Curator’s Note in Catalogue Collection N ° 1: “The One That Got Away”
The Madame Grey Estate. April 16, 2025.
At 16, I was certain I’d die young. My death would be tragic, a glamorous undoing. Something cinematic. A Romeo and Juliet ending. Found on a Saturday night, disheveled and lifeless in a hotel dressing gown, equal parts mystery and messy mascara. It was the narcissism of a tortured youth, naturally. In my adolescent mind, I was Marilyn Monroe—doomed and adored. I imagined the headlines, the grainy photos of my beautiful but melancholy face taped to teenage girls’ bedroom walls. The envy of others, but a cautionary tale wrapped in satin ribbon.
Janis Joplin, Edie Sedgwick, Gia Carangi—each famously elusive, each famously dead before thirty. And then there was my next-door neighbor, Jessica Miller. Jessica was beautiful in that feral, small-town way. She wore tight Jordache jeans with side zippers and Charlie Red perfume. She lived in a trailer behind her parents’ house, and she had a reputation for “putting out” and stealing everyone’s boyfriend. She died at nineteen. The family said it was a heart aneurysm, but everyone knew she took her own life. I romanticized Jessica and her untimely death. I would have given anything for her perfume and those jeans. I even considered asking her parents if I could have them. Instead, I saved up my babysitting money, bought my own Jordaches and a bottle of Charlie from the Woolworths on Market Street.
But I didn’t just want to wear designer jeans and drugstore perfume. I wanted to be the girl who ruined your life. A Holly Golightly type. Maybe a photographer’s model, a stage actress, a moody poet. I wanted to be wild. I wanted to be the one that got away.
In 1996, Lynda Resnick famously shelled out $211,000 for Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’s iconic three-strand pearls. Jackie wore them everywhere—to state dinners, tea with the Queen, chasing after her children on the South Lawn. Never mind that she bought them from Bergdorf ’s in the ’50s for $35. Resnick knew exactly what she was buying: mythology. She created an exact replica and the sales? Over $100 million.
The value was never in the three strands of glass pearls. It was the myth of Camelot—youthful, idealistic, and impossibly captivating. We don’t buy Chanel handbags for the leather—we buy the story: the orphan who climbed her way into high society, who redefined Parisian chic, and gave women permission to wear pants. We are buying Jane Birkin’s effortless charm and Michael Jordan’s obsession with greatness. We are buying the only thing Marilyn Monroe wore to bed.
I can’t explain why I didn’t exactly choose the life of a mysterious woman. Instead, I spent an unreasonable amount of time working with French perfumers to bottle her. This catalogue—the first in a series from the Madame Grey Estate—marks the release of the Madame Grey extrait de parfum: the scent of the one that got away. As always
with love,
Cassandra Grey