BUSINESS ABROAD: King of Perfume

In a paneled Paris office overlooking the Etoile last week sat a grey-haired, lean and elegant Frenchman, chain-smoking Havana cigars. In his buttonhole, Pierre Wertheimer, 65, wore the emblem of the Legion of Honor; on his glass-topped desk stood row after row of perfume bottles and boxes of cosmetics. They, too, were emblems of achievement. For Pierre Wertheimer, a man so shy that few have ever heard of him (he permits no photographs), is the world's perfume king. He owns the Bourjois and Chanel companies, bosses 3,000 employees in plants from Rochester,...