America's Obsessives: The Compulsive Energy That Built a Nation

by Joshua Kendall

  The master organizer’s miraculous solo flights now took place not in the heavens, but on the ground, as he weaved across Central Europe, heading to and from each of his European families. His new vehicle of choice was a sky-blue Volkswagen Beetle—his “love bug”—that he had recently purchased in Switzerland. And for these arduous journeys, a key part of the challenge was to make sure that no one would be watching.

  The former pilot was not quite the proverbial sailor with a lover in every port. His three main squeezes were located within driving distance of one airport—Frankfurt International.

  Pulling into a VW dealership in Walldorf, not far from the airport, Lindbergh politely asked in English (he spoke not a word of German), “I’ve got a problem. Can you help me?”

  “No problem,” responded Gerald Schroeber, the English-speaking salesman who handled all the American customers. According to Schroeber, who recalled the conversation four decades later in an interview with Rudolf Schroeck, Lindbergh gave his true name and age. But when asked if he was the famous aviator, he said, “I’m often asked this question. No, the aviator is a distant cousin of mine.”

  Lindbergh explained that he was looking for a place where he could both park his Beetle and have it serviced, adding that he lived in America and flew in to Frankfurt four times a year, staying a few weeks each time.

  By then, the fifty-nine-year-old Lindbergh had been romancing his trio of German lovers for several years, and three of his European children had already been born. His aim was to bring more order to his affairs.

  For the next thirteen years, he would use the parking spot in Walldorf as his base, from which he would drive his love bug about 20,000 kilometers a year; his quarterly visits with each family would rarely last more than several days. A routine would be set in stone. First, he would drive 600 kilometers south to hook up with the Prussian Valeska and her two children, who were then living in the Swiss canton of Ticino located near the Italian border. Without telling Valeska his destination, he would next head west some 210 kilometers to Wallis, to the waiting arms of Marietta Hesshaimer and her two children. The last stop was 600 kilometers away in Bavaria where Brigitte lived with her three Lindberghs. And then it was another secret 400-kilometer trip in the Beetle back to Frankfurt.

  After two hundred thousand kilometers, the Beetle’s four-cylinder Boxer engine died. But the thrifty Lindbergh—with a history of deep attachments to machines—refused to consider tossing his car. Harking back to his days in the black laboratory, Lindbergh chose an organ transplant instead, plopping down 1,000 marks on a new engine. After his last ride in the spring of 1974, the speedometer of the VW with the Swiss license plate—GE-9473—recorded a figure just shy of three hundred thousand.

  Like his planes of the 1920s, Lindbergh’s love bug also served as a surrogate home. “My father,” Dyrk told me, “had the seats redesigned so he could sleep in it in his sleeping bag. It was very well-organized and contained everything he needed, including a water tank as well as a steady supply of dried milk powder and Muesli.”

  Even though the young Dyrk didn’t know his father was the famous aviator, his old man was still his hero. In a talk that he gave to his school class when he was about ten, Dyrk referred to his father—rather than any movie star or athlete—as his Vorbild (role model). “I was impressed that he knew a lot about a lot of different things,” Dyrk stated. Careu Kent expressed particularly strong and informed opinions about the design of machines. He liked Volkswagens because they were simple. When the teenage Dyrk built a plastic model of the Concorde, his father couldn’t help but jump in with his assessment, arguing that the jumbo jet used too much fuel and was not economical enough. “He was right, of course,” noted Dyrk.

  After reading Scott Berg’s biography in the late 1990s, Dyrk was perplexed. “The portrait the author painted wasn’t consistent with my experience. I never saw my father as a cold and unemotional tyrant,” he recalled. “While he wasn’t around much, he was always very engaged with us during his visits. In the United States, he had the burden of being a public person. But in Europe, where he could move around as he liked, he was relatively relaxed. My family was very fond of him. When I spoke to my mother about him in the 1990s, she still had a glimmer in her eyes. She never had an interest in finding another man. He was the love of her life.”

  On Friday, August 16, 1974, Lindbergh was trying to summon up the strength to organize a final flight.

  The seventy-two-year-old was stuck in the Intensive Care Unit at Manhattan’s Columbia Presbyterian Hospital. He was dying of cancer, and his team of eleven doctors said that even if they stepped up his chemotherapy, he was unlikely to live more than a few weeks.

