Sixteen Candles: Jake Ryan (Gloria Vanderbilt, Estee Lauder Cinnabar, Aramis JHL)

This week, Abigail and I and a couple of friends are using characters from the films of John Hughes to talk about some of the perfumes we remember from high school and the eighties. First up: Jake Ryan, the guy who made such a lasting impression that still, all these years later, he inspires pangs of dreamy infatuation in women my age all over the country (see above photo of unknown internet user and her, um, date) and plenty of men, too. Trust me.

Jake was like no other guy I'd seen on screen before: sensitive, drop dead good-looking, sleepy-eyed, quiet, relatively smart, and far more interested in the odd girl out than the prom queen. There was something sad about Jake, too; something melancholy. It seemed like he was trapped by circumstances beyond his control, which made his determination to do the unexpected something close to heroic. It was the first time I'd seen the most popular kid at school depicted as such an underdog.

In case you aren't familiar with the character and the film, we're talking about Sixteen Candles here, which came out in 1984. The movie is set in fictional Shermer, Illinois, where another Hughes character, Ferris Bueller, also resides. Molly Ringwald plays Samantha, whose birthday is the sixteenth in question. No one remembers--not mother, father, siblings, paternal grandparents, maternal grandparents--mainly because her older sister is getting married that weekend. Everyone's in town visiting, and in the chaos of preparing for that happy event, Samantha gets pushed to the periphery.

It's nothing she isn't used to. Most of the movie deals with life at high school, where Samantha is equally ignored. She's crushing hard on Jake Ryan, one of the most popular seniors. She worships him for afar. As it turns out, he's not quite as far away as she thinks. Jake is crushing hard on her, too, only it takes a while for her to put this all together. The movie roots for her, and for getting them together. If these two can end up together, high school can't be all that bad. Before that can happen, various mishaps and complications ensue. A geek and a foreign exchange student add to the mixed signals and misunderstandings. Oh--and Jake has a girlfriend, Caroline. There's that to be straightened out first, too.

Michael Schoeffling, the actor who portrayed Jake Ryan, had been a model. He'd done GQ covers, among other things. Many of the people who saw Sixteen Candles at the time of its release were used to admiring him from afar, like Samantha. After acting in a handful of movies he retired with the girl he was dating during the filming of Sixteen Candles. They're still married, and live outside the public eye. It was almost like Schoeffling understood the audience's need to keep him preserved in memory the way he was in Sixteen Candles. In reality, he probably got sick of the bullshit of the business. But that's in keeping with Jake Ryan, too, who seemed equally frustrated by the rules of high school.

The following imagines a parallel universe in which Jake attempts to figure out a.) what perfume Samantha wears, and b.) what it is about said perfume that drives him crazy:

"The skinny geek with the braces swears on his mother's Tupperware collection that the perfume Samantha wears is Cinnabar. According to him, she got it at the mall. He seems to know a lot about her--at least he says he does--but he says she gave him her panties, too, and I highly doubt that.

I wanted to be sure--not about the panties but the Cinnabar--so I sort of grilled him, and he went straight as a rod, then he got all bent out of shape. He was pretty indignant.

'Don't you trust me?' he wanted to know.

Of course, I said. Of course. I just want to be sure. I want to be sure that's the one she wears. You're sure it's called Cinnabar?

'What do you want with her perfume,' he said, a little suspicious. 'Don't you think that's...I don't know...kind of...creepy?'

This from the guy who stole her underwear. Spoken like a true panty fiend, I said.

Later, I went to the mall to smell it, the Cinnabar, and I'm pretty sure he's right. I can't tell you what it does to me. She comes up to me in the hall and I freeze; I go numb. Samantha. It's the most amazing thing ever. It's so serious. It's so heavy. It's some seriously heavy stuff, that Cinnabar. It smells like experience--not, like, slutty experience--I don't mean like that. But maturity. Like she's all grown up. The rest of them are children.

When I asked the lady at the counter to let me smell it, she asked me how long my mother's been wearing the stuff. I told her it isn't my mother, it's my girlfriend, and she got a very confused look on her face.

'How OLD are you?' she said. She had her glasses perched on her head and raised her eyebrows so high she nearly knocked them off.

My girlfriend is a freshman in high school, I said. She's almost sixteen years old.

Her glasses really did fall then, and she said she'd never heard of a girl wearing anything as...sophisticated as Cinnabar. She said sophisticated like somebody'd used her counter for a bathroom.

My girlfriend isn't like any other girl, I said.

Which isn't exactly true, given that my girlfriend is actually Caroline, not Samantha.

