from fashion.

Good taste

The instinct to look to the past rather than sideways, at what the crowd is doing today, is how Shalom and Lekach operate. Ask them about taste, the internet's favorite topic, and they become almost allergic. “We don't look at what's currently trending. We go and do the opposite,” says Shalom, who adds that she wore being the weird kid “as a badge of honor” growing up. Lekach has little patience for online tastemakers telling people what to want. “If somebody tells me this is cool, I'm actively going away from it,” he says. “That's really what drew us to these old films and to El Morocco. This is undeniably glamorous, and it's not something that currently exists.”

The outcome can be read as an expression of the knowledge the pair have accumulated of what came before them. El Morocco Perfumery's five scents — 154 (the club's address), Gala, Highball for Lucius B., Lulu's Back In Town and Two Cigarettes In The Dark — launched this year as a $135 discovery set, housed in a polished metal case modeled on an Edwardian cigarette case Shalom had spotted in an ad while combing the Vogue archives. Inside is a prong that pops up when opened, presenting the the vials as for the taking, like a cigarette. It's a piece of hardware designed to be kept: once the El Morocco vials run dry, samples from other brands can slot in. “The idea of creating something now that you can save for decades, reuse, and hopefully pass down to your children — that's very important to us,” says Shalom. Full sizes will follow later this year in bottles shaped like the match strikers that once sat on the club's tables.

Eternal ephemera

The philosophy is fitting, given the brand could not exist had El Morocco's ephemera been thrown away. During our video interview, the pair gesture around the room at artefacts they've collected from the club. At one point, Lekach holds up a collection of printed newsletters in protective sleeves, are held up for us to see at one point. Pristine finds, like Shalom’s silk handkerchief, are framed to prevent any further wear.

By now, the antique resellers Shalom and Lekach buy from recognize their names, and following the launch of El Morocco Perfumery, prices have risen accordingly. “Something they'd have listed at $500 became $700,” says Lekach. “Now it's $1,500.”

Perhaps El Morocco itself anticipated all of this. Owner John Perona purposely put zebra print and the El Morocco logo on everything, precisely so patrons would leave the matchbooks on their lunch tables as a way of letting people know that yes, they got in. Perona also published No News, an in-house gossip sheet, so patrons could read about themselves as they sat at the very tables where they were being written about. Shalom and Lekach have revived it as a free print magazine, with contributors telling stories of the club and its era.

The club itself isn't coming back, and for now the address will remain a parking garage, ghosts and all. But that, more or less, is the pitch. “Wouldn't it be great to be able to visit?” says Lekach. “If not just with a little spritz.”