  “I want to go home,” he told his startled wife, Anne.

  Home was then some five thousand miles away in Maui. His doctors were reluctant to let him leave the ICU, much less fly across America. But as with his signature flight a half century earlier, he could not back down from the challenge. “No one,” Anne later stated, “believed he could do either and survive.”

  Five years earlier, Lindbergh had built a modest two-story house with few modern conveniences—it had no phone—in the isolated Hawaiian town of Hana. Anne was not thrilled with the idea, but reluctantly agreed when he promised not to travel so much. But that was a ruse; he stayed in the house overlooking the Pacific Ocean at most two months a year. In the end, he had left Anne stranded on one side of the earth while he pursued his sexual adventures on the other. Knowing what we now do of his nefarious intentions, Anne’s diary entries and letters penned from Hawaii, where she felt “dropped out of the world,” can be painful to digest. “What a romantic C is! Imagine buying a vacation home without even trying out the climate and locale for one season!” a lonely Anne noted in her diary on February 1, 1969. Two years later, she complained to a friend, “This is the most isolated place on earth: 35–45 minutes from the nearest village.”

  That same day from his bed in the ICU, Lindbergh sent out a final love letter to all three German mistresses. The text was the same in each. “The situation is extraordinarily serious.… All that I can send you,” he wrote in blue pen on blue airmail paper, “is my love to you and the children.” In a postscript, which he added to the missives to Brigitte and Marietta, he noted that he had set up a Swiss bank account to provide for the family after his death. To the self-sufficient Valeska, he would not leave any money. “My father made sure that we were well taken care of,” stated Dyrk, who noted that neither he nor his siblings has ever sought any financial compensation from his father’s American heirs. “We went public only because we wanted to be officially recognized as members of his family.”

  On the morning of Sunday the eighteenth, Lindbergh, lying on a stretcher, arrived at Kennedy Airport, where he was lifted aboard a regularly scheduled United Airlines DC-8 flight, which departed at ten thirty. Accompanying him in the first-class cabin were Anne and his sons, Jon and Scott, who gave him his medicine as they headed west.

  As he awoke the next morning in Hana, Lindbergh began compiling a new series of checklists, as he turned his attention to his final journey—the one into the ground.

  In the week of life left to him—he died after breakfast on Monday the twenty-sixth—though he would drift in and out of consciousness, Lindbergh kept planning the details of both his funeral services and burial. In the end, he arranged everything. Rejecting Anne’s suggestion of Bach cantatas for his memorial service, which he requested be held a day or two after the burial service, he settled on Hawaiian hymns because, as he told the family, “no one will know what they mean.” While he had hoped that his body would be wrapped in sheets made of pure cotton, he reluctantly agreed to a 50-50 cotton-polyester mix. He even instructed the pallbearers, local day laborers, what to wear, insisting on work clothes.

  As if he were back looking over the shoulders of the engineers at Ryan Airlines, Lindbergh helped design both his coffin—one-inch planks of a special type of mahogany were to be
used—and his gravesite. He specified the shape and size of the lava rocks that were to surround each side of the fourteen-by-fourteen-by-twelve-foot pit where he—and later Anne—were to be buried. He kept badgering his wife and children about every detail. “Father was obsessed about drainage,” Jon Lindbergh noted.

  Today the Lone Eagle still lies alone, as Anne later chose to be cremated rather than to be buried beside her husband.

  Part Three

  Celebrity Compulsives

  (Photo source: Estée Lauder putting makeup on a woman’s face, 1966. Bill Sauro/World Journal Tribune/Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division [LC-USZ62-109674].)

  6.

  Beauty: Estée Lauder

  The Woman Who Couldn’t Stop Touching Faces

  Good was not good enough.…I know now that obsession is the word for my zeal. I was obsessed with clear glowing skin, shining eyes, beautiful mouths.

  —Estée Lauder, Estée: A Success Story (1985)

  Without a beauty business as an alibi, Estée (pronounced “Esty”) Lauder might well have gone to jail for aggravated assault with deadly face powder or lipstick.

  For this cosmetics tycoon, putting makeup on women’s faces was not a chore; it was all that she ever cared about. It was not something that she did to build a company; she built a company so that she could keep on doing it. During her adolescence, as she later recalled, “I was forever experimenting on myself and on anyone else who came within range.”

