How cancer robbed sense of smell that made my fortune

She’s the fragrance guru who built an empire on her wildly popular scents. Here, in the second part of her autobiography, she recounts with raw honesty her devastating battle with breast cancer — and the most cruelly ironic side-effect of all...

IN SATURDAY’s Mail, Jo Malone told how, from a difficult start on a London council estate, she grew her one-woman business into a multi-million pound success story. Here, in part two of our captivating series, she tells how she feared she could lose everything due to her health...

One summer’s day, just as I was stepping out of the shower and about to reach for a towel, I felt a lump in my right breast. I knew that I’d need to see my GP about it, but I was in new York at the time, doing a photo-shoot for a brochure about me and my fragrances so I just carried on with it.

There were countless changes of clothes and various settings, from ‘At home with Jo’ to ‘Christmas with Jo’ to ‘Making cocktails with Jo’. It’s fair to say I was feeling wonderful. I was well on my way to having 50 shops around the world and was living a kind of dream.

I’d grown up on a council estate, left school at 15 and was so dyslexic that I still got confused between my left and right. Certainly, no one who knew me when I started making homemade face creams in saucepans could have predicted my startling future.

Yet I’d always known I had a keen sense of smell, and with the help of a Paris perfumer I’d finally made my first break-through fragrance in 1994: Lime Basil & Mandarin.

After that, my husband Gary gave up his job as a surveyor to run the company, and just five years later we sold it for millions to the cosmetics giant estee Lauder. But now it was 2003 and I had a lump in my breast …

A few days later, I saw my GP in London. ‘It’s not cancer, is it?’ I asked. It could be a cyst, he said carefully, but stressed it was important to get it tested in hospital that very day.

‘Will it take long?’ I asked. ‘Because we’ve a dinner to attend and it starts at eight.’ In my head, I was already at the Serpentine Gallery’s annual party, for which I was planning to wear a shocking-pink dressshirt and black Armani suit.

During the mammogram, I didn’t take my eyes off the nurse, scrutinising her for the slightest reaction. And that’s when I spotted it — a subtle flicker of recognition on her face.

I think I knew then, and an ultrasound confirmed it.

It’s amazing how even your husband’s arms don’t feel safe when you’ve just been told you have cancer.

The next day, I paced round our home thinking: ‘OK, you have cancer. It’s a curve-ball you weren’t expecting. Happens in business all the time. Think. Don’t feel sorry for yourself. Think.’

I called evelyn Lauder, the wife of Leonard Lauder, the chief executive of estee Lauder. In the three years since I’d joined the company, we’d developed an easy rapport.

More importantly, I knew she’d founded the Breast Cancer Research Foundation in 1993.

Genie, her assistant in new York, answered my call. ‘Hold on, I’ll find her,’ she said. ‘It may take longer than usual …’

When I was put through, all I heard was a fierce blowing, as if evelyn were standing in a wind tunnel. In fact, I wasn’t far wrong: a passionate hiker, she was halfway up a peak.

She was the first person to whom I voiced my fear: ‘It’s cancer, evelyn, it’s cancer. I think I’m going to die …’

I’ll never forget her wind buffeted reply. ‘You’re not going to die, Jo. We’re going to get you through this.’

SHE told me she was going to ring a new York breast cancer expert called Dr Larry norton, and a few days later, Gary, our threeyear-old son Josh and I flew to new York. next step was an operation to remove the tumour and a lymph node to see if the disease had spread.

I dressed for my first visit to the Sloan Kettering Memorial hospital in the largest clothes I had — a billowing shirt and baggy pants — because I felt unclean, ashamed of my body. The next day, a doctor gave us devastating news. I had ductal carcinoma in situ — an aggressive cancer — and some of my lymph nodes were ‘positive’ for signs of cancer.

I needed a mastectomy within a week. Gary slumped forward, head in hands, and sobbed.

Afterwards, all I seemed to do for 24 hours was cry. I cried so much that I became fed up with my sadness.

When I finally met Dr norton himself, a slightly-built, bespectacled, straight-talking man, I told him that I didn’t want chemotherapy. It actually scared me more than the thought of a mastectomy.

The first image that came to mind was Ali McGraw in Love Story. The second was of a young man I’d seen in the corridor. He was in a wheelchair — all skin and bone, no hair, a face the colour of grey paint. I remember thinking: ‘Please, God, don’t ever let that be me.’

Fortunately, Larry would be as precise as a perfumer, measuring the chemotherapy dosage to exact drops. He’d pioneered ‘dose-density drug delivery’, where the treatment is administered at an optimised level specific to the patient.

We rented a flat ten minutes from the hospital. One of the first things I did was to buy a patchwork quilt that I sprayed with my Grapefruit fragrance. The flat had to smell like home at least.

On the day of the operation, I insisted on walking to the hospital. I was probably the only person in Manhattan who wasn’t in any kind of rush.

As we neared the hospital, I felt as if I was going to throw up. Fear operates in much the same way as creativity: it grips you, takes over and consumes your every thought.

At Sloan Kettering, they don’t wheel you into the theatre; you walk in, fully conscious. I lay down beside metal trays laid out neatly with surgical instruments and prayed out loud for God to bring me through.

Later, when I woke up, I felt a rigid, zipped-up tightness in my body, as if my own skin were a jacket two sizes too small. I