It was the morning after Valentine’s Day, and the man on the phone was beside himself. He had received tulips from Los Feliz Florists that were for all practical purposes anonymous. Their only tag of identity was an old yellowing 1985 Valentine’s Day card that said Happy Valentine’s Day to Bette From Mick. It was a mistake, he insisted. His name wasn’t Bette or Mick--it was Mike. No, explained the florist, that card came with that order.
“The guy was going nuts trying to find out who sent them,” said Vince Crisboi, the manager of the flower shop who dispatched them to the radio station where Mike worked.
When confronted with the ticklish question of who was behind the mystery flowers, Crisboi fell back on his profession’s unwritten code: “I said, ‘We have hundreds of people come in the store and I can’t remember who the person was,’ ” Crisboi recounted innocently.
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Right. Like he could forget her. For one thing, she got a parking ticket outside his shop. “She said, ‘These flowers are really costing me a lot of money, you better not tell him who they’re from.’ ” She knew exactly what she wanted and she had her own strange card to go with the order. She didn’t even want to be described. “She said, ‘If he calls and asks what I look like, you won’t tell him anything about me, will you?’ ” Crisboi, ever the gallant florist, promised: “I said, ‘No, it’s not a problem.’ ”
Who could be more caught in the crosscurrents of love and lust on Valentine’s Day than a florist? But no matter how the recipient coaxes and clamors on the morning-after, mum’s the word.
“If (the sender) asked us not to, I never would. Never,” said Arlene Copeland, manager of Secret Garden in Beverly Hills, which sent four or five anonymous deliveries, one of them a silver pitcher resplendent with lilacs, amaryllis and blushingly peach roses (for a cool $140.) “The recipient basically isn’t our customer. We really try to service our customer.”
It’s less a matter of the florist being priest-like than businesslike. But that doesn’t stop the florist from trying to let the perplexed down easy.
At The Woods in Brentwood, saleswoman Wendy Camras spent one post-Valentine’s call soothing a recipient of an anonymous arrangement.
“I said, ‘If I told you, he would probably never send anything anonymously through us again,’ ” said Camras. “She understood I couldn’t tell her but she was definitely frustrated that she couldn’t find out who sent her flowers. I think they were from her husband. He had the same last name. I don’t know who she thought her secret admirer was. I said, ‘I’m sure you’ll find out soon enough.’ She said, ‘Yeah, I guess so.’ People aren’t very patient.”
They are, however, overly confident.
“The person who calls says, ‘Don’t give out my name, they know who it is,”’ said Copeland the day after Valentine’s Day in a shop surrounded by orchids and amaryllis and serenaded softly by finches in a bird cage (which are for hire with topiary arrangements.) “I’d say 80% of the people call and ask who sent the flowers. So they don’t know who they’re from. But the customer thinks they’re the only special person in someone’s life.”
Crisboi said: “It’s very arrogant. They think, ‘Oh, I’m the love of their life. They’ll know.’ And they always call.”
The investigative fervor knows no bounds. “They’ll try everything,” said Robert Alvarado, owner of Aida’s Flowers in Hollywood. “They’ll say they’re not going to tell anybody.”
Copeland sees a gender difference. When women call, they tend to inquire softly. Men, however, are “usually more blunt: ‘Well, I don’t know who this is.’ Because some men have a lot of girlfriends,” she said.
Sometimes the person the customer wants to tantalize isn’t even getting the flowers: “One woman had flowers sent to herself and the card read, ‘From the guy at the gym,’ ” Crisboi said. “She did it to piss off her husband.”