  The adult Lauder would sidle up to perfect strangers whom she bumped into in elevators and on street corners in order to perform an instant makeover. In the early 1950s, a few years after starting her eponymous company, the forty-something entrepreneur was taking the train to Utah to open her counter at Auerbach’s Department Store in Salt Lake City when she spotted a young woman decked out in a Salvation Army dress. Just because you’re in the service of the Lord, she suddenly thought, as she later noted in her autobiography, doesn’t mean you can’t be beautiful. When asked if she wanted to be made up, her stunned interlocutor declined. But a persistent Lauder soon whisked her into a roomette, where she dabbed on some cream, a drop of Honey Glow face powder, and a hint of turquoise eye shadow.

  A decade later, after overhearing the legendary designer Sister Parish, who was paying a visit to her Manhattan mansion, mutter to an assistant, “Oh, what I could do with this house,” Lauder patted her guest’s sagging cheeks and quipped, “Oh, what I could do with that face.”

  This habit would follow her to the grave—and beyond. “When I was attending grade school in the 1980s,” her granddaughter Aerin Lauder, now the company’s image and style director, told me, “she went to my parent-teacher conference. And she brought some product and did a makeover.” Estée Lauder’s idea of heaven, as she remarked toward the end of her life, took “the form of little angel girls on high, who could use just the teeniest dab of blusher, just the little drip of Super-Rich All Purpose Crème.…I’ll be there…to do the dabbing.”

  Today, nearly a decade after death, her compulsion remains the driving force behind the Estée Lauder Companies, a public megacorporation whose annual sales exceed $9 billion. As its marketing department stresses, this beauty colossus, which now hawks more than two dozen brands (including such stalwarts as Clinique, Origins, M-A-C, Bobbi Brown, and Jo Malone) in more than 150 countries, “touches” more than half a billion consumers around the globe. Every day, its army of beauty experts—a significant subset of its nearly thirty-five thousand employees worldwide—provide one-on-one skincare in the same obsessional manner as the founder to more than five million individuals.

  While the company’s raison d’être can be traced back to Estée Lauder’s compulsion to touch faces, it first shot to prominence because of her extraordinary nose.

  Nose is beauty-industry jargon for someone who mixes fragrance components into perfume. “In all America,” stated the late Ernest Shiftan, long the chief perfumer of International Flavors and Fragrances, Inc., the world’s leading creator of fragrances, a half century ago, “there is only one true nose and it belongs to Estée Lauder.”

  Lauder’s nose, which forever changed the scent of the American woman, was as perfectionistic as the late Steve Jobs’s eyes. Just as the Apple founder obsessed over the parts of computers that went unseen—he nixed the initial design of the circuit board inside the Apple II because the lines were not straight enough—she could not stop worrying about the parts of scents that went unsmelled. In 1973, when her company was launching Private Collection, she startled her colleagues by demanding that department stores send back early shipments, complaining that “it didn’t have dunk-dunk in it.” When told that “Nobody will know the difference,” she responded, “But I’ll know the difference.”

  This world-famous nose first made its mark back in 1953 when the beauty business that she ran with her husband, Joseph—an easygoing accountant, he kept the books and oversaw manufacturing—still sold just a handful of products, the most successful of which was its signature Estoderme skin cream. One evening while attending a dinner party, the workaholic and mother of two was seized by an idea. Examining a tray on her host’s dresser—Lauder was the eternal snoop—she noticed three beautifully packaged but unopened bottles of perfume. “Perfume was the perfect gift,” she later recalled. “That was killing it.… I’d convince the American woman to buy her own perfume, as she would buy her own lipstick.” In America, as opposed to France, where Chanel No. 5 already ruled, women considered perfume a luxury and would use only a few dabs at a time.

