Remembering Patti Upton (Editorial)

Patti Upton

Patricia Pulliam Upton’s death last week was not a surprise — we were aware that her health was failing — but the realization that she was 79 was jarring. She never seemed like a product of the pre-World War II era, and not just because she wore her age especially well.

Patti Upton was an outlier from a generation in which even college-educated women — she was Miss University of Arkansas in 1959 — worked only if they needed the money. Think of “Laura,” the classic film noir from 1944, in which the young career woman of the title is almost freakish because she managed to move out of the paste-up room at a New York advertising agency.

The story of Aromatique, the company that essentially created the “decorative fragrance industry,” was less one of ambition than of creativity and curiosity. “I would do anything if it was interesting to me. And if it wasn’t, you could forget it,” she said in an interview for the UA’s Arkansas Business Hall of Fame, into which she was inducted last year.

Upton was already in her 40s, a wife and mother and fashion model, when she went into business making the lines of potpourri and candles and other decorative items that have become ubiquitous. She became a business sensation featured in magazines (People, Southern Living) and television shows (“Lifestyles of the Rich & Famous” even) and collecting more accolades than you could shake a holly branch at, including the Arkansas Women’s Hall of Fame. Aromatique became a reliable employer in Heber Springs, and Upton spent 18 years on the board of directors of AT&T Corp.

Her family’s loss is shared by Arkansas, where she will be remembered among entrepreneurs as a woman who did it her way for a long time — but not nearly long enough.