Caroline isn't like most girls either. The problem is, she's exactly like all her friends. They dress alike and talk alike and feather their hair all alike, and I think if I heard them coming up from behind I wouldn't be able to tell the difference. Caroline wears that perfume with the swan on it. It's got that weird looking lady in the commercials, the jeans lady. She looks like your mom trying to act like your sister, which totally creeps me out. She's got a smile like the joker from Batman. A white face and a big smile that splits her face in half, and she sells those jeans like if everybody doesn't have at least three pairs in two years she'll jump out the window with a lit piece of dynamite clenched between her teeth.

The stuff smells okay but it's everywhere. Vanderbilt! That's what it's called. It's the perfect name for a rich girl's perfume, the kind of girl whose daddy wears Rockefeller after shave. Caroline's friends spray it in their books, their bags, their hair. She gets in the car when we go on a date and it's unbelievable how much she puts on. If I want to kiss her I feel like I have to break through a wall of stink. Not that I want to kiss her much anymore. She mostly WANTS me to kiss her, and of course she expects me to make the first move. She sits over there in the passenger seat winking at me and I try to figure out if I can drive without passing out at the wheel. Vanderbilt. It smells like flowers in the shape of a big mallet. The big mallet is whacking you over the head.

Samantha isn't like that at all. You have to get right up close to her. You smell the Cinnabar where you'd want to kiss her. It smells of cinnamon--like the name. So soft. It's like a blanket. Spices. Deep and dark and rust colored, just like the cap. Just like her hair. It's weird, because Cinnabar is technically so much stronger than the swan stuff, but she knows just where to put it and just how much to put. It should be a shout, but it's a whisper. It's something whispering in your ear.


I think Caroline knows something. And I feel bad. Maybe she sees me watching Samantha. I try to be careful. I can't help myself. Samantha draws me in.

My dad tells me we're incredibly lucky, for Shermer, for Illinois, for America, for anywhere, we're lucky. I'm lucky to have such a pretty girlfriend. I'm lucky to be popular. I'm lucky I have both of my legs and wasn't born disadvantaged. I feel guilty a lot of the time, because I am thankful, but I'm also miserable. We were riding in the Rolls and we passed somebody in a pinto, and he turns to me, my dad, and he says, "always remember how lucky you are." He says stuff like that like he feels bad for what we have that other people don't have, but if he knew I was watching Samantha all the time he would tell me to remember where I come from and where she comes from and how sometimes people aren't meant to get too close. In other words, I'm lucky, but don't press my luck.

I figure he wouldn't know his head from his ass, so what can he tell me about keeping the proper distance?

I don't like who I am. I don't mean I don't like myself, exactly. I mean that if my life is driving around in my dad's Rolls talking about people from at least several yards away, if that's where I'm going, I'm going to be seriously unhappy. I can feel the weight of that forcing me down. So I'm lucky, but the luck is so heavy it's crushing me. I'm not that person, the guy my dad wants me to become. I'm not sure who I am, yet, but I can tell, looking at Samantha, being with her, that the decision is mine. I can be happy and close or I can keep my distance and be lucky for the rest of my life.

I went over to the cologne section while I was at the mall. I smelled everything they had. I don't know how close I can keep getting to Samantha without people raising their eyebrows so high their glasses fall off their heads, but maybe our smells can reach out to each other. I wanted to pick out something that seemed like the best possible answer to the question Cinnabar is asking. I wanted something Samantha could smell and use to read my mind. Something she could smell and use to see that guy I want to be.

Here's what I picture, with this perfect cologne. I'll spray it where I want to be kissed. I'll stand at my locker, across the hall from Samantha's locker. I'll stand there with the cologne on, waiting. I'll stand there until she smells it. I found the perfect thing. It's called JHL. It smells like we were kissing, me and Cinnabar, and Cinnabar rubbed off on my stubble. JHL is saying something about cinnamon, too. It's saying something like, 'Please get closer.' It's a code. Cinnabar needs JHL and JHL needs Cinnabar; they need each other, to figure the code out. Once they get closer, they'll put it all together.

The geek said I wasted my money. He rolled his eyes and huffed and puffed and postured and clicked his tongue like he was disappointed in me. He said I didn't need to spend half that much. What was I thinking!? I said it was money well spent. I said I would have paid more, much more, if that's what it took. I would have traded in my dad's Rolls, that worthless heap. What else is it good for but keeping a distance? The geek rolled his eyes some more, halfway off his face, and called me a sap. He said I still have a long way to go. Such a long, long way to go. Stick close, he said: look and learn. Lesson number one: he showed me HIS cologne. He got it from his father. Jovan makes the stuff. It's called Sex Appeal for Men and it smells like arm pit.

No wonder he has to lie about girl's panties."