  The five-foot-four-and-a-half-inch blonde with the blue-green eyes and perfect skin, which she kept perfect looking as she aged—“You have only one face, so you better take care of it”—also had a nose for the bottom line. In the mid-twentieth century, perfume was just a tiny fraction of the $1 billion cosmetics and toiletries market—less than 1 percent—and gross margins (the difference between the cost of raw materials and the price) averaged a robust 80 percent, 10 percent higher than for most other beauty products. To induce middle America to change its ways, this always elegantly attired entrepreneur went into the fragrance biz “backwards.” For years, she had been tinkering with a flowery scent, and now she finally decided to bring it to market, but as a bath oil rather than as a perfume per se. “It was feminine,” Lauder later recalled, “all-American, very girl-next-door to take baths.” And to make her new product, which she dubbed Youth Dew, more accessible to customers, Lauder did not seal the cap with cellophane or gold wire, as French manufacturers did. With the bottle easy to open, women who passed by the counters in the select department stores where she sold her wares—she was already in both Saks Fifth Avenue and Neiman Marcus—could easily take an experimental whiff.

  “Youth Dew was an immediate success,” her elder son, Leonard Lauder, recently told me. Leonard, who would succeed “Mrs. Lauder,” as he used to refer to his boss, as CEO of the Estée Lauder Companies in 1982, was then a college student and his mother’s part-time assistant. “We didn’t even have proper distribution channels,” he noted. “But it emerged as the engine behind the growth of the company.” In 1953, the product brought in $50,000; three decades later, the figure came to $150 million.

  Youth Dew, as Americans soon discovered, had magical properties. If Helen of Troy, as Renaissance poet Christopher Marlowe has put it, was “the face that launched a thousand ships,” this was the irresistible fragrance that saved thousands of marriages. It could even revive the careers and romantic lives of Hollywood has-beens. The Mexican-born beauty Dolores del Rio, whose star had fizzled out in the early 1940s (at the same time as her highly publicized affair with wunderkind director Orson Welles), stated publicly that the secret to “driving men ga-ga” was putting some in her hair. Likewise, Joan Crawford, whose box-office clout was fast declining, revealed to an interviewer that Youth Dew helped her snag her fourth husband, Mr. Pepsi-Cola. “I can’t stop dancing with you,” Alfred Steele whispered in Crawford’s ear, “
you smell so exquisite.” While contemporary companies have to pay big bucks—through the nose—for such endorsements, such kudos came unsolicited.

  A superb networker, Lauder often contacted celebrities after she read about their use of her products in the press; and Joan Crawford became her lifelong friend who also stuck a free plug for Youth Dew in her bestselling 1971 memoir, My Way of Life. A decade later, when Crawford’s tumultuous life made it on to the big screen in Mommie Dearest, Lauder rushed to the theater with her granddaughter Aerin, the elder daughter of Estée’s second son, Ronald, the prominent Manhattan philanthropist who has held numerous positions in the company over the years. Aerin was then a preteen, and one might think the campy biopic about a neurotic mother torturing her daughter might not have been on her list of must-see flicks. When asked to say more about this outing in a recent interview in her office, Aerin took a cue from her idol, the woman in the huge portrait taken by the photographer Victor Skrebneski that hangs behind her desk: “My grandmother was a private person, who didn’t gossip with kids. All she said after the film was, ‘That was someone I knew.’”

  With Youth Dew stoking interest in her creams, lipsticks, and face powders, Lauder went back to touching and dabbing customers with her characteristic abandon. For this supersaleswoman, marketing depended upon personal contact. “Touch your customer, and you are halfway there,” she would later instruct her staff. Like Heinz, Lauder also emblazoned her office with her favorite mottoes, and she had “Bringing the best to everyone we touch” engraved on little squares of pale green glass next to the elevator banks at the company headquarters in the General Motors Building on Fifth Avenue. Her specialty was the three-minute makeover, which, she insisted, “could change a life.” The department store mini-makeover, which has been the bedrock of the cosmetics business since the 1960s, has Lauder’s stamp all over it. She was a hands-on businesswoman. Like Kinsey, who took the sex histories of science journalists in his attempt to bond with and control them, Lauder gave beauty editors makeovers. And whenever Lauder met with a male department store executive, she would pat a few drops of Youth Dew or one of her creams directly onto his hand—and she always sought out the right hand. “That was a brilliant insight, to seek out the dominant hand, which is the one people are likely to touch themselves with,” explained Jane Lauder to me, while seated at her desk overlooking Central Park. Jane is Ronald Lauder’s youngest daughter and a graduate of Stanford; Fortune has described her as “press-wary” and “serious.” She has been a member of the firm’s board of directors since 2009. Jane emphasized how market research backs up her grandmother’s key teachings, adding, “Letting customers touch and put on the product has a tremendous impact on sales.”